Many years ago, almost on my first acquaintance with Calvin, I was impressed by a phrase in that last brief letter of his to his old companion in labor and battle, William Farel:

Live mindful of our union which, as it has been useful to the Church of God, so its fruits await us in heaven.

The problem of a possible continuity of late medieval heresies and sixteenth century sects in Switzerland and Germany has not been thoroughly investigated yet. Of course some historians have touched upon the problem. Thus in 1886 Ludwig Keller advanced the thesis that Anabaptism was closely connected with the Waldensian tradition. Recently a Marxist historian, Gerhard Zschäbitz, pointed out that certain ideas of the Hussite tradition had infiltrated Anabaptism in Thuringia. On the whole, however, it is assumed that medieval heresies did not survive the fifteenth century. The sixteenth century German sects are considered a product of the Reformation. This is implying that the Reformation constituted a complete break with the past and opened an altogether new age. It hardly needs pointing out that this is a hazardous assumption. It is rather hard to believe that heresies, which had secretly lived on in certain towns and villages for one or two hundred years should suddenly have died out by 1500.

In a special advertising supplement to the New York Times (May 6, 1962) the State of Connecticut sponsored an old claim: “The world's first written constitution, creating government by consent of the governed, appeared in Connecticut in 1639.” The diverse implications of this venerable assertion and their relation to the Rev. Thomas Hooker are the subject of the present essay. Intimations that Hooker deserved remembrance as a champion of liberty date at least to William Hubbard's General History of New England, written in the 1670's. But full-blown theories came after 1776, and especially after Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's discovery in 1860 of a remarkable notebook of sermon notes taken down in cipher between April, 1638, and April, 1641, by Henry Wolcott, Jr. of Windsor. Herein was found an outline of Hooker's now famous sermon to the Connecticut Court on May 31, 1638, as that body began its historic deliberations on a “Frame of Government.” George Bancroft would reflect the impact of this find in the revised edition of his widely read History of the United States. He saw in Hooker's pronouncements the “seed” whence flowered the “first of the series of written American constitutions.” Paraphrasing Ezekiel Roger's epitaph, Bancroft refers to Hooker as “the one rich pearl with which Europe more than repaid America for the treasures from her coast.” John Fiske in his work on The Beginnings of New England (1889) would claim even more stridently that Thomas Hooker “deserves more than any other man to be called the father [of American democracy].” George Leon Walker accepted Fiske's judgment and subtitled his biography “Preacher, Founder, Democrat.”

The journey is long from the Massachusetts theocracy that banished Roger Williams in 1635 to the predominantly Roman Catholic Massachusetts of the twentieth century that finally in 1936 lifted that ancient ban against the original Rhode Islander. The tale of this remarkable transition is the story of how the heretic became the hero. In his own time, Williams had days of agony and glory—mostly the former. Likewise, in the running currents of our national history, his reputation has had days of agony and glory—mostly the latter. This is not to say, however, that he always properly deserved the precise glory given him, or, rather, that he has been invariably lauded for his true contribution.

Commenting upon Neville Chamberlain's announcement of war to the British people on September 3, 1939, Frederick Lewis Allen remarked, “With these sentences, spoken so quietly thousands of miles away, an era ended for America and another began.” Sufficient time has now elapsed for historians to analyze and appraise the events which informed and circumscribed that past era. Two articles have recently appeared in this journal substantiating such a conclusion. In his article dealing with “Continental Influence on American Christian Thought Since World War I,” Professor Sydney Ahlstrom forcefully argued that the most significant points of contact between the altered theological situation on the Continent and America's post-liberal thinking were four in number and scope: 1) a new movement in biblical exegesis and interpretation; 2) the German social movement; 3) the Swedish movement in theology; and 4) the “crisis theology” or dialectical school associated with Karl Barth. Without taking issue here with Ahlstrom as to the correctness or adequacy of his delineation of these times as “post-liberal” (in itself a somewhat unattached and ambiguous term), I would like to record those same points of contact within and from the perspective of American Methodism.