Although for two and a half centuries of our American history slavery was a legal institution and for much of that time a significant factor in our life and although throughout that long period there were opponents to it, moral and religious opposition was not strong until a late date. Much of the opposition in the colonial period was from an economic point of view: the returns would not justify the institution; the initial cost of the slaves was great; their labor was unwillingly given; the system promoted the idleness of the rich and robbed the poor of opportunity and prevented the immigration of industrious laborers. Benjamin Franklin thought that slavery retarded population and industry, and Dr. Benjamin Rush observed that small farms with free labor returned greater profits than slave economy. Here there was no question as to whether slavery was morally right or wrong, only “did it pay?” There was also, in this early period, opposition to slavery from a political point of view in that security was endangered. But in all the thirteen colonies slavery existed and everywhere respectable people owned slaves and clergymen of the major churches, if they had the price, owned them as well dressed clergymen today own automobiles. Here and there a lone voice was raised in opposition on moral or religious grounds, but only the Quakers, as a religious group, made slave-keeping a bar to fellowship. John Woolman, their anti-slavery apostle, made it his life work to go about the country and argue against slavery, because it was contrary to Christianity and because “liberty was the right of all men equally.”

The last generation of the ante-bellum South devoted its best thought to the integration of a plantation culture whose economic base was chattel slavery. Every aspect of its civilization had to make its peace with slavery or be rejected. Long before the guns fired on Fort Sumpter, southern civilization had wrought out an ideology that was as dogmatic as Marxism has ever dared to be. Those who rejected this ideology were promptly silenced or ushered into a cooler climate. The liberalism of an older revolutionary South had long ago been smothered in the atmosphere of cultural fascism.

Within the years indicated in the title of this paper, missionary activity in the United States came to be permeated by a spirit of enterprise that was truly remarkable. The enthusiastic outbursts of those years, presently to be noticed, were in truth novel expressions of faith grown militant, but they were not uncharacteristic of the time. Rapid change within a generation had made thoughtful Americans keenly aware of the fact that they were living in a new age, an age distinguished, among other things, for Christian benevolence. As the democratization of American life proceeded, latent energies were released and the mobilization of such energies in associations for the promotion of change was revealing to the common folk of America a new and effective way of social action and was implanting in their consciousness a belief in the idea of progress. By the decade of the 1820's Americans generally were coming to believe that it was possible by united effort to achieve emancipation for the more fortunate many and amelioration of the lot of the less fortunate few. The multiplication of associations revealed an eager striving to attain these aims. In the realm of religious activity the urge to accomplishment took the form of united endeavor for the conversion of the world.

The Brotherhood of the Kingdom was organized in December, 1892, by a small group of converts to the ideal of the kingdom of God on earth who, not unmindful of the examples of St. Francis and of the Society of Jesus, planned to reestablish the idea of the kingdom “in the thought of the church and to assist in its practical realization in the world.” The year 1892 had witnessed a rising crescendo of social turbulence and political unrest throughout America. In the midwest the populist revolt was growing, while industrial warfare had broken out in the violent Homestead strike at the Carnegie steel plants. Jacob Riis had opened wide the festering tenements of the great cities in his revelation of How the Other Half Lives, while in intellectual circles the younger economists were rebelling against the tenets of the Manchester school. William Jennings Bryan's campaign for free silver was only four years away, and the Spanish–American War but six years in the future. Into such an atmosphere of storm and stress was born the Brotherhood of the Kingdom, dedicated to the realization of a spiritual ideal in the social order.

The age of the Reformation, as one of the creative periods in the history of the Western church, was rich in great personalities. The challenge of the time brought some men to heroic heights, while it took scores of lesser men out of their small corners and flung them into the great stream of movement and action which was remaking the world, where they were compelled to assume places of leadership. The names, and often the life stories, of many of the characters of four hundred years ago are still familiar to us today. Some of them are household names. But there are no Anabaptist names among them, even though the Anabaptist movement represents a distinct type of continental Protestantism. Menno Simons, the sturdy leader of Dutch Mennonitism, is perhaps most widely known of the Anabaptist leaders, although the quadricentennial of his conversion from Catholicism to the Anabaptist movement, which was celebrated last year by Mennonites round the world, passed scarcely noticed. But Menno was not the founder of Anabaptism, and ten years before he appeared on the theatre of action most of the original founders and leaders of Anabaptism in its birthland in Switzerland and South Germany were numbered among the martyrs. The careers of these Swiss leaders were so short that even among their present-day Mennonite descendants most of them had been totally forgotten until they were revived in recent years by modern historical research; and today there is no living tradition attached to their names. It is true that as long ago as 1910 Adolph von Harnack could say in his History of Dogma: “Thanks to the research of recent years we have been presented with figures of splendid Christian leaders from among the circles of the Anabaptists, and many of these noble and reverend characters come nearer to us than the figures of an heroic Luther and an iron Calvin.”

The period of the Reformation is one in which the editing and publication of new documents may be expected to necessitate a periodic revision of the general works. In a sense this is true of every period, but the unpublished sources for the age of the New Testament are slight and not often does the investigator turn up a Didache or the Odes of Solomon. In the Reformation period, however, discoveries are frequent and critical editions incomplete for even the great figures like Luther and Calvin. Zwingli is still in process in the Corpus Reformatorum. Traugott Schiess did not live to finish Bullinger. Some ten years ago M. Aubert showed me at Geneva the materials for the correspondence of Beza, but so far as I have observed nothing has appeared. Thomas Müntzer was in luck with the publication of his letters by Boehmer and Kirn in 1931 and his works by Otto H. Brandt in 1933. The Anabaptists have been favored only with a beginning. The Verein für Reformationsgeschichte has brought out one large volume on Württemberg and a smaller one on Brandenburg, but eleven more are still in the loins of Abraham. The Kommission zur Erforschung der Geschichte der Reformation und Gegenreformation published the letters of Peutinger and Cuspianus and selected works of Erasmus (edited by Annemarie and Hajo Holborn now of Yale), but further work on the humanists has been dropped. If only we might revive it in this country! Among us the Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum has been wallowing in the trough of foreign exchange. The fourteenth volume happily is out. Bender, Yoder and Correll have the material for a volume of Grebeliana if only the way opens to make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness.