The classic chapter in Newman's Idea of a University on “University Preaching” remains at many points as timely and convincing as when it was written, in 1855. Its discrimination of real from spurious earnestness—“I do not mean that a preacher should aim at earnestness, but that he must aim at his object … which will at once make him earnest”; its warning against the recondite, remote, and abstract—“The most obvious truths are often the most profitable”; its advice that sermons should be prepared in writing, but spoken without notes—“While then a preacher will find it becoming and admirable to put into writing any important discourse beforehand, he will find it equally a point of propriety and expedience not to read it in the pulpit”—all these counsels and principles, though Newman throughout his preaching at St. Mary's violated the last of them, are as applicable as ever. Yet, on the other hand, the force of Newman's teaching is for many readers limited by his reiterated reference to ecclesiastical authority. What St. Francis de Sales, or St. Charles, or St. Antoninus, may have said about sermons is assumed to be of more significance than the judgments of the not less saintly Newman. The preacher whom Newman has in mind is a Roman priest, who “has before his mental eye the Four Last Things,” and feels “the horror and the rapture of one who witnesses a conflagration.”

The appearance of the last product of Dr. Cheyne's pen offers occasion to review briefly his work, and to estimate it as far as is now possible, bearing in mind that the significance of a scholar's work is not always clearly visible till some time after he has ceased to be active.

More than two years have passed since Dr. Driver died (26 Feb., 1914), the greatest Hebraist of his generation, recognized both in England and in America as a master among Old Testament scholars. The time has come when we may attempt, more calmly perhaps than was possible before, to take a survey of his work as a whole, and to consider what are his permanent contributions to Biblical science.

The future historian of Modernism will be much embarrassed by the contradictory appreciations and misjudgments which are to be found in our contemporary literature on this subject. One book presents Modernism as a movement of the Latin mind, distrusting individualism and laying stress upon the corporate element in religion; another writer, on the contrary, characterizes Modernism as “a spirit of anarchy, of individualism, of personal distinction and culture.” To some writers Modernism is the greatest spiritual movement ever produced inside the Catholic Church, while to others it is an insignificant and useless dream of a few not completely developed minds. Consequently some of them outline the development of Modernism as an anecdotic history without a real unity in purpose, while others conceive of it as of a system of theology derived from certain fixed and definite philosophic premises.

From the time when I began to make a study of Confucianism, it has been my growing conviction that no antagonism should exist between Confucianism and Christianity. The two religions, like two persons, should be friends; and as two persons, who are friends, differ in mien, physique, temperament, thought, manner, and occupation, so these two religions, while differing in many characteristics, ceremonies, and the consciousness as to what is right and what is wrong, should be friendly to each other and helpful to each other, through agreement in those spiritual ideas which are essential and fundamental, through the reverential realization of the common source of all truth and goodness, and through aspirations after higher things, an enlarged vision, and future perfection, which these religions, along with the best in all lands, expect ere long to see fulfilled.

A philosophical argument is the attempt to record and communicate a vision. Or, if this phrase appears to fasten upon the philosopher the stigma of a mere visionary, let me say an intellectual perception—intellectual, because what he perceives is not even mainly made up of sense-data; perception, because it shares the directness and the self-sufficiency with which the sheer quality of sounds and sights comes to him. In speaking thus of vision or intellectual perception, I have no intention of setting up any antithesis between seeing and thinking or reasoning, nor do I mean to deny that the most comprehensive and penetrating philosophical visions are achieved, I might almost say built up, only through a toilsome process of reflection and argument. I use vision in the wide sense in which even thinking is a way of seeing, is indeed essentially the effort to see things as they are. There is no need to quote authorities, however great. My appeal is to the whole tradition which, from the earliest days of philosophy, has drawn from the eye and from its medium, the light, the language for expressing the way in which philosophical truth strikes upon the mind.

The religious propaganda carried on in Italy by the Protestant churches has not, we must confess, yielded the results they presumably hoped for. It is not that they have achieved no practical result. Doubtless they have done good to scattered groups of believers. But the result has had no national importance. It has not been felt as a vital force in the world of Italian culture, nor as creating a spring of living, genuine religious feeling such as could exercise a noticeable influence on the further development of the religious consciousness of the country.

Confucianism, with its elaborate ritual, its bloody sacrifices, its antiquated symbolism, and its fine ethical teaching, has again been made the State religion of China. Several recent mandates by the President, Yüan Shih-k'ai, have restored to it in the school, in the civil service, and in the army, the authority which previous to the revolution it had held almost uninterruptedly for two thousand years.

The American college is a picturesque, a unique, a very vital community. Students are not out of the world—a college is not a monastery; yet it is a world of its own, with peculiar objects and traditions, with a distinct atmosphere. The catalogue shows a curriculum, a faculty, a few hundred names, and the college would seem to be lectures, study, recitations. But around all that and including it, the college is a great fraternity, a mystic circle, a cult. It is Alma Mater, a glorified personality.

The growth and shape of a human skeleton are determined, not solely by inheritance and nutrition, but partly also by what its possessor does with his bones. They become compressed here, enlarged there, in response to tugging muscles or sagging burdens.

So with medical ethics. The codes and standards of the physician depend in part on the peculiar strains and stresses, the special irritations and inspirations of his professional work. He may turn away from them all, unbranded and undeveloped by his lot. If so, he remains the exceptional man to whom the conclusions of this essay have no application.

Though the object of business is money-making, its essence is service. Facts in support of this conception face us on every hand. For example, follow through the day the most typical of all citizens, the suburbanite. A cook serves him with breakfast, his town with a sidewalk, an eager boy with a newspaper, an engineer with safe conduct to the city. “Bag carried, sir?” is his welcome there. Thereafter both necessities and luxuries are everywhere thrust upon him—collars, fish, custard pies, vacuum cleaners, pyramids of oranges and of apples vigorously shone on anonymous trousers. A street car takes him to his office-building, an elevator to his office, cleaned for him in the cheerless hours of darkness by a woman on hands and knees. Throughout the day a stenographer and office-boy do his bidding. At lunch a restaurant serves him. When evening comes, superabundant theatres seek to entertain him. No socialist, however ardent, can conceive greater eagerness to serve. The very streets are congested with people bent on serving one another. The activities produced by charitable agencies are in volume as nothing by comparison. There is, however, a stern condition. The recipient of this service must pay for it. With rare exceptions, ability to pay can come only from the recompenses of service. The service of business is reciprocal.

Among the most notable contributions of recent years by classical philologians to New Testament interpretation is E. Norden's Agnostos Theos (Berlin, 1913), a comparison of the Lukan account of Paul's missionary career and preaching with Hellenistic parallels, more particularly the biography by Philostratus of Apollonius of Tyana. As a further example of the same method of literary parallels Norden appends a discussion in the last chapter of this book (Schlussbetrachtung, pp. 277–308) of the famous logion, or saying of Jesus, from the Second Source (Q) on the Son's Knowing the Father and being Known of Him (Mt. 11 25–30 = Lk. 10 21–22).

Professor Kent has undertaken to provide English-reading students of the Old Testament with a complete library of hand-books for the study of the contents of that great collection of Hebrew writings, which shall be of scientific value; not necessarily presenting new and original research by the author, but representing the best results of modern scholarship. The present volume, the fifth in this series, deals with the lyric poetry of the Old Testament, including songs of lamentation, songs of love and marriage, and a variety of oracles, triumphal odes, and national songs. All of these together, however, constitute but one-fifth of the total sum of Hebrew lyric poetry here dealt with, four-fifths consisting of the Psalms. It is especially Professor Kent's treatment of that collection of hymns, constituting not merely far the greater part of Hebrew lyric poetry quantitatively but also far the greater part of it qualitatively, which I propose to discuss in this article. As Kent says in his preface, the Psalms “are the real heart of the Old Testament. In them the innermost soul of the Jewish race is laid bare.” Not only this; they are “the link that binds the Old to the New Testament.” They have played as large a part in Christian as in Jewish worship. They have been translated for Christian use in all kinds of forms into almost every tongue, and an enormous literature has grown up about them. From the modern standpoint, however, they “have been to a certain extent neglected.”

In a previous article in The Harvard Theological Review the writer presented an estimate of the contribution of Professor Royce to Christian thought. In the present article he endeavors to do the same with respect to another American philosopher of great significance to Christian theology, George Holmes Howison.

The recent extension of scientific psychology to religious life could not leave the theologian unconcerned. “What theological problems can the psychological treatment of religion solve?” “According to what method must the psychology of religion proceed?” These and other questions have become, especially among German theologians, frequent topics of discussion.

That man's social instincts and emotions have been intimately bound up with his religious emotions and ideas is, happily, in no danger of being forgotten. Through the cumulative impact of many motives, we are learning to look to man's social experience for such insight as the analysis of individual experience seemed not to afford. Thus far, the most striking instance of this—at least in the popular mind—is in the domain of morals. Conscience, when viewed as the possession and experience of the individual alone, has every appearance of something sacred and imperious, absolute and inexplicable. But once let conscience be put into the crucible of anthropology and social psychology, and its mysteriousness and absoluteness seem to have vanished. We see its function and we comprehend its genesis. It is simply the echo within the individual of the past experience of the race, an inherited instinct, which has a definite survival value in the struggle for existence. It would hardly be fair to say that every question about the meaning and worth of conscience is forthwith settled. Concerning the ultimate inferences to be drawn from the undoubted fact that conscience has had a history within man's social experience, there is much which may easily escape us in our first enthusiasm for the concepts of history, development, and social experience.

The neglect of Pascal by the English-speaking world today is little short of amazing. Within the last decade France has produced literally scores of studies of his life and thought; but, with the exception of a book by St. Cyres and an essay by Paul Elmer More, there has been scarcely a sign that we were conscious of any special relation between the spirit of our own age and that of this seventeenth-century genius. Yet Pascal is indeed a man of the present, and a study of his multiplex personality has never been more pertinent than it is today. Geometrician, experimental physicist, biting satirist, literary artist, keen-sighted moralist, devout believer, philosophical sceptic, man of the world, ascetic recluse, the problem of the balance and inter-relation of these selves is still waiting a completely satisfactory solution. How was it that the geometrician and experimental physicist could be a pronounced supernaturalist? How was it that the almost cynical man of the world could become the devout recluse? What relation can we find between the sceptical doubt of the possibility of knowledge and the obedient acceptance of the dogmas of the church? With what consistency could the rationalistic critic of Jesuit morality be the challenger of all philosophic creeds? How could all these conflicting interests keep house together in the same frail tenement and present the semblance of a unified life? Perhaps they could not, and his death in his fortieth year was the outcome.

For a generation or so the world has been tending to regard life from a social, an organic point of view, and this has developed into Socialism, strictly so called. The Churches have endeavored to meet this sometimes by opposing the principle and addressing themselves still to the individual, and sometimes by adopting it and becoming benevolent institutions for the ameliorating of the conditions of living. What is in general the result, not so much upon the world as upon themselves? Is the social motive likely to be profound and permanent? Is it, as some claim, the Gospel; or, as others claim, distinctly not the Gospel?