Political success is measured according to the accomplishment of the goals determined by politicians. This definition poses a challenge to historians, for political aims often are ambiguous, and our knowledge of them incomplete. This problem becomes more acute with regard to the history of the papacy, whose asserted aims on the one hand, and its real policy on the other, often were characterized by inner contradictions.

Historians of English Puritanism concede that by the 1650s the revolution of the saints had run its course. The political activism of the Presbyterians, Independents, and radical sects during the war gave way in the Interregnum period to more private concerns of personal and collective piety. The pattern of changing popular mood in an unstable political environment is clear enough, but the social meanings of religion as devotional practice are more obscure. Lost in the historical analysis is the realization that piety is an expressive form of communication in the politics of social life. In times of militant controversy the public role of piety is more obviously ideological, and devotional literature achieves publicity in the sense of promoting sectarian reformation. From this perspective, I shall focus on Henry Jessey's The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced (London, 1647) and will place it in the context of the art of dying (ars moriendi) tradition and of factional pluralism in civil war London. The story of Sarah Wight's illness and conversion experience attempted to unify religious and political divisions in a crucial revolutionary year. Within a traditional framework of devotional literature, Jessey communicated a political message. Sarah Wight herself was not a passive recipient of ministerial advice, but an influential teacher of radical theology. In fact, it was the customary form of the artes moriendi tradition that allowed her conversion to become an occasion for lay preaching.

Daniel Neal's The History of the Puritans was a standard eighteenth-century source for modern historians and, as will be shown, prefigured nineteenth-century Whig conceptions of Puritanism. Published in four volumes between 1732 and 1738, Neal's work went through at least twenty-one editions or reprints; the last one was done in 1863. New editions were printed in London, Bath, Dublin, New York, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the History was twice expanded by continuators in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. The History of the Puritans was not a narrowly religious or sectarian study: Neal strove to elucidate the Puritan contribution to the state. A Congregationalist minister, Neal produced the closest thing we have to an official Dissenting history of England, one which glorified the role of Puritanism in fostering English liberty. To study Neal's History is to gain insight into the historical and political ideology of early eighteenth-century Dissent.

The revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV in 1685 resulted in the immediate exile of all ministers of the French Reformed churches not amenable to conversion, the illegal flight of several hundred thousand of their fellow-believers to neighboring Protestant lands, and the nominal conversion under duress of the rest of the Roman Catholic church. It also precipitated a literary polemic in which Protestant writers protested vigorously the injustice of revoking an “irrevocable” edict—and the cruel and oppressive measures preceding and accompanying it. Catholic counterparts asserted that, on the contrary, the Edict had been a temporary expedient to end civil strife, extorted forcibly by a naturally rebellious and turbulent minority.

Writing in the first issue of The Magnetic and Cold Water Guide in 1846, an unnamed editor hailed the virtues of the cold-water cure: “Instead of the dosing and drugging of the old system of practice, it proposes to rely on the indwelling healing power of nature alone, to provoke and regulate which, it employs the widespread element of fresh unadulterated water.” In case readers had not caught the full dimensions of the message, the writer inserted “the testimony of an experienced physician of Massilon, Ohio.” The doctor, an A. Underhill, waxed eloquent on his investigations of “the Water Treatment of disease” and worked his way to a concluding rhetorical flourish. “Physiology, Phrenology, and Magnetism,” he summarized, “are the keys that are unlocking the great mysteries of nature and mind, and letting us in, as it were, to the inner temple, where the sunbeams of light and truth are filling the minds and understandings of all the truly devout worshippers of the Eternal principles which govern all things.”