The idea of natural religion is one of those arresting ideas which never get fully defined but which nevertheless excite reflection and even controversy whenever they appear. The history of its life within the Christian tradition is a case in point; the idea has been taken as a foundation to be built upon, and it has been rejected as a combination of concepts involving the same sort of contradiction to be found in the notion of a round square. Natural religion has been appealed to as a touchstone of rationality and it has been attacked as illegitimate if not actually blasphemous. An idea capable of producing such reactions cannot be ignored.

In the important controversy between Sir Thomas More and Christopher St. German during the year 1533 — a controversy whose importance reaches into theological domains and involves also the vexatious conflict between the common law and the Roman canon law in England — we find a citation of St. John Chrysostom used first by St. German and then accepted and repeated by More. The apparent source is Chrysostom's famous commentary on St. Matthew, and this work (translated by Burgundio of Pisa in the later twelfth century) is, as Miss Smalley reminds us, the book “which St. Thomas Aquinas preferred to the whole town of Paris….” Further involved, of course, is the larger problem of the influence of St. John Chrysostom before and during the sixteenth century, as well as the technical question of methods of using commentaries on Scripture and thus the weight of auctoritas among the early Tudor controversialists. While it is only the modest story of one maxim that I wish to call attention to in this brief paper, I think that we shall in addition learn something of the English fortunes of one of the most widely used medieval compendia of commentaries, the Catena Aurea of St. Thomas Aquinas.

In the Christ of Paradise Regain'd recent scholarship has recognized Milton's answer to the classic problem of the Renaissance epic poet — the choice of an exemplary hero. In both of his epics the perfect “pattern of a Christian hero” is exhibited not in a secular “king or knight,” but in the Son of God himself — the “Most perfect Heroe, try'd in heaviest plight Of labours huge and hard, too hard for human wight.” In the protagonist of Paradise Regain'd Hughes saw “the culmination of the faith of the Reformers in an exemplar [sic] Redeemer, the Word of Saint John's Gospel, as it fused with the cravings of the critics and poets of the later Renaissance for a purely exemplary hero in epic poetry.”

Francis Greenwood Peabody, lecturer in ethics and professor of theology at Harvard University from 1880 to 1912, introduced the teaching of social ethics at Harvard and ranks as one of the foremost interpreters of German theological thought in America. As academic teacher he brought about the abolition of compulsory worship at Harvard College, helped transform the Harvard Divinity School from a denominational seminary into a non-denominational professional school of theology, and introduced studies in contemporary social problems at the Divinity School and at Harvard College. His pioneering work on social problems secured for him a leading rôle in the Social Gospel movement of his time.