Until the last few years we had scanty information on the cult of Apollo at Actium, which, after the victory of Augustus won there in 31 B.C., became very popular in the Greek and Roman world. The games of Actium, reorganized and elevated to panhellenistic rank, flourished for a long time in the Roman empire. The lucky discovery of an inscription at Olympia, from the end of the third century B.C., has now brought us new light on the earlier history of this cult.

Papias of Hierapolis has suffered from the fact that his work, Exposition of the Words of the Lord, in five books, has been lost, and that so little or, if preferred, just so much, has been preserved, that the fragments confront us with difficult problems. These are many and may easily overshadow the text. The following comments are primarily of an exegetic nature and serve to shed light on Papias and his work.

The Journey of the Divine Comedy begins with a conversion. The pilgrim “comes to” after somehow having lost his way in a dark wood. He looks up from that tangle and sees the rays of the sun striking upon a mountain-top, and knows that he must attain the summit. From that moment, the problem is no longer where to go, but rather how to get there, and the problem proves to be insoluble. Try as he may, he cannot achieve the goal which is the beginning and the cause of all joy, for three formidable beasts drive him back into the wood from which he has come, and he retreats, no longer able to help himself, exhausted, and very nearly defeated.

Recent published allusions to Platonism in the minds of Calvinists, and the compatibility of its position there, brings back the memory of Professor William Wallace Fenn's interpretation of the thought of Jonathan Edwards, in lectures more than twenty-five years ago at the Harvard Theological School. Since this interpretation is no longer popular among writers, it might be of interest to mention it again. Professor Fenn liked to picture Edwards as the protagonist of a New England Tragedy. There was tragedy in the outward failures of his life. But the more devastating tragedy was his inward failure as a Christian philosopher. This, according to Fenn's interpretation, arose from Edwards' self-conscious awareness of being unable to reconcile his Platonism with his Calvinism.