Any wise psychologist will insist that a period of personal depression is not an appropriate time for meditation on the meaning of life. Yet it is such times that most individuals select. A period of social depression, retrogression, and catastrophe is hardly opportune for the deliberate and detached examination of the meaning of history. Yet it is in “times of trouble” that men seem most inclined to somber meditation on the subject. Numerous current publications testify that the relationship of Christianity and its doctrine of revelation to history is one of the most serious problems that the present generation of theologians has to face. Paul Tillich has characterized history as the problem of our age.

In an article published recently on the English pupils of St. Anselm, the saying which forms the title of this essay is quoted from the Dicta Anselmi. The same sentence appears in Ps. Anselm's Similitudines, and in Eadmer's Sermon on Gregory the Great. This coincidence is used as evidence for the dependence of the two latter works upon the former. But the saying is of much greater antiquity.

In 1932 Vitelli and Norsa published a substantial fragment of the Greek Jonah, the remains of a parchment codex, consisting of the final leaf of an initial quaternion and two other complete quaternions, in all seventeen consecutive folios or thirty-four pages. The text covers 1.11b–4.10a. The fourteen missing pages of the first quaternion and five additional pages beyond the present end of the codex would suffice to complete the text. The quaternions are so arranged that each begins and ends with a recto, and within the quaternion verso always confronts verso, recto always confronts recto. Each page bears one column of ten lines, and the lines contain as few as six and as many as fourteen letters, but commonly eight to eleven letters. Vitelli and Norsa give the size of the columns as 4 × 4.5 cm., but this is probably a mean estimate since a measurement taken on the facsimile yields 4 × 4.8 cm. for the columns of writing on pp. 12 and 13 of the third quaternion. The codex is 5.5 cm. broad and 6 cm. high. The unusually small format is noteworthy. The editors have assigned the manuscript to the fourth century A.D. It was acquired by purchase and its provenience is unknown.