Ethical writers, like biologists, are no longer concerned with the mere fact of evolution. They are dealing with more specific questions of causes and methods. And, as with biology, two stages in the study may be expected. Biologists were at first interested in the historical question: What was the origin of species? They were temporarily satisfied with the answer: Natural selection, operating in conjunction with heredity and variation. Now, however, a clue to the specific method of heredity has been found in Mendelism, the causes operative in producing variation are being discovered by experimentation, and biology is entering upon a constructive stage which promises great results for agriculture, and perhaps also for human health and well-being. Ethics is as yet almost entirely in the descriptive stage. Perhaps we are staggered at the complexity of present problems, and timidly leave to the practical reformer or politician the responsible task of making positive suggestions. But, when the past evolution has been thoroughly analyzed, it may be hoped that social reform and moral education will be more intelligent. The interest of these problems for the student of religion is also obvious. For, to illustrate by one suggestion out of many, we ask: What causes the difference in the ideals of different ages and races? Is it religion, or philosophy, or economic needs and conditions solely? And shall the religious teacher who would hasten the Kingdom of God appeal to the conscience or to the legislature, or, in the conviction that neither of these avails, shall he stand still and wait for the inventor and the inevitable social revolution? It would be absurd to say that we are yet in a position to answer this old question conclusively, but it is not too much to say that no one can now afford to give dogmatic answers without first considering the complexity of the interaction which is increasingly coming into view between religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and ethical factors.

The religion whose adherents call themselves “Worshippers of Mazda,” the Wise God, and which we commonly name after its founder Zoroastrianism, is in many ways of peculiar interest. It is the only monotheistic religion of Indo-European origin, as Judaism is the one independent Semitic monotheism. Zoroastrianism is, further, eminently an ethical religion, both in its idea of God and of what God requires of men. It presents itself as a revelation of God's will through his prophet. His will is that men, renouncing the false gods, should serve the Wise Lord alone, obey his word, and contend on his side for the defeat of evil and the triumph of all good in nature and society and in the character of the individual. The prophet warns men that the day of the Lord is at hand, an ordeal by fire in which God will separate between those who serve him and those who serve him not, and of the endless blessedness or the unfathomable misery beyond. God has his allies not only among men but among the hosts of spirits; to the hierarchy of good powers corresponds a hierarchy of evil. In the endeavor to clear God of the responsibility for evil, Zoroastrianism recognized a powerful head of the evil spirits, a devil. But it had firm faith in the final triumph of good and the end of all evil. When that day shall come, all the dead will be raised to stand at the bar of God in the grand assize and receive the just recompense of reward. The main features of this eschatology were adopted by the Jews and adapted to the premises of their own religion; through Judaism it passed to Christianity, where it was fused with elements of diverse origin; from Judaism and Christianity, and to some extent directly from later Zoroastrianism, Mohammedanism inherited it. The orthodox beliefs about the hereafter of the world and the individual entertained by the nations of Western Asia, Europe, and America, are thus ultimately derived in no small part from Zoroastrianism; only in the farther East, in India, China, and Japan, does another system prevail.

Luther is a fascinating subject for the historian. Not only does the personality of the man himself offer exceptional attractions, but so too does the age in which he lived, for then society, politics, and religion were all in the melting-pot, out of which in time was to issue the modern world. Luther was a product of the old, but he was also in a very true sense the exponent of the new. “The world is not what it once was,” said he to the German nobles,—knowing that again the fulness of the times had come. The favorite assertion of many German writers that Luther was the Reformation is often disputed, yet the statement is not half so exaggerated as it sounds, for if ever the spirit of a great movement which permanently affected the welfare of mankind got itself embodied in the person of one man, that movement was the Protestant revolution, and that man was Friar Martin.

The recent books on the life of Luther by Dr. Preserved Smith and Dr. A. C. McGiffert may well rouse new consideration of Luther's religious experience. America was dominated by Calvinism, but there is small reward today in going back to Calvin, who applied the logic of a legal mind to a subject beyond the sphere of jurisprudence. Luther, on the other hand, was trying to utter the apprehensions of a great heart. Calvin's thought is dead. Luther's heart still throbs. We shall perhaps understand our own hearts more clearly if we apply religious psychology to his.

The publication of The Blue Bird a year or two ago, and later its successful presentation on the stage, has awakened new interest in an author whose fame and influence seemed somewhat on the wane. It is now some twenty years since a little volume of essays by Maurice Maeterlinck caused the author to be proclaimed with a flourish of French trumpets as the “Belgian Shakespeare,” the “European Emerson,” and the “greatest mystic of the age.” And these epithets and designations were not without some reason. The Treasure of the Humble, which helped to call them out, became of genuine soul-value to many people who could lay no claim to that particular virtue. The author's later essays, too, were conceived in a somewhat similar vein.