THE present work, as I have tried to make clear in the title, does not pretend to be a complete and exhaustive treatment of its subject. Neither is it a collection of detached essays. It is a set of studies which are linked together by two main ideas. One is that the substance of the Gospel ‘is neither a dogmatic system nor an ethical code, but a Person and a Life’. The other is that the key to the New Testament is the notion of the ‘saving Remnant’. In the light of these two ideas it seems possible to see light clearly and to understand much in the teaching of Jesus that would otherwise remain obscure.

The book has grown out of the technical studies described in Chapter I (pp. 15–21). My original plan was to publish the results of these studies simpliciter, and to leave it to others to draw their own conclusions: and I prepared a first chapter somewhat after the style of what now appears as Appendix I, but much more elaborate and detailed. This I showed to Principal Oman and Professor Anderson Scott. Both agreed that the results were interesting, and both advised me that it would be better if their implications could be drawn out more fully. This I have attempted to do. In the process more and more of my material has been absorbed in the text, and the Appendices have been correspondingly reduced. From first to last the work has occupied the greater part of my leisure time during the past five years. Its publication now is made possible by the generosity of the Syndics of the Press.