How did Christianity appear to men and women of the GrecoRoman world when it first began to emerge into public view? What ideas and conceptions were present within Roman “social thought” to identify and define a new phenomenon such as Christianity? What did men “see” when they looked at the Christians? In antiquity no one subjected the Christian movement to a social analysis or took a Gallup poll of popular opinions, but there is some evidence from which to gain an impression of how Christianity appeared to outsiders. As a methodological guideline I take the suggestion made by James Gustafson in his Treasure in Earthern Vessels.

The relationship between the Renaissance and the Reformation is a major theme of sixteenth-century historical studies. Generally, the discussion of the influence of these two movements upon one another has centered on two facets of their relationship: first, the influence of the Renaissance in creating an intellectual atmosphere which fostered certain Reformation movements such as a revival of biblical studies, the rejection of scholasticism, and the undermining of the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman church; and secondly, the Reformation's rejection of Renaissance humanism because of its optimistic view of human nature. This latter relationship was exemplified in the debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam, the undisputed leaders of the respective movements during the early decades of the sixteenth century. While the question of the Reformation's dependence upon Renaissance intellectual movements is usually conceded (after all Luther did use Erasmus' edition of the Greek New Testament as the basis for his German translation), there has been little evaluation of the corresponding influence of the Reformation on Renaissance humanism.

In the two decades from 1590 to 1610, there were three major events in the life of the Seven Provinces of the United Netherlands. In theology there was the outbreak of the so-called Arminian controversy over predestination and related issues, culminating in the polarizing of the Dutch Reformed Church into Remonstrant and Contra-remonstrant parties. In economics there was the transition from late-medieval and intra-European trade patterns to the new global and colonial patterns of the Dutch East India Company. In politics there was the signing of a truce with Spain, with the unprecedented granting of independence to a new nation by a great power.

Gibbon was scrupulous and generous in discharging his intellecttual and scholarly debts. The footnotes in the Decline and Fall (which comprise about a fourth of the work) are a candid and reliable index of the materials used in its composition. The reader of Gibbon is most forcefully struck by those mordant remarks which annihilate the work—and occasionally the character—of some obscure pedant. But the majority of Gibbon's notes are elegant apostrophes to the scholarship that supports the Decline and Fall. Of all the secondary authorities cited by Gibbon—there are nearly 3,000 such references— none is so frequently cited (about 250 times) and praised as Sebastien LeNain de Tillemont. He is “that learned Jansenist,” “the indefatigable Tillemont,” “the accurate M. de Tillemont”; and in one of those felicitous metaphors of which Gibbon was a master, Tillemont is “the patient and sure-footed mule of the Alps” who “may be trusted in the most slippery paths.

After having surveyed the barrenness of the valley in which were scattered skeletal remains, the prophet in the book of Ezekiel was asked, “O mortal man, can these bones live?” And his reply was not an optimistic “they will live” but rather “O Lord God, thou knowest.” When the historian begins to discuss the common theological assumptions and issues which perplexed the seventeenth century, he does not know whether they can be put into a meaningful context and is uncertain that these “bones” can be made to live. The recent historian who made a large American audience aware of seventeenth-century thought was the late Perry Miller who summarized the New England strands of thought in an essay entitled “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity.” Miller argued that theology was a part of the essence, the very marrow, of Puritanism to which a copious amount of thought was devoted. The seriousness of the Puritan concern was witnessed by the succession of able theologians from William Ames and Richard Baxter in the seventeenth century, to Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Chauncy in the eighteenth century.

During the late nineteenth century, Irish immigrants were not always sympathetic toward the Catholic Church. Observers indicated that large numbers of Irish-Americans were dissatisfied with Catholic attitudes toward American conditions and might consequently sever their ties with the church. At times, priests, members of the hierarchy, and the American Catholic press showed particular concern that Patrick Ford, the influential and controversial editor of the New York Irish World, encouraged immigrants to question their traditional place in the church. In the late 1870s, Ford's opinions of American socio-economic and political affairs directly challenged those of Catholic spokesmen.