Excerpt from The Scroll: Vols. 42-44; January, 1945-December, 1946

Even the New Testament is not of one piece. To be fully understood and appreciated, it must be read in the light of its highest peaks. The Bible is a self-interpreting book if one views it from these heights. The Sermon on the Mount, and the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians are the heights. In them is the Golden Rule of love. Love is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets. Knowledge of the truth is the instrument and the guide of love and the path to freedom. Wisdom is justified of her children. The parables of Jesus, especially those about the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, are on the heights. Nearly all his teachings move at this high level, and it is an impressive fact that so consistent a report of his sayings is maintained. In face of the fact that he himself wrote nothing and that his sayings come to us only at the hands of his humble followers after many years and the passing of one or two generations. It is still more impressive that we have so faithful an account of his sayings, and especially the spirit of them, after nineteen centu ries of a'divided church with its conflicting theol ogies and very human adherents. It is a mistake to assume that the teaching of Jesus was superceded at Pentecost and by the subsequent teaching of the Apostles. If the Gospel was ever once for all delivered it was in the Sermon on the Mount and in the parables of Jesus. At many points after his death the writings dip to lower levels, becoming in many places legalistic, weak. And unspiritual.

These places need always to be compared anew with the recognized norms of the mountain peaks.

Paul wrote most of the New Testament and to his passionate devotion we owe the founding of many of the earliest churches and much of the flaming zeal of Christians throughout the centu ries. Yet Paul never knew Jesus on the earth and seldom makes any quotations from him which he might have learned from others. Some things he wrote in his epistles do not rise to the heights of his own words in his first letter to the church in Corinth. What he says about women keeping silence in the church, about subjection to husbands, about the motive for marriage, are all rejected by his interpretation of the law of love, of there being neither male nor female in Christ, and about the freedom wherewith Christ has made us free. His letter to Philemon concerning his return to Philemon of the slave, Onesimus, does not reject the system of human slavery as his doctrine of equality in Christ implies and requires. He ad vised Timothy to drink a little wine. He thought bodily exercise of little profit. Although he says.

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