This inscription, which was discovered some years ago in the Ceramicus, has been assigned on epigraphic grounds to the middle of the fifth century and Peek has conjectured with some probability that it is a memorial to the men who fell in the battle of Coronea. Their defeat and death is ascribed to supernatural intervention and the development of this topic has given the poem a form which bears little resemblance to that of the usual official epigram of the classical period. Apart from its historical and literary interest, the inscription is of importance as a religious document and the primary aim of this article is to examine its language in some detail, with a view to elucidating the religious ideas underlying it and to determining, if possible, its relation to the event which it records.

The following remarks are intended to be merely general indications of overall problems which nonetheless, I believe, are necessary before one investigates specific words or concepts which may be borrowed by one culture from another.

It was once remarked with much truth that the non-fulfilment of the expectation of the Parousia was the principal factor in the development of early Christianity. This is all the more important, because it was not the custom of the first Christians to speak of the “second” coming—that is a modern point of view—but of the “coming” of the Messiah. To them the Son of Man, Jesus, had come, and the resurrection proved that he was now the Messiah in heaven, but, as Professor Burkitt has recently pointed out, “Son of Man” does not mean “Messiah” in the full sense, but is rather the description given of the predestined and pre-existent Messiah, before he actually came as Messiah in function. The Parousia of the triumphant Messiah whom they expected was as much future for Christians as it was for Jews, and on this point the main difference between the two was that the former believed that they knew who the Messiah was.

As the comparative study of religion has advanced in recent years, one of its most salutary effects has been the qualification, if not the removal, of old caricatures about other people's religions. It is increasingly recognized that only distance and ignorance make religious traditions seem homogeneous entities, and that the tensions they encompass within themselves are often at least as extreme as the gulfs that separate one tradition from another.

On the face of it, the very title of this paper may appear puzzling. Responses to the problem of evil are by their nature theological or philosophical, whereas halakha, or Jewish law, is about behavior. In what sense, then, can there be a halakhic response to the problem of evil?

The leaden tablet, on which this defixio is written, was presented to the University of Reading by Dr. W. H. Buckler, F.B.A., who bought it in Constantinople from an antique-dealer, who gave Claudiopolis in Bithynia (the modern Bulu) as its provenance. The number of defixiones from Asia Minor is comparatively small (K. Preisendanz in his ‘Die griechischen und lateinischen Zaubertafeln,’ Archiv f. Papyrusforschung, ix, 1930, 119–154, mentions thirteen from Caria, two from Phrygia, and one from Pontus), and, if this tablet really comes from Claudiopolis, it is the first, so far as I know, to be reported from this region.

Theology is constantly recognizing, more fully and more freely, the closeness of its relation to philosophy. Starting though they do from different impulses—theology attempting to interpret experience and philosophy to attain knowledge—they converge upon a common field. No great theologian but influences philosophy, no great philosopher but affects theology.

Of American philosophers since Edwards, no one has made so rich, profound, and extensive a contribution to religious thought as Josiah Royce.

In 1895 there appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Prussian Academy an account of Eine bisher unbekannte altchristliche Schrift in koptischer Sprache, by Carl Schmidt, at that time a scholar of the German Imperial Archaeological Institute in Egypt. Schmidt was helped in further research on this document by Pierre Lacau, the Egyptologist, but a full publication was delayed in the hope of further knowledge. This has come, slowly but satisfactorily from new discoveries and the friendly coöperation of French, English, and German scholars.

In the October number of this Review for 1912 there appeared, as many readers will doubtless remember, a striking article by Professor Benjamin B. Warfield of Princeton Theological Seminary, under the caption “Christless Christianity.” This is his rather clever designation for the religion of those who hold that belief in the historicity of Jesus, however valuable to the Christian, is nevertheless not absolutely indispensable to Christian faith. The article shows a wide acquaintance with the recent literature of the subject, is written in a spirited and forcible manner, and altogether makes an appreciable contribution, as it seems to me, to the clearing up of this interesting question.

As making for this devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, however, what we have chiefly to thank Professor Warfield for is the way in which, having chosen his presuppositions, he carries them through to their logical conclusion, and states the result with all the candor that could be desired. He plays the game; he is never “off side.” And when he intimates that, in his judgment, the exponents of this “Christless Christianity”—among whom the present writer finds himself included—are not Christians at all, there is no just ground for complaint; it is all in the game. It is a case where, in strict logic, everything depends upon how Christianity is defined.

Complicating the exegesis of this difficult passage are certain textual problems with which this present submission is to be concerned. With the Masoretic Text of v. 24 — wayehî badderek bammālôn wayyipgešēhû YHWH wayebaqqēš hamîtô — the Versions are in substantial agreement. The Syriac text twice inserts ‘Moses’ into this verse, as the subject of the sentence and as the object of mût, but this is an obvious intrusion designed to clarify a difficult context, while the Targum (expectedly) and the Old Greek prefix an equivalent for Heb. mal'āk before YHWH. It is probable that the double mention of a setting (i.e. badderek/bammālôn) is the preservation of two ancient variants. J. Morgenstern, who with others, has rightly noted this, draws attention to the peculiarity of the article with mlwn (i.e. bammālon), since the contextual situation is generally vague and in a journey of many days there may have been several such stops, though on the other hand the article with derek occasions no difficulty since the journey as a whole is referred to. Morgenstern preferred to read bammālôn as a nominal form from the root mûl, translating ‘now upon the journey, at the circumcision Yahweh attacked him (i.e., the child) and sought to kill him.’

George Tyrrell's identification of the Pope as the Antichrist was not particularly original but it was important. For Tyrrell was the leader of a movement which, in the opinion of René Marlé, created the most serious disturbance in the Catholic Church since the time of the Reformation. Moreover, the reformers and iconoclasts who had made this charge previously had usually done so from a position outside of Catholic tradition. Tyrrell, however, attacked the Pope from within, as a member of his flock. The Jesuit philosopher even went so far as to claim that his radical posture was the inevitable consequence of his Catholic convictions. Thus he explained:

I believe in the Roman Church so far as it is Christian and Catholic; I disbelieve in it so far as it is papal. I see two spirits in it, as in myself, struggling for supremacy — Light and Darkness, Christ and Anti-Christ; God and the Devil. At present Christ is thrown and Anti-Christ is uppermost. … I look for the day when Peter, after his boasted fidelity and manifold denials, aliquando conversus, confirmabit fratres. It is a long way off from that blessed cockcrow.

In 1861, a French priest published in Paris a pamphlet entitled “The Modern Papacy Condemned by Pope Saint Gregory the Great: Excerpts from the Works of Saint Gregory.” The author, René-François Guettée, was a Gallican, deeply involved in the so-called Roman Question. He proposed to demonstrate to his opponents, the advocates of absolute papal supremacy, that his side was really more orthodox because it conformed to the views of St. Gregory. From the letters of Gregory he drew support for his argument that all bishops share the same dignity and that claims by the bishop of Rome to a superior position represent a corruption of early Church practices. And upon those readers who rejected his thesis he placed the burden of explaining why Pope Gregory did not merit as much credence as modern popes. Father Guettée therefore turned to Gregory for help in building a case against the present-day papacy. It was not the first time someone had done this.

The German mysticism of the fourteenth century was one of the most remarkable manifestations of that individualistic trend of thought and feeling which set in during the thirteenth century with the height of chivalric culture, developed under the influence of the growth of civic independence in the great municipal republics, and finally, in the religious Reformation of the sixteenth century, overturned the whole corporate system of the mediaeval church and state.

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.”

In his early years, Martin Luther read and critically annotated the sermons of the German mystical theologian, Johannes Tauler O.P. (*1360). This occurred between early 1515 and mid-1516—a crucial if not the most critical period in the development of the young Luther. The copy of Tauler's sermons used by Luther was the personal copy of his friend Johannes Lang. It was published by Hannsen Otmar in Augsburg in 1508.

No one can speak with authority on the subject of the modern missionary policy of American societies, to say nothing of the societies that have their home in England and on the continent of Europe. Any general statements made with reference to modern missionary work can be successfully contradicted. No one appreciates these facts better than the writer of this article. Missions are so complicated and diversified, by tradition and practice, by the opinions of administrators, and by the ability and characteristics of the missionaries, that a vast and widely separating difference in a variety of respects runs through the whole body of missionary operations. Hence the almost insuperable difficulty of making general statements as to present missionary policy and methods without exposing oneself to a rejoinder that would be difficult satisfactorily to meet. It should be thoroughly understood that no statement hereinafter made can be of universal application.