Origen's vocabulary is quite definitely that of an intellectual; it owes little to daily life or to the vernacular of his time.… He seems …to manufacture his own language, often hermetic, abstract, or difficult to understand, the language of a man concerned above all with ideas, somewhat cut off from the real world, and constitutionally separated from concrete realities. Are we wrong in attaching a particular significance to the fact, so characteristic of his passionate idealism as well as of his introversion, that he made himself a eunuch ?

The thirteenth century represents a high point in the establishment of female orders, whose ministry was directed largely at an urban population prone to heresy and undergoing the disruptive transition from pastoral feudalism to nascent capitalism. During this period, more than a quarter of the contemporary saints were women; they identified with all of the new movements which animated the church. Some, continuing the already established tradition of princely veneration, were active in evangelization in the recently Christianized regions of Europe's periphery, like Spain and Poland, through the patronage of charitable institutions and religious houses. The canonization trials of Hedwig of Poland, Elizabeth of Thuringia and Margaret of Hungary all reflect a broadly based constituency including rural and urban, lay and clerical, male and female support Others appealed to a narrower social and geographical audience and ministered to the problems of the urban poor: Sperandea of Cingoli's miraculous cures were performed exclusively on married women of the city and of the adjacent countryside. But the largest number of female saints continued to be cloistered women whose chief accomplishment was the establishment or endowment of a new convent or the foundation of a new female order, usually in association with a male order; for while many such orders began independently, the church feared the consequences of independent female piety and sought to ensure orthodoxy by associating the female houses with a corresponding male order. Nevertheless, while contemporary hagiography continued to be patterned after the stereotypical saints of early Christianity, the character of female piety changed to reflect such dynamic changes within the church as the rise of mendicancy, the transition from rural to urban life, the cult of the Virgin, the rise of national states, the war against heresy, the new emphasis on the humanity of Christ and the political struggles of the papacy.

If one were to ask a Scandinavian to name the outstanding Pietist from the eighteenth century, that Pietist would undoubtedly be Erik Pontoppidan. August Herman Francke would most assuredly come in second place. Pontoppidan's lasting fame rests with his “Explanation” (Forklaring) to Luther's Small Catechism which he published in 1737 under the title Truth Unto Godliness (Sandhed til Gudfryktighed). A little over one hundred years later (1842), a pioneer Norwegian-American pastor by the name of Elling Eielsen translated it into English and walked—yes walked—from the Fox River settlements in northern Illinois to New York City in order to get Pontoppidan's “Explanation” published.

On 29 May 1831, the Reverend James Jenkins Trott, a Methodist missionary to the Cherokee, was arrested in the Cherokee Nation by the Georgia Guard and forced to march 110 miles to prison at Camp Gilmer. Released after four days, he was required to post a five-hundred-dollar bond and ordered to keep out of that part of the Indian nation within the territorial limits of the state of Georgia. He refused to obey the order. Married to a Cherokee who lived near his mission station at New Echota, he went to visit his wife and two children in July. On 6 July he again was arrested and forced to march 110 miles back to prison. With him this time were two Presbyterian missionaries, the Reverend Samuel A. Worcester and Dr. Elizur Butler. Two of Trott's friends, the Reverend Dickson C. McLeod and the Reverend Martin Wells, who were also Methodist circuit riders within the Cherokee Nation, heard of his arrest. They saddled up and rode after him. When they caught up with the prisoners along the road, the officer in charge, Col. C. H. Nelson, ordered them curtly to “flank off!.” When McLeod made some disparaging remarks about the treatment of the missionaries, Nelson ordered him off his horse, arrested him and made him march with the prisoners. Wells, who was left holding McLeod's horse, also was ordered with oaths to flank off. When he refused, “Col. Nelson cut a stick and making up to Mr. Wells gave him a severe blow on the head.”1

This essay focuses attention on certain aspects of the religious forces which powerfully shaped the small colleges which dominated American higher education prior to the Civil War. Religion, and more specifically evangelical Protestantism, has long been recognized as an important factor influencing the early history of these colleges. But the precise connections between evangelicalism and higher education during those years have not been studied very systematically recently, especially in the light of a new historiography concerning the ante-bellum college which has been developing during the past decade. This article begins with a brief sketch of the new historiography and tries to suggest some of the interpretive strengths and weaknesses of the recent writings. Then follows a description of the “agency” systems developed by certain Midwestern schools to aid in fund raising—a specific point of linkage between the general religious community and the colleges this community helped to found. This latter section seeks to redress in a limited way the interpretive imperfections of the recent historiography and to suggest something of the nature of the special relationships which existed between the small colleges of the Midwest and the evangelical Protestant churches during the middle decades of the nineteenth century.

I am greatly honored but a bit puzzled to find myself president of the American Society of Church History. Most of my predecessors in this position have been professors within theological faculties or departments of religion. Even those who have been, like me, members of secular departments of history, have generally received some formal instruction in religious studies. But this year you have chosen a president who is entirely secular in both education and career, whose graduate training was in diplomatic history of the Reformation period and whose teaching has been largely limited to secular state universities. I descend, to be sure, from a line of Protestant missionaries, ministers and religious educators, and over the years I have learned a good deal of historical theology from some very gifted students. But neither asset, I fear, places me very securely within the line of succession in which I now find myself.