of these documents.  We tend thus to exaggerate that which must be only incidental, as, for example, the Jewish element, in the teaching of Jesus.  We thus underrate phases of Jesus’ teaching which, no doubt, a man like Paul would have apprehended better than did the evangelists themselves.  In truth, in Harnack’s own delineation of the teaching of Jesus, those elements of it which found their way to expression in Paul, or again in the fourth Gospel, are rather underrated than overstated, in the author’s anxiety to exclude elements which are acknowledged to be interpretative in their nature.  We are driven, in some measure, to seek to find out what the gospel was from the way in which the earliest Christians took it up.  We return ever afresh to questions nearly unanswerable from the materials at hand.  What was the central principle in the shaping of the earliest stages of the new community, both as to its thought and life?  Was it the longing for the coming of the Kingdom of God, the striving after the righteousness of the Sermon on the Mount?  Or was it the faith of the Messiah, the reverence for the Messiah, directed to the person of Jesus?  What word dominated the preaching?  Was it that the Kingdom of God was near, that the Son of Man would come?  Or was it that in Jesus Messiah has come?  What was the demand upon the hearer?  Was it, Repent, or was it, Believe on the Lord Jesus, or was it both, and which had the greater emphasis?  Was the name of Jesus used in the formulas of worship before the time of Paul?  What do we know about prayer in the name of Jesus, or baptism in that name, or miracles in the name of Jesus, or of the Lord’s Supper and the conception of the Lord as present with his disciples in the rite?  Was this revering of Jesus, which was fast moving toward a worship of him, the inner motive force of the whole construction of the dogma of his person and of the trinity?

In the second volume Harnack treats of the development primarily of the Christological and trinitarian dogma, from the fourth to the seventh centuries.  The dramatic interest of the narrative exceeds anything which has been written on this theme.  A debate which to most modern men is remote and abstruse almost to the point of unintelligibility, and of which many of the external aspects are disheartening in the extreme, is here brought before us in something of the reasonableness which it must have had for those who took part in it.  Tertullian shaped the problem and established the nomenclature for the Christological solution which the Orient two hundred years later made its own.  It was he who, from the point of view of the Jurist, rather than of the philosopher, gave the words ‘person’ and ‘substance,’ which continually occur in this discussion, the meaning which in the Nicene Creed they bear.  Most brilliant is Harnack’s characterisation of Arius and Athanasius.  In Arius the notion of the Son of God is altogether done away.  Only the name remains.  The victory