Four hundred years ago this autumn William Tindale was executed at Vilvorde, a few miles south of Antwerp. So ended an adventurous career which began some forty years earlier in the soft western vales of Gloucestershire. The family acres, while not too broad, made possible a university education, which resulted in the youth becoming an Oxford M. A. in 1515. More important, it brought him in contact with the works of Erasmus, whose ardent disciple he became. Settling in his native region as chaplain and tutor to one of the important county families, he soon distinguished himself as a champion of the new learning. In this work he found himself handicapped by lack of suitable English books. He therefore translated his Dutch master's Enchiridion, and resolved to answer the great humanist's call for vernacular scriptures available to the masses. But the church authorities of his diocese were hostile, and, in any case, for such work he needed greater facilities than those of a country parish.

Roger Williams is justly famous in history as the Pioneer Statesman of Religious Liberty. He can never be robbed of this distinction and honor. But it is not the only cause for which he should be famous. According to the well known story, arriving in Massachusetts Bay Colony on February 5, 1631, he declined an invitation to become minister of the Boston Church because it was constituted of “an unseparated people,” still holding fellowship with the Church of England, and because the civil magistrates of the Bay punished for breaches of the First Table, that is exerted authority in religious affairs. After years of controversy with the authorities of the Bay, sentence of banishment was passed upon him in October, 1635, and in January, 1636, he was forced to leave its jurisdiction. Reaching the Narragansett country, he established the Providence Community and later Rhode Island Colony.

The year 1936 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the Institutes of the Christian Religion In that work is contained the mature expression of Calvin's religious thought. Attention may well be centered, at this time, upon one of the most procreative conceptions contained in the Institutes—a conception still rich in suggestions for our community of Christian life. The conception is that of the “societas fidelium” or the “communia sanctorum.” In the following study the “communia sanctorum” is considered in relation to its concept and to predestination, cult, discipline, and social service.

Somewhere in the complicated pattern of colonial fears that were aroused by legislation, actual or proposed, during the fifteen years preceding the American Revolution, an indeterminate space must be found for the so-called Mayhew Controversy. Coming into the open in 1763, this anti-Anglican outbreak drew its life from roots which stretched profusely into the past. This study aims not only to describe the various sources of the controversy, but also to point out several of its more interesting characteristics.

Although the social gospel has been described as “the first expression of American religious life which is truly born in America itself,” it was evoked upon the American scene by forces, world-wide in scope, which have everywhere brought about similar reactions in the field of religion. The full setting in of the industrial revolution in country after country of Western civilization created such problems for religion as to lead within a generation to a vigorous enunciation of a social ethic by alert religious leaders of the country. The decade of the 1770's in England saw the beginnings of what Lewis Mumford calls the “paleotechnic” phase of civilization and within a generation Wilberforce and the “Clapham Sect” were thundering against the iniquities of the slave trade. Despite the passions of the great war with France, the cold rigidities of the “dismal science,” and the distracting ecclesiastical convulsions of the Oxford Movement, the development of a social emphasis in religion went on to find expression in the charities of Peabody and Shaftesbury, and the positive teachings of Maurice and Kingsley.

There are various accounts of the origin of Christianity in Ethiopia, but most of them have no satisfactory historical basis. One tradition, found in the Royal Chronicles and other native works, claims that the Apostle Thomas was responsible for the introduction of Christianity into Ethiopia. Origen refers to the Apostle Matthew as a missionary to the Ethiopians, an association which Rufinus also gives. Gelasios of Cyzicus links the name of Bartholomew with Ethiopia. There is also the well-known account by Luke of the baptism by Philip of the Ethiopians,” around which a legend has developed. Candace, however, was a name used chiefly in Nubia and ancient Ethiopia, and not to be found among the queens of Ethiopia proper. There is actually no trustworthy record of Christianity in this country in the first century. These traditions have probably resulted, for the most part, from a confusion of terms. Early historians were not at all clear about the geographical limitations of Ethiopia and, in using the name, might have meant Nubia, or Egypt, or even India. In fact, Ethiopia was sometimes referred to as “India ulterior.” Even as late as the fifteenth century this confusion remained.