Some had remarked that there are merits in team operations, where scholars get together in a team, or students in a field get together in a team. I recently had the very good fortune to be involved in such an effort. Actually it wasn't quite scholarship. I was asked to be the principal advisor of a thirteen-part television series called The Long Search. I'm happy to say that the series, on world religions, was very well received by the critics. But it was very strongly a team effort, and in documentary style. I thought at the outset that there would be some difficulty in persuading people who were working on the ground in BBC television to take what I regarded as the right sort of approach to religion. On the contrary, I found that to be extremely easy, much easier, I thought, than persuading some academics. And I think the reason was that by taking a documentary approach the people at BBC weren't in a way too much bound by previous images of what it was to look at religion, and they were not too much bound by the kind of history that we are all bound up with ourselves.

With the appearance of this volume, our survey of western religious thought in the nineteenth century is concluded. We take this opportunity to thank all who contributed to its successful completion. We thank especially the authors of individual articles for their co-operation, patience and support at every stage of production. We are grateful to colleagues at Lancaster and to former colleagues at Dartmouth in particular for helping to read and evaluate some manuscripts; for their assistance with matters bibliographical, we thank Paul Morris of the department of religious studies and R. M. Bliss of the department of history at the University of Lancaster. We also wish publicly to acknowledge our indebtedness to the more than sixty scholars from around the world who encouraged and advised us especially in the early stages of the project. We cannot list them all by name here, but we can record that their expert judgment proved invaluable in planning the shape and scope of the three volumes now published.

Our delight in seeing the final volume appear is necessarily tempered by our deep sorrow that the distinguished American historian Sydney Ahlstrom did not live to see the publication of his last article in the field to which he contributed so much. His early enthusiasm for this project was much appreciated by the editors.

On both sides of the Atlantic and on both sides of the Channel, there has been in recent years a renewed interest in nineteenth-century religious thought. Reasons for this by now widespread revival of interest need not be rehearsed. It is perhaps sufficient to recall that several issues which dominated discussion in the decades following the European Enlightenment remain central in contemporary debate within the academic study of religion and within the theological community, whether Protestant or Roman Catholic or Jewish. In order to make this point, one need only call to mind such recently debated issues as hermeneutics and tradition, faith and history, projectionist and other reductionist accounts of religion, the limits of historical relativism and the nature of rationality, the possibility of a purely ‘scientific’ study of religion and the legitimacy of theological studies within the university, as well as such religiously intramural concerns as the place of myth in christology or the nature of Jewishness. Each of these problems was either initially raised or significantly recast during the nineteenth century.

Whilst taking care not to underestimate the distance between their world and our own, one must nonetheless allow that greater understanding of these and other contemporary issues can often be gained by attending to those thinkers who in the main have determined the direction of modern religious thought in the West. Theirs was a revolutionary time when the older theistic world-view, already under attack since the Renaissance and throughout the Enlightenment, gave way to a new, more variegated, more complex circumstance for religious thought.