George Tyrrell's identification of the Pope as the Antichrist was not particularly original but it was important. For Tyrrell was the leader of a movement which, in the opinion of René Marlé, created the most serious disturbance in the Catholic Church since the time of the Reformation. Moreover, the reformers and iconoclasts who had made this charge previously had usually done so from a position outside of Catholic tradition. Tyrrell, however, attacked the Pope from within, as a member of his flock. The Jesuit philosopher even went so far as to claim that his radical posture was the inevitable consequence of his Catholic convictions. Thus he explained:

I believe in the Roman Church so far as it is Christian and Catholic; I disbelieve in it so far as it is papal. I see two spirits in it, as in myself, struggling for supremacy — Light and Darkness, Christ and Anti-Christ; God and the Devil. At present Christ is thrown and Anti-Christ is uppermost. … I look for the day when Peter, after his boasted fidelity and manifold denials, aliquando conversus, confirmabit fratres. It is a long way off from that blessed cockcrow.

The life and thought of Reinhold Niebuhr are characterized by a running debate with rationalism. As a Christian, Niebuhr saw it as his task to defend the Biblical view of man against corruption by an opposing view found in the rationalist tradition of Hellenic philosophy. As a modern Christian, Niebuhr felt even more compelled to resist the incursion of rationalism into Christianity represented in theology by liberal Protestantism and in ethics by the Social Gospel movement.

The literary career of H. G. Wells began in the reign of Victoria and extended beyond World War II. For some three decades down into the 1930's his ideas on the human situation and the probable future of mankind were as much a part of the popular mind as those of anyone else writing in English. In the last decade of his life, however, there was a sharp decline of interest in Wells which brought him to almost total eclipse by his death in 1946. He had reflected important facets of the mind of an age, and that age had passed. Even at the height of his fame, as we can see clearly now, he was not in the first rank of literary figures and was much less sensitive to what was happening in the West than Eliot or Conrad or even Aldous Huxley.

It is suitably ironic that Socrates' classic submission to Athenian injustice some centuries before Christ provides, in the face of contemporary criticism of traditional education, amazing relevance for our time. Does citizenship make it immoral to defy the injustices of one's country?

Complicating the exegesis of this difficult passage are certain textual problems with which this present submission is to be concerned. With the Masoretic Text of v. 24 — wayehî badderek bammālôn wayyipgešēhû YHWH wayebaqqēš hamîtô — the Versions are in substantial agreement. The Syriac text twice inserts ‘Moses’ into this verse, as the subject of the sentence and as the object of mût, but this is an obvious intrusion designed to clarify a difficult context, while the Targum (expectedly) and the Old Greek prefix an equivalent for Heb. mal'āk before YHWH. It is probable that the double mention of a setting (i.e. badderek/bammālôn) is the preservation of two ancient variants. J. Morgenstern, who with others, has rightly noted this, draws attention to the peculiarity of the article with mlwn (i.e. bammālon), since the contextual situation is generally vague and in a journey of many days there may have been several such stops, though on the other hand the article with derek occasions no difficulty since the journey as a whole is referred to. Morgenstern preferred to read bammālôn as a nominal form from the root mûl, translating ‘now upon the journey, at the circumcision Yahweh attacked him (i.e., the child) and sought to kill him.’

Whatever else it may be, the study of political revolution is the study, in a given case, of competing and incompatible assertions regarding the legitimation or justification of violence. This is true because: Since, as Weber put it, the state by definition possesses the legitimate monopoly of violence, and to propose radical changes in the character of a state, as happens in political revolutions, is to propose a radical alternative to the existing pattern of legitimating violence. In short, a revolution is, among other things, a contest over who may properly employ violence under what circumstances.