T HAT WE must interpret the texts, concepts and institutions of Biblical religion in the light of the religious life and thought contemporary with them is something to which, I take it, we all agree. Our feeling of inner compulsion in the matter is based upon the conviction that the re-ligious aspects of human life and its expression are subject to the same principles of development and growth that we find operating in all other spheres of finite, timebound existence, and that in reconstructing the process of this development we are, in some measure at least, learning to understand what it means. The immediate basis