We do not possess the complete works of John Calvin. Three editions calling themselves Opera omnia have been printed. The first at Geneva in 1617; the second at Amsterdam in 1671, and the third as volumes 29–87 in the series Corpus Reformatorum. The Geneva edition contained most of the Latin works published in the Reformer's lifetime, together with Latin translations of the sermons, delivered originally in French, on 1 Samuel and Job. It had also a collection of letters from, to, and concerning Calvin. Amsterdam differed from this in no significant point. Corpus Reformatorum was vastly superior to its two predecessors. Besides containing everything that they had printed, it also aimed at including all the French works published in the sixteenth century, it greatly increased the number of letters, it provided not only the definitive edition of the Institutio (as Geneva and Amsterdam had done) but also the earlier editions and the 1560 French edition, and finally it gave the three lives of Beza and Colladon and the Annals drawn from the Registers of Geneva which illustrate the course of Calvin's life and work in the city.

These verses form a clear and independent section, summing up in memorable and penetrating phrases the criticism levelled by Isaiah the prophet against the religion of his contemporaries.

To James 2.14–26 we may give the title, Of true faith. The clue to the understanding of the section is the fact (very often ignored) that in verse 14 (‘What doth it profit, my brethren, if a man say he hath faith, but have not works? can that faith save him?’) the author has not said, ‘if a man have faith’, but ‘if a man say he hath faith’.1 This fact should be allowed to control our interpretation of the whole paragraph. The second ‘faith’ in the verse is to be taken as in inverted commas. By ‘that faith’ (ἡ πίςτις) the writer means that thing which the man in question wrongly calls ‘faith’; he does not imply that he himself regards it as faith. When this is recognised, it is clear that the burden of this section is not (as is often supposed) that we are saved through faith plus works, but that we are saved through genuine, as opposed to counterfeit, faith.

The appropriateness of an article of this kind in a theological journal, even in a journal which recognises the importance of good religious education and sees it as a sphere of theological concern, may be open to question. For methods may seem to be of limited interest and importance to the educator himself, and certainly to be excluded by their very nature from any dialogue into which the theologian might wish to enter with him. A division has, in fact, been made between ‘method’ and ‘content’, as if these two existed in complete detachment from each other. ‘Content’ is regarded as the more important and of proper theological interest, inasmuch as the framing of catechisms or the drawing up of catechetical programmes or church curricula involves right understanding and right statement of the Bible witness. ‘Method’, if thought of at all, is regarded as neutral and unworthy of serious theological consideration. Such positions at least deserve re-examining, and their re-examination may help to justify this theme in this journal.