Immortality is one of the language symbols engendered by a class of experiences to which we refer as the varieties of religious experience. This term is perhaps no longer the technically best one but it has the advantage of a great precedent, especially here at Harvard. Hence, its use will be convenient to secure, I hope, a common and immediate understanding about the subject-matter of inquiry.

The number of writings appearing on Teilhard de Chardin is increasing daily, with the great majority of them treating his philosophical, theological or humanistic ideas. Discussion of his evolutionary theory from a more scientific point of view is relatively rare. For one thing, he seems to have leaned heavily, though not exclusively, on a neo-Lamarckian explanatory viewpoint. The major problem, however, is that he espoused a theory of evolution, orthogenesis, which is rejected by the majority of scientists today on the ground that there is no evidence for it. Many writers force one to conclude that they are unaware of the ramifications of holding a theory that is considered unviable in the scientific community. In the same vein, too many authors do not seem to take seriously the critics of Teilhard who have made this point, e.g., George G. Simpson, Peter Medawar and Theodosius Dobzhansky. One gets the impression that there is a wider gulf between “the two cultures” than he might have imagined. Little concern for Teilhard's orthogenetic evolution leads us to suspect that writers do not know that it makes a difference what type of evolution Teilhard espoused. There may be a cultural lag between science and the other disciplines, but orthogenesis has been around for many years now, and has been rejected by biologists for at least fifteen years, which is a conservative estimate.

“Free Will” is not a problem which can simply be answered. The long history surrounding this issue would seem to indicate that. It is not that an answer is impossible; on the contrary, the problem is that many answers may be given and no single one can be established to the exclusion of all others. Which answer is adopted depends upon one's metaphysics, upon one's basic assumptions about the first principles which govern and structure the world. Does all this leave us lost in a helpless pluralism where freedom of the will is concerned, an issue which might well be the crucial problem of our own era and which certainly has been important in every philosophical age? No, not unless we adopt an attitude of scepticism where metaphysics is concerned. Thus, our success in dealing with free will depends upon our metaphysical competence. If we can analyze previous metaphysical views and then construct and defend our own, we can still structure an answer to the issue of freedom of the will.

The first printed work of an English Protestant was Tyndale's translation of the New Testament (Cologne, 1525; Worms, 1526), and the second was his free translation of Luther's introduction to the Epistle to the Romans: “A compendious introduction / prologe or preface vn to the pistle off Paul to the Romayns” (Worms, 1526). The third came from the pen of William Roye, one of two apostate Friars from Greenwich, who, like Tyndale, left England for the Continent in the mid 1520's. Having served as Tyndale's assistant in the preparation of the New Testament for the press, Roye made his way to Strassburg, leaving Tyndale at Worms. There had apparently been some friction between them.

The Milḥemet Ḥobah (Obligatory War), a collection of polemical treatises published at Constantinople in 1710, contains a tract entitled “Disputation of Rabbi David Kimhi” (Wikuaḥ ha-Ra-DaḲ). The ascription of this work to Kimhi has been a subject of some discussion. J. D. Eisenstein, who published the text in his anthology, Oẓar Wikuḥim, and Salo Baron have apparently accepted it as genuine without reservations. Suler in his article in the Encyclopedia Judaica considered it to be basically the work of Kimhi with interpolations. On the other hand, A. Geiger and L. Finkelstein have completely rejected the possibility of Kimhi's authorship. None of these authorities has brought support for his conclusions.

The understanding of Mic.7 was helped considerably in the year 1924, when Hermann Gunkel published a study of 7:7–20. In opposition to the predominant “literary critical” method of separating Biblical material into different sources, Gunkel wanted to use this passage to demonstrate the “literary historical” approach which he wished to carry through in the sphere of Old Testament research. His purpose was not to distinguish between primary written sources of a Biblical book, but to observe the representative forms (Gattungen) which occur in the text, to determine the practical basis for the origin of the textual elements and the milieu in which they were transmitted (the Sitz im Leben), and to deal with the text as a whole organically and not mechanically. His approach was in fact what has later come to be known as “form criticism.” Gunkel brilliantly demonstrated that the whole passage, Mic.7:7–20, can be understood as a homogeneous composition. He thought of a poem in four parts which had been artistically composed and constructed like a liturgy to be used at one of Jerusalem's mourning festivals.