This book is exactly what its title says: a Synopsis. It does not claim to be a commentary, though I examine each book with some care and often point out even small details that seemed to me to reveal the writer’s design. But my aim was not to explain particular texts. I believe you cannot really feel the force of individual sentences unless you connect them with the purpose of the book they belong to. So I have looked for that purpose in each Gospel and Epistle I take up. And still more, I have wanted to show that they share one common subject; that they point to a Living Person; and that when read in relation to him they have a unity that no comparing of passages by itself could uncover.
I have not burdened you with what are called practical questions—first, because I have always found them very unpractical; and second, because I do not think it reverent to use the Bible to point a moral or decorate a story of our own. I believe it contains a revelation. What I want to ask is what it reveals.