Students of medieval theology are acquainted with the fact that neither the formative years of the medieval synthesis—say, from the 8th through the 12th century—nor the climax of the Middle Ages— 13th century—conceived of Holy Scripture as being only a set of inspired books, the ‘Canon,’ containing the Revelation committed by Christ to His Church. Rather, the Sacred Scripture—or, as it was also called, the Sacred Page or the Sacred Doctrine—was to the medieval mind wide enough to encompass somehow the works of the Fathers and those of subsequent Doctors. Distinct though these were from the canonical scriptures, they nonetheless were viewed in the same perspective: Holy Writ and the commentaries thereupon formed one uncleft whole which was kept together by the continuity of the Church's life. The apostolic writings were in a way continued by the Fathers' homilies and treatises, and these in turn were prolonged in the early medieval tractates.

The Diggers who broke the turf on St. George's Hill Sunday morning, April 1, 1649, have an importance far larger than the number of people involved would suggest, for their action was the first effort to bring into being a socialist Utopia. Their bold combination of theoretical and practical communism baffled their contemporaries, and historians ever since have failed to see them in the totality of their meaning.*** Were they simply hungry men, agrarian revolutionaries filing one more protest against economic and social injustice? Or were they religiously inspired men who used the most dramatic means at their disposal to portray the sinfulness of man and the possibility of redemption? The ambiguity of the Digger experiment has lent color to both explanations.

The crisis in the relations of the church and state in Prussia in the seventies, the so-called Kulturkampf, became acute with the passage of the May Laws in 1873. These laws climaxed a series of measures which had curtailed clerical freedom of speech (Kanzelparagraph), abolished the Catholic Section of the Ministry of Worship, suppressed the Jesuits, and limited ecclesiastical influence over the schools (Schulaufsichtsgesetz). The primary objective of the May Laws, according to the Minister of Worship (Kultusminister), Adalbert Falk, was “to secure the indispensable rights of the state while rejecting interference in purely ecclesiastical affairs.”

A dual culture and geographical barriers which foster regional development have made writing Canadian history a difficult task. One historian regards it as ‘an act of faith, the substance of things hoped for.’ All the problems which the secular historian faces as he tries to organize his material into a connected story are intensified in the field of Canadian church history, and up to the present no one has ventured to do more than to trace ‘certain general movements of religion in Canadian sociological development’.

America in 1830 could have taken Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon as portent and symbol. Itself the narrative of an ancient religious migration, the book begot a greater wandering, an epic in-gathering of believers from Europe and the States seeking New Jerusalem on the American frontier. Every Mormon proselyte knew by heart and in his own tongue the words of Father Lehi, refugee from Babylon, American immigrant circa 600 B. C.: “We have obtained a land of promise, a land which is choice above all other lands…Yea, the Lord hath covenanted this land unto me, and to my children forever, and also all those who should be led out of other countries by the hand of the Lord.” That was the book's portent, big with history and promise. America, it said, had always been promises.