When, at an unknown but manifestly early period, speculation regarding the duration and destiny of the world began, the thinkers of those days had two analogies to guide them, and consequently two divergent conclusions were reached. The first was the recurrent cycle of the seasons; the second, the growth, maturity, decay and death of the human and all other animal bodies. Reasoning from the one, some arrived at the conclusion that the world, at least the earth and mankind, had passed and would always continue to pass through a series of epochs, limited in number, which when they had ended would recommence, and so on indefinitely. From the other datum the result was reached that as a man dies and does not come to life again (for even the fairly wide-spread and early doctrine of reincarnation supposed only that the soul would be given a new earthly body of some kind, not that the whole individual would return), so the earth, or the universe generally, would grow old and die and that would be the end of it. It is the purpose of this paper to examine these two ideas and one or two offshoots of them as they are known to have appeared in the two classical civilizations of Europe, and especially in Greece, and if possible to draw some tentative conclusions as to which, if either, can be found more characteristic of native thought.

Within the sanctuary of Artemis, on a small plain just east of the Sacred Harbor of Delos, lies a tomb dating from Minoan times which remained holy throughout most of antiquity. Modern investigators call it the sema of the Hyperborean Maidens, identifying it with a tomb which Herodotus says is “on your left as you enter the Artemisium” (4.34). Here, he was told, lay the remains of two maidens, Hyperoche and Laodice, who had once brought a tribute to the goddess Eileithyia from the Hyperboreans and had died on the island; here, in their honor, the boys and girls of Delos placed locks of their own hair. Callimachus, writing around 270, seems to know of this tomb; he does not mention it, but he says that the Delian girls offer their hair to the daughters of Boreas, Upis, Hecaerge, and Loxo, who once brought a tribute from the Arimaspians. The boys now give “the first-fruits of their beards” to honor some men who escorted the “Arimaspian” maidens to Delos (Hymn 4.278 ff.). And Pausanias says that the Delian maidens used to cut their hair in honor of Hecaerge and Opis (1.43.4).

The idea of natural religion is one of those arresting ideas which never get fully defined but which nevertheless excite reflection and even controversy whenever they appear. The history of its life within the Christian tradition is a case in point; the idea has been taken as a foundation to be built upon, and it has been rejected as a combination of concepts involving the same sort of contradiction to be found in the notion of a round square. Natural religion has been appealed to as a touchstone of rationality and it has been attacked as illegitimate if not actually blasphemous. An idea capable of producing such reactions cannot be ignored.

It is by no means fortuitous that our contemporary world is deeply occupied with the problem of time. The literature which has gathered about this problem is not only abundant but also notable for the ways in which various disciplines have sought to wrestle with it. The natural scientist, the philosopher, the theologian, the historian, the sociologist, the poet, and the writer of fiction and drama have all engaged in a common encounter with the mystery of this basic givenness of our human existence. Yet, while it is true that periods like our own incite reflection on time's meaning, the problem plays a role in the history of human thought quite beyond that of the pressures and hazards of eras of social crisis.

The subject of this brief note is not new, but good reasons exist for reopening the topic. The evidence for the establishment of this festival in honor of Soter at Alexandria by Ptolemy Philadelphus consisted until recently of the decree passed by the Nesiotic League (The League of Islanders) agreeing to send theoroi to it, which has been regularly dated to ca. 281–279 B.C. In 1954 I published two fragments of a decree, in identical terms, from Delphi, according recognition to the festival, and agreeing to send theoroi, emanating from the Amphictyonic Council. This decree I dated on the basis of the Nesiotic decree, which, after a detailed discussion, I placed, in the usual way, in 280–279 B.C. In 1958 the situation was altered by the publication by J. Bousquet of what he claimed to be the prescript of the decree published by myself, containing the date in the form of the eponymous Delphic archon Pleiston, whom he assigned to 266–265 B.C. (or less probably to 270–269).

In the important controversy between Sir Thomas More and Christopher St. German during the year 1533 — a controversy whose importance reaches into theological domains and involves also the vexatious conflict between the common law and the Roman canon law in England — we find a citation of St. John Chrysostom used first by St. German and then accepted and repeated by More. The apparent source is Chrysostom's famous commentary on St. Matthew, and this work (translated by Burgundio of Pisa in the later twelfth century) is, as Miss Smalley reminds us, the book “which St. Thomas Aquinas preferred to the whole town of Paris….” Further involved, of course, is the larger problem of the influence of St. John Chrysostom before and during the sixteenth century, as well as the technical question of methods of using commentaries on Scripture and thus the weight of auctoritas among the early Tudor controversialists. While it is only the modest story of one maxim that I wish to call attention to in this brief paper, I think that we shall in addition learn something of the English fortunes of one of the most widely used medieval compendia of commentaries, the Catena Aurea of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Among the sensational Oxyrhynchus finds from the turn of the twentieth century were several mutilated papyri which contained non-canonical sayings of Jesus. Because of the fragmentary nature of much of this new material, scholarly reconstructions often were necessary to fill the lacunae and give sense to the larger fragments. In many cases, there was no known parallel material by which such restorations could be guided.

The designation of one, and only one, of the Twelve Apostles is recorded to have been changed, with the result that he became known by a name different from (or else supplementary to) that which he bore originally: Simon (Simeon) bar Jonah, “called Peter,” the most prominent of the band. The circumstances of his renaming are recorded somewhat differently by the Evangelists. Mark (iii. 16) mentions the change summarily when he tells of the despatch of the Twelve on their mission; John (i. 42) associates it with Simon's original summons, near the scene of John's baptizing in the Jordan; Matthew (xvi. 18) describes the episode at greater length, bringing it into relation with Simon's recognition of Jesus as Messiah at Caesarea Philippi: while Luke overlooks the circumstances. Thus while there is no serious contradiction in the New Testament story about the details, there is on the other hand imperfect consistency, and it is legitimate to reconsider the matter ab initio. Attention will be directed here therefore to a neglected parallel, which may conceivably throw light on the problem.

In the Christ of Paradise Regain'd recent scholarship has recognized Milton's answer to the classic problem of the Renaissance epic poet — the choice of an exemplary hero. In both of his epics the perfect “pattern of a Christian hero” is exhibited not in a secular “king or knight,” but in the Son of God himself — the “Most perfect Heroe, try'd in heaviest plight Of labours huge and hard, too hard for human wight.” In the protagonist of Paradise Regain'd Hughes saw “the culmination of the faith of the Reformers in an exemplar [sic] Redeemer, the Word of Saint John's Gospel, as it fused with the cravings of the critics and poets of the later Renaissance for a purely exemplary hero in epic poetry.”

In 1797–98 Coleridge wrote a series of five autobiographical letters in which he presumably recounted everything which he remembered or had been told regarding the period from his birth (21 October, 1772) to his departure from Christ's Hospital in 1791. As it turned out, these first recollections were only a beginning, for Coleridge continued to add to them for the greater part of his life, the most notable additions being contained in the Biographia Literaria and in the biographical notes which he gave to James Gillman. When all of the recollections are assembled, they present an account of the boy Coleridge which would seem hardly creditable even if it were consistent, and it has seemed much less creditable when it is compared with the account furnished by the juvenilia. For this reason, perhaps, the account given by the recollections has presented a problem to biographers. Some of them have dismissed it altogether as a creation of Coleridge's over-active imagination; others have respected it by ignoring the juvenilia or by dealing with the recollections and the juvenilia separately, as if they related to two different persons. In no instance has anyone attempted to reconcile the two accounts. It has seemed to me that such a reconciliation ought to be attempted; for, to the extent that the recollections are dependable, they should provide an invaluable clue, not only to an understanding of Coleridge's early writings, but, more importantly, to an understanding of the basis and direction of his mature thought.

A recent book on St. Edmund makes remarkable advances in the knowledge of this outstanding saint and scholar. The author, C. H. Lawrence, has sifted the mass of evidence produced by Edmund's canonization and reduced it to an understandable corpus, identifying the authorship of some pieces and tracing their relationships. He has edited much of this evidence so that it is now accessible for use. Edmund's biography stands out somewhat clearer. It was known, of course, that Edmund came of a borough family, had a long period of study and teaching in arts and theology before he came into prominence as Treasurer of Salisbury and Archbishop of Canterbury. The author shows that Edmund's family was really rich in children and property, that Edmund deserves more credit for more effective political leadership than he has received and that, at the end of his life, he was merely making a routine trip to Rome rather than retiring into exile at Pontigny. Further clarification of Edmund's life is possible within the limits of the evidence without conjecturing unreasonably.

Hans Lewy's posthumous book, the fruit of many years' devoted study, should arouse fresh interest in one of the most tantalizingly obscure of ancient Greek texts. The Chaldaean Oracles were a divine revelation in bad hexameter verse; its authors were believed to be gods (speaking through the lips of entranced mediums?), but it was given to the world, as Lobeck guessed and Bidez finally proved, by one “Julianus the theurgist,” who lived under Marcus Aurelius. It is of serious concern to historians of religion, as the last important Sacred Book of pagan antiquity, and to historians of ideas, as one of the major influences which shaped the later development of Neoplatonism from Porphyry to Psellus. Unfortunately it has come down to us only in fragments.

I am not the first to detect in recent scholarship dealing with the “Transcendental” period of New England a tendency toward vindicating, or at least toward putting in a good word for, the hitherto regularly berated opponents of Emerson and Theodore Parker. Because in the 1830's and 1840's and well into the 1850's the phalanx of those most outspoken in resistance were the Unitarian clergy, the custom has been for chroniclers of the literary and theological radicalism to heap derision upon the men who occupied established pulpits in the neighborhood of Boston and who spoke for the substantial portions of the community.

Somebody has said that Mencius, though he lived almost twenty-five centuries ago and belonged to an alien culture, is more intelligible to us today than our own Jonathan Edwards of Connecticut. There is some truth in this remark.

Francis Greenwood Peabody, lecturer in ethics and professor of theology at Harvard University from 1880 to 1912, introduced the teaching of social ethics at Harvard and ranks as one of the foremost interpreters of German theological thought in America. As academic teacher he brought about the abolition of compulsory worship at Harvard College, helped transform the Harvard Divinity School from a denominational seminary into a non-denominational professional school of theology, and introduced studies in contemporary social problems at the Divinity School and at Harvard College. His pioneering work on social problems secured for him a leading rôle in the Social Gospel movement of his time.

May I begin with a personal introduction to the theme of this evening's lecture, the encounter between continental pietism and New England Puritanism? I began teaching Church history at the Martin Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg in 1932. There I had the opportunity to study the archives of August Hermann Francke, in the old library of Francke's orphanage. These archives were in a state of highly inspiring disorder, for there were chances of all kinds of unforeseen discoveries, both in the many boxes containing Francke's correspondence and on the shelves holding all the books sent to this head of pietism by his friends all over the world. At first, I studied his correspondence with ministers, scholars, bishops and generals in Russia and the Baltics, publishing an article about Francke in Russia. Then I came across some boxes which held an enormous mass of material connected with New England, letters to German ministers and German communities in Pennsylvania, diaries of emigrants, together with letters in English from Puritan theologians and New England missionaries. I was especially interested in Francke's correspondence with Cotton Mather.

Since 1825, when Bishop Sumner issued the first edition of John Milton's De Doctrina Christiana, the Arianism of that treatise has become an all but unanimously accepted fact. Although reviewers of Sumner's two quarto volumes divided in praising or lamenting Milton's tenets on the Trinity, they united in pronouncing them unorthodox and Arian; and later scholars have generally accepted this nineteenth-century verdict. In 1959, consequently, students of Milton were surprised when William B. Hunter, Jr., under the title “Milton's Arianism Reconsidered,” devoted some twenty-five pages to the argument that “we may assert positively that Milton was not an Arian” even though “modern judges are unanimous in branding him one.” And more recently, Roland M. Frye, praising Mr. Hunter's work, has gone on to state that “Milton could never be convicted, before a fair and competent theological court, of trinitarian heresy in Paradise Lost.” With these assertions of the orthodoxy of Milton and his epic I cannot agree; and at the cost of controversy with two close friends, I must argue 1) that Mr. Hunter is wrong in believing that Milton's view of the Son accords with that stated in the Nicene Creed; and 2) that Mr. Frye violates an established principle of textual interpretation when he denies the Arianism of Paradise Lost.