Johnston of Warriston, the Scottish Church rejected Laud's Liturgy, the bishops were compelled to resign, and the Church became Presbyterian. 1639 Roger Williams, banished by the Massachusetts General Court for his separatist views, formed in the Providence settlement on Narragansett Bay a Church of baptized believers. He aided another party of exiles in founding a settlement and Church at Newport. Though hampered by Arminian controversies and holding aloof from the Calvinist Great Awakening, the early Baptist bodies with considerable doctrinal variety spread the denomination along the Atlantic seaboard and westward, and with the accession of Adoniram Judson (1812) and others entered on a vigorous work in foreign missions. 1640 The faith of the Greek Church was defined as against Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in the catechism composed by Mogilas, Metropolitan of Kieff. The catechism was directed against Cyril Lucar, Patriarch of Alexandria and later of Constantinople, whose confession in 1629 had shown Calvinist influence. The catechism accords in the main with the findings of the Council of Trent. 1643 The Westminster Assembly, a gathering of divines representing the English counties and universities, Ireland, Wales, and the Church of Scotland, was summoned by the Long Parliament. Its Directory of Worship, 1644, was adopted by law and the use of the Book of Common Prayer prohibited. The draft of Church Government was finished in 1645, the Confession of Faith and the Larger and Shorter Catechisms in 1647. The confession was adopted in Scotland and in Presbyterian churches generally. 1647 George Fox began his public ministry. He and his associates proclaimed the necessity of inward spiritual experience, preaching in churches or barns or at market crosses. Fox visited America and the West Indies, and other Friends carried the message to Europe, Africa, and the Near East. In England the Friends, who almost alone among Dissenters held their prohibited meetings publicly, were subject to persecution until the Toleration Act of 1689. 1648 The Peace of Westphalia, ending the Thirty Years' War, approved the Treaty of Passau and the Peace of Augsburg and extended privileges to Calvinists. In all affairs of the empire Catholic and Protestant estates were put on a footing of equality. 1648 The New England churches in a synod held in Cambridge approved the Westminster Confession of Faith, except for amendments expressed in the Cambridge Platform. 1653 Pope Innocent X condemned five propositions on predestination drawn from the teaching of Cornelis Jansen, who while rejecting Protestant principles upheld the authority of the individual conscience. 1656 Jansenism was defended in Pascal's "Provincial Letters" and Madame de Longueville, cousin of Louis XIV, protected the popular movement. Jansenist propositions drawn from the "Reflections" of Quesnel were pronounced heretical by Clement XI in 1713, in the bull Unigenitus enforced by law in France. Jansenists withdrew to Holland. 1658 In the Savoy Declaration, one hundred and twenty Congregational churches expressed agreement with the Westminster Confession, dissenting on church government and discipline. 1672 The Synod of Jerusalem of the Greek Church adopted a confession, signed by Dositheus and sixty-eight Eastern bishops, directed against both Lutheran and Calvinistic Protestantism. 1673 The Test Act made reception of Holy Communion and denial of transubstantiation necessary qualifications for public office under the English crown, after the anti-Puritan Restoration Parliament had penalized Non-conformist worship in the interest of a now popular national Church. 1675 The Helvetic Consensus expressed the rejection by scholastic Calvinists of the theology of the French school of Saumur, represented by the biblical scholar Capellus, who denied the verbal inspiration of the Hebrew texts, and Amaryldus and Placeus who held moderate Calvinist positions on human salvation and the imputation of original sin. 1677 The fundamental laws of West New Jersey, where Friends established the town of Burlington, provided democratic equality and freedom of conscience. 1682 William Penn sailed with a company of Friends and founded Pennsylvania, where he proposed to govern without armies, to reduce the Indians by justice and kindness to civilization and Christianity, to administer justice without oaths, and to extend an equal toleration to all persons who professed a belief in God. 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, followed by an exodus of French Huguenots to Holland, England, and America. 1688 In England, where the crown was distrusted as inclined to Rome, general satisfaction was felt upon the acquittal of six bishops brought to trial for their opposition to measures of toleration taken by James II in favor of Roman Catholics. 1723 Death of Increase Mather, Congregational minister in Massachusetts, rated as one of the greatest Americans of the colonial period. 1734 The revivalist work of Jonathan Edwards, followed in 1740 by that of George Whitefield, resulted in the Great Awakening which swept New England and other American colonies, accompanied by controversy between the Old Lights who disapproved and the New Lights who approved the revival. 1739 John Wesley, after a memorable meeting of the society he had founded, the first to be held in the Foundery at Moorfields, devoted himself to evangelization, extending his work with the assistance of a devoted band of preachers to Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. 1742 Henry Melchior Mühlenberg, the first great leader of the Lutherans already long settled in America, arrived in Philadelphia, taking as his motto, Ecclesia Plantanda (the Church must be planted). 1759 The Jesuits were expelled by Pombal from Portugal. The activities of the order alienated governments and clergy and popular favor. Its suppression in France followed in 1762. Spain and Naples declared it illegal in 1767. The Society was abolished by Clement XIV in 1773 and restored in 1814 by Pius VII. 1773 The secession from the Church of England of Theophilus Lindsey and in Ireland that of William Robertson marked the formation of a distinct Unitarian denomination. In America the first official profession of Unitarian faith by a congregation was made by King's Chapel, Boston, in 1782. 1784 Wesley ordained Thomas Coke and instructed him to ordain Francis Asbury, who had gone to America in 1771 and was a leader there in the spread of Methodism. Wesley ordained others also in the conviction that bishops and presbyters were essentially of one order. He opposed separation from the Church of England for the organization he perfected before his death at eighty-eight in 1791. 1784 The Methodist Episcopal Church was organized by a convention with Coke and Asbury at Baltimore. The convention adopted the first Discipline of the Church; the doctrinal standards, including Wesley's sermons and his notes on the New Testament; and twenty-five articles of the Church of England, modified to avoid all trace of ritualism and distinctive Calvinist doctrine. 1789 A general convention of Anglican laymen, clergy, and bishops of the United States adopted a constitution and canons providing powers for an autonomous Church and lodging legislative authority in a more representative body of clergy and laity conjointly. This Church was organized as "The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America". The preface of the American Book of Common Prayer declared that "this Church is far from intending to depart from the Church of England in any essential part of doctrine, discipline, or worship, or further than local circumstances require." 1801 By the Concordat of Napoleon and Pius VII, modifying the civil constitution of the clergy enacted during the Revolution, the French State paid the salaries of bishops and clergy, reserving powers of appointment, and repressing religious orders or "congregations"; these returned under Louis XVIII in 1815. 1825 The American Unitarian Association formed at Boston signalized a growing division in Congregational churches. The National Unitarian Conference was organized in 1865, and the International Council of Unitarian and other Liberal Religious Thinkers and Workers in 1900. 1833 John Henry Newman began the issue of his "Tracts for the Times." With John Keble, E. B. Pusey, and others, he labored in the so-called Oxford Movement to revive recognition of the sacramental character of the Church of England. The movement, as such, was halted in 1845 by Newman's becoming a Roman Catholic. Its effects survived in a new High Church movement in the Anglican communion at large. 1865 The First National Council of Congregational churches issued at Boston a brief statement of doctrine, known as the Burial Hill Declaration. A fuller confession of faith known as the Commission Creed was issued in 1883, both statements being offered for voluntary adoption only. 1870 The Council of the Vatican, convened in 1869, proclaimed the infallibility of the Pope when ex cathedra, as the pastor of all Christians, he defines a doctrine of faith or morals to be held by the whole Church. It also adopted a definition, to which the Syllabus of errors of 1864 was preliminary, of the relation of faith and reason as against pantheism and rationalism. 1875 Mary Baker Eddy (died 1910) published "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures", the textbook of a movement which attained rapid growth in the United States and extended to distant parts of the world. The mother Church was founded in Boston in 1879 and reorganized in 1892. 1905 The Concordat with the Papacy was denounced by the French Republic and separation of Church and State was provided by law. 1907 Pius X issued an encyclical with a syllabus condemning Modernism in the writings of various biblical, historical, and philosophical scholars. 1924 In England, the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics, and Citizenship was held at Birmingham. 1925 The Universal Christian Conference on Life and Work was held at Stockholm, the Archbishop of Upsala presiding. 1927 Proposed meeting at Lausanne of World Conference on Faith and Order. BIBLIOGRAPHY LUTHERANISM Bax, E. B. The Peasants' War in Germany. Macmillan. 1899. Harnack, A. von, History of Dogma. Funk & Wagnalls. 1923. Janssen, J. History of the German People (Vol. II). K. Paul, Trench, Koestlin, J. The Theology of Luther. Trubner & Co. 1896-1925. (Translation by C. E. Hay.) 1897. Lindsay, T. M. History of the Reformation (Vol. 1). Luther's Works in English (Vols. I and II). (Translated and edited by a group of Lutheran scholars.) 1915-1916. McGiffert, A. C. Luther. 1911. McKinnon, History of the Reformation. Smith, Preserved, The Age of the Reformation. 1920. Smith, Preserved, Erasmus. 1925. Smith, Preserved, Luther. 1911. Smith, Preserved, and Jacobs C. M. Luther's temporary Documents (Vols. I and II). Vedder, The Reformation. Correspondence and other Con1913-1918. Wace & Bucheim, Luther's Primary Works. Hodder and Stoughton. 1896. Anstadt, P. Life and Times of S. S. Schmucker. New York. 1896. Mann, W. J. Life and Times of Henry Melchior Mühlenberg. 1891. Wentz, A. R. The Lutheran Churches in American History. 1923. CALVINISM Baird, H. M. History of the Rise of the Huguenots. 1895. Baird, H. M. The French Reformation (Vols. I-II). Huguenots (Vols. III-IV). Revocation of Edict of Nantes. Scribner. 1896. Balfour of Burleigh, The Rise and Development of Presbyterianism in Scotland. 1911. Cunningham, J. The Church History of Scotland. 1892. Drysdale, A. H. History of the Presbyterians in England. 1899. 1887. Good, J. History of the Swiss Reformed Church Since the Reformation. 1913. Hamilton, T. History of the Irish Presbyterian Church. Jackson, S. M. Huldreich Zwingli. 1901. |