The question has been often asked whether there were any religious motives dominant in the mind of Columbus and his royal patrons when the expedition toward the unknown West was undertaken. Those who would fain canonize the discoverer of a new world appear unable to see any other guiding motive, and they also earnestly desire to impress their belief upon all the world. Others, differently inclined, seem to have difficulty in finding anything other than a base and ignoble love of gold and an overweening desire for power and fame in the proposals or the subsequent career of the adventurer. The question is then, first as to the very existence of such motives at all, and secondarily, if they are found to exist, as to the position which they occupied in the minds of the parties concerned, and the extent to which later occurrences stamped them as genuine or spurious; formative in their influence, or merely put forward as a pretext and makeweight in argument.

TO be the President of this Society puts one in a rare succession and is an honor to be coveted. I thank you for the election. On casting about for a subject worthy of your attention and appropriate for this inaugural address I concluded to call you away from modern books and modern men to a distant past, no less strenuous than this present but after a different pattern. I take you from the twentieth to the ninth century, and from the magnificent buildings of this theological seminary to a lowly monastery on the banks of a little river in France.

Any one who has glanced at the venerable document known as the “Saybrook Platform,” which served as the legal basis of Connecticut Congregationalism during the eighteenth century, has noticed that there are prefaced to the fifteen famous Articles which form the Platform itself, not only the elaborate Confession of Faith adopted at the Savoy palace in 1658 and re-enacted at Boston in 1680, but certain “Heads of Agreement Assented to by the United Ministers formerly called Presbyterian and Congregational,” as their title runs. And if one's curiosity has been sufficiently aroused to read the words of introduction in which the Saybrook divines describe their work, one finds them uniting in the declaration that these Heads of Agreement shall “be observed by the Churches throughout this Colony” of Connecticut. The question at once presents itself how it came about that a document which purports to be a compromise between Congregationalists and Presbyterians, should be accepted as one of the pillars of the legally established ecclesiastical constitution of a colony where declared Presbyterianism had as yet no foothold; and be received as so authoritative an exposition of eighteenth-century Connecticut Congregationalism as to form the liberal half of the two fold result of the Saybrook Synod, and at least a co-ordinate actor in the Platform, without the adoption of which the Synod would never have arrived at unanimity. What it was, and how it came so to be used, is the object of our present inquiry.

That Magna Carta guarantees to every Englishman trial by jury is in some legal circlesan almost inerradicable conviction. As firmly rooted in many ecclesiastical circles is a belief in respect to the first clause of that great document: quod Anglicana Ecclesia libera sit. Though the historical meaning of the phrase is indisputable, it is constantly used in a false sense. It is supposed to have defined a fundamental principle of English ecclesiastical policy although not immediately realized. Just as trial by jury was definitively established only in the contest with the Stuarts, so this great principle of liberty was only secured for the Church at the Reformation; at that time the Anglicana Ecclesia became free and received its birthright assured it in the Charter. This quaint perversion of the meaning of the phrase may in some points be connected with the indisputable fact of the religious and administrative continuity of the Church of England; and the legal status of the modern Church of England has come to be regarded as practically identical with that of the Anglicana Ecclesia contemplated by the Charter. That the libertas electionum, the liberty especially referred to in Magna Carta, has totally disappeared, lost at the Reformation, seems not in the least to have effected the popular ecclesiastical interpretation. But closely connected with that belief as to Magna Carta and the Church is a commonplace of English legal tradition, universal since the sixteenth century, that the Ecchsia Anglicana, which term may be conveniently used throughout this discussion to designate the medieval Church in England as distinguished from the Church in modern times, stood in some exceptional legal relation to the rest of Western Christendom and to the Roman See and that that See had usurped at some time an authority over that Church not recognized either by theChurch or the State. In the exposition of this theory the point is often made that Pope Urban recognized this exceptional position when, according to William of Malmesbury, he introduced Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, to a Roman synod as quasi alterius orbis papam.

No one can doubt that, if the Christian Church were one in spirit, and one in organization for work, she would fulfil her appointed mission better than she does. Indeed, since the establishment of brotherly love is a chief part of that mission, so long as that love is wanting, so long she fails in her mission. It may be safely said that no single cause so effectually obstructs Christianity within the Church, and none so prevents its acceptance outside, as the schisms and enmities whereby she is divided against herself. While she thus offers a ready text to her critics, detractors, and opponents, how can she hope to conquer the world for brotherly love?

Whatever weighty reasons there may have been in days gone by for rending to pieces the Christian body; whatever advantages may have seemed likely to spring therefrom, that rending, being an absolute belying of the Christian spirit, was, in itself, an unmixed evil. The Church that had so far lost the spirit of Christian love, as not to be ready to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things, rather than fall to pieces, was not the Church of Christ. No corruption or abuse, however glaring, could ever constitute a sufficient excuse for schism or revolt. Schism may be allowable in every other institution: in the Church of Christ it is forever forbidden; for the reason that her very essence is the unity of brotherly love, and where that fails, she fails. As St. Ignatius says: “If any one followeth one that maketh a schism, he doth not inherit the kingdom of God.” (Philad., iii.)

The existence of wounds resembling those of the crucified Christ upon the body of St. Francisof Assisi is now generally admitted to be probable. It has been demonstrated that such phenomena can and do occur through psychopathic causes. Only by rejecting cogent evidence can the stigmata be eliminated as thorough fraud. Whether the wounds were self-inflicted or inflicted by others post mortem is still an open question.

When Columbus anchored in the Tagus River, March 5, 1493, he precipitated on Europe one of the most difficult questions with which the mind of man has ever grappled. It was this: By what title should the New World be held ? The Catholic sovereigns Ferdinand and Isabella determined to hold what their Admiral had discovered. But the Spanish lawyers found great difficulty in proving their title under the Roman law, which alone would be accepted as conclusive by the other powers, because it did not recognize the right of discovery. The Roman law recognized the acquisition of property through the operation of either the jus gentium or the jus civile? Under the jus gentium, which alone was applicable in this case, property could be acquired: ist, by occupation, occupatio; 2d, by natural increase, as land formed by seas or rivers, accessio; 3d, by transfer, traditio. The only doctrine suitable to the purposes of Spain was that of “occupation,” which some eminent Roman lawyers incorporated not in the jus gentium but in the jus natura, as affirming a natural right.

The approach of the 500th anniversary of John Huss's death and the interest taken at the present time in questions of ecclesiology have suggested the subject of this paper. The “Treatise on the Church,” De ecclesia, was Huss's chief writing and from it were drawn the charges for which he died at the stake, July 6, 1415.

To the earliest Protestant communions which found a home upon the hospitable shores of North America belongs the Evangelical Lutheran Church. As early as 1638 a colony, professing the Lutheran faith, arrived from Sweden. They purchased from the Indians a tract of land, lying in Eastern Pennsylvania and in the present State of Delaware, established a number of churches, built houses of worship, and were served by devout and liberally educated ministers.

It is everywhere conceded that the forces which brought about the change in the religious life of Northern Europe that we call the Reformation were much more complex than was formerly supposed. No one now thinks of attributing results so widespread and permanent to restored emphasis on a single neglected doctrine, or to the personal influence of a few divinely commissioned men. However important to the movement Luther and his colleagues may have been, their importance is seen to lie chiefly in the fact that they embodied convictions and hopes that had been gradually developing in Teutonic Christendom. The modern student of the origins of the Reformation is not so much concerned with the lives of the Reformers as with the influences which made the Reformation possible. This is a much more difficult and a much more fascinating subject.