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1895. Church writes in the Preface: The present volume must be considered as an introduction or preface to the series of Epochs of Modern History...This is a mere general sketch...My aim has been little more than to disengage the leading lines in the history of five most important and most confused centuries, and to mark the influences which most asserted themselves, and which seem to have most governed the results as we see them in subsequent history. In this summary view I have confined my attention mainly to the West, saying little of the great nations of later times in the North and East-Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary, Russia. The reason is, that the course of modern history was determined in the West, and what happened in the North and East took its start and course from what happened and had taken permanent forms in the nations of the West and South. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.

Their unflinching and severe proclamation of Church principles and Church doctrines coincided with a state of feeling and opinion in the country, in which two very different tendencies might be observed. They fell on the public mind just when one of these tendencies would help them, and the other be fiercely hostile. On the one hand, the issue of the political controversy with the Roman Catholics, their triumph all along the line, and the now scarcely disguised contempt shown by their political representatives for the pledges and explanations on which their relief was supposed to have been conceded.