One year before the accession of Victoria, a young Scot, reared in a Presbyterian home, educated at Edinburgh and Glasgow, now a Fellow of Balliol, was ordained deacon in the Church of England. Six years later he succeeded the great Dr. Arnold as Headmaster of Rugby. Another seven years, and Lord John Russell nominated him to be Dean of Carlisle. In 1856, Viscount Palmerston conveyed to him—recently stricken by the death of five of his children—the Queen's command tendering the see of London. Only once before in the course of two centuries had a man not already a bishop been named to the metropolitan diocese. In another twelve years—years of conflict and of progress, marked, too, by his refusal of York—Disraeli designated him to Canterbury on the death of Archbishop Longley—the first Scotchman in history to occupy the throne of Augustine.

The terms “Reformation” and “Renaissance” have acquired such currency that they have come to be accepted as denoting what really and truly happened, and in fact, the words themselves are regarded as the guarantee of the actuality of the phenomena they merely have been coined to describe. The matter of defining accurately and precisely the meaning of both the Reformation and the Renaissance has occasioned so large and disputatious a body of scholarship that it is with some trepidation that I add another, question to an already sufficiently vexing problem. For not only must the meaning of the Reformation and the Renaissance be defined in themselves but the relationship between them must be clearly stated as well. The fact of the matter is that the relationship between the two has an existence and nature as real and as significant as they have in themselves, for since the one without the other is impossible of full definition, what then is the exact relationship between them? What are the origins of this relationship and how did it develop and come to be regarded? I have tried to answer these questions in this paper; to simplify the story somewhat I have confined the study to English materials.

The first Synod of New York, formed two hundred years and a month ago, was the outcome of a religious revival, the Great Awakening, which on a great scale transformed and regenerated organized Christianity in the American colonies. The life of the Synod is a brilliant example of this transforming and regenerating work, so that its history is of much more than Presbyterian significance. Among its permanent effects was the stámping upon American Presbyterianism of a lofty character derived from the great revival.

Slowly during the years just preceding our War of 1812, and rapidly during the decade that followed the Peace of Ghent, the vast reaches of Latin America swam within the ken of the people of the United States. Of this “discovery” of our southern neighbors and of our relations with Latin America before 1830, we have learned much from a volume recently brought out by a distinguished historian of the United States, Professor Arthur P. Whitaker. Professor Whitaker's informing study was intended to be nothing less than a well-rounded history of the impact of Latin America upon the United States to 1830; and such it has proved to be—with one exception. Professor Whitaker completely overlooked the religious phase of the subject he otherwise treated so skillfully. Upon this neglected part of the history of our early relations with Latin America this paper will endeavor to throw some light.

When one speaks of the Counter-Reformation in Scotland, we usually think of it as something which appeared after 1560. To do that, however, is to regard the Scottish Counter-Reformation as principally post-Reformation, and also as inspired entirely by the Council of Trent. Such an interpretation fails to take into account the very determined efforts made by the Scottish church itself to stay the spread of heretical doctrines before 1560. It fails to realize that while aided considerably by the Tridentine decisions, the Scottish Counter-Reformation was largely a native movement which had its own views of the proper methods of dealing with the growing canker in the body ecclesiastic. Thus in order to have a due appreciation of the background of the Scottish Reformation and all that it entailed, it is necessary that we should have some understanding of the forces opposing Protestant reform in Scotland before 1560. Such a background this article will endeavour to give.

Augustine lived at a critical moment in western European history. On the last day of the year 406, many Vandals, Alani, Suevi crossed the Rhine and, having defeated the Franks, settled for a time in Gaul and finally reached the Pyrenees. Four years later Rome itself fell to Alaric and his Visigoths. In addition to these outward catastrophes, the church's inner life suffered from the assaults of heretic and schismatic. Arianism persisted in Gaul, Montanism and Manichaeism were rife in North Africa. Puritanic Donatism laid claim to being genuine Christianity, a claim which the doughty Bishop of Hippo could not countenance.

Modern psychoanalysis tells us that disease is the touchstone of the healthy mind. What is true in the realm of psychology is not less true in the realm of ethics. The most terrible disease in the realm of human relations is war and so we can say that war is the touchstone of a healthy ethical system. In its attitude toward war the weakness of an ethical system is revealed. In the war situation an ethical system is revealed as basically unrealistic if it proves unwilling to face the actual situation and therefore uses the escape of absolute pacifism. It is revealed as basically immoral if it condones any war to such an extent that it loses sight of sin and injustice and makes of that war a holy war or a crusade.

The lady is Flavia Domitilla of the imperial Roman family and the emperor is Domitian, the traditional “second persecutor” of the Christians. We know little about their relationship, save that they were relatives, but the story goes that Domitian killed the lady's husband, Flavius Clemens the consul, and sent the lady into exile. This was by no means an unusual thing for Domitian to do, but with this event is inseparably connected the question of whether or not Domitian persecuted the Christians. To the “persecution” are again tied various matters of importance for church history and the study of New Testament. The problem of the lady and the emperor therefore assumes significance for critical study. Furthermqre, it offers us a good vehicle for a survey of the development of church-historical writing and research, partly because of its fascinating character which has attracted many prominent scholars, and partly because it has been rather free from theological prejudices. Its treatment does not exhaust the critical problems of the “Domitian persecution,” which would be impossible in a paper of this nature, but it does offer us a representative discussion of the issues involved. We shall therefore proceed to a description of the weaving of this ancient tapestry and shall then follow the unraveling of its threads which has taken place through four centuries of historical effort.

As is well known, Puritanism, as well as social, economic, and constitutional issues, were involved in the struggle against the Crown in the reigns of the first two Stuarts. Like the other groups which comprised the opposition—the lawyers, the merchants, and the country gentry—the Puritans came to focus their attention on Parliament as the agency for the articulation of their grievances against the policy of the government. But unlike the other groups, the ties which bound the Puritans to Parliament were somewhat weak, and to a certain extent indirect. In the first place, the primary concern of the Puritans was with religious reformation, and it was only after they had been repulsed by the Crown and disowned by Convocation that they came to regard Parliament as the only avenue of protest against the conservative Anglicanism of James and the more extreme high church propensities of his son. Moreover, it was impossible for the natural leaders of the religiously disaffected—the Puritan preachers—to champion their cause in Parliament, since the lower clergy had been excluded from that assembly after the fourteenth century on the grounds that they were represented in Convocation.

When the British Army entered Philadelphia on September 26, 1777, they entered the largest town in the colonies. But Philadelphians of today might be amused by the extent of the great metropolis, Philadelphia proper extended from Vine Street to South Street and westward to Fifth. “There were few houses west of Sixth street and most of these were on Chestnut and Market streets…”1 Fifth Street was really the western boundary of the town as we may see from the number of cemeteries along its entire length, For example, at Cherry Street there were two Lutheran graveyards; (diagonally opposite at the northwest corner of Arch was the Presbyterian yard. At the southeast corner of this same street was the Episcopal yard; farther down, just below Market Street, was the graveyard of the Baptists. On the east side of Fifth below Walnut was the Romanists' cemetery and on the west side was that of the Free Quakers. Phjladelphians at least had the grace to remove their graveyards to the extreme limits of the town. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why colonial Philadelphia missed some of the worst epidemics.

So distinctive is revivalism of American religion that for “almost two hundred years it is revivalism more than any other phenomenon that has supplied the land-marks in our religious history …. It would not be difficult and by no means unsatisfactory to write the history of American Protestantism from the standpoint of its periodic awakenings.”