2. The Dlyine Witness. — Throughout the apostolic writings runs the conviction that God is constantly witnessing in various ways to the truth of the gospel. In Ac 14' 15' miracles are taken to be the means by which the preaching of Christ among the Gentiles is so attested (cf. Gal 3'). But it is chiefly through the work of the Holy Spirit that this witness is borne. This work is seen in the individual and in the Church. The hope that Christ has made us sons of God is con- verted into a certaintj' by the voice of the Divine
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Spirit speaking within us (Ro 8"). In 1 Jn 5»-" tlie meaning of this witne.ss is drawn out in fuller detail. Christ's coming was by water (baptism) and blood (the Cross). But these historic facts must be brought into personal relation with every life, or they have no reality for that life. It is the Holy Ghost who does this. He teaches every man to know that new life has come to him because Christ accepted His mission and died upon Calvary. 'There are three who bear witness, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood ' (v."). This witness is Divine (v."); every one can test it in his own heart (v.'°)j and it consists of the po.ssessinn of eternal life through the Son (v."). But the witness of the Holy Spirit to Christ is not confined to this inward conviction. It appears also in the bestowal of charismatic gifts on the faithful (He 2*), especi- ally that of preaching, which exists only to testify to Jesus (Rev 19'°), and in the fulfilment by Christ of Scriptures in which the Spirit has spoken of Him (He 10» ; cf. 1 P 1").
The consistency with wliich the NT writers dwell upon tliis varied testimony of the Holy Spirit to Christ is remarkable. Modern preaching has not yet fully recovered this note, but there is an increas- ing sense of the need of it, and the results of evan- gelistic work, especiallj' in the foreign mission field, are daily illustrating its meaning in the life of the Church.
Lttkrature. — H. B. Swete, The Holy Spirit in the NT^ London, 1909 ; D. W. Forrest, The Authority of Christ, Edin- burgh, 19U6, cli. vii. C. T. DiMONT.
WOE. — The word oi'a( (LXX equivalent for mk and 'in) occurs freely in the LXX, in the Book of Enoch (esp. xciv., c), and in the Gospels, but is found only twice in the Epistles (1 Co 9'" — 'Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel,' and Jude ", where a reference is made to the false teachers in the Church — ' Woe unto them ! for they went in the way of Cain,' i.e. as men in the wrong, entertain- ing a murderous hostility towards tlie lovers of truth. The idiom here is the familiar one of prophetic denunciation — 'Woe be to.' The sense in 1 Co 9'^ is 'Woe is mine,' i.e. 'Divine penalty awaits me ').
In the Apocalypse, the word is used followed by the accusative in Rev 8'*. The solitary eagle flying across the sky cries with a great voice, 'Woe, woe, woe, for them that dwell on the earth ' (the threefold woe possibly corresponding to the three plagues yet to fall upon the earth). The idea here is hardly that of denunciation, but of ominous announcement. Similarly in Rev 12'= (where the accusative instead of the dative is again used) — ' Alas for the earth and for the sea.' oi)o( introduces each section of the three-fold dirge of lamentation uttered by the mourners of fallen Babylon (Rev IS'"- '«■ '") and is followed by the nominative— the broken construction suggesting the emotion of the mourners.
oval is used in Rev 9'" 1 1'* as a feminine substan- tive ('woe,' 'calamity') indicating the disasters following the blowing of the last three of the seven trumpets. The first woe is the plague of tormenting locusts ; the second is the slaughter wrought by the fiery horses and their angel riders ; the last is ajiparently the final overthrow of Satan and the completed destruction of the wicked in the drama of 12-20. H. BuLCOCK.
WOMAN.— The position of woman in any .section or period of society is a recognized test of the con- temporary level of morality and general enlighten- ment. Apostolic Christianity need not fear this test. In fact, the exaltation of womanhood is justly claimed as one of the best examples of what Christianity has done for the world. Doubtless
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this feature of its inlluence has often been exagger- ated, either by jiiuntiiig too darkly the vices of paganism or by nej;lecling the actual limitations of historical Christianity. We must certainly beware lest we take the sixth Satire of Juvenal as descriptive of the character and conduct of women in general in tlie 1st cent, of the Koman Empire. ' At the worst, these vices infected only a comparatively small class, idle, luxurious, enervated bj' the slave system, depraveil by the example of a vicious court. . . . Both the litera- ture ami the inscriptions of that age make us acquainted with a very different kind of woman ' (S. Dill, Boman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius", p. 87). Nor must we forget that the just rights of married women were much more fully recognized by Roman law than by the ecclesiastical law which replaced it: 'it is by the tendency of their doctrines to keep alive and consolidate the former [proprietary disabilities of married females], that the expositors of the Canon Law have deeply injured civilisation' (H. S. Maine, Ancient Law, new ed., 1907, p. 163; cf. EBr^^ xxviii. 783). J. Donaldson (one of the editors of the Ante-Nicene Christian Library) indeed went so far as to say that ' in the first three centuries I have not been able to see that Christianity had any favourable effect on the position of women, but, on tlie contrary, that it tended to lower their character and contract the range of their activity' (CR Ivi. [1889] 433). So far as this somewhat questionable judgment is sound, it relates to the asceticism of the Church subsequent to the Apos- tolic Age. The Pauline ' asceticism' springs from a different source, i.e. the expectation of a rapidly approaching end to all earthly things. This is an important fact to remember, for the attitude of apostolic Christianity to woman is largely due to the interaction of two distinct principles— the fundamental Christian assertion of the intrinsic worth of human personality, and the eschato- logical foreshortening of the time, which could not fail to hinder the social application of the former principle.