No one can speak with authority on the subject of the modern missionary policy of American societies, to say nothing of the societies that have their home in England and on the continent of Europe. Any general statements made with reference to modern missionary work can be successfully contradicted. No one appreciates these facts better than the writer of this article. Missions are so complicated and diversified, by tradition and practice, by the opinions of administrators, and by the ability and characteristics of the missionaries, that a vast and widely separating difference in a variety of respects runs through the whole body of missionary operations. Hence the almost insuperable difficulty of making general statements as to present missionary policy and methods without exposing oneself to a rejoinder that would be difficult satisfactorily to meet. It should be thoroughly understood that no statement hereinafter made can be of universal application.

In the Cambridge Modern History and in a later work, Studies in Modernism, the present writer has given an account of the last three pontificates, those of Pius IX, Leo XIII, and Pius X. Each of the three was in its own way a momentous pontificate, and has left a lasting mark on the Church. With the present Pope a new period opens. It will be one of harvest. The passions unloosed by his immediate predecessors have burned themselves out; but their works follow them. Benedict XV will reap what they have sown. Also—and this is the real key to the position—he will have to meet the situation created by the European war. His is a pathetic, almost a tragic, figure; for it combines the appearance of power with the fact of powerlessness. Never was man less master of his fate than he. His infallibility binds him hand and foot; he inherits the legacy of evil left by his predecessors; he is crushed under the crimes of kings.

These opening years of the twentieth century have been marked by a profound revival of interest in Mysticism, though we are perhaps not yet justified in speaking of a distinct revival of Mysticism itself. This revival of interest in Mysticism can be traced to no one explanatory cause, but is due to a confluence of many contributory streams of influence. Our expanding historical knowledge has very freshly brought to light the important part which Mysticism has played in the religious life of the world, and especially in the nineteen centuries of Christian development. A group of psychological researches has aroused an immense interest in the inner life, and particularly in the deep-lying regions of the subconscious, where vast sources of hidden spiritual energy appear to lie. The prevailing tendencies in philosophy—common to many schools—to attack “intellectualism,” to humble the claims and pretensions of “knowledge,” and to exalt, on the other hand, intuition, first-hand experience, knowledge of acquaintance, appreciation, and valuation, have given aid and comfort to those who prefer the “heart” to the “head.”

To estimate with any considerable degree of accuracy the moral value of the Oriental religions under the Roman Empire is a hard and perhaps an impossible task. The difficulties arise in part from the fact that these religions, like most others, did not aim primarily at developing what we understand by morality in the individual, but rather at establishing such relations with the gods as to give men security and prosperity here and hereafter; and in part the difficulties are due to the paucity of our data and our liability to error in the interpretation thereof. Yet a religion, like any other form of human expression, inevitably influences as well as reflects the conduct of the social group which cultivates it; that is to say, it cannot exist apart by itself. Therefore it is not an unprofitable thing to attempt to determine with such accuracy as may be attainable the relation to morality of the imported Oriental cults which were widely cultivated in the Occidental part of the Roman Empire between the first and the fourth centuries of our era. We confine our consideration to the Western half of the Empire, for there the evidence as to these exotic religions is most plentiful and it is possible to see them isolated, so to speak, from their native environment. It will be necessary, however, first to consider the moral and religious environment into which these cults entered.

It will be generally admitted, I think, that Aeschylus is one of the great religious and philosophic poets of all time. And it will be perhaps hardly less generally conceded that no philosophic problem was for him more interesting or more momentous than that of establishing and defending the concept of a moral government of the world. Even those who accuse him of having subjected all things to the iron rule of Fate cannot reproach him with a blind fatalism. If he saw inexorable Necessity at the heart of the world, he also saw Justice writ large upon its face; and if he believed God and man alike to be pawns in the hands of Destiny, the rule of the game was still to punish the wrong moves of the one by the sure interposition of the other.

A few days ago, meeting one of my scientific friends, I happened to mention the fact that I was going to Harvard to deliver the Dudleian Lecture, and that I had chosen as my subject “The Permanent Significance of Miracle for Religion.” “It is a good subject,” he said, “but you have left out the most important word. It ought to read ‘The Lack of Permanent Significance of Miracle for Religion.’”

A few years ago (1906) the Protestant missionary enterprise in India celebrated its bicentenary. A few months ago the centennial celebration of the founding of American missions in India was an occasion of much joy. It must be a matter of deep interest, not only to the missionary body, but to the members of our Christian community in America to study both the progress and the vast and, in some cases, revolutionary changes of this great enterprise on the mission field. Even during the missionary experience of the writer innovations have been numerous and fundamental. To those who think that the missionary enterprise is wanting in the spirit of the age, the transformations which have already taken place and are constantly going on will lead to astonishment. These changes have been coincident with and a part of the progress of the Christian world in thought and life, and embrace not only the forms and methods of work but also the fundamental principles which underlie and permeate the whole work. In the present paper it is proposed to study a few of these innovations which have marked the onward march of this great movement.

Interest in theology shows no signs of dying out in our time. The theology most frequently and eagerly discussed may be different from what it was a century ago; the conception of the relation between theology and the other sciences may have changed; and a number of interests have crowded in where theology was once supreme. The sermon is not now the sole or even the chief intellectual event of the week. We are for the most part much more interested in knowing a man's political or economic convictions than in discovering his views on inspiration or the Trinity. But if we may judge from the columns of reviews or the publishers' lists, theology is as much written, and presumably as much read, as ever.

This is especially true of the doctrine of the Atonement. In the last half-century no other doctrine has received more careful consideration. We have but to think of the names of Bushnell, Campbell, Dale, Simon, Lidgett, and Moberley. Those who are interested in theology as a whole, like Denney, show that they regard the Atonement as vital. It is vital for us all. If we take our theology seriously, we cannot afford to suspend our judgment here. We are bound to be partisans. Even in refusing to form a theory, we are accepting a theory. In fact, a doctrine that deals with any part of theology is bound to find itself as a doctrine of the Atonement. Every conviction about God's relation to the world runs up into a conviction about what Christ has done for man.

I wish to begin what I have to say on this theme by frank acknowledgment that the idea of a future life often seems to me, as I suspect it has seemed to many reflective minds, all but unbelievable. It may be true, for all that, as many unbelievable things have turned out to be true. Indeed my present purpose is to argue as best I can that it is true. But I have to start with the recognition of a certain natural repugnance toward it, on the part of minds accustomed to look at things in the cold light of reason and common sense.

In one sense of the word there is of course no place in the ministry for the uneducated man. The preacher who is so ignorant as to be illiterate—illiterate in that he does not read and study and observe—is not to be thought of as a candidate for the ministry. If, on the other hand, we think of the educated minister as the student who has been graduated from college and from theological seminary, we rather narrowly limit our definition of education. Many men of unusual success in the ministry have preferred to take graduate work along certain specific lines rather than to pursue the course in the seminary. In this they may have been mistaken, but of course they belong by pre-eminent right in the ranks of the educated. Moreover, the fact of actually receiving a degree is not the chief essential. Perhaps for our purpose we may define the educated minister as one who has in a reputable college, university, or seminary mastered the point of view of the scholar, attained some success in the use of scholarly methods, and acquired scholarly habits. For our purpose the uneducated minister is one who has not received his training at such an institution. We assume, however, in our use of the word “uneducated” that the minister has studious habits, and that he does the best he can to make good by incessant effort the lack of early institutional training; otherwise we can hardly see what place he has in the ministry. We may be permitted further to drop from our consideration both the occasional pulpit “genius,” who comes to popular power without formal mental training, and also that bearer of scholastic degrees who is remarkable chiefly for his dulness.

One of the most engaging personalities of that most engaging of Christian centuries, the thirteenth, is Brother Salimbene of Parma. His life, begun in 1221, five years before the death of Francis of Assisi and ended, probably, about 1288, thirteen years after the birth of Dante, connects the mystical, devotional, ascetic piety of the Middle Ages with the rational, individualistic, personal attitude of the modern mind. A devoted member of the Franciscan Order and acutely sensitive to its historic significance, he spends his life in its manifold activities, and toward the close sets himself to the congenial task of putting down in order the most vivid impressions remaining to him of the men and things he has had dealings with.

What special students of so-called psychic phenomena will think of Mr. Henry Holt's two generous volumes I do not know, but to me, and no doubt to many like me, they are quite the most important and significant, as they are the most entertaining, exposition of the subject. This is indeed something more than a dead book; it is a life—as it were the voice of a friend confiding to us through the hours of a long winter night the lessons, still mingled with hesitations and questions, of his ripe experience. The publicity of high spirits may abound; but there are pages also which will reveal their full meaning only to those who know the author as a friend in the literal sense of the word, passages, for those who understand, of almost sacred privacy. So, for instance, the minute account of the spectacle unfolding at sunrise to the eyes of the watcher at the author's summer home has its place and weight for all readers as an argument that, as these lovely things are far beyond “our ancestors' universe of darkness and silence,” so there may be infinite ranges of perception still to be discovered by mankind; but to one who has entered that hospitable “gate, open to all who care to come,” and with the kindly guidance of his host has seen the sunlight falling from mountain top to valley and from valley to lake, the printed words will be something more than the speech of a book to its unseen audience.

Two difficulties especially beset religion as a working force among thoughtful people. One is to find an adequate terminology, which shall somewhat nearly approach in expressive power the infinitely illusive realities with which religion has to deal. The other is to guard such a terminology, when once it has been accepted, from a too literal and insistent use. Nothing is so repellent to cultivated minds, for instance, as the too frequent familiarities which men take with the name of deity. Especially is this the problem of the one who has to deal professionally with religion, and who with all his handling of divine reality must not lose that which most truly characterizes it, its reticence and reserve. It is his function to declare the being of God, and to make real to others the relations which that Being sustains toward men. All other accomplishments on his part will fail without this fundamental fitness for impressing men with a sense of some one infinitely good and enduring above the passing shows of daily living. The true minister of religion is one who has walked and talked and lived with God. Amidst human limitation and change, the fixed lights of the Spirit for him stand out clear. For him at least, intellectual doubt and moral reaction have not dimmed the eternal verities of righteousness, truth, and love. The world remains for him God's world, whatever men may have done to deteriorate it morally; and he continually seeks to renew in others a consciousness of this essential worth of life and to spur them to a greater realization of it in themselves.

Of all European countries Russia is the most prolific in religious sects. Distrust of the Orthodox state church, on the one hand, which is regarded as too closely allied to the political power and unmindful of its duties to the people, and, on the other, religious ignorance with its consequent superstition, have given rise to innumerable sects, which range from religious nihilism to the most rigid traditionalism.

Alongside the doctrine that our Gospels, in their general structure as well as their individual anecdotes, reflect the beliefs and practice of the primitive brotherhoods which gave them currency, should stand (if the theory be valid) some corresponding reflection in the still older Pauline Epistles. Especially should we expect Baptism and the Eucharist to affect the mode of teaching.

Theology is constantly recognizing, more fully and more freely, the closeness of its relation to philosophy. Starting though they do from different impulses—theology attempting to interpret experience and philosophy to attain knowledge—they converge upon a common field. No great theologian but influences philosophy, no great philosopher but affects theology.

Of American philosophers since Edwards, no one has made so rich, profound, and extensive a contribution to religious thought as Josiah Royce.

From the head of the Persian Gulf extend two great plains, the one stretching northwestward along the Tigris and Euphrates, the other northeastward along the Karoun. These two plains constitute Turkish and Persian Arabistan respectively. They were the seat of one of the earliest and most highly developed civilizations of the world, or perhaps rather of two competing and rival civilizations. Once the region teemed with a vast population. Now it is largely desert. Both plains depend for their fertility not upon the rain, but upon the rivers which flow down from the mountains. When these were diked and dammed and carried every-whither by irrigating canals, the Babylonian plain and the steppe of Persian Arabistan were immensely fertile, capable of sustaining by their own products an enormous population. Now dikes and dams are broken and canals choked and the life-creating water runs to waste, part of the year causing inundations and turning vast regions into lakes and swamps, and the remainder of the time moving seaward through a single channel, shrunk far below its banks.

I have been a dreamer from my earliest childhood. My dreams have been of all kinds, from the most fantastic and grotesque to those that were orderly and coherent; but I have never had any others like those which I am about to describe. My ordinary dreams often take the form of short stories or adventures of various kinds; among them is one recurrent dream in which I find myself in some house in the Middle West, very hospitably entertained by hosts to whom I am an unwelcome guest. I try to go home, but eastward-bound trains are difficult to reach and the baggage-express is never available. Such experiences seem to have no important meaning. Commonly they fade with the coming of daylight and make no definite or deep impression on the mind.

Set apart from all such commonplace dreams are three visions of the night which came in quick succession, and left me, on awaking in the morning, deeply impressed with a sense of the supernatural. I have no belief that they were revelations having any source outside of my own mind and experience; but they gave me a clue to the understanding of those things that happened of old when in a dream some important revelation was made to a patriarch or prophet; and, whatever their source, they wrought a change in my thought and feeling concerning the reality and nature of the future life that still abides and after five years makes the thought of an incorporeal existence seem perfectly natural and very attractive. They have also made me understand some events in ancient history, and have given a new meaning to the belief that dreams were the favorite channels through which the divine wisdom flowed into human life.

Since the appearance of Professor David G. Lyon's article entitled “Recent Excavations in Palestine,” which was published in the January number of The Harvard Theological Review, 1908, other ancient Biblical sites have been explored and many noteworthy discoveries have been made. And now that the work of excavation and exploration has been indefinitely arrested by the outbreak of war, it seems especially fitting that what has been accomplished during the past six or seven years should be collected and summarized.