It was at a later epoch still that those insoluble questions which press most inexorably for consideration when theological thought and study are most serious and earnest--the questions that concern the divine sovereignty in its relation to human freedom and responsibility--arose in the Catholic Church to divide Jesuit from Dominican and Franciscan, and in the Reformed churches to divide the Arminians from the disciples of Gomar and Turretin.

All these divisions among the European Christians of the seventeenth century were to have their important bearing on the planting of the Christian church in America.
In view of the destined predominance of English influence in the seaboard colonies of America, the history of the divisions of the Christian people of England is of preeminent importance to the beginnings of the American church.

The curiously diverse elements that entered into the English Reformation, and the violent vicissitudes that marked the course of it, were all represented in the parties existing among English Christians at the period of the planting of the colonies.
The political and dynastic character of the movements that detached the English hierarchy from the Roman see had for one inevitable result to leaven the English church as a lump with the leaven of Herod.

That considerable part of the clergy and people that moved to and fro, without so much as the resistance of any very formidable _vis inertiae_, with the change of the monarch or of the monarch's caprice, might leave the student of the history of those times in doubt as to whether they belonged to the kingdom of heaven or to the kingdom of this world.

But, however severe the judgment that any may pass upon the character and motives of Henry VIII.