John Stuart Mill once declared that Coleridge and Jeremy Bentham were the two creative minds in the English thought of their time. It was characteristic of Mill to take the impartial standpoint from which such dissimilar thinkers could be likened in originality and eminence. One fears that neither of them could have been equally dispassionate in judging the other, and it would be hard to say which would have felt the deeper resentment if he could have foreseen the company in which he was to be placed. The period to which they belong was not rich in speculative talent so far as England was concerned, and few will dispute the justice of Mill's compliment to the two men who really left an enduring mark. It will be the purpose of this article to look at Coleridge in his special relation to the progress of theology, an aspect of his writings by which he would himself beyond all doubt have been most anxious to be appreciated. Julius Hare declared that by his work in this field he had shown himself “the true sovereign of modern English thought.” Kingsley at his moment of deepest doubt on religious matters received Aids to Reflection with “utter delight.” The leaders of the Cambridge Apostles — particularly Maurice and Sterling — could find no words to express their indebtedness but those which St. Paul judged fitting in Philemon towards himself, and acknowledged that they owed to Coleridge their very souls. But while all are agreed that his influence was significant, perhaps beyond that of any one else, upon the development of thinking at that time in the English Church, there are reasons which make his precise place somewhat difficult to specify.

Eusebius in his Life of Constantine, chapters xxxvi f., gives an account of the MSS. of the Scriptures prepared in Cæsarea at the command of the Emperor for the use of the churches in Constantinople, owing to the remarkable increase in the number of Christians after the conversion of the court. His account ends with a sentence which according to Schwartz, whose opinion seems obviously correct, is unfortunately incomplete. ταῦτα μὲν οῦν βασιλεὺς διεκελεύετο αὐτίκα δ᾽ ἔργον ἐπηκολούθει τῷ λόγῳ, ἐν πολυτελῶς ἠσκημένοις τεύχεσιν τρισσὰ καὶ τετρασσὰ διαπεμψάντων ἡμῶν….

It takes perhaps some boldness of assertion to maintain that the life-story of an author relatively unknown—at least to the English-reading world — deserves to rank with those acknowledged masterpieces of religious autobiography, the Apologia pro Vita Sua of John Henry Newman, and the Souvenirs d'Enfance et de Jeunesse of Ernest Renan. Renan and Newman were born leaders of men, each drawing after himself a train of zealous disciples, and followed by an admiring public. Both were consummate artists in words, knowing full well how to make the most of the dramatic and human element that chance or their own choice had woven into their careers. Each produced a long row of eloquent volumes, and their writings not only enjoyed the widest vogue in their own day but are among the works of the nineteenth century whose significance is still far from being exhausted. Each was a convert — the one into Roman Catholicism, the other out of it — and so their self-revelations appeal to the psychological interest of such a process, when the subject of it is a man of genius, and no less to the historical interest attaching to any conspicuous individual whose career has become interwoven with the Church of Rome. The Choses Passées of Professor Alfred Loisy assuredly did not originate in any conscious imitation of these two famous writers, although both were conspicuous among his formative influences. But his book belongs in the same class with theirs, and in its distinction of style, its dramatic and human appeal, and its psychological and historical interest, as I shall try in this article to show, falls no whit behind. It is my confident belief, at least, that Choses Passées bids fair to become in its turn a classic to be placed beside the Apologia and the Souvenirs on the shelf of the student of religion, as a document of outstanding significance for the intellectual and religious evolution of the last quarter-century.

Professor C. C. Torrey's recent monograph on The Composition and Date of Acts has placed in the hands of New Testament scholars a new and fascinating instrument for exegesis. By his demonstration of a document in Aramaic, underlying Acts 1 1b–15 35 and translated by Luke with painful fidelity into Greek, he has opened up a whole new field for the criticism of the book of Acts. Things which no sober critic would have dared to suggest on the basis of the Greek text alone become not only possible or plausible but even certain on the basis of the Aramaic. A few results of a reading of these chapters in the light of the new theory are here presented.