the ages of the ages). Amen.' This is not quite the language that one human being would be justified in using of another. Easterns do use what to us are extreme figures of speech, but neither John, nor Paul, nor any of the most mystical of Christian writers or members of the Christian Church of whom we have ever heard or known anything, have permitted themselves an indulgence in such a form of speech as is here found, because they have felt that the words could apply to the Lord Jesus, and to Him only, in their full sense, and that applied to a merely human being they would be unreal and mischievous.

III. Having completed my remarks on the Epistles of St. Paul, I now come to those of St. Peter. I am bound to admit that the two Epistles of Simon Peter do not bear upon their faces any of the direct, or indirect evidences to the personal divinity of Christ,' such as are to be found in the Epistles of St. Paul. I have no doubt in my own mind—but this is, of course, subjective evidence, and ought to be taken only for what it is worth-that Peter' did really believe in the Divine nature of his Lord; but that belief does not come out in vivid unmistakeable phraseology in his writings, as it does in the writings of St. Paul. Simon Peter's references to our Lord dying, or suffering for sin ; to His bearing our sin on, or to the tree; the phraseology by which he refers to Jesus, phraseology which the modern humanitarian would never dream of using, were it not already supplied to his hand; and the entire tone of his Epistles,-carry with them, to me at least, an irresistible suggestion that the man who wrote them was writing, not of a brother man, born under 'the law of sin and death,' an imperfect, fallible, sinful creature, but of a Divine Being, who had entered into the conditions of our humanity, and who was Lord of all men, as no mere man is or can ever be. St. Peter, unlike his brother Paul, was not a great theologian, while much of the phraseology he used was determined by the fact that he was the apostle of the circumcision, or to the Jews, even as St. Paul was the apostle of the uncircumcision, or to the Gentiles. Possibly, had their official positions been reversed, their language would have differed.

The general Epistles of St. James and St. Jude are next in order of time. To those who desire to study these Epistles carefully and exegetically, I would most strongly recommend Dr. Plumptre's notes on them in the 'Cambridge Bible for Schools.' That divine is a most scholarly, sober, Christian man; of no particular school in the Established Church, but full of generous sympathy with truth wherever it may be found, and far too thoroughly grounded in Biblical and other knowledge to speak or reason flippantly or inexactly. Dr. Plumptre treats exhaustively the question of the relation between the Second Epistle of St. Peter and the Epistle of St. Jude, and to his remarks I refer my readers.

112. In ver. 1 of St. Jude's Epistle, he speaks of those who are called, as not only beloved in God the Father,' but as 'kept for Jesus Christ;' in ver. 4, of Jesus Christ as 'our only Master and Lord,' or, the only Master and our Lord Jesus Christ; and in ver. 21, the persons to whom the apostle is writing are not only besought to keep themselves in the love of God, but to 'look for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.' I find myself unable to understand how a Jew, believing in every fibre of him in Jehovah as One, could use language of this kind of a mere man, without feeling that he was treading upon dangerous ground, and subjecting himself to the imputation of forgetting the eternal distinctions between the Creator and the

creature.

113. With respect to the Epistle of St. James, just as there is no controversial element in it, such as appears, for example, in Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews, so there is no special reference to the writer's belief as to the divinity of his Lord. In the opening verse he speaks as 'a servant (or bond servant) of God, and of the Lord Jesus Christ.' In 5th chap., vers. 10, 11, he refers to the prophets who spake in the name of the Lord,' and to what he calls 'the end of the Lord,' in the case of Job, 'the Lord' in the New Testament being uniformly a phrase referring, not to God as God, but to Jesus Christ. One fails to see how 'the prophets could speak in the name of the Lord,'

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or in what way the Lord could be associated with Job's case, if He had no existence prior to His appearance on earth, if, indeed, He were only a man, sharing our common nature, and of like passions with ourselves.

Modern critics-whether in the Christian Church, or out of it— are agreed that the Epistles of the New Testament bearing the name of John were written by 'the beloved disciple.' I would refer such persons as are interested in the authorship of what is called 'the Revelation of St. John the Divine,' or the Apocalypse, to the Speaker's Commentary on the New Testament, vol. iv. p. 405, in which they will find a most elaborate introduction to the 'Revelation' by Dr. Lee, Archbishop King's Lecturer in Divinity in the University of Dublin. The learned professor comes to the conclusion that the writer of the Apocalypse was the Apostle St. John, and that the Apocalypse and the Fourth Gospel, together with the three Epistles which bear St. John's name, were written by one and the same author. This question of authorship is also discussed in Ellicott's New Testament Commentary, vol. iii. p. 523; in Sear's Fourth Gospel (Boston: Noyes & Co).; and in Westcott on the Canon of the New Testament.

114. (1 John i. 1–4.) The paragraph is too long for quotation. But it will be seen that the writer is referring not to an ideal, not to an abstraction, but to a person, who had been heard, and seen, and handled. The writer is thinking of the Eternal Life which was with the Father. This Eternal Life, he says, was manifested to himself and to his brother disciples. In the manifestation was life, the life, the Word of Life, to which he would bear witness, and show, by this word of testimony. God was like the Word of Life (or Word), that very Word they themselves had known, and which brought them into fellowship with itself, and with the Father, which gave them fulness of joy, and which joy he desired that those to whom he wrote should share. Now when John wrote these words, and gave forth these teachings, what was his thought of the personality of his Master? It may be said that I have arrived at a foregone conclusion, and therefore that my witness is of little value. Let me then introduce

to you the witness of a well-known American Unitarian divine, himself a believer in the humanitarian theory, but who makes a most remarkable admission. In A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, by the Rev. W. R. Alger (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1878), that learned divine says (p. 301): As for ourselves, we do not see how it is possible for any unprejudiced person, after studying the Fourth Gospel faithfully, with the requisite helps, to doubt that the writer of it believed that Jesus pre-existed as the Divine Logos, and that He became incarnate, to reveal the Father, to bring men into the experience of true eternal life. St. John declares this in his First Epistle in so many words, saying, 'The living Logos, the Eternal Life, which was with the Father from the beginning, was manifested unto us ;' and, God sent His only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him.' It is evident, from what follows after this quotation, that Mr. Alger himself does not suppose that the doctrine thus set forth by St. John was really entertained and taught by Jesus Himself; but that does not diminish the value of the testimony which the writer gives to the actual teachings of the apostle. In the same volume, at p. 315, Mr. Alger says, in expounding St. John's doctrine: Christ was the Logos, who, descending from His anterior glory in heaven, and appearing in mortal flesh, embodied all the Divine qualities in an unflawed model of humanity, gathered up and exhibited all the. spiritual characteristics of the Father in a stainless and perfect soul, supernaturally filled and illumined, thus to bear into the world a more intelligible and effective revelation of God the Father than nature or common humanity yielded, to shine with regenerating radiance upon the deadly darkness of those who were groping in lying sins, that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.' So much for the evidence of a most capable opponent. To quote the 'indirect evidences' in St. John's Epistles to the 'personal divinity of Christ,' would be to quote more than half their contents. He says that 'our sins are forgiven us for His name's sake; that to deny the Son is to be without the Father, to confess the Son is to have the Father; that Christ was

manifested to take away sins while in Him was no sin; that the Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil; that every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God, and that the spirit who denies this coming is the true anti-Christ; that the love of God was manifested in sending His only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him, and that the Son was sent to be a propitiation for our sins,—that, in fact, the Son is our Advocate with the Father; that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world; that none overcome the world but those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God; that God has given us eternal life and that this life is in His Son, so much so indeed that he that hath the Son hath the life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life ;' while he ends his First Epistle by saying, ' And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.' That is to say, as I understand it, that Jesus Christ is 'the true God,' in opposition to all the false gods of the heathen world, and hence St. John adds, 'My little children, guard yourselves from idols.'

115. There are no special 'indirect evidences' in the Second and Third Epistles of St. John, but the teachings in them respecting the Lord Jesus are in perfect harmony with those which are to be found in the First Epistle; and, taking the three Epistles jointly, I find myself shut up to the conclusion that the writer of them did not for one moment believe in his Master as a simple human being, born as we human beings are, but that He was the Eternal Son of God, descended from heaven, manifesting and revealing to us God, the Eternal Father. It may be said, it will be said by most modern Unitarians, that St. John was mistaken.' I do not, of course, believe for one moment that he was; on the contrary, I think he was a far more competent witness to the personality of his Lord than we ourselves are, and that it is more reasonable to believe with him, than to reject his teachings.