The Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century inherited as a part of their consciousness the following ideas which had to do with their views of toleration.

This magnificent work is part of a series of Rerum Britannic: Medii Ævi Scriptores, or “Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages,” published under direction of the Master of the Rolls as part of the Rolls. It embraces all the important contemporary materials for the history of Thomas. Vols. i.–iv. contain the contemporary Vitæ (by William of Canterbury, Benedict of Peterborough, Edward Grim, Roger of Pontigny, William Fitz-Stephen, John of Salisbury, Alan of Tewkesbury, and Herbert of Bosham, etc.); vols. v.–vii., the Epistolæ, i. e., the whole correspondence relating to Thomas. (An eighth and last volume is to contain the French Lives, edited by Paul Meyer.)

The inquisitorial procedure in the investigation of crimes, which developed in the Church in the thirteenth century, grew out of the criminal procedure of the later Roman Empire, modified by the special conditions of the times as well as by more primitive Germanic ideas. The older ecclesiastical procedure, the accusatory, likewise based on the Roman law, had left the entire initiative in prosecution to the private accuser, who presented himself in the character of a plaintiff, formulated the accusation, and produced the proofs exactly as he would have done in a civil case, except that he was compelled to accept the lex talionis—that is, in case he was unable to support his charges with a reasonable show of evidence, the accuser agreed to submit to the same punishment as would have been inflicted on the accused if the charges had been proved. The obvious objections to this procedure were that the church authorities had no means of prosecuting crime on their own initiative and that the dangers surrounding an unsuccessful accuser, together with the various conditions that had to be fulfilled before a private person could qualify as an accuser in any case, made adequate private prosecution impossible. The accusatory system, it is true, had been modified by the introduction of denunciation, where a denouncer takes the place of the accuser, with this difference, that he is not compelled to subscribe to the talio nor is he compelled to possess all the qualifications of a legal accuser. This tended to encourage private prosecution of crimes, but the advantage was more than balanced by the privilege enjoyed by the accused of clearing himself of the charges by purgation, either the oath or the ordeal.

Among the accusations brought against the Templars by Pope Clement V. in 1308, there was one to the effect that the officers of the Order—the Master, the Visitors, and the Preceptors—absolved the brethren from their sins. It is further asserted that de Molay admitted this in the presence of high personages before his arrest. That the accusation was an after-thought is shown by the fact that it is not contained in the preliminary list of charges sent in September, 1307, by the Inquisitor Guillaume de Paris to his subordinates as a guide for them in the expected trials of the Templars. Yet Clement was not the first to take note of this assumption of sacerdotal prerogatives, which, in fact, was well known to all who busied themselves with canon law, and public attention had already been called to it. In a diatribe on the disorders of the Church, written by a mendicant friar apparently towards the end of the thirteenth century, all the three great Military Orders—the Hospital, the Temple, and the Teutonic Knights—are reproved for this usurpation of the power of the keys, although it is ascribed rather to ignorance than to wilful intrusion on priestly functions. The truth or the falsity of the accusation has never, I believe, been investigated, and though the question is a subordinate one, yet everything connected with the catastrophe of the Temple possesses interest, and this derives adventitious importance from its relation to the development of Catholic doctrine in the thirteenth century.

The subject is not of my own choosing. It was assigned to me by our Secretary, when he invited me last summer to write a paper for this meeting of the Society. The raeson for this request lies in the fact that, for the last dozen years, much of my spare time has been spent in special work on this engrossing subject, which is shrouded in much mystery. But we all know something about the great Anabaptist movement, which paralleled the history of the Reformation. We have all touched these Anabaptists in their life and labors, in the sixteenth century, in all Europe, but especially in Switzerland, upper Germany, and Holland. Crushed and practically wiped out everywhere else, they rooted themselves deeply in the soil of northeastern Germany and above all in the Low Countries. And thence, whenever persecution overwhelmed them, they crossed the channel and moved to England, where their history is closely interwoven with that of the Nonconformists in general and especially with the nascent history of the English Baptists.

It is a fact of general observation that hereditary talent is rare. The history of our country, whether in the ecclesiastical or secular field, shows but few instances in which prominent service has been rendered by three generations of the same lineage. There have been, indeed, conspicuous exceptions to this wellnigh universal rule. The Winthrops and the Adamses of Massachusetts, for instance, or the Edwardses in the Connecticut valley, have placed their country in debt to their successive generations. But these illustrations are noticeable for their uncommonness. They seem to defy the universal law; and we look upon them with interest because, while they reveal the possibility of an aristocracy of birth and service, they show that the democratic constitution of America accords substantially with the general principles which govern our race in its development.

Complete religious freedom never existed upon earth until the present century, and even now it is found only in North America and some of the colonial possessions of Great Britain. The ancient world seems never to have formed the conception of such a thing. Religion was always allied with the State. Each people was supposed to have its own gods whom it worshipped in its own way. And rarely did even foreign conquest deprive the subdued people of their religion. Thus Assyria allowed the settlers who took the place of exiled Israel to have a priest of Israel to “teach them the manner of the God of the land.” 2 Kings xvii., 27. And when the Jews were carried off to Babylon, it appears that they were allowed to retain their own religious usages without hindrance. But whenever propagandism was attempted, or any attack made or supposed to be made on the faith or worship of a people, there came at once a violent reaction. Thus the main charge upon which Socrates was condemned at Athens, was that he did not worship the gods that the city worshipped, but introduced new divinities of his own. Imperial Rome rarely disturbed the religion of the nations which one after another submitted to her authority, yet there was a distinction made in regard to the worships introduced into the Eternal City. Some were allowed, others were forbidden. Christianity with its exelusive claims soon came to be numbered among the latter.

The intellectual, social, and religious upheaval of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of which the Renaissance and the Protestant Revolution were phases, along with the decidedly skeptical tendency of the Scotist philosophy which undermined the arguments by which the great mysteries of the Christian faith had commonly been supported while accepting unconditionally the dogmas of the Church—together with the influence of Neoplatonizing mysticism which aimed and claimed to raise its subjects into such direct and complete union and communion with the Infinite as to make any kind of objective authority superfluous:—all these influences conspired to lead many of the most conscientious and profoundly religious thinkers of the sixteenth century to reject simultaneously the baptism of infants and the traditional doctrine of the Trinity. Infant baptism they regarded as being without scriptural warrant, subversive of an ordinance of Christ, and inconsistent with regenerate church membership. Likewise the doctrine of the tripersonality of God, as set forth in the so-called Nicene and Athanasian creeds, involving the co-eternity, co-equality and consubstantiality of the Son with the Father and the personality of the Holy Spirit, they subjected to searching and fundamental criticism.

Even though in the field of Church History comparatively little has been done in England in the present century, I do not think that a catalogue of authors and their works would be particularly illuminating. I have decided therefore to limit my remarks by confining them to historians with whom I happen to have been personally acquainted, hoping thereby to give a little human interest to a topic which might otherwise be somewhat dull, unless treated at a length inordinate for a single paper.

Those were red-letter days in 1890, when in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany the learned and beloved President of our Society was my almost daily guide, teacher, and companion.

Two churches of the Presbyterian family, the Associate and the Associate Reformed, were the pioneers in organizing theological education west of the Alleghanies. As they were small and their history is not generally known, this paper may open with a brief account of their origin.