Among the reasons for the emergence of American denominationalism, the impact of the separation of church and state has never been under-rated by scholars. The same is true of the religious pluralism of the nation. Other environmental conditions of comparable importance have been listed but those who recognize the toughness and adaptability of the modern American denominational structure have reason to ask whether historians have done full justice to its internal dynamic. The reaction against denominational history in the grand style is, of course, well warranted. Over against “denominational historians who can recount the achievements of the several denominations as separate bodies, the reasons for their separateness, and the grounds of their greatness and glory,” W. E. Garrison wrote, “we must concern ourselves chiefly with the movements of the common Christian mind, the issues which drive planes of cleavage through all denominations transverse to those which divide them from each other.…” Some of these unitive issues are American-made; others are rooted in Europe. But the denomination, as Garrison recognized, is the mode in which American church history manifests itself, a vehicle whose continuities must be grasped if modern American church-manship is to be understood.

Sources for discovery of the missionary motivation of the Indian evangelists and their supporters in seventeenth century New England are scanty. Nevertheless, the most compelling factors come clearly to view. The avowed missionary intent of colonization, as voiced in the Plymouth and Massachusetts Charters, was not one of these. The directors of the colonial companies might have had the notion of serving God and checking Roman Catholic political expansion through Protestant missions, but such an aim was of little force in the thinking of the colonist and his children. They were, indeed, creating a Christian commonwealth. They were completing the Reformation also in a place at the end of the earth. It had to be wrested from the heathen who possessed it. But this extension of Christendom was by the displacement of the heathen, not by their conversion.

In today's world the most powerful appeal of any spokesman for the West is to champion liberty against the oppressiveness of a monolithic society and the tyranny of the totalitarian state. The call for freedom appeals to the deepest aspirations of peoples and touches upon the longing of masses of individual human beings. No rellying cry is so effective in creating a durable ethos among the democratic nations and in bringing to their consciousness a sense of those values by which they live or ought to live. No idea is more useful in destroying the image of the West as the self-satisfied defender of the status quo and in dramatizing the authentic revolutionary tradition, for men live by their dreams and visions.

The following bibliographical sketch is designed to acquaint the student of American theological education with the present state of available sources on its history. It is the by-product of the researches pursued in connection with the writing of an article on American theological seminaries (Theologische Bibelanstätten) for the new edition of Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart. The article is a joint enterprise by professor George Huntston Williams of Harvard University and F. D. McCloy, and covers the period from the close of the eighteenth century to the present. There is no comprehensive study of the development of ministerial tranining with regard either to educational theory or institutional structure during the one hundred and seventy-eight years since the founding of the first seminaries by the Dutch Reformed and the Roman Catholic denominations in 1784. A very brief survey was given by William Adams Brown in “A Century of Theological Education and After,” Journal of Religion, VI, 4 (July, 1926), pp. 363–383, and, also, in his article, “Theological Education,” in A Cyclopedia of Education, edited by Paul Munrone (New York, 1931) V, pp. 582–606. Henry K. Rowe, professor at Andover-Newton Theological Seminary, Contributed a short supplement, dealing with the American scence, to the major article on the history of theological education by Ferdinand Cohrs in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (reprint, Grand Rapids, 1950) XI, p. 335a. Three articles on Jewish, Protestant, and Roman Catholic theological training apperared in Highers Education, IX, 18 (May 15, 1963), pp. 202–216, by Seymour Siegel, Oren H. Baker, and James E. O'Connell respectively.

Soon after Pope Leo XIII's pastoral letter on historical studies, Saepenumero considerantes, was published on August 18th, 1883, a renewed interest in the field of Catholic historical research became apparent. Once again, great scholars came forward “to undertake the writing of history for the purpose of showing what is true and genuine” in the drama of international ecclesiastical development.