Religion has been a potent social force throughout American history. The reverberations of the Protestant Revolt and the Catholic Reformation have been experienced many times in many American communities since the 17th century, in varying degrees of intensity. Colorado, in the last quarter of the 19th century, was typical of this tradition. Colorado had been part of a vast Spanish domain and, therefore, many of its citizens, particularly in the southern half, were both Spanish-speaking and Catholic in faith. On the other hand, a preponderance of the adventurers and fortune-hunters who came after the gold discoveries of 1858 and 1859 and who tended to settle around and north of Denver, were Protestants. This, then, was the religious setting as convention delegates met in Denver in the winter of 1875-1876 to write a constitution for the state.

Research in the realm of Mennonite thought, history and biography has been increasing since the beginning of this century and particularly since World War II. Approximately 120 doctoral dissertations alone were written in Europe and America since World War II dealing with some aspect of Anabaptism-Mennonitism. Numerous factors could be given as reasons. In Europe some confessional and denominational prejudices are disappearing because of the changing pattern of the European religio-cultural and political life. Some liberal Protestant theologians have become interested in the Left Wing Reformation and stimulated research in this field. On the other hand, the more tradition- bound scholars also have inspired the younger generation to investigate Anabaptism. The improved status of the Free Church in Europe has, since the great upheavals resulting from World Wars I and II, stimulated research. The old notion that the state church is the church and the splinter groups are sects is on its way out in European thinking. In America the theological and denominational atmosphere has more or less been of the nature of “to believe and let believe.” Anabaptism, as a Left Wing of the Reformation, has found more attention in the realm of research than any other group of its size since World War II.

The Civil War more than any other episode in American history struck into the lives of all the families of the land, demanding that everybody take sides. Partisanship focused upon many facets and features of the conflicting causes, but the order of the event allowed no bipartisanship. Only a handful of anticipative revisionists, who earnestly cried that the whole affair, even once begun, was needless and somehow avoidable, found ground for nonpartisanship. Families branched across Mason and Dixon's line split and sided in spite of torn loyalties and wistful recollections of unity. Had slaves foreseen, as freedmen knew, that emancipation's price was personal degradation, they might have borne mixed feelings about the issue, but even their ambivalences purchased no point of impartiality.

In the last years, a number of surveys on Luther have appeared. Some of these will be continued. With the re-appearance of the Luther-Jahrbuch and the regular “Zeitschriftenschau” by Gunther Franz in various issues of the Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, an ongoing medium for references to articles and reviews of books is at hand. All major German books are reviewed in the Luther-Jahrbuch and in the Theologische Literaturzeitung. The 1957 issue of the Luther-Jahrbuch, the first volume in the resumed series after a fifteen year interval, contains a summary Luther-Bibliography for 1940- 1953, and a more extensive survey for the year 1954. The 1958 volume contains a bibliography for 1955; the 1959 one, for 1956; the 1960 one, for 1957. The disadvantage of the time lag in publication does provide the possibility of a comprehensive listing. Apart from the book reviews, the materials are listed without evaluation.

During the 1960 convention of the American Historical Association a session on historical reviewing subjected the noncommittal or picayune irrelevance of these professional offerings to their due measure of censure and derision. Despite the justice of extending such judgments to the genteel and congratulatory “comments” and “critiques” ordinarily given at our conventions, I shall not attempt at any demolition of Professor Clebsch's scholarship or conclusions. This is not because my critical faculties are paralyzed but due to genuine satisfaction with what he has done and gratitude for the glimpse here given of his more extensive research. No more fitting centennial observance of the Civil War could be imagined than a sober examination of the meaning of this, our great national tragedy. Having no desire to manufacture disagreements or magnify quibbles, I can preserve some of the appearances of debate only by urging that the scope of his findings be extended at certain points. To this end I undertake the strangely impossible task of making the point of his essay both broader and sharper.

For more than fifty years the Weber thesis, which attributed to Calvinism a decisive influence in the development of modern capitalism, has been vigorously debated. In his celebrated essay, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904), Max Weber had suggested that Calvinism contributed to the rise of capitalism in various ways—by relaxing the restraints which hitherto had largely served to impede its growth; by fostering the economic virtues of diligence, frugality, honesty, prudence, and sobriety; and, most of all, by providing a psychological, fillip to the development of the “spirit” of capitalism, “the temper of single-minded concentration upon pecuniary gain.” The controversy precipitated by the publication of Weber's essay engendered considerable heat that often served to obscure the points at issue, but over the years the continuing discussion has served to remove many of the issues from the area of debate and to narrow the focus of the central issue that remains.

This meeting, I gather, is concerned with the need for reinterpretation. I am not at all certain that reinterpretation is a universal necessity, i.e., that there cannot be final or definitive interpretations especially in those areas of historical research which are the most important. But I cannot go now into this difficult theoretical subject. I must limit myself to saying that the call for reinterpretation is dangerous practically. That call tells the historian: be original! Originality is very rare and the original historians do not have to be told to be original. As for the large majority of historians, they merely get bewildered by that call. Every one of us is probably flattered by the implication that we could be original if we only tried. This implication draws our attention away from our simple and urgent duties, the duties to be careful and thorough and to think straight. It would be also a great delusion to believe that the demand for novelty has made us more receptive to novel approaches: the resistance to genuine innovations as distinguished from fads is today as great as it was in the most benighted ages.

Many of the giants of American Catholicism were born in Europe and this is seen rather strikingly in the case of the American period of Roman Catholicism in California, which period dates from 1850. When, on December 6 of that year, a young Dominican friar, newly consecrated in Rome as Bishop of Monterey, arrived through the Golden Gate in San Francisco, he brought with him strong European traditions and background.