It has been too much the custom to treat Quietism as a sporadic type of religion, as a sort of capricious “sport,” to use a familiar botanical term, expressing itself in two or three famous, but solitary and isolated, mystics on the continent of Europe, and to assume that later evidences of Quietism must be traced back to the teachings of these few rare expounders of it. I am convinced, on the contrary, that these select individuals were only luminous examples of a profound religious tendency, which, in varying form of expression, swept over the entire western world in the latter part of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries, flooded into the consciousness of all who were intensely religious, and left an “unimaginable touch” even on the rank and file of believers. It was a deep and widespread movement, confined to no one country and it was limited to no one branch of the Christian Church. It burst forth in sundered places and spread like a new Pentecost, through kindled personalities and through quick and powerful books of genius.

The problem of the One and the Many is a problem essentially Platonic. Characteristically Platonic is the saying of Socrates in the Phaedrus: “If I find any man who is able to see a ‘One and Many’ in nature, him I follow, and ‘walk in his footsteps as if he were a god.’” The problem of the One and the Many may indeed be said to be the point around which Plato's deepest concerns center. It occurs in most of his dialogues. It appears in different formulations, and it receives a variety of emphasis. It is certainly at the root of his morals. “Not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued,” is Plato's fundamental teaching. And the good life is a life of law, order, justice. The diverse elements of the soul must be set in order; they must submit to one organizing principle; they must become a well-ordered unity.

I. The development of religious institutions and beliefs may be logical or real.

1. Logical development is the explication of the content of a notion. Nothing new is added; it is like the opening of a closed hand. Such a development is consistent with the static, or mediæval, conception of the world, and is not unknown to the older theologians. In this sense of the word many of them would admit a development—e.g. of the Papacy, of Transubstantiation, of Sacramental Confession, of the devotion to the Blessed Virgin—from the less formally complete teaching and practice of an earlier age. But there is no process, they would maintain, in the notion; the change is not in the notion but in us. This proviso is essential. The full powers of the modern Papacy, we are taught, were conferred by Christ on Peter; and the Syllabus of 1907, in condemning the proposition that the apostle was ignorant that this was so, appears to reject the principle even of logical development—of which it would be truer to say that it is tolerated than that it is approved of, by the official Church. Pius X carried this identity of dogma back into the legendary age of the Old Testament, attributing a knowledge of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin—defined in 1854—to the Hebrew patriarchs. Noah, he says, contemplates this mystery in the ark; Moses meditated upon it before the bush that burned in Horeb; David when he danced before the ark of the covenant. This is the language of a formal Encyclical (February, 1904), not the devout play of a pious imagination sporting over the sacred text.

About six o'clock on the morning of Oct. 12th, 1914, the Porto di Rodi dropped anchor off Jaffa. No one with a particle of historical imagination can look for the first time without a thrill on the scene that spread itself out before us in the long luxurious roll of the Mediterranean and the easy flowing lines of the distant hills. The little city stood opposite us black against the morning sunshine, which came pouring over the mountains and into the Philistine plain. On such a day some two thousand years ago a man had gone up to a house-top in that city. It was also at the sixth hour, though, being Jewish reckoning, this meant the dazzle of the noon. The man did not notice the sky effects. His attention was concentrated upon a curious phenomenon. An object like a great sheet seemed to be descending out of the sky. As it reached the level of the house-top and he was enabled to look into it, he found it full of all sorts of squirming things, every one of them unclean and very offensive. Disgusted at the sight, he was about to turn away when a command came from somewhere: “Rise, Peter, kill and eat.” “But I cannot,” the man said. “I have never eaten anything common or unclean.” “What God hath cleansed make not thou common,” replied the voice. While the man stood wondering at the strange experience, there was a loud knocking at the door, and he was informed that a certain Cornelius, centurion of the Italian cohort, wished to speak to him about a matter touching the welfare of his soul!

To the student of differing methods of education the chief interest of a comparison between English, Continental, and American methods is that the first two represent entirely different views as to objects and methods, while American education is a compromise between them. It is therefore perhaps desirable before proceeding to discuss theological education in particular to develop a little more fully the general characteristics of the three forms.

It is sometimes said that what matters in history is not so much the fact as what people think is the fact. This is perhaps especially true of those commanding personalities whose names are household words. Popular ideas of them are usually only roughly correct. The names become symbols to denote qualities dear to a succeeding age but often foreign to the persons they designate. To every generation Christ has become something different, this or that side of his character being emphasized to fill the ever changing need of living men. How many philosophies and passions have been read into Shakespeare's plays! So to every generation Luther has meant something different; in each succeeding century he has been both loved and hated, but for different reasons. No country save his own has given him such attention as England. It is the aim of the present paper to give a very broad idea of the general trend of British opinion throughout four hundred years.

Professor Adolf von Harnack in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy for December 9, 1915 (pages 854–875) has discussed afresh in his characteristically interesting and instructive fashion the textual criticism and meaning of the angels' song in Luke 2 14. After a full exposition of the evidence and an investigation of the rare word εὐδοκία, he decides for the following text:

Δόξα ἐν ὑΨίστοις ϑεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς

Εἰρήνη ἀνϑρώποις εὐδοκίας,

which he translates:

“Glory in the highest to God and on earth

Peace to men of (His) gracious will.”

This form of the Greek text is in the second line substantially that on which the English Revised Version rests (“men in whom he is well pleased”); but Harnack, following Origen, connects εὐδοκίας not with ἀνϑρώποις but, by a somewhat harsh hyperbaton, with εἰρήνη, and interprets: “Peace is now given to men—no ordinary peace but the peace of His gracious will.”

Harnack's argument, which contains much valuable discussion on various aspects of the verse, need not be here repeated. But two of the points which he makes, and in regard to which his reasoning is convincing, deserve notice; for although at first sight they might appear to occupy but a modest place among his results, in reality they seem to offer the key to the serious textual problem of the passage, and so lead to a translation and interpretation quite different from Harnack's. They may be stated thus:

(1) With the reading εὐδοκίας, the song is a distich, of which the first line must be taken to include the words ἐπὶ γῆς and the second to begin with εἰρήνη.

(2) ἀνϑρώποις εὐδοκίας is a phrase wholly unexampled and in itself full of difficulty. For εὐδοκία means “God's gracious will.” It refers to His purpose, His choice, not to His approval or satisfaction with man's performance; and it looks to the future, to grace, to the hope of a needy world, not to the past, to man's merit, or even to the inherent worth of human nature.

In his Philology of the Gospels Professor Blass referred somewhat casually to the Lukan style of the pericope adulterae. His theory of a Roman edition of Luke's works issued by the author himself, in connection with which his reference was made, has not received very wide acceptance, and so the linguistic phenomena to which he called attention were not made generally known. The motives of the present writer in bringing the subject forward again are not merely that the Lukan style of this passage impressed itself independently upon him, as it might upon any one familiar with Luke's style, but because von Soden's careful study of the text of the passage, and Harnack's recent use of the style of the Lukan writings make it desirable to give a fresh presentation of the evidence.

In the midst of dusty records in long-forgotten corners of history one sometimes comes pleasantly upon personalities which have all the freshness and charm of present-day acquaintances. At once they become such real friends that one wonders how they have escaped more general notice. One feels that it must have been untoward circumstances only which veiled their light and kept its radiance from shining down the centuries to reveal them at least to their spiritual kin of later times.

Such a one was John Hales of Eton College, called curiously enough by his own generation and that following the “ever memorable.”

The thought of Augustine on the two ethical categories of sin and grace is of great importance in the history of Christian theology. His system of grace and predestination prevailed for many centuries, although not without strong opposition, and underwent, through scholastic elaboration, substantial changes in order to save the freedom of the will; and finally it reappeared in the conception of the spiritual life shaped by Luther and the other teachers of the Reformation. It is on account of his doctrine about grace and predestination that Protestant theologians like to call Augustine “der Paulus nach Paulus und der Luther vor Luther.” Whatever may be the exactness of this genealogy, it shows at least the value and efficacy of the Augustinian conception of the natural and supernatural life on the development of the European spirit. In the Catholic tradition this thought of Augustine is at the very basis of the ethical, ecclesiological, and sacramental systems; in the Christian but non-Catholic movements this doctrine, interpreted in a rather paradoxical way, gave a starting-point to the Reformation.

Dr. Torrey has produced a work which, though contained in a little treatise of seventy-two pages, may well be an epoch-making contribution to our knowledge of Acts. He has undertaken to demonstrate two things: first, that Acts 1–15 35 is directly traceable to an Aramaic source which Luke translated; secondly, that the rest of the book is the work of one author.

Simon Zelotes or Simon the Cananæan is one of the Twelve of whom it is customary to say that we know nothing except that his name shows that he had once belonged to the Sect of the Zealots or Cananæans, the “physical-force men” of the Jews, and that he had afterwards, seeing the error of his ways, adopted the pacific teachings of Jesus.

It is therefore somewhat of a shock to discover from Josephus that, if his evidence be correct, the use of the name Zealot to describe a Jewish sect or party cannot be earlier than A.D. 66. For this reason it seems opportune to bring together the facts dealing with the Zealots and cognate contemporary movements, and in their light to ask once more what is the meaning of “Simon the Zealot.”

The most generally acknowledged mode of apprehending God or argument for his existence, is the Moral. The argument has various forms, of which the more commonly accepted and influential, in its main principles, is that of Kant. Kant emphatically rejected the traditional arguments for the existence of God — the Ontological, Cosmological, and Teleological — as inadequate and invalid. More generally, he rejected or greatly subordinated the theoretical reason in the sphere of religion, and gave primacy to the practical or moral reason. He went far in teaching that the sphere of science and the sphere of religion are separate and independent of each other.

On February 27, 1917, I had occasion to spend some hours in the library of Union Theological Seminary in New York, looking over the admirable collection of hymnody on the Seminary's shelves. As I came to the collection of Unitarian hymn-books I opened by chance a copy of the Unitarian Hymn and Tune Book (1877), when a letter fell from the volume. Picking it up I recognized the handwriting of Samuel Longfellow and saw that the letter had to do with certain of his hymns.

It is not with the details of homiletics that this paper will occupy itself—how to write a sermon or how to behave in church. These profitable lessons it will dismiss to the class-room or the Sunday School, and will then hold itself free to expand in joyous exaltation of the magnitude and dignity of the training requisite for the fit discharge of the highest duties of the ministry. Every ability which one brings to it may help—those of the carpenter and the goldsmith, of him that smootheth with the hammer and him that smiteth the anvil. But all powers and all training will adjust themselves to its main purpose, the curve of which is determined by its two foci—for every great process is not circular but elliptical—the foci of preaching and worship. Around these the details of a theological curriculum will revolve. The Pentateuch and the Synoptic Problem, the Nicene Council and the Social Settlement House, the Anselmic theory of the Atonement and the Malthusian theory of population, all will have in view their ultimate end of preaching and worship, and all will come bringing their gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.

The church has come to have an enduring place not only in history but in thought. At least since the writing of The City of God it has decided some of the most vital questions confronting us because of a peculiar sanctity attached to it. It is not therefore out of place to demand from time to time that it show us its credentials. The present essay is an attempt to discover if there is anything peculiarly sacred about the manner of its founding that would justify us in ascribing unique spiritual authority to it.