The major task of all our theological seminaries is to prepare men for the Christian ministry. It is true that some men who go out from our seminaries will be diverted into other lines of religious service. A few become teachers; others are drawn into the cogs of ecclesiastical machinery in administrative functions for which they are peculiarly fitted. Here and there a man goes through some hard, unhappy experience in a parish and leaves the ministry altogether to become a radical free lance. But these men are in the minority.

The majority of the men who graduate from the seminary become the teachers and pastors of our churches. And whatever the inevitable disciplines and disappointments of their work, they will remain parish ministers to the end. This means that they will do their active work in the world and will make their contribution to the religious life of their time primarily through their identification with three or four successive groups of men, women, and little children to whom they minister.

“The earliest trace of the Toy family is found in England in the person of Robert Toy, bookseller in Saint Paul's Churchyard in 1640. Members of the family came to America about 1720, and settled first in New Jersey and then in Baltimore, whence Professor Toy's grandfather moved to Virginia about the beginning of this century” [19th]. This grandfather died in 1814 leaving an infant son, Thomas Dallam Toy, 1814–1879.

It may be gathered not only from the tone of his admonitions but from at least one specific reference (13 19), that the author of Hebrews was himself associated with the community to which he wrote. His Epistle may therefore be accepted as evidence for the religious position of the readers, as well as of the teacher who addressed them.

The question of destination cannot be regarded by any means as settled, but the weight of critical opinion is more and more in favor of Rome. In this paper I propose to deal more especially with the theological considerations which, to my mind, bear out this hypothesis. The arguments from the literary side are familiar, and it will be enough to recall them with the briefest comment.

The story of the voyage of the Mayflower in 1620 and of the Pilgrim settlement at Plymouth has been told again and again, and in this year of the tercentenary celebration will be repeated in still further varying forms; but we are certain that it will never be more graphically narrated than by the Pilgrims themselves and their friends during the twenties, thirties, and forties of the seventeenth century.

In this paper I do not intend to venture to give any new version of that narrative. It is my purpose rather to recall certain phases of the story as they appear in the vigorous and terse English of the earliest accounts, and to note especially also the interesting archæological information concerning the Indians of New England which they furnish.

It is characteristic of today that the intellect should require such humble allegiance as that which I offer in this lame and halting discourse.

“But yesterday the word of Reason might

Have stood against the world; now lies it there,

And none so poor to do it reverence.”

In considering the relations of the early settlers of Massachusetts and the Indians it is greatly to be regretted that the Red Men possessed no civilized method by which they could leave a record of their own ideas, their own thoughts, and their own reasons for their actions, and that consequently nothing has survived except through tradition or through the medium of records compiled and written by the invaders of their country. All that we really know is the White Man's version; he has always been the judge, the jury, and the advocate for the plaintiff, all in one. The defense has had no means of being heard except through the plaintiff's lawyers, whose knowledge, even of the Indian language, was very slight. Certainly a unique trial. When we stop for a few minutes in our present energetic, busy, hurrying everyday life, and consider the luxury in which we now live, our comfortable homes, our variety of food, our steam cars, our motor cars, our telegraph and telephone, all of which we now demand as necessities and as our lawful rights, it is almost impossible to realize that three hundred years ago in this same land, in our own Massachusetts, for one winter and more or less for two years, our ancestors were absolutely dependent on the Indians for food sufficient to sustain life.

Ethiopia or Cush extends from the upper end of the First Cataract in the Nile southwards to somewhere near the junction of the White and the Blue Niles at Khartum. Strictly speaking, the name “Cush” was applied by the ancient Egyptians to that part of the valley which lies between the Second and the Fourth Cataracts while the name “Wawat” was given to that between the First and Second Cataracts. More general names were “Ta-set” (or perhaps “Ta-Khent”), “Khenthennefer,” and “Tanehsi” (= Land of the Negroes), and a still more general name was “The Southern Lands,” applied to all the southland including Wawat, Cush, Punt and the tribal districts along the Red Sea and in the eastern and the western deserts. The people of Ethiopia are usually called neḥsi which is translated inaccurately “negro;” and neḥsi are represented in the monuments as typical woolly-haired black men. But it is clear from the pictures of men from Ethiopia and from the skeletons found in the ancient cemeteries that Ethiopia was inhabited by a race, dark-skinned it is true, but easily distinguished from the true negro. Thus it is probable that the proverb in Jeremiah 13 23 (“Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots ?”) was founded on the Egyptian tradition rather than on a first-hand knowledge of the Ethiopians.

In both the Old Testament and the New there is a climactic point, a passage, I mean, which so epitomizes all the teaching of that section of our Bible that we should be eager to save it were all else to be destroyed. In the Old Testament it is the Ten Commandments, which form a foundation for civil society. Society would go to pieces were not the Ten Commandments understood and usually obeyed. In the New Testament it is the Lord's Prayer, which lays foundations for the harmonious inner life as the Ten Commandments do for the outer. Here speaks the aspiring spirit to its Maker. This is the love-song of the Christian world. Few precepts of our Master, I suppose, have been more widely observed than that we are to “pray in this manner.” For most of us that day would lack something in which the Lord's Prayer had not been repeated. It fits all circumstances. It is the chant of the saint in his most exultant moments, his refuge and solace when most depressed. The poor sinner, who through walking in the ways of vice has almost lost the power of aspiration and can no longer formulate for himself his better desires, finds in these sacred phrases his appropriate utterance.

Psychic Research, “not to put too fine a point upon it,” means for the most part thus far a careful and systematic investigation of the phenomena of spiritualism. A more elegant and reputable camouflage might be devised for it, and of course the name can be legitimately used to designate the study of many things with which spiritualism has nothing to do. But words have to be taken in the sense which common usage gives to them, and practically psychic research is the study of spiritualism. It used to be said by almost everybody, except the spiritualists, that the matter was not worth investigation; it was all an unwholesome mass of fraud, imposture, and delusion, to which no reasonable person would think for a moment of giving serious attention. Very likely a good many people are saying that still; but not if they have enough knowledge of the facts to serve as the basis of intelligent judgment. Whatever frauds may be practiced in the name of spiritualism, there are plenty of occurrences which no sane mind, having real knowledge of them, will attribute to that source.

The widespread reaction towards the Church of Rome by which the first half of the last century was marked, has been subjected to a multitude of more or less intelligent explanations. It was to be expected from poor human nature that each critic should explain in accordance with that law of human development which he had himself embraced, and in illustration of that moral which he deemed it most salutary to draw. In this field the disciple of Bossuet will be forever at issue with the disciple of Comte. From the one we hear how the eyes of Europe had been providentially opened by long years of anarchy and bloodshed, how the spirit of schism had been at length unmasked, how the exhausted nations were taught once more to value a unified spiritual control, and how amid the wreck of thrones and the desolation of kingdoms the very dullest of mankind must have been awed by the spectacle of the Chair of Peter standing fast, an authentic token of the Mighty Hand and the Outstretched Arm. From the other side we listen to the cold comment that world disasters are apt to drive back the less robust sort of mind to the solace of old superstition, that mental progress like all things human has its ebb and flow, and that we need not be surprised if a season of shivering credulity alternates with a season of fearless rationalism. The philosophic historian may well be left to wear himself out in this profitless debate with the brethren of his own craft. Non nostri est tantas componere lites.

How alluring and yet how elusive is the personality of the self-effacing Diarist of the Acts! Modest to the last degree and yet dignified in his quiet assurance that he is an integral part of the most significant spiritual fellowship of his day, a hero worshiper, lost in admiration for his leader and yet singularly correct in his identification of really great events, and always unwaveringly convinced that he is observing and recording consequential affairs, he nobly deserves his place in the comradeship of the Book. The more, therefore, should we like to draw this quiet workman out of his namelessness, and set him in his true place as pioneer of those historians of the clearer insight to whom the expanding church of Jesus Christ has seemed the central fact of the world's life. Can we do him this right? I venture to hope that it may yet be possible.

“In the next place, for the wholesome counsel Mr. Robinson gave that part of the Church whereof he was Pastor, at their departure from him to begin the great work of Plantation in New England. Amongst other wholesome instructions and exhortations, he used these expressions, or to the same purpose:

We are now, ere long, to part asunder; and the Lord knoweth whether ever he should live to see our faces again. But whether the Lord had appointed it or not; he charged us, before God and his blessed angels, to follow him no further than he followed Christ; and if God should reveal anything to us by any other Instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his Ministry. For he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word.

The scope of this article is strictly limited. It takes no account of the great issues, social, national, and international, which, in the course of time, flowed from the few simple folk “in the north parts” of England about Scrooby and Gainsborough who obeyed what they believed to be a divine impulse.

Others far more competent for the purpose have already dealt with, or will deal with, these. Nor does it do more than touch the details of the life into which the exiles passed at Amsterdam and Leyden. For on these, Dr. Dexter and his son — to mention but two of the workers in this fieldx — may almost be said to have spoken the last word. Nor does it follow the Pilgrims into the new world where they struck root with such heroic fortitude, except so far as is required to correct one or two somewhat inveterate mistakes. It is, in fact, limited to the man who, beyond any one else, was the chief spiritual influence in those earliest pioneers whose character and ideals imparted a permanent direction to the development of New England. At the same time, while relating the substance of what is known of Robinson, I have tried to state the truth with regard to the circumstances in which the Pilgrim movement took its start; and if, in so doing, it has seemed necessary to criticize adversely the conclusions of one writer in particular, my excuse must be that his narrative has been accepted, in some high quarters, as that of an authority on the subject whose word is final. It is not by any means final, as the sequel, I think, will show.

The Second Report of the Joint Commission on the Book of Common Prayer is an interesting document, not only for the history of liturgy in the American Church but also in showing, perhaps more by implication than by direct statement, the lines along which thought in the Episcopal Church is at present moving.

The problem of evil is nearly as old as philosophy itself. At present, however, it is occupying a very prominent place in philosophic thought, perhaps because the horrors of the great war and the unsettled social conditions have brought home to us with added emphasis the evil in the world, and have upset some of our theories of the even tenor and progress of mankind.

Among the many anecdotes about Pope Sixtus V, a stern figure of an Italian Pope-king of the sixteenth century, there is one which tells of an old Franciscan friar who had been a close friend of the Pope when the latter in his young days was a friar himself, known by the name of Felice Peretti, living in a small convent of northern Italy. When “Fra Felice” was elected Pope, his friend thought that Sixtus would not forget him and would call him to Rome and perhaps make him an important personage in the Curia. But no call came from Rome, not even an acknowledgment of the humble letters of congratulation sent with so many hopes by the old friar to his exalted friend. So he decided to go to Rome and speak personally to the Pope. After many hours of waiting in the antechamber he was admitted to the papal presence. Sixtus looked at him with indifferent eye as if he never had known him.