"1909. 2nd Edition. 422 pages. No dust jacket. Red cloth with gilt lettering. Rough cut pages are moderately tanned and thumbed at the edges, creased corners and foxing. Inscription to front endpaper. Binding has remained firm. Boards are a little rub worn, slight shelf wear to corners, spine and edges. Corners are a little bumped. Spine ends are mildly crushed. Moderate sunning to spin and edges. Boards are slightly bowed. Slight forward lean to text block."
Mildly crushed! An almost oxymoron 
I think the seller sees book description as a vocation to be fulfilled! The photo is the seller's image.
I think the seller sees book description as a vocation to be fulfilled! The photo is the seller's image.I found a much better copy at a good price, now dispatched and coming later in the week, bought to replace a previous copy that I gave as a gift to someone I knew would appreciate it, and love it.
The book is a commentary on the First Epistle of John, by Robert Law, The Tests of Life (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1909) Over the years I've found I gravitate towards several books in the Bible as favourites. I suppose we all develop preferences, discover passages or whole books that resonate with us, speak to our condition, take root in the mind and heart, become a well trusted remedy for whatever troubles us, or are proven correctives for when life once again needs resetting.
The First Epistle of John (I still prefer that older fashioned name) was one of the first New Testament letters I studied with the help of a commentary - in this case the Tyndale commentary by John Stott, still a classic. Some years later in College, during the New Testament Introduction course, Principal R. E. O. White strongly recommended we get out hands on Law's, The Tests of Life. In his own commentary on 1 John, REO (as we called him - not to his face!) so admired Law's book that in the Preface he wrote that Law's volume was so exactly apt " as to cause subsequent commentators to despair."
In any case, I have returned again to 1 John for a further season of inner revision of what matters in faith and life. In three different churches, over a decade apart, I preached through 1 John - not verse by verse, but based loosely around Law's The Tests of Life. Like REO I haven't found a more incisive analysis and explanation of what John was up to in his masterpiece of pastoral apologetics and theological ethics. So I will read Law again, and enjoy a way of writing about Scripture that had its heyday in Edwardian Scotland, a context from which came some of the finest biblical scholarship and exposition in the tradition. That's a story for another time.
Comments