The letters, books and pamphlets which you can find in the New Testament were written some nineteen centuries ago, and written from inside a world not only hidden from us by the barrier of time but as distant in all its thinking and experience the far fringe of an alien Empire where the growing vigour of Europe met the old dreams of the East. In that remote and incomprehensible world, there was a tiny community unlike any society which had been seen on earth. It is the message of that obscure community which you hold in your hands in the twenty-seven books of the New Testament its beliefs, its hopes, its experiences, as the members wrote them down for each other, writer and reader both at the home in that unimaginable world.