would have given still more for the history of the Syrophenician woman's daughter, for that is the only recorded case of mercy granted by Christ to a Gentile,1 and is therefore the one fact by which his readers would be most powerfully affected. He did not give it, because he had never heard of it. It belongs to the last stage of St. Peter's memoirs, which never reached the West till the Gospels were written.

But though there was no conscious selection of what was proper, the inevitable pressure of circumstances and locality must unconsciously have moulded the development. St. Matthew's Gospel, being built up in the East, deals with the inferiority of the Law to the Gospel, the fulfilment of Scripture in Christ, the guilt of the Jewish nation for crucifying Him. It thus justifies and explains the destruction of Jerusalem, which was the one event of Providence which demanded explanation with the Jews.

If I wanted to describe the special features of this Gospel, I should call it the proclamation of Christianity amid the ruins of the Holy City. The catechists, who gradually shaped it, had the coming destruction before their eyes, and it was not finally written until that destruction was an accomplished fact.

St. Luke, on the other hand, felt very slightly the pressure of this terrible tragedy. A Gentile himself, whose work lay amongst Gentiles, he could view with comparative equanimity the events which were so overwhelming to his neighbours. For him the universality of the Gospel, and its applicability to all ages and nations, to the poor, the sick, the lost, the dying, was the essential thing. Brought up under St. Paul, he teems with the Pauline spirit. And though he delights to colour his page with. details of Jewish ritual and Semitic thought, he does so with the feeling of an artist, and not because he cares for such trivialities in themselves. His Gospel is the gospel of humanity.

But if St. Matthew's Gospel and St. Luke's show traces of progress in spiritual and intellectual understanding, St. John's does so sevenfold. His open

ing verses reveal a depth of knowledge to which St. James never attained. Not that St. James would have contradicted them, or doubted their truth. But it is one thing to see truth when it is

1 The centurion's servant (Matt. viii. 5-13; Luke vii. 1-10) was probably a Jew, and the centurion himself was certainly a proselyte.

set before you; it is another to set it forth yourself. There is such a thing as latent knowledge. The grander the truth, the more simple and obvious it is when once enunciated; but for all that it is long in coming. "The Spirit divideth to every man severally as He wills."

I suppose no one now would hold that the Gospels were written in a state of ecstasy; that the evangelists, scarcely conscious of what they were doing, held the pen whlle the Holy Spirit directed it. Such crude conceptions of inspiration are not favoured by Mr. Halcombe nor by any other competent observer of the facts. We agree that the inspired writers give what they had learned. I hold that they had learned it after a long search. I believe that St. John's ideas are clear, because they are the product of a life of thought. Christ's speeches, as he records them, must not be regarded as verbatim reports, made as it were by the help of a shorthand writer. What Christ really said, was, I maintain, often simpler and briefer. The thought is Christ's, the clothing of it is St. John's. The cast of the sentence, the choice of words, are not seldom the evangelist's contribution. This is proved by a strongly marked style and a peculiar vocabulary, not to be found in the Synoptic writers. The speeches and the narratives had been turned over in his mind and reproduced in his oral teaching for a generation. they acquired some new polish, some fresh illustration. He had repeated them, till he did not sharply distinguish between the original saying and the inspired commentary. Indeed, these are perpetually mixed up. Sometimes we can see the distinction, but oftener it eludes us; so completely is the interpretation blended with the text.

Every year

This process demands time. Mr. Halcombe holds that St. John's Gospel was completed, published, and received as canonical a few weeks after the author had been blindly asking, "Lord, dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” I, on the contrary, require at least several decades of experience, meditation, and prayer for the education of the greatest of the evangelists.

I do not believe that it was easier to write a gospel than to write an epistle. I deny that the one was a mere effort of memory, the other the product of thought. And, therefore, I cannot admit that St. John when he followed St. Peter about as a dumb companion,2 never to our knowSo he invariably appears in Acts iii.-viii.

2

ledge opening his mouth, was engaged in composing or had already completed and was known as the author of those weighty chapters which have in many respects given us a nobler conception of Christ than we can gain from any other source, and have done more to solace the sufferer than the other evangelists put together.

If Christ Himself during His period of humiliation grew in wisdom as perceptibly as He grew in stature, and needed thirty years' meditation, study of Scripture and prayer before He broke silence, much more did His youthful servant need experience and training before he commenced to write. Pontius Pilate or Caiaphas might have given us a life of Christ, which in many respects would have been fuller and more correct, historically and legally, than what the evangelists have given. We should value such a document highly for critical purposes, but it would not have been a Gospel. And why? The consecrated thought would not have been there; the sympathetic insight, which we define as inspiration, would not have discerned the treasure which should bless ages unborn.

It is impossible to separate St. John's Gospel from his first Epistle. To say that the Epistle was written as a preface to the Gospel is perhaps going too far, but the two works teem with the same ideas, and can hardly have been written at very different epochs. Now the tone of the Epistle is sad. It speaks of antagonism. The struggle against opposing forces is constant and severe. But in the first years of Christianity the apostles were triumphant. The people magnified them. The attempts of the rulers and the Sadducees to crush them failed because they were the heroes of the hour. Their converts were numbered by thousands. They carried everything before them. The Master's triumphant return was their daily expectation.

A

In a few years this state of things began to change. St. Stephen was martyred by a mob acting under lynch law. A general persecution followed, and the brethren were scattered. little later, Herod Agrippa I. slew St. James the son of Zebedee. This brutal murder brought him so much popularity, that he resolved to strike a blow at the ringleader, St. Peter. It was long before the Roman authorities were aroused, but they were aroused at last, and then the outlook was black indeed.

Now if St. John wrote, as Mr. Halcombe says,

in the earliest days of Christianity, he would have been more or less than human, if his writings had not reflected the triumph of the moment. They must have been inspired with hope and the sense of coming victory. But, on the contrary, they are permeated with gloom, and with the feeling that though not crushed or capable of being crushed, yet the revelation of Christ in many quarters was not making way. And this is true of the Gospel as much as of the Epistle. Look, for example, at the use which St. John makes of that word, "the world" in both of them. It is not a new word. St. Mark uses it twice; St. Luke three times in his Gospel and once in the Acts of the Apostles. SS. Peter, Paul, Matthew, James, and the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews employ it still more frequently. But with St. John it is a keyword. He repeats it twenty-one times in the Epistle, seventy-eight times in the Gospel. And its meaning has been deepened. St. Luke spoke of all the kingdoms of the world. St. Paul teaches that the world by nature knew not God. But with St. John the kingdom of the world is the antithesis of the kingdom of God. Ignorance has been succeeded by active hatred. No compromise is possible. "We are of God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one." This is the result of ripe experience. This is a sign that the power of Rome was stirring itself. Tertullian thought it impossible for the Roman emperors ever to become Christian. His opinion was the natural, if too literal, deduction from the teaching of St. John.

Again, the fulfilment of Scripture by Christ was an engrossing study in the first ages. It was the subject of endless discussion with the Jews. But it was not merely a weapon to confute or persuade them it was one of the strongest means of establishing the Christians themselves, both Jews and Gentiles, in the faith. St. Peter began. the investigation on the day of Pentecost, and it was continued not only in the East, as St. Matthew's Gospel testifies, but by St. Paul in his Epistles, by St. Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, in St. Peter's First Epistle, and in the Epistle to the Hebrews. St. John draws attention to four fulfilments, which are not expressly noticed else where. They all relate to the passion, and all occur in the nineteenth chapter. (1) They parted my garments among them, and upon my vesture did they cast lots. (2) When I was thirsty, they

gave me vinegar to drink. (3) A bone thereof shall not be broken. (4) They shall look on Him whom they pierced. St. Mark knows nothing of these fulfilments. Some of them, especially the third, are so recondite that they are not likely to have been discovered in the primitive times.

St. John not only gives the incident of the drawing of a sword and cutting off the high priest's domestic servant's ear on the night of the arrest, but says that St. Peter committed the outrage and Malchus suffered it. If both men were dead, there could be no harm in publishing their names. Otherwise some trouble might be apprehended, or why did the Synoptists suppress the information?

The

St. John, after completing his Gospel, added another chapter by way of supplement. object was to correct a false opinion which was current, that his own exemption from death had been predicted by Christ. If he felt death to be drawing near, we can understand his anxiety to remove a stumbling-block from the faith of his friends. But if he wrote immediately after the Ascension, what time had there been for the rumour to spread, and what probability that it was not correct? It was an inference, an extension, of Christ's words, but at least a very reasonable extension. Lapse of time alone was showing it to be false, and lapse of time alone justified St. John in interpreting so positively our Lord's obscure words respecting St. Peter. For the prophecy, "When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest; but when thou shalt be old, another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not," does not on the face of it point to martyrdom. Only after St. Peter's death could St. John have unreservedly explained it so. Again, look for a moment at the form of the sentence: "This spake He, signifying by what death He should glorify God." How unnatural to write thus of the departure of your dearest friend, if he was still by your side. How natural if the severance had taken place five years or upwards. There is joy for the comrade who has entered upon his rest, thankfulness that the fiery trial has ended in triumph, regret that such honour should be denied to himself. Here is a typical specimen of St. John's style. The simplest words teem with the deepest meaning.

It appears from v. 2, vii. 2, xi. 18, xviii. 40, and other passages, that the Gospel was written for foreigners and persons unacquainted with Jewish customs and Jewish topography. It cannot, therefore, have been written in the first days when St. John himself lived in Jerusalem, and almost the whole of the Church was resident in that city. Indeed, if written then, it would most certainly have been written in Aramaic.

It is objected that if St. John wrote after the destruction of Jerusalem, he ought not to have said, "There is in Jerusalem at the sheep (gate), a pool . . . with five porches." "There was" would have been the necessary word. No doubt the five porches were destroyed, and the pool filled up with the rubbish. But St. John had never visited the city since its destruction. He may not have known the full extent of the demolition. It was natural for the old man to picture the scene as he remembered it in happier days. It is characteristic of great age to live in the distant past. I cannot regard this as an insuperable difficulty.

The theory of inspiration which underlies the views advocated in this paper, may seem to some people subversive of belief. I have not found it So. It may make belief more difficult, but it seems to be more in accord with the facts, and therefore in the long-run preserves faith by preventing a conflict with reason.

God's way of revealing Himself is never exactly what we should have expected. He chooses to employ human agents with all their weakness and liability to make mistakes. Inspiration quickens their spiritual perception, but does not altogether preserve them from errors of fact.1 Christ might have written down His own message for us on some sheets of vellum which could have been legible to this day. Nay, the phonograph might have been invented before the fulness of time came, that we might still have for ourselves the Sermon on the Mount in the very tones with which it was delivered. But by granting none of these things, God seems to warn us against putting our trust in the flesh. After all, we are not saved by the Gospels, but by Christ.

1 See, for example, Matt. i. 9, 11; Mark ii. 26; Luke ii. 2; John xii. 3; Acts v. 36, vii. 16.

(To be continued.)

by speaking or writing proclaims the gospel in the world, then an absolute inactivity, an absolute silence, would be man's only attitude towards evangelical truth. Who then would know truth? Who would believe in it? What progress would it make amongst men? How are they to believe if they do not hear? said Paul. Contrast with this the picture of true Christian activity, and its results. We have to take our place in this universal work.

II. We have been made in order to help
on the truth.

Are we to take our places amongst those witnesses and workers for the truth? Must we not leave it to those whom God has elected and prepared for so glorious a ministry? True, there are those who have been chosen in order to accomplish some great work, and God has equipped them well. In particular, we have the example of Paul. There are those again who have been set apart in order to accomplish a work, if not great, at least special, such as the minister, the missionary, the evangelist. All are not so called. But it is nevertheless true that each of us is called to the honour of serving the truth.

God has given us a measure of intelligence,-it is that we may understand the truth and explain it to those who do not understand it (children, the ignorant, etc.).

God has given us speech-not fluent, you may say, not eloquent. Your speech is, however, sufficient to express your joy or grief, your desires and your fears. Why should it not be sufficient to utter God's truth? This speech that is always busy in keeping up a kind of interchange between us and our neighbours ought to put into this interchange the truth.

God has given us health, strength, skill, etc. God has given us this world's blessings. Let us say, then, we have got health, strength, etc., only for the truth.

From this point of view, how great is the life of the humblest amongst us! He is a fellow-worker with St. Paul and even with God Himself!

Have we reached to this high and holy calling?

III. Often, instead of helping the truth,
we hinder it.

This third part might be an application, and, as it were, the peroration already begun.

Firstly, There is such a thing as indifference to truth.

There are people who say, like Pilateat any rate their behaviour speaks for them-What is truth? They do not care to know it for themselves, and they do not care to let it be known. They use their faculties, powers, time, etc., in the service of their own self-interest, vanity, or pleasure; but as for the truth, who thinks of it?

Secondly, There is the indifference which leads to a kind of hostility. He who is not for us is against us. One is a stumbling-block when one is not a help (for instance, a Christian professing to believe, and living an inconsistent life).

Conclusion, If it is so with any of you, you use your power against the truth.

Peroration, It is a fraud. For all you have got of power you have received for the sake of the truth.

It is a wrong done to men, for you were made to communicate the truth to them.

It is folly, for you give up the high dignity God has designed for you.

Repent, therefore, and strive to answer more faithfully to the purpose of God.

Do it in order to obey God; do it that you may be useful to your fellow-men; do it as disciples of the Saviour of men.

SECOND SCHEME.

This would be a practical exegesis-a paraphrase of the whole chapter-in order to explain ver. 8, and to see the character of the apostle, who did not seek for his own things but for the truth.

There were people in Corinth who were disputing Paul's apostolic authority, and who, when he threatened the guilty ones with his severity, pretended that he was powerless. You wish me to give you proofs of my authority and apostolic power? I will do it assuredly. I am weak like Christ, but like Christ and with Christ I shall show you that I am strong. Paul is certain of his power in Christ, but this power he possesses only for the truth; it is for him a means to the end which is truth. This truth is the Gospel received and lived-the power of redemption, regeneration, salvation. This is what Paul strives. after. He cannot pursue any other aim.

To demonstrate his power, he does not wish. That would be proving that the Corinthians were in fault. He would then be an enemy of the truth. That is impossible to him-it would be