A sketch of the struggle for religious liberty during the course of the last four hundred years will be attempted in this paper. Attention will first be focussed on the theories and factors affecting persecution and tolerance on the part of both Catholics and Protestants. Then the administrative aspects of the subject will be considered alike from the broader standpoint of the structure of the church and of the state and from the more specific angle of the handling of dissent by political authority. Finally brief consideration will be devoted to residual and perennial problems of constraint and freedom.

In evaluating recent literature pertaining to the Catholic Renaissance regard must be taken rather to choice selection than complete coverage; furthermore, the period must be strictly defined, for the number of books that have been written is veritably immense. I shall therefore first of all restrict myself to the late rather than to the early Renaissance, i. e., roughly speaking from the beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the Peace of Westphalia (1500–1648); or to put it in another ecclesiastico-historical way, from the pontificate of Julius II (1503–1513) to Innocent X (1644–1655). I shall further restrict myself to the Catholic controversies arising from, and following in, the immediate wake of Protestantism; reaction taken to the Protestant Reformation by the Catholic or Counter-Reformation, e. g., by the Council of Trent with its re-affirmation and re-definition of traditional Catholic dogmas and practices, with corresponding condemnation of all new teachings opposed to such traditional doctrines; to certain controversies among Catholic scholars occasioned by the capitula and canones of the Council of Trent, e. g., those referring to the compatibility between the necessity of grace for every supernatural act and the required co-operation of man's free will for a meritorious act (Congregatio de auxiliis gratiae) under Clement VIII and Paul V, etc.

Henry Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883) opens with the sentence: “Natural law is a new word.” But the term may claim a respectable antiquity: it goes back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. In Drummond's time it was merely being put to a new use. To him it meant the body of principles learned in the laboratories of physical science. In the long tradition of ethical, legal, and political thought from Hippias to Kant it implied a body of principles which, resting upon a divinely implanted endowment of human nature, underlie all acceptable ethical precepts, just laws, and sound political institutions.

Among American churchmen and statesmen, there has been a tendency to regard the Establishment of the Anglican Church entirely in the light of a privilege conferred by the State on one church to the exclusion of others. Where the idea of the Establishment has been derived from the sight of the immunities and official endowment enjoyed by the church of the colonial governor, this point of view is natural. It determined the early statesmen of the young republic to dispense with a luxury which appeared to them to be pregnant with oppression and arrogance. Externally there is little to criticize in the view for it represents fairly accurately the relative position of the Anglican Church both in colonial and English history in the eyes of non-Anglican communions. Internally, however, the case is not as simple, as the Free Churchman, whether within or without the Anglican fold, has been ready to detect, and Cartwright here is in complete accord with Newman. The conflict was brought to an issue when the House of Commons rejected the proposals for the revision of the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 in two consecutive years, 1927 and 1928.

Many people in the United States today feel that England is fighting a battle that is also their own. The English people, on the other hand, note with great satisfaction and gratitude the sympathy that the United States displays for their life and death struggle. A similar mutual interest existed between the American colonies of the seventeenth century and the England of the age of the Revolution. We have only to look at the many impassioned controversies on both sides of the Atlantic. They tell us a lively story of the exchange of ideas between Old and New England. Robert Baillie, Samuel Rutherford, William Twiss, three outstanding members of the Westminster Assembly, engaged in long arguments with John Cotton on various problems of doctrine and church government. John Cotton and other New England ministers in long pamphlets answered any reproaches of heresy made by the English or Scotch Presbyterians. It is safe to say, furthermore, that the controversy between John Cotton and Roger Williams, with which we are here concerned, would never have been started without Williams's participation in the debates of the Long Parliament in 1643/44.

I confine myself largely to the period between 1830 and 1850 and to the movement for additional religious instruction of slaves which flourished during those years, though it did not end in 1850. The sources on which the analysis is based represent conditions in South Carolina and Georgia, with a moderate sampling of Alabama and Mississippi, and not a great deal for the border states.

Humanists and reformers in the age of the Renaissance and Reformation were concerned for the revival of antiquity both classical and Biblical. Some stressed one and some the other and some like Erasmus were interested in both. Because of the close relation of the two fields, we have brought together into one chapter two essays dealing first with the classical and then with the Biblical scholarship of our period.

Patriarch Nikon is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in Russian church history. A zealous, although needlessly harsh and domineering, reformer of the church, forceful to the point of being dictatorial in the exercise of his patriarchal office, his endeavor to make the church independent of the state precipitated a struggle which in the days of Peter the Great culminated in the abolition of the patriarchate and the subjugation of the church.

In 1652 John Milton reminded Cromwell that the chief end for which the Civil War had been fought—to gain religious liberty—had not yet been attained:

New foes arise,

Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains.

Help us to save free conscience from the paw

Of hireling wolves, whose Gospel is their maw.

Yet, despite the fervor of Milton's plea, it was plain to the clear-sighted Englishman in the early 1650's that by far the greater threat to religion was the lack of order and government in the church. Thus, when Cromwell became Lord Protector in 1653 no problem seemed graver than that of restoring order in the church. He must furthermore do this in such a way as to keep the support of all the sects. The ship of state must be carefully steered between the Scylla of intolerance and the Charybdis of ecclesiastical disorder.

A number of factors have combined to obscure the Puritan mind from contemporary view. Until about a century ago, Puritan history both in England and America was written mostly from anti-Puritan, post-Restoration sources. Thomas Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell marked a turning point in this practice, and the works of Samuel Rawson Gardiner and of Sir Charles Firth gave seventeenth century English Puritanism a narrowly interpreted, but fairer, hearing. The New England Puritan, however, received little real benefit. The political historian and the economic determinist despised theology and, accordingly, lacked the chief instrument whereby to probe the Puritan mind. Moreover, the American historian, steeped in nineteenth century liberalist notions and mightily affected by the English Whig tradition in history writing, usually made the historical error of reading into the New England mind ideas which are the results of nineteenth and twentieth century experience. Accordingly, they read backward into colonial history merely to emphasize the Puritans as forerunners of religious toleration, democracy, and capitalism (all of which, in the contemporary sense, the Puritan would have abhorred from1 the bottom of his soul!). These writers refused to believe any people could be as religious as the Puritans pretended and they concluded either that Puritans were all hypocrites or that a hypocritical Puritan clergy tyrannized a defenseless people until the latter, in righteous desperation, overthrew the bigoted priests and let in the pure air of eighteenth century rationalism.

Students of the cultural history of the late Roman and Byzantine periods sometimes speculate as to what may have been the ordinary daily intellectual interests—the private store of detached thought and emotion—of the average educated men of those times. To us, the literary activity of those centuries seems a barren skeleton, picked bare by the sophists, an abhorrent thing in which we can find no real interest. The formal philosophy of the schools was a wild business whose fantastic flights seem to many of us today to be quite incredible and absurd. We can perhaps understand a little better the intellectual and political interest which attached to the theological controversies, though these often went to lengths which seem to us to be excessive. Private religious experience there was, of course, and there was an emotional outlet in Christian art which we can understand quite well. But even the total of these things will not perhaps satisfy our curiosity; whether rightly or wrongly, we find it difficult to understand that a man's life can have been made up of these things alone, and we wonder what a mind of at least some independence and vigor can have found as a basis for its individual existence.

From 1640 to 1660 England passed through a succession of extremes in religion which were unusual, abnormal, and very racking to poise and confidence. These years might in a sense be compared to the reigns of Edward and Mary one hundred years before. Both periods were very unlike England's customary course of easy continuity. By 1660 these extremes were reaching some moderation, some compromise, some tendencies toward integration, which would probably have come to a modus vivendi before long had not the unwise Restoration, with the customary excesses of reaction, restored a rigid and persecuting Anglicanism wholly out of line with the age. It is the purpose of this paper to point out some of these trends toward integration.

John Hales's life during the Marian Exile throws much light on the development of that Puritan group which came back to England in 1558 and helped to found the Elizabethan church in the chaos left from the Roman Catholic reaction of Queen Mary. While Bishop Ponet and John Knox were formulating the political credo of the later Puritan party, Hales was working out his “congregational experiment” in the field of practical politics at Frankfort.

The notion of a synthesis in medieval philosophy and theology is itself the resultant of a given attitude toward the study of broadly cultural and philosophical movements. Now modern historical research, by employing as one of its main concepts the principle of continuity, has been of great service in tracing the line of connection between historical individuals and events which would otherwise have appeared as isolated separated points without any significant connection. Insofar, however, as the aspect of continuity in history has been emphasized, there has been a proportionate danger that the unique differences of the individuals which are united by a single thread are disregarded. As a result, analysis of the specific problems faced by individual philosophers and of the methods which they devised to deal with the problem as conceived by them, has yielded in order of emphasis to a wider and looser manner of characterizing philosophic positions, as e. g., realistic, idealistic, pragmatic, etc., often unaccompanied by a knowledge of the method actually employed by the philosophy in question.