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world's treatment of Christ. The world is to be reproved, or convicted, in respect of sin, because it does not believe on Christ, an extraordinary assertion to make, if 'sin' is to consist in not believing on a fellow-creature.

30. (John xvi. 13, 14, 15.) Howbeit, when He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth, for He shall not speak of Himself, but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak, and He will show you things to come. He shall glorify me, for He shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you. All things that the Father hath are mine, therefore said I that He shall take of mine and shall show it unto you.' Unhappily we are so familiar with these words that their great significance does not readily or deeply strike us. But the more they are pondered, in connection with other words used by our Lord, with regard to Himself, of the Father, and of the Holy Spirit, the more will it be seen that common modesty, if nothing else, would have prevented our Lord from using them if He had known at the very same time that He was a man only, standing upon the merely human plane, and in no respect superior in nature to the persons to whom He addressed Himself.

31. (John xvi. 28.) 'I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go unto the Father.' If these words do not teach the pre-existence of the Son of God, we must despair of getting any intelligible meaning out of them.

JUST 'BY THE Way.'

The more one studies such a subject as this, and the more one reads what has been written on the divinity of Christ, or His humanity, the more one is constrained to feel, with a growing intensity, that what we believe about Christ's personality must inevitably and always affect our understanding of the four Gospels. You may deny the authenticity of this and the genuineness of that portion of the Gospels; you may relegate the miraculous element in them to the region of fairyland,' as

these words, and similar ones, in consistency with his theory; or he may doubt or deny that such words were ever uttered by our Lord. But if he believes them to have been uttered, one would like to know by what fair canon of exposition the Lord's words can be made to yield any doctrine short of His own personal divinity.

26. (John xv. 14.) 'Ye are my friends if ye do whatsoever I command you.' No human friendship ever existed upon such a basis as this. No one human friend would ever dream of making his friendship with another depend on his obedience to him. The very essence of human friendship depends upon equality, while the friendship would disappear instantly if one friend claimed such superiority over the other as to insist upon the entire obedience of that other.

27. (John xv. 23, 24.) 'He that hateth me hateth my Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other man did, they had not had sin; but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father.' This is saying, perfectly plainly, that to see and hate Christ is to see and hate God. But the one result does not follow by natural consequence from the other, if Christ is only a creature, and not divine.

28. (John xv. 26.) 'But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceedeth from the Father, He shall testify of me.' Christ here asserts that He has the power to dispose of the Spirit of God: 'I will send Him unto you.' Take what theological ground one may as to the personality of the Holy Spirit, this at least is evident, that our Lord here makes a claim which it would be simple blasphemy for one who knew himself to be a creature to make.

29. (John xvi. 8-11.) 'And when He is come, He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of sin, because they believe not on me; of righteousness, because I go to my Father, and ye see me no more; of judgment, because the prince of this world is judged.' (Read the more correct rendering of these words in the Revised Version.) The significance of the advent of the Holy Spirit all turns upon the

world's treatment of Christ. The world is to be reproved, or convicted, in respect of sin, because it does not believe on Christ, an extraordinary assertion to make, if 'sin' is to consist in not believing on a fellow-creature.

30. (John xvi. 13, 14, 15.) Howbeit, when He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth, for He shall not speak of Himself, but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak, and He will show you things to come. He shall glorify me, for He shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you. All things that the Father hath are mine, therefore said I that He shall take of mine and shall show it unto you.' Unhappily we are so familiar with these words that their great significance does not readily or deeply strike us. But the more they are pondered, in connection with other words used by our Lord, with regard to Himself, of the Father, and of the Holy Spirit, the more will it be seen that common modesty, if nothing else, would have prevented our Lord from using them if He had known at the very same time that He was a man only, standing upon the merely human plane, and in no respect superior in nature to the persons to whom He addressed Himself.

31. (John xvi. 28.) 'I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; again I leave the world, and go unto the Father.' If these words do not teach the pre-existence of the Son of God, we must despair of getting any intelligible meaning out of them.

JUST BY THE WAY.'

The more one studies such a subject as this, and the more one reads what has been written on the divinity of Christ, or His humanity, the more one is constrained to feel, with a growing intensity, that what we believe about Christ's personality must inevitably and always affect our understanding of the four Gospels. You may deny the authenticity of this and the genuineness of that portion of the Gospels; you may relegate the miraculous element in them to the region of fairyland,' as

Matthew Arnold does; you may doubt whether some awkward phrase, which will not square with your theory of His simple humanity, was spoken by Him; you may, in fact, pick and choose your way through these narratives, taking what is consistent with your notion, and rejecting all that is against it. But in doing so, you have, as a result, not the Christ which the four Evangelists have given us, but an eclectic Christ, the Christ of your own arbitrary making. I do not in the least deny your right to do this kind of thing, but I must be allowed to say that you ought to tell us plainly how much of the four Gospels you receive, and how much you reject, and the grounds upon which you proceed. I believe the twofold doctrine of the verbal infallibility and plenary inspiration of every word of the four Gospels to be unproved and unprovable. But it is not necessary to hold such a doctrine in order to be able to extract, by perfectly fair means, the doctrine of Christ's personal divinity from the Gospels. The theory that has prevailed for so many ages, that 'the Holy Ghost guided the sacred penmen in every Alpha, every Omega, every Iota, they formed upon the scroll,' is gradually being given up by all scholars, orthodox and heterodox alike. But what remains after criticism has done its work most exactly and most honestly, does not take away from us, but leaves us intact such statements made by our Lord respecting Himself, and of Him by others, as cannot be made to harmonize with the humanitarian theory. That theory may be the correct one, although I for one do not believe it is, but that it is the theory honestly deducible from the four Gospels I do not and cannot believe.

32. (John xvii., whole chapter.) Of the exact time when, and the exact place where, the contents of this chapter were first of all uttered, we cannot speak absolutely. But the speaker was the Lord Jesus, the form of speech was a prayer, a prayer addressed to a Being whom He called 'Father,' and whom He described as 'the only true God.' The chapter divides itself

into three parts, the first relating to the Father and the Son, the second to the Son and His immediate disciples, and the third to the Son brought into relation with others in the future, through the instrumentality of those disciples and their successors. I cannot pretend to give the faintest outline of what Frederick Denison Maurice calls the 'Prayer of the High Priest,' what others have called the 'Consecration Prayer;' but to those who are interested in studying the letter, that they may arrive at the spirit beneath the letter of this chapter, I would recommend Maurice On the Gospel of St. John, page 411; Neander's Life of Christ (Bohn's edition), page 446; Plummer On St. John, in the Cambridge Bible for Schools series, page 307; Ellicott's New Testament Commentary, vol. i., page 521; the Speaker's Commentary on the New Testament, vol. ii., page 236; and last, although by no means least, dear old Matthew Henry On the New Testament (Liverpool edition of 1860), vol. i., page 1149. Almost any one of these would be sufficient, with our devout and careful thought and personal experiences, to help us through this marvellous chapter, this absolutely unique prayer, the prayer of an exile returning home, of a father for his children, of a brother for his brethren, of a shepherd for his sheep. I do not know how the prayer may present itself to the consciousness of another, so well as I know how it presents itself to my own; but I find it not only difficult, but simply impossible to believe that Jesus of Nazareth could have offered such a prayer as is here ascribed to Him, if He at the same time believed and knew Himself to be simply human, human in birth, human in nature, human in passion, human in temptation, human in death' (Positive Aspects of Unitarian Christianity, 2nd edition, page 133). Is the possession of 'eternal life' conditioned not only by the knowledge of 'the only true God,' but also of a human being? Of what human being could it ever be said, 'I have glorified Thee on the earth, I have finished, or, having finished the work Thou Such a statement is in strange contrast with what the best and truest who have ever lived on this earth have felt and expressed. Greg, in his Enigmas of Life, says, 'The

gavest me to do'?

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