Obviously, the most valuable parts of Foxe's Acts and Monuments are the accounts which he gives of the disciplinary measures by means of which the ecclesiastical authorities of England endeavored to make good their claim to supreme jurisdiction over the faith and morals of their subjects, particularly during the reign of Henry VIII and that of Mary. Although Foxe repeatedly stated that he “professed no such title to write of martyrs,” it was as a history of ecclesiastical persecution primarily, that the work was hailed with delight by all factions of English Protestants. The public lost no time dubbing it “Foxe's Book of Martyrs,” the title by which it has ever since been popularly known. Those who had safely lived through the dreadful tempora Mariana, either as exiles abroad or as heretics at home, eagerly scanned its pages for some mention of relatives or acquaintances who had perished in the flames rekindled by Mary and her councillors. Many of its readers, not looking for it, were no doubt gratified as well as surprised to find their own names woven into the story of religious and patriotic heroism, a factor which contributed not a little to the enormous popularity of the work. It was not, then, for the history of the Waldenses or the Turks or the Husites that people turned to the Acts and Monuments, at least not primarily; their chief interest lay in Foxe's history of the English martyrs —Lollard, Henrician, and Marian.

Disestablishment of the church and religious liberty in Virginia were achievements of the democratic movement of the Revolutionary period, but they were not by any means mere by-products of American independence. It should be remembered that ecclesiastical home-rule had been the forerunner of complete political independence, and that after the famous “Parson's Case” of 1763 colonial autonomy in church affairs was assured. Independence, therefore, did not necessitate disestablishment. In spite of the acute opposition to the Establishment before 1775, due to the rapid spread of the Baptists throughout the state, it was maintained until 1779, its abolition was stubbornly resisted by conservative elements in Virginia, and full religious freedom did not become law until 1786. The solution of the relation of church and state consequently awaited the new order.

The era of the English Reform Bill of 1832 presented difficulties and dangers to both state and church. For the state it set the task of achieving a social order—of forming a new social mind—in a period when social change had destroyed the basis of custom in English life and thought. The rise and growth of mechanized industry had produced both a new working class separated from the land and the processes of production and with only its labor to sell in return for a meager livelihood, and a new industrial middle class which, finding itself excluded from the rights and privileges of the state, had set about the task of acquiring a political position comparable to its new economic status. Though the latter group secured the passage of the Reform Bill, to secure social stability was a much more difficult task. The industrial society showed itself as a divided society, described by Disraeli as “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy … as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets,” a society in whose towns a French writer of the period could discover “nothing but masters and operatives.”

Among the frontier ministers who contended “earnestly for the faith once delivered,” Joshua L. Wilson stands well to the front. He was born in Bedford County, Virginia, Sept. 22, 1774; and died in Cincinnati, Ohio, August 14, 1846. His father was Henry Wright Wilson, a grandson of Major Josiah Wilson of Maryland. His mother was an elder sister of Drury Lacy, a well-known Presbyterian minister of Virginia. Wilson's father married Agnes Lacy in Chesterfield County, Virginia, on April 7, 1765. Joshua was the third child and second son. At the time of his birth the family had moved to Bedford County, where Henry Wright Wilson practiced his profession of physician. His career was cut off by death when Joshua was about four years old, and the family was left in needy circumstances. Wilson tells us in his Memoirs that his mother soon married again “with a hope of obtaining a better home.” Her second husband was John Templin, an elderly Presbyterian farmer of the neighborhood. He was living with his only son by a former marriage, Terah. The latter was probably the first Presbyterian to preach the Gospel in Kentucky. After he lost his fiancée by an early death, his father and David Rice, his minister in Bedford County, persuaded him to study for the ministry. At the time of Wilson's birth David Rice was preaching near his home, and Terah Templin was preparing to become a minister. Although his mother was a Baptist, the religious atmosphere thrown about Wilson was Presbyterian.