In 1907, His Holiness, Pope Leo XIII appointed a Commission to revise and re-edit the text of St. Jerome's Latin version of the Bible, known as the Vulgate and accepted by the Roman Church as its standard text of Holy Scripture. The undertaking was assigned, most appropriately, to the Benedictine Order, which from the days of Cassiodorus to those of Mabillon and from Mabillon to the present time has a record of scholarly achievement that for depth and continuity no other organization, sacred or secular, can match. Far-reaching plans were formulated, and a veritable laboratory of textual research was established at the Benedictine monastery of St. Anselm on the Aventine. The methods employed for listing and assorting the manuscripts and for securing collations and photographs are described in two reports, entitled “The Revision of the Vulgate,” published at St. Anselm's in 1909 and 1911. The present writer had the pleasure of visiting the monastery in 1912, under the guidance of the learned Abbot, now Cardinal, Gasquet. An imposing amount of material had already at that time been collected, but the stupendous character of the undertaking hardly promised definite results, certainly not a final and authoritative text, within the limits of the present generation. And yet Dom Quentin, to whom the task of editing the text was assigned in 1907, has succeeded after nearly fifteen years of unremitting toil, in presenting a new survey of the history of the text of the Vulgate and a precise method for determining its original form.

It is a characteristic of German scholarship to see problems and to work with them in the solution of intellectual and spiritual questions. Certainly it is a praiseworthy trait in the field of history that it follows the inner relation of events and cannot rest until all the subtlest threads are discovered. Such a problem is presented in the rise of the modern world of thought and the inquiry as to the factors which have contributed to it. In von Below's book on the causes of the Reformation, referred to at the beginning of my third article (HThR, Jan. 1924, pp. 5f.), the question is discussed, among others, whether the transition from the Middle Ages to modern times is really to be found in Luther and his work.

A group of German biblical scholars have presented to Professor Hermann Gunkel of Halle, on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday (May 23, 1922), a volume of studies on the religion and literature of the Old and New Testament.

The first part comprises eleven papers and relates to the Old Testament. In the first two articles H. Gressmann and P. Eissfeldt discuss some of the patriarchal stories of Genesis from two different points of view, that of “Stoffkritik” and of “Quellkritik” respectively.