The Irvingite sect, or, as it names itself, “The Catholic Apostolic Church,” can be traced back to a meeting called by Henry Drummond, an eminent banker of London, at the beginning of Advent in 1826. Drummond was then a loyal member of the Church of England and had no suspicion that his invitation to twenty “students of prophecy” for eight days of conference at his suburban estate was to lead to the establishment of a new dissenting body with himself as one of its chief ministers. Yet from this informal beginning there germinated an international church, which, in its authoritarianism, sacerdotalism, sacramentalism, and ritualism, ran in close parallel with the Catholic development within Anglicanism.

Most of the people to whom the missionaries of the American Home Missionary Society ministered in the South were leading the rugged lives of frontiersmen, and frontier life is never easy. The missionaries themselves, though usually far above the average frontiersman in educational achievements, were not exempt from the hardships and privations of the frontier. Indeed the very nature of their tasks often made them feel the harshness of their environment even more keenly than did the average settler. In the maze of theological problems, interdenominational conflicts, slavery agitation, and the routine duties of a missionary, one easily loses sight of the fact that the principals involved in all these enterprises were self-sacrificing men of high ambition. Frequently they were men with families, from the more thickly settled North. The purpose of this essay is to call attention to the human side of the missionary enterprise, the suffering entailed by the lack of material possessions, by the lack of books, by sickness, and sometimes by physical violence at the hands of fellow-men. The hardships to which the missionaries were subjected changed progressively with the shifting Southern frontiers.

It is a matter of common knowledge that at the beginning of the Christian church the Christians were persecuted by the Jews. Later the Jews were persecuted by the Christians. Throughout the Middle Ages the hatred between the two increased. Finally the Jews were banished from England, Spain, France, and other states of Europe until they were allowed to dwell only in parts of Italy, Germany, and Poland. When the Reformation began, the Protestants were faced by many problems in their attempts to organize a purified church. One of these problems was whether Jews should be allowed to live among Christians. The first of the leading Reformers to deal systematically with this problem was Martin Bucer of Strasbourg.

The record of Governor William Bradford, in his own hand, presenting the story of the founders of Plymouth from 1606–1646, originally bore only the title, “Of Plimoth Plantation.” Now it is referred to as the “History of Plymouth Plantation,” or “The Bradford History,” or “The Bradford Manuscript.” This important document has had an eventful career. For many years it was lost, and then under strange circumstances it was found not in some hidden place in this country but in England. It is the purpose of this paper to unfold the steps in that discovery, and to follow the events which led finally to the return of the valuable holograph to the United States.

The operation of the Plan of Union in Ohio, while less spectacular in its effects than in New York, was equally important, and needs to be thoroughly understood by the student of the pioneer development of either Presbyterianism or Congregationalism in Ohio.

It is not strange if in New York Congregational writers regarded the Plan as a misfortune, since all Congregational associations dissolved or became absorbed in the Presbyterian system. Yet in Ohio, too, where Congregationalism was more successful in surviving its influence, the reader of the papers of the Ohio Church History Society, a Congregational group, runs across such expressions as “those dark days of the prevalence of the Plan of Union,” “the unclean thing,” and descriptions of what seemed to them an unmixed calamity.

The story of the American Protective Association, a manifestation of narrow nationalism in the closing years of the last century, is an almost forgotten phase of American history. Though a few may be fairly familiar with certain aspects of the history of the American Protective Association, a study of the attitude of the Swedish American press toward the Association, supposedly hostile to the immigrants, may offer some interesting side-lights on general trends of American history from 1890 to 1896.