thew and Luke. These are considerably longer and contain accounts of the life of Jesus up to the time of his baptism by John, an event with which Mark and John both begin, the latter prefacing his Gospel by a passage about the Logos of God and his incarnation. Mark records with minute detail many incidents which, while included in other Gospels, are not so picturesquely described, for example, no one but Mark records the anger of Jesus at the Scribes and Pharisees when he healed. the withered hand on the Sabbath:

"And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved at the hardening of their heart, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thy hand. And he stretched it forth; and his hand was restored." Mark 3:5.

Mark alone records the miracle of the healing of the deaf man with the impediment in his speech, and the details are given:

"And he took him aside from the multitude privately, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to Heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And his ears were opened, and the bond of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain." Mark 7:33-35.

Other examples of this quality of Mark will be apparent to anyone who will compare the accounts of the same incidents as given in Mark, and as given in other Gospels.

Matthew is sometimes spoken of as the Gospel for the Jews, as Luke is called the Gospel for the Gentiles, because the former treats of Jesus as "the son of David, the son of Abraham," 1:1, and has much to say of the

establishment of a Messianic Kingdom on earth. Luke's conception is broader and includes the whole world. He alone records the sending out of the seventy. Luke 10:1-24. Matthew contains, chs. 5, 6, 7, the Sermon on the Mount. The version in Luke is incomplete and not continuous, 6:20-49, 11:9-13, 12:22-31, but contains, 6:24-26, sayings of denunciation not found in Matthew. In Luke are accounts of the childhood and early manhood of Jesus not included in the other Gospels. Luke alone gives the parable of the Good Samaritan, 10:25– 37, and has more to say than the others about miracles of healing. This is attributed to his being a physician. The Fourth Gospel, or John, spiritual, philosophical and esoteric, is addressed in large part to the disciples, or to individuals, rather than to the multitude. Examples of this, peculiar to John, are the story of the first three disciples, 1:35-42; the call of Philip and Nathanael, 1: 43-51; the miracle of Cana, 2:1-11; the conversation with Nicodemus, 2:23-3: 21; the conversation with the woman of Samaria, 4:4-26; the man at the pool of Bethesda, 5:1-46; the discourse on the Bread of Life, 6:22-71; the visit to the Feast of Tabernacles, 7:1-52; the discourses on the Light of the World, and spiritual freedom, 8:12-59; the Good Shepherd, 10:1-21; the raising of Lazarus, 11:1-46; the farewell discourses,

chs. 14-17; the appearance to Thomas, 20:26-29;

the appearance to the seven disciples, 21:1-24. Only by making a "harmony" of the Gospels can these extraordinary differences in their contents be made manifest. While there are four Gospels, they are so different from each other, with all their similarities, that we could not omit one of them in a study of the life and words of Jesus without neglecting material of vital importance.

The Acts of the Apostles

The book of the Acts of the Apostles attributed to Luke, opens with the Ascension and incidents connected with it, which are found nowhere else. Luke ends with the Ascension, as does also the supplementary passage, Mark 16:9-20, but it is not referred to by Matthew, and is mentioned by John in two passages, 6:62, 20:17, as foretold by Jesus, but not as occurring. It is mentioned also in Acts 2:33,34, 5:31; I Peter 3:22; Ephesians 2:6, 4:10; I Timothy 3:16, but it is interesting to note that the account of it in Acts is fuller than that given in the Gospel of Luke.

Acts tells us of the gift of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, the preaching of Peter and John, the persecutions and difficulties of the young Church, the martyrdom of Stephen, the conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch, the conversion of Saul, the imprisonment and miraculous release of Peter, the missionary journeys, preaching and afflictions of Paul, his defense before Festus and Agrippa, his appeal to Cæsar, and his perilous journey to Rome.

With the Ascension, the history of Christianity entered upon a second stage, and the book of Acts is the record of the events which happened between the bodily disappearance of Jesus in the cloud, and the preaching of Paul in Rome, at the close of a life of intrepid courage amid perils of all kinds, in the performance of his duties as a preacher of the Gospel to the Gentiles, as well as to the Jews.

CHAPTER VII

BIBLICAL STORIES

RUTH, Esther, Jonah, Tobit and Judith form, as literature, a class of their own in the Old Testament and Apocrypha. They are stories, although Jonah was by the Jews included among the “Minor Prophets." Much of the historical books is composed of stories embedded in the structure of history.

Ruth

Ruth and Esther are two short prose stories, one purely idyllic, with its pictures of the pastoral·life, and its wonderfully beautiful presentation of human relationships, the other verging on history. Each contains, as its chief character, an extraordinary young woman. In a literary way, they stand out distinct from the other books of the Old Testament.

Interpreted by some as a parable representing, in its different characters, God's relations to sinners, Ruth is an unexcelled example of ancient story-telling. Its presence in the Jewish Scriptures is accounted for, whatever other good reasons may be assigned, by the statement in the closing verse:

"Boaz begat Obed, and Obed begat Jesse, and Jesse begat David." Ruth 4:21-22.

Ruth and Boaz are mentioned as the great-grandparents of David in Matthew 1:5, and Boaz is named

in Luke 3:32, thus placing the time of the story of Ruth about a hundred years before David. The scene is in Bethlehem of Judea, "the city of David." Just what the purpose, if any, of Ruth may be, in its teachings concerning the much-discussed question of marriage between Jews and other peoples, as set forth in such passages as Deuteronomy 7:1-4, 23:3-6; where mixed marriages are forbidden, or Ezra 9:1-2, where the fact of mixed marriages is recited as an abomination, we do not know, but it is worthy of note, in view of such passages, that we find the story of a mixed marriage told with no intimation that such a practice was not to be approved.

The story of Ruth may bear all, or none, of the secondary interpretations that have been given to it, but it remains, on account of its simple story of fidelity and affection, one of the loveliest pictures that we have of life in Palestine. The scene is laid in the time of the judges, and, for this reason, the book was, in the Septuagint, placed immediately after Judges, although in the Hebrew Scriptures it is in the "Writings." The contrast between the peaceful and virtuous life of the village as depicted in Ruth, and the kind of life represented in the stories of Samson, is such as to make us realize that in every age, however disorderly and corrupt it may be, the ideas and practice of the domestic virtues are always to be found in lives uninfluenced in that respect by the irreligion and immorality of the time by which they may be surrounded. Whatever may be the date at which Ruth was written, we find the conception of the religious life of the family and home similar to that which is set forth in Psalms 127, 128, 133, or in the exquisite picture in Proverbs ch. 31 of the "worthy woman," on whose tongue is "the law of kind