The aim of this paper is to throw some light on Tertullian's attitude to military service. His statements on this subject are highly useful for a more accurate understanding of his own changing views on the empire and the duties of citizenship. They are also important evidence for marking a crucial stage in the pre-Constantinian evolution of the relations of church and state. It will be seen that the whole question of Christians serving in the Roman army became relevant only in the late second century; Tertullian is one of the earliest literary witnesses for this momentous development. Therefore, on both counts, the texts deserve close scrutiny.

Gregor Heimburg, the bitter critic of the papacy and of Nicholas of Cusa, is said to have taunted Cusanus, saying that because Cusanus was defeated in a lawsuit in Mainz, he turned from the practice of law to theology.1 Heimburg, a utriusque iuris doctor who rendered his legal services to both secular and ecclesiastical princes, was certainly versed in the legal literature of his time. But, as we shall see below, history does not seem to bear out his insinuation that disappointment and failure in the field of law led Cusanus to take up theology as his career. It is probably of little importance to ask whether Cusanus would have continued to work as a lawyer had he won the case in Mainz. We must note, however, that Cusanus is so well known as a theologian, cardinal, philosopher, and even as a scientist that we are apt to forget his early career as a canon lawyer in the service of the archdiocese of Trier. It is only recently that due attention began to be paid to the legal activities of Cusanus.2 The purpose of this paper is to throw light not only on his education and activities as a canon lawyer, but also on the role which he played in the disputed episcopal election of 1430 in the archdiocese of Trier.

Charles I, King of England and Scotland, appointed John Spottiswoode Chancellor of Scotland on December 23, 1634. This position was the last and highest bestowed upon a man who had served the crown faithfully for over three decades. Spottiswoode was ordained a minister in the Scottish Reformed (Presbyterian?) Church in 1583. In 1604 James named him Archbishop of Glasgow; in 1605, appointed him to the Privy Council; and in 1615, translated him to the Archbishopric of St. Andrews. In this position it fell to Spottiswoode to implement the Scottish ecclesiastical policy of James I, which consisted of an attempt to make the Scottish Kirk more episcopal in form. In the early stages of the transfromation which dealt with structure Spottiswoode was successful. However, in the final analysis, he failed because, even though the Five Articles of Perth which contained the liturgical changes were ratified by the Perth General Asembly of 1616 and by Parliament in 1621, they did not receive general acceptance. Nothing that Spottiswoode did quieted the vocal opposition among the clergy and laity.1 These groups became the nucleus of the opposition to Charles in the 1630s.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars took the English into Europe in unprecedented numbers, and, once there, they stayed. Commerce and industry followed inevitably in the wake of the armies; colonies of Englishmen sprang up in places not previously centres of international trade; English industrialists promoted factories and railways, operated and maintained by English workmen. The new industrial aristocracy chose to spend its vacations in Europe, usually at the fashionable watering places, and some were sent by their physicians into more or less permanent European exile. Not without reason did the Christian Remembrancer ask rhetorically, in 1845, if there was yet a square yard of ground in all the five continents which the restless curiosity of the English traveller had not raked over. Yet, if psychologically, there was no longer “any such thing as a foreign country” for the affluent nineteenth century Englishman, Europe remained for all practical purposes the limit of the horizon: and it was within this ambit that the transformation was most substantial. Sporting members of parliament had their château in Provence or their schloss in Hungary where their forebears had been content with a shooting-box on the Yorkshire moors, and undergraduates went off fly-fishing during the long vacation to Norway rather than to Wales. Altogether, the knowledgeable Anglo-German, George Biber put the English population on the continent in 1845 at between 200,000 and 300,000.1 There was no doubt about it; whatever government policy was to be, England's psychological isolation from Europe was at an end.

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.

The American revolution caused the Anglican churches in America to separate from their parent body: the Church of England. This threw the Episcopalians upon their own resources to rebuild their church. In the process of reorganization, the former Anglicans accomplished an ecclesiastical revolution in respect to episcopacy. For the first time since the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Episcopalians in America made a bishop of a major religious body the elected official of a convention of clergy and laymen. In the second place, the office of bishop in a major denomination was completely separated from the state for the first time since Emperor Constantine officially recognized Christianity in 313 A.D.

There is now general agreement among historians that American abolitionism developed out of religious origins. Considerable attention has been paid to the sources of antislavery feelings in previous religious movements, particularly the Finneyite revivals in New York and the benevolence societies led by Lyman Beecher in Massachusetts. What has not been sufficiently explored is the possibility that antislavery, at least in the minds of some of its chief advocates, was a religious movement in its own right, with its own distinctive approach to theological problems.1 And yet to pursue this possibility is merely to take seriously a complaint made by the denominations themselves against uncomprising abolitionists: that is, that abolitionists had abandoned organized religion because of their own dogmatic suspicion of all attempts to subject divine impulses to earthly forms of organization.