In the following reflections I shall start from what I consider an undeniable fact, namely, that the modern temper is uncongenial to the idea of immortality. It is that over and above the objections which the modern intellect entertains against it on theoretical grounds. These — which for brevity I will simply grant en bloc — are by themselves indecisive. As transcendental, the object of the idea — immortality itself — is beyond proof or disproof: it is not an object of knowledge. But the idea of it is. Therefore, the intrinsic merits of its meaning become the sole measure of its credibility, and the appeal of such meaning remains as the sole ground of possible belief — as certainly the lack of such appeal is sufficient ground for actual disbelief. But since what is meaningful depends, beyond the mere condition of logical consistency, largely on the dispositions and insights of the mind that judges it, we must interrogate these for their prevalent unresponsiveness as well as for any possible hold which the idea, even in its present eclipse, may still have, or reclaim, on our secularized estate. Thus an examination of the problem at this hour will be as much an examination of ourselves as an examination of the issue of immortality; and even if it should throw no new light on the latter, on which in more than two thousand years probably everything has been said there is to say, it may yet throw some light on the present state of our mortal condition.

When Schleiermacher appeared in the lecture hall at the University of Berlin, instead of reading to his students a polished narrative of his completed thinking, he spoke from simple notes and laid everything before them “as problems” to be thought through again in their presence. He was by nature, David Friedrich Strauss later recalled, decidedly one of those men in whom liveliness and a quicksilver-like mobility predominate, If he spoke from the pulpit, a tone of solemnity counter-balanced this vivacity, but in lecturing his manner was restless, as he moved from one idea to another, examining it now from this side and now from that, until he would have made his auditors dizzy were it not that his power of speech seemed to hold the listener by the hand and help him over the fissures in the presentation. “Imagine now,” Strauss declared, “the task of capturing such a lecture in writing! It likens itself to that of photographing a dancer in full motion.”

The striking text which Codex Bezae presents, aside from evoking much controversy and several novel theories, has long been at the center of the yet unsolved mystery of the so-called “Western” text, which is itself one of the most urgent and yet most enigmatic areas of New Testament textual criticism. B. H. Streeter did not exaggerate when he said that many a scholar “… has met his Waterloo in the attempt to account for, or explain away, the existence of the Bezan text.”

The question of ascribing to William Tyndale or to George Joye the 1533 treatise The Souper of the Lorde (Short-Title Catalogue 24468) was rightly decided in Joye's favor by W. D. J. Cargill Thompson, but somewhat more careful attention to the contents of the treatise might have removed even the little doubt which that investigator allowed to shadow the ascription to Joye. His admirable summary of the most persuasive external evidence was indeed conclusive enough virtually to eliminate Tyndale from consideration as author, in spite of the opinions of such notable Tyndale scholars as J. F. Mozley and S. L. Greenslade. But internal evidences clinch the case for Joye.