Among the defining traits of Restoration politics was a degree of hostility between the royal court and the English episcopate unprecedented since the Reformation. A long pattern of cooperation between the king and bishops was broken after 1660. The issues of religious toleration and of Charles II's Catholic sympathies particularly divided church and court, and at times rendered them overt political opponents. Significant study has been made of the policy disagreements beneath these battles, and of the political maneuverings that resolved them. Less attention has been given the ideas and attitudes that divided the Restoration court and church leadership. This article will argue that certain intellectual shifts were required before the policy disagreements that divided Charles II's court and the bishops could emerge as open political fights.

“Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be!—and all was light,” according to Alexander Pope. Other British subjects were not so sure. In recent years, historians have begun to take more seriously the persons who opposed Newton on either philosophical, scientific or theological grounds. Rival systems of natural philosophy were already in the field, including the scholastic, the alchemical, and especially the Cartesian. Newton had learned a great deal from Descartes, but he also set out to correct the errors in his system. Many Cartesians, at least in the period shortly after 1687, were not convinced by Newton's arguments. His methodology was suspect as well. The mathematics that Newton had invented was hard to follow and the role that it played in his system was unfamiliar. Political antipathies sometimes led to the rejection of Newtonianism. But the crux of the problem was theological. Newton's natural philosophy, as stated in his Principia Mathematica, seemed to undermine the traditional doctrines of the Christian religion.

The revolutionary and legislator Bertrand Barrère in his Sur les idiomes étrangers et l'enseignement de la langue française had said, “Federalism and superstition speak Breton; emigration and hatred of the Republic speak German; the counter-revolution speaks Italian, and fanaticism speaks Basque.” For Barrère, regional languages were intertwined with religion (“superstition,” “fanaticism”) and the other antigovernment forces. And he was right, at least in part. Surveys made in the last century indicate that of those regions where a language other than French was spoken (German in Alsace-Lorraine, Flemish in the department of the Nord, Gaelic in Brittany, Basque in the Southwest, and Catalan in the Roussillon), all save the Roussillon had statistically high levels of religious practice. To explore how religious practice has been supported by linguistic culture in modern France, I have chosen the high-practice region of Alsace and the low-practice region of the Roussillon in the last half of the nineteenth century. I want to interpret the dynamics through which Alsace supported religious practice and the Roussillon did not.

On the morning of Wednesday, May 20,1885, Boston police arrested three Protestant clergymen for preaching on the Common. News of the outrage traveled quickly, and within hours the city's evangelical Protestants were in an uproar. When the preachers—A. J. Gordon, pastor of the Clarendon Street Baptist church; H. L. Hastings, editor of a locally popular evangelical periodical, the Christian; and W. H. Davis, superintendent of a mission in the North End—appeared at the Municipal Criminal Courthouse on Thursday morning, a crowd reported to be between four thousand and five thousand, “principally of the middle-class, well-dressed and well behaved,” thronged the steps of the building. “[I]t was clearly evident,” Hastings later wrote, “that something unusual was going on in the police court of the city of Boston.”

Looking back at the events that led up to the Azusa Street revival in Los Angeles, California, the foremost revival of the century in terms of global impact, eyewitness Frank Bartleman announced that the “revival was rocked in the cradle of little Wales … ‘brought up’ in India” and then became “full grown” in Los Angeles, California. To the Pentecostal “saints,” as they commonly called themselves in America, the appearance of “Pentecostal” phenomena (for example, visions, dreams, prophecy, glossolalia, and other charismatic gifts) in India confirmed that what the Old Testament prophet Joel had foretold about the “latter rain” outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the end times (Joel 2: 28–29) was being fulfilled simultaneously in other parts of the world. As one songwriter put it, “The latter rain has come, / Upon the parched ground … The whole wide world around.”

Robert Duvall's film The Apostle initially raised the eyebrows of those concerned with how popular film might portray religious topics. However, suspicions that this film would be another exposé attempting to cash in on the public's fascination with the well-known trials and tribulations of evangelists were soon laid to rest. Rather, Duvall has produced a sensitive and honest portrayal of an American cultural and religious phenomenon—the southern Holiness tradition. The Apostlenot only entertains but also provides insight into the cultural and religious richness of the South as well as the complexities of human frailty and grace.