The first fifteen years of the twentieth century may some day be remembered in America as the Age of Crusades. There were a super-abundance of zeal, a sufficiency of causes, unusual moral idealism, excessive confidence in mass movements, and leaders with rare gifts of popular appeal. The people were ready to cry “God wills it” and set out for world peace, prohibition, the progressive party, the ‘New Freedom’ or ‘the World for Christ in this Generation.’ The air was full of banners and the trumpets called from every camp. It was a brave time in which to be alive.

The Council of Constance, like any other serious event involving many people and lasting over a considerable period of time, can be studied from many points of view. It started out as a gathering for purely ecclesiastical purposes. But some twenty or thirty thousand persons from every class of society, except, perhaps, the lowest, cannot come and remain together for almost four years to discuss one set of difficult and complicated questions without, intentionally or unintentionally, raising many other questions, social, religious, philosophic, economic and political, and forming for the moment, as it were, a microcosm of the forces of the age. Most of the issues that agitated Europe five hundred years ago cropped up sooner or later at Constance, the cost of living, the obnoxiousness of robber barons and private warfare, the right and wrong of tyrannicide, the conflict between Germans and Poles in the East and between English and French in the West, to say nothing of the special issues with which the Council was expected to deal, the claims of three popes to be the only true successors of St. Peter, the perilous teachings of Wiclef and Hus and the worldliness and corruption of church administration.

The parable of the tares is the proof pàssage for religious liberty. Sinite utraque crescere (Matthew 13, 30) is the counterpart of compelle intrare (Luke 14, 23). The apostles of liberty repeat the text with monotonous iteration, although there is an occasional variety in the emphasis. Some stress the rationalistic argument: we do not know enough to separate the tares from the wheat. Others emphasize the eschatological approach: we can afford to be patient because God will burn the tares at the harvest. Others again make a legalistic appeal: Christ has commanded us to leave the tares alone. More interesting are the expedients employed by the persecutors to evade the liberal implications of the parable. The simplest device is to identify the tares not with the heretics, but with the moral offenders within the church. Another subterfuge is to identify the overly zealous servants with the ministers, not with the magistrates, who are not to be hampered by the parable.

No ecclesiastical body in this country suffered as much from the Revolution as did the Anglican Church. The process of recovery was so slow that it was scarcely consummated a century after. In the light of the peculiar importance, attaching to the epoch 1775–1785, the Diary of one of the most eminent Anglican clergy of Colonial days may not be without interest It is a small, thick volume bound in contemporary leather, in the author's own clear and tidy hand, with the fly-leaves covered with financial items —a kind of book-keeping appendix to the Diary proper.1 The Diary is entitled “Memorandums of T. B. Chandler.”

About the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, a change came over the general spirit of American society. Historians have often noted the fact and they have described it and explained it in various ways. It was a time of storm and stress, a period of controversy and conflict and finally war. There was scarcely a single phase of life that was not infected. As if by some preconcerted signal the souls of men in most diverse groups and relationships suddenly became sensitive and combative. The result was one of those swift ruptures with the past that leave abiding scars in the body of society.

“Let the Church be free and hold her rights and liberties inviolate.” Disregarding this opening dictum of England's time-honoured Magna Charta, Henry VIII stamped Erastianism lastingly upon the Church of England. By three epoch-making Acts of parliament, the second Tudor monarch established the judicial, legislative, and appointive supremacy of the crown in ecclesiastical affairs. Since his time the Church of England has known no hour of complete ecclesiastical autonomy. In recent years the Prayer Book controversy has brought this arresting circumstance clearly to the light. What is more important about a church than its Prayer Book. its forms of worship, its articles of faith, its liturgies? Yet in 1927 and again 1928 the world witnessed the strange spectacle of a British House of Commons comprising men of every faith, Roman Chatolic, Protestant, Christian Scientist, and even the Parsee Communist, Shapurji Saklatvala, carefully weighing and sifting theological niceties and in a single spectacular debate decisively rejecting the overwhelming opinion of the church courts, diocesan, provinical, and national.

The School of St. Victor derived its name from the monastery, or rather priory, of St. Victor, situated near Paris. The monastery became a school when William of Champeaux, in 1108, gave up his chair of philosophy at the Cathedral school in Paris and retired there to devote his life to monastic seclusion. His reputation as a teacher was such that students followed him to the monastery and at their insistence he resumed his career as teacher, and continued to give lectures until he was promoted to the bishopric of Chalons-sur-Marne. The place, however, owes its fame as a center of philosophical studies not to William of Champeaux, but primarily to Hugh the founder of its system of mysticism and in a less degree to Richard the scholar, and to Adam the poet. Hugh of St. Victor, in the opinion of his contemporaries and of some of the most discriminating of modern writers, deserves to rank not only with the greatest of the philosophers and theologians of the twelfth century but of the entire Middle Ages. He was an indefatigable student, a man of broad culture, of independent judgment, and a scholar who influenced profoundly the course of philosophical and theological thought and speculation. Though there is considerable discussion as to his nationality it seems reasonably certain that he received his early education in the monastery of Hamersleben near Halberstadt. It was in order to become a student of William of Champeaux that he came to Paris and to the monastery of St. Victor. He commenced to teach in 1115, and from 1133 until his death in 1141 he was the head of the school. The reproach which was so frequently brought against Hugh that he was opposed to profane science is shown by Ueberweg-Baum-gartner to be utterly without foundation, and it is clearly proved that he was interested in all science, and that he was convinced that secular art and science are valuable auxiliaries in the promotion of theological knowledge. His writings embrace treatises on theology, philosophy and exegesis, together with several works dealing expressly with mysticism or contemplation. The best known of these works on the subject of mysticism are De Contemplatone et ejus Speciebus, De Meditando, De Amore Sponsi ad Sponsam, De Arca Noe Mystica, De Arca Noe Morali, De Vanitate Mundi, De Arrha Animae, De Laude Caritatis, De Modo Orandi.

Richard Baxter correctly described the seventeenth century as a “contentious, dividing Age”. Divisive tendencies had been dominant in the preceding century. But the Protestant leaders in the Age of the Reformation had generally maintained that there was but one universal church. Their protests against Roman Catholic abuses and the consequent counter-charges of a revived Roman Catholicism produced the cleavage of Western Christendom and broke the formal unity of the church. Despite the inevitable differences of opinion which emerged amid the storm and stress of the time, the Protestant leaders often expressed their interest in the promotion of the visible unity of the church and they shared a common hope for the ultimate establishment of a new catholicity expressed in terms of universal free communion in place of the old Catholicism under the headship of the pope. But tendencies which the reformers failed to curb soon produced a succession of divisions. The separatists from Rome showed a marked inclination to form separate communions which, at first, followed territorial and national lines. Due to territorial, national, personal, political, and theological differences, the lines of demarcation between the groups into which Christendom was being divided gradually became defined with more pronounced clearness. In the latter part of the sixteenth century new lines of cleavage appeared. The development of rigid types of Protestant scholasticism intensified the strife over confessional differences and the Wars of Religion increased the hatreds of the age.

The Managing Editor of Church History has sent me a peremptory summons demanding at once an account in one thousand words—no more, no less—of the work of the Church History Deputation to the Orient. In view of the probability that a full report will in due time appear as a separate publication, the present statement may quite appropriately be confined within the limits set by the Editor.

During the past century the textual criticism and literary history of the Penitentials have received considerable attention, but the investigation of their actual function in social and church life has only begun. Yet the field is inviting. The Penitentials have, for instance, notable legal and economic aspects; they offer considerable information on ascetic practices, they have a bearing on ritual developments; and the relation of their relaxations, compositions and commutations of penance to the development of Indulgences is itself an important question. It is not the purpose of the present article to investigate any of these, but to suggest still another angle of approach. I wish to present some elementary considerations toward the answer to a question which is perhaps more basic than any of those just suggested. The question may be stated thus: What did the Penitentials contribute, and what were they designed to contribute, to the cure of souls? The cure of souls (cura animarum ) means of course the general ministry of religion in the care, and only incidentally the healing, of souls. But the penitent was regarded as one morally diseased and ill, and his treatment is, in the Penitentials, repeatedly, even habitually, referred to as the task of the moral physician. His sins are the symptoms of disease. The penalties enforced are “medicamenta,” “remedia,” “fomenta”—measures designed to restore his moral and spiritual health.

In dealing with the Anabaptists as a group which discovered or held political and social views of their own, it is first of all desirable to escape from any possible preconceived notion to the effect that the term “Anabaptist” must be used to designate a variety of groups all united to a greater or less degree by some principles or beliefs commonly held. At the outset of the movement such men as Konrad Grebel and Felix Manz, in Switzerland, gave some semblance of unity to the various divisions of the sect by moving from one place to another, and by thus serving somewhat in the capacity of liaison officers. But the movement was still very young when one must say of it that there were a great many small and distinct groups which held nothing of any importance in common, yet which were generally to be designated under the term Anabaptist. Thus, considering the real character of the Anabaptist movement and its chief significance—which I take to be social—the name given to the Anabaptists is less relevant than at first might be supposed. The sectaries did not call themselves Anabaptists; and they resented the use of the name by others. At least from the year 1525 on the name was nothing but an external designation for the various sects. As Sebastian Franck has affirmed, the sects were so disunited amongst themselves that he scarcely knew how to write anything certain or final about them; and he was unable to find even two Anabaptist congregations which held views exactly the same.