each soul here and now through its choice of the will of God and in the degree of its moral oneness with God. That which most concerns us is no doubt the question which of these hopes, the eschatological or the ethical and inward, was held and taught by Christ. My own conviction is that the new and distinct hope, the spiritual, belongs to him and proceeds from him, and not the familiar Jewish apocalyptic. Two opinions stand in the way of this judgment; two opposite types of literalism in Biblical interpretation. Dogmatic literalism accepts scripture throughout, and refuses to distinguish between higher and lower, between truth and error, in what is written. In regard to hope, this view leads to great stress on prediction and fulfilment. The assumption is that the Biblical predictions that have not been fulfilled will come to pass in the future. This is precisely a fundamental assumption of the apocalypse. It is solely upon this conception of scripture that many devout Christians rest their expectations of the outward coming of Christ and his thousand-year reign on earth, just as the same idea of Biblical predictions leads orthodox Jews to expect that Jerusalem will be the capital and Israel the ruling nation of the world. This literalism stands in the way of the world's present acceptance of Christianity as the religion of its highest hopes. But there is a like danger in the opposite literalism of the historian. We have already seen how the history of Jewish hopes makes the literal acceptance of similar New Testament hopes unnatural if not impossible. The literalism of the historian is, of course, to us true and immediately helpful in liberating us from bondage to the letter of an ancient book. It leaves us free to apply our own reason and conscience and experience to the interpretation of our own life and times. It turns us back upon our own souls, upon our faith, our desire, our will, to unveil and shape the future. But the historian is in danger of doing less than justice to the ethical and spiritual contents of the hopes of the Bible because of his very love of truth and willingness to sacrifice his wishes to it. The unpardonable sin to him is the modernizing of an ancient writing because of reverence for it, and the effort to find in it what he likes rather than things outgrown and unwelcome. This conscientious fear, I cannot but believe, has resulted in a one-sided interpretation of the New Testament, especially the teachings of Jesus and of Paul, as essentially apocalyptic in contents and spirit, and a hesitation to recognize the essentially inward, rational and ethical quality, the prophetic character of the New Testament as a whole, and to make due allowance for the ease and naturalness with which the current apocalyptic ideas of early Jewish Christians could persist and be applied to Jesus and attributed to him.