SHORT PAPERS 



PROFESSOR EDWIN D. STARBUCK, of Earlham College, presented a short paper 

 on " Religious Education without Doctrines or Scriptures." 



REV. THOMAS E. JUDGE, editor of the Catholic Review of Reviews, presented 

 the following paper on " The Divorce of Religion and Education as Opposed 

 to the Principles of Historical Continuity." 



THERE were two cities that would have an irresistible attraction for the 

 Apostles divinely commissioned to establish Christianity as the world-power 

 the cities of Rome and Alexandria. The former was the seat of world-wide 

 empire. Every current of history had been tributary to its imperial supremacy. 

 After several hundred years of Roman conquest the world had been marvelously 

 unified by the diffusion of a common civilization. Christianity in the nation 

 and in the world at large, as well as in the individual soul, raises the supernatural 

 structure on the basis of the natural. It, therefore, commenced its superhuman 

 task of establishing a world-wide kingdom of liberty, equality, and fraternity 

 among the children of men, by appropriating all the advantages of Roman 

 unification. What Rome had accomplished in the coordination of the influences 

 which control the external lives of men, Alexandria had attempted to achieve 

 with the deeper forces that govern their minds and hearts and consciences. The 

 famous lighthouse of Pharos, which stood at the entrance of the main harbor of 

 Alexandria, might be regarded as a symbol of the city's intellectual relationship 

 to the world at the beginning of the Christian era. Athens had for centuries 

 ceased to be the mother of arts and eloquence. Greek freedom had been ex- 

 tinguished at the battle of Chseronea, and science and philosophy could not 

 flourish under a despotism. Athenian wisdom as well as Athenian chivalry 

 followed Alexander in his expeditions, until he established a congenial home for 

 it where the Nile mingles its waters with those of the Mediterranean Sea. There, 

 too, came the Jews, in numbers sufficient to give a name to one of the principal 

 quarters of the city, bringing with them the Scriptures of the Old Testament 

 and their synagogue ritual. There came Orientals of every variety of race and 

 religion, with their dark sense of sin and their gloomy gospel of despair. For the 

 first time in history there was absolute freedom of thought. 



Christianity, the Great Synthesis 



It was in this arena that Christianity was to measure its strength with the 

 combined intellectual forces of antiquity and to win a decisive victory. It was 

 here that wise men of the East were again to offer their gifts of gold and frankin- 

 cense and myrrh at the cradle of Christianity. It was here especially that the new 

 religion, after a century of isolation, during which, like the infant on its mother's 

 bosom, it drew its nourishment exclusively from its divine source, was now, 

 like every vigorous organism, to appropriate and assimilate and organize into its 

 own life every element of value in its intellectual environment. 



Thus Christianity in Alexandria became a great synthesis, in which the Incar- 

 nate Word was the unifying principle that coordinated and perpetuated all the 

 wisdom of antiquity. But in Alexandria there was a great school of literature 

 and science as well as a great school of philosophy and religion. Its system of 

 exegesis, to which we owe the preservation and integrity of the ancient classics, 



