study of Christian history is almost wholly virgin soil," and yet the paradox contains, I fear, a grain too much of truth. "There are,” he continued, "thousands upon thousands of histories; there have been hundreds upon hundreds of historians; but for all that, the fields of Christian history are new, as until recently all fields of history were new, because they need new research and the application of new methods. The past of Christianity has been studied for the most part so far as a collection of antiquities or a collection of biographies. Ecclesiastical histories are for the most part either museums or biographical dictionaries. But that which lies before the earnest and candid student, as an object of supreme and absorbing importance, is the discovery of the nature of Christianity; its relation to the whole mass of contemporary facts; the attitude of mind in which successive generations have stood to this origi nal Christianity; and the causes of those attitudes. This is a study as vast as it is interesting; the final results are not for us or for our time. But there are general results which may come to us in our time apart from the final results which are yet on an unseen horizon." If, in quoting these words of Dr. Hatch, I seem to concede that those whose special province it is to discover and to disclose the successive phases through which original Christianity has passed, are only at the beginning of their tremendous task, I feel compelled to add that this is all the more reason why those who deal from the secular side with phases of Christian belief should be both humble and wary, and to add further that the reproach of the ecclesiastical historian is rapidly passing away. This is the age of scholars, like Lightfoot and Hatch and Harnack. The latter have taught us-the Englishman by the minuteness of his observation; by his scrupulous anxiety to overlook nothing of importance; by the more than human industry with which he sought out fact; and by the almost divine calmness with which he accepted truth; by the swift and steady movement of his reason and by the fullness of his charity; and the German by the vastness of his knowledge; by the swiftness of his insight; by the grandeur and accuracy of his combinations; by his sympathy with every age and every form of earnest thought-that the historical writer of the future need not be, unless he is willfully so, ignorant any longer of the crises through which Christian belief has passed in its progress to our time. For these and many others with them have worked, not as iconoclasts, but as discoverers; not as apol

ogists, but as investigators; not to preserve or to destroy traditions or institutions, but to discern the ways of God in human history, leaving these ways to justify themselves to mortal men. They, in the beautiful language of one who carried gloriously the spirit and "substance of a passing system into the forms of future power-they have obtained a good report, but have not obtained the promise, for without us they can not be made perfect." Only as we who believe in a science of history avail ourselves of their results to complete our training and our studies, only as we enlarge our minds by breathing their spirit, only as we increase our skill by applying their methods and our power by making use of their discoveries, shall we see wisdom justified of her children and make it appear that the masters have not wrought in vain.

VIII.-THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE HISTORICAL DOCTORATE

IN AMERICA.

BY PROF. EPHRAIM EMERTON,

OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY.