Leo XIII's letter Testem Benevolentiae was the culmination of a tumultuous period in American Catholic history which may be designated as beginning with the deliberations of Baltimore III in 1884. The issues which tore at the spirit of episcopal fraternity during this period were varied and complex. Although certain groups of prelates might be labeled as conservative and others as progressive, e.g., Bishops McQuaid and Corrigan as opposed to Bishops Ireland, Gibbons, and Keane, John Lancaster Spalding had a foot sometimes in one camp and sometimes in the other, but rarely both feet in either camp at the same time.

There has never been a form-critical study of 2 Clement. Because of this, conclusions concerning its Gattung have varied considerably. Harnack and Goodspeed, for example, have argued that 2 Clement is in the form of a letter, and beyond that, that it was sent by Bishop Soter of Rome (c. 166–74) to Corinth. Contrary to this position, Lightfoot, Knopf, and Windisch, among others, have argued that it is either a sermon or a homily. Although in recent years this latter position has been readily accepted, it always appears as an assertion without support, form-critical or otherwise.

There have been two principal ways of comparing Paul with Judaism, each of which has suffered from characteristic defects. One has been holistic in a certain sense. Taking “Paul” to be essentially represented by the doctrine of justification by faith and “Judaism” to be essentially represented by works righteousness, many Christian scholars have understood Paul and Judaism as antithetical. The characteristic weakness of this sort of comparison is that Paul is oversimplified, Judaism is both oversimplified and misrepresented, and the comparison is made in order to show the superiority of Paul to Judaism. That is, such comparisons have generally been pejorative and biased. The other principal method has resulted in more of a genuine comparison. Instead of dealing with generalized essences, this approach concentrates on individual motifs. It may properly be called atomistic, although the term Motivsgeschichte might better describe the method. Those who have followed this approach have generally answered the question of whether or not there is a positive relationship between Paul and Judaism affirmatively. The characteristic weakness of this approach — and this is a much less serious weakness than that of the other approach — is that a conclusion about some of the parts may lead too quickly to a conclusion about the whole. One may, for example, learn a great deal about the relation of what Paul says about Adam to Adamic speculation in Judaism without being able to determine whether or not Paul's religion was basically Jewish. As David Flusser has seen, building blocks from one edifice may be used to put together quite a different construction. Seeing the similarity, or even the identity, of some of the stones should not lead one to conclude that the building is the same. Thus a comparison of the two wholes as represented by their generalized essences generally goes awry, but the same may also be true of a comparison of any number of parts. Is there any way around this difficulty?

There is a good deal of very interesting material preserved in the Armenian tradition belonging to the general category of Canon Lists. Some of this has been published and some not; very little of it has been translated into European languages. The series of studies of which the present note is the first will make available in a single place some of the most interesting of those lists which have been published in Armenian, as well as certain new materials recently discovered in the manuscript traditions. The translations and notes, it is hoped, will make this material readily accessible to scholars concerned with Canon Lists and the Biblical Canon.

In 1907, Édouard Dhorme first associated the term 'ēd in Gen. 2:6 with Sumerian id, “the cosmic river.” This identification accords well with the presumed Mesopotamian background to the Yahwistic creation account, and so has enjoyed wide acceptance. The term, as was quickly recognized, also occurs in Job 36:27 with similar force. That this name for the cosmic river was normally pronounced id in Akkadian as well as Sumerian is shown from syllabic spellings, so that the loan into Hebrew offers no linguistic difficulties. In the Mesopotamian materials, a primary function of id, the (divine) River, was, as is well known, to serve as judge in certain legal cases. Trial by river ordeal was a widespread phenomenon, in which the accused was plunged into the river, where his success in withstanding the rushing waters was supposed to determine his guilt or innocence.

John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions had its genesis in 1623 when Donne fell into a nearly fatal illness. In an age which held that there is literally no health in man — “only two degrees, sickness and neutrality,” as Donne wrote to Sir Henry Goodyer — sickness was widely taken as the visible sign of a sinful condition, and Donne's Devotions is no exception. Like “Good Friday, 1613,” “Batter my heart, three person'd God,” and “A Hymne to God the Father,” the Devotions reflects a soul distressed by sin and longing for the assurance of grace. Yet the Devotions is more than a series of meditations on his physical and spiritual condition; it is also a prose sequence on repentance that is aimed at a public audience. As Donne wrote to Sir Robert Ker while convalescing, “I have used this leisure to put the Meditations, had in my sickness, into some such order as may minister some holy delight.” Given Donne's public intention, both the “order” of the Devotions and its “holy delight” merit further examination.

Recently R. S. Hartigan examined Augustine's position on war and killing particularly in relation to the fate of the innocent. Although attention was rightly focused on some of the difficulties inherent in Augustine's views, Hartigan's handling of certain supportive texts is, in the view of this writer, open to question. It may be profitable, then, to reconsider his arguments and, more fundamentally, to question his structuring of the problem as a whole.

In the provocative eleventh book of his Confessions, Augustine mused:

What then is time? Who can find a quick and easy answer to that question? Whoever in his mind can grasp the subject well enough to be able to make a statement on it? Yet in ordinary conversation we use the word ‘time’ more often and more familiarly than any other. And certainly we understand what we mean by it, just as we must understand what others mean by it when we hear the word from them. What then is time? I know what it is if no one asks me what it is; but if I want to explain it to someone who has asked me, I find that I do not know.

Since the resurgence of interest in the Augustan period, the myriad of sixteenth- seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary attacks on the Puritans have been enumerated, catalogued, analyzed, and elucidated. Although the Puritans were accused of a seemingly endless series of malefactions, most of the anti-sectarian assaults, we have been told, charged them with ignorance — the inability to see the value of the established church — or hypocrisy — the desire to use religion to advance political ambitions, secure riches, or satisfy libidinous interests. By mid-seventeenth century, however, a change occurred in the nature of the attacks which has not been adequately discussed. Instead of questioning the sincerity of the Puritans' religious countenance or ascribing the usual peccadillos to them, Puritan traducers charged the sectaries with insanity. Although societies in all ages have protected themselves from unpopular and dissenting opinions by declaring them products of a deranged mind, anti-sectarians in the Restoration and eighteenth century established a rationale for their charges of madness by employing contemporary medical theory to demonstrate that the Puritans suffered from mental and emotional disorders as a result of natural physical causes. Enthusiasts were seen as splenetic sufferers, and their erratic behavior and religious delusions were explained as the inevitable consequence of melancholic vapors.

The Chorus of Milton's Samson Agonistes is highly platitudinous because it relies on Old Testament traditional wisdom to account for Samson's experience. It is groping within that kind of wisdom to understand the significance of what is happening to Samson, while his experience cannot be made explicable on the basis of Old Testament legalism. Trying to cope with the Chorus, critics often speak of the “different levels of awareness” in the poem and tend to press a division between Samson and his Chorus, too frequently insisting that the separation obtained is even greater at the end of the work. Professor Summers, for example, ascribes this tension between the protagonist and the Hebraic Chorus to the disparity between heroic and non-heroic experience: “…the Chorus is often wrong in typically unheroic ways, and … only as a result of the action does it acquire ‘true experience’ and understanding. Those Danites, friends and contemporaries of Samson, represent the ‘conventional wisdom’ of the drama; but the premise of the poem is that conventional wisdom is inadequate for tragic experience. If it were otherwise, there would be no function for the tragedy; the community would already have been saved …” The Chorus (with Manoa) is impercipient; but the fact that it follows after Samson, noting his changes and his actions and often repeating his attitudes, attests to a unity between Samson and the Chorus which Professor Summers' otherwise excellent treatment misses. Christian heroism does not, as he seems to suggest, depend upon separation, but upon communion with others, even as a true relationship with God, for Milton, removes the obscurities from one's relationships with other men. Milton plays off Samson's former selfheroism — which does separate him from his people — against the true heroism of the ending; responsiveness to the latter pulls the Chorus and Samson together.

This bibliographical listing of Christopher Dawson's works was compiled as the preliminary step to a doctoral dissertation which dealt with his representation of the Middle Ages and was presented at the Institut d'études médiévales of the Université de Montréal. One of the last representatives of a school of thought that has enjoyed a very wide audience, especially because of its interpretation of the Middle Ages and of its attitude towards the modern world, Dawson not only deserves an effort such as this but in fact calls for it if, indeed, the intricate workings of this very typical mind are ever to be delved into.

The traditional account of Berkeley's philosophy recognizes that his philosophical activity was an attempt to refound science and philosophy on a religiously acceptable basis. But it is not clear, from this account, just how he proposed to do it. The traditional opinion emphasizes the apparent claim of the esse est percipi principle to provide at one stroke a conclusive proof of the existence of God and a definitive account of the character of physical objects; according to that account, however, both of these claims are practically absurd. It is not altogether clear why Berkeley thought that such a weak proof and such a bad explanation could help the cause of religion.