[194] Dr. Moffatt's book, full of learning and ability as it is, seems to exemplify what I once described as "a deep-seated vice in the modern methods of (New Testament) scholarship. The student finds so much to learn that he rarely has time even to begin to know. It is inexorably required of him that he shall be familiar with the opinions of many teachers dead and living, and it is not sufficiently impressed on him that mere ability to set forth in fluent and polished language the thoughts df others is not real knowledge He does not learn that knowledge must be thought out afresh by him from first principles, and tested in actual experience, before it becomes really his own. He must live his opinions before they become knowledge, and he is fortunate if he is not compelled prematurely to express them too frequently and too publicly, [195] that they become hardened and fixed before he has had the opportunity of trying them and moulding them in real life." These sentence 1 sum up what this review attempts to say at greater length. Underneath the book which lies before us there is hidden a greater man than the Author shows himself in the printed page. He is, as I believe, capable of far better work if he once learns that we are no longer in the nineteenth century with its negations, but in the twentieth century with its growing power of insight and the power of belief that springs therefrom.

FOOTNOTES:

1 Taken from "The Charm of Paul" in "Pauline and Other Studies”.