very strong presumption in its favour. The onus probandi rests with those who would impugn its genuineness, and nothing short of the fullest and most decisive marks of spuriousness can fairly be considered sufficient to counterbalance this evidence.

As I proceed, I hope to make it clear that, allowing their full weight to all the difficulties (and it would be foolish to deny the existence of difficulties) in this gospel, still the internal marks of authenticity and genuineness are so minute, so varied, so circumstantial, and so unsuspicious, as to create an overwhelming body of evidence in its favour.

But before entering upon this investigation, it may be worth while to inquire whether the hypotheses suggested by those who deny the genuineness of this gospel are themselves free from all difficulties. For if it be a fact (as I believe it is) that any alternative which has been proposed introduces greater perplexities than those which it is intended to remove, we are bound (irrespective of any positive arguments in its favour) to fall back upon the account which is exposed to fewest objections, and which at the same time is supported by a continuous and universal tradition.

We may take our start from Baur's theory, for he was the first to develop and systematize the attack on the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel. According to Baur it was written about the year 170. The external testimony however is alone fatal to this very late epoch; for, after all wresting of evidence and post-dating of documents, it is impossible to deny that at this time the gospel was, not only in existence, but also received far and wide as a genuine document; that it was not only quoted occasionally, but had even been commented upon as the actual work of St John. Consequently the tendency of later impugners has been to push the date farther back, and to recede from the extreme position of this, its most determined and ablest antagonist. Hilgenfeld, who may be regarded as the successor of Baur, and the present representative of the Tübingen school (though it has no longer its headquarters at Tübingen), would place its composition about the year 150; and Tayler, who a

few years ago (1867) reproduced the argument of Baur and others in England, is disposed to assign it to about the same date. With a strange inconsistency he suggests, towards the close of his book, that its true author may have been John the presbyter, though John the presbyter is stated by Papias (who had conversed with this John, and from whom all the information we possess respecting him is derived) to have been a personal disciple of our Lord, and therefore could hardly have been older than John the apostle, and certainly could not have been living towards the middle of the second century.

This tendency to recede nearer and nearer to the evangelist's own age shows that the pressure of facts has begun to tell on the theories of antagonistic criticism, and we may look forward to the time when it will be held discreditable to the reputation of any critic for sobriety and judgment to assign to this gospel any later date than the end of the first century, or the very beginning of the second.

But meanwhile, let us take the earliest of these dates (A.D. 150) as less encumbered with difficulties, and therefore more favourable to the opponents of its genuineness, and ask whether a gospel written at such a time would probably have presented the phenomena which we actually find in the fourth canonical gospel. We may interrogate alike its omissions and its contents. On this hypothesis, how are we to account for what it has left unsaid, and for what it has said?

Certainly it must be regarded as a remarkable phenomenon, that on many ecclesiastical questions which then agitated the minds of Christians it is wholly silent, while to others it gives no distinct and authoritative answer. Our Lord's teaching has indeed its bearing on the controversies of the second century, as on those of the fourth, or of the twelfth, or of the sixteenth, or of the nineteenth: but, as in these latter instances, its lessons are inferential rather than direct, they are elicited by painful investigation, they are contained implicitly in our Lord's life and person, they do not lie on the surface, nor do they offer definite solutions of definite difficulties.

Take, for instance, the dispute concerning the episcopate. Contrast the absolute silence of this gospel respecting this institution with the declarations in the Epistles of Ignatius. A modern defender of the episcopate will appeal to the commission given to the apostles (John xx. 22, 23). I need not stop here to inquire to what extent it favours his views. But obviously it is quite insufficient by itself. It would serve almost equally well for an apostolically ordained ministry of any kind, for a presbyteral as for an episcopal succession. Is it possible that a writer, composing a gospel at the very time when the authority of this office had been called in question, if a supporter of the power of the episcopate, would have resisted the temptation of inserting something which would convey a sanction, if an opponent, something which would convey a disparagement, of this office, in our Lord's own name?

Or, again take the Gnostic theories of emanations. Any one who has studied the history of the second century will know how large a place they occupy in the theological disputes of the day; what grotesque and varied forms they assume in the speculations of different heretical teachers; what diverse arguments, some valid, some fanciful, are urged against them by orthodox writers. Would a forger have hesitated for a moment to slay this many-headed hydra by one well-aimed blow? What can we suppose to have been the object of such a forger, except to advance certain theological views? And why should he have let slip the very opportunity, which (we must suppose) he was making for himself, of condemning the worst forms of heresy from our Lord's own lips? It is true that you and I think we see (and doubtless think rightly), that the doctrine of God the Word taught in St John's Gospel is the real answer to the theological questionings which gave rise to all these theories about æons or emanations, and involves implicitly and indirectly the refutation of all such theories. But it is only by more or less abstruse reasoning that we arrive at this conclusion. The early Gnostics did not see it so; they used St John's Gospel, and retained their theories notwithstanding.. A forger would

have taken care to provide a direct refutation which it was impossible to misunderstand.

Or, again: about the middle of the second century the great controversy respecting the time of celebrating Easter was beginning to lift up its head. For the latter half of this century the feud raged, bursting out ever afresh and disturbing the peace of the Church again and again, until it was finally set at rest in the fourth century at the Council of Nicæa. Was the festival of the Lord's resurrection to be celebrated always on the same day of the week, the Sunday? Or was it to be guided by the time of the Jewish Passover, and thus to take place on the same day of the month, irrespective of the day of the week? Each community, each individual, took a side in this controversy. Unimportant in itself, it seriously endangered the existence of the Church. The daring adventurer who did not hesitate to forge a whole gospel would certainly not be deterred by any scruple from setting the matter at rest by a few strokes of the pen. His narrative furnished more than one favourable opportunity for interposing half a dozen decisive words in our Lord's name: and yet he abstained.

Thus we might take in succession the distinctive ecclesiastical controversies of the second century, and show how the writer of the Fourth Gospel holds aloof from them all: certainly a strange and almost incredible fact, if this writer lived about the middle, or even in the latter half, of the century, and, as a romancer, was not restrained by those obligations of fact which fetter the truthful historian who is himself a contemporary of the events recorded!

But if the omissions of the writer are strange and unaccountable on the assumption of the later date of the Gospel, the actual contents present still greater difficulties on the same hypothesis. In the interval between the age when the events are recorded to have taken place and the age in which the writer is supposed to have lived, a vast change had come over the civilized world. In no period had the dislocation of Jewish history been so complete. Two successive hurricanes had swept

over the land and nation. The devastation of Titus had been succeeded by the devastation of Hadrian. What the locust of the first siege had left the cankerworm of the second had devoured. National polity, religious worship, social institutions, all were gone. The city had been razed, the land laid desolate, the law and the ordinances proscribed, the people swept into captivity or scattered over the face of the earth. 'Old things had passed away; all things had become new.'

Now let us place ourselves in the position of one who wrote about the middle of the second century, after the later Roman invasion had swept off the scanty gleanings of the past which had been spared from the earlier. Let us ask how a romancer so situated is to make himself acquainted with the incidents, the localities, the buildings, the institutions, the modes of thought and feeling, which belonged to this past age and (as we may almost say) this bygone people. Let it be granted that here and there he might stumble upon a historical fact, that in one or two particulars he might reproduce a national characteristic. More than this would be beyond his reach. For, it will be borne in mind, he would be placed at a great disadvantage, compared with a modern writer; he would have to reconstruct history without those various appliances, maps and plates, chronological tables, books of travel, by which the author of a historical novel is so largely assisted in the present day.

And even if he had been furnished with all these aids, would he have known how to use them? The uncritical character of the apostolic age is a favourite commonplace with those who impugn the genuineness of the canonical Scriptures, or the trustworthiness of the evangelical narratives. I do not deny that the age (compared with our own) was uncritical, though very exaggerated language is often used on the subject. But obviously this argument has a double edge. And the keener of these two edges lies across the very throat of recent negative criticism. For it requires a much higher flight of critical genius to invent an extremely delicate fiction than to