Raymundus Lullus (Ramon Lull) tells of an educated Mohammedan ruler, who, when urged by a missionary to embrace the Christian faith, answered him: “Prove to me that your faith is true; then I, with all my subjects, shall adhere to it.” The missionary replied that Christian faith is too sublime a thing to be proved, and he contented himself with explaining the actual belief of the Christians. Answered the king: “If you ask me to leave what has been my faith thus far, then you should give me something reasonable instead of it.” Lull uses this story in order to warn missionaries among the Mohammedans not to follow such a method. According to him, it is useless and even ridiculous to refuse to discuss Christianity in philosophical terms in giving demonstrations of its truth to people who are acquainted with such a method.

It is generally recognized that the centralized organization and strict discipline of the Jesuits played an important role in the Order's successful agitation against Protestantism during the Counterreformation. It is little known that during this period of great accomplishment the Society went through one of the most serious crises of its 400 years of existence—a rebellion, centered in Spain, against the allegedly dictatorial rule of the general and for a quasi-democratic form of governnient. This movement reveals the intrusion of constitutional ideas into an organization which usually has been held up as the prototype of autocracy and monolithic cohesion.

The crime of being “righteous overmuch”—of singing psalms, of expounding the scriptures, of praying extempore— was considered sufficiently grave two hundred years ago to expel six students from the University of Oxford. There were, it is true, alleged extenuating circumstances—illiteracy and low birth—but the basis of the prosecution was that six undergraduates of St. Edmund Hall were “reputed methodists.”

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England were a time of rapid change, of bitter tensions, and of great hopes. This was what the economic historians describe as the “classical period” of the Industrial Revolution. These were also years in which new vitality of faith and a spate of educational and reform movements issued from the Evangelical movement within British Protestantism. Indeed, the energetic hopefulness of Evangelicalism was the child of industrial and commercial expansion as well as of renewed Christian vision. Though England suffered no such violent overthrow of authority as France, yet both industrial progress and Evangelical sense of responsibility produced a critical attitude toward the status quo in state and Church.