FOREWORD

THIS MANUSCRIPT lay penned but not finished for a number of years before my father's death because, as he says in his introduction, 'For a day-to-day biography (of Christ) there are no materials, and only a small number of days are even mentioned.' He had, I think, intended a short life of Christ, but with many another found the chronological problems connected with it a rather formidable barrier to a connected narrative. He got no further than the Wedding Feast at Cana, and for the purposes of publishing this material as a complete study in itself my mother has decided to use the sub-title 'An Introduction to the Life of Christ', and to take it to the point where Christ emerges Victor from the contest with Satan in the Wilderness, prepared and proved, and ready to enter upon His Public Ministry.

I have heard my father mention, with amusement, the rather pompous young man who, upon his celebrated father's death, used to raise aloft a copy of the Scriptures in the pulpit and say, with hushed voice and bated breath, 'My father's Bible!' All I wish to say about my father's Bible, the fairly new one he was using at the time of his death, is that certain pages in the second half of Isaiah are very thumb-marked indeed in comparison with the fairly clean state of the remainder of the sacred volume!