THE FACULTY OF DIVINITY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1917 4. The Harvard Theological Review has been partially endowed by a bequest of the late Miss Mildred Everett, "for the establishment and maintenance of an undenominational theological review, to be edited under the direction of the Faculty of the Divinity School of Harvard University. . . . I make this provision in order to carry out a plan suggested by my late father, the Rev. Charles Carroll Everett." During the continuance of The New World, Dr. Everett was on its editorial board, and many of his essays, now collected in the volume entitled Essays, Theological and Literary, appeared first in its pages. Sharing his belief in the value of such a theological review, and in devotion to his honored memory, the Faculty of the Harvard Divinity School, of which he was a member from 1869, and its Dean from 1878 until his death in 1900, has accepted the trust, and will strive to make the Review a worthy memorial of his comprehensive thought and catholic spirit. The Review is edited by a committee of the Faculty of the Harvard Divinity School consisting of Professors William W. Fenn, Kirsopp Lake, Frederic Palmer, and James H. Ropes. 211003 YRASELI It has been too much the custom to treat Quietism as a sporadic type of religion, as a sort of capricious "sport,' to use a familiar botanical term, expressing itself in two or three famous, but solitary and isolated, mystics on the continent of Europe, and to assume that later evidences of Quietism must be traced back to the teachings of these few rare expounders of it. I am convinced, on the contrary, that these select individuals were only luminous examples of a profound religious tendency, which, in varying form of expression, swept over the entire western world in the latter part of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries, flooded into the consciousness of all who were intensely religious, and left an "unimaginable touch" even on the rank and file of believers. It was a deep and widespread movement, confined to no one country and it was limited to no one branch of the Christian Church. It burst forth in sundered places and spread like a new Pentecost, through kindled personalities and through quick and powerful books of genius. Quietism was the most acute and intense stage of European mysticism. It was not a wholly new type of inward religion. It was rather a result of the normal ripening, the irresistible maturing, of experiences, ideas, |