Christianity

A geological discovery in the 1820s, writes A.D. Orange, altered the views of scholars upon the Mosaic story of the Creation and the Flood.

Findings at a desert site in eastern Syria shed light on pagan, Jewish and early Christian religions.

J.B. Morrall offers his study of the events that led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and of the French Calvinists’ fortunes thereafter, both at home and abroad, down to the beginning of the present century.

Only in a free political society, declared Lamennais and his followers, could nineteenth-century Catholics hope to evangelize the new age. Complete religious liberty, with disestablishment of the Church, freedom of education and of the press, and the decentralization of governmental authority, writes J.B. Morrall, were among the aims they advocated. His views having been condemned by the Vatican and himself denounced by conservative critics as “Robespierre in a surpliceLamennais at length abandoned the faith to which he had devoted so much talent and energy.

When Mark Twain said of the Mormons, 'Their religion is singular but their wives are plural' he expressed the sum of what is generally known about them. Yet the Mormon story deserves to be better known. It illuminates one side of the development of a pioneer society, and forms a commentary upon many of the main themes of American history.

Robert Cecil describes how the preacher’s influence in the years before the American Revolution was as great as that of the press, and in New England probably greater.

A Puritan Commonwealth on the western shores of the Atlantic Ocean was the ideal that Governor Winthrop and his seventeenth-century colleagues had in mind, writes Richard C. Simmons.

At Oxford, in 1833, writes K. Theodore Hoppen, a group of earnest reformers set out to infuse new spiritual life into the Established Church.

Jessie Childs recounts the chilling story of an exorcism performed in an Elizabethan household in Hackney.

Georgina Battiscombe introduces the Dean of Windsor; the wisest of Queen Victoria’s private counsellors and a relation of the Duke of Wellington.