“Let, whatsoever I will, be that esteemed a canon.” So retorted the Arianizing Emperor Constantius at the stormy council of Milan in 355 after he had become sole ruler of the Empire and was able to give full expression to his Arian sympathies. Whether Athanasius has accurately recorded his language is not certain; that he has captured the intention of Constantius in a vivid phrase is indisputable. It takes its place alongside James I's summary disposition of the Hampton Court Puritans, “No bishop, no king,” to be set over against another series of resounding affirmations of a contrary significance: Ambrose of Milan's “the emperor is in the Church,” and Andrew Melville's retort to the same James, “Sir, thair is twa Kings and twa Kingdoms in Scotland.”

The first fleeting glimpse we have of the shadowy figure of Amalarius is one of him as a youth in the city of Tours at the monastic school of Saint Martin under the careful tuition of Alcuin, the most learned teacher in the Carolingian realm. The last we hear of him, many years later, is a bitter remark that by his words and books he had infected and corrupted almost all the churches within and beyond France and that his writings should have been destroyed after his death. Both the date and the place of the beginning and the end of his life are unknown, and even his full name is uncertain—some have called him Amalarius Fortunatas; others, Symphosius Amalarius. Yet this man, whom J.-K. Huysmans called “the most ancient of the liturgists,” played a vital role in the busy years of the first half of the ninth century.

In the century from 1750 to 1850, to use a phrase of Whitehead, there was a change in the “climate of opinion” in the Western World. Men ventured upon new paths with new methods of investigation and new tests of reality. A score of epoch-making books appeared between Rousseau's Social Contract and Emile, 1762, on the one hand, and Comte's Positive Philosophy, 1853, and Spencer's earliest writings on the other. John Fiske said: “In their mental habits, in their methods of inquiry and in the data at their command, the men of the present day who have fully kept pace with the scientific movements are separated from the men whose education ended in 1830 by an immeasurably wider gulf than has ever divided one progressive generation of men from their predecessors.” This change of viewpoint and method of approach to reality involved both intellectual disintegration and theological reconstruction.

In 1685 the government of Louis XIV revoked the vestiges of the Edict of Nantes, after having made various encroachments on it since the 1630's when Richelieu nullified the military provisions. And thus France, which under Henry IV in the late sixteenth century had gone farther toward legal toleration than the other states of Europe, lapsed into the ranks of those intolerant. The Edict had never been popular with a large element of the French people, notably the group which had fought under the Guises in the Wars of Religion. The clergy in particular urged its repeal. Louis XIII and Louis XIV under the influence of his Jesuit advisors, Pères Le Tellier and La Chaise, and of his second wife, Madame de Maintenon, a zealous ex-Protestant, revoked the Edict completely.