“Christology was an important element of the earliest Arianism.” So states Raven in the introductory chapters to his study of apollinarianism. This paper will consider the christology of the “earliest′ Arians,” in particular that of Arius himself. Christology has been defined as “the study of the Person of Christ, and in particular of the union in Him of the Divine and human natures.” In the latter “particular” sense, we shall conclude that Arius really had no developed christology. This is not to say, however, that Arius was not christologically concerned in the larger sense of the word; i.e., “the study of the Person of Christ.” It is true to say after Dorner that:

We should be very greatly mistaken … if we were to suppose that the Christological labours had meanwhile been totally suspended: on the contrary, in the case of the thinkers of the Church, Christology was the perennial motive of their trinitarian efforts.

King John of England has one of the most unsavory reputations of any medieval English king, but it is some vindication of the principle “The evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones” to find that he made charitable contributions amounting to substantial sums. Moreover, in spite of the harsh criticism that has sometimes been directed toward the medieval practice of charity, there is something stimulating about a system which caused even such a man as John to pay regular alms from his revenues throughout England.

Atheists were even rarer and more obscure in seventeenth-century England than communists are in the modern United States. The scarcity of atheists, however, rather enhanced than restricted the term as an expression of loathsomeness and evil beyond accurate description. Those who seemed obviously wrong-headed on matters of the most serious import, and who were yet exasperatingly hard to prove wrong, must be in the power of some unnatural evil. Thus Thomas Hobbes was denounced as an atheist; and the accusation was as honest and almost as irrational as the accusation heard recently in many parts of the Southeast that the NAACP is communistic.

From time to time during the later colonial period individuals or groups in America sought and received advice and political assistance from certain influential friends in England. Who these “friends at Court” were and what their actual relationship was to the colonists and to the British Government has remained obscure. Part of the answer is to be found in the Minutes of the Protestant Dissenting Deputies now deposited in the Library of the City of London at Guildhall. These manuscript volumes contain not only a record of all the colonial matters discussed by the Deputies, they also reveal a hitherto unrecognized influence in the growth of religious liberty in America.

Historians have shown a reluctance to discuss a basic issue of the Al Smith campaign of 1928: the relationship between the Church and the State.