Though Amos stands at the beginning of literary prophecy, the book that bears his name shows evidence of clear-cut, careful organization: (A) The great Judgment Speech against the nations (chapters 1 and 2); (B) Three addresses beginning with the phrase “Hear ye this word” (3: 1–15; 4: 1–13; 5: 1–6); (C) Three charges beginning with “Woe” (5: 7–17; 5: 18–27; 6: 1–14); (D) Five visions, four beginning with “Thus the Lord showed me” (7: 1, 4, 7; 8: 1), one with “I saw” (9: 1); and (E) An ending of consolation and hope (9: 11–15).

The history of the Church in North Africa, so far at least as the sources are concerned, begins for us in the year 180, and it begins with martyrdoms. At Carthage on July 17, Namphano of Madaura, called “Protomartyr” by Augustine, Miggin, Sanam, and six other Christians from Scili in Numidia were sentenced to death by the proconsul Saturninus and beheaded. The official record of their trial has been preserved to us in Greek and Latin and constitutes the oldest document in Africa's Church History.

The pilgrim-diaries associated with Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury (990–994), and Nikolás, abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Munkaþverá, Iceland (1155–1159), commend themselves to historians of ecclesiastical Rome on more than one count. Both diaries include itineraries unusually detailed for their periods and in this regard are unique for the countries of origin and valuable in regard to the history of the regions traversed. More than this, and of particular moment for the historian of the medieval Church, both diaries devote considerable attention to sights seen in the Eternal City. Here these little works offer a welcome, in a sense intimate, view of Rome of the periods in question; for they tell us one very important thing that the medieval Baedekers do not, namely, just what two individuals elected to see or were shown or, equally significant, what two men chose to note down or especially remembered in the course of their tour of the city. The English diary with its systematic list of Roman churches — the titles often in a dubious Latin (see the individual items, especially pp. 275–276 below) — furnishes us, furthermore, with a little catalogue that, coming between the list of Leo III (806) and the list that the papal chamberlain Cencio Savelli (later Pope Honorius III) compiled in 1192, fills an obvious gap. The Icelandic diary, though less important in this regard, gains in interest by including a number of secular monuments and considerable detail about the churches, wanting in the English work. Both texts are worthy of more study than has been devoted to them.

In an examination of the influence of the Book of Enoch on certain motifs in Milton's Paradise Lost, Mr. Grant McColley challenges the commonly accepted belief that Bruce was the first to restore to Western Civilization the knowledge of the existence of I Enoch, which had passed out of circulation during the early centuries of Christianity. Mr. McColley's belief that at least the existence of I Enoch was known to certain persons in the mid-seventeenth century and before rests on quotations from three popular travel books of the time: Sandys' Relation of a Journey (1615), Purchas His Pilgrimage (1613), and Peter Heylyn's Cosmography (1652). These authors all agree that the Ethiopians, or Abyssinians, had books containing the ‘oracles’ or ‘writings’ of the patriarch Enoch.

The exploration of the Greek settlements in South Russia has produced a fair number of epitaphs in verse, which for the most part repeat poetic commonplaces: but a find of 1931 from around Kertch, the ancient Panticapaeum, has distinct interest. It is a stele, broken off at the top and bottom: traces suggest that the top was decorated with a relief representing a man and his young attendant; his name and patronymic may have accompanied this relief. The epitaph, preserved entire, in lettering assigned by the editor to the end of the first century B.C. or the beginning of the first century A.D. and by Dr. Sterling Dow to ca. 40–ca. 100 A.D., runs as follows:

οὐ λόγον ἀλλὰ βίον σοφίης ἐτυπώσαο δόξαν,

αὐτοδαὴς ἱερῶν γινόμενος κριμάτων.

εὕδων οὖν, ‘Εκαταῖε, μεσόχρονος ἴσθ’ ὅτι θᾶσσον

κύκλον ἀνιηρῶν ἐξέφυγες καμάτων.

Tatian, adv. Graecos 40 (p. 41, 1-10 Schwartz):

The argument of this passage follows a line familiar to readers of the apologists: the Hebrew Lawgiver and the prophets belonged to an earlier age than the wise men of Greece, who borrowed Hebrew wisdom and perverted it in one way or another. Leaving one word purposely untranslated, we may render the last sentence, “For their sophists, tampering freely with what they had learned from Moses and those who shared his philosophy, tried to give it a false stamp, first, in order that they might be credited with saying something of their own, and secondly, that they might cloak what they did not understand with some fictitious ῥητολογία and unfairly represent the truth as a fable.”

The writer has in his possession a small octagonal amulet of a lavender or greyish stone, which is engraved on six sides and which is stated on reliable authority to have come from Samsun in Pontus, near the ancient town of Amisus. Height, 0.015 m.; length, 0.03 m.; thickness, 0.007 m. Height of Letters, 0.002 m.