clear into and through intellect and emotions and will, right down into the depths of heart and love, clear out into every action of the life.

And John sweeps in the whole crowd of the world in the way he puts it here. Listen: "that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ." That was for the Jew peculiarly in the first instance. The Jew had been taught through generations that there was One coming who was God's chosen One for the Hebrew nation. He was the Anointed One. The Hebrew said Messiah. The Greek said Christ. Both mean the same, the One chosen of God, anointed by Him as the King and Leader of His chosen people, and through them of all the race.

Listen further: "that Jesus is the Son of God." That is for all of us, Jew and foreigner, insider and outsider. This Jesus is in a distinctive sense the Son of God, the only begotten Son. This pure loving pleading wooing suffering dying rising-again Jesus, this is the only begotten Son of the Father. All there is in a Father comes to, and is in, an only begotten son. This is God Himself coming to us in His Son.

Once let this sift into thought and heart, then who would not believe, and trust, and love, and fall on his face in the utter devotion of a voluntary slave before such a God!

And so believing, trusting, loving, touching, His life flows in and fills up and floods out. We have it now. That word eternal, used so often by John with the word life, is not a mere length word. It is not a calendar word. It tells the sort of life, the quality of life, that comes in through the opening door of our believing. This is John's back-door key, but it lets you clear in through the whole house.

Then there is the side-door key. It hangs at the side, a bit towards the back. It is in the Thursday night talk, as we commonly call it, that last heart-talk with the inner group on the betrayal night. It is in chapter sixteen, verse twenty-eight: "I came out from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go unto the Father."

Run through this Gospel with that fresh in your mind, and it is perfectly fascinating to find how much like a magnet it is, picking out to itself so many bits from the Master's lips that fit exactly into it. Jesus' constant thought was that He used to be with the Father; He came down on an errand to the earth. By and by when the errand was done He would go back home again.

This sentence becomes a simple, exact, comprehensive outline of the entire Gospel. Notice: "I came out from the Father": that is chapter one, verses one to eighteen. There Jesus is seen coming down from His Father's own presence. Then chapter one, verse nineteen through to the close of the twelfth chapter is fully described and covered by the next clause, "and am come into the world." Here He is seen in the world, in the midst of its crowds and contentions and oppositions.

"Again, I leave the world,"—chapters thirteen to nineteen. In chapters thirteen to seventeen He is tenderly leaving the inner circle. In chapters eighteen and nineteen He is going out of the world by the terrible doorway of the cross it had carpentered for Him. How quietly He says the words, though the terrible going is yet to come, and is now so near that He can already feel the shame and the thorns and the nails.

And as quietly He looks beyond and adds, "and go unto the Father." In chapters twenty and twenty-one He lingers a little for the sake of these being left behind, but His face is already turned homeward. They would hold Him in their midst. He quietly tells them that He is going back home to the Father to get things ready for them, as He had said.

He Comes to His Own.

The front-door key hangs right at the very front, outside, low down, where even a child's hand can reach it. It is in chapter one, verses eleven and twelve: "He came unto His own, and they that were His own received Him not. But as many as received Him to them gave He the right to become children of God, even to them who believe on His name." This is the great key, the chief key to this whole house. It flings the front door wide open and you are inside at once, and take in the whole of the house at a glance, one glance, one wonderful glance.

The first twelve chapters tell of Jesus coming to His own, His own nation, humanly, racially, His own chosen people. He is coming steadily and persistently, in spite of rebuffs; coming patiently, tenderly, earnestly; coming ever closer in the ever increasing measure of divine power seen in His actions.

And continually, persistently, He is being rejected and accepted. He is rejected silently and contemptuously, then aggressively and bitterly, viciously and murderously. "His own received Him not." But many received Him, eagerly and warmly and thoughtfully. They received Him with a growing depth of conviction and deepening tenderness of love. And as they come, He is ever receiving them, giving them that touch of new life that marks only the children of God.

In chapters thirteen to seventeen He is receiving into closer fellowship those who have received Him, and at the same time wooing them into yet closer touch. The story of the trial and crucifixion in chapters eighteen and nineteen, puts the most terrific emphasis on the words, "received Him not." They not only keep Him out of His own possessions, but do their worst in putting Him out of life. And the little book closes in its last two chapters with His receivers being received into the sweetest intimacies of tested triumphant love and into the inner secrets of rarest resurrection power.

This is the most heart-breaking of all of John's heart-breaking sentences. John had a hard time writing this Gospel of his. He was not simply writing a book; that might have been fairly easy. But he was telling about a friend of his, the friend of his life, his one dearest Friend. And when he remembers how they treated Him his eyes fill up, and his heart beats till it thumps, and his quill sticks into the paper in sheer reluctance to tell the story.

I think likely in the original manuscript, John's own first copy, the writing was a bit shaky and uneven here. The dew of his wet eyes drops and blurs the words a bit as he puts down, "He came to His own, and . . they who were His own . . received . . Him . . not."

One day a young student was crossing the quadrangles of one of the old Scottish Universities towards his quarters in the dormitory. He was not feeling well. His eyes had troubled him and made his work very difficult. On the advice of a friend he sought the judgment of an expert in the treatment of the eyes. The specialist made a very thorough examination and then informed the young student tactfully but plainly that he would lose his eyesight, surely and not slowly.

Lose his eyesight? A sudden terrific actual blow between his eyes could not have stunned his body more than this stunned brain and heart. Lose his eyesight! All his plans and coveted ambitions seemed slipping clean out from his grasp. With the loss of eyes would go the loss of university training, and so of all his dreams. Dazed, blinded, he groped his way rather than walked out of the physician's office.

His life was to be joined with another's. And now he turned his distracted steps towards her home, hungry doubtless for some word or touch of comfort for his sore heart. And he was thinking, too, that with this utter break-up of the future she must be told. And as he talked he said in quiet manly words that under these unexpected circumstances, and the radical change in his prospects, she must be free