.
So far as they succeeded, in their teaching they did so because they
devoted themselves to expressing clearly what they wished without
troubling to ask whether it conformed to what other people said, and
they spoke the clearest language which they could find in their own
generation.

To do the same thing is the business of preachers and teachers to-day.
The man who tries merely to repeat the thoughts or the words of past
generations forgets that the call which comes to the teacher is not to
repeat what others have said because they have said it, but to say what
is true because it is true, and to say it in the language of his own
time that it may be intelligible. He will often appear to contradict
the thought or the language of Jesus or of Paul or of Origen, but he
will be loyal to the purpose which was theirs, and yet so much more
than theirs.

[1] This proves that this form of thought is not Semitic; had it been
so, the Spirit would scarcely have been masculine.

[2] It would be unfair and misleading to say the doctrine of the
Trinity. That doctrine is not the statement of the "threeness" of God,
but of the relation which this bears to his unity.

[3] No doubt the "threeness" was emphasised by the habit of three
immersions in baptism, whatever the origin of this practice may be, and
by philosophic reflections as to the properties of triangles such as
are found in Philo.

[4] Illuminating suggestions can be found in F. C. Conybeare's _The Key
of Truth_ and in H. Usener's _Weihnachtsfest_.

[5] In the _Earlier Epistles of St. Paul_, pp. 335 ff. (especially p.
368), I suggested that the shorter recension of the Epistle to the
Romans, the existence of which is proved by the evidence of the Latin
_breves_, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Marcion, and by the textual
confusion surrounding the final doxology, may be the same as that which
omits all mention of Rome, and that, if so, it was probably written
originally for some other destination. This suggestion has met with
little approbation from critics, but with even less discussion. I
still think that it is worth consideration.

[6] _Paulos doulos Iesou Christou kletos apostolos aphorismenos eis eu
aggelion theou o proepeggeilato dia ton propheton autou en graphais
hagiais peri tou uhiou autou tou genomenou ek spermatos Daueid kata
sarka tou hopisthentos uhiou en dunamei kata pneuma hagiosunes ex
anastaseos nekron Iesou Christou tou kuriou hemon._

[7] The just