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men with the constellations of the Lion, Virgin, Scales and Scorpion. He certainly adduces some curious similarities between the properties which were supposed by the astrologers to belong to these four signs and those which are shewn by the horsemen. In the same way he interprets the mysterious woman of chapter xii, who, clothed with the sun and with the moon under her feet and crowned with the twelve stars, gives birth to a child, as the central sign of the Virgin, and suggests that one form of interpretation of Isaiah's words 'Behold the Virgin shall conceive, etc.' was that this great constellation, thought of, of course, as a divine or angelic being, would be the mother of the Messiah. Those who are interested in these speculations will certainly find Boll suggestive. I do not say that they will find him convincing.
Hitherto even the little evidence we have found has been mainly concerned with astrology itself and not with that popular and loosely connected product of astrology, the planetary week. The ordinary student of the New Testament, who is not likely to discover for himself the subtleties of Boll and Lepsius, would probably say that there is no trace to be found in it of any knowledge of the planetary cycle. Yet, apart from these possibilities and some others which I shall suggest from the Epistles to the Galatians and Colossians, there is one momentous fact in the history of the Church which deserves at any
