In the Cambridge Modern History and in a later work, Studies in Modernism, the present writer has given an account of the last three pontificates, those of Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X. Each of the three was in its own way a momentous pontificate, and has left a lasting mark on the Church. With the present Pope a new period opens. It will be one of harvest. The passions unloosed by his immediate predecessors have burned themselves out; but their works follow them. Benedict XV will reap what they have sown. Also—and this is the real key to the position—he will have to meet the situation created by the European war. His is a pathetic, almost a tragic, figure; for it combines the appearance of power with the fact of powerlessness. Never was man less master of his fate than he. His infallibility binds him hand and foot; he inherits the legacy of evil left by his predecessors; he is crushed under the crimes of kings.

It will be generally admitted, I think, that Aeschylus is one of the great religious and philosophic poets of all time. And it will be perhaps hardly less generally conceded that no philosophic problem was for him more interesting or more momentous than that of establishing and defending the concept of a moral government of the world. Even those who accuse him of having subjected all things to the iron rule of Fate cannot reproach him with a blind fatalism. If he saw inexorable Necessity at the heart of the world, he also saw Justice writ large upon its face; and if he believed God and man alike to be pawns in the hands of Destiny, the rule of the game was still to punish the wrong moves of the one by the sure interposition of the other.

One of the most engaging personalities of that most engaging of Christian centuries, the thirteenth, is Brother Salimbene of Parma. His life, begun in 1221, five years before the death of Francis of Assisi and ended, probably, about 1288, thirteen years after the birth of Dante, connects the mystical, devotional, ascetic piety of the Middle Ages with the rational, individualistic, personal attitude of the modern mind. A devoted member of the Franciscan Order and acutely sensitive to its historic significance, he spends his life in its manifold activities, and toward the close sets himself to the congenial task of putting down in order the most vivid impressions remaining to him of the men and things he has had dealings with.

Alongside the doctrine that our Gospels, in their general structure as well as their individual anecdotes, reflect the beliefs and practice of the primitive brotherhoods which gave them currency, should stand (if the theory be valid) some corresponding reflection in the still older Pauline Epistles. Especially should we expect Baptism and the Eucharist to affect the mode of teaching.

Since the appearance of Professor David G. Lyon's article entitled “Recent Excavations in Palestine,” which was published in the January number of The Harvard Theological Review, 1908, other ancient Biblical sites have been explored and many noteworthy discoveries have been made. And now that the work of excavation and exploration has been indefinitely arrested by the outbreak of war, it seems especially fitting that what has been accomplished during the past six or seven years should be collected and summarized.