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 the exact place where, the contents of this all uttered, we cannot speak absolutely.

exact time when, and chapter were first of 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

I

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. 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 gavest me to do'? 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

labours of the ablest and most successful are so disappointing and unfruitful. If, at the close of life, we can say we have enjoyed much happiness and done some good, we shall have cause for deep gratitude and humble hope; but a sense of complacency, of satisfaction as of a part fulfilled and a work accomplished, can belong to no man who looks back over his course with a single eye, and in the light of an approaching change. The finer the spirit, the profounder the insight, the more unconquerable is this feeling of disappointment.' Exactly so, and yet, side by side with Mr. Greg's confession, which expresses with rare felicity the world-fact, put the words of our Lord in the fourth verse of this chapter, and they are either the words of 'conceit run mad,' or of conscious divinity. I am free to confess that such a prayer as this is degraded and insulted when we come to it merely for help to build up some theological system, or from which to borrow weapons for sectarian conflict; but I think we are warranted in so far drawing near to it, and allowing its own spirit to inspire us, as that we may be enabled to answer for ourselves the question as to the personality of Him who uttered it. Mr. Charles Beard, in Positive Aspects, says, 'There is a sense in which the question "What think ye of Christ?" is the deepest and most urgent question which theology can ask.' I have often heard it said that it mattered little what Christ's personality was, and that the chief matters were what He taught, and the possession of His spirit. Undoubtedly, if any man have not the spirit of Christ he is none of His,' a truth very much lost sight of amid all our un-Christian rivalries; but surely it is only the commonest sense to affirm that such a chapter as this will be variously viewed, and the impressions it makes will be of various kinds, according as we believe in the simple humanity, or in the divinity of its author. If it were competent for a mere man to offer such a prayer as this, there can be no antecedent objection to its being offered by any other eminently Jesus Christ could have no monopoly in such outpourings and petitions.

holy man.

33. After the utterance of the prayer just referred to, I think

our Lord went His way with His disciples to Gethsemane, while on the way He again warned Peter of his impending treachery. What has always been called 'our Lord's agony in Gethsemane,' is a subject about which those who feel the most will say the I have no desire whatever to lessen, rather I would bring out very distinctly, the intense humanity of that agony; but it has struck me for many years that the agony is to be accounted for far more reasonably by the theory that He who suffered was THE Son of God, clad in our human flesh, than the other and opposite theory that He was a man, simply and only a man. I do not mean by this that the scriptural account of Gethsemane will necessarily yield the divinity of Christ, but that it is more intelligible on that hypothesis than on the other. If it be said that divinity, that the divine nature cannot suffer, I say that the impassibility of the divine is a pure assumption, held to because it is too often necessary as a component part of some iron system of theology. If God is love, and if the divine love is in any manner or degree akin to human love, then there must be sacrifice in the divine nature, and wherever there is sacrifice there must be suffering, sometimes in one form, sometimes in another. To me, an impassable God is a simple monstrosity.

34. (John xviii. 33, 37.) I wish here to fasten particular attention on ver. 37. Would not any mere man, however richly endowed, however highly placed, be guilty of unpardonable arrogancy if he were to claim all the truth-loving, not merely as his brethren, but as his subjects? The Son of God, the Word made flesh, the truth as well as the wisdom and power of God, might very well do this; but not a mere human being, born under 'the law of sin and death.'

35. I readily admit that the Crucifixion and the Resurrection of our Lord are not, in themselves, any evidences of His divinity. That is to say, that the narratives which tell of these events cannot be fairly and necessarily made to yield any such doctrine. That He who was crucified, that He who was raised from the dead 'by the power of God the Father,' was the Eternal Son of God, veiled from us in flesh, I most utterly and