The title of this paper calls for qualification and explanation. A distinguished Swedish theologian once remarked that the rise of a school in any department of theological study can be inimical to the best interests of scholarship, since the members of a school tend to be concerned rather with the defence of positions already assumed than with impartial inquiry into truth. Diversity of opinion on certain problems among the Uppsala group of Old Testament scholars would in itself acquit them of this charge; and it may therefore be questioned whether the term ‘school’ can be accurately applied to them. If we do so use it, we must take it to indicate a common approach to Old Testament problems rather than detailed agreement in the solution of these problems. Again, the use of the term ‘Uppsala’ is open to criticism. The common approach just mentioned confessedly owes much to work done outside Scandinavia and in other parts of Scandinavia. Neither form criticism nor tradition history originated in Sweden; and the importance of the cult in Old Testament religion and of the place of the king in the cult was first maintained elsewhere than in Uppsala.

The Object of this brief survey is to discover, if we can, from the surviving plays of Aeschylus how, in the opinion of enlightened and pious men of his age, the spirits of the dead were to be approached when it was thought desirable to do so, and to compare the methods which were then in use with those of other, especially of later, epochs. I speak of enlightened and pious men, for surely Aeschylus was both. Had he been born a generation later, he would probably have been something of a philosopher, influenced, as Euripides was, by the critical opinions of the contemporary sophists and investigating the fundamental assumptions upon which the traditional beliefs of his country rested. As it was, he, like his contemporary and acquaintance Pindar, came sufficiently early to take the form of their beliefs from tradition, with no more than revisal of details here and there (Pindar will not believe impious myths and does not know what to make of tales which represent the gods as fighting one another, Aeschylus is not sure that a god will really feel human passion for a mortal woman), ennobling the whole with their own lofty thoughts and feelings, in which the Athenian goes further than the Theban, for he was the deeper of soul and even the Apolline religion of Pindar, lofty though it is, the fruit apparently of a genuinely religious mind which had something mystical in it, lacks the sublimity of Aeschylus' attitude toward Zeus.

On May 25th, 1831, an aged Presbyterian clergyman rose to his feet in the supreme ecclesiastical court of Scotland, the General Assembly, to utter a final plea for his eldest son, who stood accused of a charge of the utmost gravity before the venerable tribunal which was about to determine his fate. An interrupter protested that intervention at that stage was out of order; nevertheless the court allowed him to continue, and at length he ended with these words:

“I bow to any decision to which you may think it right to come. Moderator, I am not afraid for my son; though his brethren cast him out the Master whom he serves will not forsake him; and while I live I will never be ashamed to be the father of so holy and blameless a son.”