to manipulate what comes to his hands. He gives it to us just as it came to him; so the Gospel according to Luke shows throughout the spirit of faithfulness to the truth, combined with a great deal of what you might call human interest, breadth of view, and love for humanity at large. To Luke Christ is the Light to enlighten the Gentiles, and all men are the objects of his saving and redeeming work. When Luke comes to paint the various apostles, he paints them with a human interest that is very well worthy of a master in the art.

Luke was not, then, a painter upon canvas, but he was a painter with his pen; and of all the pictures in the four Gospels that are given us of the life and work of Christ, there is not one that we should value more highly, that we should study more closely, from which we can get more benefit in our daily, spiritual life than we can from this Gospel according to Luke.

We have next Sunday the contrast to all this. I trust that a review of these four Gospels will bring to our minds what perhaps has never been brought before us so clearly before, the great variety that exists in these various pictures of the life and work of Christ; and the last of them, the Gospel according to John, the Gospel of the divinity, as this one to-day is the Gospel of the humanity, is in many respects the most sublime and most wonderful of them all.

G

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN

THERE were two brothers in the apostolic age, one of whom was the first martyr for the faith, and the other of whom lived on to the very end of the first century and died the very last of the apostles. Those two brothers were James and John. John and James were the sons of Zebedee. Zebedee was a fisherman of Bethsaida, in Galilee, a man well-to-do, apparently; for we are told that he had hired servants. Salome, his wife, perhaps after the death of her husband, was one of those women who followed Jesus in his preaching tours through Palestine and ministered to him of her substance.

John was known to the high priest, and it was he who afterward took care of our Lord's mother, according to his commands, until her death, as tradition relates; all of which is more easy to understand if we suppose that he was a man of some means, and more intelligible still if the tradition be true that Salome, his mother, was a sister of Mary the Virgin. In fact, John may have lived and studied in Jerusalem at the school of the rabbins long before his discipleship began. But we read of him first in connection with Andrew at the Jordan, where the Baptist is preaching. The great preacher of reformation points to Jesus, the Lamb of God, his Lord and theirs, and they all leave the Baptist and follow the Saviour.

It appears that John and James were admitted into

an intimacy with Christ enjoyed by no other of the apostles except Peter. These three we find in the inner chamber where the ruler's daughter lies dead, present at that wonderful exhibition of power in her resurrection to life; we find them on the Mount of Transfiguration, beholding the glory of Christ; we find them with our Saviour in Gethsemane, in the depths of his suffering; and Peter and John were among the very first witnesses of our Saviour's resurrection. At the time. that our Lord was apprehended in Gethsemane, John, with the other disciples, forsook him and fled; but he seems to have overcome his fears and to have made his way courageously to the judgment-hall. He was present during the trial of Christ; he was present during the crucifixion; there he received the Lord's command to take charge of his mother. He became from that time the adopted son of the Virgin, and he cared for her until her death.

Until the close of the narrative in the Gospels, and in the Acts as well, we find John always in company with Peter. He was at Jerusalem, as Paul tells us, at the close of his narrative, and was one of those who gave right hands of fellowship to the Gentiles; and, remaining in Jerusalem for twenty or twenty-five years after the death of Christ, he was engaged in ministering to the Jews or the Jewish Christians. When the apostle Paul ceased his labors and Peter had suffered. martyrdom, the great church at Ephesus and the other churches in Asia Minor needed apostolic supervision; and then, in the prospect of the destruction of Jerusalem, John left Palestine, went to Ephesus, and there remained until his death, which took place probably at

the very end of the century. It was 98 or 99, perhaps 100, before the apostle John died.

There was one interval, an interval of persecution, an interval of exile under Nero, about the year 67 or 68, when John the apostle was banished to Patmos, a wretched rock in the Ægean Sea, and there the Apocalypse was written and sent to the seven churches of Asia Minor; but with that single exception, John was a resident of Ephesus until he died.

The personal characteristics of the apostle John are exceedingly striking; and it is impossible to understand the Gospel unless we know something about the man. John had two remarkable characteristics. In the first place, he was a man of intuitive perception. He was not a man of logic. It has frequently been said that John never argues, he always affirms. John has all the natural predisposition of a seer. One might say he was a born prophet, as far as man can be born a prophet. By his natural temperament and organization he was fitted for the work of prophesying. The eagle, among the cherubic figures, has always been assigned to John as his proper symbol, the eagle that can gaze undazed upon the brightness of the sun, that can soar aloft higher than any other winged creature, and from that height can see the fish in the very depths of the sea. That was the description of John given by the church Fathers, and there is something very characteristic, striking, and correct in it all. John was a man of intuitive discernment, but he was a man of deep and ardent affections. That was the second characteristic. A man of fiery mind, a man of fiery zeal, great warmth, and fervor of temperament, he joined

to some of the very highest intellectual qualifications, the faculties of insight and of spiritual perception, the deepest and most ardent love. He was one who from his nature and fervid temperament was in danger of being biased. This warmth and ardor, if it is undisciplined and untrained, may make a man a mere partisan; and this warm temperament, these strong impulses, had to be checked and disciplined. You remember that when John and James were commissioned by Christ to precede him, as he was going to Jerusalem, and the Samaritans refused him a night's lodging, John and James thought it was quite a proper time for our Saviour to do as Elijah had done before him, and they asked, "Lord, shall we call down fire from heaven upon them?" It indicated the fiery indignation of these

two men.

Some years ago I asked my child how she knew the apostle John in the pictures. "Oh," she said, “I always know John because he has long hair and looks like a woman." I suppose that idea of the apostle John is very prevalent in the church. John is thought to be the disciple of love, and often love is thought to be weakness. How very different from that is the truth! Why, John and James were Boanerges, "sons of thunder." They were full of hot indignation against wrong. No weakness there. But that hot indignation was subdued, that warmth of temperament was disciplined by the rebukes of Christ and by the sorrows through which they passed, until at last John became the disciple of love. John in his last days was continually repeating, as the tradition relates, "Little children, love one another." Love is the solvent of all