ke and his keen observation become
every year more striking as fresh discoveries in the lands of which he
wrote show how true he is in the tiniest detail; while his modesty is
equally remarkable, for only by carefully noticing when he says 'we'
and when 'they' can we discover when he shared St. Paul's dangers and
trials.

[Illustration: VERY ANCIENT FRAGMENT OF A PAPYRUS ROLL, WITH PORTIONS
OF THREE PSALMS WRITTEN IN GREEK]

'_Only Luke is with me_' (2 Timothy iv. 11) wrote the Apostle from his
Roman prison. The beloved physician was faithful to his great leader
to the last.

How did Luke write, and what did his two books look like when he had
finished them? He wrote on papyrus--that is, on reed paper, using an
ink like black paint, and a reed pen.

As far as we know no portions of the Bible-books of this date are left
in the world, but in the beginning of the year 1911 a large number of
very ancient fragments of Bible-books were discovered in Upper Egypt,
and with these was part of a translation of Luke's Book of the
Acts--just shreds and tatters of fragile papyrus paper, the remains of
what is up till now the oldest copy of the New Testament in the world.

Amongst the ancient manuscripts kept in the British Museum are old old
copies of Homer's War poems, and here also are stored the precious
fragments of the chronicles of that other great Greek writer--St. Luke.

Homer's book belongs to the forgotten past, for the heathen religion of
Greece is to-day as though it had never been.

But the writings of St. Luke are as full of blessing and power as ever,
and the war he wrote about grows more wonderful every day. For Christ,
the Son of God, came down from Heaven not to fight _against_ men as the
false gods of the old Greeks were supposed to have done, but to fight
and conquer _for_ men, to lift up the fallen, and to win for the
victors a crown of deathless glory.

The Apostle Peter, in contrast to St. Luke, was only a fisherman when
the Lord bade him leave his boat and his nets to preach and teach the
Gospel.

His ideas were very limited when Jesus Christ first came into his life,
and he knew little or nothing of the various branches of knowledge
which had become a second nature to the Greek scholar; but the
fisherman was to receive his education in a very different fashion from
Luke, for his teacher was the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

How impossible it would have seemed to Peter, in the days when he
washed