Tannaite rabbis were accustomed to summarize succinctly the 611 or 613 commandments of the Law in from one to eleven general precepts; but these summaries were merely private halakoth. Until the second century A.D. there were read in the synagogue service the Ten Words which God himself spoke directly to his people, without the mediation of Moses. A Hebrew papyrus from about 200 B.C. includes the Decalogue with the Shema. And Philo goes so far as to declare that “the Ten Words are summaries of the special laws which are recorded in the sacred books.”

The outstanding importance of allegorical interpretation to the medieval scholar engaged on interpreting the Scriptures is well known. The method, which had originated in the East and was older than Christianity, became well established in the West during the Patristic age; in its application there was a good deal of variety. Ambrosiaster in commenting on the Pauline epistles combined orthodoxy with an unswerving adherence to the historical sense. Tyconius, on the other hand, laid down no less than seven rules whereby to interpret the prophecies in the Old Testament. Augustine went further in finding allegorical meaning in passages of Holy Writ than Jerome, who always maintained a certain balance in expounding the literal and the spiritual sense. The latter is more pronounced in his earlier commentaries when he was still consciously under the influence of Origen. In his later works allegorical interpretation becomes noticeably less; but it is not wholly absent even from his unfinished commentary on Jeremiah. To Gregory the Great the sensus spiritalis and particularly the sensus moralis were of such paramount significance as almost to oust the literal meaning. His influence on Bede and through Bede, as well as directly, on later expounders of the Bible was enormous.

Thanks to the considerable surviving corpus of Old-Norse literature much is known about Old North-Germanic religious practices and beliefs; by comparison, our knowledge of corresponding matters in the West-Germanic area is meager. For England, historically and sociologically an offshoot of, and by the time of the earliest written records long separated from, the north-west German homeland, our best source of information is a rather miscellaneous collection of charms. Next probably come the epic poem Béowulf and the historian Bede, who especially in his Historia ecclesiastica passim furnishes some additional information. Otherwise one is dependent upon scattered materials, ranging from single words to such cult objects as the cenotaph ship excavated in 1939 at Sutton Hoo in Norfolk. In the face of this relative paucity of knowledge any little additional information may be welcome.

Man poses for himself his most tantalizing problems. He seeks to discover what he is, to foresee whither he goes, and to find what limits are imposed on his progress. He ponders his connections with the realm of matter, and seeks to locate himself within a larger sphere of an all-inclusive Reality. As a citizen of the world of space and time, man feels an essential homelessness, and reaches out toward a possible realm in which those aspirations which are unfulfilled in his present experience may find fulfilment. He persists in looking beyond himself as an individual, and beyond the social group of which he is a part. In so doing he is confronted with a tension between the world of possibility which he intuits and his own present situation.

A note of mine written under war conditions may now be supplemented from literature to which I recently had access. I had proved, with the help of a Greek coin of Phalanna in Thessaly which is preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, that the Zeus of the Thessalian Peloria had the name Peloris, not Pelorios. The latter is only the reading of the Epitome of Athenaeus against the best Athenaeus MS, the Codex Marcianus 447. I learned now that Professor Paul Maas had already demonstrated most plausibly in 1935 and 1936 that the so-called Athenaeus-Epitome is nothing more than an abbreviated revision, a metagraphe, of a MS of the type of Codex Marcianus 447. It is therefore without value here for reconstituting Athenaeus' text. We now have a primary document that decisively supports Professor Maas' thesis, and it is a rare occasion in textual criticism that the decisive primary document is a coin. Professor Maas' suggestion however that Πɛλώρι, which occurs in Cod. Marc. 447 has the nominative Πέλωρ, can now be slightly corrected by the evidence of our coin. It can be said with certainty that the nominative is in fact Peloris.

One of the minor mysteries that float about the cloud-wrapped figure of Thomas Jefferson has to do with his quaint little scrap-book known as the “Morals of Jesus.” It relates to the books he used in making it. Of course if he had meant it to be published, or had ever thought it might be, he would have stated at the beginning just what editions of the Greek, Latin, French and English New Testaments he had cut his clippings from. But he did not intend it to be published; he made it for his own use and satisfaction, to read just before he went to bed, when the day's work was over. So the problem was left for us to solve.