SERMON VI.

THE TRINITY DISCLOSED IN THE STRUCTURE OF ST. JOHN'S WRITINGS.

PREACHED ON TRINITY SUNDAY.

JOHN, XX. 31.

These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

N these words the Apostle John declares the main object

IN

of his Gospel. His first and principal Epistle is stated to have been written with the same view, expressed in nearly the same words: "These things have I written unto you... that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God" (1 John, v. 13). And in his other chief contribution to the volume of inspiration, his Book of Prophecy, where that Son of God Himself stands forward in his own awful personality, the similar purpose of the whole is scarcely less distinctly impressed. The one solemn proclamation begins in the first and ends in the last chapter, as though it were the key-note of the entire" I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last!”—marking the sameness of His eternal being and agency through the long succession of revolutions the book records, and in this brief expression of the divine omnipotence of the Messiah, drawing, as it were, the moral of it all. The SON OF GOD, then, His everlasting existence, His inherent dignity, His unbounded power,—the Son of God, implying in the term a nature which was one with God (for Christ Himself and the Jews, uncontradicted by Christ, identified the claim of a divine Sonship with the claim

of a divine naturea),--the Son of God, in His high and peculiar relation as such, is the special subject which, in the dispensation of the Spirit, seems to have been eminently committed to the Evangelist St. John. Through the other Gospels the Saviour moves in the mournful majesty of His humiliation; here, though there is much of humiliation, there is more of power: they love to enlarge on His blessed relations to earth; this Apostle, to proclaim his mightier relations to heaven. As we read St. Matthew or St. Luke we might at times forget that in the humble Teacher of Galilee we listen to the awful sharer of the divine eternity: with St. John the manhood seems almost lost in the fulness of the God. While the Christ of his pages "speaks as never man spake," we feel as if the words alone were human that clothe these divine thoughts, as if the veil of our adopted nature were all too feeble to hide the Deity that kindles into glory behind it. Jesus of Nazareth is the speaker, but the voice is charged with the echoes of eternity. The ear may catch the accents of a man, but the awed and fearful heart is listening to "the Word of God," who is "with God" and "is God;" to "the only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father;" to "the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty!"

In this remarkable arrangement, which has made the last of the Evangelists the most explicit unfolder of the whole mystery of Christ's essential Godhead, we seem to see one of the instances of that law of progressive revelation which so strikingly marks the entire construction of the Bible. It was, perhaps, expedient that the Church at large should be trained by simple faith and the practice of His pure and beautiful morality into fitness for the more transcendent truths which His higher discourses involved. She was first to be taught habits of dependence, humility, sincerity, and love; all pre-supposing, of course, a general knowledge of the facts of Christ's divine nature and earthly career, but resting, as yet, for their ordinary motive and habitual meditation, less upon the former than the latter

division of this great mystery; and when thus practically versed in the life of faith, she was to rise into the more awful region of spiritual truth, to learn a profounder lesson in the story of that Being with whom we are so wondrously connected, to be taught the nature and depth of the communion we are entitled to hold through Him with the very source of life, to see at length the foundations of the Christian temple as they lie deep in the very nature of God, and to find every ordinary rule and maxim of the Faith assume a yet sublimer character when viewed as all springing from the tremendous truth, that He with whom we are one is yet more deeply one with God. And even though this master-truth had been taught as frequently as it is taught really and unequivocally by St. Paul, we can easily conceive what new illumination must have brightened round it when, in addition to the affirmations of His disciples, the discourses of the divine personage Himself were given to the Church; when His own claims were heard transcribed from His own lips, and introduced by the declaration— the clear, simple, undeniable message of the Holy Ghost—that the Word made flesh was no other than the very and eternal God.

But in thus revealing, in all its fulness, the twofold nature of Christ,-in displaying Him (in the words of the text), as at once Jesus in His manhood, the Son of God in His deity, and Christ in His office which is the result of both,-other and wider truths are necessarily involved. The nature of Christ is a point from which a far-stretching view opens into the whole nature of God. This divine Son comes from heaven to reveal the will of a divine Father; and He comes empowered and qualified by a divine Spirit. And thus St. John, in being the preacher of the deity of the Son, becomes inclusively the preacher of the deity of the Father and the Holy Ghost. It will now be my object to exhibit to you the manner in which this great doctrine of the threefold God, with its practical relation to ourselves, forms the substance of the writings of St. John; how they seem all framed in it as in a mould; how they perpetually suppose it, not alone directly (which to some minds would, perhaps, be less impressive), but silently, in their in

most structure, and in a way which could not be interpolated unless his whole writings be an interpolation; and thus to manifest the profound truth of the Text, that "these things were" indeed "written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God;" the Son of God, and thence Himself divine; the Christ, and thence the anointed of a divine Spirit.

We open, then, the GOSPEL of St. John. It commences (as you all remember) with a solemn exposition of the divinity of the Word and Son of God, considered in His immediate relation to the deity of the Father, and as commissioned to represent His unapproachable glory in the world of time and sense. It is "the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father;" He is "the only-begotten Son which is in the bosom of the Father, and hath declared Him." Here, then, are two persons of this mysterious conjunction; their distinct agency, their mutual relation. But in the influences of the second a new power is discovered, which all Scripture assigns to a third agent: "He hath given power to become the sons of God to them which are born of God;" the same gift which this Apostle elsewhere terms being "born of the Spirit," and another describes as involving "the Spirit of adoption." And thus, in this brief preface, the Father, the Word made flesh, the inworking Spirit proceeding from both, are shadowed before us; the opening prologue presents a summary of the whole majestic drama which follows.

For, this being solemnly premised, the record itself begins. Now, the point I wish you to observe is, the distribution of the doctrine imparted through the rest of this Gospel; the very divisions of the subject recognising the great fundamental truth on which we rest this day; and naturally arising in a mind previously impressed with this presiding idea.

The divine sovereignty of the Father being everywhere understood, Christ presents Himself to enforce His own claims as the Son of God, through nearly the entire of twelve or thirteen successive chapters. He is now the prominent figure; His connexion with the Father; His mysterious prerogatives thence arising; the power and glory of the kingship He inherently possesses as God, and has won to Himself as man;

these are the topics, with scarcely an exception (such as a few verses of the discourse with Nicodemus, where the alteration is plainly incidental), that engage the recording pen of the Evangelist. In the fifth and sixth chapters, more especially, Christ speaks in a tone of dignity which seems to centre in Himself the whole power of the Godhead. All seems (in comparison) to disappear from the scene except the Second Person, and His claims to unbounded fealty as the sole dispenser of every blessing from His Father to man. He alone is visible between us and heaven; in Him light, and life, and salvation; beyond Him clouds, and desolation, and darkness.

At length the hour arrives when He must leave the scene He had so long almost exclusively occupied. Accordingly, His prominence as the main object of the record gradually lessens; but exactly in proportion as it lessens, a new occupant fills the field of view. Christ, simply as Christ, is, in His turn, almost lost in the glory of "another Paraclete" who is "to abide" with the Church of God" for ever." Thenceforth to the close of His teaching, it is this Being who is the principal object disclosed to the spiritual anticipation. It is now not Christ who is "the truth," but "the Spirit of truth;" it is not Christ now who teacheth, but "the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, He shall teach you all things;" it is not Christ now who testifieth, but "the Comforter shall testify of me;" it is not Christ now who reproveth the world, but" the Comforter," who "will reprove the world of of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment." In this portion of the book, exactly where the harmony of the doctrine would lead us to expect it, everything contributes to impress that this Being, working conjointly with the Father and the Son, is also to take rank with them as a distinct object of Christian knowledge and Christian devotion. And thus the threefold agency of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,— of the Father made known in the Son, and with the Son operative in the Holy Spirit,-forms the common plan and directs the successive topics of the whole.

We saw how the opening verses presented all this, as it were, in miniature; let us contemplate it once more reproduced at the close. The entire exhibition ef divine love, as