It has been for many years a hope of mine that I might find the time to formulate, in a systematic fashion, the ethical teaching of the New Testament, and particularly of the Gospels. This would be a major undertaking, and what I write now falls far short of this. But it is not unrelated to it; for it arises from repeated, if unsystematic, reflection upon the conditions of fulfilling such a project. Certain problems have presented themselves for solution which I cannot solve. Certain possible conclusions, between which a choice must be made, compete with one another for acceptance. Certain valuations which seem to differentiate the teaching of the Gospels from other ethical attitudes have focused themselves in my attention, without achieving systematic relation to one another. It is something of all this that I have in mind to express; no firm conclusion, certainly, but rather certain prolegomena to any conclusion which may eventually become possible.

The Primacy of the Church. Christianity is often called the religion of the Book: this is because it is based on things that happened in history. Jesus did not leave behind Him, so far as we know, a single written word. We hear of His writing only once, and then it was on the dust of the floor of the temple (John 8.6). What He did leave was a community—the eleven faithful Apostles, the ministering women, His mother and brothers—about 120 persons in all (Acts 1.15), who met daily for worship because they loved Jesus and believed that God had raised Him from among the dead. When they had to fill the place of the traitor Judas, Peter said: ‘Of the men therefore which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto the day that he was received up from us, of these must one become a witness with us of his resurrection’ (Acts 1.2 if). And Matthias was chosen, with all possible care. Six weeks later the company was wonderfully strengthened and increased by the outpouring of the Spirit, and the Church began to spread from Jerusalem to ‘all Judaea and Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth’ (Acts 1.8).

The nineteenth-century revolution in historical method and its application to the study of the Bible rendered necessary a complete re-statement of the doctrine of revelation. No longer was it possible to hold a doctrine of revelation as given in propositional form at the dictation of the Holy Spirit. The object of this paper is to ask what is the biblical conception of revelation and how it can best be expressed and understood in the light of modern thought. We will begin with a very brief and necessarily inadequate summary of what the Bible means by ‘revelation’.

The object of this essay is to offer for consideration a new way of translating the fragment of Papias' Preface quoted by Eusebius, in the belief that it may show that Papias was indeed ‘a man of the primitive age’ (⋯ρχαîos), who flourished about A.D. 80, and whose ‘Interpretation’ did not deal with Matthew's Gospel, still less with Luke's, because the First and Third Evangelists had not published their works when he wrote.

It is surely in the Book of Job that the religion of the Old Testament finds its most intense and concentrated expression. For the great theme of this book is something which lies at the root of the religious life of humanity, namely, the inescapable character of man's relation to God. Its real subject is the impossibility of eluding this numinous connexion with the ultimate religious and metaphysical ground of life. Job is like some creature caught in the toils. He comes before us as the victim of the dimension of eternity in which human life stands. He knows in his innermost soul that his suffering is ‘sent’ by the living God. He feels hunted and pursued by this mysterious divine Potentate whose character and designs are inscrutable to the petty mind of man and ever baffle ‘the foiled searching of mortality’. In the apparent impossibility of finding relief from this torture of body and spirit, or a harmonious consummation of life, he longs to cut himself adrift from the metaphysical foundations of his being and to find a momentary peace upon a lower plane. One of the key-points of Job's thought, and of the Bible as a whole, is that of the supreme significance of man in God's providential purposes, the high worth with which he becomes endowed as a result of the cherishing care of his Creator. In the stress of his suffering, Job would fain elude the burdensomeness and the costingness of this uplifting relation with the divine which redeems man from final insignificance.