Severe economic depression had the Roman world in its grip during the middle of the third century A. D.; a condition from which the Mediterranean countries never fully recovered. There is much evidence to show that the economic structure of the Empire was crumbling. Very soon the outlying territories of the Empire were overrun by barbarians, trade collapsed, and brigandage and piracy reappeared on a large scale. All of this was accompanied by a rapid rise in the prices of the commodities of life. To-day we look for the causes of economic depressions in intricate and far-reaching social forces. In the third century Romans of the old school had a much more simple and direct explanation. When the Empire fell on hard times and disaster stalked the corners there was only one cause: the gods who had given Rome her power and the Empire its prosperity in the years gone by were being neglected, foreign gods and oriental cults had usurped the religious fervor of the people, and the venerable gods of the Eternal City were angered. The remedy was likewise simple: revive and stimulate the worship of the ancient gods of Rome, thus appeasing their anger, and prosperity would return.

It was long believed that Domine Everhardus Bogardus was the first minister of the colony in New Netherland. This opinion was corrected when in 1857 there was discovered a now famous letter by Domine Jonas Michaëlius, the actual first minister, to Domine Smoutius of Amsterdam.

It was on the question of Caesar worship that Christianity and Paganism joined battle. They were radically opposed, but the conflict broke out on this definite issue; and its real nature has commonly been misunderstood.

There is no occasion, in this brief paper, to discuss the origin and history of the imperial cult. Enough to say that its motive was at once political and religious. On the one hand it was nothing but a civic ritual, by means of which the diverse races could express their common loyalty to the empire. It did not seek to displace any existing religion. It was not so much a mode of worship as a patriotic gesture, like the salutation of the flag. Yet it did, in some measure, answer to a religious need. The old religions were all associated with the tribes or cities which practised them, and had lost their purpose when these were absorbed in the composite empire. What was to be the religion of the empire itself, which was now being organised as a single corporate state? To the ancient mind a political system was unthinkable apart from a religious sanction, and since there was no traditional cult on which all the races could unite, a new one had to be devised. It found its object of worship in the state itself, as represented by its supreme ruler.

It is a commonplace that young radicals become old conservatives. Not only does this principle apply in modern life but it also finds illustrations in the history of party movements in earlier times. The English Puritans, who were the progressive group of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in their country, experienced this regular defection of some of their most promising young adherents. The two famous bishops of the English Church in Ireland, James Ussher and William Bedell, were strongly inclined towards Puritanism in their early years. Samuel Ward, the great Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and delegate of the English Church to the Synod of Dort, was another who became more moderate with the years. In the tributes which have been written to the memory of Lancelot Andrewes as a great High Churchman, court preacher, stylist and Anglican devotional writer, the fact that he also passed through such a stage in his development has been generally neglected. Nevertheless such was the case, and during his early years, Andrewes made an important contribution to the development of one of the most characteristic Puritan doctrines, that of the Sabbath.