Philip Melanchthon's 1539 treatise On the Authority of the Church and the Writings of the Ancient Fathers (hereafter De ecclesiae autoritate) occupies a prominent place in the canon of his theological writings. Few texts of the Reformation period state so clearly the principles according to which the Fathers and the councils of the church may be considered authentic sources for Christian doctrine. To set the work within the canon of Melanchthon's theological work is not necessarily to say that other genres are not present in it, however. The compartmentalization of a thinker's work, while perhaps heuristically necessary, always risks distortion. The danger is all the more present with regard to an author like Melanchthon, whose intellectual interests were broad and whose historical importance is many-sided. The scope of Melanchthon's activities is broad, and so are the contexts and ramifications of his important writings. In 1960 Peter Fraenkel called De ecclesiae autoritate Melanchthon's “patrology”—not an inaccurate label, but an overly restrictive one.

In his historical defense of the doctrines of the Church of England, published in 1826, Robert Southey assumed that “the question concerning the celibacy of the clergy had been set at rest throughout Protestant Europe.” The conclusion that Anglicanism necessarily entailed the rejection of celibacy was, in early-nineteenth-century England, decidedly premature, and the ambiguity over celibacy in the Church of England is starkly and exceptionally exposed in the life and work of John Henry Newman. Recent assessments of Newman's peculiar standing in Victorian society have often emphasized the sexual—or rather, the seemingly sexless—dimension of his image, as if to concur with Sydney Smith's celebrated witticism: “Don't you know, as the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen?” The nature of specifically clerical celibacy, however, and its influence on the young Newman, have tended to be overlooked in favor of a general psychosexual understanding of his own unwillingness to marry. As an antidote to such readings, this essay will explore the distinctively Anglican and firmly intellectual tradition behind Newman's decision, and will thereby argue that his celibacy was not as “perverse”—a word which, in Victorian England, connoted conversion to Catholicism as well as sexual peculiarity—as it has sometimes been made to seem.

From the period after the Revolutionary War, when Philadelphia and New York merchants first replaced Maryland planters as the lay elite, American Catholicism has been predominantly urban. This became especially noticeable in the late nineteenth century when large numbers of European immigrants swelled the Catholic ranks in many cities of the Northeast and Midwest. The astonishing ethnic variety of the newcomers made the American Catholic Church more “catholic” than ever before, which was a boon to Catholic apologists, but a nightmare for the American bishops. To their credit, they responded to this pastoral challenge imaginatively and effectively by creating an extensive network of “national parishes” for virtually every sizable ethnic group.

In 1912, Andrew Murray, an influential spokesperson for the Keswick theology prevalent in American fundamentalism, decried the sorry state of spirituality among modern Christians. How many there are, he exclaimed, who “say that they have no time and that the heart desire for prayer is lacking; they do not know how to spend half an hour with God! … Day after day, month after month passes, and there is no time to spend one hour with God.” Closing his jeremiad, Murray exclaimed, “How many there are who take only five minutes for prayer!” A few years later, Herbert Willett and Charles Clayton Morrison, editors of The Christian Century, the voice of the emerging liberal movement in American Protestantism, published a daily devotional guide entitled The Daily Altar. Its purpose was to provide Christians with “a few moments of quiet and reflection” in the midst of “short and crowded days” in order to maintain a daily prayer life. To be precise, devotions in The Daily Altar took one and a half minutes to complete.