Authoritative surveys of religious teaching and progress are to find their occasion this week in the hundredth anniversary of the Harvard Divinity School. That famous institution really had its beginning in 1636, when money for the establishment of the college was voted by a General Court which "dreaded to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust." But the school was only gradually differentiated from the College, and not until 1816 was the distinction between them definitely and formally made. The same year saw the foundation of a "Society for the Promotion of Theological Education in Harvard University," the first class graduated from the school in December, 1817; nine years later the money had been secured for the building of Divinity Hall. For a full century the school has maintained its high ideals of scholarship and its non-sectarian spirit, the latter enjoined by the constitution, which provides that "every encouragement be given to the serious, impartial and unbiased investigation of Christian truth, and that no assent to the peculiarities of any denominations of Christians shall be required of either instructor or students."

There is something more than a merely academic interest in the forthcoming celebration; it has a secular as well as religious significance. The Harvard Divinity School looks back over a century of institutional vicissitudes and over some of the greatest transformations in human thought. In that period theology has run the gauntlet of evolutionary doctrine and come out with new methods of appeal; it has emerged from its struggle with science modified but strengthened. Religion now finds itself in closer contact with life, and there is a deeper recognition of its meaning for movements of social uplift. Doctrines differ and forms of worship still stand apart, but the emphasis is more than ever on the things which unite, less than ever on the things which divide. Not yet have the protagonists of unity reached their goal. But the churches are more joined in co-operation and mutual helpfulness than was ever possible in the days of rigid dogma and unyielding denominational pride. It will be difficult for the Harvard Divinity School to celebrate its own work without at the same time celebrating these advantages toward what Dr. A. C. McGiffert, in summing up the aims of the Christian faith, recently called "the control of all human relationships and institutions by the spirit of human sympathy, love and service." Boston Herald