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Letter 17] into a miraculous account of the feeding of many thousands upon material bread and material fish! It is greatly to be regretted that we have not one left out of the many hymns and psalms of which St. Paul and Pliny make mention. The only vestige of one that I know is found in a verse of St. Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians. It is at all events printed by Westcott and Hort as poetry, and it is thought by many commentators to be an extract from some well-known hymn (Eph. v. 14):

This perhaps is our only specimen of the earliest Christian hymnals. Surely then it is noticeable that in three lines of this unique specimen there are three metaphors, and in the second line a metaphorical use of the word "dead" which—as I have pointed out above—has probably elsewhere resulted in serious misunderstanding.

After the hymn would come the sermon. The preacher would stand up like Apollos to "prove from the Scriptures," that is, from the Old Testament, that Jesus is the Christ. If you wish to know how some of the Christian Preachers would probably discharge their task you should look at the Dialogue with Trypho written (about a hundred years after Apollos) by Justin Martyr—who, I take it, was very much superior in judgment, learning, and ability, to the great mass of Christian Preachers in the first and second centuries. There—among many other instances of the adaptation of history to preconception—you will find Justin declaring that Jesus was born in a cave, and that the ass on which He rode into Jerusalem was tied to a vine, simply because certain prophecies of Isaiah mention a cave and a vine, and because he is determined to find fulfilments of