Despite the great attention which the puritan movement has received, many historians have been reluctant to afford religion a major role as an immediate precipitant of the English civil war. There has been a tendency to settle the matter by quoting Oliver Cromwell's statement: ‘Religion was not the thing at first contested for …’, although he put forth this interpretation more than a decade after the event. Recently attention has been focused upon the early 1640s as a period in which puritans became highly militant; at the same time, the key to this aggressiveness has been provided by a series of studies of the hitherto neglected apocalyptic ideas of English protestants. Dr. Burrell has shown a close relationship between apocalyptic thought and the outbreak of the Scottish rebellion, while other scholars have indicated that such a connexion existed at the start of the English civil war. This article will attempt to chart the development of puritan militance by examining the apocalyptic interpretations put forward by prominent English reformers during the crucial period which began with the opening of the Long Parliament on 3 November 1640 and ended with the first great battle of the civil war at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. The importance of religion in the outbreak of that conflict should thereby be demonstrated.

Historians of ancien régime France frequently pay tribute to the statebuilding capacities of that most talented and successful architect of absolute monarchy, Louis XIV. And it has long been recognised that, of the many institutions either created or inherited by the French Crown which were wont to claim a share in the handling of the daily affairs of the realm, the Council of State became, during the personal rule of Louis XIV, the chief vehicle for dispensing the royal will. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of matters dealt with by the Council has tended to discourage historians from making it the object of intensive study. More important is the fact that the machinery of Council after 1661 reflected two apparently contradictory tendencies: the peculiar personal and informal nature of Louis XIV's government, and the incipient formalism and bureaucratisation which were to become dominant factors in the government of late eighteenth-century France. The consequent flexibility and complexity of the system have certainly been important characteristics which have so far precluded a full and detailed explanation of the forms and functions of the Council and, more generally, its overall significance in the administration of absolute government.

Between the accession of queen Victoria and her death sixty-three years later the Wesleyan Methodist Church increased its membership from 292,000 to 454,000 persons. Recently, however, Dr. Currie has put this seemingly impressive growth in better perspective by indicating that in no censal decade after 1841 did the Connexion keep pace with the increase of population. In this paper that increase will be examined under two categories. First, those sudden spurts of growth which the Church then and later, related to that intensification of devotional practice and religious fervour which it called ‘revivals’; secondly, the regular work and growth of the Church in the years when there were no remarkable increases of members. The third and concluding section will consider the interplay of these factors and the character of Wesleyanism at the end of the century.