An Edict or Act of Toleration is a grant of the civil government, which authorizes religious societies dissenting from the State religion to worship according to the dictates of conscience without liability to persecution. Such an Edict always presupposes a religion established by law and supported by the State, and the right of the State to control public worship. Toleration may proceed from necessity, or from prudence, or from indifference, or from liberality and an enlarged view of truth and right. It may be extended or withdrawn by the government; but it is usually the entering wedge for religious liberty and legal equality.

The recent discussion in Boston on the subject of Indulgences gives a momentary practical interest to the historical questions involved in it. These can best be traced in Spain, where mediaeval traditions have been preserved, and where the effects of the Counter-Reformation were scarcely felt, long after they had become dominant throughout the other lands of the Roman obedience. It is in a survival of this kind that we obtain the clearest evidences as to the past. Unvexed by the controversy which raged between Luther and Dr. Eck and Silvester Prierias, Spain continued tranquilly to follow in the old and beaten path, and furnishes us with the incontestable official documents which enable us to examine the matter in the pure light of history.

Pope Gregory VII. had pronounced excommunication upon Henry IV., Emperor of Germany, and divided the German princes. The latter held a meeting, at which it was resolved that Gregory should be invited to Augsburg to hear, in an assembly of the princes, all the charges against their emperor, after which the final decision of the case should be left to the pope. But if Henry, by any fault of his own, remained under excommunication a year, he should be considered incapable of ruling forever. Meanwhile he was to live in a private capacity.

The problems of anthropology depend for their solution in an unusually large degree upon psychology. While the evangelical church looks to the Bible for the materials of its theology, it still depends upon the use of human reason in the interpretation and adjustment of the materials there presented. Especially is this true in the matter of conversion and related doctrines. The language of the Bible is general, rhetorical, theological, practical, or popular, as you may choose to call it, but not strict, philosophical, theoretical, or scientific. The ultimate facts of the doctrine may be perfectly clear to the biblical student, but the adjustment of those facts in a dogmatic system will depend largely upon his ability as a thinker to see in the facts what the biblical writers have not thought fit to utter in express terms, and this upon his mental equipment for his task, or, in other words, upon his knowledge of the constitution and operations of the human mind, within which the process of conversion goes on. The history of Melancthon's “synergism” brings this peculiarity of the subject before us in a very interesting way, for clearer ideas as to the nature of the soul went, in his case, hand in hand with the alterations of the theological system; and thus his efforts to arrive at a statement of the process of conversion which should be at once true to the Scriptures and to the consciousness and the moral necessities of man, are not only interesting as the mental history of a great mind, but throw light upon the interrelations of anthropology and psychology, give us many suggestions as to the interpretation to be put upon the Reformation theology at the present day, and may serve to reveal the lines upon which all progress in respect to these questions is to be sought.

Every student of Church History is familiar with the great difficulty that attends the investigation of the progress of doctrine in the period between the Apostolic Age and the Nicene Controversy. Confused visions of Ebionites, Gnostics, Monarchians, Medalists, Montanists, etc., rise before the mind, and the bewildered student heaves many a sigh as he longs for some principle of faith or organization or theology which might serve as a guiding thread through this labyrinth.

The point of this essay is that this, work of Voragine is the occasion of certain phenomena which have been accounted for on the ground of other influences or passed by as having no explainable ground.

It is introduced as an illustration of the influence of literary works in forming historical conditions and the need of a knowledge of a work itself and the quality of its influence in forming a proper understanding of the circumstances of a given period.

I do not propose to enter into a discussion of the general subject of Eusebius' New-Testament canon; I desire to do little more than suggest an interpretation of the classical passage in H. E., III., 25.

This is the only place in which Eusebius attempts to treat the canon systematically, and in it he is speaking purely as an historian, not as a critic. He is endeavoring to give an accurate statement of the general opinion of the orthodox church of his day in regard to the number and names of its sacred books. He does not, in this passage, apply to the various works any criterion of canonicity further than their acceptance as canonical by the orthodox church. He simply records the state of the canon; he does not endeavor to form a canon. He has nothing to do, therefore, with the nature and origin of the books which the church accepts. The church whose judgment he takes is, in the main, the church of the Orient, and in that church at this time all the works which we now call canonical (and only those) were already commonly accepted, or were becoming more and more widely accepted as such. From the standpoint, then, of canonicity, Eusebius divided the works which he mentions in this chapter into two classes: the canonical (including the homologoumena and the antilegomena), and the uncanonical (including the νϑοι and the ναпλάσματα αἱρετιχν νδρν).

In the fall of 1887 the author began, at his own instance, the preparation of a complete missionary bibliography in all languages as a preliminary to a study of the subject of foreign missions. A selection from it is to be found in the Report of the Centenary Conference on Foreign Missions, London, 1888, 2 vols. (vol. I., pp. 491–538).