We might stop here and ask if the witness of a prophet thus prepared with character and learning to attest His deliverances would not be sufficient? But by the witness of this very prophet, Jesus, we cannot stop here. He was not only the single perfect man this world has seen since the visible gate of Eden was closed, but He was far more. The elements and the features of His life before men were perfectly natural, and yet a world in sin cries out with truth that so perfect a character must be supernatural; and Jesus agrees here with the world. Listen to this honest mind and heart in prayer to His Father at the supreme moment of His life: "And now, O Father, glorify Thou me with Thine own self with the glory which I had with Thee before the world was." "For Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world." Again, just as He ceases prayer, "All things have been delivered unto me of my Father; and no one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him." Again to the Jew, in whose Scriptures God had revealed Himself as the Eternal "I Am," and who bowed in reverential, though superstitious awe with mute lips before the very letters of "The Name," and to whom his forefather Abraham seemed to be on the horizon of time, the beginnings of the grace of God-to the Jew, Jesus most solemnly declared, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. They took up stones therefore to cast at Him"; but Jesus never modified the assertion. Nay, in all the variety of change, He makes the same assertion, and crowns all with the clear words in His last discourse with His disciples: "Ye believe in God, believe also in me." "If ye had known me, ye would have known my Father also: from henceforth ye know Him and have seen Him." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." And these words He stamps, with all the guarantee of His

character and inspiration, as the very words of His Father in Him; "How sayest thou, Show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in me? the words that I say unto you I speak not from myself; but the Father abiding in me doeth His works." This Jesus, the Son of God, "the effulgence of His glory and the very image of His substance, and upholding all things by the word of His power," gave the most striking illustration that "all things were made by Him. . . . . In Him was life; and the life was the light of men," when, in reference to that first creation of man by Jehovah God, who "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul," Jesus "breathed on His disciples and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Spirit."

Before this perfect character, this greatest, lowliest of all ethical teachers, this wondrous complex of man and God over all blessed forever, we bow in deepest adoration, and confess with Paul, that He "is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in Him were all things created, in the heavens and upon the earth, things visible and things invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things have been created through Him, and unto Him; and He is before all things, and in Him all things consist." Or, with John, we say: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." "No man hath seen God at any time; the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared Him."

These are the qualifications of Jesus Christ, "the faithful and true witness," for testifying upon that most important of all questions for sinful man, whom He came to save by the sacrifice of Himself, Where shall man find God speaking to him the words of eternal life? His answer is as clear as day.

The whole century, in part of which Jesus lived, is

filled by the testimony of two most competent Jewish witnesses to the Scriptures, which they held as distinct from all other books, because given by a succession of prophets through whom God spoke. Their Scriptures agree with our present Old Testament in Hebrew, barring the mere minutiae of criticism. From that century to this, these Old Testament Scriptures have come to us by two streams of transmission, (during fifteen centuries entirely dissociated from each other,) the Jewish and Christian. So that, if documentary testimony is of any worth, we know to what Jesus referred as "The Scripture,' "The Law," "The Law and the Prophets," "The Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms"; it was the identical collection of writings which we possess in the Hebrew Old Testament.

These Scriptures were, alike in all their parts, the word of God to Jesus. He mingles together the most diverse parts as equally valid history and proof. Take the twelfth chapter of Matthew, and there we find, 1 Sam. xxi. 3-6, Numb. xxviii. 9, 10, Lev. xxiv. 5-9, Hos. vi. 6, Jon. ii. 1, iii. 1-10, 1 Kings x. 1-10, directly quoted as all equally true; or, Matt. xix., where Jesus quotes Gen. i. 27, ii. 24, Ex. xx. 13-16, Lev. xix. 18, and Deut. xxiv. 1-thus running the whole scale of the Pentateuch, (which some learned men of the present day have decided is not the word of God): all quoted as God's words; or, Matt. xv., where Jesus asserts that Ex. xx. 12, xxi. 17, and Isa. xxix. 13, were all equally the word of God; or, Matt. xxiii. 35, Luke xi. 51, where He spans the extreme limits of the Hebrew Bible, by quoting Gen. iv. 3-8, and 2 Chron. xxiv. 18-22.

Or, consider John x. 34, 35, where Jesus calls the whole Old Testament the Law, the Word of God, the Scripture. "Is it not written in your Law, I said, Ye are gods? If He called them gods unto whom the word of

God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken)," etc. These words, written in their "Law," are found in Ps. lxxxii. 6, a Psalm of Asaph, and yet Jesus takes out those words, from what some now suppose to be an insignificant, post-exile composition, and makes them a touchstone for the whole Scripture which He declares "cannot be broken," the word of the omnipotent God.

This collection of writings, these Scriptures, were to Jesus an organic whole. They had one common teaching of the life of God in the soul of man; "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind." "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hangeth the whole law and the prophets" (Matt. xxii. 37-40; Mark xii. 29-31). "All things, therefore, whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them; for this is the Law and the Prophets." They also had one common supreme testimony, not to a shadowy hope, not to a mere human postulate of faith, but to a person, the Saviour, who should live and die and rise again for the salvation of man. "The Scriptures

are they which bear witness of Me." "Moses

these

wrote

of Me." "All things must needs be fulfilled which are written in the law of Moses, and the prophets and the psalms, concerning Me. . . . . And He said unto them, Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name unto all the nations."

Jesus has left us in no doubt as to the sense in which He understood the word of God; all these Scriptures had God for their author: John v. 38; x. 35; Matt. xv. 6; Mark vii. 13. Between the author and the result, the spoken and written word of God, there was, by Jesus' teaching, the free, perfect co-operation of God's chosen

servants. The type and example of all God's speaking through man, and so conveying the very words God would have spoken and written, is Jesus himself. He was the perfect Servant-not a mere pen, or flute, or mechanical intermediary-but the most commanding intellect of all the ages, at home in the solution of the subtlest problems of man's highest good, Himself free as the very mind of God, and yet He tells us many, many times that He spoke only what God commanded Him to speak. "My teaching is not mine, but His that sent me." "The word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father's who sent me." "I spake not from myself; but the Father, who sent me, He hath given me a commandment, what I should say and what I should speak. . . . . The things, therefore, which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto me, so I speak." And in the solemn rendering of the account of His life unto His Father in prayer, He recurs to this most free and happy service, "These things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them Thy word."

This reiteration of His own inspiration from God His Father, which covers His whole life, is the rule by which we understand what Jesus means when He says, it "was spoken of through Daniel the prophet" (Matt. xxiv. 15); "David in the spirit calleth Him Lord "; or when it is indifferent to Him whether He says "Moses said" or “God said," or when He merely quotes by the formula "It is written," which takes the impress of His meaning from His repetition of it thrice in the first great conflict of His life with Satan in the desert (Matt. iv., Luke iv.). He rested His soul with absolute confidence on the written word of God in that typical contest with the enemy of all souls, as He rested His soul on that word amid the cyclone of death in Gethsemane, the Prætorium, and on Calvary. Jesus is the perfectly qualified witness to the inspiration