It is a fact which is not justly appreciated that the Sun and the Moon had almost no cult in the early and classical age of Greece except for the Sun at Rhodes, a cult which is reasonably suspected to be of foreign origin. Helios and Selene were, of course, considered to be gods, but in mythology. Those scholars who have eagerly tried to find evidence for their cult ought to remember the statements of Aristophanes and Plato that Helios and Selene were barbarous gods. These two certainly knew the cults of their compatriots better than we do. On the other hand, the Sun cult was very popular and wide-spread in Roman times and became finally the last State religion of the Empire. It came from the Orient, and the mediator and the reason of its popularity was astrology. So the question arises: why did the Greeks accept the astrology which they rejected in an earlier age, and why did they begin to pay a cult to Helios to whom they had shown no veneration in earlier times? Did they simply succumb to a foreign religion or were there intrinsic reasons which contributed to this result?

The commonly accepted idea of the evolution of the Delphian mantic may be outlined thus: There was first an oracle of the Mother Earth, working by incubation (cf. p. 16, later). Later on, Apollo took possession of it, but its character remained unchanged: the believers continued to receive revelation in dreams. Afterwards Dionysos went to Delphi and with him ecstasy entered into the cult. It was not until then that oracles were given by an inspired, i.e. ecstatic, priestess called Pythia.

From the time of Origen and of Rufinus and St. Jerome the question of the apparent change of the apostle's name from Saul to Paul has interested students of the New Testament. The problem is due to the fact that the author of the Acts in briefly giving an account of Paul's meeting with the Roman governor of Cyprus, Sergius Paullus, and with the false prophet Elymas, simply states: “Then Saul (who also is called Paul) filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him, etc.” Before this verse in Acts the apostle's name is invariably given as Saul, and after this verse he is always called Paul, except in two passages where there is reference to the very beginning of his career, his conversion. In his letters the name Paul, and never Saul, is used.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a brief description of Existenz-philosophie as it appears in the work of three men—Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers—and to make a few critical comments. One special obstacle should be noted at the start. A summary always misses the particular shades of meaning which an author brings out as he develops his theme in his own words, and in this philosophy it is the special nuances which are particularly important. Existenz is in fact as much like poetry as it is like philosophy, and a large part of its flavor is lost when it is translated into plodding prose. It makes less, that is to say, of the appeal to objective, verifiable truth than of subjective experience in its individual aspect. So far as it makes use of universal, communicable forms these are aesthetic rather than intellectual, and resemble more nearly the imaginative projections of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche than the logical essences of, say, a Plato. This appears to be true even in Heidegger's case in spite of the fact that he inherited from his master, Husserl, an interest in the bracketed, “reduced” logical essence which is reminiscent of the Platonic form. In Heidegger's hands Phänomenologie by becoming Existenz has turned from the logical to the more imaginative and emotional side of experience. Existenz is thus a poetic and philosophical attempt to describe the subjective experiences of religion, and as such it depends for much of its appeal on its own medium of expression.

It is now some fifty-two years since the first modern edition appeared of any part of Hephaistion of Thebes' compendium of astrology. The editor very properly collected in his introduction the scanty facts relative to the author and the unknown friend to whom he dedicates his work. But, apparently a little annoyed by the too positive assertion of Salmasius that all astrologers of that date were pagans, he put forth the hasty theory that this astrologer was a Christian. He had indeed no difficulty in proving that a somewhat unorthodox or lax Christian might have been a devotee of astrology at the time, about A.D. 381, when it is likely that Hephaistion wrote; but he went too far in the further statement that “das Werk des Hephaestion selbst bietet sicherlich keinen positiven Anhaltspunkt, dass der Verfasser desselben Nicht-Christ gewesen sei.” This has been echoed by later writers, as A. Bouché-Leclercq, who says “Il est possible qu'Hephestion de Thebes … fût chrétien,” and Fr. Boll, writing shortly before 1912, when a good deal more of our author had been printed in the C(orpus) C(odicum) A(strologicorum) G(raecorum). He sums up Engelbrecht's arguments, that the work begins σὺν θεῷ and is dedicated to one Athanasios, who is called ὁσιώτατος (and by other complimentary superlatives) and so may have been a Christian priest, concluding that the theory of the writer's Christianity is arrived at “wohl mit Recht.” As it seems to me remarkable that three learned men, of whom one had edited the astrologer and the others had certainly read him, should have overlooked the cogent evidence that he was a pagan, I think it worth while to set forth the proofs, positive and negative.