PROGRESS OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY, ESPECIALLY 

 ANCIENT, DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 



BY JEAN REVILLE 



[Jean Reville, Professor of History of Christian Literature, University of Paris; 

 Directeur d'Etudes in Church History at 1'Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris; 

 Directeur Revue de 1'Histoire des Religions, b. 1854, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 

 of French parentage. D.D. University of Paris, 1886. Minister, Lutheran 

 Church at Sainte Suzanne, 1880-83; Chaplain, Reformed Church, Lyc6e 

 Henri IV, Paris, 1886-94; Maltre de conference, 1886; Directeur d'Etudes, 

 1903, a 1'Ecole des Hautes Etudes; Secretaire de la Section des Sciences re- 

 ligieuses de 1'Ecole des Hautes Etudes since 1886. Author of many books in 

 French on religious subjects; Le protestantisms liberal; La Religion fi Rome 

 sous les Severes, etc., some of which have been translated into German, the 

 first one also into English.] 



LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, In this paper I have to condense the 

 progress of ecclesiastical history during the nineteenth century 

 and to describe its present state. Ecclesiastical history, that is, the 

 history of the Christian Church in all its forms and of the Christian 

 religion in all its varieties, is a very extensive science, including the 

 whole religious and moral history of the Christian world. And that 

 history itself is intimately joined to the whole of the spiritual life 

 as well as to the political, social, and economical evolutions of the 

 different Christian peoples. It is not in a few minutes that one can 

 draw up an inventory of such an immense field. 1 My aim is only to 

 put down some guiding-marks, which may be fit to point out the 

 progressive course of this history, especially in the field of ancient 

 Christianity, and to show the present direction of our studies. 



Ecclesiastical history is born out of the Renaissance and the 

 Reformation. 2 In the Middle Ages there were chroniclers, not properly 

 historians. The Reformation, while claiming to be a restitution of 

 pure primitive Christian doctrines and institutions which had been 

 spoiled and corrupted by the Roman Church, was obliged to justify 

 such a pretension by historical proofs. 3 The Catholics, at the other 

 side, endeavored to refute the historical arguments of the Protest- 

 ants. 4 Ecclesiastical history, thus from the very outset subdued to 

 church controversy, took first a confessional character. But the 

 passion of the contest and the importance of the cause imparted 



1 Amongst the conditions imparted to European official speakers the second 

 was: "The time to be occupied in the delivery of an address shall be, as nearly 

 as practicable, forty-five minutes." 



2 We are speaking here of ecclesiastical history in modern Christianity. Ancient 

 Christianity has had a first-rate historian, Eusebius from Cesarea, and others, 

 who left useful writings, although not equal by far to his. But we may say, 

 without doing harm to them, that none of them had the sense of history as 

 we understand it now in modern times. 



8 For instance, Flaccius and the Centuriae Magdeburgenses. 

 4 See Baronius and his followers. 



