It is sometimes said that Christianity has been so long identified with the West, it has so thoroughly become a Western religion, that it is not adapted to take a great place in the mind and life of the Eastern nations. It is not intended in this remark to overlook the fact that Christianity is itself by origin an Oriental faith, an outgrowth of Judaism. Nor is it denied that, in considerable numbers, men of Oriental race, mainly within the borders of the present Turkish Empire, have from of old confessed Christianity in forms familiar to us in the Greek churches. But these Oriental Christians sustain rather than disprove the judgment which was above expressed. Not only have they shown since before the rise of Mohammedanism no perceptible zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith among other Orientals, but they have reacted powerfully against the propaganda on behalf of Western forms of the Christian faith in their own midst.

Doctor Foster's book has brought to the attention of scholars the entire movement of the New England theology in its genesis, development, culmination, and collapse. The book is conspicuous for learning, ability, fairness, and sincerity. For the thorough apprehension of this school of theology the volume is the best that we possess. When we reflect that an entire generation has risen up since the last great master of the New England divinity closed his labors, at Andover, in 1881, and that students of theology today can nowhere hear the old system expounded as it was wont to be expounded, Doctor Foster's book is at once seen to answer an essential need of the time.

The time may appear to many persons inopportune for the launching of a Journal of Theology. The tide of theological interest may seem to have ebbed so low as to leave no channel for such a venture; the profession of the ministry fails to win recruits; the queen of the sciences is deposed from her throne; critics are announcing the rout of the theological schools. The machinery of the churches, it is true, revolves with energy, but it does not seem to be geared into the wheels of the working world; and the deliberations of the theologians are frankly regarded by great numbers of people with indifference, if not with contempt. A distinguished railway president, on being informed that a promising youth had undertaken the study of theology, remarked, “Why does not so gifted a man devote himself to something that is real?”

In 1559, the little republic of Geneva was menaced by its former viceroy, the Catholic Duke of Savoy, who had been restored to his hereditary domains by the treaty of Cateau Cambrésis and had begun to take steps to recover the rights which he claimed over Geneva. The Duke's ambassador gave fair words, but a Genevan councillor declined his offer in this Puritan response, “For the sovereignty of God and the Word of God we will hazard our lives.” The council promptly voted “to recommend themselves to God and to keep good watch.” The response of the councillor and the vote of the council reveal the characteristics bred by twenty-three years of Calvin's programme for a Puritan state in Geneva. A sense of a moral obligation to “hazard life for the sovereignty of God and the Word of God,” a quiet trust in God, intelligent preparations for a vigorous defence of God-given liberties through practical human means—these are characteristics of the Puritan. Where he was able to organize the state on these principles, he built up a series of Biblical commonwealths, or Puritan states, Geneva under Calvin and Beza, Scotland under Knox and Melville, the England of Cromwell and Milton, and the Puritan colonies of New England.

Modern ideas of God are many and various, but all of them, so far as they are not mere reproductions of traditional views handed down from the past, are dominated by one or the other of two independent tendencies, which took their rise respectively from Spinoza and from Kant. In this article it is impossible to follow the various ramifications of these tendencies. They are often found together in the same theologian in curious and even inconsistent combinations. I desire to distinguish them sharply the one from the other, and to study them separately as they appear in a few of their most notable and consistent representatives. The former tendency, as I have said, took its rise from Spinoza. Despised and neglected by the leaders of European thought for nearly a hundred years after his death, he finally came to his rights, and was speedily a dominant force in Germany, which was about to assume again the intellectual leadership of Europe held in the eighteenth century successively by England and France. The time was ripe for Spinoza's philosophy. Reaction against the extreme individualism and superficial rationalism of the period was growing rapidly, and the profound and massive monism of the great Jewish sage was fitted to appeal to the imagination of the new age. The first important utterance was Herder's little work entitled Gott, which appeared in 1787 and had wide influence. In this book Herder interprets Spinoza in the light of Leibnitz's dynamic conception of the universe, and so supplements his unity of substance with an all-pervasive unity of force.

The long period of helpless infancy through which the human being who is to survive in the struggle for existence must pass is proof conclusive that from the time when first men were men—and from an even earlier time—they must have lived together in groups. Whether those groups were, as in the case of the gorilla, patriarchal in kind, or matriarchal, as they are seen to be, or may be conjectured to have been, in the case of some tribes very low in the social scale, is still a disputed question. The tendency of those groups, however, was in the patriarchal direction; this tendency strengthens even in times when the tribe is still migratory, and is fully established by the time when the tribe settles down in a fixed habitation as a village-community. From the village-community the city-state develops; an amalgamation of city-states may produce a national state; a national state may become a world-power, and even seek to establish itself as a world-empire.

As every one knows, psychology is a word to conjure with. We have today the Psychology of Art, the Psychology of Business, the Psychology of Advertising, the Psychology of Childhood, of Adolescence, and of Old Age, the Psychology of various great men and of various centuries and epochs, until one stands quite aghast at the psychological insight of our times, and feels that the key to everything and anything worth knowing must surely be in the hands of the omniscient psychologist. In fact, psychology would seem to have enlarged her bounds at the expense of every other subject, and to have chosen all knowledge to be her province; so that he who desires his book or treatise on any subject whatever to be regarded as strictly “modern” and “scientific” must needs endow it with a psychological title. This is indeed a short and easy method of becoming a psychologist; and the result is— as one might expect—that all the psychology contained in many of these works is spread, usually in large letters, upon the titlepage. All is not gold that glitters; neither is every treatise psychological which bears that mystic word upon its cover.

In no field of serious inquiry are these remarks more pertinent than in that of religion. Our book-shelves and our periodicals are laden with works on “religious psychology,” most of which prove on examination to be hardly more psychological than anatomical or geographical. Treatises on theology and statistics, on Church history and Sunday-school methods, as well as that large and amorphous class of writings which twenty years ago would have appeared under the title “Philosophy of Religion”—all these are now pressing themselves upon our attention by the use of that potent shibboleth, “Psychology.” And yet, though one-half the works with titles of this nature have not much more to do with genuine psychology than with the weather, there is, I believe, a young branch of scientific inquiry which rightly deserves the name Psychology of Religion.

”Modernism” has already become as vague and ambiguous a term as Socialism. The latter stands for anything between common Christian charity—a recognition of social duties acknowledged by all and neglected by most—and a systematic reconstruction of the whole framework of society. Similarly, Modernism, thanks largely to the Encyclical Pascendi, has come to stand for the mildest as well as for the extremist concessions of Roman Catholicism to the exigencies of modern life and thought and sentiment. Owing to this comprehensiveness, it is possible to group together in one unholy fraternity, and under the same anathema, those who are sincere Catholics by conviction and those who, having lost all faith in the Church, continue Catholics in name and profession, whether through indifference, or self-interest, or consideration for the feelings of others. Men whose modernity is little more than an educated Ultramontanism are thus brought under suspicion of a secret sympathy with deists, atheists, and agnostics, and held up to the odium of the faithful at large.

It is of the philosophy of Plato that I would write, but I would keep in mind a definition of philosophy given by Plato himself when he spoke of it as “meditation on death.” I would write, too, not of any inner details of what Plato thought, but of his teaching in its general character and value; and especially, on behalf of my readers, I would assume that, for their purposes as well as always for my own, no fair estimate and no vital appreciation of Plato or his meditation can ever be attained without some understanding of the place of Plato and his philosophy in the history of his very remarkable people, the ancient Greeks, and of their dead civilization.

Systematic theology in its classic form is at once a philosophy of religion, a philosophy of history, and a world-view. It sums up in its master mind, St. Thomas Aquinas, the knowledge of its age. A great picture it is—none greater was ever conceived; indeed, for completeness, for dramatic movement, and for religious interest, none has ever remotely rivalled it. The great epics of Hinduism and the world-views of Buddhism and Islam fall far short in power and unity, in scientific grasp and form, in philosophic insight and in moral purpose; while the modern world has nothing which can be put in comparison, for our world-view is incomplete, discordant, perplexed with doubts, nor has it come to an understanding with the religious and ethical nature of man.

There are two classes of people who have an interest in the question which we have proposed for discussion. It may be asked by those who believe that in historic Protestantism we have the true and final form of religion, and who therefore view with alarm any radical departure from the position of the earlier Reformers. In this case the question whether our Protestantism is still Protestant will mean the inquiry whether our modern liberal Christianity has so far departed from the fundamental principles of the Reformation that its title to the name of evangelical Christianity may rightly be called in question. On the other hand, the inquiry may be made by those who believe that historic Protestantism represents a stage of religious development which the world is destined to outgrow. In the latter case the meaning of the question will be whether the process of theological reconstruction has gone so far that the new type of religious thought and life which is expected to supersede the old can at last be clearly differentiated from its predecessor.

Theology was once the great intellectual interest of thoughtful men. It explained their religious experience, justified their faith, and gave them intellectual satisfaction. It earned and deserved the title of “the queen of the sciences.” It has now fallen upon evil days. It is depreciated and neglected. Its foes are many; and its friends, even in the Church, are not numerous. The explanation for this situation of theology may be found in the immediate practical interests of life, the new thought-world in which men now live, and also in the inadequacy of the theology once current to meet the intellectual and moral demands of modern men.

Explanation, however, is not justification. There is the same reason for theology today as yesterday. The facts of religious experience remain essentially the same, and they still demand interpretation. The faith of the soul must be maintained in a world which challenges its right to be, and against hostile systems of thought. The interpretation and vindication of religion are more needed today than ever before. The incompetence of old theologies is no reason for doing without theology. If we are true to the demands of religion, we shall be constrained to provide some theology. The new attempts at securing an adequate theology must, however, be thorough and courageous. The great need now is the discovery of some principle by which we can interpret the facts of religious experience and arrive at a reasoned insight into the meaning of man, the world, and God. It is the conviction of the writer that the religious thinker has given him in Christ this interpretative principle, and that his great tasks can be achieved by the use of this principle.

A favourite argument of the neo-Hegelian apologists for the appearance of evil in a perfect world is the contention that without evil good could not exist. By this we are to understand, not that evil is a sine qua non of the existence of the good, unavoidably incidental to its production and maintenance, but rather, indeed, that it is an indispensable factor in the very essence of perfection and positively contributive to its value. Unaltered in accidents yet changed in substance, it is, as it were, transubstantiated by an eternal act of consecration in the mind and purpose of God. That we neither perceive nor comprehend the miracle is due to our human limitations. Could we see things as God sees them, “under the aspect of eternity,” we should then understand how what we call sin and suffering and defeat and shame have their place in the economy of the whole, and provide, along with the other oppositions and conflicts in the world, the indispensable condition of that victorious battle with obstacles and limitations and that triumphant resolution of contradictories in higher syntheses in which the life and happiness of the absolute consists. So, though our partial and superficial experiences do not enjoy the triumph (and indeed cannot, since were we conquerors or indifferent to defeat there would be no evil to transcend), we may yet have faith that in our deepest and total self the victory has been won and peace attained. Thus God's ways are justified to man; and though the world is apparently full of evil, we are still entitled to believe it really good, and are able intelligently to account for and defend our belief.

Until within the memory of men little past middle life Butler's Analogy was a standard text-book in American Colleges, and up to 1850 it was among the books for the final examinations in the University of Oxford. Recently it has been brought into fresh prominence by the publication of Gladstone's Subsidiary Studies, and by the sumptuous edition of Butler's works issued by the Oxford University Press, to the preparation of which Mr. Gladstone devoted the last months of his illustrious career. Furthermore, within a short time two critical biographies of Butler have been published, one by W. Lucas Collins, Prebendary of Peterborough, and one by W. A. Spooner, Tutor of New College, Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church. The interest in Cardinal Newman is perennial, and fresh appreciations of his philosophy and of his unique personality are continually appearing.

Two philosophical conceptions of God are now contesting the field with the theology of Christianity—Monism and Pluralism. It will be the endeavor of this paper to show that neither of them offers so rational, adequate, and comprehensive a conception of God as does Christianity, for the reason that neither is so true to that category which is coming to be more and more clearly recognized as the supreme interpretation of deity, namely, personality.

Christianity as not only a world-religion, but pre-eminently the world-religion, can be rationally appreciated only in the light of its origins. The nineteenth century, therefore, to which nothing was understood that had not been understood genetically, devoted its newly won methods of historical criticism to a comparison of the contemporary documents, the Pauline Epistles, with Acts, the earliest embodiment of the tradition, that it might learn the facts of the great evolution of the Church from the Synagogue. But inquiry into the story of the second founder of our faith was, from the nature of the case, a mere preliminary to the deeper inquiry into the story of its first Founder.

The Faculty of the Harvard Divinity School provided for their students in 1883 six lectures by oflBcers of the University representing other departments of government and instruction, as follows:

The Minister and the People: Phillips Brooks, D.D., of the Board of Overseers.

The Evolution of a Christian Minister: J. F. Clarke, D.D., of the Board of Overseers.

One Word more about Free-Will: William James, M.D., Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

Plato's Idea of Immortality: W. W. Goodwin, LL.D., Professor of Greek.

The Natural History of Altruism: N. S. Shaler, S.D., Professor of Palaeontology.

Vivisection: H. P. Bowditch, M.D., Professor of Physiology, and Dean of the Medical Faculty.

While recent discovery in Palestine has added much to our knowledge of the peoples who lived there, it must be admitted that the results are, in comparison with those obtained in Egypt, Assyria, and Babylonia, disappointingly meagre. Some of the reasons for this are clear. Palestine was not, like the countries named, the seat of a great empire, with splendid palaces temples and tombs, with boundless wealth and luxury built on the tribute of the nations, with nourishing centres of art and literature. Much of the best that was produced in Palestine has been destroyed by the wars which have so often devastated the country. Still further, the sites where most might be expected, at least for the Hebrew period, yet await investigation—Jerusalem and Samaria. The former, being almost entirely built over, is likely to remain a sealed book. The latter, owing to its great size, would be an expensive undertaking, but not otherwise difficult. The whole mound might be explored, save the eastern end with its village and cemetery.

When Pope Pius X, standing upon the traditional rock of papal authority, issues a decree upon matters of faith, his words carry the weight not only of his sacred office but also of his immense social influence. We may perhaps share Tertullian's amazed indignation, when Pope Calixtus first assumed the right to speak for the whole church—“Audio edictum esse praepositum et quidem peremptorium”—and yet we listen. We listen, because, in this modern world, no interest which concerns the well-being of any part can be of indifference to the whole social structure; and more especially we listen because the movement which in Roman Catholic circles is known as Modernism is a vital and pressing problem in every organized body of Christian believers.

Professor James tells us that pragmatism has suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. Of absolutism the opposite is true: while not losing its definite centres of influence, it has gradually diffused itself into the air. Everywhere the tendency has been to exalt the universal and to minimize the individual; to belittle the human and to ascribe all to the divine; to emphasize the far end and to ignore the near. This absolutist atmosphere and tendency is the theme of the present article.