scope of the Evangelist. He may promote it so far as he believes that he is a fellow-learner with those whom he is teaching; so far as he is convinced that the words of the Evangelist are clearer and diviner than any which he, of his own wit or by the help of inferior books, can put in their place; so far as he desires that his own eyes, and those of all students, may be purged that they may see what is actually in the words; so far as he believes that there is One who is above the words, above the writer of them, to whom they point, and from whom all the wisdom that is in them comes; so far as he trusts for himself, and encourages all to trust, that this Teacher wills us to come to the knowledge of His truth, and will withhold no help that we need in the pursuit of it. Beseeching the Holy Spirit of God to keep alive this temper in your minds and in mine, I would begin the examination of St. John's Gospel to-day, desiring, if God permit, that we may go through with it to the end.

When I talk of St. John as a Theologian, I adopt the title which was given to him at a very early time. In our own day that title has awakened a suspicion about the genuineness of this Gospel. He is spoken of by the other Evangelists as a fisherman mending his father's nets; as one of two Apostles whom our Lord called Sons of Thunder; as giving some warrant for that designation by desiring to call fire from heaven upon a Samaritan village; as showing signs of a special ambition by his prayer that he himself and his brother might sit one on Christ's right hand and one on His left in His kingdom; as exhibiting the sectarian and exclusive temper of his nation, by forbidding a man to cast out devils in Christ's name who did not follow with His Apostles. Was there anything in these early characteristics to prepare one for expecting that he would be the divine, not of a Jewish synagogue but of a Christian Church? True, he is spoken of as being present on the Mount of Transfiguration, and in the Garden of Gethsemane. On both occasions his eyes were heavy, like those of the other disciples, with the sight of glory and the sight of suffering. When others forsook and fled, he did so likewise. In the Acts of the Apostles he appears, no doubt, in a conspicuous position, but it is still expressly as a Jewish Apostle. If he is joined with St. Peter in healing the sick man, it is when they are going up to the Temple at the hour of prayer. He endures the reproaches and the scourges of the Sanhedrim. But after the preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles, we hear no more of him; he vanishes out of sight. St. Paul calls him one of the Apostles of the Circumcision, but alludes to him no further. When we meet with him again, not in the sacred record but in the mist of ecclesiastical traditions, there are reports of him as adhering to the Jewish observance of the Passover, as in some sense representing the dignity of the high-priest. How could we suppose from such intimations that he would open a Gospel with the words I read to you in the text, words which seem to intimate an acquaintance with heathen speculation, even with a high philosophy? Does that language belong at all to the simplicity of the first century? Is it not much more in accordance with the spirit of the next age, when plain narratives were combining themselves with curious speculations, and Christian teachers were introducing what they had learnt in the porch or the academy among the doctrines and the exhortations which had been uttered to fishermen on the lake of Tiberias or to the crowds who were gathered round the mount?

From what I said of my reasons for selecting this Gospel as a subject for discourses in the pulpit, you will anticipate part of the answer which I should give to these suggestions. If the Gospel is what those who make them, say that it is, they are right. If its theology is of an abstract, artificial character, compounded of elements drawn from all heterogeneous sources, let it be attributed to an age—I do not determine whether the second century was or was not such an age—in which an artificial habit of mind prevailed, in which system-building had become a profession. If there are no traces of such a disposition in the fourth Gospel,—if it is, in its language, in the construction of its sentences, in the style of its narrative, the simplest of all the Gospels,—then we may have good cause to think that it savours more of the fisherman to whom it has been for so many ages ascribed, than of the learned convert from some Gentile school, the ingenious blender of Jewish and Gentile dogmas, whom critics of this age have imagined to be its manufacturer.

I do not, however, desire to avoid a part of the inquiry which these remarks may not seem at first to meet. All the accounts of St. John in the New Testament, all that we can guess of him from other sources, certainly lead us to think of him as one whose mind had been cast in the Hebrew mould, who had learnt the lore of a child of Abraham, who had not, in the same sense that St. Paul did, thrown himself among the inhabitants of the Greek cities, and become as 'one without law, that he might gain those that are without law.' St. John's position in the city of Ephesus, during his latter years, does not affect the opinion that he was essentially a Jew. Jerusalem had fallen, or was about to fall; nowhere, perhaps, would he be more likely to find a colony of men attached to the customs of his forefathers than in that city. Confessedly, he had no part in founding its Church or converting its Gentile inhabitants; that had been St. Paul's work. And we may admit without scruple the evidence, imperfect though it be, that St. John in that city did preserve some of the characteristics of his childhood and of his education, even when the world to which those strictly belonged was passing away.

How do these admissions affect our belief that he was the writer of the sentences which introduce the Gospel that bears his name? I believe they strengthen that belief exceedingly. I can conceive nothing more thoroughly Hebrew than these sentences. I pass over the resemblance, which will strike you all upon this day,[1] between these verses and those at the commencement of the Book of Genesis; though the correspondence between their style and the style of Moses, is one of those internal correspondences which we feel the more strongly the more we reflect. But I would beg you to notice the essential difference between this kind of writing and that of any person who had been brought up in any school of philosophy whatsoever, whether one purely Greek, or where Greek and Hebrew elements were mixed as they were at Alexandria. Would you expect in such a person the broad, simple, assertive tone, 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God'? Would not the true philosopher try to vindicate his name by proving that he was a seeker after wisdom? Would not the false philosopher, if he were ever so much inclined to dogmatise, at least produce some plausible arguments in support of any statements which he advanced? Where, but in the writings of the Old and New Testament, do you meet with such an adventurous proclamation as this? Where, even in the Books of the Old and New Testament, do you meet with one that is quite a parallel to it?

And then look at the contents of the sentence. What have you been hearing of, all through the Psalms and the Prophets, but of God's word, which was to give Joshua courage, which David delighted in and fed upon, which was a fire in the heart of Jeremiah? On the surface of the Bible this language encounters you. I mean, that your eye cannot wander over a page without being arrested by expressions of the kind; you become so familiar with it that you forget the peculiarity of it. But if you stop for a moment to think, you will perceive that whenever the word