It is useless to think to understand a detached sentence that may present special difficulty, without reference to the connection. If I should bring you a letter, and, pointing to a sentence near the close, should ask you to tell me what my correspondent means, you would at once ask, “What is he writing about? what does he say in what precedes?” If I should reply that I didn’t wish you to know the subject of the letter, and would not allow you to read it from the beginning, you would say, “Then I can not help you.” But if I should put the letter into your hands, asking you to help me to understand the difficult sentence, you would at once read the letter carefully from the beginning, making sure that you understood everything as you read, and then, with all that preceded the difficult sentence clearly in your mind, you would expect to understand the sentence itself. Even thus reasonably should we deal with the Bible. Therefore, to each one I say: Study the very words of the text. Go over them again and again; and every time you begin the study of a new portion, go back to the beginning and review all that you have been over. It is a royal method, and it yields royal results. The first chapter of Galatians gives us a brief, comprehensive view of what the Gospel is, of the condition of the Galatian brethren, and of Paul’s personal experience. The second chapter refers to the meeting held in Jerusalem, seventeen years after Paul’s conversion, and tells us what was the subject of controversy, and Paul’s relation to it. The apostle’s sole burden was to preserve “the truth of the Gospel” among the brethren. Having the first chapter clearly in mind, we may proceed to the study of the second, remembering that it is but a continuation of the first.