It is sometimes said that Christianity has been so long identified with the West, it has so thoroughly become a Western religion, that it is not adapted to take a great place in the mind and life of the Eastern nations. It is not intended in this remark to overlook the fact that Christianity is itself by origin an Oriental faith, an outgrowth of Judaism. Nor is it denied that, in considerable numbers, men of Oriental race, mainly within the borders of the present Turkish Empire, have from of old confessed Christianity in forms familiar to us in the Greek churches. But these Oriental Christians sustain rather than disprove the judgment which was above expressed. Not only have they shown since before the rise of Mohammedanism no perceptible zeal for the propagation of the Christian faith among other Orientals, but they have reacted powerfully against the propaganda on behalf of Western forms of the Christian faith in their own midst.

”Modernism” has already become as vague and ambiguous a term as Socialism. The latter stands for anything between common Christian charity—a recognition of social duties acknowledged by all and neglected by most—and a systematic reconstruction of the whole framework of society. Similarly, Modernism, thanks largely to the Encyclical Pascendi, has come to stand for the mildest as well as for the extremist concessions of Roman Catholicism to the exigencies of modern life and thought and sentiment. Owing to this comprehensiveness, it is possible to group together in one unholy fraternity, and under the same anathema, those who are sincere Catholics by conviction and those who, having lost all faith in the Church, continue Catholics in name and profession, whether through indifference, or self-interest, or consideration for the feelings of others. Men whose modernity is little more than an educated Ultramontanism are thus brought under suspicion of a secret sympathy with deists, atheists, and agnostics, and held up to the odium of the faithful at large.

It is of the philosophy of Plato that I would write, but I would keep in mind a definition of philosophy given by Plato himself when he spoke of it as “meditation on death.” I would write, too, not of any inner details of what Plato thought, but of his teaching in its general character and value; and especially, on behalf of my readers, I would assume that, for their purposes as well as always for my own, no fair estimate and no vital appreciation of Plato or his meditation can ever be attained without some understanding of the place of Plato and his philosophy in the history of his very remarkable people, the ancient Greeks, and of their dead civilization.

Until within the memory of men little past middle life Butler's Analogy was a standard text-book in American Colleges, and up to 1850 it was among the books for the final examinations in the University of Oxford. Recently it has been brought into fresh prominence by the publication of Gladstone's Subsidiary Studies, and by the sumptuous edition of Butler's works issued by the Oxford University Press, to the preparation of which Mr. Gladstone devoted the last months of his illustrious career. Furthermore, within a short time two critical biographies of Butler have been published, one by W. Lucas Collins, Prebendary of Peterborough, and one by W. A. Spooner, Tutor of New College, Oxford, and Canon of Christ Church. The interest in Cardinal Newman is perennial, and fresh appreciations of his philosophy and of his unique personality are continually appearing.

Professor James tells us that pragmatism has suddenly precipitated itself out of the air. Of absolutism the opposite is true: while not losing its definite centres of influence, it has gradually diffused itself into the air. Everywhere the tendency has been to exalt the universal and to minimize the individual; to belittle the human and to ascribe all to the divine; to emphasize the far end and to ignore the near. This absolutist atmosphere and tendency is the theme of the present article.