taken by chance anywhere. It is a delightful way of opening the
day. Every one, even in a turbulent, ill-disciplined life, should
do the same. Endless repetition, in and out of season, has spoiled
for us the freshness, the naivete, the simple romantic charm of the
Gospels. We hear them read far too often and far too badly, and
all repetition is anti-spiritual. When one returns to the Greek;
it is like going into a garden of lilies out of some, narrow and
dark house.

And to me, the pleasure is doubled by the reflection that it is
extremely probable that we have the actual terms, the IPSISSIMA
VERBA, used by Christ. It was always supposed that Christ talked
in Aramaic. Even Renan thought so. But now we know that the
Galilean peasants, like the Irish peasants of our own day, were
bilingual, and that Greek was the ordinary language of intercourse
all over Palestine, as indeed all over the Eastern world. I never
liked the idea that we knew of Christ's own words only through a
translation of a translation. It is a delight to me to think that
as far as his conversation was concerned, Charmides might have
listened to him, and Socrates reasoned with him, and Plato
understood him: that he really said [Greek text which cannot be
reproduced], that when he thought of the lilies of the field and
how they neither toil nor spin, his absolute expression was [Greek
text which cannot be reproduced], and that his last word when he
cried out 'my life has been completed, has reached its fulfilment,
has been perfected,' was exactly as St. John tells us it was:
[Greek text which cannot be reproduced] - no more.

While in reading the Gospels - particularly that of St. John
himself, or whatever early Gnostic took his name and mantle - I see