stormy disputes are waged, is altogether unlike the synoptics both in matter and manner. Omitting much which they narrate, as the birth, the baptism, the temptation, the agony in Gethsemane, the discourses "on the mount," those concerning the second advent and earthly kingdom, and the clear precepts which "he who runs may read " in pithy saying or delightful parable; it gives us prolix harangues full of mystical talk, of self-analysis, and lofty pretensions; long prayers and wearisome controversies. Instead of a plain and simple story, it is an essay in which Jesus is merely a lay figure into whose mouth is put certain doctrines which had arisen about him through the intermixture of Hebrew and Greek speculation on Egyptian soil.

But the spirit of love that permeates it is the spirit of Jesus, and in such stories as that of his meeting with a woman of Samaria, the essence of his teaching is expressed in the words, "an hour comes and now is when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth : for the Father seeketh such to worship him. God is spirit; and they that worship, must worship in spirit and truth."

John is known to have lived for some years after the death of Jesus, and it may be that the germ of this gospel is in certain well-remembered sayings of the Master which the apostle in his old age, and perhaps with confused additions incident to lapse of time, repeated to men ignorant of current traditions in the other gospels, ignorant too of Jewish customs and places, who steeped what he told them in the thoughts of later times and of a foreign land, blurring for ever the portrait of Jesus of Nazareth.

INDEX.