A Somber Theme:—Ever since Eusebius sought with dedicated zeal to prove the survival of the Church by blazing a trail back to the Apostles, the program of church history has been the same: “To give a clear and comprehensive, scientifically established view of the development of the visible institution of salvation founded by Christ.” To describe it—not to question it. By its very definition church history requires unquestioning acceptance of the basic proposition that the Church did survive. One may write endlessly about The Infant Church, l'Eglise naissante, die Pflanzung der Kirche, etc., but one may not ask why the early Christians themselves described their Church not as a lusty infant but as an old and failing woman; one may trace the triumphant spread of The Unquenchable Light through storm and shadow, but one may not ask why Jesus himself insisted that the Light was to be taken away. Church history seems to be resolved never to raise the fundamental question of survival as the only way of avoiding a disastrous answer, and the normal reaction to the question—did the Church remain on earth?—has not been serious inquiry in a richly documented field, but shocked recoil from the edge of an abyss into which few can look without a shudder.

James Arminius (1560-1609) is not nearly as well-known as the various movements which bear his name. “Arminianism” is a familiar word in Protestant history and theology and a pervasive movement particularly in English-speaking Protestantism. The Arminian movements, however, because of their diversity do not point clearly to Arminius himself. The label of Arminianism has been applied to and often accepted by such diverse entities as the politics of William Laud, seventeenth century Anglican theology from high churchmanship to moderate Puritanism, the communal experiment at Little Gidding, the empiricism of John Locke, Latitudinarianism, the rational supernaturalism of Hugo Grotius and the early Remonstrants, early Unitarianism in England, Wales, and New England, the evangelicalism of the Wesleys, and the revivalism of the American frontier. In our time the term means for some the crowning of Reformation theology; for others it points merely to an anachronistic sub-species of fundamentalism; and for still others it means an easy-going American culture-Protestantism.

An excess of partisan feeling has surrounded the study of the Covenanting movement in 17th century Scotland. The issues which led to the Second Reformation, bound so closely as they are with religious feeling, have often prevented historians from exhibiting a reasonable amount of objectivity toward God's New Israel, as the Covenanters were inclined to call Scotland. Consequently the Covenanters have usually been portrayed as either the embodiment of the true faith or as a group of bigoted and conceited fanatics.

The eighteenth century Welsh revivalist, Howell Harris, was record conscious. He left behind almost 300 Diaries and almost 3,000 letters, together with miscellaneous papers, known as “The Trevecka Manuscripts”. (Trevecka, a village in Breconshire, South Wales, was Harris's home.) Today, they form the nucleus of the Calvinistic Methodist Connexional Archives and are deposited in the National Library of Wales, at Aberystwyth.

An issue that inevitably appears in discussion concerning historical method is the degree to which a historian's philosophical presuppositions influence his historical work. It is not surprising that the matter is most heatedly discussed in the realm of New Testament interpretation, although the principles involved concern all historical work.

The Civil War more than any other episode in American history struck into the lives of all the families of the land, demanding that everybody take sides. Partisanship focused upon many facets and features of the conflicting causes, but the order of the event allowed no bipartisanship. Only a handful of anticipative revisionists, who earnestly cried that the whole affair, even once begun, was needless and somehow avoidable, found ground for nonpartisanship. Families branched across Mason and Dixon's line split and sided in spite of torn loyalties and wistful recollections of unity. Had slaves foreseen, as freedmen knew, that emancipation's price was personal degradation, they might have borne mixed feelings about the issue, but even their ambivalences purchased no point of impartiality.

During the 1960 convention of the American Historical Association a session on historical reviewing subjected the noncommittal or picayune irrelevance of these professional offerings to their due measure of censure and derision. Despite the justice of extending such judgments to the genteel and congratulatory “comments” and “critiques” ordinarily given at our conventions, I shall not attempt at any demolition of Professor Clebsch's scholarship or conclusions. This is not because my critical faculties are paralyzed but due to genuine satisfaction with what he has done and gratitude for the glimpse here given of his more extensive research. No more fitting centennial observance of the Civil War could be imagined than a sober examination of the meaning of this, our great national tragedy. Having no desire to manufacture disagreements or magnify quibbles, I can preserve some of the appearances of debate only by urging that the scope of his findings be extended at certain points. To this end I undertake the strangely impossible task of making the point of his essay both broader and sharper.