No literary product of the humanistic period north of the Alps enjoyed a wider circulation or had a more lasting impact than satire. By far the best known of Erasmus's works today is In Praise of Folly, a satire that lays open and criticizes the foolishness of pre-Reformation society. Yet the prince of humanism had produced only a derivative of another satire, Sebastian Brant's Narrenschiff which also claimed a spot on the Western world's best-seller list for a few centuries. Sebastian Brant and Erasmus still are recognized as two of the severest critics of the society in which they lived, and their conception of pre-Reformation life set the trend for generations of historians to come. Erasmus's “Fool Stultitia continues, year after year, to climb her pulpit and deliver her oration to new audiences in every langauge…”

One of the principal areas of disagreement between the followers of Martin Luther and the Swiss reformers during the Reformation concerned the Lord's Supper. As one church historian has observed, “every dissension concerning the Gospel necessarily expresses itself in dissension over the Lord's Supper.” Not surprisingly, therefore, liturgical variations in the celebration of the communion service became major points of controversy as well. Unfortunately, modern scholarship has often overlooked or underestimated the significance of these differences.

Among the many fruits of the evangelical piety within British Protestantism was the movement of renewal which crystallized around the end of the 1820s into the sect usually known as the Plymouth Brethren (or Christian Brethren as they now prefer). Brethren have “remained fairly small numerically… but [with] a theological influence much larger than [their] membership would indicate.” It is hard to say exactly when the group first appeared; its period of gestation lasted several years. At the outset “the founders … had no programme, manifesto or creed.” The sect originated among a group of earnest seekers centered first in Dublin and later in Plymouth, where at the beginning of the 1830s they began to take on the form of an organized movement. It soon had followers throughout the British Isles, and a few adherents were gathered in France, Germany, and Switzerland. Though eventually the Brethren became a predominantly lower middle-class body, the leaders of the first stage of the movement were drawn almost exclusively from the upper ranks of society: Anglican clergymen, Oxford dons, lawyers, doctors, sons of country families or wealthy merchants, and even a future peer of the realm. They were then all young men in their twenties or early thirties, nearly all of them well educated and several of them excellent classical or biblical scholars.

Most of the standard books on the social gospel mention Charles Oliver Brown's Talks on the Labor Troubles, published in 1886, the year of the Haymarket riot, as one of the early clerical statements on the problem of labor in America. Several of them also allude to Brown's controversy in San Francisco with George D. Herron in 1895. But these writers on the social gospel were unaware of Brown's importance, even though Henry F. May noted that a whole issue of The Kingdom, a paper issued by Herron's supporters, was devoted to the refutation of Brown's charges against Herron.

In 1859 an influential theological quarterly asserted without fear of contradiction that postmillennialism was the “commonly received doctrine” among American Protestants; but by the early twentieth century, it had largely vanished, and Lewis Sperry Chafer, with only slight partisan exaggeration, could claim in 1936 that it was without “living voice”. In part, this change resulted from the defection of conservatives like Chafer to the expanding premillennial ranks, and several historians have told their story in detail. The disappearance of postmillennialism outside of premillennial quarters, however, has received scant attention. There—especially among the moderate to liberal Protestants with whom this article is chiefly concerned—the once dominant eschatology appears not to have suffered outright rejection but to have ebbed away. Although its remants endured as faith in progress, it gradually ceased to be a distinct biblically grounded eschatology.