Karl barth has for so long been a star of the first magnitude in the firmament of religious thought that his visit to America had something of the spectacularity of an unprecedented approach of a heavenly body. But when he took his seat in the chancel of the Rockefeller Chapel at Chicago University, and peered curiously at the 2400 people gathered to hear him; when he grinned puckishly while the chairman asked no one to disturb him with flashbulbs, he betrayed a kind of oldshoe homeliness that promptly transferred him from the celestial realm to the company of one's country cousins.

Hegel was a resident of Jena when the Battle of Jena, a shattering defeat for Prussia, took place. On October 13, 1806, the day on which the French entered the town and deployed for the engagement fought the next day, Hegel wrote to his friend Niethammer:

As I wrote to you earlier, all of us here wish the French victory and success. The Prussians are suffering the defeats they deserve… This morning I saw the Emperor Napoleon, that World Soul (diese Weltseele), riding through the town to a parade. It's a marvelous feeling to see such a personality dominating the entire world from horseback … He is capable of doing anything. How wonderful he is!

Three months later, in a letter to another friend, Zelmann, Hegel summed up the historical lesson of the Battle of Jena: “There is no better proof than the events occurring before our eyes, that culture is triumphing over barbarism and the intellect over spirit-less mind.”

Unlike the laws enacted against religious and political dissenters in almost every European state since the Reformation, the Popery legislation enacted by the Irish Parliaments of William III, Anne, and the first two Hanoverians was marked by a near absence of sanguinary punishments. The long period of enforcement, one hundred years, and the areas of human activity regulated distinguish the Irish laws from twentieth-century commitments to ideals of ideological uniformity. Not only were the Irish Popery laws unique in these respects, but they comprised one of the most persistent legislative efforts ever undertaken by a western European state to change a people. Although the Popery laws have been discussed and analyzed since their enactment, such discussions have usually been colored by confessional and political partisanship. Neither polemicists nor serious historians have satisfactorily analyzed either the purpose of the laws or the problems and consequences of enforcing them. While these matters are the principal concern of this article, the writer hopes that his necessarily limited investigation of the Irish Popery laws will invite the attention of social scientists to the other complex human problems created by this legislation.

It is a commonplace of personal and social experience that, having once secured the conditions of human survival and temporal well-being, men have always turned their curiosities to the hows and whys of the universe and themselves in it. Generally, the results of such investigations have found expression in behavioral and systematic patterns formulated in their speculative learnings and assimilated into the language and culture of their times. These learnings and cultures, no less than the universe and societies of which they are the meaningful expressions, are the products of concrete and unique historical processes. To ignore this essentially historical condition of the emergence and development of human learnings and cultures is to risk sacrificing that all-important criterion by which any subsequent age is able to discern and assimilate the definitive achievements of every prior age and thus avoid the extreme alternatives of wholly accepting or wholly rejecting all of the achievements of any given age. To effect this discernment between the tentative and the definitive in the recorded results of our civilized past would seem, therefore, to require some broad yet genuine appreciation of the variables and the constants, the discontinuities and continuities in the past. It is to contribute something to the large task of that discernment that this analysis addresses itself.

When historians come to assess the Eisenhower era they will ponder the fact that for the first time in American history a popular president was faced with an opposition Congress for six out of his eight years in office. Unquestionably, they will attribute part of this phenomenon to the fact that the President was stronger than his party. But they will also have to contend with the lack of divisive issues on Capitol Hill. This juxtaposition which has persisted so long dates from the G.O.P. revival of the later 1930's. This resurgence in turn brought about an alliance between Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats which explains so much about recent American politics. It is the purpose of the present study to investigate the causes of the Republican upsurge which once more made the Party a force of respectable opposition and laid the groundwork for its restoration to full power in 1952.