God is the Creator of the Universe, the Ruler of the Universe and of the Fate of man. He enjoins his commandments upon man, which man must keep. He is the High God, elevated above man and not to be reached by man. In antiquity he had no cult and no sacrifices, nor were prayers directed to him. Man believes in this God and fears him. But man needs also a God who is his helper, who cares for him in his sorrows and his anxiety. Man believes in this God and trusts him. These two differentconceptions of God are differently emphasized in different religions. The great achievement of Christianity was to combine the two; this conditioned and furthered its spread and its victory.

Martin Heidegger, teacher and one-time rector of the University of Freiburg in Breisgau, is without question one of the most mysterious and puzzling personalities, as well as one of the most enigmatical philosophical thinkers of our age. A spectator who watches him come from his Black Forest hideout to enter the Freiburg university lecture hall sees him not only garbed in a costume which is itself peculiar, but enveloped in an air of remoteness and even of mystery, which seems to mark him off sharply from the lives and fortunes of ordinary men. And, during the brief period when he ventured to leave the world of speculative thought, to express himself on political matters, the effort can hardly be said to have been crowned with success, since the purport of his remarks was that Adolf Hitler was a man of genius, and a worthy member of the tradition that began with Socrates, and Plato. His later retraction has been accepted by many, but others who watched him at that period have found his words and actions hard to forget or forgive. Nor are the puzzles he presents limited to the field of politics. His philosophy itself is so difficult that those who call themselves his followers are at odds with one another as to just what it means, and his own frequently expressed judgment is that from the start he has been completely misinterpreted. The point on which all seem to agree is that what he is now saying contradicts what he said earlier.

In 1861, a French priest published in Paris a pamphlet entitled “The Modern Papacy Condemned by Pope Saint Gregory the Great: Excerpts from the Works of Saint Gregory.” The author, René-François Guettée, was a Gallican, deeply involved in the so-called Roman Question. He proposed to demonstrate to his opponents, the advocates of absolute papal supremacy, that his side was really more orthodox because it conformed to the views of St. Gregory. From the letters of Gregory he drew support for his argument that all bishops share the same dignity and that claims by the bishop of Rome to a superior position represent a corruption of early Church practices. And upon those readers who rejected his thesis he placed the burden of explaining why Pope Gregory did not merit as much credence as modern popes. Father Guettée therefore turned to Gregory for help in building a case against the present-day papacy. It was not the first time someone had done this.

Commentators on Lycidas have usually traced the origin of Milton's line, “Under the opening eyelids of the Morn,” to a marginal reading in the Authorized Version of Job. As several scholars have observed, “the alternative reading for ‘dawning of the day’ [Job iii. 9], offered in the margin as more true to the Hebrew, is ‘the eyelids of the morning,’” and in Job xli. 18 [Heb. 41:10] this image occurs in the text itself — “By his neesings a light doth shine, and his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning.”