Christianity

S.G.F. Brandon explains how, from the religious conceptions of the ancient Hebrew people, sprang the traditional idea of how mankind originated.

James Shiel introduces Jerome, a charming letter-writer and worldly-wise mentor of fashionable proselytes, a learned theologian and fiery controversialist. He lived through a critical period in the history of Western civilization, when the Church established its authority and Rome was sacked by a barbarian foe.

“Bleak indeed, but blazing,” Prynne was one of the martyrs of the seventeenth-century Puritan movement. Yet, as William M. Lamont notes, even in his own party, his fiercely uncompromising character often aroused hatred and contempt.

J.B. Morrall explains the first hundred years in the history of the French Calvinists, whose loyalty to their faith led to civil turmoil in France.

Gnosticism was one of those developments of religious thought that, although finally rejected by Christians as heretical, played a major part in the formation of Christian theology during the first three centuries of the Church’s life, writes S.G.F. Brandon.

John Lomax recounts how, for nearly two centuries, a priestly protectorate ruled over the native tribes of Central South America. In an age of slavery and merciless exploitation, the Jesuit fathers established a government based on justice, peace and harmony. Their subjects began the working day, and marched homewards again, to the sound of music, preceded by the Mayor and his officers wearing gold-trimmed uniforms and plumed hats.

For seven-and-a-half centuries, Rome's Santo Spirito has remained an “oasis of security and peace." Its foundation on the site of an Anglo-Saxon hospice, Iris Origo writes, was inspired by the dream that visited an early thirteenth-century pontiff.

Oliver Cromwell was at heart no republican; but he believed that God manifested His will through the triumphs or misfortunes that He awarded to those engaged in “great businesses”. Charles Ogilvie writes how Charles's continued misjudgments revealed that, if the world were to be made safe for the “Godly,” the King must be executed.

Not until the Revolution had collapsed from within, and the quarrelsome heirs of the Long Parliament had forfeited the right to govern, was the way clear for the restoration of a Stuart sovereign. The return of the monarchy, writes Austin Woolrych, was welcomed with enthusiasm as an alternative to social anarchy.

Francis Watson delights in Defoe's inimitable personage not only as the hero of one of the greatest of all adventure stories, but “as the portrait of an Englishman, a representative of the contemporary middle class, with a Protestant stimulus to hard work, founding a new age of commercial, industrial and political development.”