You ask me to list the positive gains in the science of Greek and Roman religion during my lifetime. As I was born in 1874 this time covers three-quarters of a century, or if you count from my first publication on Greek religion in 1900, half a century.

Antigonus of Socho, who flourished in the first decades of the second century B.C., was ranked among the “Fathers” of the Synagogue by the later Pharisaic teachers, but they had no recollection of his words and deeds. A solitary maxim kept his memory alive and passed his name on to posterity.

A good deal of attention has centered of late on those sections of Samuel and Kings which are often said to constitute a biography of David. In particular, this ‘biography’ was recently singled out by Professor R. H. Pfeiffer, in his Presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature, as an example of the almost complete absence of religious motivation in the school of which it was representative: Its showed history almost independent of religion, as the work of the Chronicler showed religion almost independent of history.