In lectures the charm of which his students will never forget, Dr. C. C. Everett used to speak of Schopenhauer as the most brilliant of the profound philosophers. This German thinker is perhaps little read in England, and still less in America, where the levels of culture are low, and the primitive life-instincts still fresh and strong. But among old and reflective peoples the case is bound to be different; so far as he is known at all, he is certain of a hearing—and a not unsympathetic one, whatever the final verdict. He has already ploughed deep in German thought, and his influence in France and Italy is considerable. Perhaps he is (or would be) most easily understood in India, his doctrine, in capital points, being parallel to the Buddhist philosophical writings. As we in America get further on, in age and in reflective habits, he will probably be more and more read here; and one of the crucial problems of philosophical thought may come to be, how Schopenhauer shall be disposed of.

To the very title of this paper, or at any rate to the idea implied in it, the average religious thinker might conceivably make more objections than one. He might in the first place inquire whether any meaning can be found in the term “rational mysticism”; and, examining it either from the standpoint of reason or from that of mysticism, might complain that it attempts to bring together two quite incompatible things. Reason has usually held mysticism in scorn, looking upon it as a sort of quack method, if the word may pass, of accomplishing, or of pretending to accomplish, what reason accomplishes in the professional and only legitimate way. Mysticism, from the other side, has been ready enough to repay scorn with scorn: it has claimed to find its way to the secret places of truth by a subtle process far more efficacious than that laborious following of the trail which reason practises; and its independence of reason, its irreconcilability with reason, it has always taken as its glory rather than its shame. What—the average religious man might say—what can “rational mysticism” mean? How, indeed, can such a thing exist at all? And in the next place, even supposing you could manufacture the curious compound that “rational mysticism” would be, and could link the two seeming incompatibles together, how are you going to make any connection between your newly created rational mysticism and New Testament Christianity? Rational, indeed, New Testament Christianity is, or claims to be; and to show its harmony with reason (provided that the thing be not pushed too far) is one of the chief objects that Christian apologetics may well keep in view.

Among the Hebrew manuscripts recovered in 1896 from the Genizah of an old synagogue at Fostat, near Cairo, and now in the Cambridge University Library, England, were found eight leaves of a Hebrew manuscript which proved to be fragments of a book containing the teaching of a peculiar Jewish sect; a single leaf of a second manuscript, in part parallel to the first, in part supplementing it, was also discovered. These texts Professor Schechter has now published, with a translation and commentary, in the first volume of his Documents of Jewish Sectaries. The longer and older of the manuscripts (A) is, in the opinion of the editor, probably of the tenth century; the other (B), of the eleventh or twelfth.

Each generation and each century seems to have its own peculiar danger and its own peculiar genius. The Christian church, for example, was confronted in the early centuries with the dangerous and subtle opposition of Greek thought; and the genius of the church victoriously faced this opposition with that spiritual interpretation of the life and teachings of Jesus which we find in the Fourth Gospel. Later, in the sixteenth century, the danger appeared in a materialistic church, and the genius of the Reformation was unmistakably present in the religion of the spirit and the liberty of the individual. In the eighteenth century the peril was seen in dogma, or irreligion, or a tepid morality; and the opposition developed Pietism in Germany, Methodism in England, and the Great Awakening in New England. Every century appears to be led into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil in some new guise, and is compelled to find the apt, victorious text in Scripture.

And yet, whatever be the temptation and whatever be the triumphant reply, the issues are always the same,—sin and salvation. In the Greek myth of Proteus, when that old man of the sea was grappled with, he assumed most horrible and terrifying forms. Now he was a fire, now a wild stag, now a screaming seabird, now a three-headed dog, now a serpent. Sin is always protean, and presents to the wrestling centuries new and terrible aspects. What, then, we ask, seem to be the principalities and protean powers against which we are compelled to wrestle? I venture to think they may be suggested in one word, Materialism.

The necessity of moral and religious training in the education of children and the significance of education in matters of religion have in our day become the subject of much discussion. It may be profitable, therefore, to examine a unique institution of early New England by which religion was linked to education, and religious education was given a high place in the life of the churches. It is remarkable that this institution seems never to have received the attention of a single book, pamphlet, or magazine article.