The literature of the New Testament must be understood historically if understood at all. It must be understood as the product, we might almost say the precipitate, of the greatest period in the history of religion. It represents the meeting and mutual adjustment of two fundamental and complementary conceptions of religion. The antithesis is not merely that between the particularism of the Jew and the universalism of the Gentile. It is an antithesis of the social ideal of Law and Prophets against the individual ideal of personal redemption through union with the divine Spirit, which lay at the heart of all vital Hellenistic religious thought in this period of the Empire. Christianity as we know it, the religion of humanity as it has come to be, the ultimate world-religion as we believe it destined to become, is a resultant of these two factors, Semitic and Aryan, the social and the individual ideal. Its canonized literature represents the combination. On the one side the social ideal is predominant. It perpetuates the gospel _of_ Jesus in the form of Matthæan and Petrine tradition, supplemented by apocalypse, which tradition attaches conjecturally to the name of John. The goal it seeks is the Kingdom of God, righteousness and peace on earth as in heaven. On the other side the individual ideal predominates. It perpetuates the gospel _about_ Jesus in the form of the Pauline and Johannine doctrine of his person, regarded as the norm and type of spiritual life. The goal it seeks is personal immortality by moral fellowship with God. Its faith is Son ship, by participation in the divine nature, without limitation in time, without loss of individual identity. Both types of gospel are justified in claiming to emanate from Jesus of Nazareth; but neither without the other can claim to fully represent the significance of his spirit and life. The unity of the New Testament is a unity in diversity. Just because it presents so widely divergent conceptions of what the gospel is, it gives promise of perennial fecundity. Studied not after the manner of the scribes, who think that in their book of precept and prophecy they have a passport to rewards in a magical world to come, but studied as a "manifestation of the life, even the eternal life" of the Spirit of God in man, it will continue to reproduce the spirit and mind of Christ. Studied as a reflection at various times and in divers manners of that redemptive Wisdom of God, which "in every generation entering into holy souls makes men to be prophets and friends of God" (Sap. vii. 27), and which the Greeks, considering it, unfortunately, in its intellectual rather than its moral aspect, call the Logos of God, it will prove, as in so many generations past it has proved, an "incorruptible seed," a "word of good tidings preached unto" the world, a "word of the Lord that abideth for ever." BIBLIOGRAPHY 1. General Introductions to N.T. Literature.