‘Cette grande personnalité chrétienne’: the phrase, applied to him by a Swiss theologian, M. Guiran, is rightly fixed upon by M. Loisy in his Mémoires as the mot juste in describing Friedrich von Hügel. In language no less well chosen the same writer has gone on to speak of those ‘valeurs intimes et profondes que M. von Hügel a si magnifiquement et si humblement incarnées.’ For it was indeed not by the construction of a system that von Hügel promoted our understanding of religious experience, nor even chiefly by originating or giving currency to new and fruitful ideas in this department of study, but rather by the impression made by his unforgettable personality upon those who were brought into contact with it, whether through actual conversation or correspondence with him during his lifetime or through the reading of what he wrote and stamped with the peculiar and distinctive style in which that personality found so characteristic an expression. Therefore, while in the case of any thinker who takes as the subject of his lucubrations one which, like religion, must be comprehended, if at all, by an experience in which the whole man is engaged, some acquaintance with his biography will perhaps be found necessary to the understanding of his thought; in the case of such a thinker as he of whom I am now to speak to you it is certainly indispensable.

Many years ago, to a student who had made what to him and to the rest of the class seemed a sensible guess as to the origin in the misty past of a practice still in vogue, the teacher, an eminent anthropologist, made what was to me a memorable reply. Said he in substance, “When we are probing back into antiquity we need be ever on our guard against the fallacy that what seems to us rational or sensible or practical would have so seemed to them. Thus it has been my experience that when seeking to explain the origin of a practice which still continues, but with no real indication as to what started it, of all the various possible guesses the one which seems to us most [sensible] or [reasonable] is the one to be most resolutely excluded. Because a practice so appears to us is no guarantee that it would so have appeared to men under totally different circumstances, whose notion of the world was totally different from our own; in fact, it is usually a guarantee that the exact opposite would be the case.”

Information about the cult of the divi and divae greatly increased with the publication of the Feriale Duranum. The editors of the latter have shown that the divi and divae whose cult the Army took over were those of the fasti publici. The divae included Trajan's sister Marciana and her daughter Matidia but no member of the Julio-Claudian and Flavian families.

Three recent discussions of Irenaeus by Reynders, Audet, and Enslin have examined the thought of Irenaeus almost exclusively in relation to the Christian tradition. This attitude toward his writings is natural, since Irenaeus lives so largely within the tradition; but he lived in the philosophical-rhetorical world of his day as well as in the church. It is the purpose of this paper to examine some of the ideas which he shares with non-Christians of the second century. First we shall consider his use of doxographical materials for the opinions of philosophers, and then we shall turn to his knowledge of other authors and of rhetoric.

The fragments of an unknown Gospel published by Mr. Skeat and myself in 1935 have recently been made the subject of a thoroughgoing and very interesting study by a Japanese scholar, Dr. Goro Mayeda, to whose kindness I owe a copy of his work.

E. R. Dodds, in his article “Maenadism in the Bacchae,” notes a number of parallels in other cults to the Dionysiac practices mentioned in Euripides' Bacchae. His list of parallels, while long, is by no means intended to be exhaustive; and it is proposed here to point out still another — the dancing and ecstasy characteristic of that unique movement in modern Jewry known as Hasidism.

In 1924 Herzfeld discovered the largest (in size) Middle Persian inscription extant, near the village of Sar Mashhad in the province of Fārs. It was never published, and in the summer of 1948 when in Iran I made a trip to the site. The literary remains of Herzfeld, with which I had been occupied, gave scant detail about the location and condition of the inscription, but with the aid of local people, especially Muhammad Hani of the village of Balādeh, I was able to find and copy the inscription.