The most important question which a man has to decide in this world is that of his work in life. The majority of men must settle this problem in the light of conscience and common sense, their knowledge of their world, what can be done and what needs to be done in the world, and their knowledge of themselves, their natural inclinations and abilities.

Catholic writers on Scholastic Theology do not hesitate to admit that no work contributing new and valuable additions to this science has been published since the days of Bellarmin, Suarez, and Lugo. The collapse of scholastic philosophy after the fifteenth century could not fail to affect also scholastic theology, which in losing all contact with the new scientific progress lost also its strong appeal to speculative minds. Moreover, the Church, instructed by the events of the Reformation, had become so suspicious of novelties that any attempt to introduce new additions to the traditional teaching of theology was more likely to bring a thinker into the hands of the Inquisition than to lead towards a cardinal's hat.

The term teknonymy is applied to the custom of naming a man after his son. It is unusual in Western Europe, where the name received at birth is rarely changed, but as a practice of primitive peoples it has long been known to anthropologists. Indeed the term is of anthropological devising, apparently invented by Tylor, the father of the craft, and duly noted in Sir James Frazer's great repertorium of anthropological data, The Golden Bough. But neither Frazer nor Tylor seems to have referred to the teknonymy of a civilized people, the Arabs, who have developed the system as fully as could well be done. Almost every Arab has a personal or direct name, the ism, and an indirect one, or surname, taken from his child, the kunyah. He may have a number of other names as well, derived from his tribe, his rank, a sobriquet, a common pseudonym, or a patronymic. But it is the name and kunyah that most closely correspond to the given, or Christian, name and the surname of Western Europe. This kunyah contains the Abu, ‘father,’ indispensable to all Western writers who seek to establish an oriental background for their stories, culminating in the literally preposterous ‘Abou Ben Adhém’ of Leigh Hunt's famous poem. As a matter of fact kunyah may mean ‘patronymic,’ but the kunyah that contains Abu, ‘father of’, is so much the most common that ordinarily, when the word kunyah is used, we think of the teknonymic system rather than the other.

In his article ‘A Decade of Luther Study’ (Harvard Theological Review for April 1921, p. 111) , Preserved Smith says of A. V. Müller: “His own thesis, doubtless carried too far, is that everything in Luther can be found in his predecessors, and that there is practically nothing original at all in the Reformer's thought.”

In two articles, to which Preserved Smith does not refer, Müller has collected concrete evidence in support of his view. He there compares the theology of two members of Luther's order (the Augustinian) with that of Luther, showing that there is a perfect agreement on many important points between Agostino Favaroni and Jacobus Perez on the one hand, and Luther on the other.

The well-known Armenist of the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes at Paris, Professor Frédéric Macler, has laid New Testament scholars and those who are interested in the Caucasian languages, more particularly Armenian, under a decided obligation by the publication of this elaborate study of the text of Matthew and Mark in the Armenian version. What makes the book of especial value is the fact that we have here a large number of variants drawn from Mss. which were inaccessible to the editor of the only variorum edition of the Armenian text hitherto published — that of Zohrab, Venice, 1805. This is peculiarly grateful to the Armenist, while the New Testament critic finds a large body of readings from various Armenian Mss. or manuscript groups collected, translated, analyzed, and compared with the Greek, the Old Syriac, and the Peshitto by a competent scholar.