It is possible to be so familiar with a subject that one no longer sees its peculiar features. Roger Fry, the English art critic, spoke of a specialization of vision that prevents us from observing familiar objects around us until artists awaken us to the distinctive reality of what we have overlooked by lending us their eyes. Historical discoveries are often very much like an aesthetic awakening. Only a relatively small percentage are prompted by the discovery of wholly new and previously unknown evidence. The great majority are stimulated by fresh insight into evidence so familiar that its significance has been underestimated or disregarded.

In English history, 1688 is best remembered as the year of the Glorious Revolution. But that same year also witnessed the death of John Bunyan (1628–1688), the Nonconformist Bedford minister widely known as the author of The Pilgrim's Progress (1678; part two, 1684) and a preacher capable of drawing 3,000 persons to Sunday sermons in London. In subsequent centuries his fame increased, and, partly through translations into numerous languages, his story of Christian's pilgrimage became known in nearly every region of the world. In our own time his life and work have drawn the attention of many scholars from several fields, and the publication in modern editions of all of his sixty printed works has been undertaken. In 1988 the tercentenary of his death has been observed by a variety of activities including scholarly conferences and publications.

In 1875 the distinguished Unitarian minister and local historian Henry Wilder Foote preached a eulogy for his late colleague, the Reverend James Walker, philosopher and former president of Harvard University. It was an appropriate occasion to characterize the achievement of the antebellum generation of Harvard Unitarian leaders that Walker represented. “They were much more than mere denominationalists or founders of a sect,” Foote declared. “The whole tone of their teaching was profoundly positive in its moral and religious quality. Trained at our American Cambridge, they were really the legitimate heirs of that noble group of men nurtured at the Cambridge of England–the Latitude Men, as they were called–who blended culture and piety and rational thought in their teaching.” Building upon Foote's perceptive characterization, this article will explore the significance of the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists for the Harvard Unitarians of the mid-nineteenth century. In so doing it may illuminate other forms of New England religious thought that also drew upon Platonic or Neoplatonic sources, including Edwardseanism, Hopkinsianism, and the progressive orthodoxy of Horace Bushnell. In particular, I hope to shed light on the relationship between Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.

Gerasim Petrovich Pavskii (1787–1863) was arguably the brightest pupil of Russia's most-noted nineteenth-century prelate, Metropolitan of Moscow Filaret Drozdov. Pavskii's work under the tutelage of Filaret dated from the future Moscow metropolitan's rectorate at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, 1812–1817. Yet in the subsequent twenty-five years following Filaret's appointment to the episcopate in 1817, the young theologian and philologist Pavskii would break decisively with his former rector. That break culminated in the celebrated Pavskii Affair of 1841–1844—the so-called Delo Pavskogo—a far-reaching synodal investigation that dramatized the deep divisions in the Orthodox church of Nicolaevan Russia. On one level, these divisions involved issues of modern biblical textology. It is the thesis of this work, however, that alongside the textological issues were deep-seated differences over Orthodox piety and church polity that conditioned the responses of the esteemed metropolitan and the erudite theologian. This fundamental divide within Russian Orthodoxy was never reconciled and, indeed, has continued to the present in modified form within religious circles of the Russian emigration.

Horace Bushnell's children knew him as a tender, playful father whose after-dinner romps and continual courtesy warmed the memories of their early family life. But his daughter, Mary, once told of a curious and glaring exception to his habit of fun and kindness at home. “The sight of a doll or [toy] monkey was abhorrent to him,” she remembered, “and he could not restrain his expression of the disgust thus awakened…Woe to the doll which lay in his path!”

The publication of a major reference work in any field of interest is always a welcome event. The three-volume Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience: Studies of Traditions and Movements, edited by Charles H. Lippy and Peter W. Williams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988), is no exception. It is welcome for the authoritative up-to-date information it supplies, and it is doubly welcome for its new conception in design, format, and scope. Unlike many encyclopedias, it is not an alphabetical compendium of many brief entries dealing with narrowly defined topics or very specific items. Instead, this new encyclopedia is composed of 106 essays (mostly fourteen to sixteen large double-column pages in length, with some as long as twenty-eight pages) ranging over a broad spectrum of themes, traditions, movements, and preoccupations of“the American religious experience.” Little is neglected. While the volumes are not arranged for ready reference use, provision is made for this aspect of more convetional encyclopedias by an unusually good index which helps one locate information on a wide variety of subject matter, both past and present. The focus on the broad aspects of religion in America more than compensates for the absence of any readily available alphabetized items of information.