This year's topic for the Dudleian Lecture is designated as ‘Roman Catholicism and Protestantism’, or, in the words of the statutes, this lecture is intended: ‘For the detecting and convicting and exposing the idolatry of the Romish church, their tyranny, usurpations, damnable heresies, fatal errors, abominable superstitions and other crying wickednesses in their high places; and finally, that the Church of Rome is that mystical Babylon, that man of sin, that apostate church, spoken of in the New Testament.’.

This essay will attempt to make some systematic clarity out of the thought of St. Augustine in reference to his conception of evil. The problem of evil is one which confronted St. Augustine at every point of his intellectual development; it is everywhere either to be openly seen or to be perceived lurking just beneath the surface of the question at issue. This assertion, however, needs some qualification as will become evident as the essay develops. The essay will attempt to show that the problem of evil for St. Augustine resolves itself into the problem of the will. This problem is, for Augustine, clearly at the base of man's moral dilemmas. The question of the will of God is at the root of the theological-philosophical doctrines of creation and natural order. The problem of the will comes to the fore as the metaphysical question par excellence; bound up with the question of the motivation of the will (or more particularly here, the question of the ‘cause’ of the defection of the human will) is the arch-problem of the introduction of a dynamic link into the movement from an unmoved Creator to a changing creation. An attempt will be made to point out the bearing of the more overtly theological questions of grace and predestination upon the questions of the will, evil and creation. Of a piece with these concepts is that of the Augustinian epistemology.

In his introduction to the volume, Letters of Principal James Denney to His Family and Friends, James Moffatt records among a somewhat exiguous collection of Denney's obiter dicta these words: ‘The Church's Confession of faith should be sung, not signed.’ Though Denney was in some ways a champion of orthodoxy, he was also, on occasion, something of a trial to the orthodox; and it may be that there are those who judge that the remark is only what might have been expected of a man whose wife could say to him: ‘James, I think your preaching style has greatly improved since you took to reading those French novels.’ However, it is not my present intention either to defend or to impugn the orthodoxy of Denney's dictum. Since Moffatt has given no indication of the context in which it was uttered, I have taken the liberty of applying it, in the title of this address, to the Old Testament. So to apply it is to echo what the late Dr H. Wheeler Robinson once wrote: ‘the Book of Psalms is not only the living and passionate utterance of Israel's piety at its highest, but also supplies the data for an epitome of Old Testament theology.’ The elaboration of that theme, so far as that may be attempted within the limits imposed by the present occasion, is the task which I have set myself in this Presidential Address.

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the Old Testament and its cognate literature teach about human suffering something usually neglected by those who study this great problem: that human suffering is almost always connected with the life of a community, and sometimes with the creation of a community, under the hand of God.

At the present time a considerable amount of attention is being paid to the eschatology of St. Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, largely as a result of the publication in 1954 of Professor Hans Conzelmann's Die Mitte der zeit,1 which has recently been made available in English under the title, The Theology of St. Luke.2 In addition to this work, Professor C. K. Barrett's Luke the Historian in Recent Research3 must now be mentioned.