bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Use of Hebrew to a Minister
Authors: Richardson H. G.
Published: November 2011

In its bearings on the preparation for the work of the ministry the question, Is Hebrew worth while? is a live one. Like most questions, it has more than one side. I may declare at the outset my own conviction. In the practical work of the ministry Hebrew is not only worth while, but in these times comes near being essential if the work is to be done in a thorough way. Hebrew should, therefore, not only be a part of every seminary curriculum, but should be required for graduation.
Robert Louis Stevenson as an Interpreter of Life
Authors: Geissinger James Allen
Published: November 2011

It is difficult to think of Robert Louis Stevenson as other than the creator of delightful and weird romances. His name always calls up Treasure Island—not to mention the other progeny of his fruitful imagination—Treasure Island and the higher geography. Stevenson will always stand forth as master of the finest artistry and as a modern symbol of the imagination. And it seems nothing short of sheer prose to turn from the fairy world flung into space by the deftness and swiftness of this man's fancy to our gray world of every day.

Yet Dr. Japp and Mr. Zangwill both insist that he will finally be remembered as an essayist and not as a romancer. We must all of us agree, I think, that whatever comes of Stevenson the fictionist, Stevenson the essayist has enriched the world by his half-dozen slim volumes of comment on life and men. If we think of the essay as a bit of preachment, we may still think of Stevenson as an essayist. He seems to like the rôle of preacher; and whatever our own homiletical notions may be, we must admit that his preaching is always fresh, human, and in good spirit; his truths stay with us and his disclosures send us afield for more truth,—qualities all preaching does not possess. “To be honest, to be kind, to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family the happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends, but these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy.” This is commonplace truth put with such finality and authority that, if it has not become scripture, it has at least served as a text for not a few preachers.
The Harvard Expedition to Samaria
Authors: Lyon David Gordon
Published: November 2011

The ruins of the ancient capital of Israel lie on a large, detached hill about six miles northwest of Nablus and twenty miles from the Mediterranean. The hill rises about three hundred and fifty feet above the surrounding valleys, and about fourteen hundred and fifty feet above the sea. It is enclosed by mountains, some of which reach a much greater height. At its base the hill has the appearance of being between four and five miles in circuit. The ascent is everywhere steep, but, owing to a saddle connecting with the mountains on the east, is less steep on that side than on the others. Like all the mountains about it, the hill is covered with large artificial terraces, constructed to prevent the washing away of the soil and to make cultivation easier. The surface of these terraces has a gentle slope, but their sides are in many places so steep as to be climbed only with great difficulty. The entire hill is under cultivation, and there are extensive olive orchards, interspersed with fig and pomegranate trees.
Italian Modernism, Social and Religious
Authors: Badè William Frederic
Published: November 2011

During the past year a prolonged stay in Italy gave me occasion to visit most of the larger cities between Naples and the Alps, and supplied the opportunity of personal contact with many of the men who are now at the helm of Italian social, religious, and philosophical movements, while at the same time I was able to obtain first-hand acquaintance with the thoughts and desires of the Italian laborer. I soon became aware of the variety, intensity, and complexity of the issues which are now agitating Italian public life. It is true that Latin blood warms more rapidly, and reaches a higher temperature in controversy, than that of the Anglo-Saxon. But no superficial grievances are those over which conflict now rages; both in politics and in religion the contending parties feel that the joust of the tournament-field has become a battle for existence.
The Types of Authority in Christian Belief
Authors: Beckwith Clarence A.
Published: November 2011

This presentation is limited to an exposition and estimate of the chief types in which authority has appeared in the church, to which are added one or two fundamental suggestions.

The first type is naturally that of the Roman Catholic church. Authority here was a gradual growth. At the outset no one could have foreseen the ultimate result, yet the claims of a series of bishops of the early church of Rome, not seldom men of the greatest administrative ability, whose assumptions were favored by circumstances, grew at length into the acknowledged supremacy of the Roman see. This supremacy gradually took the place of the state and subordinated every government to its own law and end, and this claim now extends to every interest of every individual whenever and wherever the church sees fit to exercise its prerogative.
Reverence as the Heart of Christianity
Authors: Allen Charles A.
Published: November 2011

When we stand by the sea and watch a storm dash huge waves on the rocks with furious roar and tumult, the power of the ocean fills us with awe. When the storm passes by and the night comes on and the stars shine out, at first one by one and then in throngs, till the great dome is all aflame and infinite spaces open above us, lighted with innumerable fires,—while the grandeur of the scene awakens awe, the mystery and boundlessness of these evening skies awaken wonder also. But when the day dawns and we look around us and see some lovely landscape, we no longer feel either awe or wonder; both have disappeared with the shadows of the night and the mystery of the stars; we feel only admiration. Then, if we enter some home where sons and daughters gather around the chair of an aged mother, we see that they feel no awe, for she is feeble and they are strong; and perhaps there is no admiration, for her form may be bent and her features wrinkled; but when her children think of what her sweet goodness has been to them through many years, they feel a nobler sentiment. It is not mere respect, however, such as we always render to age; it is not mere gratitude and love; it is reverence.
Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Platonism
Authors: Casey Robert P.
Published: November 2011

One of the most fruitful branches of recent patristic study has been the effort to determine the relation between early Christian theology and Greek philosophy. Starting from the assumption that the affinities between the two were many and close, scholars have found themselves able to draw detailed inferences of literary and intellectual dependence, and in the case of many Christian authors to discover the exact sources from which they drew their philosophic ideas, or at least to assign these to some contemporary school. Without such work an accurate estimate of the fathers' views and ways of thinking is impossible, but it must be remembered that an author is not explained, or even fairly represented, by showing how much he may have derived from others, for in the last analysis his finished thought is his own, however extensive the foreign material employed in its construction. It is not, therefore, at the end but at the beginning of his work that the historian of thought can expect most help from the investigation of sources, since even an author who differs from his contemporaries in his answers to current problems must usually begin by seeing them as they do. The background of an author's thought must have supplied the starting point for many of his ideas.
Was the Diatessaron Anti-Judaic?
Authors: Harris J. Rendel
Published: November 2011

Vogels, in his new “Handbook to New Testament Criticism,” has started some interesting and important enquiries, by a consideration of the changes that can be marked in the copies and versions of the New Testament by an investigator who understands not only how to register various readings but also how to detect the causes of such differences. The evangelical stream is demonstrably discolored by the media through which it passes. The Bible of any given church becomes affected by the church in which it circulates. The people who handle the text leave their finger-prints on the pages, and the trained detective can identify the criminal who made the marks.
Rejoinder
Authors: Blake Robert P.
Published: November 2011

Professor de Zwaan in challenging the reading of the inscription on the cover of the Koridethi codex as interpreted by von Lemm makes an ingenious plea for recognizing in the Coptic exclamation ḫêppe the Georgian word tsignthasa, which would restore the usual text of the quotation from Ps. 40, 7. (Hebrews 10, 7). The argumentation is plausible, but breaks down at one fundamental point. The word tsigni ‘book,’ ‘letter,’ is written in Georgian with initial tsil (the 32nd letter of the alphabet, ṭ), and not with tsan (the 30th, ṭ'). Furthermore tsil is used in the normal uncial form in the next word tseril.
New Papyri concerning Incidents at Alexandria
Authors: Casey Robert P.
Published: November 2011

The papyri edited by Bell and Crum in the volume Jews and Christians in Egypt are among the most important that have been published. Apart from their palaeographic and diplomatic interest they are of immediate concern to historians of the empire and of the early church.
Religious Life in Japan
Authors: Addison James Thayer
Published: November 2011

The cult of family ancestors in Japan is of fundamental importance in the religious life of the people. Though less deeply rooted than in China it still remains of vital consequence, for a large majority of the Japanese people continue to observe its rites, and even in 1911 official measures were taken for the purpose of encouraging ancestor worship as essential to the perpetuation of the national ideals.
Literature on the New Testament in Germany, Holland, and the Scandinavian Countries, 1921–1924
Authors: Windisch Hans
Published: November 2011

A methodological discussion of the value and use of parallels from the history of religion retains its value, especially to-day, when the ‘religionsgeschichtliche Methode’ is rejected even by some scholars of genuine insight.Deissner,a conservative theologian, recognizes in principle the justification of the method, and aims to set the New Testament in its relation to the history of civilization and of religion. He holds the comparison of Christian traditions with kindred non-christian facts to be indispensable, but criticizes the usual method, as employed for instance by Bousset, on the ground that it pays too much attention to the connection of the New Testament with the world of religion outside and too little to the specific nature of Christianity itself. To him, comparison with other religions is a means for determining the connection and contact of the New Testament with the world at large (for example, in the field of language) with the object of showing how incomparable is the New Testament, how underived, real, original — dogmatically speaking, of showing its supernatural character, built up of elements which the conception of a purely immanent cause leaves unexplained. His book is intended to be conciliatory, and formulates in detail various sound principles, such as the distinction between adopting alien religious terminology and filling it with new and distinctive contents. He errs in making the problem too simple and trying to solve it by a dogma. The relations of primitive Christianity to the development of religion in general are too complicated to be covered by the mere distinction between form and contents. It is also a mistake to identify the individual and distinctive with the essential. To the essential elements of primitive Christian tradition belong in fact those which find complete analogy in syncretism and Judaism, and it is dangerous to rest the character of Christianity as revelation on those elements only which a scholar thinks not to be derivative or to have no analogies. Others may think differently, or the missing analogies may be found to-morrow! (See also Bultmann, ThLZ, 1922, no. 10.)
Bentley's Collation of Codex Bezae
Authors: Casey Robert P.
Published: November 2011

Not mentioned by Scrivener (Bezae Codex Cantabrigiensis, p. xii), and hitherto unnoticed, is the collation of Codex Bezae with the text of Stephanus made by Richard Bentley († 1742) and numbered Adv. e. 2. 1 in the collection of his books preserved at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Ancient Georgian Versions of the Old Testament
Authors: Blake Robert P.
Published: November 2011

One of the most important questions in ancient Georgian literature has to do with the old Georgian versions of the Bible. The problems in this field are very complex. Not only is the history of the translation of the Old Testament entirely distinct from that of the New, but in each of them the translations were made by various hands from different languages and different types of text.
The Georgian Version of Fourth Esdras from the Jerusalem Manuscript
Authors: Blake Robert P.
Published: November 2011

The last editor of Fourth Esdras, Bruno Violet, in summing up the literature which had appeared on the subject between the first and second parts of his edition, observes with regret that he is unable to add anything more to his original discussion of the Georgian version. In substance his conclusions were as follows. The Georgian printed text of Fourth Esdras is an eighteenth-century translation from the Latin. Only two manuscripts of the original version exist, one of the year 978 in the monastery of Iviron on Mt. Athos, the other dating from about the year 1050 at Jerusalem. In the latter the mutilated text ends, according to Tsagareli, with chapter 9, 1–2. This latter manuscript Violet was unable to find during his visit to Jerusalem in 1901. Furthermore, upon hearing that Professor N. Marr of Petrograd possessed a manuscript of Fourth Esdras, he applied to him for information, but without success. Violet was thus unable either to make use of the textin extensoor to obtain any clear conception, whether of its character, of its importance, or of its position in the textual tradition of the work. Among thepia votawhich are set up in the course of the introduction is included the wish that further light might be forthcoming on the Georgian version. The present essay is an attempt to meet this need, at least in part.
The Protestant Missionary Propaganda in India
Authors: Jones J. P.
Published: November 2011

A few years ago (1906) the Protestant missionary enterprise in India celebrated its bicentenary. A few months ago the centennial celebration of the founding of American missions in India was an occasion of much joy. It must be a matter of deep interest, not only to the missionary body, but to the members of our Christian community in America to study both the progress and the vast and, in some cases, revolutionary changes of this great enterprise on the mission field. Even during the missionary experience of the writer innovations have been numerous and fundamental. To those who think that the missionary enterprise is wanting in the spirit of the age, the transformations which have already taken place and are constantly going on will lead to astonishment. These changes have been coincident with and a part of the progress of the Christian world in thought and life, and embrace not only the forms and methods of work but also the fundamental principles which underlie and permeate the whole work. In the present paper it is proposed to study a few of these innovations which have marked the onward march of this great movement.
The Function of the Educated and of the Uneducated Ministry
Authors: McConnell Francis J.
Published: November 2011

In one sense of the word there is of course no place in the ministry for the uneducated man. The preacher who is so ignorant as to be illiterate—illiterate in that he does not read and study and observe—is not to be thought of as a candidate for the ministry. If, on the other hand, we think of the educated minister as the student who has been graduated from college and from theological seminary, we rather narrowly limit our definition of education. Many men of unusual success in the ministry have preferred to take graduate work along certain specific lines rather than to pursue the course in the seminary. In this they may have been mistaken, but of course they belong by pre-eminent right in the ranks of the educated. Moreover, the fact of actually receiving a degree is not the chief essential. Perhaps for our purpose we may define the educated minister as one who has in a reputable college, university, or seminary mastered the point of view of the scholar, attained some success in the use of scholarly methods, and acquired scholarly habits. For our purpose the uneducated minister is one who has not received his training at such an institution. We assume, however, in our use of the word “uneducated” that the minister has studious habits, and that he does the best he can to make good by incessant effort the lack of early institutional training; otherwise we can hardly see what place he has in the ministry. We may be permitted further to drop from our consideration both the occasional pulpit “genius,” who comes to popular power without formal mental training, and also that bearer of scholastic degrees who is remarkable chiefly for his dulness.
Fra Salimbene and the Franciscan Ideal
Authors: Emerton Ephraim
Published: November 2011

One of the most engaging personalities of that most engaging of Christian centuries, the thirteenth, is Brother Salimbene of Parma. His life, begun in 1221, five years before the death of Francis of Assisi and ended, probably, about 1288, thirteen years after the birth of Dante, connects the mystical, devotional, ascetic piety of the Middle Ages with the rational, individualistic, personal attitude of the modern mind. A devoted member of the Franciscan Order and acutely sensitive to its historic significance, he spends his life in its manifold activities, and toward the close sets himself to the congenial task of putting down in order the most vivid impressions remaining to him of the men and things he has had dealings with.
Theology and Tradition
Authors: Arnold William R.
Published: November 2011

It must be confessed that many a candidate for the Christian ministry nowadays enters upon his course of professional study with misgiving. He is quite clear as to his own purpose, to serve God in his day and generation most directly and effectively by showing Him forth in word and deed. But he has a vague feeling that the curriculum of the theological seminary has nothing very definite to contribute to the preparation for this lifework. A glance at the announcement shows him that it concerns itself largely with the distant past—the writings of the Old and New Testaments, the vicissitudes and controversies of the Church, the theological problems set by dead religious thinkers. While he is eager to rush into the thick of the fray, he is bidden to stay and devote some of his most precious years to a laborious survey of ancient ground. Would it not be better to leave tradition and the traditional disciplines on one side, and give his time and attention at once to the consideration of the present needs of society and of the men and women who compose it? to learn what there is to do, and how to do it?
Religion in Some Contemporary Poets
Authors: Archibald Warren S.
Published: November 2011

With eager expectations and with wistful yearning men have always turned to the poets as to watchmen of the night. The great poets see beyond the sunset and the stars, and read the writing of the wind upon the darkness. They are our prophets. God has whispered his secrets to them. And what they hear in the silence of the eternal, they proclaim in the streets of men. The poets are the pioneers of the spirit. They wander in desolate places; they are voices crying in the wilderness; and by the rivers of Babylon they see visions. The poets, at their best, have been leaders in religion.

So for these reasons many people ask today, Who are the new poets, and what message do they bring?
The Fitness of the Environment
Authors: Simpson James Y.
Published: November 2011

When Darwin first turned the search-light of his genius upon the world of Nature, and under its illumination men were compelled to replace their static views of organic creation by a dynamic representation that made the history of life a connected and, in great part, progressive process from the beginning, attention was mainly concentrated on the fitness of the organism to its environment. The fact of such fitness had long been obvious in differing degrees, but the problem of its causation as a factor in survival was then for the first time philosophically treated in the doctrine of Natural Selection. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that through all the earlier discussions that ranged round these topics the point of view was more or less one-sided. The fitness of the organism to its environment was stressed and stressed again; the question of the fitness of the environment to the organism was seldom raised, or even realized. In some cases, along with views advancedly transmutational, a conception of the environment was maintained that was almost static. The organism, isolated from its environment, was ransacked for its history in the laboratory or made the subject of experiment in order to elucidate its behavior. The conception of the organism and its environment as vitally and reciprocally connected, as a single system undergoing change, had not yet been reached.
The Effect of the War on Protestant Missions
Authors: Barton James L.
Published: November 2011

One would be indeed presumptuous to predict the effect of this war upon foreign missionary operations. Indeed, to report fully the present effect of this world war upon the work of the various foreign missionary societies of the world is an impossible task. Missionary leaders are, however, attempting to estimate the significance of the present bearing of war conditions, while few would be so bold as to suggest even what the future may be.
Christianity and Democracy
Authors: McGiffert Arthur Cushman
Published: November 2011

Whatever the outcome of the war, it has already rendered the world an immense service in defining with unexampled clearness and on a hitherto unmatched scale an ethical issue of the profoundest and most far-reaching significance. I do not mean the old issue raised by every war since the time of Christ—whether war is ever right and to engage in it ever Christian. That question is largely academic and in existing circumstances of altogether minor importance. In a situation like the present, Christian men as well as other men will fight, and fight with a good conscience, whatever may be said as to the abstract right or wrong of war, or as to its consonance with Christian principles. It would be easy to show that to identify Christianity with pacifism, as many devout and eager Christians are doing, is profoundly to misinterpret it and to lose sight altogether of its great controlling principles. But I am concerned this morning with another matter altogether—the fundamental moral issue raised by this particular war and Christianity's relation to that issue. I refer—to put it in a single phrase—to the issue between autocracy and democracy.
Seekers after God
Authors: Drake Durant
Published: November 2011

“In evil times men turn their minds more anxiously to religion.” Thus wrote that hearty atheist, Lucretius, amidst the alarums of those far-off, uneasy, Roman days. Equally true is the saying of the still more desperate years through which the world has lately been passing. Even before the torrent of war broke, in the confused and restless prelude of the opening century, many hands were outstretched, many hearts yearning for a new vision of God. For God, or for something to take His place, something to give an ultimate meaning to life, an ideal dimension, an underglow of purpose and a deep tide of peace—

“Round our restlessness His rest.”
The Reconstruction of Religion
Authors: Hayward Edward Farwell
Published: November 2011

In the process of world readjustment incident to the war no department of man's life is likely to remain unaffected. Probably the more deeply we go into human nature, the more profound will be the reactions. On the surface the earth will not be the same. The scars which the Thirty Years' War left upon Europe have not yet been wholly effaced. Although the World War did not last as long, its far greater intensity and destructive force insure a vaster modification of outward nature. We already begin to see how powerfully government, society, and industry are to be affected. The whole order of life is being subjected to new pressures and set in new directions. The programme of education will have to be rearranged to meet the demands of a young manhood which has been tested ideally and practically as no other has ever been tested. Is it then likely that religion, that last resort of the human spirit, can hope to escape the challenge of the hour? To indicate certain tendencies which are already apparent and to point out the probable changes which they foreshadow—one can hardly hope to do more at this time—is the purpose of this article. It will have to do not merely with the attitude of the popular mind toward religion in general, but more particularly with the demand which it is likely to make upon the Church as the depositary and working instrument of religion.
Isaac Watts
Authors: Palmer Frederic
Published: November 2011

It is somewhat singular that the teachers of Protestant theology who have had probably the widest influence have been not professors of divinity, not preachers, not persons of any standing as theological instructors, but unofficial men and women, often laymen and always self-appointed. For I suppose it is unquestionable that poetry and especially hymns have spread theology more widely than have treatises of divinity. Calvinism was stamped upon English-speaking peoples not so much directly by the Institutes as by Milton's Paradise Lost; and even more efficient in establishing the system which came to be known as Evangelicalism were the hymns of the eighteenth century; secondarily those of Newton and the Wesleys but primarily those of Isaac Watts. The formative influence of Watts, especially upon the religious life of New England, has been profound.
A Protestant and Social View of the Church
Authors: Hall Thomas Cuming
Published: November 2011

The Church is a divine institution, just as all legitimate organizations, like the State, the university, the political party, or the private club, are divine institutions. This is the outcome of any thoroughgoing acceptance of the Protestant position of the essentially divine character of all life, the priesthood of all believers, and the rejection of local divine places. Any special claim the Church can make must be based not on its essential character but upon its purpose and aim, and its special efficiency in pursuit of some end. That some ends in life are higher than others goes without saying. The end of a private club is legitimate and praise-worthy, but it is not in the judgment of thoughtful men on the same level of importance for life as a university. It is true that any scale of importance is finally based upon judgments of value which are in the last analysis extra-rational. The end aimed at by all churches, and among them we must include synagogues, cathedrals, and the lecture-halls of the Ethical Culture Society, is the mediation to men of the unseen and eternal values of religion and ethics. And each particular church bases its claim for recognition upon its assertion that it is attempting to mediate the truest and highest of these values in the most efficient way it knows. We thus see that the Church or churches represent the community, or rather parts of the community, organized for a particular purpose. The older distincrtion between a visible and invisible church should have lost all meaning for a consistent Protestantism, because it was fundamentally based on the false assumption that our relationships with God depended upon the mediation of the church, and that outside of the church there was no salvation. Hence to account for certain obvious facts, an invisible church had to be postulated. The logic of Protestantism makes any such assumption needless. Our relationships to God and salvation are not in the keeping of any church.
The Lord's Prayer
Authors: Von Dobschütz Ernst
Published: November 2011

The Lord's Prayer has of late received renewed study, and fresh material has been brought together for determining its form and meaning. The problems have not been fully solved, but the discussion has reached a point at which a general survey of its present state and results is interesting and profitable.
Contemporary Philosophies of Religion
Authors: Perry Ralph Barton
Published: November 2011

In the present essay I propose to compare certain typical religious philosophies, with a view to discovering what degree of religious hope they justify; or what, in view of the nature of reality, they make of religious ideals. Philosophy, viewing experience roundly, taking into account both the uttermost that man wants and the evidence of reality, has reached different conclusions as to the relation between the two, or as to the consequent status of religious values in the light of critical reflection. There seem to me to be four typical philosophical verdicts of this sort: first, that the ideals of religion are illusory and vain; second, that its ideals are self-sufficient, and independent of reality; third, that its ideals define, or coincide with, reality; fourth, that its ideals are progressively efficacious, or may be realized. These four philosophies of religion may conveniently be termed: disillusionism, symbolism, idealism, and progressivism.
Recent Excavations At Babylon
Authors: Lyon David Gordon
Published: November 2011

Through the pages of its Mittheilungen, of which 55 numbers appeared prior to 1915, the German Orient Society has kept its members informed concerning the excavations which since 1899 it has been conducting in the East. The more technical details have from time to time appeared in the Wissenschaftliche Veröffentlichungen issued by the Society. That Assyria and Babylon have been a field of special attractiveness seems natural for a Society the inception and direction of which have been in large measure the work of the eminent Assyriologist Friedrich Delitzsch. It is due to his enthusiasm that the Society has secured such large financial support that it could project and execute plans on a scale and with a degree of thoroughness not seen before in the Babylonian-Assyrian territory. The friendly relations between the German and Turkish governments have likewise greatly eased the path of the explorer.
The Place of Coleridge in English Theology
Authors: Stewart Herbert L.
Published: November 2011

John Stuart Mill once declared that Coleridge and Jeremy Bentham were the two creative minds in the English thought of their time. It was characteristic of Mill to take the impartial standpoint from which such dissimilar thinkers could be likened in originality and eminence. One fears that neither of them could have been equally dispassionate in judging the other, and it would be hard to say which would have felt the deeper resentment if he could have foreseen the company in which he was to be placed. The period to which they belong was not rich in speculative talent so far as England was concerned, and few will dispute the justice of Mill's compliment to the two men who really left an enduring mark. It will be the purpose of this article to look at Coleridge in his special relation to the progress of theology, an aspect of his writings by which he would himself beyond all doubt have been most anxious to be appreciated. Julius Hare declared that by his work in this field he had shown himself “the true sovereign of modern English thought.” Kingsley at his moment of deepest doubt on religious matters received Aids to Reflection with “utter delight.” The leaders of the Cambridge Apostles — particularly Maurice and Sterling — could find no words to express their indebtedness but those which St. Paul judged fitting in Philemon towards himself, and acknowledged that they owed to Coleridge their very souls. But while all are agreed that his influence was significant, perhaps beyond that of any one else, upon the development of thinking at that time in the English Church, there are reasons which make his precise place somewhat difficult to specify.
The Double Loyalty of the Christian Ministry
Authors: Sperry Willard L.
Published: November 2011

The major task of all our theological seminaries is to prepare men for the Christian ministry. It is true that some men who go out from our seminaries will be diverted into other lines of religious service. A few become teachers; others are drawn into the cogs of ecclesiastical machinery in administrative functions for which they are peculiarly fitted. Here and there a man goes through some hard, unhappy experience in a parish and leaves the ministry altogether to become a radical free lance. But these men are in the minority.

The majority of the men who graduate from the seminary become the teachers and pastors of our churches. And whatever the inevitable disciplines and disappointments of their work, they will remain parish ministers to the end. This means that they will do their active work in the world and will make their contribution to the religious life of their time primarily through their identification with three or four successive groups of men, women, and little children to whom they minister.
The Authorship of the “We” Sections of the Book of Acts
Authors: Blaisdell James A.
Published: November 2011

How alluring and yet how elusive is the personality of the self-effacing Diarist of the Acts! Modest to the last degree and yet dignified in his quiet assurance that he is an integral part of the most significant spiritual fellowship of his day, a hero worshiper, lost in admiration for his leader and yet singularly correct in his identification of really great events, and always unwaveringly convinced that he is observing and recording consequential affairs, he nobly deserves his place in the comradeship of the Book. The more, therefore, should we like to draw this quiet workman out of his namelessness, and set him in his true place as pioneer of those historians of the clearer insight to whom the expanding church of Jesus Christ has seemed the central fact of the world's life. Can we do him this right? I venture to hope that it may yet be possible.
The Epistle to the Hebrews and Roman Christianity
Authors: Scott E. F.
Published: November 2011

It may be gathered not only from the tone of his admonitions but from at least one specific reference (13 19), that the author of Hebrews was himself associated with the community to which he wrote. His Epistle may therefore be accepted as evidence for the religious position of the readers, as well as of the teacher who addressed them.

The question of destination cannot be regarded by any means as settled, but the weight of critical opinion is more and more in favor of Rome. In this paper I propose to deal more especially with the theological considerations which, to my mind, bear out this hypothesis. The arguments from the literary side are familiar, and it will be enough to recall them with the briefest comment.
John Robinson's Farewell Address
Authors: Fenn William Wallace
Published: November 2011

“In the next place, for the wholesome counsel Mr. Robinson gave that part of the Church whereof he was Pastor, at their departure from him to begin the great work of Plantation in New England. Amongst other wholesome instructions and exhortations, he used these expressions, or to the same purpose:

We are now, ere long, to part asunder; and the Lord knoweth whether ever he should live to see our faces again. But whether the Lord had appointed it or not; he charged us, before God and his blessed angels, to follow him no further than he followed Christ; and if God should reveal anything to us by any other Instrument of his, to be as ready to receive it, as ever we were to receive any truth by his Ministry. For he was very confident the Lord had more truth and light yet to break forth out of his holy Word.
Zoroastrianism
Authors: Moore George Foot
Published: November 2011

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.
The Mysticism of Maeterlinck
Authors: Frothingham Paul Revere
Published: November 2011

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.
The Divine Revelation and the Christian Religion
Authors: Evans Daniel
Published: November 2011

With the dawn of the modern era there came a new interest in nature and the human mind. There was a withdrawal of attention from the supernatural to the natural, from the eternal to the temporal, from the divine to the human. This world with its interests came to its own. The secrets of nature were studied; its facts gathered; its laws formulated; its powers utilized; and its beauties appreciated. And the greater secrets of the human mind, too, were eagerly studied. The ideas of the mind were examined to discover whether they were innate or acquired; the relation of the data of the senses to the structure and the function of the mind was noted that the rise of knowledge might be learned; the legitimacy of the use of the categories of thought to interpret nature and the validity of our knowledge was called in question; and aspects of experience and powers of mind other than the distinctively rational came in for new appraisal.
The Lukan Tradition of the Lord's Supper
Authors: Bacon Benjamin Wisner
Published: November 2011

In its effort to determine the historic sense of the New Testament records, and thus to understand them genetically, modern criticism has developed no instrument more effective than the method of comparison. In former days the aim was harmonization, because the interpreter started with the assumption of a mechanical agreement among the witnesses. Today the aim is distinction, because mechanical coincidence is neither assumed nor desired. On the contrary the broader the contrast in point of view, the surer the ultimate inference. Stars so remote that they give no parallax, their rays seeming to come at precisely the same angle no matter from what point of the earth's orbit the observer takes his measurements, afford small hope of determining their real position. There must be difference of angle when the earth has swung round half its orbit, or there is no basis for measurement. Fortunately for the problem of the historical Jesus, the rays which come to us from him do not travel along precisely parallel lines. On the other hand the problem is enormously complicated by the process of mixture; for the testimony of one witness has visibly affected that of another, detracting from its independent value.
The Eschatology of the Synoptic Gospels: Its Fidelity to Religious Experience
Authors: Sperry Willard Learoyd
Published: November 2011

After the critical proving as by fire to which the Bible has been subjected during recent years, Protestant apologists have succeeded in re-establishing its claim to a position of central importance in our religion. They have achieved this end by abandoning Calvin's vicious logical circle, which based the authority of Scripture upon the approving testimony of the Spirit and tested the Spirit by the standards of Scripture, and by adopting the more powerful lines of argument deduced from the accepted canons of general literary criticism. “I know that the Bible is true because it finds me,” said Coleridge, and thus he achieved in a single sentence what the labored casuistry of centuries had failed to establish. The Bible is true, we say in this generation, because it presents persistent types of profound religious experience which may be verified, “always, everywhere, by all men.”

In particular the critic asserts, and for Christianity at large this is the most reassuring dictum of contemporary scholarship, that the teaching of Jesus, as recorded in the Synoptic Gospels, constitutes a body of truth quite untrammelled by the narrowing circumstances of time and place. In the Sermon on the Mount we stand in a “celestial everywhere and forever.” Occasional dissenting voices have not destroyed the wide-spread conviction that modern scholarship in thus vindicating the universal validity of Jesus' words has achieved, if not its perfect work, at least a signal contribution to contemporary faith.
᾽ΕΜΒΡΙΜΗΣΑΜΕΝΟΣ and ᾽ΟΡΓΙΣΘΕΙΣ, Mark 1, 40–43
Authors: Lake Kirsopp
Published: November 2011

The interpretation of these verses and the textual problem which they involve has long been disputed among critics. With the ordinary text the difficulty begins with the word ἐμβριμησάμενος in vs. 43. It means ‘scolding,’ or ‘rebuking,’ and no reason can be seen for Jesus' adopting this attitude towards the man whom he had just healed. The matter becomes even more complicated if the variant readings in verse 41 be considered. The ordinary texts read σπλαγχνισθείς, ‘having compassion on him,’ but one of the earliest, Codex Bezae, reads ὀργισθείς, ‘being angry with him,’ or perhaps more accurately, ‘being in a passion,’ although nothing in the story explains why Jesus should have been in a passion with the unfortunate leper. With this agree several old Latin codices. It seems probable that ὀργισθείς is the original reading; it certainly is “hard,” and there was no reason why σπλαγχνισθείς should be changed to it, though the reverse change is not difficult to understand. Perhaps the explanation can be found in the punctuation. I suggest that it should be punctuated and translated as follows: ‘And there came to him a leper beseeching him and kneeling and saying to him, If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean; and he [the leper] put out his hand in a passion of rage and touched him. And he [Jesus] said, I will, be thou clean. And immediately the leprosy departed from him and he was clean. And he rebuked him and immediately drove him out.’
Medina and ΠΟΛΙΣ, and Luke i. 39
Authors: Torrey Charles C.
Published: November 2011

In the Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. XV, 1909, pp. 259 f., and again in my essay entitled ‘The Translations made from the Original Aramaic Gospels,’ in the Studies in the History of Religions presented to Crawford Howell Toy, 1912, pp. 290–292, I attempted to show that the curious phrase εἰς πόλιν Ἰούδα in Luke i.
Ancestor Worship in Africa
Authors: Addison James Thayer
Published: November 2011

Evidence for the existence of ancestor worship among the uncivilized peoples of Africa is varied and abundant. Outside the limited range of Mohammedan and Christian influence, there are few tribes whose religion has been reported with any care that do not appear to practice ancestor worship in some form. Without any attempt to provide a complete volume of testimony, and with the purpose only to indicate the wide range and diversity of these practices, we shall review geographically a portion of the facts available, passing across the map somewhat irregularly from northwest to southeast.
Varia Armenia
Authors: Conybeare Frederick C.
Published: November 2011

The following extract is from a homily attributed to a certain Ananiah, who was bom about 380, and died about 450, or even later. He was ordained about the year 420 bishop of Sinni, a province of Great Armenia, and was associated with Mesrop and Sahak Catholicos in the great Christian revival which took place at the beginning of the fifth century. Father Basil (Dr. Sargisean) in 1899 edited this homily at Venice along with another, also attributed to him, upon Jonah.
A Papyrus Manuscript of the Minor Prophets
Authors: Sanders Henry A.
Published: November 2011

Among the parchment and papyrus manuscripts and fragments brought to this country by the University of Michigan Expedition under Professor Francis W. Kelsey, only one is of paramount interest to the Biblical scholar. There are indeed lectionaries and parts of lectionaries dating from the eleventh century and later, and even a single papyrus fragment of a Psalm, but the former are uninteresting textually, and the latter is too small to give much evidence.