John's Gospel in connexion with the knowledge attributed to John the Baptist

477 Note IV.—On the relation of the words, 'The Lamb of God,' to the Passover, and to the passage in the 53d chapter of Isaiah 479 Note V.—On the objections to a revision of the Scriptures 481 Note VI.—Extract from Gregory of Nyssa 484 Note VII.—On the resurrection of the body and the judgment-day 484 Note VIII.—Comparison of the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount with that in the 8th chapter of St. John 488 Note IX.—On the doctrine of Atonement—Scotch and English divinity 492 Note X.—On corporate holiness 498 Note XI.—A translation of John viii. 2 501

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DISCOURSE I.

THE JEWISH FISHERMAN, THE CHRISTIAN DIVINE.

[Lincoln's Inn, Septuagesima Sunday, January 20, 1856.]

St. John I. 1.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

An eminent man, who died not long since in Germany, was wont to divide the life of the Church into three periods. That before the Reformation he called the Petrine; the three centuries since the Reformation, the Pauline; one he maintained was at hand, which would last to the end of this dispensation—that he named the Johannine. The classification is perhaps too ingenious to be true; and there are many reasons why we ought not to treat all the years before the sixteenth century as belonging to the same division. Nevertheless, there is something in the observation concerning St. John which has commended itself to minds of a very different order from his who put it into this shape. Some have supposed that St. John is to displace the earlier writers of the New Testament, because his teaching is more profound, or more charitable, or more simple than theirs. Some suppose that he was especially appointed to explain, unfold, bring out into their fullest light, all that previous Prophets and Apostles had presented under different aspects, in forms suitable to their own times and circumstances. Wide as this difference is, both may agree that the writings of St. John, much as they may have been studied hitherto, deserve a fresh and a more earnest study. Both may hope that if they have been intended for the illumination of our days, the meaning of them may come forth to us with greater clearness than it did to our forefathers; not because we are wiser than they, but because a larger experience, perhaps an experience of more intense doubt and ignorance, may make us more ready to welcome the divine interpreter, and less eager to anticipate his discoveries by the conclusions which ask to be corrected by them.

There are three books in our canon which we attribute to St. John, besides the two short letters to Gaius and the Elect Lady. Of these, his Gospel appears to me a perfect summary of Christian Theology, his First Epistle of Christian Ethics, his Apocalypse of Christian Politics. I do not despair of seeing even this last book come forth, out of the hands of soothsayers and prognosticators, as a real lesson-book respecting the dealings of God with the nations, respecting the method and the issues of His righteous government. The craving there is in the minds of men for a faithful history of the past, which shall be also a faithful guide to the future, will surely be satisfied some day; this book may teach us how it shall be satisfied. It requires even less faith to expect that when we are tired of speculations about the maxims and principles of morality, which do not make our morality better, while yet their very failure convinces us that there are principles which we did not create and which must bind us, we may turn to an old and simple document, which sets forth the commandment that has life—which tells us what the end of our existence is, what has deranged it, how each man may recover all that he has lost, and be what he was created to be.

I had thought at first that these Bible ethics might be more suitable to a congregation of men, busy in the world and valuing higher maxims only as they can test them by their application to its daily occasions, than what I have called by the more imposing name of Theology. I should have acted upon that thought if I had believed that St. John's theology was of that stamp which has made the word agreeable to schoolmen, offensive to those who would turn words into acts. If theology is a collection of dry husks, the granaries which contain those husks will be set on fire, and nothing will quench the fire till they be consumed. It is just because I find in St. John the grain which those husks sometimes conceal, for which they are sometimes a substitute; it is just because theology in his Gospel offers itself to us as a living root, out of which all living powers, living thoughts, living acts may develop themselves; it is just because there is nothing in him that is abstract, because that which is deep and eternal proves itself to be deep and eternal by entering into all the relations of time, by manifesting itself in all the common doings of men; it is therefore, I believe, that he makes his appeal, not to the man of technicalities, not to the school doctor, but to the simple wayfarer, and at the same time to the man of science who does not forget that he is a man and who expects to ascertain principles only by the honest method of experiment.

To all such, I am sure, the careful study of the fourth Gospel will prove of unspeakable worth and interest. A preacher may do much to hinder such study; he may also do something to promote it. He will hinder it if he seeks to make texts give out a sense which he has first put into them. He will hinder it if he seeks to stifle any doubts which the words themselves may excite; any that are suggested by the contradictions of the world, and the perplexities of the reader's own mind. He will hinder it if he breaks the continuity of the narration by taking a passage here and there to inculcate a particular moral, without considering how it is related to the passages that precede and that follow it and to the general