Paul's Epistles to Colossæ and Laodicea Peter, Events and Utterances of St. Philip the Evangelist and the Epistle to the Hebrews Religion and Architecture, Relation between Religion and the Bible Reviews Resurrection in Egyptian Religion, Christian Conceptions of 114, 121 85 34 17, 129 340 104 225 3 147 65 345 147 328 34 85 Trial, What was the End of St. Paul's U. Utterances of St. Peter unrecorded by St. Mark, Certain Events and : The Organisation of the Native Section of the By BISHOP GIBSON. The Present Opportunity in China. By S. LAVINGTON HART, D.Sc., Principal of the Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College. Contrasts and Likenesses. By the Rev. CANON RIVINGTON. The Egyptian (Coptic) Church. By ARCHDEACON WARD. The Attitude of the Christian Church to Caste ONE SHILLING NET; or 4s. a year, post free, if prepaid. SOCIETY FOR THE PROPAGATION OF THE GOSPEL IN FOREIGN PARTS CAMBRIDGE, MASS. THE INTERPRETER. Then said the Interpreter to Christian, Hast thou considered all these things? Chr. Yes, and they put me in hope and fear. VOL. V. OCTOBER, 1908. No. 1. EDITORIAL NOTES. The Growth of Laws. When Professor Kent writes about Laws he writes on a subject which he has thoroughly made his own. His recent book, Israel's Laws and Legal Precedents (Messrs. Hodder and Stoughton), adds the third volume to The 'tudents' Old Testament Series. The other two volumes are Narratives of the Beginnings of Hebrew History and Historical and Biographical Narratives. We refer to them because all are so worthy of notice. The latest volume is valuable from every point of view; valuable from its complete classification of laws; valuable from the notes which elucidate points otherwise obscure; valuable from its charts and diagrams; but perhaps most valuable to the general reader from its clear and attractive account of the growth of Israel's laws, and the soil from which they originally sprang. Babylon-the Earliest Home of Law. Law, as far as we can penetrate the past, began, neither in Rome, nor Greece, nor Israel, but in Babylon. And the cause to which it owed its rise was the nature and IV. V. 1 position of Babylon. So rich and fertile was the plain of Babylon that all peoples desired to possess it. So widely did its borders spread, so exposed were they to attack that only the strongest could keep it. Those who conquered it must be skilled in toil and war to utilise and retain it. Thus its possessers made early strides in commerce and the civilised arts. Roads, great natural land and water roads, led out from Babylon on every side, and along them the caravans rolled or the ships sailed, and commerce in consequence throve. But commerce needs laws to protect it and writing to record and seal the bargains it has made. So it was commerce and the demands of expanding civilisation which gave the earliest powerful stimulus to the formation of mutually protective laws. How old the oldest laws may be it is impossible to say. They only come to us at second hand. Their history has been similar to the history of those rocks which we call conglomerate. In those rocks, which lie exposed in many a quarry and on many a sea shore, we see the smooth round pebbles that once rolled upon a pre-historic beach sealed up now in a solid cliff of stone. Once, in the far past, that stone was the muddy bed into which the pebbles fell. Heat and pressure and time have done the rest, and the whole now forms one solid rock. To the uninformed eye it is all equally old. Yet the embedded pebbles have a history far older than the rock which imprisons them. So even in the oldest writings of Babylon there are buried the encrusted remains of laws as old again as the writings in which they lie. They are called Sumerian laws and the few that are preserved deal in the main with family relationships. Hammurabi's Code. In process of time other and nobler codes sprang up. Of the remarkable collection which is described as the code of Hammurabi we have spoken before. They relate to |