The average person, of average acquaintance with the history of our country, knows but little of the missionary labors of our Christian ancestors. He remembers hearing something, or reading somewhere, about a certain John Eliot, a Puritan preacher, who tried for years to Christianize some Indian communities near Boston; and to him Eliot was simply a visionary and a gently-stubborn fanatic, unpractical and unreasonable as the enthusiastic preacher sometimes is; but of course Eliot was the only preacher foolish enough to try to Christianize Indians; and the slow development and the final decay of Eliot's enterprise proved conclusively the utter folly and futility of giving the white man's religion to the red man, and also proved conclusively that Eliot himself was little more than a dreamer, or a monomaniac, to foresee his cause triumphant finally over countless impossibilities. Christian preachers and people generally devote themselves to labors more profitable and objects more sensible.

Van Der Hardt significantly entitled his voluminous collection of documents bearing on the Council of Constance, Magnum œcumenicum Constantiense concilium —the Great Œcumenical Council of Constance. The recent Catholic historian Funk pronounced it to be “eine der grossartigsten Kirchenversammlungen welche die Geschichte kennt”—one of the most imposing church assemblies known to history. In my own judgment, the council which assembled in Constance (1414) was, upon the whole, not only one of the most imposing of church œcumenical councils but perhaps the most imposing assembly of any sort which has ever met on the soil of Western Europe. In its sessions the urgent questions were discussed which agitated to its foundations Western Christendom during the last centuries of the Middle Ages. The Council had on it the smell of the Middle Ages and at the same time it felt the breath of the age about to open. It was an ecclesiastical synod and yet it had much of the swing of a democratic assembly. It was the first approach to a free religious parliament in which the lay element had recognition at the side of the clerical element. The two elements, mediæval and modern, strictly clerical and lay, had representation in its two places of meeting, the Cathedral, the temple of religion, and the Kaufhaus, the board of trade. The assembly was an ecclesiastical body, called to settle ecclesiastical questions; Constance was an imperial city, one of the centers of the North Alpine traffic. The questions discussed were of church administration and doctrinal purity, but the voting was done by national groups, “nations,” a wide departure from the habit of restricting the voting to the bishops, as at the Council of Nice, 325 A.D., and later councils.

The Protestant ministry in the United States extends back over three hundred years; the present study covers the first two hundred. For the sake of simplicity the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries are treated successively. A stricter division might terminate the first part of the period with the founding of the College of William and Mary in 1693, or with the establishment of Yale College in 1701; and might end the second part either with the opening of the first theological seminary, or with the early nineteenth century, when the practice of attending the seminaries had become general. These dates, however, fall so close to 1700 and to 1800 that it will suffice to treat the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries successively.

In ordinary times a paper on Recent Activities of Catholic Historians could have meant nothing more than a bibliographical survey or a critical enumeration of the writings of Catholic authors on the subject of ecclesiastical history during the preceding year or even the preceding six months. Such an approach to the matter is now impossible. The last four years have been lean years in historical bibliography. Historians may not have been idle; but they have concerned themselves more with the problems of the present than with the problems of the past. The output of historical works has been meager. Our knowledge of them is more meager still. We have not only been shut off, through the exigencies of war, from a large part of the world, but we have been deprived of the guidance of historical periodicals which would make it possible to give a complete survey of the actual conditions of historical writing and investigation at the present. Many of these periodicals have gone out of existence, others have been temporarily suspended, and many more have been inaccessible because of censorship regulations, while others have changed their character to such a degree that they hardly deserve the name of historical magazines.