John Colet (1466–1519) resolved the bewildering tensions in the relation of man and God by attributing as much as possible to God and as little as possible to man. Spontaneously he destroys nature in order to exalt grace, feeling, as did St. Bonaventura, that pious souls, careful of the divine majesty, ascribe all things to God. He castigates the arrogance of those who imagine that they can know the true or will the good without the aid of grace. No reiteration of the radical insufficiency of man and nature is excessive. The core of his piety is a religious rejection of the world in which “all that belongs absolutely and essentially to man (who is nothing if not weak, foolish, evil, vain, lost and nought; whose power is weakness, his wisdom folly, his will malicious, his acting an undoing, his accomplishment destruction) all, I say, that goes to make up man is condemned with one voice and one judgement of the Spirit throughout the entire Holy Scriptures of God.”

Among the 734 inscriptions included in the first volume of Frey's Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum there are twenty-one (CII 535–551e) which are listed as from the Jewish community of Porto, the ancient Portus Traiani. There have been so many misstatements and differences of opinion among scholars with reference to the Jews of Porto that a fresh study of the data is appropriate.

In a recent article Professor Norman H. Baynes discussed the evidence for opposition to religious art prior to the outbreak of the Iconoclastic Controversy. In the course of his illuminating article, he called attention to an important fragment of patristic literature which was first published in recent years and which but for Professor Baynes might have remained unnoticed. It is an excerpt taken from the Miscellaneous Enquiries (Συμμικτὰ Zητήματα) by Hypatius of Ephesus, who was archbishop of this most important see from 531 to about 538 and in addition one of Justinian's most trusted theological advisers. Professor Baynes used the text to illustrate the fact that prior to the Iconoclastic Controversy “any general cult of the icons in such extreme forms as later appears in the apologies of the iconodules would seem dangerous and a wrongful use of a practice which was tolerated only in the interest of the weaker members of the church.” (p. 95). The text, however, is also important from other points of view. Since it is difficult Greek and since the trend of Hypatius' thought, though entirely logical, may not be clear at first sight, it is advisable to submit here a translation of the document, accompanied by explanatory notes. The writer gratefully acknowledges that he owes much to Diekamp and Baynes for an understanding of the document.