During the summer of 1938 an important discovery was made in Ostia. In the area at the west of the magnificent Horrea Epagathiana was excavated a temple dedicated to Hercules Invictus according to an altar set in its pronaos. Although inscriptions and works of art referring to Hercules had come to light in Ostia before, these findings in themselves were not sufficient evidence to indicate the existence of an important cult of Hercules in Ostia. So the discovery of a large temple of Hercules came as a complete surprise.

Any wise psychologist will insist that a period of personal depression is not an appropriate time for meditation on the meaning of life. Yet it is such times that most individuals select. A period of social depression, retrogression, and catastrophe is hardly opportune for the deliberate and detached examination of the meaning of history. Yet it is in “times of trouble” that men seem most inclined to somber meditation on the subject. Numerous current publications testify that the relationship of Christianity and its doctrine of revelation to history is one of the most serious problems that the present generation of theologians has to face. Paul Tillich has characterized history as the problem of our age.

The myth of Môt and ʼAlʼeyan Baʻal, who is Hadad, recounted in the texts unearthed at Ugarit, is a work of the schematizing imagination, and expressive of the ordered relations of natural phenomena conceived as embodied in gods. The systematic organization of the events in which the gods are caught, or which they dominate, shows that the myth arose from “observation of the great annual fluctuations of the seasons and a desire to explain them,” and that the authors or revisers, “brooding over the mystery of external nature,” sought “to lift the veil and explore the hidden springs that set the vast machine in motion.” We are well aware that “the civilized nations of western Asia and Egypt pictured to themselves the changes of the seasons, and particularly the annual growth and decay of vegetation, as episodes in the life of gods, whose mournful death and happy resurrection they celebrated with dramatic rites.” But in our texts we are introduced to subtle variations. Here the lapse, absorption and return of the rain are interfused with the regeneration and decline of plants in a rhythmic process to which no parallel is to be found among extant documents of similar purport and provenance. And the investigation of “nature's plan,” however cumbered with besotted notions, is so diligent as to bring the resulting depiction close to the twilight zone between mythology and the speculations of the early physical philosophers.

‘The central place in the field of Old Testament religion’ says Hertzberg ‘is undoubtedly occupied by the prophets. It is therefore little wonder that research and investigation has concentrated ever more directly on this point: What are the prophets, and what is their significance for the spiritual development of men?’ For a generation now the most keenly discussed question in this connection has been that of ‘ecstasy,’ and the extent to which the prophets were subject to abnormal experiences. It has been held that ‘ecstasy’ is of the esse of prophecy, and that it provided a criterion without which neither the prophet nor his audience would be satisfied. Yet at best the ‘ecstatic theory’ could tell us only the How? rather than the What? of prophecy.

Thomas Underhill, a citizen of London during the Commonwealth, described that period of English history as “Hell Broke Loose.” Partly as a result of Anabaptist influence, and partly as a continuation of the indigenous Lollard movement, large numbers of persons in every part of England separated themselves from the Established Church and formed themselves into independent religious societies. Some of these groups were very eccentric in their beliefs and practices. Thomas Edwards, their bitter opponent, made a Catalogue of “the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices … vented and acted in England” between the years 1642 and 1646, which he called, Gangraena. In it he distinguishes no less than two hundred and ten errors which were held by one or other of the sixteen groups into which he divides the sectaries. The sixteen were, “Independents, Brownists, Chiliasts or Millenaries, Antinomians, Anabaptists, Manifestarians or Arminians, Libertines, Familists, Enthusiasts, Seekers and Waiters, Perfectists, Socinians, Arians, Anti-Trinitarians, Anti-Scripturalists, Sceptics and Quietists.” The Parliamentary army especially abounded with men whose “great religion” was “liberty of conscience and liberty of preaching.” G. P. Gooch and others have shown how deeply the roots of modern democracy are embedded in the religious struggles of these seventeenth century sects. Most of them disappeared with the Commonwealth, or were absorbed in the rising Quaker movement, but certain fundamental principles for which they stood continued to exist and to mold public opinion.

In an article published recently on the English pupils of St. Anselm, the saying which forms the title of this essay is quoted from the Dicta Anselmi. The same sentence appears in Ps. Anselm's Similitudines, and in Eadmer's Sermon on Gregory the Great. This coincidence is used as evidence for the dependence of the two latter works upon the former. But the saying is of much greater antiquity.

The Coverdale Bible of 1535 in itself, in its sources, in its enduring vitality, is one of the remarkable monuments of the Protestant Reformation in England. Any historical study of it must set one at the heart of that astonishing release of human energies that put an end to an older epoch of Christendom and, along with other influences, set us on the road to our modern complexity of forces whose issue we do not descry. The new vernacular Bibles of the sixteenth century, embedded in the new doctrine of the private reader's emancipation from authority, were manifestly one of the chief engines of the popular appeal of Protestantism, which was to be in the event so sweepingly successful throughout northern Europe.

From his earliest days on this planet man has ever been conscious that he has been walking on dangerous ground; that he is far from being lord of all he surveys; that instead there are powers, apparently quite outside of himself or of his control, of which he need definitely be on his guard. Under certain circumstances they will work for him, aid him, make his life more secure; under others, they can and do bring about just the reverse. With the dawn of conscience, which latter in essence may be called the memory of burnt fingers and rapped knuckles, he became convinced that certain courses of action definitely did not pay; others did. Together with other forms of magic he speedily discovered — or thought that he did — that it paid very decidedly to give to these invisible but dreadfully real powers what they wanted. Thus he might very possibly escape their vengeance, might even gain their favor. Do ut des, perhaps even more frequently do ne des, became one of the earliest utterances of what anthropologists with marked charity have denominated homo sapiens. It would appear to me too obvious and well attested to require detailed proof that sacrifice was man's attempt to placate, avert the anger, satisfy, make friendly to him, powers which he might or might not know, but toward which he had come to have, by the only way in which he has ever learned anything, viz., experience, a very lively respect.

The first half of Matthew 6: 33 presents a difficult problem to the textual critic, and the leading editors of the New Testament have solved it in different ways. The textual authorities offer several variant readings, but none of them is satisfactory from every point of view. However, it is possible by means of a highly plausible conjecture to obtain a text which makes excellent sense.

The two poems which I shall here transcribe and discuss have been often noticed but never printed. They appear as additions in a fifteenth century hand to a version of the late fourteenth century treatise Poor Caitiff, preserved in MS. St. John's College, Cambridge, G. 28 (195), itself of the fifteenth century. Besides our two poems, which appear on the front fly leaves, the margins contain numerous scribbles in one or more sixteenth century hands. The manuscript possesses marks of ownership by one John Graunge, who also owned another fifteenth century collection containing such Latin pieces as Expositio Symboli, Peter of Blois's De Amicitia Christiana, Speculum St. Eadmundi, and Decretum Abbreviatum, now preserved in the same library. The donor of our manuscript was Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, who gave it to the College in 1635.

Sometimes it is said that it would not have mattered much whether Christianity had won or not, the result would have been much the same, for the spiritual background of the time was the same. I leave this opinion to be judged on its own merits and turn to a side of religion in which the difference between Paganism and Christianity is thought to be thoroughgoing, the cult. That is to say, the cult of the gods, for the similarities between the cult of the Saints and martyrs and that of the dead and heroes are striking and well known through the work of Lucius. Shrines were built for the Saints, votive offerings brought, and even animals slaughtered just as for the heroes, food was placed and drink poured out on their graves and banquets held on them just as on the graves of the pagan dead. This is mentioned in the epigrams attributed to Gregory of Nazianzen and was more frequent in the Western part of the Empire, but it must have been common in the East too, for the custom of holding meals in churchyards on the Psychosabbaton, the Saturday before Whitsunday, is widespread in the Greek Church to this day.

In 1932 Vitelli and Norsa published a substantial fragment of the Greek Jonah, the remains of a parchment codex, consisting of the final leaf of an initial quaternion and two other complete quaternions, in all seventeen consecutive folios or thirty-four pages. The text covers 1.11b–4.10a. The fourteen missing pages of the first quaternion and five additional pages beyond the present end of the codex would suffice to complete the text. The quaternions are so arranged that each begins and ends with a recto, and within the quaternion verso always confronts verso, recto always confronts recto. Each page bears one column of ten lines, and the lines contain as few as six and as many as fourteen letters, but commonly eight to eleven letters. Vitelli and Norsa give the size of the columns as 4 × 4.5 cm., but this is probably a mean estimate since a measurement taken on the facsimile yields 4 × 4.8 cm. for the columns of writing on pp. 12 and 13 of the third quaternion. The codex is 5.5 cm. broad and 6 cm. high. The unusually small format is noteworthy. The editors have assigned the manuscript to the fourth century A.D. It was acquired by purchase and its provenience is unknown.

Among young Samuel Pepys's many acquaintances was Thomas Fuller, antiquary, historian, preacher, biographer and wit. Fuller died on August 16, 1661, but he had previously appeared more than once in the Diary. On May 17, 1660, Pepys had a rapturously busy time at court: “After that, going to see the Queen of Bohemia, I met with Dr. Fuller, whom I sent to a tavern with Mr. Edw. Pickering, while I and the rest went to see the Queen. …” Early the next year (January 5, 1661), “Several people came to me about business, among others the great Tom Fuller, who came to desire a kindness for a friend of his … which I promised to do.” Later in the month (January 22) “I met with Dr. Thomas Fuller and took him to the Dog, where he tells me of his last and great book that is coming out: that is, his History of all the Families in England; and could tell me more of my own, than I knew myself.” In the same conversation Fuller talked with great complacence and detail about his own feats of memory. Twice Pepys heard Fuller preach: the first time (February 3, 1661), he commended a point made by the speaker, but on May 12, 1661, he was forced to admit, “methought it was a poor dry sermon.” He heard of Fuller's death, “of a sort of fever” then prevalent, on the day it occurred, and called him “the famous Tom Fuller.”