I think it safe to assume—and I shall assume—that every college student has a certain amount of religious conviction and belief—more than we sometimes think—-more perhaps than he is himself conscious of having. I am emboldened to say this because I believe that religion—that is, the relation of the human in us to the divine in us and above us—is a part of the essential nature of man, potential even though latent in every man, and because the Christian environment in which most college students have passed their early days must have called these potentialities into more or less distinct consciousness.

But what I recall in myself as a young man, and what I see in others, tells me that when this religious consciousness is made the object of appeal and of summons to expression and action it is very much inclined to withdraw within itself, and to fold itself about with reserve, and even to take on a kind of resistance. And when I examine this state of mind in myself and others, I think I can see that in a certain stage of spiritual immaturity, and perhaps more or less always, this reserve in religious expression is justifiable and even normal.

The mediatorial office of Agni (Latin ignis), the Vedic Fire-god, has never been explained; nor has there ever been an attempt to clarify the relation between Agni as mediator and as avenger, or to show whether either of these functions is extraordinary. Usually the office is taken for granted, as if it were the regular business of Agni to act as a mediator between gods and men. It depends on what is called a mediator whether this is true or not; and the loose use of language has surprising results when non-Sanskrit scholars take up a word used by Sanskrit scholars in a literal sense and employ it in the theological sense. ‘Mediator’ means literally a go-between, or messenger, and Chaucerian English so uses the word; but the common theological connotation adds to this the idea that the messenger or go-between goes as an intercessor or reconciler between two opposed parties.

Now when the author of Ethnic Trinities (and even Tiele) undertakes to show the universality of Christian ideas in religious phenomena, he instances the Hindu Fire-god as a ‘mediator,’ using the word as applied in Christian theology. As a matter of fact, this gives a very incorrect view of Agni, who does not intercede with other gods for the sake of men. The idea that the fire of the sacrifice helps to appease the wrath of other gods is not wholly absent; but it is worth while to see when and where this idea is found, and especially to learn how it is reached and what it implies.

Whatever else it may mean in art or morals, there is no doubt whatever that in economics the word value means power in exchange and nothing more. It is the power which an article possesses of commanding other desirable things in peaceful and voluntary exchange. Why a thing has this power is the first problem in economic value.

Illingworth, J. R., The Doctrine of the Trinity.

Hall, F. J., Introduction to Dogmatic Theology.

Ritchie, W. B., Revelation and Religious Certitude.

Bowne, B. P., Personalism.

Rogers, A. K., The Religious Conception of the World.

Lloyd, A. H., The Will to Doubt.

Drummond, James, Studies in Christian Doctrine.

Peile, J. H. F., The Reproach of the Gospel.

Nash, H. S., The Atoning Life.

The Christ that is to Be.

Worcester, McComb, Coriat, Religion and Medicine.

Powell, L. P., Christian Science, its Faith and its Founder.

Campbell, J. M., Paul the Mystic.

Scott, W. M., Aspects of Christian Mysticism.

Inge, W. R., Personal Idealism and Mysticism.

The belief in a doctrine of Providence, at least in some sense of the word, is inseparable from theism. Let a man once assume a good God or a righteous universe, and he thereby also assumes that all events must be directed, or at least overruled, for good. Perhaps, however, it is a little easier to declare what one means when he says, “there is a God,” than to explain what one means by “the divine Providence.” Do we believe in a special Providence, that enters into each particular act or moment, so that, for example, it is literally true that not a sparrow “shall fall to the ground without your Father”? Do we think that the infinite Power carries every individual life in its thought, and even plans, and cares what each man does, suffers, or enjoys? Or do we think of Providence as merely a general guiding agency, like the intelligence that steers a ship in safety without any special responsibility for the conduct or the pleasure of the passengers? Do we think that a man can interfere, by the exercise of his little will, with the working of divine Providence? Or does Providence also enter into and direct the motion of every individual will, as it may be conceived to enter into the motion of the sands on the beach?

Periodical articles on religion are like the plague of frogs in Egypt not only in number but in the fact that they appear in the most unlikely, not to say unsuitable, places. A special apparatus is indispensable to all who have any reason to try to keep track of them. Mr. Ernest Richardson, formerly librarian of Hartford Theological Seminary, now of Princeton University, an experienced hand, with the co-operation of several other bibliographers, has undertaken the laborious task of preparing a special index to this literature on the general plan of Poole's Index. The volume before us includes articles on religion published in the ten years, 1890 to 1899 inclusive, in not far from fifteen hundred periodicals. At a rough estimate, making no subtraction for repetition, the whole number of entries is between 60,000 and 70,000.

The first season's work of the Harvard Expedition to Samaria closed in the latter part of August. In consequence of various delays and interruptions incident to the beginning of the undertaking, the actual digging covered only nine or ten weeks in all. Doctor Gottlieb Schumacher, who has had the direction of the work, surveyed the ground, tracing the remains of the city wall, the circuit of which is about two miles and a half, and made a plan of the site.