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Gift of
Edward T.Root
19S3

ADDRESSES

ON THE

GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN

Delivered in Providence, R. I., at Eight Conferences held
bet'ween October 21, 1903, and May 11, 1904

WITH APPENDIX

THIRD T H O TJ S A. IST r>

PRINTED AND CIRCULATED
BY THE
ST. JOHN CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
PROVIDENCE, R. I.
1906 '

BINGHAM PAPER BOX CO.
PRINTERS
NEW LONDON, CONN.

PREFACE.

During the year 1902-3 a series of Saturday afternoon conferences for pastors,
addressed by Seminary Professors, ¦was held at the Y. M. C. A. Hall in Providence.
The subjects and speakers ¦were as follows : —
November 29, 1902. " The Unique Character of the Gospel of John "- Profess
or M. W. Jacobus, D.D., and Professor C. S. Beardslee, D.D., of Hartford Theo
logical Seminary.
January 31, 1903. "The Grace and Truth that came by Jesus Christ". (John
I : 17 and i : 14). Professor George B. Stevens, D.D., and Professor Frank K.
Sanders, D.D., of the Yale Divinity School.
March 7. "Johannine Antitheses". Professor Henry C. Sheldon, S.T.D.,
of the Boston University School of Theology.
April 1 8. "The Father, the Saviour, the Comforter". (John 14). Professor
William H. Ryder, D.D., of Andover Theological Seminary.
May 16. "That they all may be one". (John 17). President W. H. P.
Faunce, D.D., and Professor Henry T. Fowler, Ph.D., of Brown University.
Several of the above named Professors spoke in churches of the city on themes
in John's Gospel on the Sundays following the Conferences.
* Previous to this series of conferences many pastors in Rhode Island had
taken up this Gospel in the mid--vveek meeting of the church. Dr. Henry M. King,
Pastor of the First Baptist Church, of Providence, in introducing Professors
Jacobus and Beardslee at the first of the above mentioned conferences spoke as
follows concerning the experience of his own church the preceding year : —
"I have never had a year of such prayer meetings in all my ministry. The
attendance has been increased and an unusually large number of people have taken

*A series of monthly conferences had also been held in South-'Western 'Washington County, R. I.,
under the auspices of a Washington County Interdenominational Committee of which Rev. Alexander
McLearn, Pastor of the Seventh Day Baptist Church of Rockville, R. I., was chairman. The study of the
Gospel was begun on December 4, 1900 (Rockville), and completed July 24, 1901. Between these dates over
fifty conferences were held in fifteen different villages, three of these being held in Connecticut. Three
chapters were taken each month. The conferences were conducted and addressed by the local pastors,
assisted by the ministers of Westerly. Several speakers came from a distance, viz. ; Professor Frederick L.
Anderson, D.D., of Newton Theological Institution, Professor Wm. H. Ryder, D.D.,of Andover Theological
Seminary, Professor Charles F. Kent, Ph.D., of Brown University (now of Yale), Rev. L. L. Henson, D.D.,
and Rev. L. S. Woodwortb, of Providence.
Through the courtesy of the editors of the local papers, viz. : Hon. George H. "Utter of the Westerly
Daily Sun, Mr. Edward T. Spencer of the Hope Valley Advertiser, and Mr. John Larkin of the Hope Valley
Free Press, a series of " Talks on John's Gospel" had been published at frequent intervals, contributed to
by well known ministers of Rhode Island and other states. It had been hoped that this valuable series might
be included in the present volume, but the limits of space did not permit. A few of these articles, however,
of a nature supplementary to the Providence Addresses are printed in the Appendix (see pp. 444-480).
Those contributing to this series were the following; Rev. Edward Abbott, D.D., Rev. James Church
Alvoid, Rev. Wm. C. Bitting, D.D,, Rev. George A. Conibear, Rev. Samuel M. Dick, Ph.D., Rev. John
G. Dutton, Rev. Edward O. Grisbrook, Professor Doremus A. Hayes, Ph.D., S.T.D., LL.D., Rev. Dorr A.

iv PREFACE.
part. The people were very sorry when we completed John's Gospel, and some of
them would have been glad to go over the same course again. It has been a reve
lation of the deep things of God, and has stimulated our people to spread the truth
more and more. John's Gospel stands as the crowning Gospel, nearest the heart
of Christ. We have commended the work to others. There has been a continuity
about it which has been most profitable. It has been helpful in many ways. The
spiritual life of the church has been deepened and the sense of responsibility to win
others to the same knowledge of Christ has been increased. I want to commend
this as a system. We are now to take up John's Epistles in the same way".*
It has of course been a common practice for pastors to take up some one book
of the Bible consecutively in the mid-week meeting. Professor F. L. Anderson of
Newton had a most interesting experience with St. John's Gospel when pastor of
the Second Baptist Church of Rochester, N. Y. One chapter was taken each week.
The attendance was large, sometimes reaching 200. Each person attending was
requested to read the chapter at least once during the week and, if possible, once
each day. At the meeting attention would be concentrated on one or two of the
great themes of the chapter. Dr. Richards, of St. John's Church, Providence,
relates that some years ago Phillips Brooks told him that he began to lecture weekly
on St. John's Gospel the preceding fall, and that at the end of the winter was but
half through. Dr. Richards laughed at his slow progress, tried the experiment
himself, and at the end of the winter's lecturing found he had only reached chapter
seven ! Probably the most effective method, the one that would hold the greatest
interest of the greatest number, would be the more rapid one of a chapter a week,
or at any rate the completing of the Gospel during the church year, ^his plan
might be varied by taking, also, great themes of St. John occasionally at the
Sabbath morning or evening service.
The interest in the series of Saturday afternoon conferences mentioned above
was such as to warrant the suggestion of a more thorough-going effort the following

*Quoted from " The Polished Arrow ", organ of the Pawtucket Congregational Charch, which was
among the churches taking John's Gospel the current year.
Hudson, Rt. Rev. Frederick D. Huntington, S.T.D., D.C.L., LL.D., Rev. Reuben Kidner, Rev. Henry
M. King, D.D., Rev. Alexander McKenzie, D.D., Rev. Wm. W. McLane, Ph.D., D.D., Rev. Rennetts C.
Miller, Rev. James Lee Mitchell, Ph.D., Rev. Wm. J. Mutch, Ph.D., Rev. Frederic Palmer, A.M., Rev.
Arthur B. Patten, Rev. Edwin M. Poteat, D.D., Rev. C. A. L. Richards, D.D., Professor A. T. Robertson,
D.D., Rev. E. Talmadge Root, Rev. George W. Shinn, D.D., Rev. Reuen Thomas, D.D., Rev. Willard
Brown Thorp, Rev. Horace W. Tilden, D.D., Rev. James G. Vose, D.D., Rev. Wm. Hayes Ward, D.D.,
LL.D., Rev. Ernest G. Wellesley- Wesley, President Henry G.Weston, D.D., LL.D., Professor William C.
Whitford, A.M., Professor Irving F. Wood, Ph.D., Rev. S. H. Woodrow, D.D.
During the absence in Palestine of Professor James S. Riggs, D.D., of Auburn Theological Seminary,
who had consented to prepare for the pastors outlines on the Gospel, valuable outlines were prepared by
Professor Edward E. Nourse of Hartford Theological Seminary. Subsequently outlines were prepared by
Professor Riggs (76 pages), which were found exceedingly useful and stimulating by the churches using
them. Of these outlines Professor Beardslee has written these words: "They are the work of a steady
hand. In well-nigh every sentence a trained and tireless finger points straight at some problem or some
treasure among the many with which this book abounds. I know of no guide at once so handy and so sure
to shape the course of any honest and resolute explorer amidst the teeming wealth that here awaits and
rewards all intent research". Professor Hayes has also written as follows; " I am delighted with them.
They must be invaluable to beginning students of the Gospel according to John ; and mature students must
find much in them that is stimulating and suggestive. I should think that one who would master all the
outlines, answer all the questions, study all the topics for research, and read all the suggested literature might
well begin to feel like an expert himself, in this field. They are the helps which only a master could fur
nish; and we may all feel grateful for the work he has done for us". It is hoped that they may be published
by the author.
Papers were printed on individual chapters of the Gospel contributed by the following: Professor
D. A. Hayes, S.T.D., of Garrett Biblical Institute (Chapters); Professor Charles C.Camp, of Seabury

PREFACE. V
year. At the final conference, held on May i6, 1903, the following resolution was
adopted : —
" Whereas, The Gospel of John occupies a central and commanding position
among the New Testament writings, owing to its deep unfolding of the truths of
Christ and to its intimate disclosure of the heart and mind of the Master, and
"Whereas, These truths of Christ are the fundamental principles of Chris
tianity and the -very life blood of the Christian Church,
" Therefore, be it Resolved, That we do recommend to the churches of the city
and state special study of and work with this Gospel during the months of the
coming year in such ways as may commend themselves to the individual pastors.
We would suggest, as a central source of inspiration and suggestion, a series of
conferences to be held at stated intervals during the year, at which teachers and
preachers of the different denominations shall be asked to speak with the aim of
bringing strongly home to the hearts and minds of both ministers and people these
deep, vital truths so essential to the vigorous life and work of the church".
In accordance with this resolution a committee was appointed to have charge
of the conferences consisting of the following pastors of Providence and Paw
tucket : —
Rev. Carter E. Cate, D.D., Chairman, Rev. Arthur M. Aucock, Rev. Frank J.
Divinity School (Chapter 4); Professor Edward I. Bosworth, D.D., of Oberlin Theological Seminary
(Chapter 6) ; Professor F. L. Anderson, D.D. , of Newton Theological Institution (Chapter 12). The deepest
obligation was felt by the Washington County pastors to all who, in these various ways, so generously
assisted them.
The conferences were greatly enjoyed and the opportunity to listen to continuous expositions of large
sections of the scripture was appreciated. The verdict of those attending them was, *' We are glad to have
the ministers get behind the Gospel",
The following is a schedule of the local conferences held on Chapters 13, 14 and 15. Other places at
which conferences were held during the season were Shannock and Hope Valley, R.I. ; other pastors
giving addresses were Rev. L. F. Randolph, Rev. John M.Paige, Rev. Warren Dawley, Rev. F. C. Baker,
Rev. Wm. J. Sholar.

Laurel Glen, Conn., 1
IWednesday, April 17. 1
Carolina, E. I., 1
2Friday, April ig*. ]
Alton, R. I„ I
ITuesday, April 23. ]
Wood River Junction, R. I., i
IFriday, April 26.t (
Ashaway, R. I., j
2Friday, April 26. )
Hopkinton,R. I. , )
SSaturday, April 27. \
Rockville, R. I., j
ITuesday, April 30. )
Pendleton Hill, Conn., 1
IWednesday, May i. /
Miner'sMeetingHouse.Conn. )
ITuesday, May 7. \
WoodviUe, R. I., )
^Tuesday, May 7. )
Niantic, R. I., j
^Thursday, May 9. J
Dunn's Corners, R. I.. 1
SSaturday, May ri. )
Perryville, R. I., 1
^Sunday, May 12. )

Chapter 13.

Rev. E. P. Mathewson,
Rev. C. A. Burdick.
Rev. F. H. Decker.
Rev. C. A. Burdick.
Rev. E. P. Mathewson.
Rev. Alex. McLearn.
Rev. E. P. Mathewson.
Rev. C. A. Burdick.
Rev. Daniel Davis.
Rev. O. U. Whitford.
Rev. O. U. Whitford.

Chapter 14.

Rev. F. D. Luddington.
Rev. H. A. Cornell.
Prof. W.H. Ryder,D.D.
Professor Ryder.
Professor Ryder.
Rev. C. A. Burdick.
Rev. F. D. Luddington.
Dea. Edwin A. Lewis.
Rev. Horace Stillman.
/ Rev. Horace Stillman.
iRev. N.M.Mills.
Dea. Edwin A. Lewis.

Chapter 15.

Rev. W. D. Wilcox.
Rev. E. M. ¦Wilson.
Rev. John G. Dutton.
Dea. Geo. H. Utter.
Rev. E. I. Lindh.
Rev; Alex. McLearn,

Dea. Edwin A. Lewis,

Rev. E. M. Wilson.

* Sermon, evening. Rev. Wm. L. Swan, t Also brief address by Rev. Alexander McLearn.
lAfternoon. 2Aftemoon and Evening. SMoming and Afternoon (Seventh Day Baptist). 4Evening.
^Morning.

vi PREFACE.
Goodwin, Rev. John R. Brown, Rev. Archibald McCord, Rev. J. Francis Cooper,
Rev. Henry M. King, D. D.
Rev. T. H. Root (Alton, R. I.) was elected to act as Secretary.
Other committees were constituted as follows; —
Finance Committee — Hon. Rathbone Gardner, Chairman, Mr. A. B. McCrillis,
Mr. C. E. Hancock, Mr. Albert C. Day, Rev. John M. Lowden, Mr. J. Wm. Rice,
Mr. Geo. P. Peterson, Mr. H. E. Thurston, Mr. David Wilmot, Rev. A. E. Krom,
Dr. F. B. Sprague, Mr. C. R. Thurston, Rev. Robert Cameron, D.D., Hon. D.
Russell Brown, Rev. A. J Coultas, Mr. E. P. Metcalf, Mr. Wm. A. Walton, Hon.
C. C. Mumford, Mr. John F. Greene, Mr. F. O. Bishop, Rev. Robert B. Parker,
Mr. F. H. Fuller, Mr. Gideon G. Congdon, Mr. F. W. Marden, Dr. Albert L. Mor
rison, Mr. T. W. Waterman, Hon. N. W. Littlefield.
Publication Committee — Rev. Edward C. Bass, D.D., Chairman, Rev. T. E.
Bartlett, Rev. Levi B Edwards, Rev. M. S. McCord, D.D., Rev. George A. Conibear,
Rev. John J. Hall, Rev. H. C. Lowden, Rev. Wm. H. Durfee, Rev. T. F. Norris,
Rev. Warren Dawley, Rev. Clayton A. Burdick, Mr. A. B. McCrillis, Hon. N. W.
Littlefield, Mr. Herbert E. Drake, Hon. D. L. D. Granger, Mr. N. A. Westcott,
Mr. Edward P. Metcalf, Mr. Albert C. Day.
The programs of the eight Conferences held during the year 1903-4, giving
dates, speakers, subjects,* etc., will be found in the Appendix (pp. 487-492). Of
the fifty-four addresses delivered fifty-two are printed either in full or in part in
this volume. Two of the addresses are absent as the speakers were unable to
furnish manuscript. In arranging the Conferences it has been the purpose of the
committee that they should represent the consensus of the thought of the Church.
It has not been the purpose to introduce the controversial element. The committee
do not, of course, assume responsibility for any of the opinions expressed. The
value of the volume is much increased by the very complete analysis by Professor
Anderson and by the Suggestive Studies and References by Professor Beardslee,
both of which were prepared expressly for the Rhode Island pastors ; also by
several articles contributed to the series in the press (see note, p. iii. Preface). It is
believed that the Indices to Authors and to Texts will also add interest and useful
ness to the volume.
The Rhode Island churches appreciate very deeply the great service rendered
without remuneration by the Conference speakers. It was entirely on their part a
labor of love for the Gospel, and of desire to assist the Rhode Island pastors in this
work. The deep interest which followed the successive Conferences on the part of
the large audiences that gathered from month to month was a sufficient attestation
of the spiritual strength and scholarly power brought to the Conferences by men
of many types of mind and of various ecclesiastical fellowships. The following
words by the Providence correspondent of the " Watchman" were written immed
iately after the first Conference ; — " The speakers were men competent to instruct
as well as to kindle ardor for truth. No series of meetings in this generation in
Providence has so taken hold of the best minds in all churches. Teachers repre
senting the leading denominations come with their best thought to expound the
profound teaching of John", At the close of the series the following statement
was made by President Faunce of Brown University ; — " One of the most valuable
helps to the intellectual and religious life of the city of Providence during the past

* It will be observed that many of the great themes of the Gospel and very many of the secondary
themes have not been treated. Several of these were assigned either to professors or to ministers, but those
to whom requests were sent, were unable to respond because of engagements already entered into. The
volume by what it omits to do as well as by what it does will suggest the inexhaustible riches of this Gospel,

PREFACE. vii
year has been the series of really remarkable Conferences on the Gospel of John.
Seldom have we had in our city so many speakers of eminence on religious themes,
and never have we had more deeply interested audiences".
The Conferences were, to quote the words of Bishop Jaggar, a " manifestation
of the unity of the spirit in the bonds of peace ". Through many voices it was
the one church that spoke, and the consciousness of the one church was deepened
in the minds of all who attended. The Conferences bore signal witness to the
growing unity of Christians, and to the strength of united effort.
One familiar with St. John's Gospel will readily understand why it has been
chosen for special presentation in this way. The Gospel of St. John is remarkable
in its unity of structure, in its singleness of purpose in portraying Jesus as the
Christ, in the richness and profoundness of its teachings, and in its unique revela
tion of the personality and work of Christ. It is pervaded throughout by the
deepest spirit of poetry and is characterized by the deepest philosophic insight.
It speaks to the hearts and minds of all Christians, regardless of denomination or
theological outlook. Both liberal and conservative are one in their love of this
book. Testimony to its power, to the depth and clearness, the grandeur and
simplicity of its revelation of the Master is found in every age and in every body
of Christians. It is the most vital and vitalizing of the Gospels, preeminent in its urgent en
joining both of the "new commandment" as the organic law of the Christian
Church and also of the militant purpose of winning men to Christ. In it are found
not only the principles but also the methods for which the church in the present day
is so earnestly seeking as the means of a more vital and fruitful work. It throbs
intensely with the very heart of Christ. Meditation on and practice of its truths
are the only means by which the heart of Christ may become the heart of the
Church. It has been called the Theological Gospel because interpreting so deeply the
Person and Teachings of Christ ; the Evangelical Gospel because so intensely
permeated with the purpose that men may believe ;* it might also be called the
Ethical Gospel so lofty is its standard of Christian obligation in its insistence on
obedience to the commands of Christ and on the doing of the will of God. (It
was well said by one of the Conference speakers that a book would yet be written
on the Ethics of St. John's Gospel). It has its peculiar grip on the heart and life
because in it the disciple is brought into the very presence of the heart and mind of
the Master. It presents the psychology of the Christian life because it reveals so
much of the inmost consciousness of Christ, and because in it Christ makes clear
so many of the inner relationships of truth and life in the soul of the disciple. Its
keynotes are universal words. It appeals to those who seek the eternal truth and
life and love. To the mind of today it presents Christianity in a peculiarly
sympathetic way.

* In response to the question, " Do you think the purpose of the author was to win those not believing
to belief in Christ, or to deepen the belief of believers ? " the following informal replies were received : —
Professor Anthony: — '* I regard the Gospel as an apologetic, written both to conftrm^ and to pro
duce, belief^'. Professor Beardslee: — •" I should prefer not to try to distinguish, as your question suggests. I should
rather say in general that its aim was to engender and establish faith ".
Professor Hayes: — " Why may we not say that John wrote primarily for the church, to establish it in
the faith; but with the whole world of readers in the background of his thought ?"
Professor facobus: — " If, as seems most likely, the First Epistle of John was ,vritten in connection
with the Gospel of John, it would seem almost beyond question that the Gospel itself was written for
those who were already Christians but who, under the influence of false teaching regarding Christ and the

viii PREFACE.
It was said by a German philosopher of the first half of the century just closed,
that the Gospel of John was the Gospel of the church of the future ; that the church
of that time was not yet up to it. Whether or not this were true for that time and
country, we do not believe it is true of the church in America today. No Gospel
is so dear, and none appeals so strongly to Christian people as this Gospel. t The
church finds itself — its purposes, its ideals, its aspirations, its duty, its work, its
life, in this Gospel written by the beloved apostle. And in coming to this Gospel it
also becomes deeply conscious of its own failures and shortcomings.
In emphasizing the peculiar worth and function of the Fourth Gospel the value
of the Synoptic Gospels must not be underestimated. It is only after a study of
St. John that the range, the depth and the crystalline clearness of the Synoptic
records can be fully appreciated. The Christ portrayed by St. John is the Christ
who is revealed to us as by a lightning flash in Matthew 1 1 : 25-30 and Luke 10 ; 2 1 , 22
We can not refrain from quoting here the closing words of Professor Riggs in
the Outlines mentioned above (see no^e, p. iv of Preface) : —
"Our study of this noble Gospel has come to an end. To that study which
makes experience, life the chief interpreter, there can never be an end. It calls us

fThe uniqueness of John's Gospel consists, among other things, in its unique presentation of these three
cardinal ideas of Christianity: — belief in Jesus as the Christ; obedience to the "new commandment" ;
the relationship to God of being " sent".
I. To show the emphasis placed on this ruling idea of the Fourth Gospel the passages bearing on this
subject of belief in Jesus as the -Christ are given herewith; 1:7 — 1:12 — 1:50 — 2:11 — 2:23 — 3:15 —
3 : 16 — 3:18 — 3:36 — 4:39 — 4:41 — 4:42 — 4:53 — 5:38 — 5:44 — 5:46 — 5:47 — 6:29 — 6:30— 6:35 —
6; 36 — 6; 40 — 6: 47 — 6: 64 — 6;6g — 7:5 — 7:31 — 7; 38 — 7: 39 — 7; 48 — 8: 24 — 8; 30 — 8;3r —
8: 45 — 8: 46 — 9 : 35 — g ; 36 — 9 : 38 — • 10: 25 — 10: 26 — 10; 37 — 10 ; 38 — 10 ; 42 — 11 : 15 — 11 : 25 —
II ; 26 — II : 27 — II ; 40 — 11 ; 42 — 11 : 45 — 11 : 48 — 12 ; 11 — 12; 36 — 12 : 37 — 12: 39 — iz : 42 —
12 : 44 — 12 ; 46 — 13 ; 19 — 14 : r — 14 ; 10 — 14 ; ii — 14 ; 12 — 14; 29 — 16 ; 9 — 16 : 27 — 16 : 30 — 16 : 31 —
17 ; 8 — 17: 20 — 17: 21 — 19: 35 — 20 : 8 — 20: 25 — 20: 27 — 20: 29 — 20 : 31. The pnrpose of John's Gospel
to demonstrate that Jesus is the true and eternal life for every man represents the militant character of
Christianity. Acceptance of the principles and standards of Christianity means acceptance of and devotion
to the purpose and work of Christ " that the world may believe ". The spirit of the church is one of con
quest. It is indeed a militant church.
II. The new life brought into the world by Christ (as revealed in the cross) must be embodied in a new
law, and that law, stated with. special reference to the relation of the disciples one to another, is the "new
commandment ". The law of self-sacrificing love even unto death which was the piindpleof His life, is to be
Christian life, needed to have the teachings of Christ regarding Himself and His religion placed before
them in new and impressive ways.
*' This would seem to be confirmed by the definite statement of the author of the Gospel at the close of
the twentieth chapter, which speaks of the Gospel as presenting Jesus as the Christ through faith in whom,
that is through a real and vital faith in whom alone, a full and vital Christian life is possible".
Professor Nash; — '* I do not believe that the author of the Fourth Gospel consciously separated the
two things. But the end and aim is the demonstration to the world that Jesus is the Christ of God. The
other motive, however, was a part of the whole ".
Professor Sitterly:—" Like John's Epistles and Apocalypses I am of opinion that his Gospel was
written to strengthen * the belief of believers ' ".
Professor Stevens:—" I should say the Fourth Gospel was written for Christian Churches and
believers, as were the other three, and in order to produce and develop faith in Jesus Christ. It assumes, as
already existing, some knowledge of the Gospel facts, and an already existing germ of Christian faith on
the part of its readers".
Professor White:—" I do not know what is the basis for the opinion held by some that the Gospel
was written for believers chiefly. It certainly does greatly strengthen believers, but I do think it was
written primarily for outsiders. Surely the statement of 20: 30, 31 looks strongly towards this ".
Professor Whitford :—" I think that John's purpsse was to produce faith in Jesus. Of course such
a book as his can not fail to strengthen the faith of those who already believe".
See also pages gg-io6 and other passages throughout the book.

PREFACE, ix
to go on to know the Lord through all the profound realities of communion and
obedience which involve the ultimate depths of life. The deeper we go by this
way of interpretation the surer shall we be that this is no fabricated portrait of the
Master. It is rather the picture of one who saw not merely the scenery of Galilee
and Judea, nor simply the external forms of that memorable group now known as
Master and Disciples, but whose profoundly religious spirit, touched, illumined,
guided by the Spirit of Truth, grasped the eternal significance of Him to whom
His life had been given. Is there a subjective element in John ? Of course there is,
but it is the subjectivism of one whose insight was directed to the inner, eternal
meanings of Jesus. Rightly has it been said that John saw Jesus and His truth
sub specie Eternitat is. Does that make the Gospel less true? Evidence enough

the principle of their life. Thus the actual life of Christ is to become the actual life of the church. He calls
the disciples unto Him that they may possess this life and in turn be workers with Him in bringing this life to
others. Through the "new commandment" the power of the cross becomes the power of the church
organizing ^see p. 276) its heterogeneous and oftentimes apparently irreconcilable elements into a deep and
living unity. This is the great miracle which when accomplished proves to the world the genuineness of
Christian discipleship (13:35) and also the divineness of Christ's mission (17:21). Failure to observe the
" new commandment" has been the cause of the downfall of many a church. The militant purpose toward
those without and the new commandment working within give to the church an esprit de cor-ps which
makes it invincible.
In Chapters i - 12 the great word is belief ; in Chapters 13 - 21 the great word is love^ occasionally
interwoven with the word belief. Belief in Christ leads to love for, obedience to, union with Christ. Belief
is the gateway to the eternal life of self-sacrificing love. For passages bearing on the "new command
ment" and on the unity that results from obedience to it, see 13 : 34 — 13 : 35 — 15 : 12 — 15 : 13 — 15 : 17 —
13 : 14-16 — 17 : II — 17: 21 — 17: 22 — 17: 23 (see also 13: i — 15 : 9 — 17 : 26).
III. The many different connections in which Jesus speaks of "him that sent me" show how centra
and fundamental was Jesus' consciousness of being "sent". The iteration and reiteration of this is most
striking. It is an ever recurring refrain (as in " the will of him that sent me", 4 : 34 ; 5 : 30 ; 6 : 38; cf.
Matt. 6 : 10; 7: 21 ; 12: 50; 26: 39, 42, etc). Christ would have this consciousness become the consciousness
of the church. When we notice that the phrase " sent " in connection with Christ is used 40 times before it is
used in the final passage, we realize the tremendous impressiveness of the words of Jesus, " As my Father hath
sent me, even so send I you " (20 : 21 ; see also 17 : 18) . Relationship with Christ in learning becomes relation
ship with Christ in being ' * sent ". Note Professor Nash's definition of the living church as composed of those
who have learned how to pray and therefore have learned how to work (p. 157) . For passages see 3:17 —
3:34 — 4 : 34— 5 : 23 — 5 : 24 — S =30— 5 : 36 — 5 -'37— 5 : 38 — 6:29 — 6:38 — 6 : 39 — 6:44— 6:57 —
7 : 16 — 7 ; x8 — 7 : 28 — 7 : 29 — 7 : 33 — 8 : 16 — 8 : 18 — 8 : 26 — 8 : 29 — 8 : 42 — 9:4 — 10 : 36 — 11 : 42 —
12 : 44 — 12: 45 — 12 : 49 — 13: 20 — 14: 24 — 15 : 21 — 16 : 5 — 17 : 3 — 17: 8 — 17: 18 — 17:21 — 17 : 23 —
17:25 — 20:21. Cf. Matt. 10:40; Mk.9:37; Lk.9:48; 10:16. Christ's relation to the world is comple,
mentary to His relation to God. The force with which He is sent to the world is the same as that with which
He is sentyrow the Father. In the Synoptic Gospels the emphasis is on the former; in the Fourth Gospel
on the latter. See Lk. 5: 32 ; ig : 10 ; Matt. 20 : 28 ; 15 : 24 ; Lk. 4 : 43.
As is seen by reading the references under the above headings John 's Gospel holds up to us in a
peculiarly vivid and definite way Jesus' consciousness of being " sent " to do the will of God; Jesus' purpose
that the world may believe ; Jesus ' teaching of the new commandment of self-sacrificing love. These three
ideas are the elemental principles of Christianity. They represent a purpose, life, consciousness of Christ,
which in turn are to become the purpose, life, consciousness of the church, that the life of God which was in
Christ, the eternal life of self-sacrificing love as manifested in the cross, may be in them: " I in them, and
thou in me, that they may be perfected into one; that the world may know that thou didst send me, and
lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me". The militant purpose of the church is that men may believe, its
life is the life of self-sacrificing love, its consciousness is that of being " sent " by Christ. A church with such
a life and with such a purpose and with such a propulsive force from Christ its Lord has within itself unlimited
reserves of power.
These three principles represent the movement of the Christian life: — drawn to Christ in belief, united
with one another in love, sent out into the world in service. The most conspicuous New Testament example
of marvellous realization of this three-fold relationship is the Apostle Paul.
It will be noticed that these three cardinal ideas are very closely involved in the purpose of the Gospel
as stated in 20: 31. Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God, is sent into the world that men may believe, and that
believing they may enter into the eternal life of seU-sacrificing love.
This is He whom the church knows as King of Truth, and Life of the human race.

X PREFACE.
there is of its historicity. No other Gospel is more faithful to historical situations ;
no other Gospel is more keenly alive to psychological presentations. Its portrai
ture of Jesus, different as is its setting from that of the Synoptics, is thoroughly
consistent with theirs. What they exhibit constantly in action and now and then
by word is here completely interpreted in that blaze of glory which casts a noon-day
clearness upon the person and character of the Messiah".
During the progress of the Conferences subscriptions for a proposed volume
were taken and at the close of the series enough had been received to ensure the
printing of the addresses given. The committee are especially grateful to these
earliest subscribers without whose prompt support the volume would have been
impossible. One of the inspirations in the work of the Conferences has been the
fact that through the volume a medium will be furnished by which the best which
a large city like Providence can command will be made available for the pastor and
teacher in the remotest hamlet of the state. In serving the Providence churches
the speakers have been serving the churches of the entire state. The interest
which has been manifested by many outside Rhode Island has also been most
gratifying. Subscriptions for from one to one hundred copies have been received
from churches, seminaries and individuals beyond the borders of the state. The
committee are most grateful to the speakers for their constant encouragement
and cooperation. They can best show their appreciation of this cordial support
from the first and of the great merit of the addresses, by endeavoring to give to
the volume as wide a circulation as possible. Should the sale of the book be
sufficient to give a surplus, this will be devoted to interdenominational purposes.
The special thanks of the committee are due to Hon. Nathan W. Littlefield for
his generous services as Treasurer of the Conferences and for much labor spent in
connection with the Business Men's Lunch of January 13 ; to Rev. Albert F.
Bassford, a student in Brown University, for careful stenographic reports of many of
the addresses ; also to Mr. A. B. McCrillis and to Mr. Albert C. Day for important
aid rendered in receiving subscriptions from outside Rhode Island. Mr. Day has
also kindly consented to act as Treasurer of the Publication Committee. The
committee take pleasure also in acknowledging the uniform courtesy of the daily
press — the Journal and Bulletin, the News, and the Telegram — in reporting the
Conferences. Particularly is the committee under obligation to Rev. Thomas E. Bartlett,
pastor of the Pawtuxet Baptist Church, who has corrected the proof and super
vised the book through the press, and for whose indefatigable labor and constant
vigilance every reader will be grateful.
The Committee wish to thank most heartily all those who whether in the Con
ferences or by private subscription contributed to the necessary expenses of the
Conferences ; also all those who in many other ways have aided in connection
with the Conferences or in connection with the resulting volume. For all the
Committees as well as for very many individuals, whose names are not mentioned
in the volume but who have done much to assist, the entire work connected with
both Conferences and volume has been a labor of love.

CONTENTS.

Preface ... .iii
Men and Events in the Time of Jesus —
Professor Charles F. Sitterly, Ph.D., S.T.D. . i
The Study of the Gospel by John —
President Wilbert W. White, Ph.D. . . .10
The First Chapter —
President Wilbert W. White, Ph.D. ... .22
The Prologue— (i :i-i8) —
Professor Clark S. Beardslee, D.D. .... .26
John the Baptist and His Gospel— (i : 19-37) —
Professor Wm. Arnold Stevens, D.D., LL.D. . 30
The Call of the First Disciples — (1:29-51) —
Rev. A. C. Dixon, D.D. .... , 42
"Sons of God" — (1:12) —
Rev. Floyd W. Tomkins, S.T.D. . 50
"Full of Grace and Truth"— (i : 14) —
Professor Henry S. Nash, D.D. ... • • 59
The Miracle at C ana (with an Attempt at a Philosophy of Miracles) —
(2:1-11) —
President Augustus H. Strong, D.D., LL.D. .... 63
Jesus and Nicodemus — The New Birth — (3:1-15) —
Rev. Edward Abbott, D.D. .... . .71
Eternal Life Through Belief— (3: 14-21) —
Rev. Albert H. Plumb, D.D. . . .76
The Optimism of Jesus — (4:1-42) —
Rev. Frank J. Goodwin ... .87
The Source of Jesus' Strength — (4:34) —
Rev. Willis P. Odell, D.D. .  93
The Gospel of John in the Spiritual' Life of the Churches —
Rev. Henry M. King, D.D. ........ 99
Some Characteristics of the Gospel According to St. John —
Rev. Alexander McKenzie, D.D. . ... 107
The Works of Jesus. I. Resurrection — (5:17-30) —
Rev. George P. Eckman, Ph.D., D.D. . 118
The Works of Jesus. II. Judgment — (5: 17-30) —
Rev. Charles M. Melden, Ph.D., D.D. . . .124

xii CONTENTS.
PAGE
The Secret of Jesus' Life — (5:30) —
Rev. John Balcom Shaw, D.D. ..... 130
Faith in Christ the Spring of Religious Action — (6:29) —
President Nathan E. Wood, D.D. . . . 136
Jesus the Bread of Life — (6:30-59) —
Rev. Cornelius Woelfkin, D.D. . . . . 145
The Confession of Peter — Christ the World's Only Hope and Life —
(6:68,69) —
Professor Henry S. Nash, D.D. 153
Jesus' Controversies with the Jews —
Professor Melancthon W. Jacobus, D.D. 161
Unbelief the Fundamental Sin —
Rev. B. L. Whitman, D.D., LL.D. . . 167
Knowledge of the Teaching of Jesus Through the Doing of the
Will of God — (7:17) —
Rev. Francis J. McConnell, Ph.D. . . .177
Spirit and Life — (7:37-39) —
Rev. Amory H. Bradford, D.D. .... 187
The Sinlessness of Jesus — (8:29, 46) —
Rev. William R. Huntington, D.D., D.C.L., L.H.D. . 189
The Evidential 'Value of Miracles —
Professor Charles W. Rishell, Ph.D. ... 197
Freedom Through the Truth — (8:31-36)—
Rev. Everett D. Burr, D.D. . . 205
The Home at Bethany and the Friendships of Jesus — (ii :i-46; 12 :i-ii) —
Rev. Donald Sage Mackay, D.D. ..... 218
The Cross the World's Evangel, or the Christian Law of Sacrifice
IN Relation to Missions — (12: 20-32) —
Rev. Henry C. Mabie, D.D. . . , 224
The Attracting Power of the Cross — (12:32) —
Rev. Avery A. Shaw, M.A. . . . . 236
The Commandment of God and Life Everlasting — (12:49,50) —
Rev. Stewart Means, D.D. . . . ... 249
The Washing of the Disciples' Feet and the Law of Service— (13:1-17) —
Rev. Edwin Alonzo Blake, Ph.D., D.D. .... . 257
The Glorification of the Son of Man — (13:31, 32) —
Professor Samuel Hart, D.D., D.C.L. . . . . 2gg
Obedience to the New Commandment the Proof of Discipleship —
('3:34.35) —
Rev. Rockwell H. Potter ....
Mysticism in the 14th, 15th and i6th Chapters of the Fourth Gospel —
Professor Alfred Williams Anthony, D.D. . . , 280
Jesus the Revelation of the Father — (14:6-11) —
Professor Henry C. Sheldon, S.T.D  287

275

CONTENTS. xiii
PAGE
The Presence of the Father, Son and Spirit Through Obedience to
the Commands of Christ— (14: 21-26) —
Rev. Robert A. Ashworth, A.M. ....... 295
Friendship with Jesus Through Obedience to His Commands —
(15:14.15) —
Rev. John D. Pickles, Ph.D. ... ... 301
"That they all May Be One" — (Chapter 17)—
Professor Henry T. Fowler, Ph.D. ...... 306
The Unity of Christianity as Revealed in the Prayer of Christ —
(Chapter 17) —
Professor Henry S. Nash, D.D. ....... 311
Sanctification in the Truth — (17: 17-19) —
Rev. D. W. Faunce, D.D. ..... 317
The Self-Surrender of Jesus Christ — (i8;ii) —
Rev. George M. Stone, D.D. .... . . 326
The Crucifixion- "It is Finished" — (19:30) —
Rt. Rev. Thomas A. Jaggar, D.D. ...... 332
The Resurrection the Crowijing Fact of Christianity — (Chapter 20) —
President Herbert Welch, D.D. . ..... 344
The Twenty-First Chapter—
President Henry G. Weston, D.D., LL.D. . • ' 356
The Import of St. John 21 : 15-17 —
Rev. Galusha Anderson, S.T.D., LL.D. . ... 366
The Teaching Function of the Church —
Professor Frank K. Sanders, Ph.D., D.D. . . ... 380
The Method of Jesus with Individuals ^(3: 1-16; 4:526) —
President William Douglas Mackenzie, D.D. . 382
The Personal Equation of the Fourth Gospel —
Rev. Frederic Palmer, A.M. . . 390
The Author of the Fourth Gospel —
Professor Clark S. Beardslee, D.D. 397

APPENDIX.

Remarks of Governor Garvin, Mayor Miller and Others at the
Business Men's Lunch of January 13, 1904 .... 405
Analysis of the Gospel, Embodying also Conference Address on " How
THE Gospel was Made" —
Professor Frederick L. Anderson, D.D. . . . 414
Suggestive Studies and References —
Professor Clark S. Beardslee, D.D. . .... 437

xiv CONTENTS.
PAGE
The Gospel According to St. John —
President Henry G. Weston, D.D., LL.D. . 444
The Most Remarkable Gospel —
Professor Doremus A. Hayes, Ph.D., S.T.D., LL.D. . 447
''In the Beginning" — (i:i) —
Rev. James Lee Mitchell, Ph.D. . . 45o
A Lesson in Methods —
President Edwin M. Poteat, D.D. ..... 453
The Condition of Entrance Into the Kingdom of God — (3:1-16) —
Professor William C. Whitford, A.M. .... 455
The Gospel of the Conversations —
Rev. James G. Vose, D.D. ... ... 458
The Principle of Missions in the Gospel of St. John —
Rev. W. C. Bitting, D.D. ... . 463
Sanctification Through the Truth — (17: 17) —
Rev. Horace W. Tilden, D.D. . . . .468
The Dramatic Movement in St. John's Gospel —
Rev. Willard Brown Thorp . . . 471
St. John's Teaching of Fatherhood and Sonship —
Rt. Rev. Frederic Dan Huntington, S.T.D., D.C.L., LL.D. . . -474
A Hidden Revelation — (21:15-17) —
Rev. James Church Alvord . .... 476
The Unity of the Church —
Rev. C. A. L. Richards, D.D. ... 478
St. John in all Ages . ... . . 481

PROGRAMS AND INDICES.

Programs of the Conferences ..... .487
Index to Authors . . . . ... 493
Index to Texts ....... .502

^

But as many as received Him, to them gave He po'vver
TO BECOME the SONS OF GOD, EVEN TO THEM THAT BELIEVE ON
His NAME.
And THE Word -was made flesh, and dwelt among us,
(AND WE BEHELD HiS GLORY, THE GLORY AS OF THE ONLY BEGOTTEN
OF THE Father,) full of grace and truth.
For as the Father hath life in Himself ; so hath He
GIVEN to the Son to have life in Himself.
And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw
ALL MEN unto Me.
I AM the light of THE WORLD: HE THAT FOLLOWETH Me
SHALL NOT WALK IN DARKNESS, BUT SHALL HAVE THE LIGHT
OF LIFE. A NEW COMMANDMENT I GIVE UNTO YOU, THAT YE LOVE ONE
ANOTHER ; AS I HAVE LOVED YOU, THAT YE ALSO LOVE ONE ANOTHER.
By THIS SHALL ALL MEN KNOW THAT YE ARE My DISCIPLES, IF
YE HAVE LOVE ONE TO ANOTHER.
If A MAN LOVE Me, HE WILL KEEP My WORDS : AND My
Father will love him, and We will come unto him, and
make our abode with him.
I IN THEM, AND ThOU IN Me, THAT THEY MAY BE MADE
PERFECT IN ONE ; AND THAT THE WORLD MAY KNOW THAT ThOU
HAST SENT Me, AND HAST LOVED THEM, AS ThOU HAST LOVED Me.
As My Father hath sent Me, even so send I you.

^

" But patient stated much of the Lord's life
Forgotten or misdelivered, and let it work :
Since much that at the first, in deed and word,
Lay simply and sufficiently exposed.
Had grown (or else my soul was grown to match.
Fed through such years, familiar with such light.
Guarded and guided still to see and speak)
Of new significance and fresh result ;
What first were guessed as points, I now knew stars.
And named them in the Gospel I have writ."
— Browning- : "A Death in the Desert.'

* MEN AND EVENTS IN THE TIME OF JESUS.
by rev. charlks w. sitterl-bt, ph. d., s. t. d.,
Professor of Biblical Literature and Exegesis of the English Bible, Drew
Theological Seminary, Madison, N. J.
Whether histojy ever repeats itself is open to debate, but there can be
no question that the historical situation into which Jesus was born was
wholly unique. Like conditions had certainly never before been realized
since the world began, and it is just as clear that their duplicate can never
be approximated in the ages to come.
The signs of Jesus' times were peculiarly obscure to the men of His
generation, but they have ever since been growing more significant and
luminous until today even the rapid runner and the traveling man may
rightly read them. To be sure, His horoscope had been cast at the begin
ning with a definiteness of detail both as to time, place, and singular cir
cumstances, but even those who searched the Sacred Writings most dili
gently missed utterly the meaning of their testimony unto Him, and it fell
in His day, and so far forth until the present, that strangers took Him in
and proclaimed and finally crowned Him, while they who were His own not
only wilfully misread His credentials in all their Scriptures from Moses
until John, but entering into partnership with the proud princes of this
world, they finally condemned and crucified their own rightful King.
There are three standpoints from which one may view any great his
torical character with profit, and these contemplate Him in His relation to
the social, the political, and the religious tendencies of His times. Of
course, these relations commingle, and they may not be arbitrarily meas
ured as separate one from the other, but they are capable of practical dis-
¦ tinction and are certainly helpful to orderly discussion.
When Jesus, after thirty years of preparation, entered upon His Messi
anic mission, He was challenged by Satan from these three standpoints^^
(i) " If Thou art indeed Son of God, command these stones to become
loaves of bread — abolish hunger — make poverty impossible — command men
to divide their inheritance — make labor lighter or do away with it alto
gether. Command the earth to bring forth loaves of bread already baked ;
give us manna for the mere gathering, as Moses did ".
(2) " If Thou art Son of God, seize the reins of royalty — become the
universal king. Thou seest the separate parts of that empire and the glory
of them — they are all mine, and by adopting my methods they can all become
yours ".
(3) " If Thou art Son of God, appeal boldly to the superstitious ele
ment in mankind — ^cast Thyself down from the temple-top and let angels
bear Thee visibly up — make display of Thy powers — conjure up and play
upon the innate love of man for the spectacular and unreal — the world is

* Delivered at the First Conference, held at the First Baptist Church, October 21, 1903.

2 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
always ready for such leadership — worship me and I will bring you the
homage of millions of men ".
Thus was Jesus of Nazareth tested in His three-fold nature, and by a
careful contemplation of the three fields from which His temptation sprang
may we obtain some added appreciation of His unique personality and
mission. I. First, then, we will consider the social conditions of the world into
which Jesus was born, and I use the word " social " in the work-a-day or
domestic sense, inclusive of physical and temporal environment. In the
province of Galilee, where most happily Jesus was brought up, there existed
in miniature all the diverse conditions and combinations of human society.
Galilee was the garden of the Holy Land, and its native or Jewish popula
tion was very largely engaged in agricultural pursuits. To engage in man
ual labor was no disgrace to the Hebrew, the disgrace rested rather upon
him who would not work. Oil, wine, wheat, fruits, and fish were produced
in great quantities. Abundance of flax was raised, and the linen fabrics
made by the women of Galilee were of unusual fineness and beauty. A
peculiar kind of pottery, made from the black clay found in the region of
Cana, was highly esteemed throughout Syria. Magdala boasted of over
300 shops where pigeons for the sacrifices were sold, Safed was celebrated
for its honey, Shikmonah for its pomegranates, Akabar for the raising of
pheasants, and Sepphoris, the hitherto capital of the province, was noted
for the production of grain and fruit, Arbela was celebrated for its manufac
ture of cloth, Tarichaea, on Lake Galilee, was known throughout the east
for its extensive fish factories, and frpm this same port on the lake, Josephus
in his day collected a fleet of 230 ships to lead in the attack upon Tiberias.
It is evident from the mounds of ruins which today line the shores of that
little lake that hundreds of thousands of souls teemed about it at the open
ing of the Christian era, and it is entirely probable that between two and
three million people found residence in the 200 cities of this prosperous
province of Galilee. The majority of these towns were distinctively Jewish,
made up of families whose heads were by right as proud of their pure
lineage as any household of Judea, but there was far less of narrowness and
racial exclusiveness than in the more southern shire. Business interests
were broader and more truly cosmopolitan, and then, as now, the measure
of prosperity was more evenly shared and the commoner blessings of life
were more generally distributed than in the vicinity of the Jewish capital.
The very fact of their comparative isolation, on account of their distance
from the sacred center, together with that of their proximity to distinctly
Gentile communities, tended to deepen and intensify racial pride and
patriotism while, at the same time, it broadened the provincials in a most
wholesome way. The malicious fling at Jesus as one " from Nazareth," and
as " a Galilean," did not reflect either as wide-spread or as deep-seated a
contempt as is too often supposed, and it will be recalled that many of the
best disciplined and the most efficient forces which supported the national
cause, both with blood and with treasure, from the time of the Maccabees
to those of Bar Chochba, were drawn from Galilee. But it was appropri-

MEN AND EVENTS IN THE TIME OF JESUS. 3
ately called " Galilee of the Gentiles," and the non- Jewish element must be
clearly recognized. The most marked foreign factor is properly called
Greek, although the government was actually Roman. But from the days
of Alexander the Great and his Seleucid successors, Greek fashions, Greek
ideas, and the Greek language had taken deep hold upon the northern
province of Palestine. From Ptolemais, on the seacoast, to the group of
ten Greek cities called Decapolis, in the upper Jordan valley, there was a
chain of Greek communities right across Galilee, which inevitably and
indelibly influenced her people, and when we remember that all of the New
Testament writings, as they have come down to us, have been in Greek,
and more than half of its writers were natives of this province, we realize
how mighty that influence must have been. We are able, also, to see why
the people of Galilee lacked the narrow prejudices so common to those of
Judea, and to understand how the foreign elements among them tended to
develop and enlarge their minds and characters. This is doubtless one of
the chief reasons why Christ and His cosmopolitan system of ethics and
morals received so favorable a hearing in Galilee, and why so large a pro
portion of His disciples came from that province. It will be remembered
that II of the apostolic 12 were Galileans, one only being chosen from
Judea, " and he was a devil." We find, then, that what we have called the
social atmosphere in which Jesus Himself was developed, and in turn devel
oped His heaven-born Gospel, was peculiarly healthy as an environment for
the reception of that Gospel both from the purity of its native elements and
from the world affinities and outgoings of its foreign ingredients.
II. Let us now ascend an exceeding high mountain, and behold all
the kingdoms of the world in the first century, and the glory of them, and
see what attitude our Saviour takes toward \h& political situation about Him.
Born during the Augustan age at the very climax of Rome's imperial pros
perity, with the ears of all men still ringing with the renown of the Caesars,
and their mouths full of the tales of conspiracies and plots, the passions
and the exploits of a Pompey, a Brutus, a Cassius, an Antony and a Cleo
patra, all of whom had marched and countermarched across the Galilean
plains, with the national tales of Maccabean bravery and valor and of
Herodian duplicity and diabolism, smarting under the repeated levies of
talents and of troops to keep up the pagan pageant, what real patriot could
fail to feel the rising within him of a spirit of unquenchable hatred for
everything foreign, and a desire for revenge, and that only equal to the
depths of shame and of outrage which his land and his people had endured
for generations ? And Jesus was a most intense patriot, who yearned after
the betterment of His own people and nation with a fervent passion which
at times seemed almost to consume Him. To Him, Palestine was already
the Holy Land, and He loved its hills and vales and water courses and
mountains, its solitudes and forests, and its teeming cities and overflowing
capital with an affection which no one else except, perhaps, David had ever
approximated. He admired the splendid new temple even then in process
of building, and coveted it as " for all nations the house of prayer ", and He
enjoyed the architectural renaissance, which was filling with great structures

4 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
every corner of the land, but He could not fail to read in these things the
extension of Beelzebub's kingdom, and He was not deceived. Althoug
Jesus was born in the reign and dominion of Herod the Great, He passed
His life as a civil subject of Herod Antipas, whose tetrarchate of Galilee
covered the entire period of Christ's career. Antipas inherited the political
cunning of the greater Herod and ruled his province with marked success,
trimming adroitly between the prejudices and customs of his Jewish and
Greek subjects, never failing in his loyalty to Tiberius Caesar, in whose
honor he built and named the new capital on the lake, and yet never pro
voking to the brink of rebellion the liberty-loving spirit of the Galileans.
Christ correctly measured and labeled him "that fox". The province of
Judea was so much harder to control that, after the death of the first
Herod, who for over 40 years ruled it as with a rod of iron and not improp
erly thereby won the title of "Great", it was taken under the immediate
oversight of Roman procurators, of whom Pontius Pilate was the sixth
successive appointee within 20 years. But Herod the Great had utterly
demoralized and incapacitated the capital province for loyalty either to the
traditions of the fathers or to the political policies of its later masters.
No more consummate master in the art of corrupt diplomacy probably ever
lived, or more supple acrobat in the arena of spectacular public service than
the first Herod, but he was not altogether bad nor was his reign altogether
without effect in preparing the hearts of the Hebrews more willingly to
receive a spiritual kingdom and king. His glory as a builder of great pub
lic works was scarcely second to that of Solomon, and in Palestine even
today one may trace his handiwork from end to end of the land. In Jeru
salem he began by rebuilding the citadel of the temple, which he renamed
Antonia in honor of Antony. He then built a group of impregnable towers
on the north front of Zion. Next came a stadium, a theatre, and an
amphitheatre, which last occasioned a conspiracy well-nigh costing him his
life. Turning now from the capital, he began to fortify and garrison various
parts of the country, in readiness for revolt. He built two strong castles,
known respectively as the Herodium in Judea and the Herodium in Arabia,
and rebuilt four well-situated Asmonean strongholds, which had fallen into
ruin. Samaria, Cassarea, Gaba and Heshbon he fortified and lavishly
equipped as military posts. In the case of Cassarea, he spent 1 2 years in
developing a splendid seaport, erecting quays, moles, towers, sewers, col
onnades, palaces, and temples, as well as an amphitheatre, a theatre, and a
hippodrome. This soon became the Roman center of the realm. Here, as
well as at Jerusalem, games were instituted in honor of the emperor every
four years. These comprised gymnastic and musical games, chariot races,
and contests with wild beasts, and it is not at all probable that the mass
of the population, which was, of course, Jewish, kept themselves from
attending them. Thus the generation to which Jesus belonged was deeply
tainted with tastes and tendencies from which only a reformer " whose fan
was in his hand ", and whose scourge of stinging thongs could exorcise or
purge them.

MEN AND EVENTS IN THE TIME OF JESUS. 5
But the process of political servitude, so cleverly concealed and so ably
carried out by Herod and his successors, had taken such vital hold upon
the nation that when at last the Messiah was heralded by his forerunner and
proclaimed from Heaven, and accredited by many mighty works and words
of his own, neither leaders nor multitudes were able to break the hypnotic
spell that rested upon them while they cried " Away with Him, away with
Him, crucify Him, crucify Him, we have no King but Cajsar ".
III. This brings us face to face with the religious situation which
involves a problem whose complexity well nigh defies satisfactory solution.
It is well known that the spiritual life of the pagan world had dwindled
to the vanishing point. Among the Hebrews a few families, scattered more
often in rural villages and communities of the Diaspora, kept the pure light
of intelligent faith and pious living glowing in the hearts of a saving remnant,
but the nation as a whole was hopelessly divided into contentious factions
incapable of responding to common appeals or leadership except along the
lines of the basest passions and prejudices. The two poles we may say,
around which these extremes of religious energy centured v/ere. pietism and
scribism. As has been well said " the fact that a village became a town
when once it possessed ten men who agreed to be regular attendants upon
the synagogue and the additional fact that later it became customary to pay
these men for attending service, certainly does not heighten one's confidence
in popular piety ". Nevertheless the clear glimpses which the gospels give
of unfeigned faith and genuine spirituality in a few sporadic cases is evidence
that the synagogue was not the only school or source of religious activity.
The prophetess Anna was not alone in her sympathy with Mary's glad con
fidence in the Messianic future of her first-born son for " she spake of Him
unto all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem ". Nor was Simeon
the only saint awaiting in expectant joy the consolation of Israel, nor was
Zacharias the only priest, nor Nicodemus the only rabbi, nor Nathaniel the
only Israelite who were righteous and sincere and guileless inquirers into
the deepest meaning of Christ's visitation. Moreover, the fact is too often
entirely overlooked that Jesus, as well as The Baptist, did in truth arouse
and sustain a ready and genuine response to His uncompromising demands,
and that His death was accomplished before He had been teaching his
doctrine of other- worldliness three short years, and, //^a!^ largely in a province
away from the capital, all because His accusers felt and feared that they
could not themselves long continue to deceive the people, if He were per
mitted to live and teach among them. Under the head of Pietism may
properly be named a small but worthy group of men known as Essenes.
In its most flourishing period the number of the Essenes did not exceed
four thousand nor did they enter into vital relations with the national
life, yet they gave striking utterance to the spirit of religious protest
against the tendency toward both legalism and secularism which prevailed.
Probably no section of Hebrew society in the days of Jesus contributed
more to prepare the public mind for the reception of His teaching than the
Essenes. Some have gone so far as to maintain that the household of
Nazareth belonged to this sect and that our Lord's silence respecting it

6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
arises from this fact. The oft-quoted account which Heggesippus gives of
James, the Lord's brother and leader of the Jerusalem church, is construed
with some show of reason as indicating the possession by that just man of the
spirit, if not the enthusiasm of an Essene, while such practices among the
early Christians as the common meal and their desire to hold all things m
common as well as the early rise of monasticism among them are all
explained in the same way. " The cheerful confidence in God, the love of
peace, the unselfish life, the communism, the simpHcity, the acceptance for
order's sake of the law of the land and its administrators, combined with
contempt for worldly dignities and disdain of personal aggrandizement, the
love of one another, the tenderness towatrd children, to the weak, the sick,
the aged, and the distressed, the love of purity and solitude as enabling the
powers of the Spirit to recreate and display themselves, the avoidance of
oaths, the doctrine that great truths are not welcome and therefore not bene
ficial to unprepared persons, these are rare attributes, but common to the
Essenes and the immediate followers of Jesus ". (Keningale Cook).
From the same writer we quote : — " Jesus was wont to argue not only in
a sublime and generous manner of His own, but also in the subtle manner
with which the doctors of the law were conversant. He used the forms of
His times, and, perhaps, would else have been unintelligible, but His own
splendid powers shine through. He could not have remained in any sect
and the Essenes for all their spirituality and fraternity were a narrow and
prejudiced sect, while He manifests the broad, unsectarian impress of
Heaven "- In these words we have the best that can be said relative to the
similarity of Jesus' teaching to that of the Essenes and they are of value as
showing that among at least one important section of Jewish society in
Jesus' day the elements of a true, religious culture were openly recognized
and cherished.
Under the term Scribism may be collated all those movements among
the religious leaders of the nation which sprang from various methods of
interpreting the sacred writings of the Hebrews. In addition to the priest
hood after the restoration of the Jews from exile, there arose a very influen
tial class known as the Scribes. Their great model was Ezra, whose
work in restoring the national capital and institutions was only equalled by
that upon the Sacred Canon. As the common speech of the Hebrews
departed further and further from that of the Fathers and their earlier
literature, a class of expert copyists and interpreters sprang up, and a new
national institution gradually took form which became their pecuhar arena
known as the synagogue. This movement and institution promised much as
a means of preserving pure and untainted the national consciousness relative
to its calling and destiny, and its influence may be clearly traced down to
the present day ; but it has always sadly failed to grasp the deep spiritual
message of the Scriptures it has so faithfully guarded and preserved.
Although the Scribes in Jesus' day were broader and more numerous than
any one sect, doubtless the larger number were included in that influential
fraternity known as the Pharisees. As their name indicates they were
" separatists " because they insisted on the separation of God's people from

MEN AND EVENTS IN THE TIME OF JESUS. 7
all the defilements and snares of the heathen life around them. Their dis
tinguishing characteristic was reverence for the law and "their religion was
the religion of a book ". Intensely earnest at its beginning, Pharisaism in
the time of Jesus had lost its fervor and shrivelled up into zealous formalism.
The written law of Moses had been overlaid and superseded by the oral
interpretations of the elders known as the Traditions of the Fathers, and
thus the Pharisees and their Scribes "satin Moses' seat". Together they
controlled the services of the synagogue with the various ablutions needful
to the maintainance of ceremonial purity, the distinctions between clean and
unclean food, the times and ways of fasting and the wearing of fringes and
phylacteries. Their insincerity and bigotry in the case of Sabbath observance was so
amazing that we are not surprised to find Jesus stigmatizing both Scribes
and Pharisees as hyprocrites and as " whited sepulchres which outwardly
appear beautiful but inwardly are full of dead men's bones " Certain rab
binical writers were wont to classify the Pharisees under seven heads.
(i) The Shoulder Pharisee who wore openly on his shoulder a list of
his own good actions.
(2) The Temporizing Pharisee who begged for time in order to per
form a good deed.
(3) The Calculating Pharisee who said " my sins are more than coun
terbalanced by my virtues ".
(4) The Saving Pharisee who said "I will save a little of my modest
fortune to perform a work of charity ".
(5) The Pharisee who said " would that I knew of a sin I had myself
committed that I might make reparation by an act of virtue ".
(6) The God-fearing Pharisee' (as Job).
(7) The God-loving Pharisee (as Abraham).
The Sadducees were of the aristocratic class, taking their name, as some
have thought, from the house of Zadok, an ancient and honored priestly
family and a long-time center of exclusiveness and bigotry. They had been
successful in gaining and holding the high priesthood and had largely
shaped the affairs of State. Being brought into contact with foreign ideas
they had become liberal, and found in their nation's growth in temporal
power and influence their greatest satisfaction. Thus a worldly spirit dom
inated them in life and doctrine. " They had but little sympathy with the
rigid demand that religion should be the motive and measure of all action.
They honored the law but refused to consider the traditions of the elders as
obligatory upon them. Their faith rested upon the 7vriiten law and they
could find no sanction in their accepted scriptures for the doctrine of a
resurrection of the body or of retribution in another world. They therefore
rejected both ". To the Sadducees the deeper doctrines and preaching of
Christ appeared doubly visionary and far-fetched, and although they had
but little interest in His apparent iconoclasm, they were easily led at length
to see that their earthly prospects were being seriously. threatened and

8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
willingly gave themselves to carrying out the extreme plans of their Scribes
as well as those of the Pharisees in condemning and crucifying the Son of
Man. Above and beyond all other elements of Scribism stood the great Council
or Sanhedrin of Jerusalem. This body falsely claimed to be the successor
of Ezra's great synagogue or assembly, but the former was a college of
Scribes for settling questions of theology, whereas the Gerousia or Sanhedrin
was distinctly a governing body, exercising the power or powers which in
earlier days belonged almost exclusively to the High Priest. Although the
Sadducees filled both the High Priesthood and the majority of the Sanhed
rin, it is noteworthy that the Pharisees sometimes arose to a point of influence
surpassing both combined. The functions of the Sanhedrin were numerous.
It passed laws and was therefore a legislative body. It executed judgement
and possessed the most extensive powers. It dealt with questions of doc
trine. It kept in its archives the geneological tables of the principal Jewish
families. It even authorized wars and fixed the limits of towns, and alone
had the power of modifying their precincts and those of the temple.
In the matter of penal jurisdiction, the most important and highest
prerogative of the Sanhedrin, 23 members, called Beth-Din (House of
Justice), were authorized to act. It is probable that on the night when Jesus
was arrested, the members hurriedly called together at the house of Annas,
were not more than that number. This Sanhedrin of Jerusalem which had
such large powers was not competent to decide all cases or to try all crimes
throughout the land. Every town, even every village had a lesser Sanhedrin,
either of 23, or of seven members, in all cases connected with the local
synagogue. Their place of session however was at the gate of the town.
The hearing was always public and the judges forbidden to receive presents,
but the equal cause of justice was not always favored by the elders of the
people in Jesus' time any more than in our own.
These then were the dominant factors in shaping the religious life of
the Hebrews in the first century. The Sadducees, as we have seen, held the
official positions both in civil and ecclesiastical affairs, and many of them
were very rich. The Pharisees and Scribes dominated the middle class,
while the Essenes refused to take seriously any of the relations or responsi
bilities of human society.
It remains only to mention the great mass of the common people who
were, generally speaking, a virile and virtue-loving multitude largely under
the domination of the Pharisees but by no means dead to the appeals of
either a true patriotism or real religion. But down below all these there
was a large class of men who had lost all connection with religion and well
ordered humanity— "the Publicans, Harlots and sinners "—for whose souls
no man much cared. To the Saviour these last possessed souls in reality
less leprous— spirits less blackened— hearts less hardened, and minds less
closed to His Heaven-given gospel than the wise and prudent, and from
them He called forth a new and true Israel, and in close co-operation with
the truly pious remnant of the land, set up the Kingdom of God among men.

MEN AND EVENTS IN THE TIME OF JESUS. g
And thus the Sower went forth to sow His seed. His field was fhe
world of human need. His seed was the word of heavenly hope. His soil
was the hearts of sinful men. Some preempted and filled with the over
growth of selfishness and greed, some heaped high with ridges of unyield
ing hardness and pride, some trampled and trodden until they had become a
mere thoroughfare for the conquests of Satan.
But others prepared and responsive to Sower and seed and sun and des
tined to yield at the end of the age, some thirty fold and some sixty fold
and some as high as an hundred fold.

* THE STUDY OF THE GOSPEL BY JOHN.
by rk'^. -wilbert a?v. -white, bh. 3d.,
President Bible Teachers' Training School, New York.
It was about twelve years ago that, with certain misgivings concerning
the genuineness and authenticity of this Fourth Gospel, I went off into the
woods on the beautiful banks of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, with my New
Testament, determined to read the Gospel by John through to discover more
clearly what my attitude towards the book should be. I had studied it
considerably before, but that day brought to me a new vision of its unity
and perfection.
Turning to the twentieth chapter, thirtieth and thirty-first verses, I read
the statement there found of the purpose of the writer in producing the
book. He declares it to have been that the reader might believe that
Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, one might have life
in His name. As I read those verses that day, the thought came to me to
begin at the beginning and go through the book to see if the writer made
his case. Turning to the first chapter I read, " In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same
was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him ; and
without Him was not anything made that hath been made ". Having read
thus far, and being in a somewhat sceptical mood at the time, I said —
aloud, I think, — " John, you are not giving me any reason for believing.
You are making statements here which are very difficult for me to believe ".
After a moment's pause I read through the sixth and seventh verses. " There
came a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for
witness, that he might bear witness of the light, that all might believe
through him ". When I had finished, it flashed upon me that John was going
to introduce testimony, and I saw the picture of a court with judge, witnesses,
jury and lawyers. I recalled a particular experience of my early boyhood
when I heard a famous lawyer prosecuting a neighbor who had been arrested
for murder. I remembered how this lawyer stood up at the beginning of
the trial and stated to the court and to the jury in prepositional form what
he intended to prove. At the very outset he put the entire case as clearly
and as fully as he could before his hearers and stated that he proposed to
introduce testimony to prove all these points.
While I had recognized that the words " witness" and "believe" are
often found in the Fourth Gospel, never before had I appreciated their
importance. I literally ran through the chapters for other instances of the
use of these words and marvelled, and still marvel, at the manner in which
the whole argument hangs upon them, and at the wholeness of the argu
ment which hangs upon them. The word " witness " is found, I think
* Delivered at the First Conference, held at the First Baptist Church, October 21, 1903.
10

THE STUD Y OF THE GOSPEL. 1 1
forty-seven times, and the word " believe " about one hundred times in this
Gospel by John.
At this juncture I recalled an experience with the fifth chapter and
thirty-ninth verse which I had had some time before the day of which I
write. I had discovered that the Revised Version of 5:39 reads, "Ye
search the Scriptures, because ye think that in them ye have eternal life",
etc., whereas the Authorized Version reads, " Search the Scriptures ". I
was disappointed when I first read the Revised Version of this passage,
Because I had often used the other in my pubHc addresses, and felt that it
was a very important passage in emphasizing the duty of studying the
Bible. I determined, however, to discover if the revision were more cor
rect. To do this, I first examined the original and found that the verbal
form is exactly the same for " Ye search " as for " Search ". What was I
to do next? I did what has very often helped me understand a passage.
I examined the context. The result of this was that I discovered our Lord
to be giving, in verses thirty to thirty-nine, a summary of the testimony
which had been offered often in His behalf to the persons whom He
was addressing, and in the fortieth verse He tells them what the effect of
this testimony had been upon them. He said to them, " Ye will not come
to Me that ye may have life ". In the thirty-first verse He tells them that
His testimony concerning Himself is not uncorroborated. If He were the
only witness of what He was claiming for Himself, He could not expect
them to believe. In saying this He had in mind the Jewish law that at the
mouth of at least two witnesses the truth should be established. He
appeals to the testimony of John the Baptist (v. 33) and intimates that they
were not consistent in not accepting what John, whom they regarded as a
very wonderful man, had said about Him. He cites also His works (v. 36)
and the Father (v. 37) as witnesses, and finally the Scriptures, which the
Jews were very familiar with. Now, if you will think a moment, you will
see how unlikely it would be for our Lord to command these Jews, who had
been all along rejecting Him, and whose unbelief in verse forty he declares
to be wilful, — how unlikely, I say, that our Lord should command them to
go home and study their Bibles even more about the Messiah. It was not
more infomlation they needed. The evidence presented to them was ample.
The trouble with them was that they would not do that which the testimony
challenged them to do, and the reason for this was, as given in verse forty-
two, " Ve have not the love of God in yourselves ". The trouble was not
with their intellects, but with their feelings and their wills. An additional
reason for accepting the Revised Version I found in the use of the word
"life" in verses thirty-nine and forty. The Jews made the mistake of
thinking that in the Scriptures they had life and they would not come to
the Saviour in order that they might have life. They made the Bible an end
in itself instead of a means to an end, a mistake which many people
are making in the present day.
This passage lying, as I have above explained, in my mind became
vividly present on that red letter day of which I am speaking and served as
the basis of the outline which I submit below, practically all of which was

12 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
wrought out that day in the woods and has been followed with various
classes and by myself many times since, every new study of which brings
additional light on this marvelous Fourth Gospel.

LIFE.

Ye may have life.
Believing ye may have life in His name.
These things are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of God ; and that believing ye may have life in His name.
I.— TESTIMONY.
Testimony of John the Baptist.
Testimony of Jesus' Works.
Testimony of the Father.
Testimony of the Scripture.
Testimony of Jesus Himself.
Testimony of Individuals.
Testimony of the Holy Spirit.
n.-BELIEF.
I. Instances of Belief.
2. Instances of Unbelief.
3. Development of Belief.
4. Development of Unbelief.
5. Secret of Belief.
6. Explanations of Unbelief.
7. Results of Belief.
8. Results of Unbelief.
9. Duty of Belief.
10. Sin of Unbelief.
1 1 . Time of Belief.
12. Object of Belief.
Let us now follow briefly the outline above.
I. — Testimony.
I ¦ — The testimony of John the Baptist is very prominent in the Gospel
by John. It is twice referred to even in the Prologue (John i : 1-18). Why
it is there referred to is a question, to answer which some students reading
this article may profitably spend several hours. We shall not dwell upon it
here. Nothing is said about John the Baptist in the Gospel of John out of the
first and third chapters, except at the end of the tenth chapter, where we
THE STUDY OF THE GOSPEL. 13
read of the people remarking that while John did no miracles, everything
that he said about Jesus was true. The prominence of the testimony of
John the Baptist at the beginning of the Fourth Gospel is accounted for, I
think, from the fact that he was the one who pointed the writer of the
Gospel to Jesus Christ. John the Evangelist was a disciple of John the
Baptist. More time than is usually supposed had been spent by John the
Baptist in instructing his disciples about the Messiah before Jesus came to
the Jordan to be baptized. John the Evangelist was with John the Baptist
when he uttered those memorable words : " Behold the Lamb of God ", and
at the suggestion of John the Baptist, John the Evangelist went after Jesus
and never came back to his old teacher.
The Fourth Gospel is in a real sense a record of the experience of the
man who wrote it. I most firmly believe that this material has been given
by the inspiration of the Most High, and yet I believe that the inspiration
of the Most High did not in any way interfere with the free action of the
mind of John the Evangelist, and that we have here a true picture of how
our Lord impressed him from the beginning to the end. You very well
know how natural it is when one is speaking of his religious experience to
mention the one who led him to the Saviour. This is what John the Evan
gelist here does. It is worth while noticing as we pass that in this Fourth
Gospel John the Baptist is always called simply John, and never John the
Baptist, as is the case for the most part in the other three Gospels. .This,
to me, is one of a number of internal evidences of the genuineness and
authenticity of the Gospel by John. In the minds of the other writers there
were two Johns, John the Evangelist and John the Baptist, and to distin
guish them they wrote Jotin the Baptist when they had the forerunner of our
Lord in mind. The writer of the Fourth Gospel, being John, did not thus
need to distinguish, for those to whom he wrote knew that he meant John
the Baptist when he merely wrote " John ".
The value of the testimony of John the Baptist is very great when we
consider that he was the most prominent man of his time in religious mat
ters. Thousands had been waiting on his ministry and had been baptized
by him. He was fearless, courageous and truthful. Many thought that
he was one of the prophets ; some even wondered if he was not the Mes
siah ; the leaders of the people sent a deputation to inquire who he was, and
among the questions they asked was this, "Art thou the Christ? " In con
sideration of these things the testimony of John the Baptist is to be given
great weight. The first chapter of John records the testimony of John the
Baptist on three different occasions. The first was when the Jews sent to
him priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, " Who art thou? " He
assured them that he was not the Christ. With equal emphasis he denied
that he was Elijah or the prophet. When they urged him to tell them who
he was, reminding him that they had been officially sent to find out, he
answered, " I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make straight
the way of the Lord ". When they inquired his reason for baptizing, since
he was not the Christ, or Elijah, or the prophet, he declared the presence of
One in their midst coming after him in time, but before him in character

14 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
and mission, the latchet of whose shoes he was not worthy to unloose. The
second occasion of John's testifying was on the morrow after the deputation
had visited him. When he saw Jesus coming he exclaimed, " Behold the
Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world ! " and at once pro
ceeded to explain to his hearers how he knew Jesus to be the Messiah. In
doing this he related how the One who had sent him had indicated to him
definitely (by what manner we know not) that upon whomsoever he should
see the spirit descending and abiding, He it was who would baptize with
the Holy Spirit. Solemnly, in the presence of the multitudes, he pointed to
Jesus and said, " I have seen and borne witness that this is the Son of
God " The third occasion was on the day after this, when John and two
of his disciples saw Jesus walking. He once more said to his disciples,
" Behold the Lamb of God ! "
The testimony of John the Baptist on these three occasions may be
summed up as follows :
The worthiest is not worthy to unloose His shoes.
He is the Lamb of God ; the Son of God. On Him abides the Holy
Spirit. His mission is to take away the sin of the world and to baptize in the
Holy Ghost.
What of the result of this testimony of John the Baptist ? Shall we ever
be able to estimate it ? What effect did his words have upon the leaders of
the people when the deputation reported them ? How many people who
heard John the next day recalled his words later and entered into the rest
which Jesus freely gives ? We are unable to answer these questions, but
we can point to the definite results of John the Evangelist following Jesus,
and of that quiet Andrew, his companion, also following Jesus. The signifi
cance of the latter fact is hardly less great than that of the former when
one recalls that Andrew found his brother Simon Peter and brought him
to Jesus. Shall we pause a moment and think of the vast outcome of the
testimony of John the Baptist through the lives of these two of the four men
of the twelve who came to Jesus that day. I refer to John the Evangelist
and Peter the Apostle.
A word only about the testimony of John the Baptist, as found in the
third chapter of the Gospel. It is found in the second part of the chapter,
which contains two notable statements revealing to us much of the char
acter of John the Baptist. One of these expressions is, " He must increase,
but I must decrease " (v. 30). The other is, "A man can receive nothing,
except it have been given him from Heaven " (v. 27). A few years ago I
had no particular admiration for John the Baptist. I thought, in the first
place, that he did not dress well, and then I did not like the kind of food
he ate, and regarded him as unnecessarily severe. But the more I study
John the Baptist and the more comprehensive my view of the Scripture
becomes, the more I admire him. I suggest that you make a study of the
forerunner of our Lord. Gather all the material in the Gospels about him
and make an analysis of what he said about Jesus and what Jesus said
about him, and if I am not greatly mistaken you will learn to love him.

THE STUDY OF THE GOSPEL. 15
Before passing from the testimony of John the Baptist, recall those
words of our Lord in the fifth chapter of the Gospel by John, in which He
refers to the Baptist's testimony. " Ye have sent unto John, and he hath
borne witness unto the truth * * * . He was the lamp that burneth
and shineth ; and ye were willing to rejoice for a season in his light. But
the witness which I have is greater than that of John : for the works which
the Father hath given Me to accomplish, the very works that I do, bear
witness of Me, that the Father hath sent Me ".
2. — Let us now briefly note the testimony of Jesus' mighty works as
presented in the Gospel by John. This Fourth Gospel records seven
notable miracles. They are :
I. The changing of water into wine, ch. 2.
2. The healing of the nobleman's son at a distance, ch. 4.
3. The healing of the man lame 38 years, ch. 5.
4. The feeding of the 5,000 with the five loaves and two fishes, ch. 6.
5. Walking on the sea, ch. 6.
6. Healing a man born blind, ch. 9.
7. Raising Lazarus from the dead, ch. 11.
Several observations may be made about these miracles. They are all
found in the first part of the Gospel. A noted commentator calls the
twelfth chapter of the Gospel by John " the watershed of the book ". The
verse which indicates the great division of the book into two parts is 12 : 33,
at the middle, together with what follows in the thirty-seventh verse,
" These things spake Jesus, and He departed and hid Himself from them.
But though He had done so many signs before them, yet they believed not
on Him ".
The word " sign ", used in verse thirty-seven of the twelfth chapter, is
found seventeen times in the Gospel by John. It is used only once after
this verse in the twelfth chapter, and that is in 20 : 30-31, the key passage of
the book. It will be well here to recall what that passage says, as it
emphasizes the fact that the signs were given in testimony. " Many other
signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples, which are not
written in this book : but these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is
the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing ye may have life in His
name". Notice that the antecedent of " these " in verse thirty-one is
" signs ", and that " these signs are written that ye may believe ".
The word " sign " is one of at least four words, translated "miracle "-
It has a peculiar meaning, and stands for that kind of a miracle which has
significance or meaning beyond itself. The selection of miracles which
John made was for the purpose of setting forth spiritual truth. Hence he
calls them semeia (signs). It will be very profitable to trace here the fifteen
uses of the word in the Gospel up to the twelfth chapter and thirty-seventh
verse. In 2 : 1 1 we read, " This beginning of His signs did Jesus in Cana of
Galilee, and manifested His glory ; and His disciples believed on Him ".
Here you will observe the effect upon the disciples of the sign. In 2 : 18,
" The Jews therefore answered and said unto Him, what sign showest
Thou unto us, seeing that Thou doest these things ? " His answer was,

1 6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
" Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up ". The Jews mis
understood His reply, but the writer in the following verses explains that
after He rose from the dead His disciples believed, for they understood
that He referred to the resurrection of His body from the dead. The word
is used a third time in this chapter (2 : 23), " Many believed on His name,
beholding the signs which He did ". The fourth time the word is used is in
3 : 2, when Nicodemus is reported as saying " Thou art a teacher come
from God ; for no one can do these signs that Thou doest, except God be
with him ". The fifth time is in 4 : 48, " Jesus therefore said unto him,
' Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no wise believe ' ". The sixth
time is in 4 : 54, " This is again the second sign that Jesus did, having come
out of Judea into Galilee ". The sixth chapter is the banner chapter for
the use of the word. It is used four times. In 6 : 2 we read, "A great mul
titude followed Him, because they beheld the signs which He did on them
that were sick ". In 6:14 are the words, " When therefore the people saw
the sign which He did, they said, this is of a truth the prophet that cometh
into the world ". In 6 : 26, Jesus said to the multitude the day after they
had been fed, " Ye seek me, not because ye saw the signs, but because ye
ate of the loaves, and were filled ", and in verse thirty, " They said therefore
unto Him, what then doest Thou for a sign, that we may see, and believe
Thee ? what workest thou ? " In 7 : 3 1 , the multitude who believed on Him
said, " When the Christ shall come, will He do more signs than those which
this Man hath done ? " Some, in commenting upon the miracle wrought
upon the man blind from his birth (9 : 16), said, " How can a man which is a
sinner do such signs?" Many came to Jesus and testified (10:41) that
while John did no sign, everything he said about Jesus was true, and, as a
consequence, beUeved on Him. After Jesus had raised Lazarus from the
dead, the chief priests and Pharisees gathered a council and said, "What
do we ? for this man doeth many signs " (i i :47). A multitude went out to
see Jesus and Lazarus, after he had been raised, because of the report of
those who had been with Jesus when He called Lazarus out of the tomb
(12:18). 3. — A close study of the passages cited above, in the light of the whole
plan of the Gospel by John, will indicate how important the testimony of
Jesus' mighty works was regarded. The reader is advised to follow up the
study. Time after time Jesus appeals to His mighty works as evidence
that He is from God. The fact is, that he joins inseparably the next line of
testimony, namely, the testimony of the Father, with that of His mighty
works by declaring that the Father, who is in Him, does the works. He
declares that His works would not be accomplished were He alone, and
that His ability to do them should be evidence to all that God was in Him
and was doing His work through Hiir . In like manner He, before going
away from His disciples, intimated to them that should they believe on
Him the works that He did they would do also. In explaining this. He
continued, " Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do "- So in a
very real sense we may say that as Jesus doing the works of God both
received evidence and was evidence that the Father was in Him doing His

THE STUDY OF THE GOSPEL. 17
own works, so the Son of God will dwell in us who believe and give to us
and through us indisputable evidence of His presence by doing mighty
works by us. Thus may we know that He is the Son of God.
4.- What shall we say of the testimony of the scriptures, to which Jesus
appeals? He evidently has in mind the Old Testament. This was the
Jewish Bible ; it was His own Bible. In thus appealing the case beyond
the Hmit of contemporaneous testimony. He appeals to voices from the
past. And in this connection we should note that He appeals also in the
seventh line of testimony, namely, that of the Holy Spirit, to an authorita
tive voice that is to come in the future. He thus looks backward and for
ward and makes present, past and future contribute its evidence to His
august claims. We shall not here attempt to elaborate the testimony of the
Old Testament in behalf of Jesus. It is very strong and clear. The Old
Testament would not have been written if Jesus had not been coming.
We may truthfully say that the New Testament would not have been writ
ten if He had not already come. He is the central figure of the entire Bible.
To Him every part of it directly or indirectly points.
S- — The testimony of Jesus Himself, as recorded in this Fourth Gos
pel is most remarkable. The emphatic form of " I ", in the Greek, is used
at least twenty-six times in connection with our Lord's claim. Here are
some of the expressions in which this is found : "lam He" (that is, the
Messiah,), 4 : 26 ; " Before Abraham was I am " ; " I am the Bread of Life " ;
" I am the Living Bread " ; "I am the Good Shepherd " ; "I am the resur
rection and the life " ; "I am the way, and the truth and the life " ; "I am
the Light of the World " ; "I am the Son of God " ; " I am the door ".
Truly this Fourth Gospel is a strong setting forth of the claims of Jesus
Christ as the Son of God. One does not wonder at the strenuous attempts
which have been made by the rejectors of the divinity of Jesus Christ to
prove this Gospel unauthentic and non-genuine. Thank God it has stood
firm against all attacks and is better accredited to-day tharl it has ever been.
6. — Concerning the testimony of individuals as found in the Fourth Gos
pel, suffer this single remark. This testimony is introduced in remarkable
subordination to the general plan and purpose of the book and contributes
marvelously to its beauty, unity and force. The student may prove this by
examining in the light of the whole book the testimony of individuals from
that of Nathaniel, in i : 49, to that of Thomas, in 20 : 28. Notice how
strikingly these fit in with the declared object as recorded in 20:30,31.
The book there is said to have been written that " Ye may believe that
Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God". Nathaniel's testimony, in 1 149, is,
" Thou art the Son of God ; Thou art the King of Israel ", which latter
expression is equivalent to saying, "Thou art the Christ". Thomas'
words are, " My Lord and my God ". Will the reader pause at this point
and attempt to recall individual testimony as follows : Who in the third
chapter "testifies, and what did he say? Who in the fourth, and what was
his testimony ? Who in the ninth, and what the testimony ? Who in the
eleventh, and what the testimony?

1 8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
(A thorough examination of the Gospel for the testimony of individuals
is earnestly recommended.)
7. — The testimony of the Holy Spirit has already been alluded to. Refer
ences in the Fourth Gospel to this testimony are found chiefly in our Lord's
last discourses. There more than once He refers to the coming of the
Holy Spirit. "Whom," said He, " the Father wih send in My name ; He
shall bear witness of Me ". The words of our Lord concerning the testi
mony of the Holy Spirit were fulfilled on the Day of Pentecost and after
wards. Not for a single moment since that notable day has the Holy
Spirit ceased to testify in the hearts of believers and through them that
Jesus is the Son of God.
At the head of the second part of the outline which we are following is
the word " Belief", which, where it exists, is induced by testimony.
II.— Belief.
That the testimony recorded by John did produce belief is evident
from the record. The Gospel records instances of individual belief as well
as of the belief of companies. Individuals, such as Philip, Nathaniel,
Nicodemus, the woman at the well, and others, we readily recall. Then
there are such expressions as " Of the multitudes many believed ". It is not
a little remarkable to notice that there are also instances of unbelief
recorded. It is what we should expect. In fact, if there were no instances
of unbelief recorded in the Gospels, we would be disposed to suspect them
to be forged. They would be untrue to nature. Nowhere to-day, not even in
the smallest village in any country, does everybody believe. The candor of
the writer is clearly shown in his recording these instances of unbelief.
The strength of his position is greater also when one thinks about it, for he
gives satisfactory explanations of the instances of unbelief. One of the
most interesting lines of study in this entire outline is that of the develop
ment of belief and unbelief. This is seen both in individuals and in the
body of disciples and of the opposition. The marvelous unity of this Gos
pel grows on one as the development of belief and unbelief is traced, of
belief on the one hand in the disciples as they came better to know their
Lord ; of unbelief on the other in the Jews as they more and more clearly
took their stand against Jesus.
Take one or two instances of development of belief in individuals.
That of the woman at the well is one. At first her estimate of Jesus was
expressed in the words, "Thou being a Jew" After brief conversation
with Him she remarked, "I perceive that Thou art a prophet". A little
later she suggested to her fellow-townsmen that He was the Christ. The
nobleman, as reported near the end of the fourth chapter, believed the
word that Jesus said when He told him on the way some distance from the
bouse that his son lived. After his return and discovery that his son was
convalescent, we read that the nobleman believed and all his house. The
word "believed" in this last instance contained much more than it did
when he referred to the road-side experience. So it should be with every
believer. Every new day should fill the word "believe" more full of

THE STUDY OF THE GOSPEL. 19
meaning. The man born blind is another illustration of rapid development
of belief. Reference to the ninth chapter will show that the first estimate
by the bhnd man of Jesus was that He was a man. His words were, "A
man that is called Jesus made clay and told me to go to the pool and
wash". After he had heard the Pharisees discussing the claims of Jesus
and His work and then was asked his opinion, he said, " He is a prophet ".
He continued to think as he listened to the discussion, and when occasion
presented itself said, " If this man were not from God He could do noth
ing '. After they had cast him out for faithfulness to mental and spiritual
processes, Jesus Himself found him and said, " Dost thou believe on the
Son of God?" He answered, " Who is He that I may believe?" Jesus
said, " Thou hast both seen Him and He speaketh with thee ". And he said,
"I believe", and worshipped Him. Thus the blind man in a single day
covered all the distance in the development of belief, from "A man that is
called Jesus " to acceptance of this same man and worship of Him as the
Son of God. To any reader whose eyes are not open to this glorious fact
the same experience may come if, like the blind man, he has the willingness
and humility to do what Jesus tells him to do and the courage to testify up
to the measure of his conviction as Jesus more and more reveals Himself
to his inner consciousness.
Of the secret of belief I shall not here speak particularly. It has been
already in one way or another pointed out. Explanations of unbelief are
fully given in the Gospel by John. I believe there is not a single case of
unbelief in the world today of which the Gospel by John does not furnish
an explanation. Let us note two of these. The first is found in the third
chapter, also in the fifth. It is a bad life. " Men love darkness ", says our
Lord, "rather than light, because their deeds are evil; neither will they
come to the light lest their deeds be reproved ". The same is involved in
John 5 : 42 and 44. " I know you, that ye have not the love of God in your
selves. How can ye believe, who receive glory one of another and the
glory that cometh from the only God ye seek not?" It thus appears that
in the case of some people it is absolutely true that they cannot believe.
They cannot believe because they will not turn from their evil ways, just as
a man cannot see the north when his face is set toward the south ; just as
one cannot go towards the east while he is progressing westward.
The second explanation of unbelief is given in 5:40. "Ye will not
come to me that ye may have life ". Here our Saviour indicates that the diffi
culty with these Jews was not that they did not know enough ; that they had
not evidence sufficient, but that they would not act ; that they refused to do
what it was clear they ought to do. This great Physician of souls here
made a true diagnosis. He located the difficulty not in the intellect, but in
the feelings and in the will. He said to them, " Your loves are wrong ;
the love of God is not in you. Your wills are wrong ; ye will not come
that ye may have life ".
The results of belief and unbelief as indicated in the Gospel by John
are the same as those manifesting themselves both before and since the
time of our Lord. Take any cases of belief in the Old Testament times.

20 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
such as that of Moses, or David, or Daniel, and compare what resulted in
those lives with what the Gospel by John declares to be the results of belief
in God and you will be struck by the fact that the results are the same.
Take the case of any believer to-day and you will find the joy and the peace
and the power and other manifestations of belief to a greater or less degree
present. In like manner we might speak of the results of unbelief. It
thus appears that this Gospel sets forth truth for all time ; that, in other
words, it is eternal.
The duty of belief is set forth on every page of this Gospel. " Whatso
ever He saith unto you, do it ", quietly said the mother of Jesus to the
servants at the marriage feast. " He that obeyeth not the Son shall not
see life", is the solemn declaration of Jesus Himself. The evidences of
His lordship are so many and so strong that the duty of obeying Him,
which is what belief means, becomes very apparent.
One of the most striking passages setting forth the time of belief is in
the Watershed Chapter (twelfth), thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth verses, "Walk
in the light while ye have the light * * * believe on the light that ye
may become sons of the light ".
We cannot emphasize too much the fact that the object of our belief is
a person, even Jesus Christ the Son of God Himself and not a proposition
or a series of propositions. Christianity is not mere acceptance of a set of
doctrines as true. It is personal allegiance and warm, loving friendship.
" Ye are My friends ", our Saviour says, " if ye do the things which I
command you. No longer (that is, not a moment after you do the things
which I command you), do I call you servants. For the servant knoweth
not what his Lord doeth. But I have called you friends, for all things that
I have heard from My Father I have made known unto you ''.
Let me emphasize, in closing this outline study, the distinction between
explanation and evidence. Christianity bases its claims upon the latter and
not upon the former, and this is scientific. Explanations come after evi
dence is acted upon. There are many students to-day who think that they
are compromising their intellect if they accept as true that which they are
unable to understand or explain. In no other department except that of
religion, however, would they make this demand or have this suspicion.
The man is mistaken when he says, I cannot believe. He has a miscon
ception of what belief is. The fact is that belief has been appointed as the
means by which salvation is procured, among other reasons because it is
possible for everybody to believe; that is, to, act on evidence. Jesus' com
mand is, " Follow Me". This anybody can do. His next command is
" Learn of Me". This anyone will do if he will obey the first command,
" Follow Me". He does not say, "Be able to explain the doctrine of the
divine Sonship". He does say, " Do what I command".
An exceptionally intelligent student who had come to accept the general
views of Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer, and who regarded himself as an
Agnostic, one day made up his mind that he would fairly examine the
strongest presentation of Christian truth. He was advised to study the
Gospel of John. He read it through from beginning to end, taking it

THE STUDY OF THE GOSPEL. 21
simply as a book, without examination of outside evidence of its genuine
ness. When he read it through he said : " The one of whom this book tells
us is either the Saviour of the world, or he ought to be". Because of what
the Book told him of Jesus Christ he was ready to heed the call of our Lord,
" If any man thirst, let him come unto Me and drink". — " He that foUoweth
Me shall not walk in darkness". He followed the Light of the world and
found Him to be his light and is now pointing others to his Saviour.
The above, related by Dr. Trumbull, is a challenge to every man who
says, I do not know. For my part, I believe that the same prescription
would unfailingly cure every Agnostic. Let him with the following prayer,
thoughtfully and earnestly read the Gospel by John. " Oh, God, if there be
a God, and if Jesus Christ be Thy Son and my Saviour, give me evidence
of it and I will follow Him at any cost". I do not believe that any man
determined to know and do the truth at all hazards can study the Gospel
by John through without becoming a Christian.

* THE FIRST CHAPTER OF THE GOSPEL BY JOHN.
BY REV. -WILBERT -W. -WHITE, PH. U.,
PRESIDENT BIBLE TEACHERS' TRAINING SCHOOL, NEW YORK.
The Gospel by John has a prologue and an epilogue. The epilogue
constitutes the twenty-first chapter. The prologue includes the first eighteen
verses of the first chapter. In our studyof the first chapter we shall con
sider it in three parts. We shall first take the prologue, next the testimony
of John the Baptist as found in verses nineteen to forty-two, and lastly we
s^iaU make a brief study of Philip and Nathanael.
I. THE PROLOGUE.
What is the purpose of the prologue ? One great scholar much quoted
in these days says, that it was for the purpose of introducing Greek readers
of Asia Minor to Jewish thought, the body of the Gospel being Jewish.
There is a measure of truth in this, and yet the prologue itself must be recog
nized as Jewish in thought. The outstanding Greek idea which John takes
up in the prologue and into which he pours more than any Greek ever dreamed
of, is Logos. In brief, we may say that the purpose of the prologue is to
introduce. It summarizes in a sense the entire Gospel, setting forth in
miniature all that follows. There appears to be some ground for the opinion
that this prelude is tripartate and in widening circles presents the motifs of
the drama which follows and which describes the development of belief and
unbelief. The purpose of the Gospel is to prove that Jesus is the incarnate
Logos. This not by a doctrinal course of argument, but by a biography,
" and in accordance with a plan which involves two ideas, testimony and
answering belief." It requires no careful study of these verses to reveal not
only the claims set forth that Jesus is the Son of God, but also tlie presence
of testimony and its result.
Of the plan of the prologue one need not speak at length. As has been
intimated, there appears to be a series of ever widening movements, precur
sors of the development which we find in the body of the Gospel. In con
nection with the plan of the prologue it might be well to dwell a moment on
the manifest progression as therein found. This is most clearly observed in
the three propositions found in verses one, fourteen, and eighteen. The
Word was God ; the Word became flesh ; the Word reveals the Father. It
is interesting to compare the movement in this prologue with the statement
of the object of the writing of John found in 20 : 30, 31. The order found
there is, first, Jesus ; second, the Christ ; third, the Son of God. The exact

*This is the substance of President White's evening address, delivered at the First Conference on
the Gospel of St. John, held October 21, 1903, at the First Baptist Church.

THE FIRST CHAPTER. 23
reverse of this order appears in the prologue. Why? Because in the
prologue the claims are logical ; whereas, in the twentieth chapter a summary
of the historical movement as found in the Gospel is given. In the first part
of the Gospel the disciples are represented as coming in contact with one
Jesus, who, after a while is by them acknowledged to be the Christ, and at
last is confessed even by the doubting Thomas to be the Son of God. In
connection with those three propositions found in verses one, fourteen and
eighteen, may I give the following, quoted from Gomorus, who represents
Jesus as saying —
" 1 am what I was : that is God.
I was not what I am : that is man.
I am now both God and man''.
n. TESTIMONY OF JOHN THE BAPTIST.
[See preceding address.]
ni. PHILIP AND NATHANAEL.
In these two men we have completed one half of the apostolic college.
Six of the twelve apostles are found coming to Jesus in this first chapter of
John. Jesus, it is said, found Philip (v. 43) and Philip found Nathanael
(v. 54). The words of verse forty-five suggest enthusiasm on the part of
Philip in announcing to Nathanael the Messiah. Think of him as seeing
Nathanael at a distance, perhaps on the other side of a wide street, or on
the opposite side of a field, and running towards him crying, "Oh, Nathanael,
we have found Him of whom Moses and the Prophets wrote, Jesus of Naza
reth, the Son of Joseph". I think Philip and Nathanael had been talking
over matters relating to the coming of the Messiah and were looking for
Him. People who are looking are those who usually find. The answer of
Nathanael put in the form of a question, " Can any good thing come out of
Nazareth? " did not dampen the ardor of Philip. He was unable to answer
the objection which Nathanael raised, but he was sure that in spite of the
objection he had found the Messiah. He did the wise thing. He did not
arg^e, but said, " Come and see for yourself" Nathanael's response to this
invitation of Philip is a revelation of his true character. He was an honest,
earnest inquirer. He was one who was not to be turned aside from investi
gation by even a serious objection. He would give more weight to the testi
mony of his friend than to a theoretic difficulty. Would that there were
more of the spirit of Nathanael in our day.
There are three things which in closing I wish to say about these words
" Come and see". The first is that Christianity invites investigation. Not
only is it willing to have the most thorough examination of its claims made,
but it greatly desires just this thing. Its policy is not to ignore or dodge
any difficulty. On its forefront are written the words " Come and see."
The Bible invites investigation. Throw all the light possible on its
pages. The founder of Christianity invites investigation. His claims. His

24 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
character, His career, all about Him He would have you investigate most
carefully. The work of C'hristianity in the world invites investigation. It
says, let on all the light possible.
A second fact about Christianity is that it stimulates investigation. It
presents claims which make us think. We should never forget that the
modern university with all that it involves is the daughter of Christianity.
May the daughter never deny her mother. The Bible is acknowledged by
the most eminent thinkers to be the greatest stimulus to human thought.
No book in all the world's history has done for the human intellect in the
way of stimulus what the Bible has done. The paradoxes which are pre
sented in the Bible are calculated to stimulate thought. The superficial
thinker rejects the Bible as untrue because it has what he calls so many con
tradictions. These are only apparent and dissolve on closer investigation.
An illustration of this we find in this question of Nathanael to Philip," Can any
good thing come out of Nazareth ? " The prophets, as Nathanael and Philip
knew, had declared that the Messiah should come from Bethlehem of Judea.
It seemed impossible to believe that what Philip said was true, and yet a
wider synthesis of facts was all that was needed in order to make it manifest
that both were true. By the mere claim which Philip made Nathanael was
stimulated to investigate.
This leads us to the third and last remark that Christianity stands the
test of investigation. When Nathanael went to see he found things as Philip
had represented them. Everyone since that has gone to see in the same
earnest manner has had the same experience. Is it not a remarkable fact
that no one who has thoroughly investigated Christianity and acted upon the
command of our Lord " Follow Me" has returned to tell the world that there
is nothing in His claims ? Is there anyone here who does not know that
Christ is the Son of God ? My word to such an one is " Come and see." You
are challenged to do so by the very claims which are made by those about
you whom you ought to trust. Philip had never deceived Nathanael. There
are friends of yours who have always told you the truth. Not a single time
have they led you astray. They with all the enthusiasm possessed by Philip
on this memorable day when he called to Nathanael, declare that they have
found the Messiah. Will you not prove yourself to be equally as earnest and
honest as Nathanael and come and see even though great difficulties
present themselves to you ? If you will do so, you will know that He is what
He claims to be. He will give you evidence as He gave Nathanael that He
knows you through and through. Will you please notice that this was what
convinced Nathanael. When Jesus saw him coming He said to him, "Behold
an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile ! " And when Nathanael asked
Him, " How did you come to know me ? " He said, " I saw thee under the
fig tree before Philip called thee". He was doubtless in meditation and
prayer. Probably asking God to indicate to him the Messiah about whom
John had been preaching and to give him indisputable evidence when he
should see Him. His prayer was answered in an unexpected way. At once
he confessed, " Thou art the Son of God ; thou art King of Israel". From
that day forth Nathanael followed Jesus and the words of our Lord to him

THE FIRST CHAPTER. 25
proved true, "Thou shalt see greater things than these". Every day in the
true Christian's life new evidences come to him that Jesus is what He claims
to be. Limitless vistas open before him and he goes on a way of ever increas
ing wonder. Will not every hearer accept the statement at the beginning
of this book, that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and act upon it ? By this
means, great doubter though you may be, you will inevitably come to the
place as Thomas did where in the presence of indisputable evidence, you
will cry, "My Lord, and my God".

* THE PROLOGUE OF JOHN.
BY RE-S^. OLARK: S. BEARDSLEE, D. D.,
Professor of Biblical Dogmatics and Ethics, Hartford Theological
Seminary, Hartford, Conn.
There are many points of entrance into a study of this opening section
of John's Gospel.
One broad avenue of approach to its meaning is a careful survey of its
personnel. Here stands a notable company, all so disposed within its far-
spreading area of thought that each one finds ample room. No one but
will well repay a close attention.
Take the task of arranging and naming and estimating the impressive
array : God, the Father ; the Word, the Son, the Incarnate ; Believers and
an Unreceptive World ; Moses and John the Baptist.
From among these, bring forward to the foreground the figure undoubt
edly designed by the author to stand preeminent within the group — Jesus
Christ. Notice His designation : He is the Only- Begotten, the Word, the
Eternal, the Medium of Creation, the Light, the Life of all the World. He
has a world-embracing mission, is dowered with a glory as of God, bears
withm His life and being a full and blessed freightage of g^ace and truth,
can secure to all believers the proper title of children in the household of
God, and from His everlasting home in the Father's bosom can bring forth
abounding revelations of the being of the Infinite and Unseen. All this
opens before one's eye as he heeds the persons filing into view in this brief
paragraph. .Another open highway into a study of the prologue is its action. Here
is a wonderful drama, with mighty actors, engaged in a stupendous enter
prise. There are impressive hints of an eternal companionship of Father
and Son ; of the outgoings of an infinite energy and skill in the creation of
all existing things ; of an awful and far-spread alienation between persons
who should have remained genially at one ; of a gracious, world-encircling
personal illumination ; of the strangely variant response of unbelievers and
believers ; of an amazing birth from God through Christ of all receptive
hearts into filial kinship with God ; and of clusters of events fit to mark
world-eras in the ministries of Moses and John. Surely here are move
ments of the most vital and majestic type.
But, among all these living scenes one is central : the Word becoming
Flesh. Here is mystery beyond all doubt. But here is verity beyond
denial. And here pure glory is radiant. He who abides eternally with
God, He who brings a universe into ordered life. He who brings life to all
who see. He, the Only-Begotten, becomes Flesh that there may come to
* Summary of address delivered at the First Conference, held at the First Baptist Church, October
21, 1903. 26

THE PROLOGUE. 27
man from the eternal source of Truth all the fullness of infinite Grace. Here
is a transaction fit to summon every seeing eye in all the universe to give
thoughtful, reverent heed.
And other ways of easy entrance to this gateway of the Gospel of John
lie in easy view. Let heedful souls find and map out every one.
Once a man has broken into the rich interior of this short paragraph,
he is impressed with its arrangement of material in pairs . Word and God,
Son and Father, Word and Flesh, Light and Darkness, Being and Becom
ing, Faith and Birth, Repentance and Belief, Grace and Truth. Here are
set together infinite contradictions, contrasts, balancings, complements,
harmonies, fellowships.
Tremendous questions surge into a student's mind. How are the
Word and God related inherently and eternally ? What deeps lie in Son-
ship and Fatherhood in Deity ? How do Word and God cooperate in crea
tion ? What, quite precisely, are the author's views of Darkness ? How do
Faith in the believer and Birth from God consort, when people " become "
sons of God? Exactly how does "witness bearing" corroborate "light"?
How do Grace and Truth differ ? and how do they combine in " Glory " ?
Here are near and obvious queries, and any one of them may sober anyone.
And yet all these astounding coefficients lie together in this prologue in
easy fellowship, without any sign of discord or uneasiness.
Indeed, they truly unify. Though the colors vary strikingly, they evi
dently and beautifully blend. After all, the theme is one, the aim is one,
the effect is one. Here is a characteristic marvel, and herein the prologue
is like the Gospel as a whole. It is a living unity. Gospel and prologue
are fluid, not solid. All its elements interplay. The whole of it is every
where. The pressure of the entire paragraph pulses and surges in every
phrase. To state the same truth in another way, its structure is germinal.
Each sentence is like a living cell ; it alone is able to produce the whole.
The life of all is in each part. Or once again, it is like a diamond with many
facets, through each of which streams all the splendor in all the gem. So
wonderful is its unity. Prologue and Gospel are pan-centric. The center
of gravity is everywhere. It is all central. Every sentence is a radius.
Every affirmation is an orb. Its aspects vary as might vary the different
surfaces of a cube, when overlaid with varying hues. Every surface pre
sents the total cube. Such is the composition of this section. All its
factors fuse.
And they merge in the Incarnate Word. Here is all the manifoldness,
all the abundance, all the unity, all the simplicity that flash upon the open
eye at this magnetic gateway to the Gospel of John. In Him is Eternal
Deity, creative energy, effulgent light, primal lordship, all radiance of glory,
full tides of Grace and Truth. All verity and harmony reside in Him. In
Him, as set forth here, all the deep, disturbing queryings, which the various
factors of the prologue instigate, become tranquilized.
The " World " is His. He dominates its " Darkness ". He radiates its
"Light"- In His full blendings of full Grace and Truth full "Glory"
stands revealed.

2S THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Here is the central reality and the consummate wonder of this prologue.
Here play all the lasting energies of this world's life. And here those forces
find their rest. How is this so swiftly and deftly and simply achieved ?
This is the task of any earnest and penetrating student of this introduc
tory masterpiece in the matchless Gospel of John, But this is no task for a
novice, or a man in any impatient haste. It is a task for a master and for a
life-time. One broad assertion may be made at the start. He who fathoms this
prologue will be a man of one sole aim. He will be seeking with all his
eyes to find out its conception of personality.
Within this simple thought range all the areas and slumber all the
deeps which this paragraph contains. The key to unlock all the mystery of
Word and God, of Father and Son, of Grace and Truth, of Word and Flesh,
of Faith and Birth, of Darkness and Light, and of the infinite act of creation
lies fully fitted in just one deep, true glance into the mighty energies and
awful antagonisms and blissful fellowships that lie inherent in the qualities
and capacities of beings who are persons, /. e., beings who are responsible
and free. The forces that play across the face of this prologue are persons.
They are beings who know and choose and judge. They can discern and
approve and desire. They can also detect and decline. They are inher
ently and freely independent. And they are inherently and freely inter
locked. They stand in individual integrity. And they stand in social
fraternity. They may be alienated. They may be reconciled. They may
be deadened. They may be quickened. They may freely stray in dark
ness. And they may freely range in light. They may clarify, or they may
eclipse their intelligence. They may sully or they may purify their joy.
They are persons.
Among them all stands, at the focus of this paragraph, and at the focus
of the history of the world, the Incarnate Word, the Christ, the Son of God.
Now mark what is said of Him.
He is the Word. Heed that. He became Flesh. Ponder here. He
dwelt among us. Peer into that. He was radiant with Glory. If you
really have at your command a true intelligence, use it here. This Glory
was as of the Only-Begotten. Think what this does verily mean. The
Only-Begotten of the Father. How far do you really see into the essential
meaning of this word in this place ? Full of Grace and Truth. Now you
have struck the center. Do you know it? This (the blended Grace and
Truth) is the Glory. This beseems the " Father ". This is what radiates
from the " Only- Begotten ". This streams from the " Flesh ". This hails
from the " Word ". And this is the Word who was " with God ", who " was
God", through whom everything " came into being". This Word was the
" Life " which was the " Light ", which irradiated all mankind. It was
He in whom certain men "believed". It was through Him that they
became " Sons of God ". It was He whom divers other men did not
"receive". It is He who "is in the Father's bosom". It is He who
¦' declares " the " invisible " God. And He is Jesus Christ.

THE PROLOGUE. 29
Now here are overwhelming affirmations. But they are splendidly
simple. They all center in that blending of Grace and Truth. And the
blending of the unmixed energies of eternal Grace and Truth form the deep
and priceless verity, the final and full quintescence of deathless, divine
personality. This is the "Glory" of Christ. This is the "Word". In
this free range are all the vitality and verity and joy of the copartnership
of Word and God, of Father and Son. It is an infinite interplay of Truth
and Grace. Herein each is conscious of the solid and unvarying reality of His own
being in the exhaustless upspringing of His self respect, while also equally
conscious of a full and joyful outflow toward the other in the exhaustless
tide of His self-devotion. Truth, the blessed consciousness of the absolute
reality of Himself ; Grace, the blessed, free outpouring toward another —
here is all the "Glory" of God, all the eternal companionship of Father
and Son. This in the unmixed purity of the spirit life, and in the unlimited
fullness of the Transcendent One is personality in blessed archetype. It is
the unencumbered, unhindered, untiring and unmeasured interplay of Grace
and Truth.
The revelation of this is " Light ". The glad welcome of this is
" Belief ". The potent engendering of this by God through Christ is the
first inbreathing of sonship. And herein rests all basis for pure, abid
ing fellowship, whether with brother man, or Christ, or the Infinite God-
Here is personality in all its immortal nature, and ground, and range, and
blessedness. Here are the deeps of the fellowship in Deity. Here are the
deeps of the comradeship of Word and Flesh. Here is the definition of
Light. This is Life. Here is the ambient tide in which rests so peacefully
the divinely fashioned keel of human faith. And here, as with the Only-
Begotten in the Father's bosom, is the ultimate, and complete, and quiet,
and joyful haven of human rest. So deep, and strong, and clear is the infin
ite love that offers to our wondering eye its deeps in the prologue to the
Gospel of John.

* JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HIS GOSPEL.
(St. John i : 19-37-)
BY RE-\^. "WM:. ARNOLD STEVEI^S, D. D., LIj. D.
Professor of New Testament Interpretation in Rochester Theological
Seminary, Rochester, N. Y.
"There came a man, sent from God, whose name was John" Thus
the history of Christianity, as distinguished from that of Israel, begins — at
least in the Fourth Gospel. The synoptic narrative takes the same point of
departure. "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ ", says Mark —
" John the Baptizer came in the wilderness, preaching the baptism of repent
ance unto remission of sins ". It was in the person of John the Baptist that
Christianity emerged into history, and by him the foundations of the Chris
tian church were begun. The author of Ecce Homo struck a true note in
his opening sentence : " The Christian Church sprang from a movement
that was not begun by Christ ".
The student of the Gospel narrative, his eye fixed upon one central
figure, may easily overlook the large significance of the person and work of
John. One indication of this significance is the relative space given to this
subject. Take the 150 sections into which the four-fold Gospel has been
divided for the purpose of historical interpretation, 23 of them treat of, or
have reference to John. Again, in the book of Acts, in at least six passages
his ministry or his teaching comes distinctly into view. He is especially
prominent in the Fourth Gospel. In that profoundest of the New Testa
ment books there is a distinct recognition of the fact that this man and his
message must be studied if the redemptive work of Christ and the begin
nings of Christianity are to be understood.
"Sent from God", says the record. Every man who fills a place in
history and renders distinguished service to his generation is in a certain
true sense " sent of God ", but the word here means more. The reference
is not to the fact that John belonged to the priesthood, and had the conse
crated blood of Aaron in his veins. Rather that he was sent as a prophet
is sent, bearing a message supernaturally given, and thus invested with an
authority which no personal endowment, no sacred lineage, no human insti
tution, ecclesiastical or civil, could confer. Such was the claim that John
put forward for himself, and such the claim that Christ afterwards was dis
tinctly understood to put forward for him. The Jewish hierarchy recog
nized what that claim to prophetic inspiration and authority meant,^ and on
that issue they deliberately and finally rejected him.
Once for all let us discard that theory which has contributed in so
many ways to a misunderstanding of the origin of Christianity, namely, that
John belonged to the old dispensation rather than the new. Dr. Schaff

* Delivered at the First Conference, held at the First Baptist Church, October 21, 1903.
30

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HIS GOSPEL. 31
styles him "the representative of the ancient preparatory economy", and in
this sense the author of a recent hand-book on John the Baptist chooses
as its title, " The Last of the Prophets ". This is to forget that the ministry
of John, lasting, we may believe, nearly three years, was in large part con
temporaneous with that of Jesus, — that for nearly a year, perhaps more,
they were actively engaged in teaching at no great distance from each
other ; that both John and Jesus baptized, and both preached essentially
the same gospel — that John, as truly as Peter, or Andrew, or John the
Apostle, was a disciple and a servant of Christ. We are told, by way of
objection, that John was not one of the members of the kingdom, that Christ
Himself expressly excludes him from that number. But it was because the
kingdom had not come. John did not live to see the ascension, and the
advent of the Spirit ; he could not be included among those who should not
taste of death till they should see the kingdom of God (Lk. 9:27); but no
one can accept the historicity of the Fourth Gospel and consistently deny
to John a place among the ministers of the new covenant. Luke also
expressly says, "he preached the gospel unto the people" (3:18). His
proper place is in that new order of the world that we call Christian.
Who may fitly describe this great man — great in every true, high sense ?
His picture — the picture of the external man — is familiar, but the Gospels
give us no biography, no account of his education, of his life till manhood,
alternating between the temple and the wilderness. Only a few of his sail
ings are recorded ; he transmitted no system of doctrine ; the society which
he formed was not finally to bear his name or acknowledge his leadership.
Still there is no mistaking the mental and moral stature of this sublime
man, who has not yet come to his own in history, to whom even Keim's
splendid tribute has done only partial justice.
His greatness grows with time. As Edersheim says : " It is not easy to
speak of him in moderate language. Above all, it is his generosity and his
unselfishness and absolute self-abnegation which impresses us. In a gen
eration pre-eminently self-righteous, vain-glorious and self-seeking, when
even on the last journey to Jerusalem the two disciples nearest to Christ
could only think of pre-eminence of place in the kingdom, and when in the
near prospect of suffering a Peter could ask the Master, ' What shall we
have, ? ' when even at the last meal the disciples marred the solemn music
of this farewell by the discord of their wrangle about the order of rank,
* * * the Baptist stands alone in his life and in his death — absolutely
self-forgetful ".
He had, what is so rarely found, self-knowledge, a thorough understand
ing of himself and his vocation. And this suggests one of the lessons to be
learned from his life. He was conscious of a prophetic task, and had pon
dered Old Testament prophecy until its thought and spirit had passed into
his very life. He perceived that the coming of the Messiah for the deliv
erance of Israel was conditioned, that it depended in part upon the pre
paration to receive Him which the Israelite community itself should make.
The theocracy must make ready for the coming of its King ; there must be
a spiritual preparation, a revival of faith and obedience. " Come out from

32 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
among them and be ye separate". Now John, as Ewald has said, "recog
nized the Divine call as directed in the first instance to himself ". He was
the nearest person he could speak to. Not waiting for the nation, not even
waiting for the appearance of the Elijah who was to precede the Messiah,
he bowed his own soul before God, and there made ready for the King.
Not dreaming that he himself was that Elijah, he passed into the wilder
ness and became Elijah — the Elijah that was to come. Thus is it, or may it
be with us all. It is our ideals that shape our destiny.
" The thing we long for, that we are."
The power with which- he brought his message to bear upon his gener
ation may be measured by its effect. The trumpet blast of his voice shook
the land. It awoke a reformation, a revival of spiritual life. Herod Anti
pas, as well as the rulers at Jerusalem, feared him. For, as Josephus
relates, "the people were wrought up to the highest pitch of excitement by
his words ", and "seemed ready to do anything that he might advise".
Even during his imprisonment he had intercourse with his followers. For
not less than three years, we suppose, perhaps longer, he preached, taught,
gathered a body of disciples, until his mission was accomplished, and he
had, in the phrase of scripture, made ready for the Lord " a prepared
people ".
That John preached a gospel we have already shown. We are now
to inquire, what was that gospel ? The answer will be three-fold :
I. He preached a Christ — a personal Lord and Savior.
II. He preached the Kingdom of God.
III. He preached a Gospel of Righteousness.
I. John preached a Christ, a personal Lord and Savior. The modern
reader of the Gospels takes this as a matter of course, having in mind that
the whole Jewish people were in an attitude of expectation. The literature
of that age enables us measurably to appreciate the tremendous import of
the Messianic hope — the courage, the recuperative energy, the idealized
imperialism that were born of it. But that which we are accustomed to
designate the Messianic hope was the expectation of a kingdom rather than
of a king. The kingdom was to be restored to Israel. The Jew was to be
ruler of the world. A monarchy, a throne, a king of the Davidic line, these
were matters of course, but it was the kingdom that loomed large in popu
lar thought. In the compilation known as the " Sibylline Oracles " there
are certain portions manifestly of Jewish origin, which are on good grounds
considered at least a century older than John the Baptist. In their delinea
tion of the future power and glory of Israel, they scarcely more than allude
to the Messiah, the King who is to inaugurate the new era. The poet's eye
is not fixed upon a person. In the Book of Enoch, it is true, and in the
Psalms of Solomon, that personal figure is more prominent. But for the
most part the watchword of the Pharisees was not the Messiah, it was Mal-
kuth, the kingdom, and this was equally the case with the people at large.
John preached the Kingdom of God, but the distinctive feature of his
message was the teaching concerning a personal King and Savior. He not

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HIS GOSPEL.

33

only kindled anew the national hope, he interpreted it and spiritualized it.
He turned all eyes upon the Coming One. This supreme thought of a
unique person as the reahzation in Himself of the nation's long deferred
hope, was not new ; it was at least as old as Isaiah, but it was for that age
vague and obscure, and practically of slight import. John revived it.
"What you have to do with ", he warned rulers and people alike, "is not
the matter of a new polity, a reconstructed civic and social order ; the King
is coming, a King of absolute righteousness, with power to destroy as well
as to save. Your reckoning is not with the kingdom, but with Him."
Of the genesis of this phase of his gospel we are not told, nor when it
was that he first accepted Jesus of Nazareth as his Lord and Savior. No
record remains of the day when for the first time he believed on the Nazar-
ene as the Lord's Anointed, whose way he was commissioned to prepare.
But surely that was one of the decisive days of history when the Judean
prophet beheld in Jesus the Divine One, and had vision, however dim, of
the glory of the coming of the Lord. How John first discovered Him in
His true character — whether it was discovery, or by what is in scripture
termed revelation, we are not called upon to decide.
" Who shall draw the mystic line.
Which is human, which divine ? "
He was at all events distinctly enabled to discern in the lowly man of
Nazareth the world's hope, or in the language of his favorite prophet, to
" see the King in his beauty "- To the multitude the hero of the hour, the
great man, was John, not Jesus. But John saw and believed.
It is common to disparage this great act of faith. Because that faith
came in the course of the following year to be clouded by doubt, it is con
sidered no wise decisive. The inquiry sent from the prison, "Art thou He
that shall come ", in the opinion of Professor Gilbert and others, shows that
John had not fully accepted Jesus as the Messiah. But it is surely a false
principle to interpret his whole past career by that temporary and partial
eclipse of faith. John's problem, let us remember, was the same as that of
the apostles themselves. If Jesus be truly the Messiah, why does He con
tent himself with the role of a teacher and a healer of diseases ; where are
the signs from heaven, glorious displays of overawing power ? Where is " the
days of vengeance of our God ", distinctly predicted by the prophets as the
Messiah's day ? It was a signal proof of John's faith that he brought his
great doubt to the Master himself, looked for the answer to Him who alone
could give it. " Did never thorns thy path heset ?
Beware, — be not deceived ;
He who has never doubted yet,
Has never yet believed"
These words of a Christian poet are often perverted or misapplied ;
but they have in them a truth. To quote an anonymous writer : " So little
inconsistent with a habit of intelligent faith are such transient invasions of

34 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
doubt, or such diminished perceptions of the evidence of truth, that it may
even be said that it is only those who have in some measure experienced
them who can be said in the highest sense to believe at all ".
Even Keim, whose insight into the facts of Christian experience is not
always the profoundest, says of John's procedure at this crisis : " From his
dungeon, where all vision was shut out, John acknowledges his own subject
ion to the person of Jesus ".
John's message in the wilderness was not so much to tell what the King
dom should be, as who He. should be — "he that cometh after me". After
the baptism he was able authoritatively to identify Jesus of Nazareth as the
Messiah. Still later, having had, as we may believe, opportunity for personal
intercourse with Jesus, he could teach that fuller, richer gospel of which we
have reminiscences from, the pen of the fourth evangelist. It is hardly to be
questioned, I take it, that on the banks of the Jordan, after, if not before the
baptism and temptation, there were interviews which afforded John a nearer
personal acquaintance with his Master and a better understanding of the
scriptures concerning Him.
Taking a general view of both the earlier and the later ministry, John's
teaching concerning the person and office of Christ concentrated itself upon
the following particulars :
I . He was the Anointed King of Israel — the Son of God.
2. He had had a pre-existence ; he was from heaven.
3. He was to rule with justice.
4. He was to be a Savior.
5. He was to bestow the Holy Spirit.
Our space will not allow us to discuss these separately at length. As to
the term Son of God, quoted from the Baptist's teaching in the single
passage (John 1 : 34), " I have seen and borne witness that this is the Son
of God ", it is difficult to determine the precise content. For us now to
recover the Baptist's Christology, whether that of the earlier, or of the latter
stage of his ministry, is manifestly impossible. As it came from John's lips
did it stand for the proper deity of Christ, as was the case not many years
later in the early church ? Even now, after the Christian thought of nine
teen centuries, there is scarcely a term in theology more difficult to define.
The faithful interpreter of Scripture will not attempt to read into John's
language the dogmatic distinctions of a later orthodoxy. John did not
preach in the wilderness, or teach to his disciples, the clauses of the Athan-
asian creed. They would have been incomprehensible to him, even had it
been possible to translate them into the Hebrew of his day. The Qui-
cunque vult, — that whoever will be saved must " worship one God in Trinity,
and Trinity in Unity", "neither confounding the persons nor dividing the
substance ", we do not suppose John believed or preached. But he does
appear, in designating Jesus the Son of God, to have expressed a belief in
his unique divinity, and to have exalted Him above all dther humanity.
According to Stanton (" The Jewish and Christian Messiah ", p. 147) it is very
doubtful whether the Jews in pre-Christian times ever used the term Son of

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HIS GOSPEL. 35
God of the Messiah. John's testimony then marks a distinct advance in
the Messianic idea.
The remarkable saying in which John attributes pre-existence to the
Messiah is (in substance) given twice in the chapter before us: John 1:15,
29, " He that cometh after me hath been before me, for He was before me ".
That John attributed pre-existence to the Messiah need not surprise us,
considering that the doctrine had already found distinct expression in the
Judaistic literature of the first pre-Christian century. In the Similitudes of
Enoch it is said of the Son of Man : " Before the sun and the signs were
created, before the stars of the heaven were made. His name was named
before the Lord of Spirits " ; " He has been chosen and hidden before Him
before the creation of the world and for evermore ". " The Elect One
standeth before the Lord of Spirits; and His glory is for ever and ever, and
His might unto all generations ". As Mr. Charles, in his edition of the
Book of Enoch, has shown, " Son of Man" and " Elect One" are distinct
designations of the personal Messiah; he says further: the "actual pre-
existence of the Son of Man is only in keeping with His other attributes of
universal dominion and unlimited judicial authority ".
But the visions of Daniel belong to a still earlier date. In Dan. 7 : 13,
14 we read : " I saw in the night visions, and behold there came with the
clouds of heaven one like unto a son of man, and they came even to the
ancient of days, and they brought Him near before Him. And there was
given Him dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all the peoples, nations
and languages should serve Him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away, and His kingdom that which shall not be
destroyed "- Here, as Schiirer says : " The doctrine of the Messiah's pre-
existence is already stated, for it is self-evident that He who comes down
from heaven was before in heaven ".
The Messiah was to come with judgment, and this was to be not
punitive merely, but separative as well. The ax brought to the tree, and
the shovel to winnow grain, are His figures, — and fire. " He shall baptize
with the Holy Spirit and with fire"; "the chaff He will burn up with un
quenchable fire ", so reads the synoptic passage. Here two converging
lines of prophetic symbolism meet and blend. There is a fire of holiness
and a fire of wrath. In John's first use of the symbol, fire denotes the same
divine principle as the Holy Spirit ; in the latter part of the passage it is
the fire of wrath. "John connects the baptism of fire and the judgment of
fire without discrimination in time just as the Old Testament prophets were
accustomed to do ". Thus Isaiah, for instance, views the Messiah's advent
as "the year of Jehovah's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God ".
The Messiah was to be a Savior, — a Savior from sin. " Behold the
Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world ". That John took
his figure of the lamb from the 53rd chapter of Isaiah is now admitted by
the great majority of interpreters. Whether this be the case or not, it never
theless remains true that the lamb in the religious vocabulary of the Jews
was a symbol of expiatory sacrifice. Still, this utterance attributed to John
is, if we consider when it was uttered, startling enough. Can he so early

36 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
have seized upon the Christian conception of an atonement made in the
person of the Savior, which even the apostles failed to apprehend until
after that atonement had actually taken place ? It is not surprising that
many scholars are inclined to question the literal correctness of the passage
as it stands. Kohler is one who maintains the genuineness of the Fourth
Gospel and its historicity in general; he holds, however, that the words
"who taketh away the sin of the world" are not the Baptist's own, but an
explanatory addition of the evangelist writing long afterwards, when the
idea of the atonement had become inseparably connected in Christian
thought with the Savior's death on the cross. But I cannot see that histor
ical probability is altogether against the saying just as we have it. John the
Baptist was deeply read in Isaiah, and Isaiah had shown that the Servant
of Jehovah, (whether an ideal or an actual person) must suffer. Why may
not John, on his mount of spiritual vision far above all his contemporaries,
have had some glimpses, however obscure, of a mysterious tragedy of suf
fering that should expiate the guilt of human sin and reconcile the world
to God? John's doctrine of the Messiah reaches its climax in the saying, Jo. i :
33 : Christ is "He that baptizeth in the Holy Spirit ". All four of the gospels
report this saying. It seems indeed to be the keystone of his soteriology. Our
Lord himself repeated it in the last interview with his disciples on the mount
of ascension, and Peter quotes it (in the form given it by Jesus) to the
church at Jerusalem (Acts 1 1 : i6). It is remarkable that these are the only
passages in the New Testament where the baptism in, or with the Holy
Spirit is spoken of, with the possible exception of i Cor. 12 : 13. The con
ception of the bestowment of the Holy Spirit as a baptism has had special
prominence in recent theological and devotional literature. It would appear
to have originated with John.
In that phrase he seems to have embodied his highest conception of
Christ's saving work. By this gift, this sovereign act, Christ was to be the
founder of the new covenant, and the progenitor of a new race. Harnack
is strangely superficial in his view that John's message did not go beyond
the lines of repentance. Keim is here the truer interpreter, and penetrates
to the inner secret of the Baptist's gospel. "John ", he says, " is no stranger
to the notion of grace ". " The spiritual stars of the kingdom of God now
approaching were, for John, forgiveness of sins, and the Spirit of God ".
Keim practically discards the Fourth Gospel, and therefore comes to this
conclusion on the sole authority of the synoptic narrative. But the Fourth
Gospel sets the Baptist's teaching concerning Christ as the bearer and the
giver of the Spirit in bold relief. May it not have been due in part to his
earlier teacher that this evangelist distinguishes the gospel period as one
during which, as he says, " the Spirit was not yet given ", and tliat he, more
fully than the others, records Christ's own teaching concerning the future
advent of the Spirit?
It has been mentioned above that our Lord Himself in His promise of
the Spirit's coming borrowed John the Baptist's figurative phrase, " baptized
with the Holy Spirit ". In some early copies of Luke the Lord's Prayer

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HIS GOSPEL. 37
given in the eleventh chapter had as the second petition, " May thy Holy
Spirit come upon us and purify us ", instead of " Thy kingdom come ", or,
" Thy will be done ". Christ's teaching on that occasion was given, as Luke
mentions, in response to His disciples' request, "Teach us to pray, even as
John taught his disciples ". It is quite credible that here Jesus quoted, and
gave His sanction to a petition which had already been taught by John. In
any case the coincidence is an interesting one, and may again raise the
question whether John's preaching was so non-Christian as it is commonly
represented. II. John preached the Kingdom of God. " And in those days came
John the Baptist saying. Repent ye ; for the kingdom of heaven is at
hand " (Mt. 3:1,2). Prophets had foretold the founding of a kingdom, and
this, as we have seen, had become the goal of the Messianic hope. John's
doctrine of the kingdom is not even outlined in the gospels. Probably it
remained undeveloped, as was the case with the apostles until after the
advent of the Spirit. It is sufficiently clear, however, to what general type
it belonged. There are at least three prominent types of the kingdom idea
which have been widely influential in history and in Christian theology.
I . That of an ecclesiastical state. This was the thoroughly political
idea that dominated Judaism.
2. The idea of a universal church, an ecclesiastical organization includ
ing all redeemed souls — the Roman Catholic idea at its best.
3. The kingdom as an ethical principle — the law of love made operative
in human society — an idea strongly emphasized in the theology of Ritschl.
No one of these quite answers to the New Testament idea, or, as I
understand it, to the teaching of Jesus. In the New Testament it is the
eschatological aspect that predominates. It exists on the earth, but it
reaches into the world beyond, and belongs chiefly to an order of things not
seen or temporal. It is the new spiritual fellowship, the new moral order,
introduced into the world by Christ — not an ecclesiastical state, not a world-
church, not an ethical system or society permeated by ethical ideas, — but a
new spiritually organized life. As it now exists on earth it is the totality of
the Christian life as opposed to the world's sin.
John's idea of the kingdom appears rather to have conformed to the
latter type. It was not the distinctive note of his teaching, and he did not
make it his working idea. It is not unlikely that the Isaiah doctrine of "the
remnant", which afterwards impressed itself upon the thought of the apostle
Paul, had its influence in determining John's conception of the kingdom.
The prophetic manifesto of the Baptist's mission, attributed by Luke to the
angel Gabriel, declares that he is to make ready for Jehovah " a prepared
people ". The word for people is laos, properly denoting not a mere mul
titude or aggregate of individuals, but a race or nation. John seems not to
have expected the existing Israel to be that elect race; there must be
gathered a spiritual Israel, who should hear the prophetic call, " Come ye
out from among them and be ye separate ", and who should thus constitute
"the remnant ".

38 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Accordingly he came not only to preach and to teach, but to baptize.
The Gospels and Josephus are not far apart in their interpretation of this
characteristic function of his ministry. In both these sources John's rite
of baptism is viewed as an associative act. Furthermore, the New Testa
ment writers plainly view it as initiatory, marking one's entrance not merely
upon a new life, but into a new community. On this point Calvin took
issue with the Roman Catholic theology which had denied to the Johannine
ordinance the essential significance of Christian baptism. The Council of
Trent subsequently reaffirmed emphatically the Catholic position, declaring
in their decree : " If any one affirms that the baptism of John had the same
force as the baptism of Christ, let him be anathema ". We will risk the
anathema and side with Calvin.
The rite as John administered it had a double significance. Regarded
as the act of the person submitting to it, it was symbolically declarative of
repentance toward God and of faith in the Messiah. On the part of the
administrator, on the other hand, it was intended to declare that the person
baptized had fulfilled the requisite conditions and was now inducted into
the new fellowship or society.
Thus John's doctrine of the kingdom concentrated itself upon the for
mation of the new covenant-community which was to supersede the old
theocracy. His gospel, his ministry as a teacher, lay in part along this line.
He was to gather and instruct a body of disciples which should become a
nucleus of the Christian kingdom and church. That body or sect of disciples
was not itself the church, it was not the kingdom, but it was a feligious
fellowship or society in which the new kingdom first took a partially organ
ized form. Its members constituted a quasi-sect, known as the disciples of
John. They followed certain teachings and observances. Those of them
who did not fully carry out the instructions of their master and identify them
selves with the Christian church remained long afterwards a separate
Jewish sect, traces of whose existence still remain in the East.
But, as already said, John's thought was less of the kingdom than of
the King — a personal Deliverer. This was the case also with Peter and
Paul, and with John the apostle. In this respect do they not remain a les
son and a law to us ? With the kingdom as a regulative idea and as a work
ing principle we have less to do, much more with our personal relations to
Christ and His church.
III. A Gospel of Righteousness. "John came unto you in the way of
righteousness ", said our Lord to the Jewish leaders in the temple, — " John
came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye did not believe him and
repent" (Matt. 21 :32). Christ here sets the Forerunner's teaching not in
opposition to, but in line with His own. For righteousness with John was
not legalism. This we must insist upon, despite eminent authorities to the
contrary. In the Expositor's Greek Testament, Dr. A. B. Bruce, contrasting John
and Jesus, says, " The message of the one was legal, the other evangelic ''.
"The Baptist had a passion for righteousness, yet his conception of right
eousness was narrow, severe, legal ". And in his comment on the words of

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HIS GOSPEL. 39
Christ cited above, "John came unto you in the way of righteousness ", he
explains them as meaning, " he cultivated legal piety like yourselves " We
shall not go to the other extreme and say with Dr. Fairbairn, in his " Studies
in the Life of Christ ", that John " was a sort of personified revolt against the
law, written and oral ", reviving " the ancient conflict of his order against
the ritualism of the temple and the legalism of the schools ". But it is
surely a sheer perversion of the record to put John's teaching in opposition,
or even in antithesis to that of Christ. It was Jesus, not John, who said,
" Except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes
and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven ". It
was not John, but Jesus, who said, " One jot or one tittle shall in no wise
pass away from the law until all things shall be accomplished ". The essence
of legalism consists in substituting the outward form for the inward reality.
It is satisfied with the external. It is only a nominal, not a real obedience.
Thus it is not righteousness at all, it is literalism, the letter that killeth, not
the spirit, that inward reality without which there can be no true normal life.
John's message of righteousness was not legalism ; on the other hand it
was not righteousness with the idea of law left out. It implied, as in script
ure it always implies when applied to human life and conduct, conformity
to a standard of duty, obedience to moral law. It describes personal life as
related to a government, not necessarily to an expressed rule, but always to
a moral order. The phrase " conformity to truth " is not sufficient to define
it; it is conformity to imperative truth. It implies submission to authority,
to some ruling will. There have been times when it would have been quite
superfluous to maintain that righteousness in the Christian vocabulary car
ries with it the idea of obedience, so obvious and distinct is the thought of
the New Testament writers on that point. But now the author of " Pro
Christo et Ecclesia " is quoted as declaring: " Obedience is not a Christian
idea, it is an anti-Christian idea, against which our Lord most strenuously
set His face ", and a noted German theologian assures us that " Paul is the
great discoverer of the fact that God and law are mutually exclusive ".
We have already emphasized the testimony of the four evangelists that
John preached a gospel of grace — of One who was to take away guilt and to
bestow the Spirit of life and power. It was at the same time a gospel of
ethical righteousness — of obedience. According to the angelic prediction,
he was to turn " the disobedient to walk in the wisdom of the righteous "
(Luke 1:17). The Messiah was to be Savior, none the less was He to be
Lord and King. The majesty and the justice of the divine government were
to be disclosed in His person. The voice of prophecy had already declared,
"A king shall rule in righteousness"; "He shall judge Thy people with
righteousness ". Hence the doctrine of a divine retribution upon the unre
pentant was not omitted from John's message to Israel, and, hke Paul, he
" reasoned of righteousness, of temperance, and of the judgment to come ".
His conception of the kingdom, as we have already observed, appears
to have remained undeveloped. But it was certainly not that pitiful anomaly
made prominent in much of the popular theology today, a kingdom without
government, a conception of the kingdom of Christ in which sovereignty

40 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
is unnecessary, which has no subjects who are to obey, and no established
imperative moral order.
That righteousness in John's conception, while not legalism, was yet on
the other hand no mere emotional goodness, but charged with its full ethical
and positive Biblical meaning, is indicated by the stress which is laid on
repentance as requisite to membership in the kingdom: "Repent ye; for
the kingdom of heaven is at hand ". Repentance as he preached it was
repentance of sin, and denoted not merely sin felt sorry for, but sin
renounced, and renounced permanently, perpetually. This is clearly indi
cated in Matt. 3:11, "I baptize you in water unto repentance ". His bap
tism was intended to symbolize the final and absoliite separation from the
former sinful life of the person who received it ; it was " unto ", it had in
view a perpetually realized repentance.
Thus John's gospel included the demand for an ethical revival. His
teaching to his disciples was not only Messianic doctrine, but practical
religion. Only the merest fragments of his ethical teaching remain, pre
served for the most part in Luke. It is beyond the scope of the present
paper to consider them in detail. We also learn incidentally from Luke
that there was practical instruction on the subject of prayer.
If John the Baptist's gospel was one of practical righteousness and of
obedience to law, is it not a gospel for us now and here — here in America,
in church as well as in state ? I know of no fact more ominous of evil than
the effort making m so many quarters to throw overboard the idea of
authority in Christian theology, and of obedience in the ethics of the
Christian life. It is the testimony of many thoughtful and competent
observers that the idea of obligatory law is becoming in a measure obsolete
among us. What wonder, when a distinguished theologian tells us that
" we must now replace the conception of a divine governor by that of the
Heavenly Father, and the conception of a divine government by that of the
divine family ". Neither the prophets of the old nor the prophets of the
new covenant came with such an exhortation, least of all did John the
Baptist. Let us rather with him revive the idea of a divine government, and
educate the modern conscience into an apprehension of its true import.
Dr. R. W. Dale struck a true note in his volume of discourses, entitled,
" The Laws of Christ for Common Life". A single quotation from that
book may fitly close the present address, and add the weight of its
eloquent appeal to the moral message of John the Baptist to our own time.
" The Jewish revival under Hezekiah was wrecked because it was not
accompanied by a great reformation in morals. How is it with ourselves ?
Have the religious movements of late years produced any considerable
ethical reforms? Has the ethical revival kept pace with the religious?
Has our zeal for the building of churches, for the ingathering of members
and for religious education been accompanied with any marked improve-.
ment in Christian character ?
" We are entreating God to give greater energy and larger success to
all the various forms of our Christian work. It is very necessary for us to
remember that we have no right to expect that God will keep His promises

JOHN THE BAPTIST AND HIS GOSPEL. 41
unless we keep His commandments. The words of the prophet, 'Wash
you, make you clean ; put away the evil of your doings from before mine
eyes ; cease to do evil ; learn to do well ', were addressed, not to the irre
ligious, but to those who were zealous in attending the services of the temple
and in offering their sacrifices on the altar of God. And the words which
follow, ' Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord, though your sins
be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow ; though they be red like crim
son, they shall be as wool ', are not an assurance that God will forgive the
sins of men who have lived an irreligious life if they become devout, but an
assurance that He will forgive the sins of those who are earnest in religious
services, if they set themselves honestly to the moral reformation of their
own conduct. If they put away the evil of their doings, if they cease to do
evil, learn to do well, God will have mercy upon them.
" No matter how noble may be the churches that we build, no matter
how solemn may be the religious services which we celebrate, no matter
how earnestly we may preach the Gospel, no matter with what fervor we
may pray to God to grant us a great religious revival, we shall fail utterly if
in our ordinary life we show no practical proof that in the kingdom of
heaven to which we profess to belong there is a loftier type of character
than in the world outside."

' THE CALL OF THE HRST DISCIPLES.
(St. John i : 29-51.)
by rey. a. o. dixon, d. d.,
Pastor of the Ruggles Street Baptist Church, Boston, Mass.
We have in the first chapter of John's Gospel the method by which
God calls His disciples and the purpose of the call. The method is four
fold and the purpose is five-fold.
L THE METHOD OF THE CALL.
I. By public proclamation. John stood in the open and said, " Behold
the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world ". If we would
make the multitude hear the Gospel, we must, as John did, take the Gospel
to them. If they have forsaken the church, the church must not forsake
them. They can be found in the streets, and they will come to the theatre
or secular hall more readily than to the church. Let no expense of strengfth,
time or money be spared, that the crowds may be reached with the glad
tidings of salvation.
But in John's preaching there was more than proclamation. There
was testimony. Thirteen words are given to the proclamation, and one
hundred and sixteen to the testimony. And though John was no egotist,
he uses the personal pronouns "I " and "me" eleven times. He asserts
the superiority of Christ to himself, and declares that his purpose in bap
tizing was to manifest Him to Israel. He tells what he knows about Christ,
and closes with the superb confession : " I saw and bare record that this
is the Son of God " With every proclamation of Jesus there should go our
testimony as to what He is to us, and the testimony should be as public as
the proclamation. We preach to the multitude, and have our testimony
meetings among ourselves. The man without a testimony has no place in
the pulpit. He is to be a witness as well as a minister, and in the witness
box there must be a personal knowledge.
2. By more private procla-mation. "Again the next day after John
stood and two of his disciples, and looking upon Jesus as He walked, he
saith, ' Behold the Lamb of God ' ". There was no need of his adding,
" which taketh away the sin of the world ", for these well-instructed disci
ples of John knew what the mission of the Lamb of God was. They under
stood the symbolism of the paschal lamb, and were looking for Him to
Whom it pointed.
These two disciples believed in John, and that made it easy for John
to win them to Christ. " The two disciples heard him speak and they
followed Jesus ". All of us have our little coteries of admirers and friends.
* Delivered at the First Conference, held at the First Baptist Church, October 2t, 1903.
42

THE CALL OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 43
Have we, like John, won them to Christ ? Have we so lived before them
that when we speak to them of Jesus they immediately accept and follow
Him ? How about our children ? Has their confidence in us made it easy
for us to win them for Christ ? Or have we exhibited to them such incon
sistencies of life and have indulged with them in such doubtful amusements
that they have reason to call in question our sincerity when we assure them
that the Christian life is the noblest and happiest in the world ? How
about our Sunday School class ? If we have won their respect and love,
it will be easy for us to win them to Christ. A young lady in a Bible
school requested the superintendent to give all her class except two to
another teacher. He was surprised, and asked the reason. Her reply was
that all her class except two had been converted, and she desired to retain
them and seek a new class, that she might win them to Christ. Within a
few months her heart's desire was gratified.
How about those with whom you work every day in the shop or store ?
If you are a consistent Christian, you have influence with them. Have you
used that influence in winning them to Christ ? Two young men at work
in the same office had great respect for each other, and one of them was
converted by means of a letter from a friend. Anxious to win his office
friend to Christ, he one day expressed the wish that he were a Christian,
when the friend had to confess with shame that he was a Christian, but
such a negative one that the young man working at his side for a year or
more did not find it out. The young man won by the letter was H. C.
Trumbull, who became famous as a preacher, editor and author. The
office-mate lost the opportunity of doing a great work for Christ and filling
his life with the joy of feeling that he was a co-worker with God in the wide
field of usefulness which Dr. Trumbull occupied.
How about the social circle in which you move ? Have you won any
of them to Christ, or have you so drifted into their worldly thoughts and
ways that they find that they have won you and that you really have noth
ing better to offer them than they "have to offer you ?
A successful business man in New York went one evening with his
wife to an evangelistic meeting; and as they were going home she ventured
to say, "My dear, I was hoping that you would tonight manifest some in
terest in your spiritual welfare, for I wish you to know that I pray for you
every day, and nothing could give me more pleasure than to have you be
come a Christian ". He replied, " I am glad that you have mentioned
the subject, and when we get home we will talk the matter over ". After
they had taken off their wraps and were comfortably seated in the parlor, he
turned to her and said with gentle earnestness, " Now, my dear, you say
you want me to become a Christian, and I promise that I will try to be
come one if you will show me in what respect you as a Christian differ from
me who have made no profession of religion. You go to the theatre ; so do
I ; and you seem to enjoy it as much as I do. I play cards, and you can
beat me. I drink wine moderately, and so do you. I dance sometimes,
and so do you. I do not lie nor steal nor kill nor commit adultery. Both
positively and negatively we are alike so far as I can see. You say you

44 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
want me to be converted. Can you tell me from what or to what I am to
be converted ? " The wife was speechless, but that night, when face to
face with God in prayer, she said something like this : " Lord, forgive me
the great mistake I now see that I have made in dealing with my husband.
Thou knowest that I have had the motive of seeking to win him to Thee
and the church by going with him and doing as he does even when it was
distasteful to me. And now I can see that, though he loves me, he has no
confidence in my religion. Oh Lord, Thou knowest that I have in Thee
and Thy work a joy which he has not, and I pray Thee to help me from
this time to be so faithful to Thee and my deeper spiritual nature that he
will be convinced that I have something better than he has ".
If I were to mention the name of this man, some of you would recog
nize him as a man eminent in the world of business, and you would also
recognize him as an eminent Christian worker, giving time and money for
the advancement of the cause of Christ. And if you gain his confidence,
he will tell you as he has told others that he was led to seek salvation when
he noticed that the wife he loved above his life had an experience which
separated her from the world and gave her a joy superior to the doubtful
amusements, which even before his conversion, he believed were not in
harmony with the pure spirit of Christianity. When our friends in the
family or social circle see that we have yielded to their ways, they conclude,
with good reason, that they have captured us, and, though they may
esteem us for many excellent qualities, they regard our religious profession
as a sort of fad 'or idiosyncracy, if not a weakness, that they must tolerate.
With such an abidipg impression upon their minds any spasmodic efforts
we may make for their conversion during a religious revival will not count
for much. However convincing the argument that you have the right to assert
your Christian privilege and indulge things that are not morally wrong, be
cause you are not under the law but under grace, it remains true that the
worldly people who enjoy these things with you are not attracted to the brand
of religion which you exhibit ; and if they join your church it is because they
regard the church as a worldly institution and they are fit for membership
because you are as worldly as they are. The men who really win others to
Christ are the Pauls who assert the high Christian privilege of giving up
their privileges, that they may not be stumbling-blocks in the way of others ;
who convince others that they have better meat to eat than that offered to
idols, that it is no real sacrifice to give up the garlic and onions of Egypt
for the manna from heaven. Such Christians are the insulated wires
through which flows the current of divine power.
3. By individual contact. It is evident that Andrew and John started
for their brothers just as soon as they were convinced that they had found
the Messiah. John says that Andrew "first findeth his brother Simon",
and the meaning is plain that Andrew found Simon before John found
James. It was a sort of race between them as to which would be the first
to find his brother and tell him the good news. Andrew was not a great
preacher, so far as we know, but on the day of Pentecost, while Peter
preached with a tongue of fire and three thousand were converted, he had

THE CALL OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 45
a right to feel that Peter's great sermon was the echo of the personal word
which brought him to Jesus.
As soon as Jesus found Philip, he went to the home of his friend
Nathanael, and said, " We have found him of whom Moses in the law and
the prophets did write, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph". Nathanael
was a learned Jew, while Philip was an unlettered peasant, and Archibald
Brown may be right when he says that Philip misquoted his scripture, for
neither Moses nor the prophets wrote of Jesus as the Son of Joseph, or as
Jesus of Nazareth. Nathanael therefore quietly rebukes Philip for his
blunder in misquoting scripture when he asks, " Can any good thing come
out of Nazareth? " Philip acknowledges the mild impeachment as he says,
" Come and see ". As if to say, " Nathanael, I am not up in Scripture like
you, but come and see Him for yourself. Though I may blunder in my
Scripture quotation, I have not blundered in my estimate of Jesus ". And
thus^ man with an experience is ready for soul-winning even though he may
be ignorant of many things that it is important to know. If you have a
vision of Christ as the Messiah and your Savior, tell someone else about
Him. An illiterate cook in a country village won to Christ some of the best
people in it, because she had a story of personal salvation to tell, and the
people for whom she worked testified that her character confirmed the
truth of her story. When Robert McCall began his work in Paris, he knew
just two sentences in French, — "God loves you" and "I love you". He
spoke these short sentences to the people as he met them on the street, and
began in this way his most successful life-work. We should be accurate in
our Scripture quotations, but let not the fear of making mistakes prevent us
from telling others of the Savior we trust and love.
4. By the direct contact of Christ. In the case of Philip there was no
intermediate human agency. Jesus found him and said, " Follow Me ".
And shall we deny that Jesus at this day presents Himself directly to the
minds and hearts of men and wins them to Himself ? It is doubtless excep
tional, but, in view of this case, I dare not say impossible. It implies previ
ous knowledge, for Philip was evidently looking for the Messiah. He had
read the Scriptures, even if his memory were faulty. And when there is a
knowledge of the truth, God may move through it directly on the human
soul. Every flower may suggest the lily of the valley, every stone the rock
of ages, every star the star of Bethlehem, every breeze the work of the
Spirit, every spring of water the fountain open for all uncleanness, every
path the way of life, every flock of sheep the Good Shepherd, every sparrow
the care of our Father, every sunrise the Sun of Righteousness, every meal
the bread of life, and every garment the robe of His righteousness. Christ
has given to almost everything in nature a tongue of suggestiveness with
which it speaks in silent eloquence directly to the hearts of men. During
a revival in a New England town, people were convicted and converted
before they came to church. A wealthy gentleman told me that his ungodly
coachman, who had shunned the meetings as he would small-pox, was
seized with sudden conviction of sin while he was feeding his horses, and,
kneeling in the hay of the stable loft, accepted Christ as his Savior and

46 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Lord. The atmosphere of the town seemed to be charged with the power
of God. Such is the case when the word has been faithfully preached and
the people of God are in the spirit of intercessory prayer.
n. THE PURPOSE OF THE CALL.
I . To salvation. John was no mere reformer. He did give advice to
publicans and soldiers, but it was incidental. The purpose of his life-work
is seen in the words, " Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin
of the world " The fact and problem of sin confronted him. He knew
that men were guilty and lost. The first thing, therefore, which everyone
needs is a Savior from sin. We are not ready to follow Him as Leader or
walk with Him as Friend until sin has been dealt with and put away.
John would have us begin our Christian life at the cross. To the vision of
man's need the highest mountain in all the world is Calvary, the only
mountain that rises above Sinai.
2. To fellowship. When Jesus asked the two disciples of John, " What
seekest thou ? " they replied, " Where dwellest thou ? " He saith unto them,
" Come and see". They came and saw where He dwelt, and abode with
Him that day. The first impulse of a regenerate soul is to be with Jesus.
It loves the book, the church, the home, the company where Jesus is wel
comed and honored. It shuns the place where Jesus would not be at home
and happy in His surroundings. It yearns to be with Him all the time.
And Jesus responds to this impulse of the renewed heart. He invites us to
dwell with Him. What an evening of fellowship and instruction these two
disciples must have had. What heart-burnings of love they must have felt ;
what raptures of joy ; what inspirations of hope as He revealed to them His
inner self and unfolded to them the far-reaching victories they were to gain
through Him. Now, what they had for one day we may have every day,
for He said, " Lo, I am with you all the days ". He invites us to an inti
mate and perpetual fellowship. The condition is that we go with Him and
not assert the self-life by asking Him to go with us. Enoch and Noah had
a good time walking with God, and much of our unrest comes from the fact
that we are trying to induce God to walk with us. He is always going
in the right direction, and He always dwells in the right place. Let us seek
His way and walk in it ; the secret place where He dwells and abide there.
Such constant fellowship is worth all the sacrifice it may cost.
3. To service. After the day with Jesus, Andrew and John are eager
to tell others about Him. Such is always the effect of fellowship with
Jesus. It gives courage and enthusiam in soul-winning. It sends us to our
friends with warm sympathetic hearts. It gives us vigorous faith. There
is no tremor of doubt in the words of Andrew to Simon : " We have found
the Messiah, which is being interpreted the Christ". "And he brought
him to Jesus ". Such direct personal testimony for Christ cannot fail to
bring our friends to Jesus when, as in this case, it has in it the fresh glow
of a present experience. If Andrew had gone to Simon and told him an
experience ten years old, it would have had little effect. I can imagine that
Andrew had in his face a glow of hope, love and joy like the shining face of

THE CALL OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 47
Moses when he came down from a face-to-face talk with God on the mount.
When people take knowledge of us that we have been with Jesus, they are
ready to hear our message concerning Him. Secret fellowship is the source
of power in service.
4. To transformation. "When Jesus beheld him. He said, ' Thou art
Simon the son of Jonah ; thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpre
tation a stone ' ". As soon as the unstable and impulsive Simon is brought
to Jesus, our Lord begins the work of transforming his character. The son
of Jonah has the nature of the dove, easily frightened, but before Jesus gets
through with him he shall be Cephas, with a character of granitic stuff,
resisting evil and strong enough to be a pillar in the temple of God. There
seems to have been a bit of the dove still left in him when at the trial of
Jesus he took fright and denied his Lord, but it was evidently in its dying
flutter, for on the Day of Pentecost we find him as bold as a lion and as
unyielding as the stones of Gibraltar. His first view of Christ begins in
him this transformation. Simon was usually talkative, but here for once he
has nothing to say. There was something in the presence of Jesus which
awed him into silence. The narrative gives us words from John, Andrew,
Philip and Nathanael, but not a word from Simon. He is too full of thought
and emotion to speak. He simply listens to the sweetest of voices and
looks lovingly into the most majestic of faces. The " altogether lovely "
One has thrown a charm of fascination over the rough fisherman. There is
a spiritual mesmerism to which Simon yields without an effort at resistance;
He has found not only the Messiah of Israel but the Master of men. Now
that the sun is in the heavens, all the stars, however brilliant, are forgotten.
There has begun in him the process by which heavenly character is
made. John says, " It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know
that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as
He is ". God does not arbitrarily bestow perfect character in heaven ; it is
made by the process of seeing Jesus as He is. This process is clearly given
in 2 Cor. 3:18: " We all with open face beholding as in a mirror the glory
of the Lord are changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the
Spirit of God ". Beholding Jesus as the Lamb of God gives us sight with
which we may ever afterward see Him in all the perfection of His char
acter, and "seeing Him as He is" is the means by which the Holy Spirit trans
forms us into His likeness. The process with Peter was slow, because, like
the rest of us, he was often more inclined to look at himself and others than
at Jesus, and the transformation was thus hindered. But Jesus is patient,
and, having begun the good work. He will continue it until He shall see in
us His own image and be satisfied.
When Andrew brought his rough swearing brother to Jesus, he was
doing good ethical work. A lecture on profanity would have done little
good. Doubtless that had been tried more than once. What Simon needed
was the Lamb of God, who could settle the problem of sin for him by mak
ing it possible for him to get rid of its guilt and pollution and give him an
ideal that would inspire him to nobler living. In Jesus he found both. If
we would reform our friends, whose bad habits are a grief to us, let us bring

48 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
them to Jesus. He will begin with them at once, as He did with Peter, the
process of transformation, and will sooner or later make them not only nega
tively good, enabling them to give up bad habits, but positively good in the
possession of Christian graces. The merely ethical method may cast out
evil spirits and leave the house " empty, swept and garnished ", ready for
"seven other spirits more wicked than himself ", so that the last state is
worse than the first. But this Christian process casts out the evil spirit and
fills the house with angels of light, more powerful than all the demons of
darkness that prowl around, seeking entrance.
5. To vision. "Jesus saw Nathanael coming unto Him, and saith of
him, behold an Israelite indeed in whom is no guile ". Our Lord said these
words of Nathanael in such a way that Nathanael heard them. If we have
anything good to say of young converts, it will not hurt them to hear it.
And if you have anything bad to say, it ought to be said before them and
not behind their backs. For this reason I do not send applicants for bap
tism from the room after they have related their experience in order that all
may be free to discuss their cases. Let them remain and hear what is said
about them. If it is good, they will be encouraged, and if it is bad they
ought to hear it before it comes to them second-hand and exaggerated, as is
almost certain to be the case. Nothing ought to be said about anybody
that we are not willing for them to hear. Truly happy is the young convert
who, like Nathanael, hears words of commendation from the lips of Jesus.
He has a foretaste of the joy with which he will hear the words, " Well
done, good and faithful servant ".
The answer of Nathanael shows that Jesus had won not only his respect,
but his love and loyalty : " Rabbi, Thou art the Son of God ; Thou art the
King of Israel" As if to say, " Lord, if I am an Israelite, Thou art my
King. Here is the scepter and crown. Sit on the throne of my being and
reign supreme ". The reference to Israel suggests Jacob and his ladder,
and our Lord uses the vision of Jacob as an illustration by which He gives
to Nathanael a new vision of Himself as " Son of God " and " Son of man ".
" Hereafter ye shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and
descending upon the Son of man ". In other words, " Nathanael, in calling
Me Son of God you have given the top of Jacob's ladder, which reached to
the skies ; let me give you the bottom of the ladder, which rests upon earth
— Son of man. I am both human and divine. In My deity God is made
accessible to you, and in My humanity you are accessible to God. As God-
man I am the medium of communication between heaven and earth — the
Word made flesh. Through Me, as Son of God and Son of man, the mes
sengers of your need, your praises and your prayers ascend to God, and
through Me, as Son of man and Son of God, the messengers of God's love
and mercy descend upon you. I am the real Jacob's ladder, which makes
not an occasional but a constant vision of the open heaven and an unbroken
communication between God and man ".
Such a vision is the privilege of every Christian, and the secret of per
petual joy and victory is in translating the vision into daily experience.
God is accessible to us at all times. He hears our praises and answers our

THE CALL OF THE FIRST DISCIPLES. 49
prayers. He delights to give us of " His fullness and grace for grace."
Through Jesus Christ heaven opens toward us for giving and receiving.
God offers to us His best, and it is fitting that we should give to Him our
best. While Queen Victoria was on her bed of sickness, she said to the chap
lain at her side, " I wish that the Lord Jesus Christ would come in glory
before I die ". He replied, " Why, Your Majesty, do you wish that Christ
would come before you die ? " " Because ", she answered, " I can think of
nothing that would give me more pleasure than the privilege of giving to
Him with my own hand the crown of Great Britain and India ". The spirit
of Nathanael and of Victoria that would crown Jesus King in every realm of
our being is the spirit of every loyal son of God, and Jesus is worthy that
every day should be a coronation day.

*"SONS OF GOD".
(St. John i :g.)
by rey. eloyd "w. tomkins, s. t. d.,
Rector of Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia, Pa.
1 wish to congratulate you, dear friends, upon these conferences and
upon selecting for your study the Gospel of St. John, for St. John's Gospel
has been attacked more than any other of the Four Gospels, and I suppose
it has been attacked because it is preeminently the Gospel of believers. I
think the older we grow the more we occasionally, almost insistently, go to
it for devotional reading. It is the Gospel which, under God's guidance, was
written for the church — for the members of the church It is most theolog
ical in some aspects of it, but it certainly bears very especially and clearly
upon the believer's relationship to Jesus Christ. It is in St. John's Gospel
that you have the verse which is the verse of the whole Gospel — John 3 : i6 :
" For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life "- It is
in St. John's Gospel that you have that marvelous chapter, the fifteenth,
declaring our relationship to Jesus Christ, our union with Him, and that we
have that wonderful prayer of our Lord, sometimes called the sacramental
prayer, in which He prays that there may exist between Himself and His
disciples the same relationship that exists between God and Himself.
In fact, there are passages which make us almost hold our breath in
reverence, and I think that is particularly true in connection with the sub
ject about which I am to speak to you.
" To them gave He power to become the sons of God ".
When we remember that in this very Gospel (as Dr. White has shown),
Jesus Himself was called by Nathanael the Son of God, and when we
remember how St. John, in his epistles, so wonderfully refers to that fact
when he says, " Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet
appear what we shall be : but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall
be like Him ; for we shall see Him as He is ", then we realize the greatness
of the message.
"That we should be called the sons of God". It makes us fairly
tremble and hesitate to think any such honor and glory should be given
to us. Yet, as we read the first twelve verses of chapter one, it seems
to follow so naturally as the result of God's coming into this world that
it is almost logical. Do you remember how it reads? "In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
. " The same was in the beginning with God.
"All things were made by Him ; and without Him was not anything
made that was made.

* Delivered at the First Conference, held at the First Baptist Church, October 21, 1903.
50

SONS OF GOD. SI
" In Him was life ; and the life was the light of men.
"And the light shineth in darkness ; and the darkness comprehended it
not. " There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
" The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all
men through Him might believe.
" That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into
the world. " He was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and the world
knew Him not".
Saddest verses in the Bible.
" He came unto His own, and His own received Him not.
" But as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the
sons of God, even to them that believe on His name :
" Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the
will of man, but of God ".
You see at once how the very purpose of Christ's coming into this
world was that we might be the sons of God. St. John shows in the verses
I have just quoted that the love of God was so great that He made it possi
ble for us to become His sons. There is something to say about this son-
ship. We are all of us children of God by creation, and as God's sons by
creation we can claim something from Him. We may reverently say that
we can claim from God a way of redemption, because of His creation alone.
Notwithstanding the fact that we have willingly fallen away from Him,
since we are His sons by creation we may become His sons by adoption —
by re-creation. Hence you see what a growth there is in our relationship to God. I am
God's child because He has made me. I am God's child because He has
remade me, through Jesus Christ. And yet, you notice how the truth
enters — we are all God's children by creation, but only those who believe in
Him have received the power to become His sons by re-creation. Dwell a
little longer upon that word — son. Just think what it means ; the Son of
God ! It means a great deal when we use it — as it is not used here in St.
John's Gospel — simply as referring to our creation. That God made me,
gives me, or ought to give me, self respect ; that God made me, gives me, or
ought to give me, the desire to struggle against all that is evil ; gives me, or
ought to give me, a vision of all that may be mine ; gives me, or ought to
give me, a sense of responsibility concerning my fellow men, concerning the
world itself, which is God's world, and which, because it has fallen from
Him, I, His son by creation, am bound to do all I can to bring back to
Him. If you can get no further than this, that you are His son by crea
tion, you have gotten a great distance. And I sometimes think we may
make a mistake in taking men on too rapidly. A great many, because they
have not been sufficiently or properly instructed, think that because God has
made them, and because they are His sons by creation, all of these rich
results necessarily follow. When you turn to the " sons of God " inter
preted by " re-creation ", how much more wonderful it is to be God's son ;

52 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
to be admitted to His fellowship because I trust Him and love Him ; and
being His beloved son, to be admitted more and more, as I am able to bear
it, into the mysteries of His truth ; to be made more and more the object
of His confidence ; to be made more and more acquainted with the power
ful purposes through which He works ; to be made more and more in my
own being after His image — converted into His likeness — and, at last, to be
permitted to enter into His presence, where shall be revealed the very acme
of glory. Remember that wonderful verse in St. John's epistle.
" Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what
we shall be : but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like
Him ; for we shall see Him as He is ".
If any man had written these words without inspiration it would be
blasphemy to speak them ; and, as it is, we tremble and cover our faces,
and yet that is what being sons of God must mean.
Now, I want you to think of the way in which this sonship of God by
re-creation is granted us. I shall speak of the power afterwards. I wish to
speak of the sonship first.
We are the sons, or we have the power to become the sons, of God.
Evidently, this must be something which comes not in a moment but grad
ually. We are made the sons of God by creation in a moment, as it were,
when we are born ; by the very fact of our existence we are God's children.
We are made the sons of God by re-creation by a precise power to become
such — not accidentally. St. John afterwards wrote to the Christians — for I
think we may take it that his epistles were addressed to the Christians —
" beloved, now are we the sons of God ", because we have entered into the
fullness of the Christian life. It is only after years of experience and edu
cation that we enter into it. St. John was an old man, and he felt as though
those to whom he wrote had an experience like his own. So that to become
sons of God, we are not suddenly changed either physically or morally, but
we enter into a new condition. I think that sometimes those who hold to
the Anglican catechism forget the true meaning of its words. It says that
we are made members of Christ, children and heirs of the kingdom of heaven.
The prayer-book undoubtedly means here — for we are told that it teaches
nothing that cannot be proved by Holy Scripture — that when the individual
is brought to the blessed gift spoken of by Christ to Nicodemus, he begins
to grow, he begins to become the son of God by adoption and re-creation.
I think it is very necessary to remember that, for two or three reasons. In
the first place, we feel ourselves utterly unworthy in our unregenerated
state to assume such a title as sons of God. Secondly, we must recognize
that the grace of God in the individual heart is just like His power which
worketh in the world : it works gradually. There is at least that much truth
in evolution : the power of God works gradually. Certain persons, we are
told in the book of Acts, were in the process of being saved. So it is with
the man who enters into this state whereby he may become the son of God :
gradually going on in that state he reaches higher perfection. There is
something very beautiful to me in this revelation of God in connection with

SONS OF GOD. S3
our growth. I go on more and more clinging to Him, trying to serve Him
and becoming more and more His son. And it is more and more a co n-
scious relationship. It is not a state merely. It certainly is not only a
condition, but it is a relationship ; the very word itself implies that.
Take the illustration of my boy. My boy is my son by birth. I stand
by his cradle and look at him with loving eyes, and I say, " My boy, my >
boy ". By-and-by that boy grows up, and he begins to come to me to learn
he gains confidence in me, and he says, " Papa, I love you " ; he comes to
me with his sins and says, "I am sorry I did wrong"; he comes to
have a trust in me, and my heart goes out with a deeper and ever deeper
flow of love for him, and what is the result ? By-and-by, when that boy has
grown up to wisdom, and the strength of intelligence is reached — when that
boy has grown to a position where he can enter into my plans, can see the
plan of my life and my plans for his life — then I hold his hand and look
into his face and say, " My boy, my son ". Can't you see the difference
in that expression from the day when I stood by his cradle of possibilities —
not yet realized — and the day when I stood by him in his youth and recog
nized the growing strength and felt those bonds which through the years
had bound us closer and closer ? It is the same in our connection with
God in sonship. He puts forth the decree that I shall enter into relation
ship with Him, and He gives me the means whereby that relationship may
be made ever stronger and richer and purer, so that I may become more
and more conscious of the possibilities of that relationship. He opens the
flood-gates of His divine love and care for and interest in me, as I am able
to receive it. And by-and-by the time will come when I shall be like Him-
That is, when I [shall have proved, through my loyalty, through my love.
but, above all else, through the power of Jesus Christ, my willingness to
give all that I have and all that I am to Him, and shall have reached that
state of consciousness when I realize that it is not I, " but Christ in me ".
Then I shall be, as the Lord prays in the seventeenth chapter of St. John —
I shall be one with Christ even as Christ is one with God.
Then, again, I want you to understand that this sonship is a relation
ship in which we become more and more intimate with God. The old idea
was that you could not know God. The old idea was that no man could
see God. Indeed, we have it in the Gospels, " No man hath seen God at
any time ". Yet we have it in the beatitudes, " Blessed are the pure in
heart for they shall see God ", and I think this beatitude refers to this life,
not some future life. I have it in my consciousness that I have been re-cre
ated by Jesus Christ ; 1 have it in my consciousness that He is pouring
more and more of His grace into me, because I am willing and ready that
He should, and so I enter more and more into a knowledge of God.
And there we come to what is sometimes called Christian experience,
which is a very important thing, and which sometimes, oftentimes, we con
fuse, with other things because of its frequent use. By-and-by the Christian
comes to a position where he can say " I know ", as St. Paul said ; where he
knows that God is his father ; where he knows that, notwithstanding the
contradictions of life, God is working out a glorious ending.

S4 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
By-and-by he becomes so intimate with God that even though he can
not understand God's working, because God is infinite and he is finite,
nevertheless he is conscious of God's truthfulness, and he works in connec
tion with it. I go on my work tomorrow. I know not what God has for
me, but I love Him so, I trust Him so fully and I know so well how He
loves me and cares for me, that I know whatever comes will be right : I
know that nothing can happen because God is ordering all things for my
best good, and consequently for His great and eternal glory. So He comes
into a practical relationship with life. You cannot live a great life as you
ought to live it unless you are His. In your life tomorrow — I care not what
your struggles may be or what your occupation may be — you cannot meet the
experiences of life, you cannot meet the trials of life, any more than you can
intelligently study the Word of God unless you are conscious of this son-
ship. Why ? Because it is only to the son that God can reveal Himself.
It is only to the man who has willingly entered into the state in which God
reveals Himself to him, and in which he grows more and more into the
nature of God, that there can come an understanding of how God works, so
that he can trust himself entirely to God, and do everything that he does in
God's name. That is what the apostle undoubtedly meant when he said,
" Do all things to the glory of God ". He mentions the small details of life
which, in the early days, were counted evil in themselves. He says,
" Whether ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of
God ". That is the beauty of the Gospel, that it leads us not only up to
the infinite mind of God, but into the kingdom of God in its glory and
beauty. He not only gives me that glorious vision, but He sends me out into
the struggle of the world, with all its agonies, with all of its friendships,
with all of its losses, and makes me live the life of a son of God ; makes me
live as one who knows that God is working with him ; makes me live as one
who is conscious of a great divine power working behind him. It is not a
theological declaration. No truth is true until it is applied, and no truth of
God can stand as a creed until it has entered into the heart of the individual
who repeats the creed. So you cannot know what the sonship of God is
until you have entered into this power in your own lives.
And there is just one more thought I want to bring out in regard to
this sonship. It is the way in which, more and more, the man gains power
himself because he is God's son. My father, let us suppose, owns some
land. He is away. I am his son. Someone comes and begins to trespass
upon that land. I go to him and say, "You cannot do that, sir". "Why
not ? " he cries out, " Who are you ? " "I am the son of the man who owns
this land ". And he at once recognizes my authority ; he knows that I,
being the son of my father, have a right to claim that he shall not injure
that which belongs to my father, a right to protect that which is my father's,
because my father and I, supposedly, are wholly in sympathy and our rights
are common. Now, there you have the secret of human power. There you
have the difference between the effort of a man to be good in himself, with
out any thought of God, and the effort of a man to be good because he

SONS OF GOD. . 55
knows he is God's son. What a difference there is. I start out tomorrow,
and I try to be a moral man ; I try to make the world better, and I go on in
my own strength and — fail absolutely. I go out tomorrow, having first
knelt down and acknowledged my sonship and asked my Father to give me
grace, and when the troubles come, when I desire to help this one or defend
that one, when I stand up for the truth or speak against evil, then I am con
scious that it is not I alone but God and I. I have the right to speak, the
right to do, because I am God's son. There cannot be any failure in such
a case. Why? Because God is back of the man, because God is in the
man. He may be working, probably is working, after a diviner plan than
the man can comprehend ; He probably is working after a very much more
mysterious plan than the man could understand if God tried to reveal it to
him. But God and he are working together.
Now, turn from that to the first part of our verse. "Power to become
sons of God ''. Oh, never forget that. You cannot rate it too highly. It
makes the difference between a human and a divine being. It makes the
difference between a regenerated and unregenerated being. It makes the
difference between one who looks up into God's face, conscious of his own
unworthiness, but who says, "My Father", and a man who goes around
and believes in God just as the devil believes in Him and trembles.
Power. "To them gave He power", and that implies, incidentally,
does it not, that the human will comes in, and that is where we have often
times made a great mistake in connection with both our efforts for and our
preaching of Christianity. We have not thought enough of the will which
God has given us. I like, I confess, that grand old controversy which used
to be very rabid sometimes, which is almost forgotten in these days : the
controversy about a man's free will and God's predetermination. I like it,
not because we can ever solve the problem therein suggested, but because
it brings out the fact that God, in making man, made man responsible.
I will not say God cannot, because I will not say that God cannot do
anything, but He will not say to man who will not love Him, " You shall
love Me ". Why ? Because He respects the individual. God wants a vol
untary love. I don't want my boy to love me because he is afraid not to
love me, nor because I am his father. I don't want him to obey me because
he is afraid of the results if he does not obey me. I want him to love me
because he can't help it. I want him to do what I ask him to do because
he wants to, because he loves to please me. God has made us free agents
in that. He gave them " power to become ".
Ah, my dear friends, it is easy enough to stand before obstacles ; it is
easy enough to stand, as the children of Israel did long ago on the shore,
and cry out. The question is whether you have any will in yourself to be
better and to do better, to overcome. The question is whether your will is
turned for or against righteousness, whether your will is turned towards or
away from God. That solves the very primal condition of the religious
nature. Look into your heart tonight. Christian though you may be, and
test the growth of your sonship. Do you will to will those things which
God wills ? Or, are you absolutely indifferent, with no idea that you have

56 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
anything to do about it, saying, " God does everything " ? I like the pas
sage in the parable of the prodigal son, in St. Luke's Gospel, where the
prodigal says, " I will arise ". There was his personal determination.
The father standing there could not save him unless he was willing to come
back ; but as soon as he was willing to come, then the father went out to
save him and to redeem him. And I thank God for this very declaration in
the words which He has spoken through John, because it respects my indi
viduality ; because it makes me feel that anything I do, I do of my free will.
How was it with the poor woman who touched Christ's garment ? She had
to do something. She said, " I will touch the hem of His garment ", and
she did and was healed. And so in all the great history of the dealings of
our Lord with men. So with you and me today. There is a g^eat mistake
made, I think, in regard to the relationship of the human will to God's will.
I have heard ministers say they are two different things and they come into
opposition, and there is the cross. I don't think anything of the kind. My
will is simply to get into parallelism with God's will. " Grant that I may
will, but will nothing but what Thou wiliest ". That is a voluntary prayer.
And then He gives "power to become "- Now, doubtless it makes some of
you a little startled because I say this. Centered first of all in the indi
vidual. Here is the glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ. The minister stands
in the pulpit and proclaims it with all his power, that God is willing to give :
but the declaration cannot do anything alone. It is only as the individual
comes forth and says, " I will " that there follows a result. You must place
yourself in the right condition if you wish to become the sons of God. You
can't do anything for yourself ; you can't manufacture yourself, or remake
yourself, but you can put yourself where God can remake you. Oh, these
human wills. God doesn't break them. He didn't crush Peter's will. He
didn't make him a different man from what he was, but He put a new
power into him. He wants you to make your will His.
Secondly, this power implies, evidently, the work of Jesus Christ. You
can't become God's sons save through Jesus Christ. "God so loved the
world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish, but have everlasting life ". Then, again, that glorious
verse quoted before, " Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed
upon us, that we should be called the sons of God ". Now I am not going
into any long theological declaration, although I think it would be intensely
interesting, of the way in which, through Jesus Christ, we are reconciled to
God ; but I think we may not recognize this, that when I have gone wrong
and am miserable and wretched, even though I may will God's power to help
me, I need some manifestation of that power to lift me up. Some have said :
" You don't have any recognition of that in the parable of the prodigal son,
do you?" I answer that we must not make all of God's parables teach
everything of God's truth, because they are put forward, most of them, to
declare some portion of the truth. But I do say, that even in that parable,
although the father ran out and welcomed him and said : " Thou art my son ",
yet the son had to be cleansed and clothed, and shoes put upon his feet
before he was taken into the house. I may will to be God's son, but my will

SONS OF GOD. 57
is nothing without Christ, Who makes it all possible. Who takes away the
error which covers me. Who opens up the road by which I must go. Who
places over me the robe of His divine righteousness. Who presents me to
God as His child. There can be no sonship without Jesus Christ. " In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God ". "To them gave He power to become the Sons of God ". Oh, that
glorious power of Christ ! Do you wonder that the religion which expresses
this truth has been called Christianity ? Do you wonder that it is in that
Name that every knee shall bow, while every tongue confesses that Jesus is
God ? Do you wonder that the little child kneeling at his mother's knee,
and the man in the depths of the struggle of life, and the aged just about to
cross the river of death cry alike, "Jesus, lover of my soul " ? Do you know
that He makes you a son of God just as soon as you are willing to let Him ?
Do you know that He gives you the power by which and through which you
grow day by day, having entered into this new relationship ? Do you know
that He gives you the power by which you begin to understand God more
and more, and to enter into the mysteries of His truth and of His service ?
Do you know that He gives you the power whereby, conscious of the right
of the Eternal behind you, you go further and further, from victory to
victory? Jesus, the Word made flesh ! Jesus upon the cross ! Jesus exalted
at the right hand of God !
Again I want you to notice in the preceding verse and in the first part
of this verse, the words " that was the true Light, which lighteth every man
that cometh into the world. He was in the world and the world was made by
Him, and the world knew Him not. He came unto His own ", that is. His
own people and His own nation, " and His own received Him not. But as
many as received Him, to them gave He power". Received 1 Sometimes
people read that "believed". Belief is a glorious thing. As Dr. White so
helpfully said tonight, it is the trusting of yourself to God. But that
receiving, it seems to me, is something which precedes the believing. I love
that old prayer : " Take my heart, oh Jesus, for I cannot give it to Thee,
and when Thou hast it, keep it, for I cannot keep it for Thee". " As many
as received Him"l How beautiful! He went to certain villages; they
received Him, and He there could work miracles. He went to other villages ;
they there received Him not, and He could there do no mighty work. I
receive Him first, as the historic personage, the Being Who once lived at
such a time and whose truth has conquered the world. I receive Him as a
divine Being, as Canon Row says : The Man Who never sinned, thereby
proving His divine origin, because never but once and only once has a sin
less man lived. I receive Him as One who has blessed men so that they
could die without fearing. I receive Him as the One who comes into my
own life and becomes my Christ, my Savior. " As many as received Him,
to them gave He power ". First you will ; then the power of Christ result
ing from your will ; and then your receiving that Christ, in order that He
may give that which you are willing to let Him give. Isn't it a wonderful
truth? You see how this growth of which I spoke goes on. I cry, " I am
nothing of myself, but I do hunger for Thee ; I do more and more thirst for

S8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Thee!" There is my will. Then God responds to that will. He says:
" Behold, I am here, my child ". He stands there and knocks, and when I
open the door and say, " Come in ", He enters. That goes on all through
life. We are so imperfect that we have to renew, as it were, this association ;
not renew the state, but keep on renewing the conditions. I love that
passage in St. John where, in speaking to Peter, Christ says: " He that is
bathed needeth not save to wash his feet ". The conditions have to be again
and again renewed, just as I wash my hands again and again all through the
day, but the one fact remains, being done once for all. We have to cry out,
" O God, I need Thee ", a thousand times a day. And God says : " I am
here, my child". . And I cry out, "Enter in, O Lord, enter into my speech,
enter into my service ; what I do is nothing without Thee". But His gift to
me never has to be renewed.
Again ; God works through means. I am His child by creation, and it
has pleased Him that my body and my mind should grow by the use of
those things which He has prepared. I eat, I sleep, I take exercise, I go in
and out amongst men, and thereby my physical being grows. And God has
ordained exactly the same method whereby my spiritual being may grow ;
and without the use of these means, my dear friends, I cannot grow. There
you have the practical Christian life going on day after day. I must pray.
I must live in constant companionship with God. I must read His Book ;
it is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path. I must go to my church
and worship, for He has promised a blessing where two or three are
gathered together. I must use what are ordinarily called " the means of
grace". John brings out again and again those ordinances of grace. He
speaks of baptism. He speaks of the Holy Communion : " Do this in
remembrance of Me". And as we go on using these means, we find that
the sonship becomes richer and fuller, and God becomes more willing and
able to pour more and more of His divine power into us.
I want you to realize, my friends, that this power to become the sons of
God is something which is of us, in us, and through us by the influence of
God's Holy Spirit. There we have the Three Persons in the Godhead
working together. ' ' God so loved " ; Christ coming that we might be saved ;
and the Holy Spirit entering in that the growth may progress. May God
grant us grace to realize more and more fully in our lives the magnificent
glory that is ours ! And God grant us grace at the same time humbly,
lovingly to recognize that this is not a birth which comes after any human
fashion, " Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of
the will of man, but of God ".

* " FULL OF GRACE AND TRUTH " .
(St. John i : 14.)
by rey. henry s. nash, d. d.,
Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Episcopal Theological School,
Cambridge, Mass.
The text I am to study is a single verse. But at the risk of repeating
what may have been already said, I must sum up the thought of the verses
that precede it. The Prologue of the Gospel, the first eighteen verses, is so
compact, so solidly thought together that an ox team could not draw a
sentence from its place. So the context is vital to the text.
The Prologue, at this point, illustrates the working of the author's mind
at large. He has been accused of mental monotony. And there is a certain
justification for the charge. To a singular degree he is one-thoughted. His
system is all center. He is like the man in our Lord's parable, who, finding
the pearl of great price, sold all that he had and bought it. So, both by
reason of the wider context as well as by reason of the nearer context we
must gather up the thought of the Prologue in order to enter this verse along
the line of the author's own mental motion.
The theme is the divine tragedy. The reality of God has entered history
and men lack perception of it. The full light of God's mind and plan of
redemption has shone forth, and 'tis as if the sun had risen in all its beauty
to beat vainly against the obtuseness of men born blind. The life of the
Son of God has been lived out in the midst of the chosen people ; and His
life is as a landscape to a blind man's eye.
The Gospel has two sides. Under one aspect, it is a study in the life
of Christ. Under the other aspect, it is the autobiography of apostolic faith.
The author is writing a great tragedy, the story of Israel's unbelief. At the
same time he tells us how a few were led into belief, how the Christ educated
a little body of disciples and friends, leavening them with His life, infusing
into them His mind, till at last, the eyes of the heart being opened, they
came to know their Master, in some measure, as He knew Himself, and to
think after Him His thoughts about God and man.
Verse 5. " The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness did not
perceive and apprehend it ". Had John known Plato's illustration of the
men who lived in a cave ind saw the light only as it filtered down through
their obstinate pride and tenacious prejudices, he might well have used it
here. Verse 11. " He came to His own estate" in history, to the land which
God had chosen for the stage of the redemptive life. "And His own
people ", His kith and kin, His countrymen, the stewards of His estate,
" gave Him no welcome ".

* Delivered at the First Conference, held at the First Baptist Church, October 21, 1903.
S9

6o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Verses 12 and 13. " But to all those who gave Him welcome" who
surrendered their prejudices into His keeping, who put their views of God
and man into His hands, " He gave the right and the power to become the
children of God ". I mean says John, " Those who beUeved in His name ",
that is, those who accepted His view of life. His understanding of the
national hope of Israel, His revelation of God, as the ultimate truth about
God and man. We have here a very simple arid intelligible description of
the mystery of the New Birth. To John it meant admission into the intimacy
of the Saviour. Friends live in one another's life and mind. The new born
man takes Christ's point of view for his very own, and so enters into His
purpose and His power.
Verse 14. "The Word became flesh". The term Logos, translated
" Word ", as John uses it, has two strains in its pedigree, — the Greek and the
Hebrew. To the Greek the Logos is the outgoing Reason of God. To the
Hebrew it is the will and plan of God, entering history to guide and shape
and control it. Both elements are in the Johannic term. But the Hebraic
element is the controlling one. The Logos is the full expression of God's
mind and heart and purpose touching man's redemption.
" The Word became flesh ". Our word " flesh" cannot translate John's
word. No one can study the Bible long and earnestly without being forced
to the conclusion that the literal translation is sometimes the worst possible
translation. In a good translation we must convey not only the logic of the
original, but its emotion and colour. Now our word " flesh " is too crassly
physical to convey the feeling of the original. Let us then make use of para
phrase and say " God's Word, His Self-expression, took unto itself a perfect
and real humanity ".
Thus and thus alone could God's thought about men come within reach
of the everyday man. The Incarnation, to us who deeply and devoutly
believe in it, is the only possible method whereby God's whole mind can be
made intelligible to the commonest man. And we think that the alternative
is a speculative mysticism, by means of which the man highly favoured by
talents and leisure may reason and train himself into intimacy with God's
innermost thought. But we Christians will have nothing to do with a reve
lation of God that belongs to the scholar and the speculator. We are
common folk ourselves. We have cast in our lot with the common folk.
And to us the Incarnation is the necessary means and method whereby God
puts His secrets within the reach of the man in the field and the man on the
street. " And dwelt amongst us " ? that is, in the midst of the chosen witnesses,
the men who through intimacy with Jesus had their eyes opened to the
meanings of His being and work. It was through their faith in Him, their
spiritual perception of His nature and His mind that the Son of God effected
a lodgment in human consciousness for His revelation of the Father.
" And we gazed upon His glory ". It is the eager and attentive look of
faith that John has in mind. Not the casual look of the passer-by, or the
indolent glance of the idly curious, but the penetrating look of a man whose
mind is bound to a supreme object. The man in the street looks at the

FULL OF GRACE AND TRUTH. 6i
starry heavens. The astronomer gazing at them, puts his soul into his look.
So the chosen men, drawn by the Christ, put heart and soul into their study
of Him. For this is the deeper meaning of faith ; it is the steady attention
of man to the supreme object of spiritual interest, an eager and tireless and
piercing perception which will not rest until it has gone to the heart of its
subject. " His glory ". Our word " glory " does not fully or happily translate the
Greek. The original involves the thought of power and majesty. Read the
Second Isaiah. He throws a clear light on the larger meaning of the word.
God's glory is His mastery over history, manifested through the crisis of
Israel's experience, the clear outshining of His will and purpose asserting
complete control over the nations. So, the glory of the Christ is His master
fulness. To the unbeliever He was a bankrupt Galilean. To the believer
He was the embodied might of God.
Again the original contains something of the meaning of our word
beauty. Plato described beauty as the visibleness of truth. John describes
the Christ as the visibleness of the mind and heart of God. Christ is the
synon3mi of God in terms of human experience. He is the beauty of God.
Through the Incarnation the being of God penetrates history, embodying
itself in humanity. Thus it becomes compelling, irresistible, even as noble
beauty is irresistible. So, to the eye of faith, of spiritual perception, the
Christ is the embodiment of the mastery and beauty of God.
" The mastery and beauty as of an only-begotten Son ". In the Christ
God speaks His deep and clear and final word regarding the mystery of our
life and His life. " He that hath seen me hath seen the Father ". God's
Son fully represents God to our heart and conscience. Touching Him we
touch the ultimate moral and spiritual meaning of things.
" Full of Grace ". Great words, incessantly used, grow stale. They are
no longer instinct with expression. And it is a waste of energy on our part
to refuse to recognize this law regarding words. So we would better disuse
the word "grace" for a time and substitute a word or phrase which shall
convey the thrill of the original. Both Paul and John meant by grace the
insetting energy and love of God. Human consciousness, standing before
its tasks, is empty of power to meet them, unless God comes to our aid.
Life, beset by problems it cannot solve and debts it cannot pay, is like a cove
which the tide has long forsaken. The mud flats lie bare. The rock-weed
turns brown. But the tide returns. The cove learns afresh the great lesson
that the universe cares for it. Irresistible cosmic forces lift the sea and
drive its waters, in all their strength and recreating power, into the forsaken
cove. And now all is changed. The cove tingles and glows with the sense
of its kinship to the universe and the confident consciousness of its dignity.
So with the heart seeking salvation. If it relies upon itself, the tide goes
out. The flats lie bare. Human helplessness is clearly revealed. But the
Christ presents Himself to our attention. Through faith we enter into His
mind and nature and meaning. And lo ! a flood of divine energy sets into
the soul. Life is filled, bankfull, with the consciousness of power and peace.

62 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
" Full of grace and truth ". Once more we must depart from the estab
lished translation if we would catch the full force of the original. Our word
truth, noble as it is, leans too much to the subjective side of experience.
We have another word, reality, inseparable from truth, that may serve us
better. John found in Jesus of Nazareth the reality of all the promises that
God had given to Israel. And thus was he saved from sin and doubt and
despair. Only reality can save us. The reality of human goodness saves
us from despair about humanity. We touch the goodness of the saints and
our confidence in our race is restored. Even so we touch the Christ and,
in touching Him, touch the very mind and being of God. He is the divine
reality, the pledge and assurance of God's power to keep all the promises
which He hath given us.
Finally, would we enter deep into this great text, we must think together
two things which we have been in the habit of holding more or less apart.
The men of the Bible, both of the Old and the New Testaments, instinctively
connected the thought of individual salvation with the thought of the King
dom of God. The prophet never spoke about his perfection without speak
ing at the same time about the consummation of history. The apostles never
preached or wrote about their own immortality without at the same time
publishing the news of the returning Christ.
Therefore, to enter fully into the text before us, let us imagine that we
have bent our whole strength to founding the Kingdom of God amongst
men, and that the terribleness of the task has robbed us of our confidence
and courage. It cannot be done, we begin to say. As individuals we may
be saved. God's mercy will take us through death into eternal life. But
that God's power and mercy can lift our race and nation to the level of His
mind and plan, this is too hard to be believed.
Yet this, nothing less, is the faith that the Saviour imparts to us. He
brings God's being and mind close to our consciousness and conscience.
His revelation of God is not made to the mystic, the scholar and the monk.
On the contrary, it is made in the very midst of us. The Word of God takes
upon itself our humanity and dwells among us. Through the incarnate Word
the divine being and purpose come upon us with irresistible force to save from
disheartenment and despair. The beauty of Christ is as compelling, as little
to be escaped from or disbelieved in, as the beauty of the dawn of a day in
early June. The eye makes a love-match with the sun, and lo ! the wonder
and splendor of the visible world. So the eye of the heart, through our dis
covery of the Christ, makes a love-match with the being and beauty of God.
One cannot doubt. One cannot falter. He joyously surrenders himself to
an unconquerable faith in humanity. " The Word took upon Himself our
humanity and dwelt in the midst of us. And we gazed upon His beauty and
splendor, the splendor as of one who is the only Son of His Father, full of
saving power and convincing reality ".

*THE MIRACLE AT CANA
With an attempt at a Philosophy of Miracles.
St. John 2: i-ii.)
BY REY. .A.XJGTJSTUS H:. STRONG, D. D., LL. D.,
President of Rochester Theological Seminary, Rochester, N. Y.
This Fourth Gospel was written long after Matthew, Mark and Luke.
It was intended as a supplement to them. The Synoptics give us the main
facts of Jesus' life and teaching, his works, his death, his resurrection.
This Gospel gives us the explanation of the facts, in the eternity, the person
ality, the deity of Christ himself. It presupposes the previous Gospels and
builds upon them, yet it adds but few facts to those which they relate. The
miracle of Cana is the first miracle that Jesus wrought, and it gives the rule
and type of all his miracles. The purpose of it is intimated when the evan
gelist tells us that "this beginning of his signs did Jesus in Cana of Galilee,
and manifested his glory ".
That word " glory " takes us back to the first chapter of the Gospel, and
we shall better understand the miracle if we consider the place which it
occupies in the Gospel as a whole. True to his purpose of explanation,
John begins with a thesis or proposition which he proceeds to demonstrate.
He solves all the problems of the Synoptics by boldly asserting at the very
start that the eternal Word of God has been manifested in Jesus of Nazareth.
It is an argument from the divine to the human, as John's first Epistle is an
argument from the human to the divine. The argument, however, is de
ductive rather than inductive. It propounds a principle and then proceeds
to point out the operation of it. It declares Christ to be nothing less than
Deity revealed, and then shows that this necessarily makes him not only
the Christ for whom the Old Testament had prepared the way, but also the
Son of God who has wider relations as Lord of the Universe and Savior of
mankind. The Synoptics had been content to trace Jesus' origin back to Abraham
and to Adam. The Fourth Gospel asserts that before Abraham was born,
Christ already was ; nay, it maintains that Christ was the Creator not only
of Abraham but of all humanity. It goes even further and holds that Christ
is God's only medium of communication and activity ; he is the preserver
as well as the creator of all, and whatever has come into being is life only
in him. Since he is the life of the universe, he can be its light, and all
knowledge of God and of truth proceeds from him. Christ is the only
Revealer of God. He has been revealing God throughout all human his
tory. The darkness of sin has not been able to overcome or suppress his
light, even among the heathen. But the incarnation has concentrated his
* Delivered at the Second Conference, held at the Mathewson Street Methotlist Episcopal Church,
November ii, 1903. 63

64 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
rays. Better even than Moses and the Law are the grace and truth revealed
in Jesus of Nazareth.
There is opposition to Christ, but this very opposition is a proof of
Christ's deity. Sin must resist holiness ; selfishness must resist love. Holi
ness and love, however, will attract to themselves their like. There will be
increasing faith on the part of some, though there is increasing unbelief on
the part of others. Hence this Gospel is the record of two opposing ten
dencies. God's self-manifestation in Christ stirs up hatred that brings the
Savior to the Cross, but it also awakens love that ensures the triumph of
his kingdom. Side by side with the growing opposition on the part of the
Jews is the growing devotion of Christ's disciples. They have every
worldly example and inducement to forsake him. When they do yield to
his claims and recognize his authority, the victory is won, the demon
stration is complete, the thesis is proved. And this point is reached when
Thomas, the most skeptical of the apostles, is moved after Jesus' resurrec
tion to bow at his feet and cry : " My Lord and my God ! " This is the
proper end of the Gospel, and all that follows in the last chapter is only a
supplement, designed to show why it was that John's service upon earth
lasted so much longer than Peter's.
The progressive revelation of Christ's glory — this is the central theme
of the Fourth Gospel. The first chapter, in which the thesis is stated and
the witness of John the Baptist is given, is naturally followed by the second
chapter, in which Christ manifests his glory, first by turning water into
wine, and secondly by driving the traders out of the temple. There is an
organic connection between the first chapter and the second which forbids
us to regard the sublime declarations of the first chapter as of later author
ship. The glory is declared in chapter one ; the glory is manifested in
chapter two. John, the protector and adopted son of Mary the Virgin, is
the natural custodian and narrator of the miracle of Cana — a miracle
wrought within a family circle, and therefore either unknown to the other
evangelists, or seeming to them outside the range of Jesus' official ministry
— an evidence that this Fourth Gospel had John for its author.
That this beginning of miracles was wrought in so humble a sphere is
quite of a piece with the general plan of Christ — his kingdom did not come
with observation. He was not born at Rome, but at Bethlehem ; his crown
was not of gold, but of thorns. He shows us what true glory is ; self-abne
gation reveals God best ; to him the cross was a lifting up. Not among
"the people", or "the world", was this wonder performed, but in the
narrow circle of the family. Though he had just come from his baptism
into death and from his struggle with infernal powers in the wilderness,
he begins his ministry with no sounding of trumpets or clangor of arms.
Instead of this, he enters sympathetically and joyously into the humble
and common life of men, helping the poor, increasing their joy, consecrat
ing their marriage.
The simplicity of the story carries conviction of its truth. The late
arrival of Jesus and of his newly chosen disciples increased unexpectedly

THE MIRACLE AT CANA. 65
the number of the guests. The mother, who had been already on the
ground, perceived that the resources of the household were exhausted
and that the married pair were exposed to embarrassment. With expecta
tions, long suppressed, but newly awakened by reports of the Baptist's recog
nition of her Son at the Jordan, expectations of some revelation of his
power, she whispered to him that "they have no wine". It is an intrusion
of her motherly influence into a sphere that is above her. Jesus gently
puts aside all authority but that of his mission and of the God who sent
him. But at the same time he shows that Mary's expectations were not
irrational, for he furnishes wine, and in such abundance that it serves as
a symbol of the royal generosity of the gifts of God.
Why should we think of the story as merely a parable ? All interpreta
tions that ignore the miraculous element are even more far fetched and
incredible than the miracle itself would be. " Jesus' conversation was so
entertaining that the guests said : What good wine we have had I " All this
is to contradict the plain teaching of the narrative. The evangelist evi
dently intended to describe a miracle. The testimony of the servants shows
what was in the jars ; the testimony of the ruler of the feast shows what it
has become. The " filling to the brim " has no meaning, unless it is meant
that the contents of all the six water-pots was changed to wine. The very
superfluity of the provision was necessary to justify the solemn conclusion
of the account: " This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee,
and manifested his glory: and his disciples believed on him ".
What was this glory, which the miracle made manifest ? It was three
fold, and, in each of its three aspects, it had to do with nature, and with
Christ's relation to nature. It was, first of all, the glory of Christ as the
Life of Nature. We constantly tend to an atheistic and unchristian view of
nature. We think of it as self-originated, as sufficient to itself, as indepen
dent of God. This miracle shows us on the contrary that nature is only the
expression of the divine mind and will, and that this divine mind and will is
the mind and will of Jesus Christ. He who created the universe has not
abandoned the universe. Our gospel designates Christ's creative activity
not by the preposition upo, "by", but by the preposition a'm, " through "
.Creation is not the work of an absent, but of a present, Christ. And so with
preservation. Only through his constant activity do the forces and laws of
the universe maintain their existence. Matter is not dead but living, and
it is Christ who upholds all things by the word of his power. And so we,
who believe in Christ, " Behind creation's throbbing screen
Catch movements of the great Unseen ".
If all that has come into being is, as our gospel says, " life in him ", th^n
nature is plastic in the hand of Christ. His will is a free will. He is not
an Ixion, bound to nature's wheel. He is nature's Lord. Hence it follows,
¦ secondly, that the glory which this miracle manifests is the glory of Christ
as the Ennobler of Nature. He is not the victim of a past process. He
adds to the process, and the successive additions from his living energy are

66 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
the secret of evolution ; indeed, no growth or progress is conceivable, until
we take into account some intelligent and beneficent agent behind or within
the process, who is reinforcing and guiding it to a preordained and rational
end. If all growth and progress everywhere is the result of his activity,
why should we hesitate to recognize his working here? In this miracle he
simply shows the inner possibilities of nature, since it is under his control.
He can subject it to the needs of man. The turning of water into wine is
a prophecy of the transformation of this mortal body into the spiritual body,
and of the coming of the new heaven and earth wherein dwelleth righteous
ness. For this glory is the glory of Christ, not simply as the Life of Nature,
and as the Ennobler of Nature, but as the Interpreter of Nature. All
Christ's miracles were signs of something higher than themselves. This
Fourth Gospel is especially concerned to point out the symbolism of Jesus'
works. He opens the eyes of the blind, to show that he is the Light of
the World ; he multiplies the loaves, to show that he is the Bread of Life ;
He raises the dead, to show that he lifts men up from the death of trespasses
and sins. The universe is moral and religious at its core. The progress is
a progress toward the good, the better, the best. Present commonness,
and even imperfection, is no measure of the final result. He who made the
world is in the world, to counteract the evil and to cherish the good.
Want, the effect of sin, is to be done away. Separation and isolation,
such as an accusing conscience brings about, are to give place to a holy
society. Love and joy are to prevail, such love and joy as springs from
virtue and the fear of God. All this is to begin in humble spheres and
from them to spread through all the world. Water is but the basis and
foundation for wine, and the world that now is is but the preparation for
the world that is to come.
But we cannot leave this first miracle without a further consideration
of the philosophy of miracles in general. We must grant that the old con
ception of the miracle as a violation or suspension of natural law, has been
superseded by a new conception of the miracle, as belonging to a higher
order of nature — ^an order previously existing indeed, but unknown to men
before. Miracle, then, is like the eclipse of the sun, whose rareness attracts
attention, but is not unnatural ; like the cathedral clock, whose bell rings
only at the advent of a new century ; like the action of the calculating
machine, which presents to the observer in regular succession the series of
units from one to ten million, but which then makes a leap and shows, not
ten million and one, but a hundred million. The extraordinary and unique
may nevertheless be the operation of a law of nature. The blossoming of
the century plant is something very unlike its former flowerless condition ;
no human being may ever have seen it blossom before ; yet the provision
therefor is in the plant from the beginning.
The burning of the Windsor Hotel in New York City is thought to
have been due to the gradual charring of the woodwork and to superheated
steam pipes. The temperature rose imperceptibly, until the sudden addition

THE MIRACLE AT CANA. 67
of a fraction of a degree changed heat into flame. The ellipticity of the
earth's orbit might go on increasing by regular gradations until centrifugal
force overbalanced the centripetal, and the earth from being a planet might
suddenly become a comet, yet this change might be perfectly natural.
There are more things in heaven and earth rhan are dreamt of in the
philosophy of the ordinary scientist. Now miracle in a similar manner may
be, and probably is, the operation of a law hitherto unknown to men, yet
entirely within the range of natural forces, when once these natural forces
are understood. I say, when once these natural forces are fully understood. But these
natural forces are never fully understood until they are recognized as divine.
For matter is really spirit, and nature is only another name for God. The
laws of nature are the habits of God. It is not true that God is the author
of the miracle only in the sense that he instituted the laws of nature at the
beginning, and provided that, at the appropriate time, miracle should be
their outcome. This view fails to recognize in the miracle any immediate
exercise of will. It also regards nature as a mere machine, which can
operate apart from God — a purely deistic method of conception. If, how
ever, we interpret nature dynamically, rather than mechanically, and regard
it as the regular working of the divine will, instead of the automatic action
of a machine, we may regard miracle as a perfectly natural phenomenon,
while yet we see in it the action of a present and personal God. There is
no such hard and fast line between the natural and the supernatural as
some apologists have imagined. With the qualifications already suggested,
we may adopt the dictum of Biedermann: '-Everything is miracle, — there
fore faith sees God everywhere ; nothing is miracle, — therefore science sees
God nowhere ".
"The Hebrew historian or prophet regarded miracles as only the
emergence into sensible experience of that divine force which was all along,
though invisibly, controlling the course of nature ". So says the Bishop of
Southampton, and he speaks wisely. This principle throws new light upon
many difficult narratives of Scripture. Miracle is an immediate operation
of God ; but, since all natural processes are also immediate operations of
God, we do not need to deny the use of the natural processes, so far as they
will go, in miracle. Such wonders of the Old Testament as the overthrow of
Sodom and Gomorrah, the partings of the Red Sea and of the Jordan, the
calling down of fire from heaven by Elijah, and the destruction of the army
of Sennacherib, are none the less works of God, when regarded as wrought
by the use of natural means. At Cana Jesus took water to make wine, and
on the hill-side of Galilee he took the five loaves to make bread, just as in
ten thousand vineyards to-day he is turning the moisture of the earth into
the juice of the grape, and in ten thousand fields is turning carbon into corn.
I do not hesitate to express my belief that all miracle has its natural
side, though we may not be able to discern it. Recent investigations show
the possibility of influence of mind upon body which go far toward explain
ing many of the cures of blindness, deafness, and paralysis, which meet us

68 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
in the gospel narrative. The virgin-birth of Christ may be an extreme
instance of parthenogenesis, which Professor Loeb has demonstrated to
take place in other than the lowest forms of life, and which he believes to
be possible in all. Christ's resurrection may be an illustration of the power
of the normal and perfect spirit to take to itself a proper body, and so may
be the type and prophecy of that great change when we too shall lay down
our own life and shall take it again. The scientist will yet find that his
disbelief is not only disbelief in Christ, but also disbelief in science. Even
though all miracle were proved to be a working of nature, the Christian
argument would not one whit be weakened, for still miracle would evidence
the extraordinary working of the immanent God, who is none other than
Jesus Christ, and the impartation of his knowledge to the prophet or apostle
who was his instrument.
Our unreadiness to accept this naturalistic interpretation of the miracle
results wholly from our inveterate habit of dissociating nature from God,
and of practically banishing God from his universe. This is the method
of modern science, and since science deals with phenomena and not with
their causes, science has its rights, and we cannot require it to enter a
foreign field. But there is another field which belongs to religion, and the
scientist is narrow and prejudiced \iho denies the existence of realities that
are behind the phenomena. In his Commentary on Isaiah 33 : 14, George
Adam Smith explains the passage : "Who among us can dwell with the de
vouring fire? Who among us can dwell with everlasting burnings?" He
tells us that the prophet had no thought of future punishment here. It was
the present retributions of divine justice that he had in mind — those retribu
tions that the wicked ignore or deny. If you look at a great conflagration,
he says, through a smoked glass, you can see the bricks falling and the
walls collapsing, but you cannot see the fire. We may use the illustration
for the subject before us. Physical science looks at the universe through a
smoked glass. It sees phenomena, but not the cause of them ; it sees the
sequences of nature, but not God. There is no antagonism between its
view an d that of religion — the two are simply complements of each other.
Faith looks at the universe without the needless intervention of a smoked
glass. Faith sees all that science sees, but it sees also the divine agency.
It sees not only the falling bricks, but it sees also the fire. And so it can
recognize the natural element in the miracle, while yet it recognizes in it
the extraordinary agency and wonder-working power of God.
Those who see in Christ none other than the immanent God, manifested
to creatures, find in this fact the explanation and the guarantee of his mirac
ulous working. The Logos or divine Reason, who is the principle of all
growth and evolution, can make God known to finite creatures only by suc
cessive new impartations of his energy. Since all progress implies incre
ment, and Christ is the only source of life, the whole history of creation is
a witness to the possibility of miracle. Every rational step already taken
proves that other steps may follow. Miracle is not only possible but proba
ble, for the reason that Christ is the Moral Reason of the world, as well as

THE MIRACLE AT CANA. 69
its Intellectual Reason. The disturbances of the world-order which are due
to sin are the matters which most deeply affect him. Christ, the life of the
whole system and of humanity as well, must suffer ; and, since we have
evidence that he is merciful as well as just, we have the strongest of
reasons for beUeving that he will rectify the evil by extraordinary means
when merely ordinary means do not avail.
Tne miracle of Cana would not have been wrought if there had not
been need of it. It was needed as a proof that Christ is the Life of Nature,
the Ennobler of Nature, the Interpreter of Nature. It taught that he
recognized the needs of the world and that he had come to supply them,
not in man's time but in his own time, with such gradualness and in such
proportion as best evince the wisdom and the munificence of God. He has
come to make all things new, to make sacred every common relation of
life, to turn earth into heaven. But he will do this through his own nat
ural forces and laws. Every new manifestation of his power shall lay hold
of and build upon and develop that which already exists, even as he uses
the water to make wine. And these transformations of the lower into the
higher have only just begun. Cana reveals the plan of Christ as a plan of
evolution. After Law comes Gospel. After labor and sorrow and pain and
tears come rest and reward and rejoicing and life forevermore. Sin gives
its brief enjoyments at the first, and afterwards brings remorse and ruin.
But Christ's gifts are ever increasing in richness and profusion. He keeps
his best wine to the last.
May I sum up what I have said by a definition of the miracle? A
miracle is an event in nature so extraordinary in itself and so coinciding
with the prophecy or command of a religious teacher or leader as fully to
warrant the conviction, on the part of those who witness it, that God has
wrought it with the design of certifying that this teacher or leader has been
commissioned by him. This definition has certain marked advantages
over those that have been commonly accepted. It recognizes the imma
nence of God and his immediate agency in nature, instead of assuming an
antithesis between the laws of nature and the will of God. It regards the
miracle as simply an extraordinary act of that same God who is already
present in all natural operations, and who in them is reveahng his general
plan. It holds that natural law, as the method of God's regular activity,
in no way precludes unique exertions of his power when these will best
secure his purpose in creation. It leaves it possible that all miracles
may have their natural explanations and may hereafter be traced to natural
causes, while both miracles and natural causes may be only other names for
the one and self-same will of God. It reconciles the claims of both science
and religion : of science, by permitting any possible or probable physical
antecedents of the miracle ; of religion, by maintaining that these very ante
cedents, together with the miracle itself, are to be interpreted as signs of
God's special commission to him under whose teaching or leadership the
miracle is wrought.
We are afflicted with a mental and moral astigmatism which sees a

7° THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
single point or truth as if it were two. We see God and man, divine sov
ereignty and human freedom, Christ's divine nature and Christ's human
nature, the natural and the supernatural, respectively, as two disconnected
facts, when deeper insight would see but one. Astronomy has its centrip
etal and centrifugal forces, yet they are doubtless one force. The child
cannot hold two oranges at once in its little hand. Our tendency to double
vision should be corrected by Old Testament revelation, for that intimates
that, in perfect consistency with the operation of natural law, the God of glory
thundereth and in the heavens God himself is speaking with the living
voice. The miracle of Cana is a New Testament corrective of our mental
and moral astigmatism, for here Christ shows himself to be the Life of
Nature, the Ennobler of Nature, the Interpreter of Nature, as only he can
be who, as the Fourth Gospel declares, was in the beginning with God, and
was himself God. To a transcendent and divine Personality miracle and
nature are one.

* JESUS AND NICODEMUS — THE NEW BIRTH.
(St. John 3: 1-15.)
by- rev. ed^yard abbott, d. d.,
Rector of St. James's Episcopal Church, Cambridge, Mass.
In order to a correct understanding of the story of Jesus and Nicodemus
it is necessary to bear in mind that the Jewish commonwealth was a com
bination of church and state, presenting an ideal, an object lesson, of that
coming Kingdom of God, when church and state, long separated, shall be
united in a homogeneous whole. One and the same code of laws answered
the purpose of both the civil and the ecclesiastical sides of the Jewish
national life. Of almost equal authority with its written law were its
unwritten traditions. It was one of the distinctions of the party known as
the Pharisees that they attached the greatest importance to tradition, and
enforced it with the utmost scrupulosity as regarded doctrine, ritual and
life. Accompanying this academic rigor was often a practical selfishness,
insincerity and superficiality. And Nicodemus was a Pharisee.
Nicodemus appears only in the Gospel of St. John, and he appears in
that Gospel only three times ; once in the interview with Jesus ; once when
he protested against condemning Jesus without a trial ; and once again
when he came with Joseph of Arimathea, bearing an hundred weight of
spices to anoint the body of the Saviour when taken from the Cross, and
so to aid in preparing it for burial. The interview with Nicodemus alone
concerns us this morning.
Nicodemus was also a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin. As a rule the
members of the Sanhedrin were scholars of authority, theologians, teachers
of the law ; constituting a supreme court at Jerusalem before whom all
cases arising under the law were brought for judgment.
With this preliminary picture we are prepared to understand the scene
about to be described, which took place at Jerusalem soon after that miracle
in Cana of Galilee which has been the basis of discussion this morning.
In the language of the Revised Version the brief story of the interview of
Nicodemus with our Lord is as follows [St. John 3 : 1-15J.
In all probability the actual words of our Saviour end with the fifteenth
verse. There follows immediately that noble epitome of the whole gospel
of the Incarnation, " God so loved the world, that He gave His only
begotten Son ; that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but
have everlasting life." But in the opinion of scholars this is a direct
declaration of the author of the gospel, pieced on to the narrative of the
conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, and not a part of the interview
itself.

* Delivered at the Second Conference, held at the Mathewson Street Methodist Episcopal Church,
November ii, 1903. 71

72 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Now let us for a moment pause in order to form in imagination, if pos
sible, a legitimate picture of the scene itself. It is in Jerusalem, at the
crowded time of the Passover, when the streets are full of the Hebrew
people. It is night. It is not improbably a windy night, and the gusts that
sweep over Judea and Jerusalem are tearing to and fro in the streets of the
city. Under the cover of darkness, this Nicodemus, an old man, I think,
wends his silent and unperceived way to the house where Jesus of Nazareth
is staying. It seems hardly probable, as has been suggested by some
students, that it was the house of John, the author of this gospel. At the
time of the crucifixion our Lord did commit His mother to the care of John,
and John took her, as the King James Version says, " to his own home."
But the word " home " is not in the original, and it is not necessary to sup
pose that at this time the author of the gospel had a " home " of his own in
Jerusalem at which Jesus stayed. Whatever was the house, we can safely
and accurately imagine that there was a stairway leading up on the outside
of it, as was not uncommon in the houses of the East, to the upper room,
which, as the guest chamber, would be the place where the Lord would
be found. Nicodemus, ascending this outside stair, could reach the apart
ment where Jesus was without attracting the attention of the people in the
house, so that both architecture and darkness favored the privacy of his visit.
But why by night ? There is danger that the intimations given in some
other parts of John's Gospel of " doors shut " for fear of the Jews should
apply to this adventure, and that it should be inferred that Nicodemus
came by night through fear. There is no authority for that interpretation,
though it may be true. Let us not label Nicodemus with the word coward
when there is nothing in the narrative except the simple fact that he came
by night, to indicate that fear had anything to do with his steps. I fancy
that if you wanted to see your pastor upon a confidential errand, you might
very likely go to him at night when the duties and interruptions of the day
were at their lowest ebb, and when perhaps you might be more likely to
find him unengaged.
At any rate, it was at night that Nicodemus went, and found the
Saviour in the room where He was lodging. You can imagine that it did
take something of moral courage on the part of this venerable Hebrew,
this Pharisee, this judge upon the supreme bench, to seek 'a private inter
view with the man from Galilee, whose unique personality, whose unpar
alleled teachings, the beginning of whose wonder-working manifestations of
His glory had already excited such a sensation, and aroused such a hubbub
of excitement and discussion among the Hebrew people. It costs some
thing to interview a man who is under suspicion. St. Paul in his prison
abode remembers with a grateful heart the man who is called Onesiphorus,
because when he was a prisoner at Rome and this man was visiting there
he had sought Paul out, and was not afraid of his bonds. Nicodemus was
not afraid of the bonds of the Master.
Notice also that he comes with a confession. The miracle at Cana of
GaUlee had acquired notoriety at Jerusalem ; and probably other miracles

THE NE W BIRTH. 73
had been wrought not here recorded. Evidently Nicodemus does not
stand alone in his confession, for he says : " We know that thou art a teacher
come from God, for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except
God be with him ". It was a joint confession in which he spoke for others
as well as for himself. It was also a compromised confession, a limited
confession, a confession with reservations. All that it said was, " we know
that Thou art a teacher"; yet that was a good deal for a member of the
Sanhedrin to say. "We know that Thou art a teacher come from God",
was a great deal more for a man in his position to say.
Now the Saviour, instead of meeting this confession as most persons
would have met it, met it as He often met such ; gives no attention appar
ently to the question or remark that had been addressed to Him by His
interlocutor, but deftly and effectively turns the mind of His interlocutor to
an entirely different point. Here comes a venerable Hebrew, a Pharisee, a
judge on the supreme bench, but by the Saviour all he says is brushed aside
with the words, " Except a man be born again he cannot see the Kingdom
of God". With one stroke He puts Nicodemus outside the pale.
Then comes the question, " How can a man be born again ? " It is like'
Pilate's question, "What is truth?" It may have been ironical, sarcastic,
contemptuous or sincere, or a little of each and all. " How can a man be
born when he is old ? " How can a man be born again when he is an old
man like me, stooped, grey-headed, and trembling of foot, as I have found
my way up these stairs ? The Saviour seems to pay no attention to this
question, for in His second declaration He passes right by it and fixes His
mind and words upon a spot beyond the place, even, where He had planted
His foot in His first answer. " Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man
be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the Kingdom of
God ".
Put these two answers side by side and note the progress in the
Saviour's thought from the one to the other. In one case it is, " Except a
man be born [from above] he cannot see the Kingdom of God " ; in the
other it is, " Except a man be born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter
into the Kingdom of God ". Spiritual perception is one thing, spiritual
experience is another. Unless a man be born from above [of the Spirit], and
of water as well, he can neither see, through his perceptions, what the King
dom of God is, nor in his experience can he know or enter into the Kingdom
of God as a real condition of his life.
Now, what does our Sfwiour mean by the distinction that He draws
here between baptism of the Spirit and baptism with water ? What does
He mean by " being born of water and the Spirit " ? I know that this is an
interdenominational meeting. I am probably speaking to those who call
themselves Baptists or Methodists or Congregationalists or Episcopalians.
I hope nothing I say will exceed the courtesy that a speaker should show in
such an assembly as this, or that it will offend or wound or distress the sen
sibilities of any brother or sister who does me the honor to listen to what I
have to say. But I want to say here unequivocally, unhesitatingly, and with-

74 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
out the slightest room for doubt in regard to my meaning, that I believe in
baptismal regeneration. Baptism is a covenant between God and the human
soul. There is a human side to it, and there is a divine side to it, and the
divine and the human must coincide to make the perfect baptism, which is
the outward and visible sign of the inward and invisible birth. That is
baptism ; and what is baptism ? It is an outward and visible apphcation of
a medium appointed by our Lord Himself, accompanying an inward and
invisible operation of the divine spirit promised by God Himself. That is
baptism, and such baptism is not only an indication, it is a means, when it
is used in faith, of the new birth. Those who have conformed to the out
ward and visible sign have a right to expect the inward and invisible grace,
and that is the literal and spiritual philosophy of that being born of the
Spirit and of water which our Saviour lays down to Nicodemus as the pre
liminary condition not only of seeing but entering into the Kingdom of
God. There are three foundation doctrines in so much of the Gospel of John
as this Conference has proceeded with in its consideration this morning.
The first is the Incarnation, God manifest in the flesh, and the world will
never outgrow the doctrine of the incarnation. Men deride it, and dispute
it, and condemn it, and forsake it, but it is of the nature of the universe.
The second is the Atonement. On the foundation of the Incarnation rises
the second great doctrine of the Gospel of John. " Behold the Lamb of
God which taketh away the sin of the world ". The doctrine may be
repudiated, minimized and rejected, but there will ever remain the sacri
ficial atonement of the Son of God for the sin of the world. And the next
great doctrine in this spiritual ascent is that of the new birth. It has a
logical connection with the others, it grows out of the others, it is essential
for the realization of the others. God manifest in Jesus Christ, the sacri
ficial Lamb of Calvary, and the new birth from above by the Spirit, with an
outward sign of the washing of regeneration by which the soul is restored
to the kingdom to which by sin it had been lost. Those are the three
fundamental doctrines of St. John's Gospel.
There are four courses to take with certain difficult passages in the
gospels of which we have examples before us in our study to-day : " Except
a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God " ; " Except a man
be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God ".
We can say, " I do not believe Jesus Christ ever said such a thing "; " diat
saying is a fiction ; it sprang up in the mind of a deluded enthusiast fifty
years after the Saviour had come and gone ". A great many people do dis
pose of such sayings in that way ; it is a very easy way to dispose of them ;
yet for one, I do not feel at liberty to take refuge in that method. The
second course is to say: " Yes, the narrative is authentic, our Saviour said
what He was reported to have said, but He was mistaken. He was honest,
sincere, but acting under an hallucination, as other men often do". Well,
there are those who comfort themselves with such a refuge as that ; but I
reject it, for I do not believe our Lord was a mistaken man. The third

THE NE W BIRTH. 75
course is to admit that our Saviour said what He was reported to have said,
and that He was perfectly sane, but that He was an imposter, a quack, a
•mountebank, a pretender who traded on the fears and superstitions of an
ignorant and half-barbaric people, knowing all the time that He was making
pretentions which had no foundation. There are those who accept that
explanation, but I reject it. There remains only one other course open.
Our Saviour said precisely what He is reported to have said ; He was a
sane man ; He was an honest man, and He is to be believed. My character
and my life are to be conformed to His teaching, and if I fail to do it, I must
take the consequences. That method of disposing of these difficult passages
I heartily accept.

* ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH BELIEF.
(St. John 3: 14-21.)
BY REV. ALBERT H. BLUIklB, D. T>.,
Pastor of the Walnut Avenue Congregational Church, Boston, Mass.
In studying the Gospel of John we find the teaching that eternal life
comes through belief. We are led therefore, to examine the statements of
this Gospel in regard to three inquiries :
First. What is eternal life ?
Second. What is the belief, or the believing, through which eternal
life comes ?
Third. Why eternal life comes through belief ?
It seems requisite, moreover, that some considerations should be pre
sented with a view to clear these teachings of this Gospel from misappre
hension and objection, and to show their reasonableness and importance.
I, What is eternal life ?
I. Eternal life is that blessed condition of existence of the soul of man
in its relation to God, which is set forth in contrast with another condition
in which the soul is described as abiding under the wrath of God, abiding
in darkness, and which involves such loss of good that the soul, though
immortal, is said to perish. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilder
ness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth
in Him should not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:14, 15). "He
that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life : and he that believeth not
the Son shall not see life ; but the wrath of God abideth on him " (3 : 36).
" I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on Me should
npt abide in darkness" (12 :46).
2. Eternal life is a certain kind of practical and affectionate acquaint
ance with God the Father, and His Son Jesus Christ, which men may have
through the aid of the Holy Spirit. " This is life eternal, that they might
know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou has sent"
(17:3). " Except a man be born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter
into the Kingdom of God" (3:5).
3. Eternal life is that happy relationship with God which men may
have as a gift from Christ which He came into the world to impart. " My
sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me : and I give
unto them eternal life" (10:27, 28). "Father, glorify Thy Son that Thy
Son also may glorify Thee, as Thou has given Him power over all flesh, that
He should give eternal life to as many as Thou hast given Him " (17:1, 2).
" I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more
abundantly " (lo : 10).

* Delivered at the Second Conference, held at the Mathewson Street Methodist Episcopal Church,
November ii, 1903. 76

ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH BELIEF. 77
4. Eternal life is that precious relationship with God which men may
have as a present possession. " He that believeth on the Son hath ever
lasting life" (3:36). "Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My
word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall
not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life" (5:24).
5. Eternal life is that glorious relationship with God which men may
have as an inalienable possession. " I give unto them eternal life, and they
shall never perish, neither shall anyone pluck them out of My hand "
(10:28). II. What is the belief, — the believing, — through which eternal life
comes ?
It is that act of the individual soul by which it recognizes and honors
the claims of Christ, accepts and confides in His offices as the One sent by
God to give eternal life to all who thus entrust themselves to His care.
Thus the phrase, " believing in Christ " is used as synonymous with receiv
ing Christ as the One by whom we, who have rebelled against God, may be
reinstated in filial relations to Him. " To as many as received Him, to
them gave He power, (or the right) to become the sons of God, even to
them that believe on His name " (i : 12).
Again the phrase is used as meaning the same as obeying Christ. " He
that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life, but he that obeyeth not the
Son (revised version) shall not see life, but the wrath of God abideth on
him" (3:36).
So Martha recognized the claim of Jesus as the Christ, the anointed
deliverer, and said to Him : " Yea, Lord, I believe that Thou art the Christ,
the Son of God, which should come into the world " (11: 27). To the
Samaritan woman her townsmen said : " Now we believe, not because of
thy saying, for we have heard Him ourselves, and know that this is indeed
the Christ, the Saviour of the world" (John 4:42).
These teachings are well paraphrased in that admirable definition of
believing in Christ, by the late Dr. Joseph Cook : " Saving faith is the
affectionate choice of Jesus Christ as both Saviour and Lord ". This
implies a penitential confession that as sinners we need Him as a Saviour,
and that as subjects we bow to His righteous rule, and engage to obey His
commands. III. The third inquiry, why eternal life comes through believing, has
its answer in the statements made in this Gospel concerning the merciful
mission of Christ. Since " God so loved the world that He gave His only
begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have
everlasting life " (3 : 16), it follows that the first, most manifest and urgent
duty for all who know this is to receive and welcome, accept and trust the
Saviour whom God sent into the world " that the world through Him might
be saved" (3 : 17). So when men inquired of Jesus, What shall we do
that we might work the works of God, He answered : " This is the work of
God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent " (6 : 28, 29). The
Saviour taught that men had such evidence of His divine mission in His
life-giving words, and in His miraculous deeds, that not to believe on Him

78 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
showed them to be ungrateful and perverse. " The words that I speak unto
you, they are spirit and they are life " (6 : 63). " If I had not come and
spoken unto them, they had not had sin, but now they have no cloak for
their sin. If I had not done among them the works that none other man
did, they had not had sin, but now they have both seen and hated both Me
and My Father" (15:22-24). "Simon Peter answered Him, Lord, to
whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have be
lieved and know that Thou art the Holy One of God " (6 : 68, 69). On
another occasion as recorded by Matthew, Simon Peter answered and said,
" Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God. And Jesus answered and
said unto him, blessed art thou, Simon, Bar-Jonah : for flesh and blood
hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven" (Matt.
16:16, 17).
IV. Having thus set forth the plain teachings of this Gospel on eternal
life through belief, or believing, it seems proper, in view of the frequent
misapprehensions concerning these teachings, and the numerous objections
to them, to add some remarks to show their reasonableness and importance.
I . God's great love and mercy are specially apparent in His giving us
eternal life on such an easy and simple condition. We are simply to turn
away from everything wrong, and in loving trust look to the Saviour God
has provided, and try to follow Him. We are not now " under the law, but
under grace " (Rom. 6:14); /. e., we are not under the law as a rule of judg
ment, although we are still under the law as a rule of action. God has not
repealed His law, which is " holy, just and good ", and as His " command
ment is exceeding broad ", " by the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justi
fied in His sight " (Rom. 4 : 20). But, since Christ has died and " borne
our sins in His own body on the tree " (i Pet. 2 : 24), God is enabled to
exercise His infinite compassion towards us, and to accept from us, instead
of the perfect obedience which the law demands, an imperfect degree of
obedience, if it is of the right kind ; if it is that humble, penitent, loving
spirit, which is impHed in the act of entrusting our soids to Christ, as our
Advocate and Redeemer.
Many years ago, when a certain brilliant young philanthropist was in
charge of the New York Independent, he wrote an editorial inveighing
against creeds, declaring it very immaterial what a man believes if he only
lives right. " There is one simple way of salvation ", he said : " Let a man
live according to the Sermon on the Mount and he will be saved". "So
he will," the clear-seeing president of a western college responded in a con
clusive reply; "but no man ever yet lived up to that standard, which
says : ' Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is
perfect' And if that is the rule of judgment every soul of man is forever
cut off from all hope of salvation ".
2. To condition eternal life on belief, or believing, furnishes one of
the best tests of character. Belief means, in this connection, as we have
seen, not the things believed apart by themselves, but the act of the person
believing, and that act of believing, which is a requisite for eternal life, is

ETERNAL. LIFE THROUGH BELIEF. 79
always a moral act, an affectionate choice of Jesus Christ as both Saviour
and Lord.
This is not as some allege, making eternal life depend on a merely
intellectual assent to the truth of a certain set of theological propositions,
even about the person and work of Christ ; a kind of an assent which may
have no decisive connection with character. I may be compelled to
believe in the newly discovered properties of matter, the wonderful powers
of certain substances as sources of light and heat. But tliis belief does not
seem at present to have any direct bearing on my conduct or to appeal to
me for any specific action.
Some objectors speak as if we teach that certain beliefs held in
the understanding act as a talisman ; as if one who has the catechism in
his mind is thereby qualified to enter into life. A parent applies to the
school authorities and gets a permit for his child to enter the public school.
With this in his hand the child secures an entrance, though he knows little
of the terms of admission, perhaps cannot read the permit. A good creed
in a man's head does not give him entrance into life. It does not neces
sarily make him a good man or give him a right character. It tends to do
so, for all truth has an inherent impelling power. " With the heart man
beUeveth unto righteousness" (Rom. 10:10). The question of intellectual
assent to the creed depends on the evidence presented. If the evidence is
sufficient, assent is compelled. It is not optional with a man to believe it
or not. He cannot help it. "The devils also believe and tremble " (James
2 : ^9). The question is, does he yield to the constraining force of that
truth upon his affections and his will? Does he accept it as the rule of his
own life, and govern himself accordingly ?
Now, when Christ bids us believe in Him, if His claims are clearly
seen and we are convinced that He is what He says He is, the appeal He
makes for our confidence, our loving trust, is the most powerful appeal
possible. For God in Christ is the supreme revelation of the divine char
acter. " God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life "
(John 3 : 16). " Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved
us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10).
If one is willing to do right he will gladly respond to this appeal by accept
ing Christ and confiding all his interests to His loving care.
3. To require belief as a condition of receiving eternal life is reason
able, because the essential element in the believing required is only the love
due from every sincere soul to the highest excellence known.
It is only in so far as Christ is revealed to us in His true character that we
are required to believe in Him. Some years ago I was present at a sym
posium on "The Meeting of the Extremes ", in the parlors of the late Rev.
Dr. Joseph Cook, when a distinguished philanthropist, who rejects the
Christian system, said : " You call us unbelievers, when in fact we believe
more than you do ". He named a number of things concerning the capa
bilities and prospects of the soul of man which are not included in the
Christian belief. The reply was made, that it is not the nuriiber of propo-

8o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
sitions believed that entitles one to be called a believer by way of eminence,
but the dignity of the propositions, and the directness and power of their
bearing on the practical issues of life.
And when we consider it, could there be a proposition submitted to the
apprehension of man for his belief more commanding, or more potent for
good if true, than the statement that He from whose creative hand the
planets rolled, in the day " when the morning stars sang together, and all
the sons of God shouted for joy ", stooped so low as here on this atom of a
world to be born a babe and lie in the arms of a human mother, to be nailed
to the cross in expiation for the sins of the world, to rise from the dead and
bid His followers go forth and disciple all nations, saying : " All power is
given unto Me in heaven and in earth, and lo, I am with you always, even
unto the end of the world "; and that He will then sit on His judgment throne
and before Him shall be gathered all nations to receive from His hands the
final awards for the things done in the body. The person who believes that,
and joyfully throws all his interests for time and eternity into the keeping of
this Almighty Redeemer, all history has persisted in calling preeminently
a believer, and is warranted in doing so. Indeed, our Lord himself bestows
this title on His disciples, referring to them again and again, by a tender
diminutive, expressive of endearment, as " these little ones that believe in
Me". But the objector further said, " We are not to be blamed for rejecting
this belief. We simply have no capacity for entertaining it ". He illus
trated their incapacity by the replies two little children playing on their
father's lawn said they gave to a tramp who demanded their money. One
said, " We haven't any " The other added : " We haven't any pockets ".
In response to this, reference was made to the fishes in the waters of
Mammoth Cave that had so long kept away from the light that their eyelids
are said to have grown together, and to the conceded fact that many a high
faculty of the soul can be in a measure extirpated by disuse, as the gpreat
naturalist Mr. Darwin deplored his perception of spiritual values had been,
to a lamentable degree.
There is also such a thing as " an evil heart of unbelief in departing
from the living God" (Heb. 3:12). We have a natural disinclination to
receive evidence that is likely to convict us of sin. The Saviour said: " He
that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in
the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation,
that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light,
because their deeds were evil. P'or every one that doeth evil hateth the
light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved" (John
3:18-20). But whether by culpable negligence of evidence or not, it was
manifest that the eminent doubter did not perceive the true relation to the
world that Christ claims to hold. For he said : " I should never think of
ending a prayer, 'for Plato's sake, amen'; nor 'for Emerson's sake', nor
can I say 'for Jesus' sake, amen ' ". The Christian can say this, for he
recognizes the offices of Christ as revealed to him in the Bible, and the
Holy Spirit has so helped him to see Christ in these relations that he rests

ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH BELIEF. 8i
his soul upon Him. This is in accordance with the promise Christ made,
" When He, the Spirit of Truth is come. He will guide you into all truth.
He shall glorify Me, for He shall receive of mine and shall show it unto
you" (John i6: 13, 14). The believer reads: "There is one God and one
mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; Who gave Himself
a ransom for all " (i Tim. 2 : 5, 6). " If any man sin we have an Advocate
with the Father, Jesus Christ, the righteous ; and He is the propitiation for
our sins, and not for ours only, but for the sins of the whole world"
(i John 2:1,2). Those whom Christ condemned for refusing to believe on
Him were those to whom He had spoken and before whom He had proved
His claims by doing "among them the works which none other man did",
so that He could say: "Now they have no cloak for their sin" (John 15 :
22-24). Seeing Christ, perceiving His righteous claims to our loving confidence,
of course must come before believing in Christ, before giving Him our
loving confidence. " This is the will of Him that sent Me ", said Jesus,
" that everyone that seeth the Son and believeth on Him, should have
eternal life, and I will raise Him up at the last day " (John 6 :4o). Yet we
are taught that " in every nation he that feareth God and worketh right
eousness is acceptable to Him" (Acts 10:35). We read: "There is one
Lord, one faith, one baptism " (Eph. 4 : 5). One Lord whose atoning
death alone makes it possible for the penitent to be forgiven. Jesus said,
" I am the way, the truth and the life ; no man cometh unto the Father but
by Me" (John 14:6). The apostle Peter, "filled with the Holy Ghost",
said of Christ, " Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is none
other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved"
(Acts 4:12). " There is one faith ", one simple act of loving, penitent, self-
surrender to the best light the soul has, the same in essence in ancient saint
and Christian Apostle, in Enoch and in John. Faith in God is love for
God as trustworthy, "love is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:10).
" An atheist may be saved ", Professor Park used to say, " if he is honest
in his doubt, and sincerely follows the best light he can get ". Who can
doubt that Socrates would have joyfully accepted Christ if the world's
Redeemer had been revealed to him ? "There is one baptism ", one orderly
required way of confessing Christ when one has seen Hire and believed on
Him. "All power is given unto Me in heaven and on earth. Go je, there
fore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of
the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe
all things whatsoever I commanded you ; and lo, I am with you alway, even
unto the end of the world " (Matt. 28 : 18-20).
The words of Professor Robert Flint of Edinboro are pertinent here.
" In religion, as in every other department of thought and life, man is bound
to regulate his belief by the simple but comprehensive principle that evi
dence is the measure of assent. Disbelief ought to be regulated by the
same principle, for disbelief is belief ; not the opposite of beUef, but belief
of the opposite. Unbelief is the opposite both of belief and disbelief.
Ignorance is to unbelief what knowledge is to belief or disbelief. The whole

82 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
duty of man as to belief is to believe and disbelieve according to evidence,
and neither to believe nor disbelieve when the evidence fails him".
(Theism, p. 358).
With this agrees the statement of Archbishop Whately : " Disbeliev
ing is believing, since to disbelieve any assertion is to believe its contradic
tory ".
4. To insist on religious belief as a condition of eternal life is really
to insist on religious life, since religious life is the response of the soul to
the appeal of religious truth.
The familiar voice of a weak sciolism cries out, " No matter about a
man's belief, religious life is the real need "; as if the latter could be had
without the former ; as if the latter were not always produced and deter
mined by the former. All truth is related to life. Strictly, there is no abstract
truth. Every conception of realities has an inherent impelling power. The
voice of the multiplication table tells us of the harmonies of God's universe,
with which it behooves us to be in accord. We look on the good Samaritan,
and the scene says, " Go, and do thou likewise". "Religion", Professor
Flint says, " is man's belief in a being or beings mightier than himself,
and inaccessible to his senses, but not indifferent to his sentiments and
actions, together with the feelings and practices which flow from such be
lief". (Anti-Theistic Theories, p. 259.) Hence the belief is the governing
constituent in all religion, indeed in all character. A man is always what
he is made by his belief, not always by what he says he holds, but by what
his life says holds him, the principles and doctrines which he accepts as
his rule of action and which govern his life. In practical affairs men
acknowledge this. A man can't get a situation as a clerk in a store without
an examination of his theological belief, if it is thought to be peculiar. A
merchant says to a friend : " Do you know of a competent salesman I can
get?" "Yes", the friend replies, ''the brightest, most successful one I
ever knew ". " Send him round will you ? " " Yes, only I ought to tell you
his religious views are rather peculiar ". " What has that to do with the
matter? " " Well, he believes in the community of goods, that God's plan
is for all property ultimately to be held in common ; meanwhile, if one does
not get his fair share he has a right to help himseff ". " Then I don't want
him around my till ", the merchant rejoins.
The genesis of religion is always the same : First, religious knowl
edge ; secondly, religious feeling, awakened by the appeal of the truth that
is seen ; thirdly, religious action, or the choice to yield to the appeal of the
truth, or to resist it. The virtue lies in the action of the will ; that is always
accompanied by emotion, but the sensibility and the will are both abso
lutely dependent on the conception of the truth by the intellect.
5. To regard belief or believing as a requisite for eternal life is a safer
rule than to consider religious feeling as the clear sign of true religion, for
unless religious feeling accords with correct views of truth, it is liable to be
misleading, and indeed to be wholly wrong itself. There is no rehgion
without emotion, but emotion is not religion. It must be regelated by a
clear vision of the facts of the situation. Thus Professor Flint remarks :

ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH BELIEF. 83
" The heart must be appealed to and satisfied as well as the head, but not
apart from or otherwise than through the head, or the appeal is sophistical
and the satisfaction illegitimate. Our feelings largely determine whether
we recognize and assent to reasons or not, but they ought not to be substi
tuted for reasons, or even used to supplement reasons ". He condemns
" the" sentimentalism which pleads feelings in deprecation of the rigid criti
cism of reasons, or in order to retain a conviction which it cannot logically
justify". (Theism, p. 334).
Men often go wofuUy astray because they yield to the impulse of wrong
feelings — feelings awakened by the lower instincts, or by a selfish and par
tial view of facts, while they shut their eyes to unwelcome truth, lest its
stronger appeal should prove effectual.
A man is passionately enamored of a lady whom he desires to marry,
but before he can make her acquaintance they are widely separated. Years
pass, when they chance to meet. Suddenly the former impulse is upon him
like a whirlwind. Learning immediately, however, that she is now married,
instantly, as an honorable man, he stifles the feeling, obeying rather the
impulses awakened by this wider knowledge of the facts of the case.
A man says : " Some oE the sayings of Jesus awaken repugnant feelings
in my mind. I feel that they cannot be true ". He is reminded that by
many infallible proofs Jesus is accredited at the bar of our reason as a
trustworthy witness, the light of the world, the truth. This fact, and the
remembrance of our imperfect knowledge, our liability to prejudice under
the bli iding influence of our sin, and our natural aversion to admonitory
truth, are considerations which appeal to him to yield a reverent acceptance
to all the teachings of our Lord.
Those who regard their own feelings as a safe guide, notwithstanding
the appeal to the contrary of attested truth, in rejecting certain parts of
Christ's teaching as untrue, do not agree with each other what parts their
feelings will allow to stand. Every man is to install his own feelings as the
supreme authority in deciding what portions of the Word of God he will
accept, what portions " find him ", as he says, or approve themselves to his
moral sensibilities. Thus the author of The Christ of Today says (p. 161) :
" The man who is full of the mind of Christ is dependent on no authority to
declare to him the portions of his Bible that are truly the revelation of God :
he has an unction from the Holy One, and understands for himself ".
Some years ago an effort was made at a misnamed Church Congress at
Hartford, to ascertain what parts of the Bible the feehngs of certain liberal
thinkers would agree in commending as worthy of belief. Paul's teaching
they felt could be disregarded, but their feelings seemed hopelessly at
variance on the question how much of Christ's teachings could safely be
trusted. At length an eminent clergyman ended the discussion by stating
that we must all become like the little child that Jesus set in the midst of
His disciples and commended, for a child does not pretend to know any
thing about these mysteries. On their plan he was right ; they were agnos
tics all with as many Bibles as there were men, and none of them worth
anything as a pillow for a dying bed.

84 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
6. To insist on religious belief as a pre-requisite to eternal life is pre
cisely what is implied in the injunction to disciple all nations.
All the extensive operations of the various missionary societies for the
prevalence of God's Kingdom over all the earth are simply an endeavor to
carry to every man, everywhere, the message which the great missionary
apostle gave to the Philippian jailer: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,
and thou shalt be saved" (Acts 16:31). And all the efforts to produce
more harmonious and efficient religious activities at home and abroad in
bringing the world to Christ, can successfully proceed only on the principle
that there must first be secured greater harmony of conviction in regard to
the underlying truths involved. What precisely is the task to be done ?
At a farewell meeting on the departure of a missionary sent by one of
the liberal denominations to Japan, the distinct declaration was made:
"We are not going out to convert the Japanese, but to confer with them, to
promote an interchange of religious ideas". And upon this apostle of
spiritual trading an educated native of that country, one of the speakers of
the occasion, invoked the blessing of the eighty thousand gods of Japan.
At the meeting of the Second International Congregational Council in
Boston in 1899, a distinguished guest, the head of Cambridge University,
in discussing Christian unity and fellowship, attempted to show that the
only union possible is " a moral unity, a unity of spirit, which is completely
independent of creed". I am compelled to take issue squarely with that
assertion, and to affirm, on the contrary, that there is no moral unity or
unity of spirit possible except that which is founded on, and bounded by,
an underlying unity of creed. The measure of harmony of spiritual life
between persons and parties is absolutely and always determined by the
measure of harmony in their creed. The gentleman further said that the
ground of unity is a recognition of " the Christlike conduct of life ". Indeed ?
And what is that? Mr. Gladstone, in his paper on Authority in Religion
says, " The human mind is accustomed to play tricks with itself in every
form, and one of the forms in which it most frequently resorts to this opera
tion is when it attenuates the labor of thought, and evades the responsibility
of definite decision, by the adoption of a general word that we purposely
keep undefined to our own consciousness ". " So ", he says, " men admire
the British constitution, without knowing or inquiring what it is, and profess
Christianity but decline to say or think what it means".
Now to define "the Christlike conduct of life ", so that it can serve as
an intelligible basis for Christian unity, one must have some knowledge of
Christ, and of the application of His teaching to our life. Such knowledge
to be effective must be apprehended with some clearness, and if thus appre
hended, it can be stated, and if stated it is a creed, and that creed governs
the feelings and acts of the man who makes it his rule of life. The propa
gation of the Gospel does not imply that perfect agreement in all minor
matters of belief is the end sought, but a substantial agreement in its essen
tial truths. The great London preacher, the late Joseph Parker, once
unfortunately said : " In the case of two men, two huiidred, two thousand,
two million, unity in mere opinion is not a miracle but an impossibility".

ETERNAL LIFE THROUGH BELIEF. 85
Yet millions upon millions passionately sing : " All hail the power of Jesus'
name ", and that shows they are cordially united in the opinions that He is
Lord, and that sinners should " crown Him Lord of all ". When Mr. Parker
adds: "Opinion is necessarily and happily changeable", his confusion
arises from spelling opinion with a capital O ; for we must ask, What opinion ?
The opinion that there is a holy God, that man is a sinner, and that they
must be reconciled to abide in peace together, are necessarily and happily
unchangeable among Christians.
On the occasion referred to, President Eliot said : " Opinions and
beliefs vary more and more, as knowledge advances and freedom grows ".
Nay, nay; for who was it who bade us "disciple all nations"? When He
ascended on high and gave gifts unto men, why did He give "some to be
apostles, and prophets, and evangelists, and pastors, and teachers " ?
Was it not ' ' for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the
edifying of the body of Christ, until we all come into the unity of the faith,
and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the
measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ ? "
7. To insist on belief as the condition of eternal life is the only way to
produce strong characters, men of power in promoting the Kingdom of
God. It has been a favorite plea of some that one cannot justly be required
to believe any definite system of truth, because nothing of that kind is
attainable. Christianity is casting aside its old forms, which, though false,
were useful once, and putting on what is true to us now, but must in time be
cast aside hereafter, for Christianity has no system of doctrine and never
can have. Thus Stopford Brooke, in his volume on Christ in Modern Life,
says: "Christ's religion never can be made into a system'', and he remarks
of his faith, "it holds all opinions and theories slightly, being ready to sur
render them for higher truth "- But a religious teacher who comes to his
hearers saying : "As at present advised the case is thus and so, but I am
pursuing my investigations, and I will keep you informed of my researches
and of my doubts as well," is like a man standing on the quivering crust of
a bog, shifting his footing all the time. He is in no condition to lift any
thing, or to strike an earnest blow, or to do anything but sink in the mire
and drag others down with him. Forty-eight years ago, here in Brown
University, Professor Lincoln gave me as my theme for a college oration,
"Faith an Element of Eloquence", and he held up before me as a type of
the men of power in all history the great apostle who said : " We beheve
and therefore speak ". The Saviour prayed : " Sanctify them through Thy
truth. Thy word is truth" (John 17: 17), and the men who have made the
world better have been men who have held the truth, and taught the truth
as that on which the eternal life of the soul depends.
8. To insist on religious belief as a condition of eternal life greatly
enhances our view of the importance of a full and clear presentation of the
truth, and thus points out the chief difference between Christianity and the
ethnic religions, a distinction wherein lies its superior power.
Max Miiller, in his study of comparative religions, reaches the conclu
sion that there is some good in all religions, enough to save a man, if he

86 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
will follow the best light he has. These religions may lead men to repent,
but none of them show how God can safely forgive them if they repent.
That, the Christian religion alone reveals, and in that " piece of informa
tion " is the hiding of its power. " Christ, Christ crucified, is the wisdom
and power of God" (i Cor. 1:23, 24). Mr. Gladstone described the
Christian religion as consisting not only of certain sacraments enshrining
its leading and distinctive facts, and of a peculiar and superior system of
morals, but also of a body of doctrine, whose center is the person and work
of Christ. It is the lack of these characteristic truths of redemption which
explains the comparative powerlessness of all other religions. Wendell
Phillips said, " The answer to Confucianism is China, to Buddhism is India,
to Mohammedanism is Turkey ". Christianity is supplanting all other relig
ions precisely because it alone is continually crying to all : " Behold the
Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world " (John i : 29).
Allow me a personal allusion as I close. At family worship yesterday
morning Mrs. Plumb reminded me that on the tenth of November, just
forty-five years ago yesterday, I was ordained to the Christian ministry, and
she accepted the position she has since held to my great satisfaction as my
helper in my work. It was a precious recollection, and it recalled the fact
that it was the voice of a Providence pastor, the saintly and sainted Dr.
Leonard Swain, of the Central Church here, which then gave me the solemn
charge to be faithful to my high calling. As we reviewed the past, it
seemed to us that the one thing which has grown most upon our thoughts is
the greatness of the love of Him who said : " He that believeth on the Son
hath everlasting life " (John 3 : 36).
I was at a ministerial gathering lately where a prominent clergyman, in
reading a paper, quoted a passage from the Gospel of John, and paused to
say he was aware that this Gospel is not considered authentic, but in
this case John agrees with the other Gospels, and so he ventured to quote
him. Think of it ! Apologizing for quoting from this Gospel, which has
been called the heart of Christ ! Such is not the spirit of this Conference.
I sometimes ask the children in the Sunday School who is the happiest
man in the Bible ? They know who is the strongest, the meekest, the
oldest man. Can there be any question that the beloved disciple, who
knew more of the heart of Christ than anyone else, who reclined at the last
supper on the bosom of his Lord, was the most favored, the happiest man
that ever breathed ? And yet he said : " Greater joy have I none than
this, to hear of my children walking in the truth " (3 John v. 4). In that
joy, you, beloved brethren of this Conference, who have been here engaged
in exalting the teaching of this holy apostle, will be permitted, through the
happy results of your labors, to share. For these Conferences will assuredly
result in securing in not a few cases, the object for which the apostle de
clares the Gospel was written. "And many other signs truly did Jesus
which are not written in this book, but these are written that ye might be
lieve that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might
have life through His name " (John 20 : 30, 31).

* THE OPTIMISM OF JESUS.
(St. John 4 : 1-42.)
by rev. erank j. good^vin,
Pastor of the Pawtucket Congregational Church, Pawtucket, R. I.
The fourth chapter of St. John reveals, as do few chapters of the New
Testament, the optimism of Jesus. This optimism manifests itself in Christ
as a soul winner, as a practical worker, and as a teacher.
I. The Optimism of Christ as a soul winner. Christ chose on two
occasions a Samaritan to teach His greatest lessons ; it was a Samaritan in
the parable of true humanity which He selected to illustrate the spirit of
brotherhood which the Jewish priest and Levite failed to express ; it was to
a Samaritan woman, a heretic in religion, a profligate in life, the most un
promising person possible to receive His message, that Christ promised the
water of eternal life which should spring up forever in the soul. He came
to be the Saviour of the world and He guaranteed to save to the uttermost.
He came to call not the strong, the spiritually acute, the morally blameless,
but the weak, the spiritually blind, the publican, the sinner and the outcast.
He did not flinch at the hardest problem ; serene and hopeful. He brought
the blessings of His truth to the most lowly and the most sinful. His
optimism was apparent in His belief that every man, however spiritually
impoverished, could hzNe and should ha.\e a religious experience, a personal
appreciation and appropriation of the Gospel of the blessed God. Christ
did not come to found a religion ; the world was filled with religions, some
dark and full of error, some bright and glistening with truth. Christ came
to bring religious life to men. He was the last and greatest of the prophets
of Israel who stood for justice, mercy, and the humble walk with God, in
distinction from external obedience to forms and ceremonies, and the
observance of fasts and feasts. Christianity is pure democracy. It assumes
that men can and will, if properly inspired and instructed, bring their liveS'
under the sway of religious ideals, laws, beatitudes. We sometimes ask
the question whether political democracy is a failure, whether the history of
republics bears out the expectations of great commoners that man is adapted
to self-government. The optimist in politics is compelled to assert his
faith in the face of many ugly facts which testify to man's indifference to
his political rights and neglect of his civic duties. " How long will the
American Union last? "said Guizot to James Russell Lowell. "It will
exist", was the reply, "so long as the men of America hold to the funda
mental principles of their fathers ". That is all that the patriot can say
and forthwith he proceeds to lift up his voice and proclaim with new vigor
the fundamental principles of liberty which are public rights, and indi-

* Delivered at the Second Conference, held at the Mathewson Street Methodist Episcopal Church,
November ii, 1903. 87

88 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
vidual responsibility. Formal religion, priestcraft, superstitious fear, and
pagan rites, baptized and called Christian, in every age of the church have
summoned men away from the supreme truth of the New Testament, that
man was made for God, and can appropriate God by penitence, faith, and
obedience ; in a word, that personal religion is every man's right and every
man's duty. If the woman of Samaria could understand Christ's message,
feel its power in her conscience, respond to it with loyal enthusiasm in her
heart, then anyone can grasp the Gospel and take its healing message to his
soul. . The supremely spiritual nature of Christ's gospel of light is seen in the
emphasis which He puts upo-a., human testimony. His gospel is for all, even
tjie most sinful, and these can experience in their hearts eternal life. After
the experience comes testimony. " I do not want to possess a religion ",
said Charles Kingsley, " I want a religion which will possess me". The
gospel possessed the woman of Samaria, she proclaimed the glad news,
" Come, see a man which told me all things that ever I did ; is not this the
Christ?" The people listened and her words brought them to Jesus.
When they had come under the Master's influence, having felt the moving
power of His words, and the charm of His benign spirit, they exclaimed to
the woman, "Now we believe; not because of thy speaking; for we have
heard for ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Saviour of the
world " (R. v.).
This is the circle which is completed again and again in the life of the
church as Christia,n disciples become soul winners ; first the penitent at the
feet of Christ, then the witnessing disciple, then the people believing in
Jesus, each for himself accepting the truth, not on the authority of another,
but because of the witness of Christ in his own soul. What does this all
mean for the spiritual life of the church ? It is Christ's seal upon the
necessity of remembering that the Kingdom of God is to be advanced not
by the iron might of dogma, nor by the power of priestly authority, nor by
the impressiveness of an ecclesiastical organization, nor by the splendor of
an imposing worship, but the Kingdom of God is to be advanced by faith,
love and hoUness, the graces of the Spirit, wrought into finished and
beautified characters. The power of the church is not to be centered, but
scattered. The disciples are first to become illumined, then to illumine,
every man a bright and shining light, giving his light to the night, but giving
also of his flame to torches of the world which else were dark, cold, dead.
II. The Optimism of Christ as a Practical Worker. When the disciples
returned from the village they found Christ sitting alone by the well, the
woman having left Him to return to her home. As He talked with them,
across the wheat fields came the people of the city (v. 35), urged by the
eager words of the woman : " Come, see a man which told me all things that
ever I did; is not this the Christ?" From the narrative it is generally
supposed that it was in early December, four months before the harvest in
April, and hence the significance of Christ's words to His disciples, " Say
not ye, there are yet four months, and then cometh harvest ? behold, I say
unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields ; for they are white already

THE OPTIMISM OF JESUS. 89
to harvest ". The grain will not be harvested for four months, but a spirit
ual harvest is here ; the people flocking through the fields show that it is at
hand. The immediate application of these words was to the spiritual
awakening which was begun by the conversion of the Samaritan woman and
which was now shown to be full of promise for all, as the eager people
sought the new Teacher.
Appropriate as are these words to the immediate evangelization of the
Samaritans, Meyer maintains (against Godet) that reference is also made to
"all mankind whose conversion begun by Christ would be accomplished
by His disciples "- Two things stand out in this passage which are valuable,
for all time. i. There have been other sowers, the prophets, and all men
of God who have wrought for righteousness, but Christ is the great sower of
truth. Nowhere in the New Testament has the dignity of labor so perfect
an illumination as in this conception of Jesus. The carpenter at the bench
brings to the mind the Christ who entered into the common life of men, but
the imagination dwells with peculiar delight on this higher figure of the
sower, the Son of man moving down the ages scattering the precious grains
of truth which shall surely spring up in the hearts of men. 2. Christ shows
the hopeful and inspiring nature of His Gospel by putting the work of the
Christian disciple not under the figure of sowing, but as Meyer says " under
the cheerful image of harvesting ". The Old Testament in the same way
represents sowing as sorrowful, reaping as joyful; as in Isaiah 9 : 3, "They
joy before Thee according to the joy in harvest " ; and Ps. 126 : 6, " Though
He goeth on His way weeping, bearing forth the seed; He shall come
again with joy, bringing His sheaves with Him " (R. V.). Christ urges His
disciples to become reapers in the field in which the truth has been sown
and the ground prepared. The field is the heart of the world in which by
discipline, by experience, by adversity, by the rude plough-shares of sorrow,
bereavement, death, God is ever making ready for the ingathering of the
ripened grain. " And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit
unto life eternal ".
III. The Optimism of Christ as a Teacher. Never man spake like
this Man, for truly He was " the Teacher come from God ". In His teach
ing in the fourth chapter of St. John, Christ presents a universal religion
which annihilates all distinction of place and time, and levels all men in the
presence of God, with whom there is no respect of persons. The Samari
tan woman felt the searching of Christ's words as He revealed to her the
secrets of her life, unknown, she thought, to any stranger, and she readily
turned to the trite theological discussion of the relative merits of Jerusalem
and Samaria as the center of religious power and authority. " Our fathers
worshipped in this mountain ; and ye say that in Jerusalem is the place
where men ought to worship ". Jesus saith unto her, " Woman, believe Me;
the hour cometh when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye
worship the Father, but the hour cometh, and now is, when the true wor
shippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth : for such doth the
Father seek to be His worshippers. God is a spirit, and they that worship
Him must worship in spirit and truth " (R. V.).

90 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
He annihilates all distinction of time in the true Kingdom of God.
"The' hour cometh and now is" when the true worshippers shall worship
the Father. Now is always the accepted time. Truth is timeless. Duty is
always now, " now ", which Emerson calls the meeting point between two
eternities. For purposes of thought and for the practical duties of life we
distinguish epochs of time, but " you do not date holiness ", says Dr. Park-
hurst. Honor, self-sacrifice, love are not concerned with time any more
than light has weight or fragrance color. So says St. John, " He that hath
the Son hath life ", hath it now. The hour of fulness of expression of that
life will come in the future world, but the believer hath eternal life now as
really and as vitally as he will ever possess it. But Christ's words, " The
hour cometh and now is" show further the reason for His supreme confi
dence in the triumph of faith in a spiritual God. Christ was telling of the
day when, in no favored centre, but everywhere, there would be spiritual
worshippers of God, and He said, " The time cometh, and now is ". "A
new power ", says President Harris, " had been introduced, a new cause for
working, and, although the large results lay in the future, the cause, the
power, was already in the life of darkened, sinning, erring humanity. He
meant more than here and there already true worshippers could be found.
* * * A new hour strikes when the old order changeth. Before results
become visible, the far-sighted seer says that the hour cometh, that the
next century, the next generation, the next decade, will witness great
changes. But the hour cometh because it now is. He foresees because he
sees. The seer is he who sees. Foresight of the future is insight of the
present". The optimism of Christ as a teacher is s"een further and chiefly in His
teaching on the nature of man. This concerns His doctrine of sin and the
grace of God. I know of no finer analysis of the Gospel of Christ in its
bearing on these two cardinal truths of Christianity than is given by
Auguste Sabatier in his " Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion ". He
says : " Christ did not construct a theory of man, of his moral life, any more
than He constructed a theory with respect to God and the universe. He
was content to place Himself at the centre of the human consciousness, and
to dig down to the source of life. He takes man as he is in all climates and
in all conditions. He does not declare him to be radically impotent for
good, but neither does He flatter him by veiling his natural misery. He
knows him to be ardent and feeble, full of needs and of illusions, capable
of conversion, subject to passions, the victim of all slaveries. He treats him
as diseased, which is the truth, and He does not think He can make him
find the principle of serious cure save in the very sense of his malady "-
" He does not blunt the edge of the moral law but sharpens it ". " He infin
itely enhances the demands of the traditional ideal ; from tlie outward act
He descends to the inward feeling — He tells His disciples to love their
enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, to answer violence by gen
tleness, injuries by love. This morality would easily become ascetic and
appear impossible if it were not blended with an opposite element which
renders it human and fruitful without either lowering or destroying it.

THE OPTIMISM OF JESUS. 91
That element is mercy and forgiveness : it is pure, unconditional grace
which in misery makes room for hope, and in repentance opens the door to
faith and to the work of faith. These two elements, inexorable law and
unconditional grace, are so intimately blended in the Gospel of Christ
that the Gospel only subsists in its originality and with its power by their
perfect fusion and reciprocal and constant action ".
These glowing words reveal the true optimism of Christ regarding
human nature and human destiny. That which makes an eminent physician
is his skill in diagnosis. It avails nothing that modern science has discov
ered medicines and principles of treatment to arrest disease, if the particular
malady challenging attention be not recognized. Jeremiah describes the
criminal complacency of the prophets, priests, and leaders of his day, who
" have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying
peace, peace; when there is no peace". The hurt was "the shortcomings
and sins of the nation", and the leaders were "like worthless surgeons.
They refuse to examine or probe the wounds of those who are under their
charge, and for the sake of their own ease, assure their patients that all is
well". False optimism which minimizes the danger and malignity of sin is
cowardly as well as indifferent, dreading a deep probe and a seaching
analysis, forgetting that true optimism is not in the diagnosis but in the
remedy. The diagnosis should be merciless, frigidly scientific ; the remedy
should be benign as the love of God, mandatory as hope founded on the
divine compassion. It is false kindness and gross negligence to say
"health, health", when there is no health, but fatal -disease. The worst
must be known that the best may be applied. So with sin. The greatness
of Christ is shown in His friendly wounds, in the end far more grateful than
the kisses of an enemy. Nothing that needs to be told is kept back by this
frank benefactor of the human race. The probe of righteousness precedes
the balm of Gilead. Sinai is the background of Calvary. Abounding in
messages of the love of God, divine forgiveness, the glory of spiritual union
with the Father, and the hope of immortality, the teaching of Christ holds
up the soul of man before the mirror of the perfect law of liberty, that we
may behold it in the bondage of sin, and be filled with a passionate desire
for that true "liberty wherewith Christ. has made us free ".
The world does not want its hurt of sin handled lightly. Horace
Bushnell used to say that the dignity of man is seen in its ruins. Large
phrases about the soul of man must not hide from us the fact which all
literature, history, and experience attest, that sin has weakened our spiritual
powers and sullied our spiritual fame. Unless there be something to be
delivered from, there can be no Christ the Redeemer; if there be no sin,
there can be no salvation from sin. It is a great thing to dream dreams ;
it is a greater thing to see visions. Dreams are of the darkness ; visions
are, like Shelley's poet, " Hidden in the light of thought ". We may dream,
if we will, of the final triumph of right, yet, when we awake, tne unsubstan
tial stuff of which our dreams are made is painfully evident ; but one keen,
quick vision of the malignity of sin, and an equally clear perception of the
re-creating mercy of God, is a pledge of present and future victory.

92 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
There are two streams in every man's life says Dr. Matheson : The
stream of heredity and the stream of grace. Personal sins bring us shame,
defeat, the sorrow of remorse ; for these we are responsible. But besides
these we feel in our hearts the downward pull of the race's transgressions
and moral failures. Whatever may be our personal views of the original
holiness of man, this we must all affirm, with Dr. Matheson, that the stream
of grace is older than the stream of heredity. God's mercy is from everlast
ing to everlasting, and "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the
world" is "the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world". In the
message which Christ brought to a poor, broken, outcast woman in Samaria,
He gave to all mankind the promise of eternal life ; a new heaven of ideals
of hope, faith and peace ; a new earth of conduct, of righteousness, love and
joy.

* THE SOURCE OF JESUS' STRENGTH.
(St. John 4 : 34.)
tBY REV. -WILI^rS B. ODEI^I^, I). D.,
Pastor of Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church of New York.
History tells us of a distinguished general who conducted a great army
through a desolate and hostile country with much enthusiasm to a remark
able triumph. The secret of his success lay in his own resolute and genial
personality. His soldiers, worn and footsore, were but scantily supplied
with food. The heat of the sun was dreadfully oppressive. Day by day
the ranks thinned out as climate and privation wrought their natural results.
But in spite of all discouragements the gallant hosts pressed on. The
explanation was to be found in the conduct of the leader. Foregoing the
privileges of rank he dismounted and put himself at the head of the column,
sharing with the common soldier the fatigue and hardship of the march.
He ate the same food and slept with them shelterless under the open skies.
The effect of his presence and example was most exhilarating. The army
would have followed him anywhere, even to the gates of death.
On a certain occasion Jesus, addressing His disciples, said: "I have
given you an example that ye should do, as I have done to you". In his
first epistle to the churches, Peter takes up the same idea and declares that
Christ has left us an example that we should follow His steps. In many
places in Scripture a similar notion is set forth with great distinctness.
There is no more manifest teaching of the New Testament than that the
disciple is to endeavor to be like his Master.
One of the most popular religious books of the ages is " The Imitation
of Christ ", by Thomas a Kempis. Written as it was by a mediasval monk,
it is nevertheless loved and prized by all communions of Christians. The
very title challenges attention and commends it. The great example is
presented as a model whose virtues are to be copied. What Christ did. His
followers are to do. Dr. Stalker is the author of another volume with wider
scope but built upon the same idea, under the name " Imago Christi ".
It describes the Master as He appeared in His human relations, in the home,
the state, the church, society, and as He conducted Himseff as a teacher, a
man of feeling, a student, a philanthropist, a winner of souls. Here also
Christ is a model. Dr. Sheldon in his well known work " In His Steps ",
discusses the question "What Would Jesus Do?" and endeavors to point
out the path of duty on the basis of an obligation to imitate the great
example. All these volumes are exceedingly valuable because they enforce
the g^eat truth that in the Master there is an ideal for all disciples.

?Delivered at the Second Conference, held at the Mathewson Street Methodist Episcopal Church,
November ii, 1903.
t Now Pastor of the First Methodist Episcopal Church, Germantown, Philadelphia, Penn.
93

94 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
The incident brought to our attention by the passage selected by your
committee for our consideration at this hour is very suggestive. The scene
is laid at a familiar point. Jesus is seated on the curbing of Jacob's well.
He had just come on a long and dusty journey from Jerusalem. It was the
sixth hour of the day. The disciples had gone to the neighboring Sychar
to purchase food. The Master had remained behind to rest. Thus seated
and waiting, a woman from the town approached Him. He entered into
conversation with her and gradually led the way to the proclamation of
important truths. He laid before her a great privilege and aroused keen
interest in His offers. She came to see herself in a new light and was
surprised and disturbed. While He talked with her the disciples returned
with a plentiful supply of edibles. They were amazed to find Him in
conversation with a woman. When she left they spread out the food they
had procured and invited Him to eat. To their astonishment He replied,
"I have meat to eat that ye know not of". This still further amazed them.
What could He mean ? Had any man brought Him ought ? To their puzzled
inquiry He answered, "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me".
The theme on which I am announced to speak is " The Source of Jesus'
Strength ". The idea embodied in the Scripture selected finds an appro
priate putting in this statement. The committee who formulated it have
brought the teaching of the passage before us into clear light. Jesus was
possessed of notable strength and in the words just quoted He revealed the
secret of it.
It will be readily agreed that the strength referred to in theme and
Scripture is not of the muscular sort. The word as here employed does
not stand for brawn, or physical virility. There are no reasons for thinking
that Jesus was particularly distinguished in these directions. His bodily
resources were probably only of the average kind. We know He was not
a weakling, for He endured many hardships with patience and sustained
vigor. But He was not an athlete. He did not attract attention on account
of physical prowess. His distinguishing ability lay in another realm.
Of course strength of any kind is valuable. It is an asset worth pos
sessing. It is stock in trade. It is a bank account. One can always turn
it to advantage. But there are varieties of strength. That is to say, one
may be strong in several directions. The strength contemplated in the
theme and provided for in the text is that which is characteristic of the
soul. By it one faces peril, bears burdens and endures hardships with
great readiness and without flinching. In this realm Jesus was very strong.
Of His soul we may say it was gigantic in its proportions. He was a veritable
athlete when it came to facing temptations and attempting tasks requiring
courage and resolution.
How did He come to the possession of such ability ? By what means
did He develop that strength for which He was so distinguished ? It is a
practical inquiry, for upon it turn some very important lessons.
It should be remembered that strength everywhere depends on nourish
ment. Full measure of strength calls for adequate nourishment. Without

THE SOURCE OF JESUS' STRENGTH. 95
food all physical powers presently decay. Life indeed is dependent upon
it. Physical vigor is everywhere maintained by entirely natural processes.
Properly enough, therefore, the scientist gives attention to the kind of
food best fitted to produce certain results. It is well known that nitrogen
ous foods are good for burden bearers, because they minister to muscular
power. Carbonates are necessary for those who are exposed to rigorous
weather, because they develop heat. Phosphates are useful for brain work
ers, because they build up nervous energy. When, therefore, one knows
what he wants to do, he can easily determine what kind of supplies are
necessary for him.
Jesus knew what He wanted, and He also knew how to get it. He saw
that the special tasks to which He was called would put particular strain
upon the spiritual nature and that, therefore. He must have nourishment for
soul. Accordingly, He selected the food which would contribute to the
desired result. What was this food ? Let us see.
" My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me ". There are no mys
teries in this passage It is a very simple statement, and its meaning is
readily grasped. Obedience is clearly the thing to which reference is
made. This is the food— the meat on which He fed. It will be remembered
that when He was a boy He said, in explanation of His conduct in the
temple, " Wist ye not that I must be about My Father's business? " The
temper and purpose He then displayed were characteristic. On the basis of
His established habits He could truly say, " I do always the things that please
Him ". That was the perpetual attitude He assumed toward the divine will.
In the model prayer which He taught His disciples to say occur the words,
" Thy kingdom come ; Thy will be done ". It was in this spirit that He met
all duties and performed all services. He was entirely submissive to the
Father's will. And so at Gethsemane, when the clouds shut down about
Him and He was face to face with the awful test. He said, " Not as I will, but
as Thou wilt ". It is not surprising, in view of this complete subjection to
the wishes of the One who sent Him, that the voice from heaven declared,
" This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased ".
Now, what were the psychological processes by which this sort of
nourishment was transformed into spiritual vigor. The question is an
important one ; but it will not be difficult to find a satisfactory answer.
The route is short and can be easily followed.
The obedience of Jesus was complete. He was absolutely committed
to the service of His Father. The thoroughness of His consecration
brought Him into entire harmony with God. There was no sense of
estrangement or antagonism. He had no will other than the divine will,
or, rather, He willed that His will should be completely surrendered to the
divine will.
Of necessity there resulted a feeling of unity. He was sure that He
was acting in accord with the divine purposes. He was contributing
directly to the accomplishment of the divine program. There was no waste
of energy because no false move. He was doing precisely what the over
ruling Power in the universe desired Him to do.

96 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
His faith in the wisdom of this Power lifted Him into an atmosphere of
hope. Ultimate success must come. The divine plans, founded in wis
dom, must be crowned with triumph. There could not be any permanent
failure, for Omnipotence and Omniscience formed a combination which
rendered defeat impossible. Naturally enough His soul caught the
enthusiasm of a great ideal. A consummation devoutly to be desired was
sure to be accomplished. The vision filled and thrilled Him with delight.
The satisfaction imparted by the prospect not only delighted Him, it
exhilarated and stimulated Him. There was refreshment and invigoration
of spirit in the outlook. The old prophet said: "The joy of the Lord is
your strength ". This came to be literally true in the experience of Jesus.
In His soul there was a sweet and restful confidence which enabled Him to
rejoice in the presence of all tasks. The gladness of His heart infused
vigor into every fibre of His being. There was genuine tonic in the view
presented to His awakened intelligence. However difficult might be the
undertaking, and however long delayed the result. He should yet see of the
travail of His soul and be satisfied.
It was some such an experience as this which came to Him as He sat
on the famous well and opened to the quickened conscience of the woman
from Sychar the great truths of the Gospel. He had made known to her the
true character of God as a spirit, to whom spiritual worship alone was
acceptable. He had announced in distinct terms the fact of His Messiah-
ship. In fulfillment of His commission to proclaim the abounding g^ace of
heaven He had set before her the opportunity of partaking of that ministry
which should be in her a well of water springing up unto everlasting life.
He caught the fire of an eager longing for the immediate salvation of an
aroused soul and His whole nature was lifted up. The weariness of the
flesh was quite forgotten in the stimulation of spirit.
In all this it should be noticed that there was absolutely nothing
miraculous ; nothing even marvelous ; nothing, indeed, really surprising.
The process was a wholly natural one. It is entirely within the bounds of
reason to say that Christ simply illustrated in this instance, as indeed in
many others, the possibilities of all men. He showed what any person
might experience who would be willing to meet the conditions. He revealed
the secret of spiritual power. What He did, anyone could do. As He devel
oped strength by obedience, so any person who would pay the price might
reach a similar result. The invigoration which came to Him was precisely
like that which will come to any one who will yield himself completely to the
divine control.
Examples of eager enthusiasm, springing out of obedient service, are
many and inspiring in the history of the centuries. Sturdy souls have not
been wanting who have followed in the footsteps of the Master and have
come as He did to great strength.
Foremost among the apostles stands that grand apostle to the Gentiles.
He was betrayed by false brethren ; he was entrapped by evil men ; he was
the victim of many ills ; he was persecuted often by those of his own nation ;

THE SOURCE OF JESUS' STRENGTH. 97
but none of these things moved Him. "Whose I am and whom I serve"
was the working motto of His life. He was obedient to the divine will and
found stimulation in it.
In great weariness of body the saintly Chrysostom resolutely faced the
deprivations and miseries of banishment. He could not be bought by royal
favor nor frightened by royal threats. Absolutely loyal to conscience he
was strong with the strength which comes from a consciousness of service
faithfully performed. To the last his soul was cheerful and contented.
Xavier was moved by a burning passion for the unsaved. Though a
Roman Catholic, he earnestly sought the good of souls. He was wholly
given to the task of proclaiming the Gospel and leading men to accept it.
After having traveled through many kingdoms and baptized thousands of
people, as it is reported, He still cried, " Yet more, O my God ! yet more ! "
"The joy of the Lord was his strength ". He found in the delight of service
invigoration for continued toil.
David Livingstone exhibited a similar indifference to hardship. After
long journeyings, Stanley found him in the centre of Africa and presented
to him an appeal and an opportunity to return to civilization. But the old
hero was unmoved. What cared he for the applause of men r On his soul
were the needs of suffering millions. He would stay where he was rather
than desert the field of duty. On his last birthday he wrote : " My Jesus,
my king, my life, my all, I again dedicate my whole self to Thee ". No
wonder with such delight in the Lord he found abundant strength for labor.
That old hero John G. Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides, closed
a recent volume with these words : "Oh, that I had my life to begin again 1
I would consecrate it anew to Jesus in seeking the conversion of the remain
ing cannibals of the New Hebrides ". In labors abundant, in perils multi
tudinous, with courage unflinching, this man of one purpose held steadily to
his chosen task through many stormy years. But during it all there was
rare cheerfulness, springing out of gladsome obedience to the Father's will.
As in all the past, the Christian life today calls for great vigor. The
apostolic exhortation was : " Be strong in the Lord and in the power of His
might ". Such an appeal is now in order. Strength is an indispensable
requisite for those who would acquit themselves like true soldiers of Jesus
Christ. But how may one become strong? By what means may the necessary
vigor be developed? In the experience of Jesus there is a sufficient answer.
If men will do as He did, they may develop all the strength they need.
Assent to a creed is not enough. Conformity to the outward require
ments of the church will not secure salvation. Something more is demanded.
If Christian life is built simply on profession, when the great crises come
disaster will be sure to follow. There must be a zeal born of deep convic
tion and enthusiasm nourished by service, if great victories are to be secured.
Not those who cry " Lord, Lord ! " but those who " do His will " are
promised divine favor. The voice of revelation distinctly declares :
" Blessed arethey who do His commandments". Only such have a prospect

98 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
of entering through the gates into the city. It was the ringing counsel of
the practical James — advice preeminently suited to these modern times —
" Be ye doers of the Word and not hearers only ".
Are there any enrolled in the army of the Lord today who are unfit for
service on the firing line ? Indeed, are there not many who are better fitted
for the hospital than for any kind of active engagement? There are many
weaklings in the church today. They have no strength and can never be
relied upon in an emergency. They are a burden on evangelism and a
hindrance to the progress of the kingdom.
What the world needs most at this hour is not harnessed Niagaras,
steel railways belting the sides of continents, ship canals uniting oceans, but
men and women of tense moral fibre, who can stand unmoved in the pres
ence of corruption, face the raging of evil men undisturbed, tower aloft
like angels above the pigmies who crouch at their feet, and with invincible
will and dauntless daring help to hasten the day when Christ's dominion
shall become universal.
Let me venture an exhortation. Let us enthrone the will of God in our
hearts. Let us make Jesus the model of our conduct. Let us with enthusi
asm imitate the glorious example He set.
Says Stalker in his " Imago Christi ": " The imitation of Christ 1
The very sound of this phrase goes to the heart of every Christian and sets
innumerable things moving and yearning in the soul. There is a summons
in it like a ravishing voice calling us to sunny heights. It is the sum of all
which in our best moments and in Our deepest hearts we desire ".
We have not made enough of this. ' We have been slow to appreciate
its value. We have been placing so much emphasis upon the meaning of
Christ's sacrifice that we have forgotten the significance of His example.
Of course He died to redeem us. This we must always remember.
We will not cease to exalt the cross. In the presence of that unparalleled
love, which led to His self-surrender to the cruel agony of Calvary that He
might secure deliverance for man from the guilt of sin, we must forever
kindle ardent affection.
But while we keep the atonement perpetually in view, as the measure of
divine love for us, let us also keep the life of the Master before us as the
ideal of conduct. Let us remember that He lived to show men how to live.
Let us take Him as our example, and let us ceaselessly endeavor to imitate
His virtues.

*THE GOSPEL OF JOHN IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
OF THE CHURCHES.
by rev. henry m. king, x). x).,
Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Providence.
This important topic will be best presented, if we consider the avowed
purpose of the Gospel ; the fitness of the author to carry it out ; the manner
in which he has done it ; and the success which he has achieved. As some
of the topics discussed in these Conferences are special and have to do with
particular passages, while others are general and have to do with the scope
and purpose of the entire Gospel, it is inevitable that there will be instances
of repetition and it is quite possible that there may be honest differences cf
opinion in interpretation.
Professor Cremer, in his able " Reply to Harnack on the Essence of
Christianity ", defines his view of the purpose of the Fourth Gospel in the
following words : " The Johannean Gospel is intended for the congregation
of believers who already know and follow Christ, and is meant to strengthen,
confirm and enrich them, and to develop their faith more fully. The
synoptic Gospels, on the other hand, give us that record of Jesus' career
and history as it was again and again reported in connection with the
missionary preaching, and as it very soon took, as to the main parts, a
relatively fixed form. Matthew gives the apology of Jesus' Messiahship
over against Judaism ; Luke a record of the history of Jesus, and the preach
ing of the Gospel set down for the enlightenment of a prominent heathen
interested in Christianity ; while Mark has put together what he heard again
and again in the missionary preaching. We may thus understand how it is
that we meet a difference between the Johannean account and that of the
synoptists, which is similar to the difference that appears between the apos
tolic account and tjiat of Christ Himself ".
In other words, John's Gospel contains the unfolding by Christ of
Himself, His person and mission, to those who had become His disciples,
and were to some extent prepared to welcome and apprehend, and be
enriched by the deeper spiritual truths of His kingdom.
. The purpose of this latest, maturest, richest of the four Gospels has
been variously conceived by different writers. There is a tradition that
John was requested by his fellow Christians to prepare a Gospel with a view
to counteract the influence of certain heretical views of the nature of Christ
which were prevalent near the close of the first century; and that before
consenting he asked them to spend with him three days in fasting and
prayer that he might ascertain the Lord's will in a matter so serious and

* Delivered at the Second Conference, held at the Mathewson Street Methodist Episcopal Church,
November ii, 1903. 99

100 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
sacred. Jerome seems to have accepted the tradition as founded on fact,
for he says that " John last of all wrote a Gospel when asked to do so by
the bishops of Asia, against Cerinthus and other heretics, and especially
against the rising dogma of the Ebionites, who asserted that Christ did not
exist before Mary ".
It looks sometimes as if the writer of this Gospel was seeking to meet
objections, and to convince heretics, and was well acquainted with the
philosophic thought of that philosophical age. He could not have been
Ignorant of Philo and his teachings of the Logos — that Jewish philosopher
of Alexandria who died within ten years after the crucifixion of Christ, and
who endeavored to harmonize the Mosaic religion with Platonism. It was
the " higher criticism " of that day, an attempt to reduce revelation to a
philosophic basis by the hypothesis of a Logos, personal or impersonal,
Philo seemed to be uncertain which, the embodiment of all divine power
and wisdom — a doctrine which was the fruitful germ of all the gnostic spec
ulations and heresies of the second and third centuries. But John, guided
by the divine Spirit (for no humble fisherman unaided could have attained
unto it), declared Christ to be the true, living, personal Logos, possessor of
creative power and infinite wisdom, God and Saviour in one person, God
manifest in the flesh. The word " Logos " in its religio-philosophic use was
like " the altar to the unknown God " at Athens. John seized the word and
the opportunity it afforded, and in applying it to Christ gave to it a larger
and truer interpretation, a diviner fulness and richness of meaning, vir
tually saying, " Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship. Him declare I
unto you ". In thought, he went back to the story of creation, " In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth '', and in similar language
opened his story of redemption, " In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God ". He gathered up all that
was true in revelation and all that was highest and best in philosophy, and
centered it in Christ, the Son of God, the Divine Logos. (An extract from
" Our Gospels ", pp. 80, 81, by Henry M. King.)
Other writers hold the view that John's Gospel was. intended to be sup
plementary to the other Gospels, to supply the deficiencies of the first three,
especially in reference to the ministry of Christ in Judea, and the remark
able events which took place during its one year, possibly two years' dura
tion, and the memorable discourses which do not appear in the synoptical
Gospels, but form so large and unspeakably valuable a part of John's mes
sage, especially the farewell discourses in the fourteenth, fifteenth and six
teenth chapters. It is impossible to believe with Alford, that none of the
other Gospels had ever been seen by John. They had been written for
thirty or forty years prior to John's Gospel, and undoubtedly had been
numerously transcribed, and widely circulated, and highly prized by the
Christian communities. Ephesus was a great center of Christian life and
activity, and it is incredible that the sacred writings of the deceased evan
gelists, on which the churches had come to rely for their knowledge of
Christ and the events of His life, should not have found their way to this

IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE CHURCHES. loi
populous city of Asia Minor, where Christianity had been planted at an
early date, and which had been " a conspicuous scene of apostolic labors ".
The character of John's Gospel gives abundant evidence that he was
familiar with the contents of these earlier writings. The things which he
omits, which he must have known and remembered by reason of his con
stant fellowship and close intimacy with Christ, and the things which he
narrates, are equally conclusive on this point. He carefully avoids travers
ing the ground which the other Gospels had gone over. He omits all of
Christ's parables, and gives only one miracle in common with the other
biographers, while he records four new ones, viz. : the turning of water into
wine, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, and the healing of the impo*
tent man and of the one born blind. The synoptists limit their story
almost entirely to the Galilean ministry, while John's Gospel is largely
devoted to the life and teachings of Christ in Judea.
This view was held by Eusebius. He said, "For these reasons the
Apostle John, it is said, being entreated to undertake it, wrote the account
of the time not recorded by the former evangeHsts * * * giving the
deeds of Jesus before the Baptist was cast into prison. * * * It is
probable, therefore, that John passed by in silence the genealogy of our
Lord because it was written by Matthew and Luke, but commenced with
the doctrine of the divinity as a part reserved for him by the divine Spirit,
as if for a superior ".
If John had intended to supply the deficiencies of his predecessors in
biographical detail, he could not have been more successful.
But the purpose and supplementary character of John's Gospel have a
deeper meaning still. It was not written s'lmply to correct errors which
were becoming prevalent, honorable as such a motive would have been.
Nor was it written and sent abroad primarily to furnish additional bio
graphical material, which had been omitted by the synoptists. As another
has said, " It was not a mere patchwork to fill up vacant spaces ". Its sup
plementary character is seen especially in the kind of material which its rich
chapters have preserved for Christ's followers of all the ages. Its definite
purpose, its supreme purpose, is generally believed to have been declared
by the author himself, near the end of the Gospel, "And many other signs
truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this
book; but these are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through His name "
(20:30, 31).
The confirmation of faith in the Messiah as the Son of God, the deepen
ing, the developing, the enriching of the life of the disciples of Christ, and
so of the churches of Christ, may be said to have been the aim consciously
and constantly present in the mind of John in the selection of his material.
It was preeminently a spiritual Gospel. It is no disparagement of the other
Gospels to say that they have to do largely, I say largely, with the outward
manifestation of Jesus, His genealogy. His birth. His boyhood. His outward
associations, the events of His life, His displays of miraculous power, that

I02 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
which was visible and made its appeal to the senses, all of which was
necessary to give to the world a real, living, historic portrait of our Lord.
But something more was required for the deeper interpretation of His
nature and spirit and mission. Clement of Alexandria said: "John, last,
perceiving that the bodily things had been made manifest in the Gospels,
being also encouraged by his intimate friends, and moved by the Spirit of
God, made a spiritual Gospel".
That John was especially fitted for this service no one can doubt. His
natural characteristics, his special intimacy with his Master, that about
him that caused Christ to draw him into the inner circle of His friendships,
to His very bosom at the farewell supper, and that made him forever known
as " the disciple whom Jesus loved ", and also his now mature and ripe
experience and long instruction through many years by the Spirit, who was
promised to lead receptive minds into all the truth, and his ever deepening
insight into the profoundest truths of revelation, all these things qualified
John in a preeminent degree for the preparation of that treatise which should
round out to a divine completeness the canon of inspiration, and made him
" the greatest, as he was the last of the spiritual teachers of the Church "
Had the Gospel of John been written forty years earlier, its form undoubt
edly would have been different. It was the production of the Spirit of God
working through a mind which had had a rich, full experience of divine
truth, and an ever growing and strengthening apprehension of the person
of Christ as well as of that life of God, that true and eternal life, which
faith in Christ generates in the heart of the believer.
Alford has drawn the following striking contrast between the work of
the two great apostles, Paul and John, while unfolding the true aim of the
latter: "The great apostle of the Gentiles, amidst fightings without and
fears within, built in his argumentative Epistles the outworks of that temple
of which his still greater colleague and successor was chosen noiselessly to
complete, in his peaceful old age, the inner and holier places ; and this after
all, ranging under it all secondary aims, we must call the great object of
the evangelist — to advance, purify from error and strengthen that matured
Christian life of knowledge, which is the true development of the teaching
of the Spirit in men, and which the latter part of the apostolic period wit
nessed in its full vitality ".
The supplementary character, the superior value, the crowning place
and service of the Gospel of John have been recognized by the friends and
foes of Christianity alike. This Gospel has called forth the fiercest assaults
of unbelievers who have looked upon it as the very citadel of the Christian
faith, whose capture would mean the overthrow of supernatural religion.
On the other hand it has made its appeal successfully to the intelligent
faith of multitudes of devout scholars, and has found its confirmation in the
deepening spiritual life of the Church to which it has ministered as from a
fresh and inexhaustible reservoir. Augustine says : " In the four Gospels,
or rather in the four books of the one Gospel, the apostle St. John, not
undeservedly with reference to his spiritual understanding compared to an

IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE CHURCHES. 103
eagle, has lifted higher and far more sublimely than the other three his
proclamation, and in lifting it up he has wished our hearts also to be lifted ".
An old Latin hymn, referring to the eagle-character of Jbhn reads:
" Bird of God I with boundless flight
Soaring far beyond the height
Of the bard or prophet old ;
Truth fulfilled and truth to be-
Never purer mystery
Did a purer tongue unfold "
Origen says : "We may presume then to say that the Gospels are the
first fruits of all the Scriptures, and the first fruits of the Gospels is that of
John, into whose meaning no man can enter unless he has reclined upon the
bosom of Jesus ". The following is the confession of Claudius: "When I
read John, it always seems to me that I see him before me, reclining at the
last supper on the bosom of his Lord, as if his angel held the light for me,
and at certain parts would place his arm around me, and whisper something
in my ear". Luther speaks of John as " the one true, tender, main Gospel ".
Ernesti calls this Gospel " the heart of Christ". Biederman character
izes it as " the most wonderful of all religious works ". De Wette says of
its expressions : " They glow with a lustre more than earthly "- Herder
exclaims in irrepressible admiration : " It was written by the hand of an
angel". Kaufman denominates John "the Plato of the inspired circle",
Lange affirms that '¦ since Irenaeus it has remained for the sons of the
apostolic spirit, the crown of the apostolic Gospels". Tholuck declares:
" This Gospel speaks a language to which no parallel whatever is to be
found in the whole compass of literature ; such childlike simplicity, with
such contemplative profundity; such life and such deep rest; such sadness
and such severity; and above all, such a breath of love". Farrar says:
"The first three evangelists give us diverse aspects of one glorious land
scape. St. John pours over that landscape a flood of heavenly sunshine,
which seems to transfigure its very character, though every feature of the
landscape remains the same ". Again Herder says : "That little book is a still
deeper sea, in which the sun and stars are mirrored ; and if there are eternal
truths (and such there are) for the human race, they are to be found in the
Gospel of John ". Hovey says : " For, verily, beneath the tranquil surface
of this Gospel, which is filled to so great an extent with what the Lord Him
self said, are deep and fervid ocean-currents of holy life and love, which no
one can undertake to explore and describe without being made to feel the
dimness of his vision and the feebleness of his speech ". And Godet says :
" It was he who bequeathed to the world in his three works the three-fold
picture of the life in God ; in the person of Christ (the Gospel) ; in the
Christian (the Epistles) ; and in the Church (the Apocalypse). He anticipated
more perfectly than any other the festival of the eternal life ".
This wonderful, profound, mature, superior, superhuman, angehc Gospel
may be said to be, then, preeminently the Gospel of life, of fife through belief
in Christ as the Son of God, not life apart from Christ, but life through

I04 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
faith in Christ, in His revealed nature and mission and power, life through
the receiving of Christ into the soul, through personal union with Christ,
life which has its origin in Christ and its sustenance and development in
Christ, which is truly the life of Christ, which is the life of God who only
hath eternal life, life for the individual, life for the church, and life for the
world. This Gospel sets forth the divine person of Christ and the sacrificial
work of Christ more clearly and fully than is done anywhere else. It begins
with His preexistence and eternal oneness with God, and ascribes to Him
the creation of all things. It goes on to speak of Him as the Incarnate
Word, the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world, the ladder of
communication between heaven and earth, and the teacher of the new spir
itual birth, of which baptism is the beautifully appropriate symbol (an inter
pretation required by the oriental form of expression, clearly taught by the
prayer book of the Church of England, where it defines baptism as " an out
ward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace given unto us ", and
nectrssitated by the spiritual nature of the Christian religion, which is not a
mechanism to be manipulated by human hands, but a life imparted directly
by the Spirit of God, whose disciples are new-born " not of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God ").
And, further, this Gospel represents Christ as the water of life, the
promised Messiah, the quickener of the soul, the just and final judge, the
light of the world, the true manna from heaven, the author of true spiritual
freedom, the good shepherd who giveth his life for the sheep, the resurrec
tion and the life, the architect and builder of the heavenly mansions, the
adequate manifestation of the Father, the living vine, the sender of the
Holy Spirit, the rightful possessor of divine glory and sharer of it with His
disciples, the confessed King in the realm of truth, and, at the same time,
the willing victim upon the cross of error and shame ; and then it concludes,
as it began, with the confession of Thomas, " My Lord and my God " ; and
upon these great truths, and upon faith in these truths, it posits the acquisi
tion and the continuance of spiritual life in the soul of man. It unfolds
with remarkable clearness and fullness the deeper spiritual verities of the
person and the mission of the Son of God, and then says — believe these veri
ties, accept Him in whom they all centre, and you shall have life. "These
are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that believing ye might have life through His name ".
The word "life " is found more than forty times in John's Gospel, and
in most significant connections. " In Him was life and the life was the
light of men ". " God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten
Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlast
ing life ". " The water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water
springing up into everlasting life ". " Ye will not come to Me that ye might
have life ". "I am that bread of life ". " Except ye eat of the flesh of the
Son of Man, and drink His blood ", that is, except ye believe in a Saviour
crucified for you, "ye have no life in you". " I am come that they might

IN THE SPIRITUAL LIFE OF THE CHURCHES. 105
have life, and that they might have it abundantly ", not " more abundantly "
as the received version has it, for this spiritual life, which Christ came to
bring, has no existence in the unregenerate heart.
" My sheep hear My voice and they follow Me ; and I give unto them
eternal life ; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them
out of my hand ". " I am the resurrection and the life ; he that believeth in
Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live ". " I am the way and the
truth and the life ; no man cometh unto the Father but by Me ". "As the
branch cannot bear fruit of itself except it abide in the vine (and draw
every moment its life from the vine) no more can ye, except ye abide in
Me ". " This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent ". " These are written that ye
might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing
ye might have life through His name " .
These, and many other passages show us the tremendous emphasis
which John's Gospel lays upon spiritual life, its source and its suste
nance, its origin and its development, as born of faith, and kept alive by
faith, in the preexistent, divine, only-begotten, crucified, risen Son of God.
It is this that distinguishes this Gospel from the others ; that gives to it its
exalted character, its transcendent richness and its marvellous power. Its
lofty spiritual truths kindle in the soul aspirations after greater nearness to
God. Its profound spiritual philosophy deepens and purifies the currents
of life. Its sublime revelations of the Saviour, which must ever in this finite
sphere be clothed with mystery, lift us up out of the realm of sense and of
material things into a new atmosphere and introduce us to a new order of
being. " The Word was with God and was God ". " The Word was made
flesh "- " We beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten Son of the
Father, full of grace and truth ". In the light of these passages we get new
conceptions of sonship with God, its privilege and its meaning, its dignity
and its obligation, and we say with the apostle Paul, " Beholding as in a
glass the glory of the Lord we are transfigured into the same image from
glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord ".
Is there any aspect of essential, saving truth that is not clearly presented
in John's Gospel, and in some instances more clearly than in any other
inspired book ? Is there any proper motive to Christian faith and obedience
that it does not appeal to with the utmost tenderness and fidelity ? Is there
any chord of the renewed heart that it does not touch with the hand of a
Master ?
How beautifully it sets forth the simplicity of saving faith I As the bit
ten Israelite looked to the brazen serpent, so may the sin-conscious soul
look to Christ and be healed. How impressively, and for all places and
times, does it declare the spiritual nature of worship ! " God is a Spirit,
and they that worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth ". How
strikingly does it emphasize the necessity of a living and perpetual union
with Christ in order to the possession and retention of spiritual life, and the
production of spiritual fruit ! " I am the vine, ye are the branches ; he that

io6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
abideth in Me and I in Him, the same bringeth forth much fruit, for without
Me ye can do nothing''. How persuasively does it inculcate the spirit of
absolute and perpetual obedience to Christ ! " My sheep hear My voice
and they follow Me ". " If ye love Me, keep My commandments ". How
tenderly does it plead for the intimate fellowship and unbroken oneness of
all the followers of Christ ! " That they all may be one ; as Thou, Father,
art in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us ; that the world
may believe that Thou hast sent Me ". How strongly and positively it
asserts the reality and blessedness of the future life, and the eternal safety
of all who put their trust in Jesus Christ ! " In My Father's house are
many mansions ; if it were not so I would have told you (if there were no
future life, no conscious dwelling with God in peace and felicity after this
life is over, I would not have left you in ignorance), I go to prepare a
place for you ", words which we repeat for their comfort by the bedside of
the dying, and for our comfort by the open graves of our precious dead.
But why need I further enumerate? To speak of all the passages in
this wonderful Gospel that minister to the strengthening of the Christian
faith and the deepening of the life of God in the soul, would be to bring the
whole book before you, chapter by chapter, and verse by verse.
Let the ministry of today breathe constantly the atmosphere of this
Gospel, be found often in this holy of holies of revealed truth, sit long at
the feet of him who sat long at the feet of the Master, and absorbed so much
of His spirit and message, and then blank Agnosticism and lifeless Arianism,
blind Naturalism and icy Formalism will be unknown in our pulpits. Let the
churches give themselves to the diligent and prayerful study of this Fourth
Gospel, and then the fatal materialism of this materialistic age, and the
worldiness which has crept in with stealthy footsteps and with deadening
power, and the unspirituality and apathy which cripple the benevolence,
curtail the efforts and limit the influence of our churches, will be driven out
at once and forever. The Gospel of John is the divine corrective of all the
ills that affiict our modern Christianity.
Dr. Henry Van Dyke says : " With the materialism, the sensuality,
the pride of our age, Christianity stands in conflict. With the altruism, the
humanity, the sympathy of our age, Christianity must stand in loving and
wise alliance. A simpler creed and a nobler life will prepare the way for a
renaissance of religion greater and more potent than the world has known
for centuries. It seems as if we stood on the brightening border of the new
day. The watchword of its coming is the personal Gospel of Jesus Christ,
in whom we find the ideal man and the real God ".

•SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST.
JOHN.
BY REV. A-LEXANDER TklcKlENZIE, X). D.,
Pastor of the First Church, Congregational, Cambridge, Mass.
Ladies and Gentlemen :^I do not propose to discuss anything
thoroughly, but to gather up some of the peculiarities and characteristics
of this Gospel as compared with the others. The question of authorship I
do not consider. I am myself persuaded that it was written by the man
whose name it bears. There is the historical evidence which is so old that
you can get very near to the time when it was written. Then, too, there is
one thing I should think every one would feel, that it was written by an
honest man. It was not invented ; it was something that had been. A
man could not think it out any more than he could think out a sunrise and
describe it, if he had never seen one ; or a friendship, if he had never
known one. Again, it needed a man of very rare qualities. For instance,
we are all familiar with the fact that St. John never mentions himself by
name, and he never mentions the name of the mother of Jesus. He loved
to call himself the "disciple whom Jesus loved". That is the man we
think of when we speak of the authorship of this Gospel. He dealt with
the tenderest things of life, the most sacred things ; he dealt with the prin
ciples and facts of life, but if he had been nothing but a loved and loving
man, his Gospels and Epistles would hardly have been like these we have.
He was a man to be loved, it is true, but he was more than that, he was
also a son of thunder. It needed just that combination to make a man go
safely among the truths which he traversed and present the most tender
things, and yet in such a way as to commend themselves to thoughtful,
exacting rhen. While we speak of this Gospel as the Gospel of the heart, it
is also the Gospel of the head and hand ; it stands on the ground, while at
the same time it ascends into heaven. St. John is commonly spoken of as
an eagle which is able to soar to the greatest heights. But he had his nest
in a tree that was very firmly rooted in this world, and if you think of him
only in the attitude of a lover you mistake the man. Then, too, he had
special advantages in being very near to our Lord. The nearer he came to
Christ the more reason he had to love and admire Him. Most great char
acters are great because of their distance. When we come up to them they
lose some of their superb proportions. There is that old saying, which I
do not like to use, that "A man is never a hero to his valet ". I am inclined
to believe that no man is great who is not great to his valet. You have to
be great to the man who stands close to you and knows the secrets of your

* Delivered at the Second Conference, held at the Mathewson Street Methodist Episcopal Church,
Novemlwr II, 1903. 107

io8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
life before you can be considered truly great. And John, in standing thus
close to Christ, marks the greatness which increased as he came to know
Him more intimately.
Again, as my old friend. Dr. Peabody, was in the habit of saying, one
thing that bears witness that John wrote the Gospel is that it was written
by an old man. A peculiarity of the old man is that he notices small
things. In this Gospel you will find more of what we are in the habit of
calling the trivial things of life. I suppose if he was writing the account of
the feast at Cana, a young man would have said, "And there were set some
water jars there which were large ". John says there were six water pots of
stone, and that they held two or three firkins apiece. In the same way, a
young man would have treated the last miracle of our Lord at the Sea of
Galilee ; he would have said that they (the fishermen) were quite a little
distance off the land ; an old man would say " they were about 200 furlongs,
I noticed ". " There were a multitude of fish " ; " there were 153 fishes, and
they were big ones ", the old man would say. " Great " is a relative term ;
he did not mean that they were large absolutely, but compared with the fish
usually taken in the Sea of Galilee. And when this writer says there were
153, and that they were unusually large ones, you see the fisherman is
betrayed, and John was a fisherman. Such little traits as these go with the
historical evidence. The Gospel was evidently written by a man with the
characteristics of this disciple.
I do not remember having seen it anywhere, although some of you
may have seen it elsewhere, yet it is borne in upon me that there is one per
son who had a great deal to do with the writing of this Gospel whose name
is not mentioned in it, and that is the Virgin Mary, the mother of our Lord.
Now when Christ was upon the cross, apparently, as far as we can read the
story, Mary was not near, and this disciple went and brought her, and from
the cross Jesus commended His mother to this disciple, and this disciple to
the mother, and then comes that very interesting line : " and from that hour
that disciple took her to his own home." What do you suppose they did
then ? What did they talk about ? They talked about the one person in all
the world who was dearest to their hearts. They talked about what had
just taken place, and the mother heart which had enabled her to under
stand and enter into the spirit of her Son was opened before the young
man with whom she was living. In the morning and at night they talked
about Him. Now if you wished to write the biography of any great man
you would go where he lived ; you would go into the house, look at the
grounds, talk with the neighbors, try to get into what we call by the indefin
ite term the atmosphere of the man and the place. For you can not write a
man's biography unless you know the man himself, and the conditions of
his fife and thought. That is the reason most biographies are of so little
use ; they can tell when a man was born and when he died, but they do not
give you that indefinable trait which you get when you come close to the
man. And this belongs to our Lord more than any one else. It is not
alone what He did or said, but in what way He said it and for what reason.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GOSPEL. 109
We sometimes represent Him with a halo over His head, but that is a poor
thing, though it illustrates what I mean. And no one knew Him like His
mother. When you get a heart that was as responsive as John's was, and
when they could talk together for weeks, or perhaps years, her thoughts
would become his. It seems to me that all through, from the beginning to
the end, there can be traced the word, spirit, and influence of that mother
through whose soul there passes a sword when He was crucified. I was
not to speak about the authorship of the Gospel, and yet these things carry
us into the very spirit of it.
St. John's Gospel is not a book of mathematics or philosophy. It is
the story of a great human life expressed in insufficient terms, and you
never can read it unless you have something a thousand times better than a
dictionary ; you must have a heart. It is itself a heart, and it must be read
by the heart and translated by the heart. I believe that those who have
read it with the heart and translated it into heart have never doubted it or
its authorship. A man who has had the spirit to go through it and enter
into it finds a witness in himself and believes because he must believe- I
call it the Gospel of the heart, and so it is, but it is even then of a very sub
stantial character. The apostles had to put together two things that had
never been put together before. They had no precedent. They had to
show a person who carried himself in this world as a common man, in whom
was the living and eternal God. As far as literature is concerned, there has
never been a problem that approached this which was set before these men,
one of whom was a fisherman, another a tax collector, another a doctor, and
the business of the other we do not know. They had to make books so
substantial that they could found churches upon them, and men could fashion
their lives by them. And how finely they have done it. Some years ago,
when I was younger and knew more than I do now, I became a lecturer in
a theological seminary. I knew that if I was going to accomplish anything
I had to be original. So I tried to be original in this lectureship. I pro
posed to tell the young men that I wanted each one to take a blank sheet of
paper and rule it into three columns, and in the first column they should
put down every passage in the New Testament where Christ was repre
sented simply as a man ; in the second column they should put down every
passage representing Christ as God, and in the third the passages repre
senting the union of the two. Well, so far as presenting Him as the God-
man, I easily filled that column, and so far as presenting Him as God
alone, I filled that column with ease, but I never have been able to find the
first entry to put in the first column. I could not find a passage in the four
Gospels which represents Jesus Christ as simply a man. If any of you
know such a passage, I wish you would tell me that I may get something in
that column. Perhaps you say, " Why, He was tired one day and while on
His way through Samaria sat down on a well ". Is that the whole of the
narrative ? You must read it all, you know. You might as well take one of
the pipes out of this organ, and get a boy to blow it, and say that is the
organ, as to take a single sentence out of a narrative and say that that is

no THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
the whole. When you write a letter, you insist that the man shall read it all
the way through. Now you will find that every heresy that is in the church,
or that is coming i'nto the church, rests upon the principle of taking a single
instrument out of a band and then insisting that that is the band. Why
stop at the place where it says that Christ was tired ? Go on. Presently
He speaks to the woman who had come there to draw water, and He speaks
such words as from the creation of the world had never been spoken, and
have never been spoken since by any one : " The water that I shall give
you shall be in you a well of water springing up into everlasting life ".
That is God. It is not a tired man sitting by Jacob's well.
Well, He was in the fisherman's boat, and " being weary He put His
head on the cushion and went to sleep ". Why do you stop there ? When
the waves began to roll and the storm to increase and the boat to begin to
sink they called Him ; He stood up. He spoke to the tempest and the
tempest became a calm. He breathed upon the waters and the waters were
as quiet as the floor. No mere man there. If the man was asleep on the
cushion. He was more when He stilled the storm.
Let me give you another instance where the man very easily appears.
He is on the cross ; three are hanging side by side. They are dying ; surely
there is the man. Read the letter through, please. This man draws to
Himself the attention of a fellow dying at His side. This man looks to
Him. His gaze is the gaze of a dying man. With some poor blind faith
he prays, " Lord, remember me when Thou comest into Thy kingdom ".
There never has been a man since the beginning of the world who would
have said what Jesus said under these circumstances. The best man you
know would have said, "My friend, let us both pray to the Father".
What did this man say ? " My poor, dying friend, I shall be in paradise
before night, and I will take you there with me." That is not a man, is it?
I have nothing for my first column. Do you think of any thing ? And
how does it happen ? In vain do you try to separate what God has joined
together. In the words that were read to us, " The word became flesh and
dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of
the Father, full of grace and truth ". That is Divine life.
Now we must expect some peculiarities in this Gospel. If you write a
book, you do not copy what some one else has written and try to publish it
as your own ; but you try to state something that is your own, something
that you have found out yourself. Now there were three Gospels written
before John began, and to copy them would be a waste of parchment.
Luke's Gospel was written by a scientific man, a physician. The other
two Gospels were written by different men with a different purpose. John's
was written a long time afterwards. He certainly might mention some
things in a different way, but he would have to go over the same ground,
just as they do in school. If you go into your lowest classes here today
you find that they are teaching the alphabet and the multiplication table.
So, if you turn to your grammar school, your high school, and university,
you will find the same things being taught, the alphabet and the multiplica-

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GOSPEL. in
tion table, but you will also find the higher grade of scholars and, perhaps,
older men teaching. So, here, while John uses the same alphabet and mul
tiplication table, he teaches it in higher branches, for he is speaking in
advance of that which has been written. You will find that John takes the
initial and essential points of the Gospel and carries them further. John
says nothing about the nativity. Why should he? That has been described.
But he presents the incarnation. The nativity is the primary school ; the
incarnation is for the university. The Gloria in Excelsis is the beginning of
the incarnation. Why should he write the nativity ? You have it from the
hand of a scientific man that has done it as well as John could do it. You
have the changing of a man's life in the earlier Gospels ; you come to
John and you have Nicodemus told to be born again. You have redemp
tion and forgiveness in the other Gospels, but John gives you " the Lamb of
God that taketh away the sin of the world." That is Brown University ;
that is the highest reach of the thought and the method of it. You find the
method of redemption described in the three Gospels, but you find John
illustrating this. "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even
so must the Son of Man be lifted up ". " God so loved the world that He
gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth on Him should not
perish but have everlasting life." That is the extension of the truth, which
in its simple principles appears in the other Gospels. But it is no more
different than Brown University is different from the kindergarten. I think
that is as far as I should go upon this part of my theme.
I ask you to notice some peculiarities in this Gospel, some special
things that are not mentioned in the others. I venture the statement that
these peculiarities are simply a development and not inconsistencies. I
have stated that you have in the first three Gospels the primary school, and
in the fourth Gospel Brown University. And they are the same, only One is
a little higher, a little older, and may express the idea more accurately.
The readers are more advanced and have more advanced truths.
Now it is a very singular thing that John opens his Gospel with the
same words which were used at the beginning of the Bible. It seems to me
remarkable that the first three things that are asserted in the beginning of
the Bible are the same three things that are asserted in the very beginning
of John's Gospel. Now how do you account for that ? No other writer
ever did that. "In the beginning ", was John's opening. "In the begin
ning God ". John says, " In the beginning was the Word ", and " the Word
was with God, and the Word WAS God." Genesis further says, " In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth ". John says, " In the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by
Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made." Thus the
first three declarations of Genesis are the first three declarations of St.
John. And further, they are written for the same reason. John is giving
the university account of what is given in Genesis. He is showing what
the world was made for and Who made it. He is entering into the mystery

112 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
of the Divine being. Father, Son and Holy Ghost ; it is God, but it is also
the Son. The New Testament teaches that it is the Son who is the creator,
and St. John grasped that truth, which the apostles repeated after him. So
that when you come later on into the Book of Revelation, you find a new
heaven and a new earth, and a new Jerusalem, and a new life, and a new
light. John is writing the story of creation. I think that is a remarkable
fact. The narrative in Genesis is the most remarkable thing in literature.
The writer was describing things which took place long before he was born.
He did it with wonderful accuracy. Some years ago I had occasion to
speak of this, and chancing to meet a distinguished geologist spoke of it to
him. He finally said, half impatiently, " I believe that the first living thing
that was created was a fish." Well, I did not feel that I knew much on the
subject, so I kept silent. I had been quoting the Bible, and here was the
answer of science. When I reached my home I went to my Bible and
looked the matter up. I found that my friend was right, for, back in the
Book of Genesis, this particular honor was given to the fish, and this was
also the last word of science. Now, if you can tell me how the unknown
writer of Genesis knew that the first living thing created was a fish, you will
solve the greatest problem in the literature of the world.
Now if you will take your Gospel of John and compare it with the
Synoptics you will find some surprising things. You will find some notable
omissions. John has nothing of the Sermon on the Mount, or the Lord's
Prayer. He has nothing of the Baptism or Temptation of Jesus. He has
scarcely anything of John the Baptist's ministry. He omits some of the
best parables that Jesus spoke. He omits the parable of the virgins and
the account of that great day of judgment recorded in Matthew. All very
substantial things, as you can see. John also omits to say that Jesus took
little children in His arms and blessed them. The parable of the Good
Samaritan, which we love so much, he leaves out. Perhaps the fact that
they had been told was a good reason, but he did repeat some things that
the others said. He made a choice of those things which best suited his
purpose, as he registered the account of the new creation by Jesus Christ
Himself ; the creation of a new man for a new world.
I want for a little while to notice some things in John's Gospel that we
do not find anywhere else. The first thing, which has already been men
tioned in your discussion today, is the account of the miracle at Cana
of Galilee. We might say that is a thing John should leave out. It was
not of any consequence, the whole thing was ethically a mistake. Why did
he put it in ? It means that Christ came down into the home life. And,
after all, the comfort that we have in our own homes goes far to make up
the real value of life and the pleasure of living. Think for a moment of the
circumstances. Here is this wedding, and the bride was probably a kins
woman of our Lord. He had been invited, and had taken several men with
Him, and as usually happens under these circumstances, the wine gave out.
We might at first think that was not a great matter, but it was. It was the
one day of that young girl's life. It would never have done to have the

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GOSPEL. 113 ,
wine fail ; it would have been a life-long disgrace. She would never have
gotten over it. Perhaps Jesus felt in a measure responsible for it. He
certainly^; pitied her, and came to her rescue as only He could do, and to
save her cheeks from reddening with shame, he reddened the water into
wine. What is the next incident ? That is much more important — an inter
view with a wise coward, but still a coward, who came by night,
when no one could see him, to converse with the Lord. He thought well
of himself, but the first thing that Christ taught him was that he was
wrong. Nicodemus said: "I would like to talk with you about the
Kingdom of Heaven "- Jesus said substantially, " It is not any use,
you are not going there. The Kingdom of Heaven is that way, and you
are going this way. If you really want to go there, you will have to take
this road and turn your back upon that ". Well, that was a pretty serious
thing to say to any man. I think I have paraphrased it a little. What
did Jesus say? "My dear sir, if you are going to be a child of God, you
will have to go back and be born over again ". There are only two ways of
becoming a man's child or God's child ; you must either be born into the
family or adopted into it. And all Christ's processes are processes of
nature, so the adoption method would not do. There is not a single eccen
tric thing in all the things that Christ ever did or taught. There was never
a queer thing in any of his words or actions. If you are to be really a per
son's son, you must be born so. I believe this is thought to be one of the
severest passages in the Gospels. There are men of more than average
intelligence who reject it, and many also fear it. It is one of the most joy
ful and hopeful things that has ever been taught. There is not one of you
here who has not said at one time or another, " Oh, if I could only live my
life over again ". This passage says that you can. In your school days you
worked over your problem and found the answer was not right. But when
you found that it was wrong you changed a figure here, another one there,
and when finally you could not make it come right you took your sponge
and wiped it all out and said, " I am going to begin over again ". Now
that is what Christ said to Nicodemus: "Begin over again as a child.
Don't do it as an old man, begin to grow up into the childhood toward
God, and then when it comes time to go to heaven you will simply go
home". I asked my little girl one day when she came home at noon,
" Why did you come in here ? " She opened her great eyes and looked at
me; she did not know what I meant. I said, "Why didn't you go into the
Doctor's, next door ? " Finally she said, " Why, this is my home ". Yes, it
is home, that is the reason you are going to heaven, you are going to youi
Father's home. It must be a home. You have to be a child of God if you
wish to enter the Father's home. There is not a man living who does not
need this new birth. There are a great many men living today who need
to have their lives turned back to the very source and to be born again
into a real childhood, and fitted for the home that is in heaven. So I say it
is one of the gladdest and most joyous things in the whole Gospel. . To think

114 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
of it, my friends, that a man can be born again. Think of it, that your life
with all its blunders can be wiped out ; that your sins can all be cast into
the sea ; that you can start all over again and prattle as God's child, and
work as God's child, and finally go home, because heaven is your Father's
house. Surely the story of the new birth is good news to the men and
women of this day.
The next incident that comes to my mind is the Lord's interview at the
well of Jacob at Samaria, which was of a similar character. The Saviour
said to this woman, "You keep coming here day after day, and you are
just as thirsty ; I want to tell you something ". Then He said the strangest
word she ever heard ; the most marvelous thing that ever fell upon the poor,
dull ear of that woman, a name she never had heard ; that the eternal God
whom her fathers worshipped was her Father. She crouched at His feet.
Other men were ready to stone her, they frowned at her, there was but one
friendly face, and only one who knew her, and down into her wrecked heart
He let fall that benediction, " God is your Father, and He loves you ". " I
can give unto you that water that shall become in you a well of water which
shall be pure water, which shall be sweet, refreshing water, and you shall
live a life indeed ". She went out and told it, and you know how much bet
ter she was than the disciples. The disciples went into the town to get
things, she went into the town to give something ; and " it is more blessed
to give than to receive ". She even left her water-pot. I wonder what
became of it. She went everywhere, telling it to everybody, and the people
asked Him to stay. The people were not courteous ; they said, " We have
heard Him ourselves, we know this is the Christ ", and then followed their
confession. It was a strange thing to say. There was hardly a Jew who
believed He was the Christ ; there are many people who do not now believe
it ; " This is the Christ, the Saviour of the world ". How many wise men
say today that Christ is the Saviour for the people in Providence and the
rest of Rhode Island ; that Buddha will do for the people of India ; that
Mohammed will do for the Turks and Arabians ; that Confucius will do for
the Chinese, and Christ will take care of the Anglo-Saxon. But they said
this Gospel should be for the world. Nine years after that, when Philip
went there, he found people waiting for him, all ready, and it is recorded
that there " was great joy in that city ". Those men had held on, they had
stood faithful to Christ for nine years. Is not that worth telling ? Was not
that worth doing? No wonder that John puts this story in. These inci
dents have been with individuals. He had not very much to do with multi
tudes, though He talked with them when they came to Him. But Christ had
wonderful power with individuals. There was Nicodemus. Christ did not
seem to get a strong hold upon him, but the man came and anointed Him
when He was dead. There was the rich young man who went away, but
went sorrowful, because he had to choose between Christ and his real estate.
And there was poor Judas. When the treason was all over he brought the
money back and threw it down and went out and hanged himself. Christ
had some hold upon him, but it was not enough to save him. It is that

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GOSPEL. 115
personal contact, the grip of spirit with spirit, that is so conspicuous in
Christ's life, and that is what John preeminently teaches.
Then, at the pool of Bethesda at Jerusalem, we have the healing of the
poor man who had been a cripple longer than Christ had been in the world.
He had not energy enough to roll into the pool, and nobody had goodness
enough to put him in. When Christ asked him, "Wilt thou be made
whole ? " he began to whine. " I have no man, when the water is troubled,
to put me into the pool, but while I am coming another steppeth down
before me ". "Why, there are forty priests in the temple; here are a score
of men going by now ; here is a man just going up out of the water ".
" Yes, I know it ", he seemed to reply, " but they go away and forget us
who are afflicted here ". And if this man was worth healing, as I think he
was, after that there was always some one there to help any other who was
helpless. From that day he always went round that way when he returned
home or went to work in the morning, if he was a workman. Some one
might stop him and ask, " Why do you always go by that road to and from
your work, you know the other way is much nearer ? " " Oh, I tell you, I
know what it is, I know how it feels to be down there. See that poor fellow
there ; I was there a long time, until the day when the good Master healed
me, and it shall never be said, as long as I live, that there is no one there to
put a poor cripple into the pool when the water is disturbed ". Suppose
there was a man here in Providence and nobody had invited him to come to
the Lord Jesus for two weeks, what do you suppose that man would think
of the Christian people of the town ? Suppose you are a professing Chris
tian and as Christ's disciple you come to the Lord's table, if you had not
for some three or four days tried to help your fellow men into a knowledge
of your Master, what would He think of your religion ? Say to yourself,
" I never, never will have it true that there was any man anxious to go into
the pool to be healed who failed because I was concerned only to get into
heaven myself. I will not let my afflicted neighbors lie unaided in their
affliction ". Every day I will go down upon these marble steps, and these
arms shall move any man who is there and needs it. Perhaps that is what
John meant by telling this story, which the other apostles omitted. Good
Doctor Sears used to say that no man ever tried to go to heaven alone who
did not freeze by the way. You come to the God of heaven with a poor
sinner in your arms and you will be able to read your title clear. When
you come to the great day of the Lord, if you say " I did not do anything,
or say anything to help any one, but here I am ", you may hear that sad
refrain, as it comes from our Lord's gracious lips, " Not he that repeateth
the name but he that doeth the will ".
I am detaining you longer than I ought; you are very patient. I
should like to say something about the bread of life, which our Lord called
Himself. All the four Gospels give an account of the feeding of the 5,000,
but John alone mentions the teaching which was given with it. Here again
we have the old man revealed. The other writers say " that there were
only five loaves and two small fishes ". John says, " there is a boy here ".

II 6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
That is the old man, he remembers the boy ; and the critical point of the
narrative is that boy. Men are always hungry, and Christ is ready to heal ;
the great trouble is to find the boy. If religion does not flourish in Provi
dence, it is because you do not do as the boy did, give up all you have.
The boy has the balance of power. When the boy is willing to part with
his barley cakes, then the multitude will be fed.
Then we have the story of the opening of the eyes of the blind man.
Here Jesus taught that He was the light of the world, and then He opened
the eyes of the man. A good teacher said that when you want to know what
Christianity is you should ask what took place between Jesus Christ and the
man who was born blind ; then you have it in the lowest terms. What hap
pened then ? Jesus looked upon him and said, " Go down this hill ; there is
a pool of water there ; go and bathe your eyes in it and you will receive
your sight ". The man's cure depended upon his trust in Christ. But why
should he obey ? No man advised it. There was not one chance in a
thousand that he would be cured. There was not a man in Jerusalem who
would not say he was a fool. Many had washed their eyes in the pool of
Siloam, and it had not helped them. But he went. The first step he took
made him a Christian. A Christian is a man who does what Christ tells
him to do, because Christ tells him to do it.
Then there is that next chapter, in which our Lord calls Himself the
good shepherd. Do you see how John extends everything, and yet every
thing is rooted in the past ? The best name God has in the Old Testament
is found in the Twenty-third Psalm. That is a very good beginning, that is
the kindergarten. What is the shepherd when you get up to the university?
The kindergarten says, " He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, He
leadeth me beside the still waters ". John says, " The Good Shepherd
giveth His life for the sheep ".
Then there came a day when some Greeks wanted to see Jesus, and as
soon as the word came to Him He sent them no message, so far as we
know. He looked up into heaven and said, " Father, the hour is come"
They had begun to see the same truth which the Samaritans saw, that
He was the Saviour of the Jews, but He was the Saviour of the world.
"And I ", He said, " If I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto Me, Jews and Gentiles ". It was a new revelation, of which the
church today is not worthy, for while we are living in luxury here in New
England the missionary boards are halting for lack of bread.
Then there was the raising of Lazarus. Then the new sacrament of
washing of feet, which John alone mentions. The symbol we take to
represent Christianity is the cross of Christ. Another symbol that Jesus
Christ gave to represent Christianity is a basin and a towel. They belong
together. If you are not wearing that symbol, do not wear a cross. He
came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give His life a ran
som for many. That symbol, if carried out in His spirit, would move this
town, if only every follower of Christ carried both the symbol and the
spirit of the towel and the basin.

SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GOSPEL. 117
Then comes the wonderful fourteenth chapter of John, that goes back
to the very beginning of things and shows how the life of Christ becomes
our life, and how Christ literally lives in us. Then there follows the prom
ise of the Holy Spirit, Who should come to abide with us forever. Then
follows that marvelous prayer by the great High Priest, who bears all lov
ing hearts up into the embrace of the loving Father and teaches us that
eternal life is to know God and Him. No human presumption, since the
beginning of the world to this time, has ever dared to couple its name with
the name of the eternal God as essential to eternal life, as Christ does here.
And yet He said, and John records it, as a definition of eternal life, "this is
life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and JESUS CHRIST Whom
Thou hast sent" Thee and Me. What a wonderful assertion. Try to
write your name, or the name of any one else between the name of Jehovah
and this assertion of life.
The crucifixion is given more in detail than in the other Gospels.
Then comes the last interviews and the confession of Thomas when he
bears witness to Christ as the Messiah. And then the wonderful twenty-
first chapter closes his record. It is the ordination chapter, with Christ's
way of ordination. " Lovest thou Me?" "I do". "Feed My sheep".
"Lovest thou Me?" "I do". "Feed My lambs". They have not
chosen Him but He has chosen them and ordained them that they should
go and bear fruit and that their fruit should remain.
I wish that I had another hour to dwell upon this book, but I must
relieve you. This is the inspiring Gospel, these words are spirit and they
are life. My beloved friend, Professor Thayer, left this as the central,
all-conquering truth of Christianity: "Personal loyalty to a personal
Master, the crucified, risen, reigning Christ ". We like to read that story
of centuries ago, how the venerable Bede had for his last labors the transla
tion of this story of St. John into our words. We are told that he wrote
while age crept upon him, and as he drew near the end of his work his
strength failed him. His disciples urged him on. They cried, " Master,
master, there is but one chapter more ". The master wrote on until his
strength was gone. His disciples said, " There is but one verse more ".
He summoned his failing strength and translated the one remaining verse.
The master said, " It is finished ". And they answered, " It is finished "-
He lay where he could fix his eyes upon the place where he used to pray,
and there breathed out his spirit to that Saviour whom he had glorified.
That is the way the Gospel of St. John came into our English speech.

* THE WORKS OF JESUS. I.— RESURRECTION.
(St. John 5:17-30-)
BY REV. GEORGE F. EOKIVIAN, Ph. D., T>. D.,
Pastor of St. Paul's Methodist Episcopal Church, New York.
The passage which has been assigned to me is so wondrously fruitful
of great thought that one could spend months in the discussion of it without
even approximately exhausting the themes which it contains. The student
who attempts adequately to treat this chapter finds himself embarrassed
much in the same way as the old hero in the Norse mythology, who, being
asked to drain a great beaker, found at length that he was vainly seeking to
empty the fathomless ocean. The temptation to turn aside to the many
important topics suggested by this passage must be resisted. Let us con
fine ourselves to the specific subject in hand.
The power to raise the dead implies, of course, the power to impart
life. And life can only be imparted by Him who is life. This is the cen
tral fact with regard to Jesus, upon which everything in this discussion must
naturally hinge. Jesus came in the form of a man, but He differed from all
other men in the fact that He Himself was life. Other men have received
life, but He is essentially life. His most intimate friend said that " in Him
was life, and the life was the light of men ". He said of Himself, " I am
the way, the truth, and the life ". When He met Death, as He did fre
quently. He did not shrink back from him as we do, but He said, " I am
the resurrection and the life ", and Death withdrew to his dark domain.
He called God His own Father, and said, "As the Father hath life in Him
self, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself ". This was a very
daring claim, and was bound to provoke hostility and criticism. But the
lucidity of His mind and the perfection of His character require us to
believe that He was very sane and very sincere when He said, " I am life "¦
Moreover, He substantiated this claim in a most marvelous fashion by cur
ing the sick and raising the dead. What a hollow sham His profession to
be "life" would have been, if He meant merely, "I am able to give spir
itual life ", but showed no evidence of it in the fact that He could raise men
from physical death ; or if, having fallen asleep in Joseph's tomb, He had
not awakened to receive the salutations of the angels. Life is a unity. We
speak of life as physical as well as spiritual, and He who calls himself " life "
must be the embodiment of all the forms that we call life. He must not
only be immanent in nature, but must transcend nature. He must not only
pervade the mind, but He must be far above the human mind. He must be the
fountain of Spiritual life, and He must be the essence of life in all its various

* Delivered at the Third Conference, held at the Beneficent Congregational Church, December 9, 1903.
ii8

THE WORKS OF JESUS.— RESURRECTION. 119
expressions. Now Jesus demonstrated this power in all the ranges of what
we call life. The shrunken limb became normal and the diseased soul
became healthy. We have never seen Him cure the sick or raise the dead,
but we have discovered Him raising men from the deadness of sin to the life
of conscious fellowship with God. And because we have witnessed this, we
believe that He could go through all the hospitals of the world and turn
out all the sick and impotent folk in abounding health, and that He could
go through all the asylums of the world and make lunacy a forgotten malady,
for He is " life ".
I. We have in this wonderful passage, first of all, an illustration of
Christ's power to impart life quite apart from any human agency, except the
response of the human will. The chapter begins with the story of the impo
tent man at the pool of Bethesda. Jesus beholds and addresses the unfor
tunate man, and arouses in his soul the latent desire to be made whole,
and leads him out of helplessness into abundant life.
Now this passage is no sooner read than some hard-brained man who
thinks more of mathematics than dogmatics, who would rather be logical
than theological, declares that it is a story more worthy of the Middle Ages
than of our times, and wants to know how the Bible can expect to hold the
allegiance of intelligent people while it adheres to such preposterous tales,
which remind one of the Church of St. Anne de Beauprd, or the statues of
the bleeding saints, or the grotto of Lourdes. He does not know that
textual criticism removes certain portions of the narrative which are offen
sive to reason. Our Revised Version recognizes the fact that a popular
misconception of the day about angelic interference in the waters of a ther
mal spring has been transferred from the margin of an old manuscript into
the body of the text, and has wisely omitted it. Yet this may be done
without impairing the value of the story. On the other hand, it receives
added strength. Those who throw over an entire narrative because some
of its details do not appeal to their reason are as unwise as an old Dutch
farmer, whose buildings were overrun with rats, and who resorted to the
expedient of burning down the structures in order that he might deliver
himself from the pests. There are persons today calling themselves logical
who, because occasionally they discover a minor defect in the Scriptures,
repudiate the whole system of Christianity. But after criticism has done its
most, there remains the fact that Jesus did heal the impotent man. We can
not strike out the supernatural from the New Testament. It is here and
everywhere. And while the skeptical may question the miraculous element
in this healing, on the supposition that the man was possessed of such a dis
ease as only needed for its removal an authoritative voice to make the vic
tim's will assert itself, no such explanation will account for many other
recorded miracles. And we have no occasion to make apology for Jesus.
He is life, and life essentially. And what we call the miraculous is simply
the extraordinary emergence of life, the unusual working of an activity that
is constantly in procedure. Huxley admitted that there was no inherent
reason for denying the credibility of a miracle ; and we who have seen Jesus

120 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
working spiritual miracles in this twentieth century have no reason to dis
credit the story of His physical miracles in the first century. But Jesus
was always chary of performing miracles. He had no disposition to per
form miracles merely that men might be amazed. The wonder is that He
performed so few ; that He should have been so self-controlled as not to be
always performing miracles. His miracles were for signs ; they were to sig
nify something. They are as different from the miracles of the Middle
Ages as can be conceived. There is no moral significance in a story of
healing by the bones of saints. But in the miracles which Jesus works there
is an essential moral significance, a spiritual lesson, a type of eternal life
which the student cannot possibly overlook. John seems to have fallen into
the habit of his Master's mind, and thought always of His miracles in rela
tion to divine truth. Did Jesus heal a withered hand ? Then it was an
indication that He could cure a diseased soul. Did He by wondrous multi
plication of fishes and loaves feed five thousand men and women ? Then it
was a mark of the fact that He was Himself the Bread of Life. Was He
able to open the eyes of the blind man ? Then it was a sublime illustration
of the fact that Jesus is the Light of the World. Could He cure an impo
tent man at the pool of Bethesda ? Then it was a type of the fact that He
could restore those who were spiritually impotent. Did He raise Lazarus
from the' dead? Then it was to prove that He was the Resurrection and
the Life. So this story has a very close relation to the whole power of Jesus
as " Resurrection " and as " Life ".
II. In the next place, we have here the self-vindication of Jesus on the
basis of His filial relation to God the Father, and His essential oneness
with Him. He is charged with a violation of the Sabbath law ; it is an
Unproved accusation. Indeed, by the strictest interpretation of the Mosaic
code He could not have been convicted. It would have been an easy thing
to dispose of this accusation by recourse to the code and to history. On
other occasions, when similar accusations were lodged against Him, He
took this course, but in the present instance He does not defend Himself in
this fashion. He ignores all such considerations, and with a simple thrust
¦ strikes at the core of the whole matter when He says, " My Father worketh
hitherto, and I work". The activity which characterizes God is not limited
by any narrow Sabbath laws which have been passed for the benefit of
mankind. From the hour when His creative work was concluded, and He
pronounced His work good, until this hour He has not ceased to pour Him
self out in the sustaining of His universe, in the impartation of life to His
creatures, in the work of redemption for those who are lost. " My Father
and I are one. He worketh until now, and I work. His will is mine ; His
work is My work. At any moment I am ready at His command to do what
soever He desireth ". Instantly the charge of an infraction of the Sabbath
law is dropped. His accusers pass over the whole matter, and charge Him
with identifying Himself with God, and, therefore, with being guilty of blas
phemy. Their instinct was correct, their motive contemptible. It is in the
assumption that He is God, and that life proceeds from Him inevitably, that

THE WORKS OF JESUS.— RESURRECTION. 121
the heart of the trouble rests. But we need not discuss that subject now.
If that is not true there is no truth in the New Testament Scriptures that one
need hold for a single instant. And if that is not truth, it is the greatest of
all folly that we should come together to study this Gospel.
Passing now from this general statement of the basis on which He has
assumed authority to impart life to men, Jesus bursts forth, first, into a
general statement of His divine right to raise the dead and judge them,
and then to a more particular statement, in a concrete and explicit form, of
His rights in the moral and external domains now and forever with re
lation to the destiny of mankind. He virtually says to these accusers,
" You profess to be scandalized because I am supposed to have violated
the Sabbath laws, and because I have claimed to be divine in My own per
son ; what will you say when I tell you that all power is mine ? that I am
the judge of the quick and the dead, and that by My own voice I shall call
men from the tomb, and in the end shall be the final and absolute arbiter
of the destinies of human beings ? For, as the Father raiseth up the dead
and quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom He will. For the
Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son ;
that all men should honor the Son, even as they honor the Father. He that
honoreth not the Son honoreth not the Father which hath sent Him.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My word and believeth on
Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemna
tion, but is passed from death unto life. Verily, verily, I say unto you the
hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son
of God ; and they that hear shall live ".
III. Again, the healing of the impotent man forms a concrete illustra
tion in symbolism of the spiritual resurrection. " Wilt thou be made
whole ? " is the challenge of Jesus. The man hears the question, responds
to it, and by the expenditure of his own will, in the exercise of what we
call faith, takes up his bed and walks ; and goes out to sin no more that he
may have no worse thing come upon him than he'has been suffering these
thirty-eight years. " Wilt thou be made whole ? " is the demand of Jesus
now and always. Those who hear His voice and respond to His call are
those who live ; and those who will not heed His voice are those who can
not live because they refuse to accept His life as a free gift. " Wilt thou
be made whole ? " Do you want to be made sound ? Are you eager to have
life and health ? That is a very crucial question. It is the question which
Jesus is always asking. And it is not everyone who is sick, and murmurs
about it, that really wants to be well. There are many people who do not
want to get health; and many. people like to tell you of their diseases, and
the sufferings they have experienced at the hands of many physicians, and
the number of hospitals they have been in or visited for treatment, in order
that they may awake in you the impulse of sympathy. And the same thing
is true iil the moral realm. Not every one who professes himself sick and
talks about his being so needy desires to be well spiritually. Lord Byron
developed a sort of foolish self-pity by such a method. He desired to

122 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
describe himself as a sort of unfortunate victim of fleshly lusts, and he gloried
in his shame. A man recently said that he would rather give ten thousand
dollars to retain his delicious thirst for alcoholic beverages than to have
that thirst remove(1. He had sunken into that insensibility which prevents
a man from hearing the voice and responding to the call which summons
to life. Do you want to be healed ? is the challenge of Jesus. Are you
willing to launch your personal will into the divine will, and to arise from
the dead ? They who hear the voice of the Son of God and respond, live ;
and they who do not heed and respond are dead.
IV. It follows naturally that judgment ensues. It is in the very fact
of men's attitude toward this call of Jesus. What He says in this connec
tion about judgment being committed to Him is simply the inevitable
consequence of His offer of life to men, and of the position they take with
reference to it. Perhaps you have read Fenelon's dialogue between Ulysses
and Grillus, the man whom Circe had turned into a hog. Ulysses wished
to bring him back to manhood. But Grillus would not consent. He said,
" No, the life of a hog is so much pleasanter ". " But", said Ulysses, " Do
you make no account of eloquence, poetry and music ? " " No, I would rather
grunt than be eloquent like you". "But", asked Ulysses further, "How
can you endure this nastiness and stench?" Grillus replied, "It all de
pends on the taste ; the odor is sweeter to me than that of amber, and the
filth than the nectar of the gods ". When men sink into the insensibility
of degrading sin they put themselves in the place of judgment; and the
judgment of the hereafter will base itself upon the position we have occu
pied in this probationary sphere. John LeFarge says, " When a man
passes a criticism upon a picture, it is the picture that judges the man, and
not the man who judges the picture ". The men who receive the offer of
Christ, and pass upon it, are judged by the attitude in which they present
themselves to His appeal. They that hear the Son of God shall live.
Others cannot see life. Even as the impotent man at the Pool of Bethesda
would have been helpless.to the day of his death, had he not responded to
the call of Christ to take up his bed and walk forth into the world.
V. And now we see that, advancing from this general statement with
regard to resurrection from spiritual deadness, Jesus addresses Himself to
the great question of the physical resurrection. He does not say that He
is now calling the dead from the tomb, but "the hour is coming, in which
all that are in the graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth ; they
that have done good, unto the resurrection of life ; and they that have
done evil unto the resurrection of damnation ". This is the supreme, the
only satisfactory and complete argument in favor of a future life. Natura
immortality is an unprovable hypothesis ; it may belong to us as our birth
right, but the Bible does not insist that this is true. And the argument
from analogy falls to pieces in the presence of the severest scientific invest
igation of our day. No man who stands by the bedside of a dying friend
and observes the process of dissolution can see anything in the phenomena
of man's death that differentiates it from the death of an animal. With-

THE WORKS OF JESUS.— RESURRECTION. 123
out the resurrection of the New Testament in the person of Jesus Christ,
there is no absolute foundation upon which one can rest a hope of the future
life. Plato may " reason well " ; so well that some of his disciples are per
suaded to commit suicide in order to reach a life of bliss ; but there is no
argument from the day of Plato to our own that can support the soul that
questions the fact of a future life. The only sure foundation of such a hope
is the personal guarantee of Him who is " Life ", who shall some day send
His voice thrilling through the world and call the just and unjust out of the
tomb to receive judgment. But this promise cuts in opposite directions.
It says that the unjust, as well as the just, shall come at Christ's command.
There is no escaping His summons. "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit?
or whither shall I flee from Thy presence ? If I ascend up into heaven,
Thou art there ; if I make my bed in hell, behold Thou art there. If I take
the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; even
there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me. If I say,
' Surely the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be light about
me. Yea the darkness hideth not from Thee, but the night shineth as the
day ' ". There is no escape from Him except escape in Him. There is no
way to avoid the wrath of the Just One, except to hide under the shadow of
His wings. Martin Luther said, " If I saw Jesus Christ standing before
me with a drawn sword, I would still fling myself into His arms ". " Ye will
not come unto Me that you might have life ", is the sad plaint of the Master
of Life and Conqueror of Death. Jesus is the life, the resurrection, the
only hope of eternal life, the judge of the quick and the dead, the appor-
tioner of the rewards of the men who have been hearers of His voice and
have known His love, the distributer of recompense to those who in deep,
moral insensibility have refused to hear His voice and have chosen death
instead of life. This is the solemn lesson of the hour.

*THE WORKS OF JESUS. II.— JUDGMENT.
(St. John 5 : 17-30.)
BY REV. OHA-RLES Ml. IklELDEN, Fip:. D., D. X).,
Pastor of the Mathewson Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Providence.
I have been asked for an exegesis of these few verses, John 5 : 17-30,
which, in the mind of the committee, teach the important doctrine of a gen
eral judgment with the Lord Jesus Christ as judge. Our task would be
simplified very greatly if we could assume either of two extreme positions,
each of which has its advocates. Mr. Campbell Morgan declares, " There
is no warrant for preaching the final judgment at all. The messengers of
Christ were never commissioned to do so. They were sent to preach the
gospel, and the only reference to the fact of judgment which has any place
in preaching is such as is necessary for urging the claims of Christ upon
men " But one might as well say that the apostles were not commissioned
to preach the new birth, the punishment of sin, the rewards of righteous
ness, or any other of the great doctrines. It would be interesting to hear
this man define the " gospel " of which he speaks.
Whether the apostles understood as clearly as Mr. Morgan the meaning
of their mission may perhaps be questioned, but it is certain that the fact of
a general judgment had a conspicuous place in their teaching.
Moreover, if we are to preach Christ, it is our duty to preach Him in all
His offices, not only as priest but as prophet and king; not only as the
atoning Saviour, but as the authoritative teacher and reigning sovereign.
His functions, according to the Gospel, are not only to redeem but to
Instruct and govern. As ruler He is also judge, and the gospel-preaching is
defective which does not thus present Him.
We might do, also, as one learned essayist in these meetings has
already done, viz. : deny that the words in vs. 28, 29 were ever uttered by
the Master, but are an interpolation by a later hand. In that case they
would not require an exegesis. The assurance with which some men erect
a personal and purely subjective standard of what ought to be said, and
reject everything which does not conform to it, is refreshing. It is an easy
way to dispose of an unpleasant truth to say Jesus never uttered it or, if He
did. He did not know what He was talking about. Whatever doubts these
men may have concerning the inerrancy of the Scriptures, they seem well
assured of their own.
Now I am disposed to accept this passage as genuine, and for at least
two reasons.

* Delivered at the Fifth Conference, held at the Central Baptist Church, February lo, 1904.
124

THE WORKS OF JESUS.— JUDGMENT. 125
First, its statements are in perfect accord with the teaching of the
Synoptic Gospels and with the writings of all the apostles, as far as they
have expressed themselves on the subject.
In Matt. 25 : 3 1-33, Jesus says, "When the Son of Man shall come in
His glory, and all the holy angels with Him, then shall He sit upon the
throne of His glory, and before Him shall be gathered all nations : and He
shall separate them one from the other as a shepherd divideth his sheep
from the goats ". In his memorable sermon on Mars Hill, Paul declared,
" He hath appointed a day in the which He will judge the world in right
eousness by that man whom He hath ordained, whereof He hath given
assurance unto all men in that He hath raised Him from the dead " (Acts
17:31). In His epistles He more than once in substance affirms that "We
must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ". The revelator in
Apocalyptic vision — " Saw a great white throne, and Him that sat on it, from
whose face the earth and the heaven fled away ; and there was found no
place for them. And * * * the dead, small and great, stand before
God ; and the books were opened ; and another book was opened, which is
the book of life : and the dead were judged out of those things which were
written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the
dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which
were in them : and they were judged every man according to their works "
You will say, perhaps, that this is imaginative and poetical. But, taken
in connection with the general trend of the New Testament, who that gives
any doctrinal value to this book can doubt that the writer is describing the
stupendous event toward which time is hurrying us all ?
The doctrine of a general judgment cannot be wrested from the New
Testament teaching without violence. The passage before us is in harmony
with this teaching, and is therefore presumptively genuine.
Secondly, this passage is in harmony with the discourse of which it
forms a part. It marks, it is true, a great advance in thought, but it is a
natural development and not an obtrusion, an irruption, into the discussion
in hand. This, I think, will be clear if we glance comprehensively, though
briefly, at the entire incident.
Our Lord had cured the impotent man at the pool known as Bethesda.
It was on the Sabbath. Contrary to Jewish custom, at the Master's bid
ding the man took up his bed and was going his way when he was accosted
by the Jews, " It is the Sabbath day ; it is not lawful for thee to carry thy
bed ". He quoted the authority of Jesus, saying, " He that made me
whole, the same said unto me, take up thy bed and walk ". Thus the con
troversy was shifted, and the Jews in the fierceness of their rage sought to
slay Jesus. In justification of His act, and to substantiate His claims else
where made that the " Son of Man was Lord of the Sabbath", He said,
" My Father worketh hitherto and I work ". This still further inflamed
their anger, and " They sought the more to kill Him because He had
not only broken the Sabbath but said also that God was His Father, mak
ing Himself equal with God ". To the charge of lawlessness was added that

126 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
of blasphemy. Notice the progress, also, in the defence. Jesus does not
deny that He claims equality with the Father ; on the contrary. He admits
it and proceeds to justify Himself in so doing. He emphasizes the perfect
accord between Himself and His Father, and then makes the still graver
assertion, doubtless with remembrance of the recent healing in mind, "As
the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth them, even so the Son
quickeneth whom He will ".
Nothing could be more natural than to pass from this suggestion of
quickening the dead — meaning probably the spiritually dead — awakening
them into new life and power, as He Himself had restored the paral3rtic, to
the associated thought of the judgment. The fact that the Father had given
this great power into His hands was put forth as an additional refutation of
the charges made against Him. He was to act as God, "That all men
might honor the Son as they honor the Father. He that honoreth not the
Son honoreth not the Father which hath sent Him ".
He moves forward in the argument with a regal majesty. He, the life-
giver and judge of men, declares that for those who hear His voice and
respond, the great crises are passed already. They already have within
them the beginning of eternal life and witness of their justification. " Ver
ily, verily, I say unto you, he that heareth My word, and believeth on Him
that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and cometh not into judgment ; but is
passed from death unto life. * * * The hour is coming, and now is,
when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God : and they that hear
shall live. For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the
Son to have life in Himself. And hath given Him authority to execute
judgment also, because He is the Son of Man ". Our Lord regards His
countrymen, and, indeed, all unregenerate men, as dead in trespasses and
sins. Though physically alive, they are spiritually dead. They are as
helpless as the impotent man in the porches of Bethesda. He, as the life-
giver, stands and calls. He says to them as He said to the other, " Wilt
thou be made whole ? " Happy, thrice happy, those who hear ; for those
who hear shall live.
It is interesting to note here the word rendered " wilt ". It is theleis, a
word conveying the idea of volition, of purpose. It is not boulei, simple
desire. It is as though He sought in this man a purpose born of faith to
respond to His life-giving power. He found what He sought, the word was
spoken, and that weak and pain-racked body thrilled and glowed with the
new life.
He stands and calls, " If any man thirsts, come unto Me, drink and
live ". If His words find response, if any hear, they shall live. If they fail
to hear, they continue in the embrace of death.
Thus Jesus judges the world today. By their attitude toward Him men
are justified and live, or are condemned and die. " For this is the condem
nation that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than
light because their deeds were evil. Every one that doeth evil hateth the
light, neither cometh to the light lest his deeds should be reproved. But he

THE WORKS OF JESUS.— JUDGMENT. 127
that doeth truth cometh to the light that his deeds may be made manifest
that they are wrought in God". Life is a continuous judgment day. By
their acceptance or by their rejection of the light men are determining their
destiny. This is the stupendous claim put forth by the Saviour. By their relation
to Him as life-giver and judge, the fate of men is settled. It is not strange
that He detected incredulity and wonder in the faces of His hearers at such
a tremendous assertion ; but He does not hesitate ; He does not soften or
mitigate in the slightest the significance of His words. On the contrary He
advances yet farther ; there is a constant crescendo in His claims. "Are you
startled at what I have said ? Does it shock you that I claim to judge those
now on earth ? " Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming in which all that
are in tneir graves shall hear My voice and shall come forth ; they that
have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil,
unto the resurrection of damnation. The voice which now speaks to you,
and which many of you refuse to hear, shall sound through the regions
where dwell the departed, and hearing, they shall obey its imperative com
mand and come forth to receive at My hand their eternal award ". This
marks the culmination of the Saviour's work as life-giver and judge. From
the act of supreme authority — judgment. He passes to the supreme act of
power — the resurrection of the dead. Then will the universe receive final
demonstration of His sublime statement, " I am the resurrection and the
life ; he that believeth in Me though he were dead, yet shall he live ; and
whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die ".
Now 1 submit that there is nothing violent or irrelevant in this reference
by our Lord to the general judgment in this discourse. It comes in the
natural development of His discussion with His enemies. His claims being
challenged, He defended them. His authority to supersede their petty
traditions rests upon His oneness with the Father. His Father worketh
hitherto, why should not He work ? He was one with the Father. He was
entrusted with divine authority and power until the honor of the Father
was indissolubly inwrought with His.
As Godet says : " This work of moral and physical restoration, carried
on hitherto by God, passes henceforth into the hands of Jesus but gradually
and according to the measure of His growing capacity. Till His baptism
He had wrought only human works. From that time He begins to work
isolated miracles of bodily and spiritual resurrection, specimens of His
great future work. From the time of His elevation to glory. He reahzes by
Pentecost the moral resurrection of humanity ; and finally by His return on
the day of His advent, and by His victory over the last enemy, death, which
shall be its consequence. He will work in the physical domain, the universal
resurrection. Then only will the work of the Father have passed wholly
into His hands ".
Jesus, as life-giver and judge must be no less than God, manifest in the
flesh. As one has said : " The more we ponder the stupendous claim which
Christ makes, the more must we feel that it is superhuman authority which

128 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
speaks to us here, or superhuman arrogance". He, Himself, seemed to
realize the force of this dilemma, for He said: "If I bear witness of
Myself, My witness is not true ". Not that He falsified in His claims, but
that He did not meet the demands of Jewish law by which a thing must
be established by two or more witnesses. "I am willing''. He says, "to
submit to this requirement. I have My witnesses and will produce them.
" Ye sent unto John, to him in whose light ye were willing to rejoice.
He bore witness to Me, it is true, but I have a greater witness than he.
" First of all, there are My works. They clearly demonstrate My divine
office and power. Nicodemus was right ; no man can do the works which
I do except God be with Him. Ye are absolutely inexcusable for not
receiving Me. If I had not done among you the works which none other
man had done ye had not had sin, but now ye have no cloak for your sin.
Now ye have both seen and hated both Me and My Father ". Jesus as the
divine ambassador brought with Him His credentials. Whatever weight
may now be given the evidential value of miracles, it is doubtless true that
He regarded them as a mark of His authority as the Son of God.
Secondly. The Father bears witness. " The Father which sent Me
hath borne witness to Me ". Our Lord here refers to His baptism, when as
the Spirit descended upon Him, the Father's voice declared : " This is My
beloved Son, hear ye Him " He must have referred also to that marvelous
scene upon the mountain, when Moses, the law-giver and Elijah, greatest of
the prophets, representing the old dispensation, came out of heaven long
enough to do homage to Him who was to supersede the law, and in whom
the prophecies were to find their fulfilment. These representatives of a
passing era faded away, leaving before the amazed apostles the solitary
figure of their Lord, while in their ears rang the words: " This is My beloved
Son in Whom I am well pleased ; hear ye Him ".
Thirdly. Our Saviour brings forward as a final witness the Jewish
Scriptures. In Moses, in the prophets, and indeed in all the Scriptures is
found testimony as to the character and work of the Messiah. The portrait
there drawn finds its original in Jesus of Nazareth. So clear and striking
and accurate the likeness that Moses himself, in whom the Jews trusted,
would condemn them for rejecting their Saviour. "There is one that
accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust. For had ye believed Moses
ye would have believed Me, for he wrote of Me ".
I have thus simply indicated what I conceive to be the teaching of this
passage. If I am correct, every day is in a sense a judgment day. Jesus
is speaking to men now engrossed in business, consumed by ambition,
drunken with pleasures, sodden in sin. He cries to them : " Wilt thou be
made whole ? " If they hear, they shall live. Oh that His voice might be
heard above the din of trade, the rush of commerce, the shouts and laughter
of revelry I Alas 1 how many refuse to listen. Like the Jews they would
away with Him. Like the Jews, too, all such call down unutterable woes
upon themselves. His blood be on us and our children forever !
His word is true. "When the Son of Man shall come in glory, and

THE WORKS OF JESUS.— JUDGMENT. 129
all His holy angels with Him, then shall He sit on the throne of His
glory, and before Him shall be gathered all nations ; and He shall sep
arate them one from another as the shepherd separateth the sheep from
the goats ; and He shall set the sheep on His right hand, but the goats on
the left ". Ah 1 that right hand and left hand ! " You seem, sir ", said Mrs.
Adams to Dr. Johnson, when the fear of death and the judgment lay heavy
upon him, " You seem to forget the merits of our Redeemer ". " Madam",
said the honest old man, " I do not forget the merits of my Redeemer; but
my Redeemer has said that He will set some on His right hand and some
on His left". It were well if men were to remember that there is a right
hand and a left. There is inextricable confusion here, but there will be a
separation there. It is sometimes impossible here to discern between those
who serve God and those who do not ; but then every mask will be torn
off and every dissembler revealed in his true character. I have stood in the
dimly lighted room of a photographer watching with great interest the
development of plates. As they lie side by side there is no apparent differ
ence between them. But when they are dipped into the developing fluid, a
change gradually takes place. On this appears the sweet face of a pure and
innocent child ; on that the harsh and angular features of one who has seen
much of toil and hardship ; on another the coarse and bloated countenance
of a sensualist; and on still another the fierce and brutish expression of the
hardened criminal. Under the magic of the photographer's art, every
characteristic is transcribed with literal exactness upon the sensitive plate
and faithfully and permanently preserved. Thus in the blazing light of the
judgement, men will stand revealed as they are and not as they seem.
Ah ! that right hand and left hand ! Only two classes ; only two
destinies. Every man must stand in one of these classes. Every man must
enter upon one or the other of the two destinies, which will be decided by
his attitude toward the life-giver and judge. By a fixed and unalterable
gravitation every man will go to his own place, whither his affinities bear
him. One has beautifully and powerfully said : " There are two twilights —
the twilight of evening and the twilight of morning; and therefore God's
question to us is not how much light have we, but which way do we face, to
the night or to the day? Not what art thou, but what wilt thou, is the
supreme question. It is the answer to this which sets some on the right
hand and some on the left ".

* THE SECRET OF JESUS' LIFE.
(St. John 5:30.)
tBY REV. JOHlSr BALCOM SKA-W, T>. D.,
Pastor of the West End Presbyterian Church, New York.
There are four Scriptures, all the sayings of Jesus and all found in the
Fourth Gospel, which define for me the basic secret of Jesus' li^e. John
6 : 38 — " For I came down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will
of Him that sent Me" — doing the will of God the purpose oi Christ's life.
John 4 : 34 — " My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me " — doing the
will of God the pleasure of Christ's life, its very sustenance and inspiration,
its enjoyment and satisfaction. John 5 : 30 — " Because I seek not Mine own
will, but the will of the Father which sent Me " — doing the will of God, the
pursuit ot: principle of Christ's life. John 8 : 29 — " I do always those things
that please Him " — doing the will of God the practice of Christ's life.
This was our Lord's unique and unqualified claim. Was it substantiated ?
Did He give full proof to the world that doing God's will was the purpose,
the pleasure, the pursuit and the practice of His life ? That He always dili
gently sought to know, and earnestly set Himself to do God's will is beyond
dispute. A study of His prayer-life fully attests this. " Strong Son of God "
though He was, aware of His appointed mission in the world as He must
have been, yet was He constantly asking His Father what direction His
way should take or what turns in the way already taken He should make.
" What wilt Thou have Me to do ? " was His perpetual inquiry. If ever any
one had less need than another to pray, was it not Jesus Christ ? And yet
we find that no one living upon our earth ever prayed so much as did He.
He alone has perfectly obeyed the apostolic injunction, " Pray without
ceasing ". Prayer stood closely related to all the great events of His life —
His baptism, His temptation. His transfiguration. His agony in the garden.
His crucifixion. The night before He chose the twelve. He was until morn
ing in the mountain alone with His Father. When the Roman guard came
to arrest Him He was by Himself in prayer, and did He not die with a
prayer upon His lips ? What a testimony to His prayer-life it was that the
disciples who took the walk to Emmaus with Him the day of His resurrection
did not identify Him till they heard His voice in prayer. We sometimes
feel that at best we are but children and dare not stir a step alone. This
was Jesus' characteristic and continuous attitude. He was supremely the
son of solitude, yet He was preeminently a man among men, ever going
about doing good.

* Delivered at the Fifth Conference, held at the Central Baptist Church, February lo, 1904.
t Now Pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Illinois.
130

THE SECRET OF JESUS' LIFE. 131
This constant converse with His Father was the source of His wisdom.
His patience and poise. His steadfastness and strength, His cheerfulness
and courage. It was this which made
" His face a mirror of His holy mind.
His mind a temple for all lovely things to flock to
And inhabit"
Living such an uninterrupted prayer-life as this. He came to know the
will of God fully and explicitly, and His life was lived with one sole com
manding passion, — to make that will known to men. The words He spoke,
the deeds He wrought, the influence breathing itself forth from His person.
His character and life, were but the utterance, the exaltation of that will. In
whatsoever capacity He appears, as the Messiah of Matthew, or the servant
of Mark, or the universal Saviour of Luke, or the divine Son of God of
John, He is everywhere and always the synonym, the embodiment, the
interpretation of the will of God — the declaration of what God thinks, what
God desires, what He purposes and what He delights in — in a word what
God ig and what He desires man to be.
"On one great mission bent.
He sped for God, forever unencumbered
Of earthly clogs, whereby our souls are numbered
In glory excellent".
There can be no question, then, but what He always sought to know
and follow the will of the Father. That stands forever true. But did He
perfectly do that will ? In other words, it is beyond dispute that doing the
will of God was the purpose, the pleasure and the pursuit of His life. Was
this the actual practice of Jesus ?
I . The consciousness of Christ is no slight or uncertain factor in this
problem. All the laws of psychology must, do give it emphasis. A sane,
true, high soul, such as Jesus confessedly was, could have had none other
than a trustworthy consciousness. When, therefore, looking into the face
of His Father, He said : " I do always the things that please Him ; " and
again, " My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me ", He established
the strongest possible presumption in favor of His claim.
2. Another test is His Father's unqualified approval of Him. This
approval would, of course, not have been given if He had failed to do the
will of God. That approval is everywhere implied, and the fact that only
once did Jesus feel Himself without it, and that when circumstances for
which He was not responsible had clouded His consciousness, strongly
confirms the implication. Twice, however, this approval was explicitly
spoken by the Father from heaven. First at the baptism : " This is My
beloved Son in whom I am well pleased ", a word which doubtless covered
the whole of His life up to that point and is a suggestive key which unlocks
for us the so-called " hidden years " ; and again at the transfiguration, when,
as St. Peter tells us, " He received from God the Father, honor and glory,
when there came such a voice to Him from the excellent glory. This is My
beloved Son in whom I am well pleased ".

132 THE GOSPEL OF SI. JOHN.
3. But better than His self-consciousness even, still better than His
Father's implied or spoken approval, was the sinless life He set before the
world. His sinlessness was more than a self-preferred claim — it was an
accepted fact. No man did convict Him of sin. The prince of this world
did come but found nothing in Him. His contemporaries testified to His
purity, and succeeding ages have confirmed the testimony, until an apos
trophe like that of our Sidney Lanier to-day awakens universal applause :
" But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign seer of time.
But Thee, O poets' poet, wisdom's tongue.
But Thee, O man's best man, O love's best love,
O perfect life in perfect labor writ,
O all men's Comrade, Servant, King or Priest, —
What zy or jc^A what mole, what flaw, what lapse.
What least defect, or shadow of defect.
What rumor, tattled by an enemy.
Or inference loose, what lack of grace.
Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's —
Oh I what amiss may I forgive in Thee,
Jesus, good Paragon, Thou Crystal Christ ?"
In view of these facts are we not justified in accepting it as an absolute
fact that Jesus did perfectly obey His Father, and that His claim is thus
firmly established, that doing the will of God was not only the purpose, the
pleasure and the pursuit of His life, but also its actual and constant practice.
No other soul was as equal to Wasson's quaint confession as was the Man
of Galilee : " If I would pray,
I've naught to say.
But this : That God would be God still.
For grace to give.
So still to give.
And sweeter than my wish His will".
Is not our next logical question this : What was the personal, practical
product of such perfect practicing of the will divine ? What sort of a char
acter-structure did it rear ? What type or pattern did it leave to the world ?
In a word, what kind of a life did it produce ? Theoretically, the effect of
such a practicing of the will of God should have been the ideal, the perfect.
If the will of God is the best possible will, if it justifies the Bible's repre
sentations of it as "That good and acceptable and perfect will" of God, if
John's dictum be true, " He that doeth the will of God abideth forever ",
then three things may be demanded of such a person :
I . That the perfect doing of that perfect will of God should produce
the highest possible character. Why? Because God is the Creator, and
only He can make such laws, which, when obeyed, will insure one's being
its highest end.
2. That the perfect doing of the perfect will of God should bring the
greatest possible happiness. God is the great Father and He would make
only those laws for His children, which, on being obeyed, would contribiite
to their fullest happiness.

THE SECRET OF JESUS' LIFE. 133
3. That the perfect doing of the perfect will of God should result in
the longest possible continuance of being. God is eternal and legislates,
therefore, only for eternity. God is man's great benefactor, and, where His
will is not intercepted, must preserve my soul " From this time forth and
even forevermore". To put it succinctly, complete perfection, complete
pleasure and complete permanence must follow from the full surrender of
the human will to the will divine.
What do we find to have been the case in our Lord's life ? Did He not
fulfil each of these three great conditions? He was not only the noblest,
the purest, the holiest character of time, but He is the only perfect man
our race has produced. Human imagination can picture to itself no higher
order of being than He. Do not the Norsemen's title of "The White
Christ ", and Lanier's representation of Him as " The Crystal Christ "
command universal consent ?
What of the second test? Did not perfect obedience to the Father's
will yield Him complete happiness ? He was " The man of sorrows ", but
He was "Anointed with the oil of gladness " above His fellows. He was
able to rise above more trial, temptation, opposition and hatred than has
come to any other being on our earth, and yet He was calm, serene, brave,
and glad through it all. "Who, for the joy that was set before Him,
endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down on the right hand
of the throne of God ".
Apply the third test — the longest possible existence. Is. He not by all
odds the first of the immortals ? Was not death powerless to hold Him ?
Is He not now alive forevermore ? Has He not the keys of hades and
death ? He who rests his faith in Him may sing with the utmost confidence :
" To Thy beyond no fear 1 give.
Because Thou livest, I live.
Unsleeping Friend, why should I wake
Troublesome thought to take
For any strange tomorrow ? In Thy hand
Days and eternities like flowers expand
" Odors from blossoming worlds unknown
Across my path are blown ;
Thy robes trail myrrh and spice
From farthest paradise;
I walk through Thy fair universe with Thee,
And san me in Thine immortality "-
And now, having reached this high point, where are we ? We have
looked upon His claim that God's will was the guiding star, nay, the rising
sun, of His life ; we have examined the facts upon which that master claim
rests, and assured ourselves that it was warrantable and conclusive. We
have scrutinized the effect of Christ's obedience and found it yielded a
normal product, answering the soul's threefold aspiration for perfection,
pleasure and permanence. Are we not, therefore, face to face with the
question as to what is the essential, practical import of all this for us ?
Surely it can have but one explicit and ethical meaning for us. It is this :

134 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
that if we would come out at a like goal, we must take the same path Jesus
chose. Do we want to attain to the highest character ? Do we want abid
ing happiness ? Do we crave a true immortality ? All this has but one
secret — doing the will of the Father in heaven. Until Christ's secret is ours
we shall not fulfil the genius of our being ; we shall chafe and fret, be ill at
ease and generally unhappy ; and the life within us, instead of expanding,
will grow shallow and negative and gradually die out.
" Have you ever thought, my friend.
As you daily toil and plod
In the busy paths of men.
How still are the ways of God ?
" Have you ever paused in the din
Of traffic's insistent cry,
To think of the calm in the cloud.
Of the peace in your glimpse of the sky ?
" Go out in the silent fields.
That quietly yield you meat.
And let them rebuke your noise,
Whose patience is still and sweet ".
Ah ! this is our difficulty. Our wills are in command, and not God's
will. Victor Hugo once said, "Men do not lack strength, but will". It is
God's will they lack. By so much as that will is not ours, by so much our
characters are defective, our hearts discordant, our lives de-vitalized. No
one has got closer to this truth, it would seem to me, than our Quaker poet,
who has in a single verse forever signalized the truth :
" And so I sometimes think our prayers
Might well be merged in one.
And nest and perch and hearth and church
Repeat, ' Thy will be done ' ".
This step but leads to another. Having come face to face with this
secret of secrets, we ask most eagerly how we may make it ours. How
may we be sure that we have taken God's will ? We do well to ask that
question, for there is a great deal of talk these days about absolute surrender,
which is ignorant, unscriptural, unphilosophical, and generally wide of the
mark. In many quarters the word surrender has become scarcely more
than a shibboleth. People talk glibly of surrender who do not know what
surrender means.
{a) To begin with, it is not a thing of the emotions, but solely of the
will. It is, therefore, a step to be taken deliberately, dispassionately, and,
above all, positively. I have known people to declare their surrender when
they were under excited feeling, who were at the time as little capable of
taking so serious a step as a child.
{j}) It is a thing of fact and not fancy. A prominent religious teacher,
speaking to a great conference of Christian people, a few years ago, sug
gested that only when one could sign his name to a blank sheet of paper
and hand it back to God for Him to fill in as He chose, was he really justi
fied in professing surrender. I submit that this is a specious test, and its

THE SECRET OF JESUS' LIFE. 135
effect most unwholesome. Imagine Christ working Himself up into such
an unreal state. He dealt with the will of God as it came to Him at the
time, and not as it might address itself to Him at some future juncture.
The call which God's will makes to us in the present is the only true test of
surrender. God has put me in a hard place ; do I accept it from Him and
in no way fight against the appointment ? My position is not what I like,
but God keeps me in it. Am I content therewith ? My life is an aimless,
circumscribed one — a tread mill, a tedious round, the dead level of the
commonplace. Am I willing to keep on and be cheerful, if God does not
turn me upon another path ?
(c) And this, mark you well, is only the first step — the beginning.
Surrender, as I understand it, is a compound act. I had almost said a
complex act. It is a ladder of three rungs, set far apart and mounted only
by long, hard strides. The first rung is submission to God's will — resigna
tion, as we more commonly express it. The second is obedience to God's
will. Not merely accepting it negatively, as if there were no other alterna
tive, but giving ourselves gladly, fully, loyally, to its fulfilment. The third
is exalting God's will — accounting it and rejoicing in it as the best possible
will. Faber was standing on this top rung when he breathed that immortal
prayer : " I worship thee, sweet will of God,
And all thy ways adore ;
And every day I live, I seem
To love thee more and more.
" He always wins who sides with God ;
To him no chance is lost.
God's will seems sweetest to him when
It triumphs at his cost.
" 111 that He blesses is our good.
And unblest good is ill.
And all is right that seems most wrong.
If it be His sweet will ".
How many of us have brought our feet to that rung ? Until we have,
we cannot make claim to full surrender to the will of God, but if we have
reached that high and holy station, we are fast becoming our truest and best
selves ; it will be easy to be brave and sweet and reposeful, and natural for
us to be happy ; and we shall rise above all ordinary, temporal limitations,
passing out of the bondage of the material into the glorious life and liberty
of the Son of God. " To be made with Thee one spirit.
Is the boon I longingly ask.
To have no bars 'twixt my soul and Thine,
Myself, Thy servant, for any task.
Life, life, I may enter through Thee, the door.
Saved and sheltered forevermore".

* FAITH IN CHRIST DEMANDED BY GOD AND THE SPRING OF
RELIGIOUS ACTION.
(St. John 6 : 29.)
by rev. nathan e. "wood, r>. t3.,
President of Newton Theological Institution, Newton Centre, Mass.
It is needless for me to enter into introductions. You have already, in
this course of study and addresses, had the Gospel of John, the " Pearl of
the Gospels", analyzed by competent, scholarly and devout men. I said
devout men, because it remains forever true that, " If any man willeth to do
His will, he shall know of the teaching whether it is of God" (John 7 : 17).
Devoutness is a key which unlocks the choicest treasures of such a Gospel
as that of John. One must sit fixedly with him in his quiet chambers of
meditation, and in the atmosphere of peace, if one would think his way into
the heart of his Gospel. The simple historic facts could be somewhat easily
narrated, but such an interpretation of them, and such a philosophy of
them, and such a living of them over again as John gives could come only
out of a heart and mind which had long been occupied by Jesus Christ.
The facts are given, but they are the facts explained after long pondering in
the luminous presence of the Holy Spirit. His Gospel is peculiarly, there
fore, food and drink to the soul which hungers and thirsts after Christ.
I will proceed at once to my assigned service and theme which was
phrased for me, " Faith in Christ Demanded by God and the Spring of
Religious Action ", John 6 : 29 — " This is the work of God, that ye believe
on Him whom He hath sent "
There is a kind of faith which Jesus both commends and commands as
an indispensable prerequisite or condition in order to His healing of men's
infirmities, but which, in so far as we have any evidence, is not the saving
faith through which the soul is knit to Christ. Significantly, it occurs always
in connection with miracles of healing.
The Roman Centurion (Matt. 8:10) is emphatically commended for his
faith in expecting the healing of his servant, and yet there is no evidence
that he was then or became afterward a disciple of Christ. His faith was
not of the kind which knits the soul to Christ as Saviour and Lord. The
men who brought the palsied man (Matt. 9 : 2) and let him down before
Christ to be healed, were also strongly commended for their faith, although
there is no evidence that they were in any sense disciples of Christ. Indeed,
the circumstances point inferentially and strongly to the fact that they were
not disciples, but only a part of the great multitude who had seen the miracles

* Delivered at the Third Conference, held at the Beneficent Congregational Church, December 9, 1903.
136

FAITH IN CHRIS T 137
of Christ in other places. The two blind men whose history is given in
Matt. 9 : 27-31, were given sight with the words, "According to your faith be
it done unto you".
Jesus had previously asked them, " Believe ye that I am able to do this ? "
His ability to give them sight was the only point on which their faith fast
ened itself. There is no evidence that they received any other benefit from
Christ than that of eyesight. Apparently they were not joined to Him in
discipleship, although they did afterwards spread abroad His fame as a
miracle worker who had special ability to give blind men their sight. Blind
Bartimeus (Mark 10 : 46-52) also had a faith which centered in his belief in
Christ's ability to give him sight, but there is no convincing evidence that
his faith embraced Christ in any inwardly saving sense. It is a mere possi
bility that V. 52 may indicate some form of discipleship when it says, "And
straightway he received his sight and followed Him in the way". All of
these are illustrations of a faith which our Lord commended and without
which He would not perform His miracles. It was a condition required of
man but was of a sort {sui generis) which must be described or defined by
the results affected through it.
What, then, is this faith and wherein does it differ from that faith
which is always allied with inward union with Christ in salvation ? This
faith rests on evidences of miracle working which they had seen or had
heard reported in definite details. They believed, on the ground of what
they had seen and heard, that Jesus had ability to heal, and this confident
assent to His power was their faith. It did not bind them to discipleship.
It did not reach a state of soul-surrender to Christ, nor a vital union of the
soul with its rightful Lord. It did not involve an inward moral obedience of
heart and life to the rule of Christ. They were not, in any evangelical
sense, behevers in Christ.
But yet this faith, as far as it went, rested on the same grounds as the
higher faith, which is both the condition and the expression of the regener
ated life. Both kinds of faith alike rest on evidence, the first kind on
evidence of the ability or power of Christ, the second kind not only on the
power of Christ, but on the perfectness of His moral character, on His claim
to be divine, and on His ability to give eternal life. If several instances had
been definitely reported to the blind men, and especially if they had been
witnesses to a few alleged cures, where the King had healed men, they
would have believed in the ability of the King to heal, somewhat regardless
of what sort of a moral character the King might possess. I do not see
that the faith of these men implied any assent to the moral character of
Christ, or any acceptance of His divine claims. It reached only to the point
that He had ability to heal, as was abundantly attested by evidences of
such healing already accomplished among the people.
Now saving faith rests on this evidence also, but goes so far beyond it
as to give it a wholly different and unique quality. It assents to His ability
to heal. His character as Holy and perfect. His claim to be the Son of
God, and such a voluntary embracing of Christ, as issues in a submission

138 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
of all the will and the life to the authority and the rule of Christ. The first
sort of faith is that ordinary confidence which arises upon presentation of
certain evidences, which seem reasonable, that a man has power or ability.
Such faith may lead one to cast one's self on that ability for help, at least
to the necessary extent. It may be for physical healing only as in these
illustrations from the Gospels. It does not imply any radical change in the
inner life or in the outward conduct.
The second sort of faith is in the sphere of the moral life where there
is voluntary assent to the truth that there can be but one ruler, lawgiver
and Lord, and that one, Jesus Christ, to whom the soul yields unhesitating
obedience and love. This faith means a radical change of both inner
life and outward conduct. It is the invariable accompanyer of the regener
ating work of the Holy Spirit, and expresses the new attitude of the soul
toward its new found Saviour and Lord.
I have been thus careful to analyze these two sorts of faith and to
differentiate them because they are both still present in human life as
much as when our Lord was here in the fiesh and dwelt among us. Men
may believe that Jesus Christ is able to do what He says that He can do,
and even assent to His claim to be divine, and assent to His miracle-
working ability, and this faith may be a very genuine one of its sort, but
still fall far short of that faith which joins the soul to Christ in a vital union,
so that a man may say, " I am in Christ ", and " It is no longer I that live
but Christ that liveth in me ; and that life which I now live in the flesh, I live
in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God " (Galatians 2: 20). This kind
of faith is more than simple intellectual credence. It is indeed a voluntary
assent to Christ, but is not that highest assent whose expression is loyal and
loving obedience. It is so different in degree as to be practically different
in kind from the faith which is the evidence of a Christian believer's
" union with Christ ". It is not evangelical faith.
A second though inadequate conception of faith is that given in
Hebrews 11:1. " Now faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction
of things not seen ". This is often supposed to be in the nature of an exact
definition. In reality it describes but one aspect of faith. The remainder
of the chapter, in which is the muster-roll of heroes of the Kingdom of God,
shows just what characteristic of faith was in the writer's mind when he
wrote this so-called definition. These heroes were in the midst of great
difficulties. They met almost insurmountable obstacles. They suffered
continual contumely and obloquy. They were robbed of their earthly
possessions. They were hunted, persecuted, and despoiled of the things
which minister to the outward comfort of fife. In their constant distresses
and deprivations, they saw by faith " things " which should be their own
possessions where "there was none to molest or make afraid", and other
things which had no material form, and hence could not be seen as could
the things here and now. Their faith grasped and embraced these things
which God held in reserve for them after life's weary struggle was over. So
vivid was this faith, that these things seemed to them already in their

FAITH IN CHRIST. 139
possession, although they were only "hoped for" and "not seen" as yet.
" For they that say such things make it manifest that they are seeking after
a country of their own " (Heb. 11 : 14).
Now it is true that faith may grasp things, seen or unseen, but that is
only one characteristic of it, and by no means describes its true nature. It
is a superficial description and was never meant to define the essential
nature of faith. In so far as the writer intended to cover one phase of faith,
it covers it adequately, but it is not an adequate definition for the whole
of It. Hence, when people often express the hope or expectation of a
heavenly home, the enjoyment of heavenly things, the possession of heavenly
estates, and otlier supernal equipments, and fancy that their faith grasps
these so certainly as to furnish reasonable ground for obtaining them, they
labor under an utter misconception of what true faith is, both in its nature
and in its objects. Many modern Christians have their whole foreground of
faith filled with " things hoped for " which are better than what they now
possess ; things which will give them greater comforts than they now enjoy ;
things which will change poverty into wealth, and want into affluence ;
things which will stay by them without being looked after ; — in a word, faith
has for its object " things hoped for ". Now this is a wholly inadequate
description of faith.
The same writer gives a far clearer and more essential description of
faith when he says, " By faith he forsook Egypt, not fearing the wrath of the
king; for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible" (Heb. 11 :27). This
is a clear recognition of the personal element in faith, which unites heart
to heart, soul to soul, person to person. Moses laid hold on God, and rested
in Him, with whole confidence that God would take care of things, and
would provide for him both in the matter of his safety from the wrath of
the king, and also in the providential guiding of his steps. God was the
source of his strength to endure, and the object of his faith. This state
ment, therefore, uncovers and discloses what I conceive to be the primal
and essential principle in faith.
The word faith (pistis) does not occur in the Gospel of John, and occurs
but once in his Epistles. "And this is the victory that hath overcome the
world, even our faith " (1 John 5:4). The word occurs frequently in every
other book of the New Testament, except in the writings of John. It has
its most numerous use in the Epistles of Paul, who writes it almost one
hundred and fifty times, exclusive of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The word
faith must certainly have been a very familiar everyday word on the lips of
the early Christian disciples, if we may judge by this frequent use of it in the
New Testament writings. Hence its entire absence from the writings of
John, with the single exception, must require a careful explanation based
on an analysis of the psychology of the religious experience.
The one time when he uses it would seem to be a case where his pen
slipped into the use of the word which was so familiar to all about him, but
which was not his own habitual and deliberate mode of conceiving that
relation of the soul to God in Christ which is called faith. I am the more

140 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
persuaded of this explanation because he proceeds instantly, in the very
next sentence (v. 5), to emphasize his own usual idea of the nature and
action of faith. "And who is he that overcome th the world but he that
believeth that Jesus is the Son of God ? " In other words, John does not
view faith as an abstract thing, or as a definable entity. But while he does
not use the word faith {pistis) excepting the one time, he does use the verb to
believe {pisteuo) more than a hundred times. Hence it would appear that
his conception of faith holds in it that subtle shade of difference which
exists between a noun and its cognate verb. He thinks of it always in the
spirit and mould which are characteristic of a verb. The noun faith is
abstract and definitional of an entity. The verb "to believe" has in it
action, movement, life, and especially in view of its supreme object. It is
impossible to imagine John, with his modes of thought, writing such a state
ment of faith as that in Heb. 11:1. It is wholly foreign both to his exper
ience and to his point of view. His thought lies in the other hemisphere.
He does not look into the soul of man to find and analyze faith. He
looks first at Jesus Christ, whom he sees luminous, gracious, redeeming,
almighty, and then secondly at the soul leaping forth to embrace Him and
appropriate Him. Hence it seems to me that John's conception of faith
is more closely allied to life, action, vital union, than it is even to the intel
lectual perception of the truth, however clear.
It is easy to place the ictus on either of these two sides of faith. The
perceptional side, with all its clear vision of Christ and the glorious power
and passion of His person, may seem the most important side ; or the side
of impulse and life, which spring forth in fruitful currents from the knowing
of Christ, may seem the most emphatic to the man who is in closest relations
with his fellow man. I am unable to accept the statement of Professor William
Sanday, of Oxford, although I have the profoundest respect for his scholarly
opinions, when he says, " Compared with St. Paul's conception, we may say
that faith with St. John is rather contemplative and philosophic, where with
St. Paul it is active and enthusiastic " (Sanday, on Romans, p. 32). This
seems to me an interesting and curious illustration of the method of criti
cism on subjective grounds. We form a preconception of a man's mode of
life or of his personal characteristics, and then compel the interpretation
or description of all his thinking or acting to lie in that mould.
We forget that man is almost infinitely diversified in his ways of mental
approach to a subject as well as in his mental moods. He will, indeed,
have his usual method of thought, but it will be broken in upon again and
again, and the unusual will usurp its place. John was a meditative and
philosophically inclined man, but that does not preclude his thought from
being cast in forms of intense action. He conceives activity, however,
from the side of the inward sources and states rather than from the side of
outward deeds, and especially does he conceive faith from the view point
of its object, Jesus Christ, rather than from the view point of faith as a pos
session of the soul.
Leaving, then, for the time Paul's conception of faith, I should say

FAITH IN CHRIST. 141
that John's conception was not at all what Professor Sanday suggests, but
rather the exact opposite. It is active, moving, living, and puts its emphasis
on the life side of faith, or in other words, faith is the activity of a soul
which is steadfastly putting itself in harmony with God. The one impres
sion which the writings of John make upon me is that faith is the expression
of a life at work in all holy ways, and that faith in Jesus Christ is a holy
living with Christ as both the supreme source and the supreme goal. Paul
in his keener analysis more frequently describes faith as " the living bond,
the secret point of union between Christ and the individual soul, the unio
mystica ".
But we must scrutinize more carefully the varied uses of the word faith
in the New Testament.
{fl) It is used to describe the body of Christian doctrine.
" If so be that ye continue in the faith " (Col. i : 23).
" One Lord, one faith, one baptism " (Eph. 4 : 5).
"The faith which was once for all delivered to the
saints " (Jude 3).
{b) It signifies an act of the soul toward these doctrines. It may be
favorable or adverse. " So belief cometh of hearing, and hearing by the word of
Christ'' (Rom. 10:17).
" Thou believest that God is one ; thou doest well : the demons
also believe, and shudder " (James 2 : 19).
(c) It signifies a favorable act of the soul toward the promises of God.
This is the familiar use in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and especially in
connection with the glorious roster of the heroes of the faith in the eleventh
chapter. {d) It signifies an attitude of the soul toward the works of God, as e. g.,
Miracles. "Though ye believe not Me, believe the works" (John 10:38).
" By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of
God " (Heb. 11:3).
(if) It signifies confidence that what is asked in prayer God will grant.
" But let him ask in faith nothing doubting " (James i : 6).
"And the prayer of faith shall save him that is sick " (James
5:15). In James, as one might anticipate, the aspect of
faith which is outstanding to his thought is the things or
works which are brought to pass through it. He sees and
defines faith in terms of results which are manifest in the
outward life. "Faith apart from works is dead" (James
2 :26).
(y) It is an act of the soul in trust or confidence in a person. If we
are looking for the primary and essential significance of faith and that which
gives it power, it will be found in this last statement which is really basal
for all the other uses of the word. Faith is an act of trust or confidence in
a person. Christian faith is an act of trust or confidence in Jesus Christ.
It is, therefore, intensely personal. It may believe in a doctrine, or prom-

142 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
ise, or work, but it believes in these because it trusts the person who is the
author or cause of them. " Dost thou beheve on the Son of God?" said
Jesus to the man who was born blind. He answered and said : " And who
is He, Lord, that I may believe on Him?" Jesus said unto him: "Thou
hast both seen Him and He it is that speaketh with thee ". And he said :
" Lord, I believe " (John 9 : 35-38). Seeing, hearing, believing and worship
ping are the steps here set forth. This expresses both God's and man's
idea of faith. God requires trust in Himself. Man says, who art Thou,
Lord, that I may trust Thee. I must see and know before I can believe.
John's Gospel is especially emphatic in this personal aspect of faith as a
living relation between man and God. Faith is not so much belief in truths,
or promises, or gospels as it is primarily and basally trust in Jesus Christ.
This is also the fundamental Pauline conception, that faith is the warm,
living, passionate, personal adhesion to Jesus Christ. We are said "to be
saved through faith", "to be justified by faith", "to be joined to Christ
by faith ", " to be preserved by faith ", " to overcome through faith ", but all
these imply a close personal relation to Christ. All these things will become
actualities of experience through the power of Christ whom we trust.
We must now attend to a still closer analysis of faith.
(a) An intellectual perception of God is not faith. It may lead to a
belief in His reality. " The demons also believe, and shudder " (James 2 : 19).
This perception does not differ essentially from any perception of reality.
There is no necessary moral quality in the intellectual perception of God,
even though it includes the moral character of God. The soul might perceive
His moral excellence and yet be hostile to Him. All that such a perception
does is to affirm the reality of God, and this is the necessary preliminary to
either faith or hatred toward God.
{b) Faith is both a perception of God as a reality and an acceptance
of and willing submission to Him as our rightful sovereign. Faith on the
one side is knowledge, and on the other is the hearty moral allegiance of the
soul to God. Hence it is not a blind act of the soul. It involves the highest
and clearest intelligence. It is a supreme act of both the intellectual and
moral reason, plus a holy choice of the heart.
Hence faith is inseparably interwoven with repentance and love in the
beginnings of the new life.
. {c) It will be asked how does faith on its intellectual side perceive God.
I answer (a) objectively through the Gospels, and (1^) subjectively
through our natures made in the likeness of God. These are separable in
thought for purposes of analysis, but they are not separable in fact. They
are mutually corrective and corroborative. Hence faith rests on the highest
rationality, on its intellectual side, and on the right exercise of the moral
nature, on its moral side. It is right knowledge plus right action based
upon it.
" He that believeth hath eternal life " (John 6 : 47).
" That every one that beholdeth the Son and believeth on Him should
have eternal life " (John 6 : 40).

FAITH IN CHRIST. 143
The Christian man beholds Christ, and beholding believes, and believing
is in possession of eternal life. One cannot say that a man has faith in
Christ and then obtains eternal life. Faith in Christ and possession of
eternal life are coincident in their beginnings. There could not be faith
without the possession of eternal life out of which faith springs, and there
could not be eternal life without faith as the expression of it. They start
together. They abide together. They are parts of one whole. It is as
useless to ask if a man could be saved without personal faith in Christ,
or if he could exercise faith without being saved, as it is to ask if one half of
an apple is not the whole apple. How explicit is John's declaration, " He
that believeth hath eternal life" (John 6:47). And he might have said
with equal truth, he that hath eternal life believeth.
Faith, then, begins at the point of union between the soul and its
Saviour Jesus Christ. The faith life is the beginning of the Christ life in
us, and the Christ life in us is the beginning of the faith life. They are at
the source of all Christian living, and inasmuch as the Christian life is a
work of God, we may say, in a general way, that faith is among the sources
of it. But if I were to define more exactly and discriminatingly my own con
ception, I should say that it is not faith which is the spring of religious
action, but it is the new, regenerate nature, begotten by the Holy Spirit,
which is the spring of it. Faith is neither the cause, nor the source, nor
the origin of that new nature, and hence is not the spring of religious action
or religious fruits. The new nature, the new life, of which faith in Christ
is the constant and true expression, is the spring of all holy desire, and of
all holy action. In a word, I should make the new nature wrought in us
by the Holy Spirit to be the spring of all right action. Faith is the continual
affirmation of the soul that it is Christ who is its life, and that it forever
enbraces and appropriates Him as the very essence of that new life. It is
the soul's perpetual acceptance of Christ. It is the soul's perpetual and
fixed looking on Christ as its Saviour and Lord, and, on the ground of what
it sees in Him, its intelligent and eager union in His life.
Faith, then, is one act in three parts. — i. The intelligent perception of
Christ as He is. 2. The flinging of one's self into the current of His life,
so that, by our own free choice, hereafter our life flows on in His life and
His life in our life. 3. The willing and joyous reception of Christ into
our life in order that He may be our justification and our sanctification. It
involves an emptying of seff, of all self help, and of all self righteousness,
and a receptive activity which appropriates Christ to itself. This phase of
faith might be called a free and rational passivity of the soul for the receiv
ing of Christ, and for the putting at His disposal all our being, powers,
purposes and possessions, so that He may, without hindrance from us, shape
and fashion us after " the good pleasure of His will ". All this we call trust,
or faith. Again I affirm that evangelical faith is intensely personal.
The secondary results are, of course, our confidence or faith that this
divine person will do for us what is best, that He will providentially direct

144 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
and overrule our lives, that He will provide daily bread, strength, wisdom
and grace. But true faith does not fix its attention primarily on bread, or
goods, or things, but wholly on Christ.
And now, having defined what faith is, I may say that really it is the
new nature which is the spring of true religious action, as it \i also the
ground from which grow true religious fruits. What part, then, does faith
have ? This, and this only, as it seems to me, that the soul by its free
and voluntary act having perceived and embraced Jesus Christ, now desires
to do what will please Him. It seeks to conform itself to His mind and
will. It tries to make its plans, purposes and goals coincident with His. It
not merely offers a passive submission of itself to Christ, but also at once
moves forward, actively and eagerly, into all the Christ activities, the Christ
plans for the world, and the supreme Christ goals. It is so completely
identified with Christ that it seeks to become itself a Saviour of the world
in company with the Christ who is the supreme Saviour.
As in the case of Thomas, first the .veil of doubt drops from his eyes
and he sees clearly Jesus, his glorious and radiant Lord, and then, in the
same instant, he flings, as it were, the arms of his love in a passionate
embrace of possession around Him, as he cries aloud, " My Lord and my
God ". This is faith, eager, passionate, personal. It is John's Gospel only
which records this incident. The reason is easy to find. It is coincident
with John's own conception of faith. He is always lying on Jesus' bosom,
looking up into Jesus' face, hearing Jesus' words, watching Jesus' works,
seeing the infinite reach of Jesus' love, conscious of the almightiness of
Jesus' care, feeling the evercleansing flow of Jesus' blood, and possessing an
ever present and vivid sense of Jesus' presence.
In the perpetual knowledge and realization of all this, he is at the same
time, on his part, voluntarily and eagerly joining himself, in an act perpet
ually renewed, to Jesus Christ as his only Lord and Saviour. This is John's
idea of faith, " the faith which overcometh the world ".

* JESUS THE BREAD OF LIFE.
(St. John 6 : 30-^9-) '
BY REY. OORKTEIjIXJS 'WOEIL.Ii'IilN',
Pastor of the Greene Avenue Baptist Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.
" I am the bread of life ". The analogues of Jesus were based upon
things most familiar to the minds of the peasantry of Palestine. By them
He articulated spiritual truths with human apprehensions. The staple food
of the daily life was bread. Accessorial luxuries might be unknown, but
bread was a necessity. Jesus likens Himself to this familiar diet, found in
every home. " I am the bread of life * * * if any man eat of this
bread, he shall live forever ". It seems so artless that the running racer
may read it. Its meaning lies so near the surface that the illiterate may
interpret it. And yet many that heard it from the lips of Jesus stumbled at
the saying. They gathered about Him in the hope of being fed with
bread from His wonder-working hands. ,He directs their minds from the
physical to the spiritual bread. Their interest is aroused, their desires
quickened. Their apprehensions grow clear and cloudy. Their emotions
flow and ebb like the tides. To their hardened hearts and opaque minds
the simple utterance became an hard saying. To them the bread became
indigestible stone — "who can receive it?" A great defection took place
among them, and " many of His disciples went back and walked no more
with Him ". Even the twelve must have been perplexed and tempted to
join the secession.
This revolutionary discourse upon " the bread of life " was the issue of
a wonder-work wrought by Jesus on the yesterday. It was the passover
season. All Israel should have been feasting ; but many were distressed
with hunger. Five little barley cakes and two small fishes — what were
these among the multitude ? Multiplied by the yearning sympathy and
compassion of Jesus, they increase sufficiently to satisfy all, with a bulk of
fragments left greater than the capital with which He began. The people
saw in this a sign, but alas for them, it pointed in the wrong direction. He
met them on the plane of their temporal need. They are content to abide
there and would proclaim Him king if He will continue with them. Their
spirit differed nothing from the Roman plebeian throng who cried "Ave
Csesar ", so long as they had the gratuity of corn to eat. A Jewish Csesar
to fight their battles and supply their temporal wants is all they ask. They
would take Him by force and make Him king — a bread king.
The wonder-works of Jesus were not wrought to encourage them to
believe that His power might be harnessed to the temporal life with all its

^ Delivered at the Third Conference, held at the Beneficent Congregational Church, December 9, 1903.
I4S

146 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
burden, strain and necessity. He had not come to ameliorate temporal con
ditions and make the life that now is, comfortable, easy and satisfying.
His mission in life was not to supplement the daily waste of the mortal life,
but to bring humanity into the inheritance of incorruptible life. Therefore
He denies Himself to mere social reform. He was the visitant who came
from above, testifying of the things which He had heard and seen. He
came from God — an ambassador to speak the word of God. He was the
light of life, the spirit of life, the witness of life, the way of life. He would
not be a bread king. He would be the bread of life, the life eternal. All
His wonder-works were signs hung out amid things seen, to be advertise
ments of spiritual things unseen. They were index fingers pointing to a life
beyond the temporal horizon. They were echoes from a higher realm ;
embroideries on the veil of nature, behind which dwelt the mysterious pres
ence and power of God. They were designed to arrest attention and arouse
interest. They were the terminus a quo by which souls might get on the
bridge of faith, and pass into the life which is life indeed. Such was the
design of the feeding of the multitude. When the people came the next
day, their very coming was latent with the cry, " Give us bread to eat ".
His answer to this cry was to turn their minds from the advertisement to
the thing advertised. The bread which they had eaten in such abundance
was a sign of the bread which nourishes the life eternal, that bread which
satisfies the deepest appetite in the human soul — a heart-hunger for God.
" I am the bread of life ". By the introduction of this analogy, Jesus
tells us that physiology has its companion law in the spiritual world. The
two run parallel. Every observance in the natural and seen should read us
lessons concerning the spiritual and unseen. By means of Christ's ana
logues we hav© the power of changing the focus of our vision. Instead of
looking at the things seen, we use them as a lense through which we behold
the unseen and eternal.
The zones of theology and biology lie next to one another. Not only
do they touch, but the line of demarcation which has hitherto indicated
their boundaries is becoming fainter. We begin to suspect that they are
upper and lower sides of one truth. Both theology and biology affirm
specialization in the several forms of life with which they have to do. They
employ different terms to designate the vital principle that lies behind the
specialization of life-forms. But the several principles, if not the terms, are
synonymous. Election is a theological term. Coming from the higher world, it seems
to wear the form of divine arbitrariness. Some minds have conceived the
doctrine of election as the only foundation upon which to build an assur
ance of the hope of eternal life. Others have repudiated it as a caricature
of the method of God. Men have fought both for and against it. Wesley
scorned the very thought of this doctrine, saying to Whitfield, " Your god is
my devil ". On the other hand, Froude, speaking from the historian's
standpoint, not the theologian's, says : " If Calvanism is indeed the hard and
unreasonable creed which modern enlightenment declares it to be, why has

JESUS THE BREAD OF LIFE. 147
it possessed such singular attractions in times past for some of the greatest
men that ever lived : if it be a creed of intellectual servitude, why was it able
to inspire and sustain the bravest efforts ever made by man to break the
yoke of unjust authority ? " We may have a duty to brush away the dust of
misconception that has accrued upon this doctrine. But the term stands
for a great vital principle, and is justified in remaining in the nomenclature
of the science of spiritual biology.
Biology employs another term— selection. This term comes from a lower
plane, plumed with the prestige of modern scholarship. But it has only aug
mented the theological term by the prefix of a consonant. Natural selection
and spiritual election are synonymous terms in the study of lower and higher
biology. They both stand for forces that crystallize in specialized forms of
life. Biology predicates structural changes. Features once prominent disap
pear, and potentialities once latent are prominently developed. By such struc
tural modification life survived the changes of environment and moved toward
more complex and higher forms of existence. Theology predicates that flesh
and blood cannot enter the Kingdom of God. Changes are coming. The nat
ural cannot abide. That is first which is natural, and afterward that which is
spiritual. The natural is the seed-plot for the spiritual. By spiritual birth
and spiritual growth we lose the features of carnality and develop the poten
tialities of spirituality. Ultimately God must be all and in all. God is a spirit,
and they who would survive must become one with Him in spirit. He that
is joined to the Lord is one spirit. This survival is on the principle termed
election. The election of theology is the selection of biology carried up to
the highest known zone of specialized life. Natural selection is the whole
creation groaning and travailing in pain, with outstretched neck straining to
greet the time when life shall emerge from the bondage of corruption.
Spiritual election is the spirit of God brooding over the human soul, seeking
to bring forth a life in the spirit and likeness of the Son of God. Theology
and biology stand and behold the Christ of God. If man is the end of
biology, then behold the man in whom the fulness of God dwells. If God is
the end of theology, then behold God manifested in the flesh. The one must
be satisfied that His life is the light of men, while the other follows Him as
the Lamb of God who leadeth into the pastures and beside the waters of the
life everlasting. Thou wilt show me the path of life. Both will join in say
ing, " I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness ".
The central theme in the Gospel of John is that speciaUzed life known
as eternal life and manifested in Jesus Christ. Eternal is the term describ
ing its quality, and, therefore, becomes one of the cardinal words of this
Gospel. Of this life certain predicates are affirmed. Its source and centre
is God. Its manifestation and channel is in Jesus Christ. Its inheritance
is through the process of a spiritual birth. Its environment is the spirit of
Christ. Its nature, type, law, purpose, and glory are all seen in the incar
nate, crucified, and risen Son of God. In the passage under consideration
we are taught concerning the meat upon which this eternal life must depend
for nurture and growth.

148 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Every form of organic life is supported by something external to itself.
Every peculiar type of life has its appointed supply whereby to maintain its
existence and development. Man has a threefold life. On the lowest plane
he has a material body, in common with animals. On the highest plane he
has a spirit, in the similitude of God. On the mediate plane he has a
rational soul, the nexus between spirit and body. The body is fed with
chemical nutriment ; the mind with thought ; the spirit with God. Each may
be imposed upon by deleterious supplies. The physical prodigal may leave
the father's table with its wholesome bread, and feed on the pods from the
swinetrough of gross sensual indulgence. The soul may leave the banquet
of truth and snuff up the fever-breeding air of pride, envy, covetousness,
authority, and vain glory. The spirit may be denied the vital tonic of holy
meditation upon God. But when each several phase of life receives its
appointed meat in due season, the tendency is toward health, comfort, and
satisfaction. But meat suited for one life cannot be substituted for another. When
the rich farmer sought to feed his soul on the corn that overflowed his
barns he became a fool and died. If the modern Christian Scientist (falsely
so-called) were to try the trick of feeding that figment of the imagination,
the body, on thought, his obituary would soon be written under the caption,
" Thou fool, this day shall thy body be required of thee ". Likewise the
spiritual life, the life eternal, cannot be supported except it feed upon God,
the Lord, the Spirit.
The Old Testament saints experienced this heart-craving. Out of the
Psalms there comes to us the cry, " My soul thirsteth for Thee, my flesh
longeth for Thee in a dry and thirsty land where no water is. * * * As
the heart panteth and brayeth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul
after Thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God ". Nor
did they cry in vain. They praised the Lord, saying, " He hath set a table
before me in the presence of the enemy. * * * Man shall not live by
bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
* * * I have treasured up the words of His mouth more than my neces
sary food ". Throughout the olden days God spake unto the fathers in the
prophets. Their faith fed upon God through every medium of revelation —
prophecy and providence, sacrifice and sacrament were tables where the
spirits of just men fed upon God. But He hath in these last days spoken
to us in a Son. In Him the abstractions of spiritual truth, which satisfied
the heart hunger of former days, are made concrete. He is the bread of
life whereof if a man eat he shall be satisfied.
There is a fourfold statement here concerning the bread of life. Each
statement supplies some additional detail to the former, and each one is
made emphatic by a double amen. The first statement advertises the
existence of the meat which abideth unto life eternal. The second statement
brings it to view, saying, "I am the bread of life". The third statement
informs us that this bread is His flesh which He will give for the life of the
world. The last statement emphasizes the necessity of our assimilating
Christ by the eating of this bread.

JESUS THE BREAD OF LIFE. 149
I. Work not for the meat that; perisheth, but for the meat which abideth
unto eternal life. There is a certain work necessary for the obtainment of
our daily bread. But this labor may fall into a false emphasis. It may
become burdened with undue anxiety and be made the pivot of carnal care.
Against this fretting anxiety Jesus specially warns us. Yet if the daily bread
came easily, man would be continually beset with the temptation to spend
his best energies in self-indulgence, and rest satisfied with the carnal pleasures
of his temporal life. Therefore the necessary work is not an accident but a
divine appointment. Responsibility calls up the latent good in human life.
Necessity sets to work the functions of brain and heart. Manual labor is
the outward scaffolding ; within is the structure of soul and spirit. Hence
the daily meal represents a greater value than can be computed into dollars
and cents. There is an undefined plus there. To this higher self man owes
his chief duty. All other responsibilities focus there. Its hunger cannot
be satisfied with the labor of hands or the genius of mind. It must have a
spiritual meat, which meat is given us by the Son of man. Our Father's
provision for spiritual life is in Christ Jesus. Him hath he sealed ; and the
only labor on our part to obtain Him is a spiritual work — the work of faith.
" This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him whom He hath sent".
II. Christ is this bread of life. First He quickens the spiritual fife and
then maintains it. Bread is a very significant analogue. The loaf that comes
upon our table is the sacrifice of the summer harvest. The grain grows in
the summer's glory, drinking in sunshine and shower. It moves like waves
of the sea under the blow of the August breezes. Then the hour of sacrifice
comes. The harvester's scythe cuts it down and cradles it. The thresher's
flail smites it again and again. Then it is ground many times in the mills
to become the finest of wheat. Kneaded and baked it comes at last to us in
the form of bread. Simple as it seems there is in it nutriment to supply the
fuel of life. It repairs the waste of bone, muscle and nerve ; it supplies the
energy that works in heart, brain and all organs. The body needs many
building materials — oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, iron, lime, soda,
phosphorus, chondrin, osmazome, cholesterine, and resin. What a perplex
ing multiplicity ! But they are all in the bread that supports physical life.
" I am the bread of life "- The meat of our spiritual nature is concrete in
His personality. In Him is life. His life becomes the sacrificial bread of
the soul. Equal with God in the eternal glory He becomes incarnate,
emptying Himself of that native majesty. A man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief. He is threshed on the floor of human sorrow and woe. On the
cross He is ground in the mills of God's mystery. Risen from the dead and
exalted to be a prince and Saviour, He is the bread of life. How many
characteristics are necessary to make our character godlike ? We do not know.
There must be love, humility, submission, patience, hope, gentleness, joy,
and all the qualities that entered to compose the character of the Son of God.
In Him all our need is supplied according to His riches in glory. In Him
are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. In Him dwelleth the
fulness of the godhead bodily. And of His fulness have we all received

150 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
and grace for grace. As we partake of Him, the soul gets out of Him the
redemption of the daily waste and the increment of the energy of the life of
God. We may not explain how it takes place, but we know from experience,
that as we meditate upon the beauty and perfection of the character of our
Lord, and as we pray that we may be transformed into His likeness, some
how our spiritual nature takes in the Christ spirit, and all the attributes of
His character transfigure themselves through our lives and conduct.
III. " I am the living bread, and the bread which I will give is My
flesh". That is to say, the bread which He gives us is life, for He came to
minister and to give His life a ransom for many. But it is His life manifested
in the flesh, — His life as we have it from the incarnation to the rending of
the veil of His flesh on the cross. Mere literalism of interpretation is a
snare here. In missing the figurative factor, Nicodemus asked: " How can
these things be ". The Samaritan woman asked : " How He could give
water having nothing to draw with ". The Jews asked : ' How can He give
us His flesh to eat ". To them it would suggest cannibalism. Here is one
of the cardinal errors of the Romish mass. They literalize this scripture in
the doctrine of the actual presence. If it were true, it would avail nothing.
Physically, the chemical properties composing the body of Jesus were no
different from those that make up our own. It needed the supply of food to
supply the daily waste, and increase it to the stature of manhood. It suc
cumbed to the mortal injuries inflicted on the cross. To eat thereof would
no more beget eternal life than could the heavenly manna confer a life
immortal. Verse sixty-three supplies the interpreting factor. " It is the spirit that
quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing. The words that I have spoken unto
you, they are spirit and they are life ". Literally a word is but a sound
in the air or a combination of letters made with ink upon paper. The
ear may hear the one or the eye see the other, and both remain mean
ingless. It requires a discerning spirit to read the meaning of words.
Christ Jesus was the word of God written in the character of the flesh. He
could be seen and heard and yet misunderstood. The Pharisees saw His
works and heard His words and said " He hath a devil ". The disciples
witnessed the same life and works and said : " Thou art the Christ, the Son
of the living God ". How did they know ? Jesus said : " Blessed art thou,
flesh and blood (not even the flesh and blood of Jesus) hath not revealed it
to thee but My Father in heaven ". Yet the revelation was through the word
made flesh. They had the spiritual discernment to understand the meaning
in the word. Physicians often write prescriptions for tonics to our systems.
In so doing the bulk of the dose taken has no medicinal value. The stimu
lating ingredients are written in drams and grains. The balance is written
in ounces. The latter are not designed to play an active part. They are
the vehicle which carry the other ingredients that could not be taken without
it. The flesh of the Son of God is the vehicle by which the life of God
comes to us, and in whom we may receive it.
There are eternal idealities and realities in God that constitute life.

JESUS THE BREAD OF LIFE. 151
Christ is the embodiment of these. By His incarnation and all its sequences
these became articulated to our conception and reception. He is the ver
nacular of God speaking the life of God to our souls.
Christ is the radiance of the glory of the invisible God. He is the sun
beam who brings us the God of light. The sunbeam seems a very simple
affair, a single thread of yellow light. A triangular piece of common glass
will serve to unwind this thread and reveal the prismatic colors. A perfect
spectroscope serves to show us not seven rays in the sunbeam, but innumera
ble rays, each haj^ing a distinct property, contributing to the life of the world.
The flesh of Jesus is a spiritual spectroscope. It is a simple matter to say
" God is love". But not until that love is unwound through the incarnation
and crucifixion of the Christ of God do we really know what it is. In that
love is the will of God, the patience of God, the holiness of God, the justice
of God, the power of God, etc., etc. So when we feed on the love of God,
made over to us in the gift of His Son we have " The living bread which
cometh down out of heaven, that a man may eat thereof and not die ". " This
is my body which is broken for you ". It is the corn of wheat which falls into
the ground and dies, that its life may be made bread for us. It is the rending
of the veil that the mysterious presence and fulness of God may be opened
to us. It is the breaking of the alabaster box, that the ointment of life may
flow out and the fragrance of divine love fill the universe. The incarnation
is the embodiment of God's will. The crucifixion is the overflow of His
love. To feed on God's will is meat indeed, and to drink of His love at the
cross is drink indeed.
IV. " He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood, abideth in Me
and I in him ". Spiritual assimilation is necessary. The life of Jesus is an
illustration. " As the living Father sent Me and I live because of the
Father ". The wisdom and power of Jesus were perplexing problems to His
adversaries. Whence hath this man this wisdom and these mighty works ?
They looked to the schools, but His name was not on the matriculation list.
They knew the carpenter shop, but no fountain of power sprang there. " I
live by the Father " ; here He discovers to us the secret. " The Father loveth
the Son ". That was the table at which He fed daily. If we would know
whence Jesus had that poise of life in which blended peace, patience, com
passion, joy and hope, He fed on the love of God. "The Father showeth
Him all things that He Himself doeth ". The Father was the secret of His
power. He could from Himself do nothing. He studied the will of God
and acted in the obedience of faith. He said : " My meat is to do the will
of Him that sent Me and to finish His work ". That will was made complete
on the cross. " Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My
life". Here then was the secret of His life and work. " I am come down
from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him that sent Me, and
this is the will of Him that sent Me, that all that which He hath given Me,
I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day ". By meditation
and obedience He assimilated the love and will of God. Even so must we
live toward Him as He did toward God.

152 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
This analogue of " Christ the bread of life ", is suggestive in many
directions. Irregularity in the daily fellowship and appropriations can not
obtain the best experiences and results. Special diet may be necessary by
meditation on specific attributes in the life of Jesus, for the reproduction of
the same characteristics in our own lives. Failure to expend the vitality
gained by meditation will clog and dry in the soul as a like process obtains
in the body. Unassimilated truth will cause distress akin to dyspepsia.
Many cannot bear the meat diet at all and must be fed on milk, and malted
milk at that. But to the soul that has the conscientious desire to grow in
spirit, there is ample provision in Christ the bread. To believe on Him is
initial faith. To receive Him is appropriating faith. To understand Him
is intelligent faith. To assimilate Him is active faith. Like all life, the
spiritual life is known by the food that it requires, and the process of replace
ment and transformed energy results in transfigured character bearing the
likeness of the Son of God.

* THE CONFESSION OF PETER— CHRIST THE WORLD'S ONLY HOPE
AND LIFE.
(St. John 6 : 68, 69.)
by rey. henry s. na-sh, d. !>.,
Professor of New Testament Interpretation in the Episcopal Theological
School, Cambridge, Mass.
" Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life ". I
count on your forgiveness, if, in order to come to this verse along the right
line I seem to repeat what may have been said in the course of the day; but
it is impossible to enter properly into any great verse of this wonderful book
unless you carry into it the light of a very large context.
There are some human sayings that have " Greatness thrust upon them",
and have become independent of their context in order to be made great.
Take for example our national motto, " E Pluribus Unum ", which was a
part of a receipt for making salad. There is a word that had to break away
from its context and history to have greatness thrust upon it. Again, you
have another humorous illustration in that saying from Terence, " Nothing
that is human reckon I to be foreign to myself ". If you ever carry that into
its context, I doubt if you will ever use it again. You will find it was spoken
by a Paul Pry who was speaking through a keyhole and who sought to
justify himself by speaking that ringing phrase.
But other words are born great, and such words must be taken with
their climate. It is impossible to find one's way along the right path into
any one of these deep words without carrying a large context with you. I
said in a preceding address that this book was all center. The problem of
its authorship is an exceedingly difficult one. I for my part believe that the
only possible explanation of ¦ the primary text of the Gospel is that it was
written, as the tradition says, by John the Apostle in his old age.
Let us call to one's aid what we know about the action of the human
memory in old age. We all know how memory behaves. If any of us are
getting towards fifty or some distance beyond, we know by personal experi
ence; more and more the intermediate state of the years from thirty
or thirty-four drops out, and as we go into ripening years, the events of
youth become contemporary. I can remember with more precision things
which happened when I was twelve years old than when I was thirty-two ;
and I expect to have that process go on, and if I live to be seventy, I expect
to be contemporary with "my little brother ", as Stephenson called the boy
he once was.

* Delivered at the Third Conference, held at the Beneficent Congregational Church, December 9, 1903.
IS3

154 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
We must add to this trait of memory, in connection with the authorship
of this book, the fact that John had no artificial memory. Our memory is
for the most part a memory of libraries ; but his was a natural one, it was in
his head. That is where he carried all his history. One knows how a man
who has had the help of no book to pin him down to accurate quotations,
and to precise scientific memories, when he comes to look back out of his
old age at the life of a great friend, will write the life of that friend. All the
accidental things will have dropped out, and only the heart of the story will
be left. And therefore the peculiarity of this Fourth Gospel is that it is all
center. There is nothing in it but the person of Christ.
The striking literary illustration of this is the fact that in the Fourth
Gospel you find no parables ; that is, no parables which strictly speaking can
be called parables. You have in the tenth chapter the so-called allegory of
the Good Shepherd, and in the fifteenth something which approaches the
parable, but they can not be called that in any exact sense. The parable
has disappeared in John's Gospel. And the reason is, that in the Synoptics
they are in connection with the doctrine of the Kingdom, but in the Fourth
Gospel the doctrine of the Kingdom has been swallowed up in the person
and presence of the King.
Again, to carry this thought one step further, John looks back at the life
of his friend through His death. Herein he is like Paul, but herein he is
also unlike Paul. For while it is untrue to say that Paul cared nothing for
the Christ of Galilee and Palestine, it is quite true to say that he did not see
deep into His life back of the cross. It is entirely true to say that because
Paul's memory was not stocked with the living words of the Lord Jesus, and
because his mind was not filled with the results of an intimate personal
acquaintance with Jesus Christ, the background of Christ's life, as Paul sees
it, is relatively narrow. But in the Fourth Gospel there is a great back
ground of the Christ of history standing behind the Christ of the cross. The
Fourth Gospel is all center. The center is the cross. But the eye sees deep
into the life back of the cross.
So the larger context which we must carry into this verse is this
structure of the Gospel. Then there are two details of the author's program
which must be added to this. The first is that in the Synoptics there is no
clear distinction between the church and the crowd. In the Fourth Gospel
the church is distinct from the crowd from the very first day. The little
company of personal believers who have been called by Jesus and blessed
by His intimacy, and through that have been taught to understand Him, —
they are distinct and separate from the mass at the outset, and remain so to
the end. The other element which must be carried into the context is our author's
conception of the Messianic mob. There is such a thing as a religious mob,
you know. And the religious mob is one of the elements in our author's
conception of our Lord's life. This religious mob, or Messianic mob,
is like the chorus in the Greek play. The chorus in the Greek drama has
no backbone of its own; it is constantly taking its color from the last

THE CONFESSION OF PETER. 155
speaker, if he speaks forcibly enough. Thus in any play of Sophocles you
can always tell by the color of the chorus what has been the theme of the
last great speaker. Even so in John's Gospel the mass of half-believers
is constantly taking color now from Jesus, and now from His opponents,
the Jews. Moving now backwards, now forwards, they, in distinction from
the disciples, are what Luther called " milk disciples ". They cannot digest
strong food. They cannot stand upon their own feet. The true believer is
the one who knew Jesus before He worked any miracle, and therefore sees
the miracles through the personality of Jesus Christ. But the other type of
believer insists upon seeing Jesus through the miracles, that is, upon seeing
the Master from the outside.
And now, coming to the more immediate context let us look at chapter
six of which our verse is a part. Chapter six, speaking in a figure, is the
watershed of the Gospel. It records the supreme crisis in the Master's life.
On the far side, beginning with the prologue, we trace in it the climax in the
story of our Saviour's popular success. On the nearer side of it, looking
toward the passion and crucifixion, lies the increasing difficulty of His
position, the deepening doubt and unbelief which issued on the cross.
You remember the contents of the chapter. Jesus had not thought it
best to go up personally to the Passover. So He must needs keep the Pass
over in His own way and He keeps it in the wilderness. He plays the part
of God's host out there in the wilderness, and His guests are a great miscel
laneous crowd of pilgrims who are on the way to the Passover. The result
of Jesus' wonderful miracle, that of the loaves and fishes, was that the
Messianic ambition of the crowd straightway sprang to life : as John tells us,
they undertook to force Jesus' hand and to make Him a King. They were
not real disciples. They were masters in disguise. Just as you and I con
stantly in our life with Christ and God play the part of master and try to
force our ambitions upon God and tell Him in effect that we will turn
Atheists, if He does not let us have our own way. So with these half-
believers. This Messianic mob tries, in the enthusiasm created by our Lord's great
miracle, to force Jesus' hand and to make Him a King. And there for the
moment, humanly speaking, the gulf opened at His feet. Humanly speak
ing. He came within an inch oi spoiling God's plans. If He had yielded,
what would have happened ? Galilee was a very small province of a very
small country. Jesus was in sight of Tiberius when He worked the miracle,
and if He had yielded a single inch to the ambitions of that Messianic mob,
there would have been a rebellion, an attempt at a popular uprising. So the
Master saw a great gulf yawn at His feet and you must carry that fact in
mind in order to understand this sixth chapter ; for straightway Jesus puts
the faith of these half-believers to the test.
First, He draws Himself aloof from them and goes off into the mountain
alone. On the morrow the crowd seeks Him and finds Him. He puts them
to the test. He makes faith hard. That is the way He sometimes treats us.
Christ and God in Him are constantly making faith hard. And why should

156 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
faith not be hard ? Why should faith be easy ? If faith were easy, it would
soon become cheap and not worth the while of earnest men and women.
But God makes faith hard in order to test the believer. And Christ here
deliberately made faith hard. And the way He does it, you will remember,
is to exalt His own personality. He will not come down to their level, they
must come up to His. He exalts His own personality and challenges those
believers to beheve in Him, not because of His miracle, but because of His
person. But they balk and will not believe on those terms. And you will remem
ber that every time they advance a difficulty, Jesus, instead of making faith
easier makes it even harder, until at last He uses the symbolical expressions
of the bread of life, and declares that unless they eat His flesh and drink
His blood they cannot be saved.
Thereupon the crowd said : " This is a hard saying " The Greek there
does not mean that Jesus' saying was one which was unintelligible. They
thought they understood it perfectly. And that was the whole trouble.
Oftentimes in the crisis of our own faith the real trouble is that we think we
know. We have got it in our heads, the thing is perfectly intelligible, only
we cannot live up to it. So the crowd did not say " This is a hard saying",
because they did not understand it. If they had said that, they would have
stopped to listen. For when you know a thing is not intelligible to you and
there is something inside of it, you stop and listen. But the crowd was very
sure they knew what it meant, and when they said " A hard saying", they
meant this is a bad saying, utterly impossible. No orthodox Jewish church
man can entertain it. And so they turned their backs upon Him and went
off to their old way of life.
Now Jesus turns to His disciples and says, with pain in His heart, " Will
ye also go away ? " Then comes the answer of the church, speaking through
Simon Peter : " Master, to whpm shall we go, it is Thou, and Thou only who
hast the words of eternal life ". The words of eternal life, — that is to say, in
the first instance, words which bring with them irresistible conviction. The
great mass of words do not, just because there is such a mass of them. The
newspaper brings no conviction, it never is meant to. The average novel
which we read is a kind of intellectual opiate when we are tired. Ninety-
nine hundredths of what we call our conversation carries no conviction, for
nowhere in it is a word that has wings, a word that breathes and burns. But
sometimes there are words that bring irresistible conviction, words that come
from the heart and life of the speaker and go straight to the heart of the
hearer. And Peter, representing the living church in all days, says to the
Saviour : " Thou hast the words of eternal life "- He means in the first
instance words which bring irresistible conviction and certitude.
" The words of eternal life" . When we have taken that phrase, which
is one of the constantly repeated phrases of this Gospel, and have studied it
long enough, the substantive swallows up the adjective. The word life is
enough. There was a time when I was a boy, and then mere life was eternal
life. When I was a freshman in college, mere life for me was eternal life.

THE CONFESSION OF PETER. 157
I do not believe any freshman, unless he is exceedingly mature when he
enters, is ever conscious of a lack of time. He has all the time there is and
a good deal more. Time seems to appear absolutely limitless to the boy just
entering college. But what happened as we grew up ? If we are earnest
there appears a disproportion between time and work. As years come on
and responsibilities are assumed and life is seen and understood in all its
vastness, the disproportion becomes almost terrible.
Then the tragedy of life begins. Life threatens to become a slow fever.
You remember Macbeth's words about the man he has murdered, "After
life's fitful fever he sleeps well ". The great trouble in growing up is that
life becomes a fever. What one of us has not the fever of life in his veins ?
What one of us does not, nearly every day, fall out of eternity into time, and
spoil our day's work by being anxious and worried about it, allowing the
thing we call time to put its jagged teeth into it and sometimes gnaw the
very heart out of it. And how are we to do a real day's work? Only by
living in eternity. The true Christian does live day by day in eternity.
Whenever a man really prays he passes out of time into eternity. The
reason why prayer is the Christian's fountain of youth is that it remakes and
refreshes him. For, when we pray, we go into eternity and return out of
prayer into time, refreshed and recreated.
Peter, speaking in the name of the living church, which I venture to
define as that body of men and women who have learned how to pray and
therefore have learned how to work, — Peter, speaking in the name of the
living church, says to the Master, " Thou hast the secret of eternal life •
Thou alone canst impart to men the art of doing the full day's work while
time lasts in the spirit and presence of the Eternal " And why ? Because
Jesus is the revelation of a personal God. What do we mean by person
ality ? Well, that is a very deep question. Perhaps I ought not to have
asked it, for, when a question is asked, you must try to answer it. But I
could not help it. The simple truth is that what we call real thinking con
sists in asking almost impossible questions and doing our best with the
answer. What, then, do we mean by the personality of God ? What do
you mean by your own personality ? For, unless you have some conception
of your own personality you are using a mere phrase, entering a mist of
words when you talk about the personality of God. What, then, do you
mean by calling yourself a person ?
We have not gone far into the mystery of personality. We have just
begun to spell it out in words of one syllable. That is all. But, so far as
we know anything about the personality, it means three things, or rather
three aspects of one thing. First of all, it means self-knowledge. The dif
ference between a person and the man or woman who is not a person is the
difference between people who do not know and those who do know them
selves. That splendid Greek motto put upon the temple at Delphi, " Know
thyself " is the maxim of every spirit. And here again let me quote Shake
speare to illuminate the subject. You remember how, in King Lear, Gon-
eril says about her father, after the awful tragedy has begun, " He did but

158 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
slenderly know himself ". It seems to me that is one of the neglected hints
in the study of Lear. There, almost under his breath, the great dramatist
himself gives us the clew to the tragedy. It grew out of King Lear's slender
knowledge of himself. And all of the real tragedies of life grow out of our
imperfect knowledge of ourselves. To know one's self is the first thing per
sonality means. And when we speak about God we mean that God alone
knows Himself.
Secondly, personality means self-mastery. Find a true man or woman
and you find beings who shape and plan their own lives. Find men and
women who are not persons, and you shall find jelly fish, and they are as
thick, sometimes, as jelly fish in any particular part of the Bay of Fundy.
I have leaned over my boat, sometimes, and counted jelly fish, it seemed to
me, up to ten thousand to a hundred square feet of water. Sometimes,
when one sees crowds of people driven towards barren conclusions and
barren actions, one is tempted to think that he sees a great mass of jelly
fish who are driven with the tide. When you find persons, you find people
who plan their lives and then live them according to a plan. Now, when
we speak of the personality of God, we mean that He is complete master of
Himself. Thirdly, when we speak of personality, this is our meaning. Find a
great human person, and you shall find someone who has the art of reveal
ing himself in everything that he does. I have known just one great man in
my life, Phillips Brooks. And he is the only great man I expect to meet on
this side of the grave. Phillips Brooks, because he was great, had the art of
revealing the greatness of his nature in mere trivialities. And just in pro
portion as we become personal and live the personal life, have we the gift
and art of imparting our entire self to those who touch us and those who
know us. Is not this the blessed mystery of friendship ? What do we mean
by friendship, whether it be that of husband and wife, or of man and man,
or of woman and woman ? We mean just this. Where you find friends you
find persons, and where you find persons you find people capable of reveal
ing themselves to each other so completely that trivial things cease to be.
There is no trifle in friendship. You outgrow trifles when you become
friends. Friendship is the life of persons walking together in the light of
the eternal. This is what we aim at when we apply the term to God. He alone abso
lutely knows Himself. He alone absolutely masters Himself. He alone
has in Himself the perfect art of self-revelation. Touch God and you touch
the whole of Him. There are no fractions in a person. There are no frac
tions in God. But where shall we go to find God as a person ? Where ?
except to Christ. Henry Ward Beecher once said that when he said " God ",
without thinking of Christ, there went up in his mind a vague mental mist.
That is just what happens to us when we say "God" without thinking of
Christ. There rises in our minds a vague mental mist, a mere spiritual
exhalation. When we want to see God as a person we go to Christ, and
through Him, — the absolutely perfect man, who is at the same time abso-

THE CONFESSION OF PETER. 159
lutely the Son of the Father, — God, or the personal life is revealed to us.
Seeing Christ, we see God. Touching Christ we have the revelation of
God's personal life. When we ally ourselves to the personality of God we
ourselves become in principle and in potence persons. And only through
our alliance with the personality of God, as revealed and incarnated in Christ,
can we become in the fullest sense of the word persons and do a person's
work. The alternative to the incarnation, the alternative to belief in Christ as
the final revelation of a personal God is Pantheism. The parable of Pan
theism cannot be better expressed than in the parable of the sick lion.
The lion became an invalid, you remember, and since he could not go out
to get his game he anticipated modern fashions and had a five o'clock tea.
He sent out invitations to all his subjects to come and see him. But the fox
refused to go. When the fox was asked why, he said that he had noticed
that all the tracks went one way, that the animals who went to that royal five
o'clock tea apparently never came back. This is the parable of Pantheism.
In Pantheism we have no foothold for human individuality. In order to
make yourself one with the eternal substance of things you allow that sub
stance of things to swallow you up. These words are in point :
"' Like bubbles on the sea of matter born.
We rise, we break, and to that sea return "-
God is a spiritual sea. We rise out of it as the bubble rises, and, like the
bubble, we break.
But in the Christian doctrine of the incarnation there is firm ground for
an ethical conception of personality, and nowhere else. So we, who in our
imperfect measure are members of the living church, that church which is
made up in all ages of the men and women who have learned to pray, and
because they have learned this have learned how to live in eternity and
to do their day's work with none of the fever of time in their veins, we say
to the Lord Jesus what Peter said in our name centuries ago, " Lord, to
whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life ". We are shut up
to Christ. And why ? I heard this morning of a man who discussed theol
ogy with one of our theological students while he was tinkering his teeth.
One comes upon theology in very queer places, sometimes. This discussion
happened in a dentist's shop. The dentist said to the theological student,
"My god is electricity". Well, that looks like a very clever thing. It
depends a good deal upon his manners. If he said it in a crude, sophomoric
way, all you can do is to wait until you and he can meet somewhere. You
cannot meet the mind of a man who says sophomorically, " My god is elec
tricity". To use Cardinal Newman's fine expression, "You might just as
well try to get up a duel between a dog and a fish ". To argue is to waste
one's time. You must wait for other opportunities before you try to defend
the work of Christ to such a man. But suppose he says it reverently ? Sup
pose he means that electricity is the latest revelation of the universe, and so
is the symbol of its majesty and mystery.
What do you say to him ? If you know your Christ you wont dream of

i6o THE GOSPEL OF ST JOHN.
burning him at the stake, and when you refuse to listen to a heretic you are
in principle burning him at the stake. If you are allowed by history to get
your hands on the reins of power you would resume the habit of burning
him in order to get him out of existence. But suppose we have outgrown
that habit, and have the patience to listen to the heretic, what shall we say
to him who reverently says that electricity is his god ? Something like this,
" Your words are all very well as far as they go ". But how far do they %o ?
What is the day's work of a man ? to mend broken human teeth ? Is it to
pick out .a little corner of the earth and know it well ? As Voltaire said,
" To cultivate his little garden " ? We have all kinds of avccaticns, but the
vocation of us all is to be deep-minded men and women, doing the entire
task of men and women. But what is the whole task of men and women ?
Why, as we spell it here, it is to take your city of Providence and make it
look a little bit like the New Jerusalem. To take New York, or any other
place and make it look a bit like the heavenly city. And how are you going
to do it ? If you take this and nothing less to be your vocation, and the
mending of teeth to be your avocation, a mere method of meeting economic
expenses while you give your whole heart to your real business in life, where
shall you go to build your strength ?
Where shall you get the power to do that day's work ? It is compara
tively easy to tinker teeth and do it well. It is comparatively easy to study
this or that branch of history or science, and do it tolerably well. But to
tackle this great day's work of making your Providence or my Boston, or
somebody's New York really look like God's heavenly and holy city, that
calls for a different sort of god. Electricity will not serve. Unless we are
to take the ostrich for our patron saint and try to solve difficulties by hid
ing our heads in the sand, there is just one way to take. We desire to
stand up to our great task like men, never faltering, never faint-hearted, but
being for the faint-hearted like that splendid figure in the second part of
"Pilgrim's Progress", Captain Great- Heart. Where shall the Captain
Great-Heart, standing for the redemption of society, find the secret of his
great-heartedness ? There is only one place where men who are seeking to
do this great work can find it, and that is in the revelation of a personal
God, who, through His friendship, promises to them all His power and
mind and goodness and might. We are shut up to Christ because He is
the one perfect revelation of a personal God, and because we would fain do
a man's whole work before we die. And so we say to Him, as Peter
said to Him in our name, " Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the
words of eternal life ''.

* JESUS' CONTROVERSIES WITH THE JEWS.
(See Chapters 7-10.)
by rey. mblanctholsr "w. ja.cobtjs, d. d.,
HosMER Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Criticism, Hartford
Theological Seminary, Hartford, Conn.
To understand Jesus' controversies with the Jews we must understand
the Jews with whom the controversies were held, and to understand the
Jews we must read their history from the time they returned from their
exile to re-occupy the Holy Land.
That history divides itself into three periods : The Persian period,
extending from 538 to 332, B. C. ; the Greek period, from 332 to 167, B. C,
and the Maccabean period, from 167 to 63, B. C, when Syria became a
Roman province.
Of the Persian period, little is known in detail. In general, the condi
tion of the people was sad. The rule was oppressive, especially towards
the close of the period, so that Alexander and his armies were hailed as
divine deliverers. In the Greek period the condition at first was favorable,
but towards the close it degenerated, reaching its climax of oppression and
corruption in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, against whose reckless
desecration of the temple and brutal imposition of infamous laws there
arose the famous revolt of the Maccabees.
Now, this revolt was in its essence a religious rebellion, crystalizing
itself in a party of national opposition to foreign rule ; but as the revolt pro
ceeded, the national party developed in the direction of political self-seek
ing, making its aim and passion official power rather than religious rights.
As a consequence, the old religious element in the party separated itself
into a party of its own, a party whose opposition was more against the
national party, which had become political, than against the foreign rule
itself. As this religious party, however, began to develop more zeal for reli
gion than for the nation, there separated from it still another party, a party
of revolutionary fanaticism, whose opposition was thrown against both the
other parties, while, as this national party in its political self-seeking came
to throw itself in favor of the foreign rule it had first opposed, there arose
another party of like political cast, but of no religious element, gathering
around the reigning family in Palestine, and having for its object the
re-establishment of the Herodian kingdom in the spirit of its traditional
policy, namely, the union of Judaism and Hellenism. This was a party

* Delivered at the Fourth Conference, held at Grace Episcopal Church, January 13, 1904.
161

1 62 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
whose opposition was against all the three parties as far as they were reli
gious, but whose favor was extended toward them all as far as they were
political. There is no need of my naming these parties I have described. They
are named in their description. The party seeking political gain was the
party of the Sadducees, the party which represented in itself one of the two
great tendencies present in the nation after its return from the exile — the
tendency to mingle with the heathen world, a tendency characteristic of the
priestly aristocracy among the Jews. The religiously separating party was
the party of the Pharisees, the party which represented in itself the other
great tendency present after the exile — the tendency to keep aloof from
heathendom and preserve the traditional religion pure, a tendency charac
teristic of the people of the Jews. The fanatical party was the party of the
Zealots, the party which believed in the sword to save the cause, a party
reckless in its zeal but strangely sincere in its recklessness, a party to which
Ben Hur might have belonged, a party which had a representative in the
apostolic circle. The dynastic party was the party of the Herodians, a
party which gathered around the political leadership that professed to be
religious, but whose union of religion and culture reduced religion to a hol
low farce and culture to a mimicry, and left nothing real but politics.
Now, if these parties could have been kept apart, there might have con
fronted Jesus a clear cut line between politics and religion. But how was it
possible for them to be kept apart ? With the Jew, religion was a part of
his national life, and national life was a part of his religion. No more
really so was it in Scotland in the time of the Covenanters, or in Holland in
the time of the Spanish rule, than it was in Judea in the time of Herod and
Pontius Pilate. As a matter of fact, much as the Pharisees disavowed poli
tics, and the Sadducees disavowed devotion to the Mosaic law, the national
fortunes of the Jews drew these two parties into alliances and then again
into oppositions that brought religion and politics into an inextricable
tangle in the nation's life, while the Herodians professed such religion as
they had for purely political ends, and the Zealots practiced such politics as
they dared with a purely religious spirit.
To be sure, in all this tangle of the secular and the religious, there was,
as there always is, an element among the people who kept religion pure.
You see it in such persons as Simeon and Anna, in the Baptist and his dis
ciples, and the family and kins-folk from which the Baptist and Jesus Him
self came. You see it also in a distinctive group of religionists, who were
not a party, or even a sect, but rather a brotherhood who came from the
same pious stock as the Pharisees, but, unlike them in their yielding to
politics, separated themselves even from the ordinary life of men — the
Essenes, who represented in themselves a deep underlying tendency always
present in the popular Jewish mind, a tendency to thoughtfulness on
religious things.
These were the Jews with whom Jesus had to deal. This was the
atmosphere in which His ministry was cast. Was it possible, then, for con-

JES US ' CONTR O VERSIES WITH THE JE WS. 1 63
troversy not to rise ? Bring before this politico-religious party life the spir
itual mission of Jesus, confront the conceptions of character which it created
with the spiritual personality, the divinely spiritual self of Jesus, and what
must have happened ? The Sadducees would oppose it all, because Jesus'
teachings were based on piety and not on culture, while Jesus Himself
involved a divine revelation and not an agnostic skepticism. The Pharisees
would resent it all, because Jesus and His teachings laid the hand on legal
istic ceremony and swept it away. The Zealots would not understand it,
because Jesus did not reveal Himself along the line of fire and sword. The
Herodians would have nothing to do with it, because Jesus had nothing to
do with the artificiality of their ideas and the politics of their isims. Even
the Essenes, who might be supposed to be rehgiously and spiritually nearest
to it, would turn against it, because Jesus would not turn against the every
day life and experience of men. And so it came that, though these parties
hated each other, time and again combinations among them threw their
forces against Jesus and His work. There was Jesus' healing of the with
ered hand on the Sabbath day. What cared the Herodians for the Sabbath
law and custom ? Yet they plotted with the Pharisees against His life.
There was the demand for a sign from heaven. What belief had the Sad
ducees in heaven or a sign from there ? Yet they united with the Pharisees
in demanding it. There was the open claim of His Messiahship which
Jesus placed before the people's leaders in the holy -week, and instinctively
Pharisee, Sadducee, and Herodians tried to break it down. It was the one
great fact of a spiritual movement in the midst of them, the one great fact of
a supremely spiritual personality among them, the one great fact of an abso
lutely spiritual claim before them that broke in upon the dream of their
political ideals, that smote the indifference of their materialism, that crushed
the self-conceit of their ceremonialism, and brought them all to realize that
if the Galilean won His way their day of power and life was gone.
Now take all this and see the light it throws upon the Fourth Gospel.
There is a great difference between the Synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of
John, and the greatness of that difference lies at the point of Jesus' dis
courses. In the Synoptists they are parables of fields and fiowers, of home
and business life, plain and simple talks on the common themes of every
day. In the Gospel of John they are deep and profound discourses on
themes transcending human experience, but the striking thing about these
transcendental themes is that they gather around the one subject of Jesus
Himself and His relation to God and the unseen universe.
Why this marked difference between this Fourth Gospel and the rest ?
Is it that the Synoptists alone give us the story of Jesus' ministry, the
Fourth Gospel coming from some later writer who knew more of Greek
philosophy than he did of Jesus' teaching? Could the same Jesus not give
both kinds of teaching ? Turn over the Gospel pages, and you will see that
significantly the Synoptic talks were given, almost all of them, in the early
part of Jesus' ministry to the peasant folk of Galilee, the simple-minded
people to whom these simple talks brought apprehension of God's spiritual

1 64 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
truth, while the Fourth Gospel discourses were given, almost all of them, in
the later part of Jesus' ministry to the ecclesiastical Jews of Jerusalem, the
speculative, controversial, the politically scheming Jews, whose one objec
tion to Jesus was that He claimed to have a spiritual truth from God to
declare. You see then what this gathering of the Fourth Gospel themes around
the person and self of Jesus means. It is not the poetizing of a philo
sophic writer who knew naught of Jesus or His truth. These discourses
are Jesus' teaching. They are the teaching of the same Jesus who speaks
to us in the Sermon on the Mount and the parables by the sea, only now He
is confronting the Jews' materialism, their political, self-seeking, nationalizing
materialism, with the great claims of the spiritualism of a God who must be
worshipped in spirit and truth, and who could be seen and known .only in
the spiritual Lordship of Jesus Himself over personal character and life.
It was the controversy which came naturally at the close of Jesus' ministry,
as the opposition to Him by the religious leaders came to its inevitable issue,
and Jesus' claims against it came to their inevitable declaration in the full.
Now, go through the scenes the Fourth Gospel gives us, and see how
all this works itself out.
I . There is Jesus in Jerusalem at the Pool of Bethesda. The impotent
man is lying on the threshold of supposed healing, with no one to help him
across. Jesus comes and says to him, "Arise, take up thy bed and walk",
and immediately the man was made whole, took up his bed and walked;
and the same day was the Sabbath. Ah, there was the trouble ! The scribes
and Pharisees are quick to the scent. They stop the man : " It is the Sabbath
Day, knowest thou not?" Everyone in Jerusalem knew that, if he knew
nothing else. " It is not lawful for thee to carry thy bed ". Everyone knew
that, too. " But He that made me whole, the same said unto me, ' Take up
thy bed and walk ' " " Who made thee whole ? " "I know not ". But He
must be brought to know, for the issue between the Pharisees and Jesus
must be straightway drawn. So Jesus came and disclosed Himself to him,
in order that he might tell the Pharisees. And he told them, and imme
diately they began to persecute Jesus and to seek to slay Him, because He
laid His hand upon the burdened ritualism of the Sabbath Day to break it
down. But why draw the issue ? Why not leave the Pharisees to the idea
of their Sabbath Day ? Simply because the Pharisees must come to know
that the Sabbath finds itself in no lordship over man, but only in such a
service to him as is possible by the lordship over it of Jesus Christ. The
Sabbath must be saved from the materialism of the scribes. The spiritual
Christ must be put in authority and power over it.
2. There is Jesus in Jerusalem again. It is the Feast of Dedication.
The people are in a great quandary about Him. Some say that He is a good
man ; others say He deceives the people. Some say tliat He is the Christ ;
others, that He has a devil. Murmuring and division among the people
because they could not understand how He could heal diseases, cure infirm
ities, cast out demons, raise the dead, show all the wonder marks of the

JESUS' CONTROVERSIES WITH THE JEWS. 165
Messiah and yet not reveal Himself to the world, the world of the nation's
politics, the world of the nation's policy against Rome. Into all this con
fusion Jesus steps, and on that last great day of the Feast, when the sending
of the great procession with its symbolic water of Messianic refreshing
testified to the people's confession that the Messiah had not yet come, the
Messiah they looked for, on that great day He stands, and over against all
this bald materialism of religion lifts up Himself in full announcement of
His spiritual self and person. " If any man thirst, let him come unto Me
and drink ".
O, the clearness of the issue ! The people of God confessing no Messiah
had come, and the Messiah in their midst ! O, the pathos of the situation !
The raging thirst for national power and life, and no thought of quenching
it anywhere save at the dried up wells of politics and culture, and the living
water there at their hand ! The helpless groping after a light, that groping
in the darkness of the world around them, and no thought of finding it apart
from the ignis fatuus of ritualism and revolution, and the light of life shining
before their eyes ! The constant problem of their relationship to God, and
no idea of solving it save only through a hold upon the history of the past ;
the promises, the covenant, the fathers, Abraham, everything back to that,
and there among them He Who is before Abraham was ! The ever present
irritation of their dispersion in the world, the ever sounding cry for a reali
zing of the covenant fold and the covenant care, for God's presence with its
mastering power, and no conception of how to secure this all, save through
the materialism of life, and there pleadirg with them the One Who was the
door of the sheep ; the Good Shepherd, Who was ready to give unto them
eternal life, and from Whose hand nothing would ever pluck them away !
And the days pass on while the shadows of Calvary gather. The Jews
do not see them ; the disciples do not perceive them ; no one is conscious of
them save Him Who had known of them all along and Whose soul was
troubled through them and exalted by them as no human soul could be.
" Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone ; but
if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit ". The hour was come that the Son of
Man should be glorified. The judgment of the Jews against the Christ was
fast approaching, but it should be a judgment of the Christ against the Jews.
" Now is the judgment of this world. Now shall the prince of this world be
cast out, and I " — oh, how the whole thing gathers up in the Christ Himself !
— " and /, if The lifted up, shall draw all men unto Me ". And the people
could comprehend naught of it, save to say, " How sayest Thou, the Son of
Man must be lifted up ? Who is this Son of Man ? "
Is it any wonder that as the shadows came they fell with greater dark
ness on the Jews than they did on the Christ ? A few months before, Jesus
had said to them : " I am the bread of life ; he that cometh to Me shall
never hunger; he that believeth on Me shall never thirst ". And now they
were dragging Him up before Pilate, and crying, "A malefactor! Crucify
Him ". Truly " The light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness appre
hended it not". To Pilate Jesus might say: "I came into the world that

1 66 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
I might bear witness to the truth ", and Pilate reply, " What is truth ? " and
put the truth upon the cross and let it die, and it signified but little to him,
a pagan mind of pagan training. What else might we expect ? But that
throughout His ministry Jesus should have held Himself up before the
people of God and declared Himself to them as the truth, and they cry out
against Him as the lie ! O Christ, how deep the gulf between Thy spiritual
self and the materialism of the world !
And they led Him away, and the soldiers crucified Him, and Pilate
wrote over His head " The King of the Jews ", and the Jews mocked and
railed at Him : " If Thou be the King of the Jews, come down from the
cross and we will believe Thee ". And as the darkness fell upon them and
the quaking earth rocked beneath their feet, they smote upon their breasts
and returned to their homes and said : " The light of this imposter has gone
out ". Yes, so it had, but only that it might burst forth again in resurrection
splendor. Yet they saw it not, for the darkness of their souls remained
within them ; and when the risen Christ was proclaimed the Saviour of the
world they killed the men who preached Him as they had killed the Christ
Himself, because ever stands the darkness of the world against the light of
God, ever blind to it and so ever ignorant of it, ever unreceptive toward it
and so ever hateful of it, till we come to realize that truth of truths — "This
alone is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and
Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent".

* UNBELIEF THE FUNDAMENTAL SIN.
BY REV. B. L. 'WKIXlVrA.N, D. D., LL. T>.,
Pastor of the Fifth Baptist Church, Philadelphia, Pa.
The profoundest text book in the world on Psychology is one that is
seldom used, either by teacher or by pupil. The greatest master of the
human mind is the last quoted in class room or laboratory. That text book
is the New Testament, and that master is Christ. We toss upon seas of
distraction, blown hither and thither by winds of uncertainty and reach no
haven, because we can not get or keep our course. We talk learnedly and
ineffectively of doubt and illusion and hallucination and bootless quest of
truth, because the very conditions of truth are wanting in us. We travel
according to the rules of logic, and reach, not a conclusion, but a new and
still more unmanageable term in a syllogism. We search the cold heights
of intellect by the colder light of reason, and find, not a soul but a phantom.
We call upon God and are answered by the echo of our own cry. We build
a fool's paradise and trip its ways lightly in the dance of death, and wonder
why life is not greater and more beautiful. And when we seek escape from
our prison-house of folly, we follow ways that lead everywhere except to
freedom. We shut our eyes to evil and take the road of blind optimism that
runs swiftly to the land of disillusionment. We shut our eyes to good and
take the road of blinder pessimism that runs more swiftly still to the abyss
of despair. We shut our eyes to fact altogether, and take the road of skep
ticism that begins in one darkness and ends in another. The way of self-
knowledge and self-surrender we do not take, and Christ says that that is
the only way that leads to freedom. Thus our problem remains unsettled
and life has no rest, because in our search for truth we pass truth by unrecog
nized. None the less the search for truth goes on. And this is well. For
man's first duty in a world of reality is to face the facts. Whatever the
theoretical difficulties of a philosophy of knowledge, the every-day man
assumes that the facts that concern his life are worth knowing and that they
can be known. Knowledge is relative, no doubt. We know things only as
they affect us. But as long as the only condition on which a rational universe
can be known at all is the condition that it shall keep faith with itself in all
its parts, the values that we find written in the equations of life must have
some kind of consistency throughout the system. That which the world is
to me it must be in its measure to every being like me, under like conditions,
wherever found. And for beings conceivably unlike me and for conditions
different from mine, the world must have its meaning, the values still pro-

Delivered at the Fourth Conference, held at Grace Episcopal Church, January 13, 1904.
167

1 68 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
portional, and, so far as the other life and mine have common bonds, con
vertible. The truth which to me is matter of slow reasoning may be to
another matter of intuition. But for me and for that other the truth is not
two truths but one.
This is only saying that the universe will keep faith with us as it keeps
faith with itself. Limitations will still hedge us about, and futility attend
much of our effort, but up to the very edge of our power the whole universe
is ours, and what we can compass we may keep. Faith is the first great
note of human sanity, faith in the honesty of the universe and faith in one's
own honesty in dealing with the universe.
Now faith is only one of an exceedingly rich group of words expressing
a disposition toward fair dealing. Belief, confidence, conviction, assurance,
trust, — we could multiply the list many times without exhausting the terms
properly belonging in it. And in them all we find the same dominant note.
It is the note of harmony, and constantly assures us that the universe and
we belong together. That which I see and hear and touch I cannot doubt
and live. And when the facts are certified to me, not by the warrant of my
own senses but by the senses of another, just as far as I have confidence in
that other I accept his experience as valid within the limits where it may
properly apply. And when it is no sense at all, my own or another's, but an
experience that has no traceable connection with the senses, that brings me
the fact which concerns me next, if the fact is duly certified I shall not doubt
it. Now the data of our mental and spiritual life though mediated by sense
are not sensible, for when I have them they are facts of consciousness, and
only more or less elaborate processes of reasoning tell us that it is through
the senses that certain of those facts of consciousness arise. Those processes
sufficiently repeated and suitably extended give us our world. The thing
we can never doubt and never be rid of is the fact of consciousness. What
is there is there. And being there it must be explained and accounted for.
To explain and account for part of these facts, we assume a material world.
To explain and account for another part we assume a spiritual world. To get
the whole implication of these worlds we are summoned to still further
explanation and accounting, and so our universe or complete world comes
to view. Conscious life, therefore, is a life of faith. I find certain facts within
me which I cannot doubt if I would. Interrogate them I may, nay must.
Doubt them I neither do nor can. And by a prodigious act of faith I pass
from that world of consciousness to a world of which I know nothing except
as the key to its understanding is within me, and the only warrant for whose
existence at all, so far as I can see, is my need of it. This applies equally
to the world of matter and to the world of spirit. In other words, the
universe itself is built by faith.
Of course this does not mean that the universe is only a creation of the
mind. It means that I proceed to the knowledge of the universe by faith.
My universe is created by faith. But this creation is creation only as a
process of personal experience. So far as the universe itself is concerned

UNBELIEF THE FUNDAMENTAL SIN. 169
my creation is a finding. It is there and I get to know it. But I am sure of
it and I can have dealings with it on the basis of faith and faith alone.
How shall we define this process or act of faith? By what words can
we make clear to ourselves what we mean when we say we believe? I
believe a thing when I accept it as real. Faith, then, may be defined as the
feeling of reality. It is the assent, not of the mind only but also of the heart
and will, whatever there is in the soul that grips. There are many specific
outgoings of faith, as there are many forms of reality. There is physical
reality. So sense perception has its corresponding feeling of reality. There
is intellectual reality. So the reasoned conclusion will have its corresponding
feeling of reality. There is esthetic reality. So the esthetic deliverance
will have its corresponding feeling of reality. There is moral reality. So
determinations of good and evil will have their corresponding feeling of
reality. There is a distinctively spiritual world. So the deeper judgments
of the soul will have their corresponding feeling of reality. But the feeling
is in essence one. It is just the soul saying, " This I find to be true ". The
thing is there and I have dealings with it.
One caution should be noted. As a purely subjective experience what
I find so is so. But my finding a thing so does not make the thing really so
in the world that transcends purely personal experience. Sometimes things
get into the mind that get nowhere else. We are obliged, therefore, more
or less constantly to test the contents of our mind, to make sure that the reality
we think we hold is real. Illusion, delusion, hallucination, dream, to say
nothing of the thousand shapes the unsound brain will conjure into being, —
these words stand for subjective reality that has no corresponding reality in
the external world. Part of the business of every waking hour is to make
sure that our faiths represent actual relations between ourselves and the
universe. The faith with which we are concerned to-day is always and
everywhere the living consent of the soul to have commerce with reality.
It is hardly necessary, but let us say it, faith needs no justification.
We can neither add to its essential character nor take away from it. It is.
And it is what it is. Like any other fact of experience it has to be taken as
it is found. Just as the mind brings with it the power to know and to feel
and to will, so it brings with it the power to believe. We cannot analyze it,
because it is a simple, ultimate mental fact. We cannot go behind it, be
cause it is at the beginning. Faith is part of the natural equipment of the
normal soul.
And we must not forget that unbelief may be as legitimate as belief.
The justification of belief is the justification of unbelief no less. This is
true whether by unbelief we mean the negation of belief or positive dis
belief. Let me be bidden to believe something that takes no hold upon my
life. The thing may be true, but it means nothing to me. There may be
mountains of gold in the moon. I know nothing about it. To me it is not
a living hypothesis. If you ask me to believe it notwithstanding this, I
can only tell you that I do not believe. There is no fact in my life upon
which such a proposition takes hold. So with disbelief. Let me be assured

17° THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
that in Providence there are men who habitually ignore the laws of gravity.
When they wish to go from one place to another they do not walk or ride,
they simply think of going and they are there. You tell me that such men
may be found in all parts of the city, on Westminster Street, on Weybosset,
on College Hill. What is my problem? I cast about within me for some
fact of experience on which this new fact can take hold. I find none. More
than that, this proposed fact contradicts every fact of my experience, so that
my entire life is a protest against its acceptance. What shall I do ? Nothing.
Yet that is not quite what I shall do. I shall do nothing, but I shall decide
that the man who requires such faith of me is deluded, unless I exercise the
right of sound reason to set him down as a liar. Believe I cannot. Dis
believe I must.
What the mind does is to assent to what it finds. If its outreach in any
direction ends in the discovery of nothing, there is no call upon the soul for
faith. Belief is the soul's assent to what it finds to be there. The grounds
on which the soul is satisfied are many and of many kinds. I can find an
object by my own eyes and ears and hands. I can find it by the eyes and
ears and hands of another. I can find it without eyes and ears and hands,
my own or another's, by signs which eyes and ears and hands can neither
take nor interpret. But whenever and however found, reality duly certified
by relation to the unquestionable facts of consciousness calls for assent in
living terms. The character of the response will bear some ratio in form
and value to the reality with which one enters into relation. If I believe
that two and two make four, I will make my reckonings accordingly. If I
believe that man is mortal, I will make my plans accordingly. If I believe
that woolen is fitter material for clothing in winter than silk or cotton, I will
dress for the cold in woolen. If I believe that a certain course of business
procedure is profitable, I will follow that course. If I believe that it is
better to be well than sick, I will seek health. If I believe that it is my duty
to think of others rather than of myself, I will think of others before I think
of myself. If I believe in God, I will serve and worship Him. What a man
assents to and accepts as real, shapes his life. For good or for evil, belief
determines conduct. Not what a man calls his belief, but his real belief
shapes his life.
The thing that is natural and right for the normal man is what the
normal man will do. But in the face of all that is natural and right we find
men failing to do what normal life requires. Here is a man to whom reason
opens the way of honor and profit, and instead of taking that way the man
walks straight to uncleanness and poverty. Here is a man who knows where
duty lies, and he turns to the end of the world that lies farthest from duty.
Here are arguments that cannot be gainsaid or denied, and yet they fall
unheeded. Here is a world that is absolutely essential to the explanation
of the world in which men live, and behold men treat it as less than a name.
What is the result ? Disorder in the whole life in proportion to the violation
of the fundamental demand of reason, that belief shall respond to fact duly
certified and properly presented. The failures of which we now speak are

UNBELIEF THE FUNDAMENTAL SIN. 171
so many cases of refusal to keep faith with the universe. This should be
impossible. Were it not for the awful power of the human will to shape its
own ways it would be impossible. But the naked fact stands, that of several
possible courses I myself determine which I shall follow : throwing the
weight of desire upon the side of this course as against that, recalling the
decision on the point of execution, appealing to conscience or some obliga
tion that just now suddenly is seen to be precious, swaying, shaping, mould
ing, finally deciding beyond recall the path I shall take. I cannot explain
how this is done. I simply find myself doing it, falling or rising by the
decision. So, close by the glory of life we find life's shame. In response
to the fundamental demand of reason we find a thorough-going violation of
the order of the universe. At the very point where faith should be final and
complete, we find faith broken or reversed altogether. It is a monstrous
thing. For if it is a wrong to the soul to believe without evidence, to believe
against evidence is a crime against the universe.
How is this monstrous thing possible ? That which should be impossible
is not impossible, as a thousand bitter experiences show. I see the better.
I see it to be the better. I approve it as the better. I follow the worse.
So the unnatural thing is done. But how can we refuse to decide by the
evidence ? The answer must lie in some kind of mental and moral disorder.
One has to bear in mind the fact that there are many forms of reality.
There is a world of flesh as well as a world of spirit. The experiences of
the flesh are real as truly, if not as permanently, as those of the spirit. And
in experience we find many elements which, though not real in valid sense,
have the appearance of reality. Error consists in the acceptance of the
invalid for the valid. It is possible for such acceptance to be so often
repeated that practical reversal of normal conditions of life takes place.
Thus what at first looks like mere intellectual and moral revolt turns out to
be mental and moral dislocation. Lives helplessly halt and blind and
withered go stumbling along the world's highway, some of them crying out
for help, some, perhaps most, neither crying nor caring for help.
We are standing face to face with the inscrutable mystery of life set to
evil. The fact of such life is only too apparent. The world is full of it, our
world and the great world of men. Intemperate men, impure men, dishon
est men, deceitful men, cruel men, bad men of every kind live their evil life
and find all the happiness they find at all in fleshly courses. And the world
lends itself to evil uses apparently with as little reluctance as it does to
good. The fact is, that what we call evil and good take on their character
as evil and good only when touched and determined by will. The world is
the great field in which the dove finds grain and the vulture finds carrion.
What one takes to the world determines what one takes from the world.
The great question concerns, not grain and carrion, but dove and vulture.
At bottom the question of life is a question, not of things but of people.
And the set of life toward the worse is what we mean by the evil will. It is
the identification of self with the lower, the coarser, the worse elements of
the world.

172 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
But every mental act does more than bring itself to pass. It sets into
effect certain influences in the outer world. It bears certain fruit in the
world of the soul. It is with the inner world that we are concerned just
now. A choice often repeated becomes the permanent choice. The act
often repeated becomes the habit, the settled course of life. So we are con-
staptly making and unmaking ourselves. Suppose that the tendency toward
evil that manifests itself in the evil will gets reinforcement from the daily
choice. The effect is seen in daily hardening of habit toward a fixed state
of evil. So every choice in a given direction makes more inevitable later
choice in that direction, till presently no other direction is thought of or
desired. How far may this hardening go ? Milton puts into the mouth of
Satan the awful words, " Evil, be thou my good." In such a case the pro
cess goes so far as to reach complete reversal of values.
Is the choice of Satan psychologically possible ? A thousand cases of
like choice, though perhaps less fixed and less confessed, make answer,
yes. Ambition, lust, avarice, jealousy, envy, hate fill the breast with seeth
ing passion, till the very life is hell. " Which way I fly is hell, myself am
hell ". Not simply Satan on his throne says that, but multitudes of men
who have no throne, but who do Satan's work and live his life in acknowl
edged or unacknowledged fellowship with him. The fact is central to life,
that evil choice repeated makes further evil choice probable, till no other
choice is possible.
And yet, responsibility cannot be disclaimed. If the choice has
become inevitable, how can one be held accountable for it ? Well may a
man say, when caught in the grip of the evil will, " I could not choose
otherwise than as I chose in this ". Truer confession than that, lips never
made. The man could not have chosen otherwise than as he did. But the
inevitableness of that choice lay in earlier choices. Back and back and
back we press until we reach a point in the man's life where other choice
was possible. Then, under the influence of passion or ignorance or
unworthy motive, the man turned from the better way. There in the
choice of the worse was the beginning of the way whose end is this bond
age to evil. And the man cannot disclaim responsibility for the result.
For choice is nothing but the soul taking the portion that seems to it
good. Will is only the soul set to accomplish the purpose the soul has set
for itself. When we do ill we are not thrust into the ill by a fate that com
pels us so to cast ourselves away. The only fate that can touch a man to
make or mar him is himself. What the machinery of the universe does is
to weave the choice of the hour into the fabric of life. The doctrine of
fate is no myth, but God's truth plainly spoken. Only, man's fate is the
fixing of man's choice, the projection of himself upon eternity. For what
he is, therefore, at a given hour, the man must hold himself accountable,
and himself alone. In that hour he can no longer help being what he is,
but what made him what he is in that hour was his own choice, deliberate
or indifferent. The web of life is of our own weaving.
The natural history of the evil will helps us to understand why the

UNBELIEF THE FUNDAMENTAL SIN. 173
requirements of righteousness are so unwelcome to the man who has cast
in his lot with unrighteousness. The set of life toward the worse reveals
two worlds within the great world. In one world is all that we call good.
In the other is all that we call evil. There is a distinct type of life for each of
these worlds. By his conformity to one or the other of the two types a man
declares his fellowship. Jesus throws this conformity into the striking terms
of family fellowship. " I am of My Father God. You are of your father
the devil. What I see My Father do I do. What you see your father do
you do ". And as the family life of God is good, the life of those who share
the family fellowship with God will be good. As the family life of the devil
is bad, those who share the family fellowship of the devil will be bad. And
as there is nothing in common between the two families, the life of each
cannot but seem unbeautiful to the other. Jesus says plainly that the
opposition He had to meet was due to something other than dislike of Him.
It was want of understanding of the things with which His life was filled.
And those who did not understand did more than fail to understand : they
misunderstood. They could not see what Jesus saw or hear what Jesus
heard because their whole life belonged in a- different sphere from His.
When the sense of the divine has gone out of the life no work will seem
divine. For those who do not know God the word of Jesus can have no
meaning as the word of God. To those who have shut heaven out of the
life the very condition by which a revelation can be understood is wanting.
By that test Jesus at once tried and condemned the men of His day. "If
any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be
of God or whether I speak of Myself ". " I speak the things which I have
seen with My Father, and ye also do the things which ye have heard with
your father. Ye do the works of your father. If God were your father, ye
would love Me, for I came forth and am come from God ; for neither have
I come of Myself, but He sent Me. Why do ye not understand My speech ?
Even because ye cannot hear My word. Ye are of your father the devil,
and the lusts of your father it is your will to do. He was a murderer from
• the beginning, and stood not in the truth, because there is no truth in him.
When he speaketh a lie he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar and the
father thereof. But because I say the truth ye believe Me not, because ye
are not of God ".
The attitude of a given moment is pre-determined. The slow setting
of life toward good or toward evil goes into it. One's total belief is engaged
in the decision of a given question. My entire relation to party and country
and race makes practically certain beforehand what I shall think of the new
special political problem. My entire religious experience is involved in the
answer to the new religious question, making it possible for any one who
knows me thoroughly to feel sure in advance what that answer will be. As
soon as one knows the family history of the men to whom Jesus speaks, one
may be confident of the response they will make to the divine demand.
For they are men whom selfishness has blinded till their understanding is
darkened, and their judgment gone utterly astray. The best outline of the

174 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
history of human error ever written is in the first chapter of Romans. Men
committed the sin of unclear judgment, with the result that succeeding
judgment became less and less clear, till complete reversals of value were
inevitable, and life took on a new and strange character. " Professing
themselves to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the
incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man and of
four-footed beasts and creeping things ". The mystery of the power of
choice remains, and the greater mystery of the use of that power unworthily.
What the apostle shows is simply the movement of man's mind in the pro
cess of his undoing. Bad grows to worse. " Wherefore God gave them up
in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness : for that they exchanged the
truth of God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than
the Creator ". Worse grows to worst. " Even as they refused to have
God in their knowledge, God gave them up to a reprobate mind, to do those
things which are not convenient ; being filled with all unrighteousness, wick
edness, covetousness, maliciousness ; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit,
malignity ; whisperers, back-biters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boast
ful, inventors of evil things; disobedient to parents, without understanding,
covenant breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful : who, knowing the
ordinance of God that they which practice such things are worthy of death,
not only do the same, but also consent with those who practice them ".
There is little need of seeking further for an explanation of the judgment
that lacks judgment and the life that is death. Mind and heart and will are
grouped together. And the awful fact is that this outworking is only an
outworking. What men do they do themselves. In this blackest picture
ever painted the central fact is man's own choice of evil. God let them go
their way. The evil they thought and wrought to their undoing was their
own. To men who have thus chosen, the divine demand is an impossible
demand. Self-centered, self-sufficient, self-seeking — what answer can a
man make to the demand of self-surrender ? For the call of God in Christ
Jesus is precisely that. As Professor Flint so well says of Christian faith,
" It is a self-surrender, an acceptance of Christ as of God made wisdom,
righteousness, sanctification, and redemption unto us; a supreme trust in
Christ based on a distinctive conviction as to His character and His rela
tionship both to God and man ". The attitude of the wilful life toward such
a demand is not hard to name. Failure to accept is not so much failure as
refusal. The mood of such a life is not defect but defiance. Alienation of
mind ends always in hostility of will.
When once the principle of the life is fixed every experience is a confir
mation of it. So the world becomes a mighty instrument of good or evil,
according to the life it touches. The sun shining upon a healthy tree
means life and ever more life. Upon a dead tree the shining means com
pleter death. Rain floods the foliage with fresh greenness. The fallen
leaves it turns into a sodden mass. Life and death are not in the sun and
rain, but in that on which they fall. It is within ourselves that we shall find

UNBELIEF THE FUNDAMENTAL SIN. 175
the sentence of life and death. When the spirit fell at Pentecost, to some
of the lookers-on the marvel seemed a serious thing and they questioned,
saying, "What meaneth this?" To others it was matter of mockery, and
they said, " They are full of new wine ". So the history of the truth runs in
all times and places in them that are being saved and in them that are per
ishing : to the one the savor from death unto death ; to the other the savor
of life unto life. The life of God Himself is deeper death to the soul that
closes itself against that life.
What is the central principle of the unbelieving life ? Its root and
bloom and fruit are one. And that one is self. It begins in self. It
matures in self — thinking self, feeling self, willing self. It ends in self.
The heart of unbelief is selfishness. All else follows as a matter of course,
want of sympathy, separation, opposition, revolt, open warfare. What is
the use of specifying the multitudinous acts of sin when we have the princi
ple of sin ? Why count the branches one by one when the pledge of them
all is in the root, and we have the root ? Out of the heart proceed the
things that defile, and when we have the heart we have all that the heart
makes sure. Men reject Christ because they have nothing in common with
Him. Their unbelief is simply their unlikeness finding expression in speech
and deed.
But why keep citing rejection of Christ, as if that were a special proof
of unbelief ? Because it is a special proof of unbelief. The spirit and the
words and the works of Jesus were divine. They were the spirit and words
and works of God. To know Jesus was to know God. Not to see God in
the life of Jesus was to show oneself incapable of seeing Him anywhere.
Over and over Jesus said, " Believe Me. But if you cannot yet believe Me,
look at My works and believe what they say". The works of God can
come only from the life of God. The character of the works of Jesus was
not doubted, even by those who hated the spirit by which they were
wrought. That was the blasphemy which the judgment of God smote back
upon the very lips of denial : insistence by men who knew better, that the
divine work before their eyes was the work of the devil. But that was only
the crowning denial, the full-voiced unbelief that did not shrink even from
charging a lie upon the holiness of God. If that is not itself always the
unpardonable sin, it is a sin that joins hands with the unpardonable sin.
The rejection of Christ is only less vital. As long as there is possibil
ity of recognizing sin at all, the rejection of Christ will be recognized as
sin. The men to whom the Spirit of God brings home conviction of sin find
their quickened consciences responding most readily at that very point, as
at last they see that all the while God has been looking upon them in the
face of Jesus Christ. And though they may have been slow to acknowledge
that there is such a thing as sin in the world, when once they realize what
Jesus Christ means to the world they must say, " Here at last is something
that is unmistakably evil, my denial of the right of Jesus Christ to my life ".
And in that evil lies the secret of all other evils that reveal in human life
alienation from the mind of God and hostility to His will. Unbelief is the
fundamental sin, the root from which every specific sin draws its life.

176 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
And this is a teaching to take hold of the life of our own day. It
belongs not simply to a far-off time and people but to the present and to us.
The claims of Jesus Christ are as direct today as ever. The life of God is
as real as ever. "And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the
only true God, and Him Whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ ".

* KNOWLEDGE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS THROUGH THE DOING
OF THE WILL OF GOD.
by rkv. itranois .t. imcoonnei^l, i?h. d.,
Pastor of the New York Avenue Methodist Episcopal Church, Brooklyn,
N. Y.
" If any man willeth to do His will, he shall know of the teaching whether it be of
God or whether I speak of Myself ". (St. John 7 : 17— R. V.)
Perhaps the best way of approach to an understanding of this passage
is to take the words in their apparently simple and obvious intent. The
easy and natural interpretation of the verse would be something as follows :
If any man deliberately sets his will toward right doing he will have little
difficulty in realizing the essential divineness of the teaching of Jesus.
Knowledge arises out of deed. Let a man come to the words of Jesus with
a deliberate intention to realize in his activity the highest kind of life, and
he will find in the teaching of the Master a satisfaction which will convince
him of the truth of the teaching. With continued doing of the Divine Will
set forth in the revelation of Jesus there will come an increasingly solid
deposit of conviction as to the truth of that revelation. We all know what
it is to set the will firmly in devotion to right doing ; we all know too what
it is to know truth, — to rest in the conviction that the deep satisfaction
which a thought brings is a warrant for holding the thought as true. We all
know, further, how this satisfaction comes out of experience in the practice
of the truth. As the practice of the truth brings increased and deepened
satisfaction, we attain to a certainty and immediacy of conviction which
nothing can shake. This is what one coming to an interpretation of the text
with experience in the search for certainty as to truth in real life would make
out of the statement of Jesus. Such a one might put his thought into finer
expression, but his conclusion would be substantially that here given.
Jesus enforced as no other has ever done the thought that God is a
person of moral quality — of highest and holiest righteousness. This con
ception is in one form or another probably at the bottom of most doing of
the will of God. Let now a man determined to do the wiU of God hear the
teaching of Jesus concerning the character of God. Will he not at once
recognize the teaching as the goal for which his soul has been seeking ?
Suppose that he goes forward in his righteous doing with the teaching of
Jesus definitely in mind. Is it not inconceivable that there should be any
other result than a deepening conviction as to the truth of what Jesus has
taught ? Or take the teaching of Jesus as to the essential dignity and worthi-

* Delivered at the Fourth Conference, held at Grace Episcopal Church, January 13, 1904.
177

178 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
ness of humanity. Can there be better preparation for the full reception of
this truth than the doing of the will of God, and if the life be constantly
ordered with the teaching of Jesus as to the eternal worth of the moral will
constantly before the mind, is it not inevitable that the soul should come to
a settled conviction as to its own eternal value in the moral universe ? Will
not the doing of the will of God make the attitude of Jesus toward sin seem
the one true attitude ? Will not the reliance upon Jesus for spiritual life by
one who is earnestly seeking to do right bring an assurance deep and stead
fast as to the truth of the Master's claim to be a veritable center of life-giving
forces ? If Christ is taken as king in the realm of right doing. He will prove
by the actual results in the increased spiritual power of His followers that
He is what He claims to be. The appeal is to life, — the same appeal that
we make in the case of any claim, — the appeal to success. Can the claim
make itself good? The final test of truth is just the satisfaction we attain
as we think the truth. If the mind is at rest as it contemplates a revelation,
the revelation is held to be true. Jesus did not come to set forth mere
statements of facts; He came to reveal and enforce certain truths. The
test of these truths is in the feeling of spiritual satisfaction which they bring.
The doing of the will of God, — the taking of Jesus at His word and the
practice of His revelation as a matter of moral doing will beget in the heart
of the doer the satisfaction which is the real and vital witness.
This would seem to be the meaning of the passage to one who should
read it for its clear and plain intent. This natural interpretation must be
allowed to stand if there is no good reason for going behind it. Jesus did
not make hidden enigmas of statements like this. He spoke the language
of real life, and while He loaded His words with a significance which eternity
cannot exhaust. He no doubt intended us to start with the simple significance
which lies upon the surface.
There are some, however, who might grant a measure of consent to this
general statement who would nevertheless insist that it gives not quite the
right ground for religious certainty.
First among the objectors might be put those who hold that no inner
assurance is necessarily a part of the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus.
For example, an intelligent friend of mine recently attended an inquirer's
service held by a reputable and responsible clergyman in a neighboring city.
The issue up for illumination was just this matter of Christian certainty.
" How can I know the truth to be the truth " was the question of seeker after
seeker. The response was stereotyped : " We know that this is true because
the Bible says so". Some of these questions had to do with inner and vital
experience. " What ground have we for believing that we are sons of God ? "
The answer was: " Have you complied with the Biblical conditions so far
as you know ? If you have, you are His sons simply because the Bible says
so. This is not a matter primarily of inner satisfaction. It is a matter of
taking the word of God as true, no matter whether there be any mental rest
or not". The point is clear. This clergyman did what many others have
been doing from the beginning. He found the ground for religious certainty

KNOWLEDGE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS. 179
in the appeal to an external authority. The appeal to the authority settles
all. There is no further need of argument.
The truth of this putting all are willing to concede. If a seeker has
become almost morbid through introspective search after some mysterious
sign, no better advice could be given him than this encouragement to take
the word of an external authority. Moreover, for very many, or for
all of us during certain stages of experience, there must be this re
liance upon authority apart from any response of inner satisfaction. In
one form or another the authoritative deliverance by the church, or the
parent, or the teacher, or the Book, must play the decisive part in the
religious experience of immaturity. All these forms of authoritative
utterance get their force, however, from the fact that out of centuries of
Christian doing has come a race-wide and heart-deep satisfaction which
lends inevitable momentum to the utterance. The Bible is believed not
because of its being an external authority settling questions by lawyer-like
dogmatism. It is received because centuries of Christian doing have
resulted in satisfaction deep and abiding. It rests not upon bodies of
evidence of a merely historical and critical kind. If the revelation were
merely the utterance of an external authority no one would trouble himself
with it long enough to ask about evidences.
Another objector declares that Christian certainty is not to be likened
to our feeling of satisfaction as we become convinced of any other truth.
He tells us that Christian certainty is a matter altogether apart from any
other kind of certainty. If not altogether a miraculous revelation it stands
aloof from the ordinary experiences of the mental life. It is a peculiar
assurance which we recognize at once as coming from the divine spirit. It
is a veritable witness of the Spirit and is not to be confounded with any
lower order of knowing whatsoever. If we would know God we must have
moments of rapt exaltation when we see things hidden from the foundation
of the world.
Here too there is a measure of truth. If it is possible for the soul to be
completely transported by its enthusiasm for earthly objects, it is altogether
unreasonable not to allow the same transports of enthusiasm for divine
objects. If love for a friend or for a country produces mountain-top
experiences, from which we learn more than from months of living at the
lower levels, it is perfectly possible to have like moments of illumination as
to the things of God. But there is nothing essentially miraculous about
these experiences. So far as they have value in any case they come out of
the sohd devotion which manifests itself in doing. If the ecstasy over friend,
or country, or God, comes not out of doing the will of country, or friend, or
God, it has but little value. Let a man give himself to the real doing of
the will of the Father and the firm conviction that he is on the path of life,
may, in particular circumstances, rise to bursts of enthusiastic delight.
But underneath all this is the rock basis of ethical, spiritual devotion. Out
of this the knowledge comes. And whether the knowledge ever rises to
the exalted plane or not, there will be for the doer of the will of God steady
satisfaction of settled conviction.

i8o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Still another objector comes forward. He is evidently much impressed
by the strictly scientific character of the day in which we live and tells us
that this word of the Master is clearly an appeal to a strictly scientific test.
If we wish to know Christian truth let us put it to a test of experiment just
as the worker in the laboratory puts his discoveries to the test of experi
ment. The objector has evidently overlooked the distinction between matters
of truth on the one hand and matters of objective fact on the other. The
body of Christ's teaching is not a body of scientific facts. It is a setting
forth of truths. Truths are not so much for detailed verification by
laboratory experiment as for the proof which comes as they show their
wearing qualities in the doubts and stresses which are so frequent in actual
life. Yet the truth as it is in Jesus has just as scientific foundation as do
those general conceptions which underlie scientific discovery. For these,
too, are matters of belief and faith. They are the product of atmosphere
and the general conditions which have been thrown around the mind. The
work of the experimenter is in large part done before the test is made
in the laboratory. It has been done in the shaping of the general
conceptions which underlie all scientific procedure. It has been done in
the scientific tendency given to the experimenter's mind. On last analysis
it would be found that this means that the experimenter has for years been
holding certain general conceptions which have been capable of no further
proof than the satisfaction which they give to the mind as it conducts its
activities. Even the belief in " evolution " which is made so much of in
these days rests not so completely upon this or that body of demonstrated
fact as upon the general satisfaction which the thought gives the mind.
The scientific investigator does not today lay much stress upon apriori
methods, but he is an apriorist nevertheless. He may not be an apriorist
in the sense that he holds to hard and fast statements of principle which
are to guide his discoveries, but the principles are in his thought neverthe
less in the shape of certain expectations and tendencies and inner tests of
satisfaction which really determine— if not what he shall find — at least the
emphasis he shall put upon what he finds.
So then we feel all the more inclined to hold fast the natural reading of
the passage of this book of John concerning the knowledge of the truth
through doing the will of God. The passage means that as we do the will
of God there comes into our minds an increasing and solid deposit of
conviction that we are upon the side of the truth in holding what Christ has
brought us. The conviction may be that indefinable something which we
ordinarily have in mind when we use the word about any matter of belief, or it
may rise at times into something more definite, even the transport of an
overwhelming enthusiasm. But in any case we have the heart of the truth
when we say that Jesus meant just this, that out of Christian doing there
comes increasing assurance as to the truth which Jesus taught. While we
would not care to bring the teaching to the test of this or that particular
experiment we are willing to say that if by experiment is meant the general

KNOWLEDGE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS. i8i
conduct of the life, we claim for Christian truth that it can be submitted to
experiment as truly as can any other truth. In the satisfaction which
follows the making of the truth taught by Jesus the rule of the life we have
the inner conviction which assures of the truth of the teaching.
But we meet still some further objection. The contender for the real
and vital communion between the soul and God feels that somehow we have
handed this entire matter of assurance over to the natural as distinguished
from the supernatural. Instead of the direct witness of God's spirit with
ours we have now only the same kind of assurance which follows grasp
upon any kind of truth. The trouble with our explanation is that it seems
altogether too easy.
To discuss this point with thoroughness would carry us over into
metaphysics. We may say, however, that what has been set forth above
is said with the conviction that in God we live and move and have our
being; that the powers which we call natural are just as truly Plis as those
we call supernatural or miraculous ; that He is in all the things of this
universe except sin ; that the worst kind of atheism is that which looks to
find God only in the startling and unusual rather than in the orderly, every
day processes which are so common ; that the assurance which we have as
to the truth, even if it seems like assurance as to any other kind of truth, is
produced by the immediate contact of God, even though he be acting in a
way which we call altogether natural.
It is high time for the church to get rid of the deism which has haunted
her for so long. The modern preaching of the doctrine of " Divine
Immanence ", crude as much of it is, is helping us to realize the presence
of God in the world of external iTature. It is time for the church to take
the further step and insist more earnestly that God is not only in orderly
physical movements, but in orderly psychological movement as well.
Mental realm as well as material realm should be looked upon as the abode
of His law. There is only one vjray that I can be convinced of the Truth,
and this is by taking it as the guide of my life and seeing if the satisfaction
of assurance follows.
But another makes the objection that if God is the immediate inspiring
agent back of all truth how are we to decide between truths of differing
degrees of importance. We have been taught that the Truth as it is in
Jesus is the supreme truth, but if all truth comes to us as the inspiration of
God, is not all truth on a level ?
There is really very little need of disturbance at this point. The doing
of the will of God is supposed to make the will of God the supreme consider
ation. If we wish to know whether the knowledge of the truth of Jesus is
the supreme truth there is only one test. Put it in the supreme place and
see if the soul finds supreme satisfaction. God indeed tells us all things
that are really true. All good gifts come from Him. There is nothing in
this thought, however, that should put all the gifts on a dead level of impor
tance. The belief is to be judged by the satisfaction which follows taking
it as a rule of life. If we wish to get the true perspective on the importance

1 82 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
of God's gifts let the perspective be the perspective of Jesus. The appeal
is always to life.
But does this conception provide against error ? Is it not possible for
a man to be woefully mistaken ? Can he not go on year after year thinking
that he is doing God's will and becoming all the more convinced that his
error is the truth ? This is of course possible, but it is possible on any
system. The believer in a miraculous witness of the spirit is just as likely
to be mistaken as the holder of the view here set forth. All that we can
say is that we ought to have something of the confidence in a right outcome
that possessed the Master. He was not unaware of the mistakes that men
might make, and yet he seemed perfectly sure of his final triumph. There
is a great deal of the merely abstract about this scruple. The difficulty is
not great in real life. If a central African chorus should attempt to prove
to us that their atrocious discords are superior to the music of Handel's
Messiah, we should concede the saving sincerity of the African's belief, but
should hold fast to our own thought nevertheless. We should even think
ourselves warranted in holding fast, no matter how great the body of proof
the heathen singers might bring forth. The satisfaction that comes from
doing the will of God includes the belief that in the end the truth will
prevail. But now our scientific friend of a few moments ago returns with the
protest that all this is desperately unscientific. The foundations of the
faith must be deeper laid than in the consciousness of satisfied assurance
in the minds of the disciples. We have to respond to him as we did before,
that there is just as much basis for the belief in Christian truth as there is
for belief in scientific truth. Science must have assumptions which rest
only on the satisfaction which they give the inner life. That splendid
system of law, according to which all things are controlled to the very
center is an assumption. If the physicist declares that he takes nothing
into the laboratory with him, we make speedy response that he takes this
far-reaching assumption with him. And he takes it simply because it satis
fies his inner needs. He will not be satisfied with thought of an arbitrary
and irrational chaos of truant and fugitive facts. He will set aside experi
ment after experiment in the hope to vindicate this settled assumption. Or
take the thought of the uniformity of nature. This assumption also stands
largely because of the satisfaction it gives our mental needs. Underneath
all laboratory research is the invisible, unproved basis which is really the
guiding factor in the scientist's work. If the scientist points to the body of
actual result which follows his assumption, so can we point to the body of
actual result which follows our taking the doing of the will of God to be our
guide toward the truth.
We conclude this part of the discussion as we began, by saying that
Jesus rested His system upon the consciousness which would come to men's
minds as they acted upon the truth He proclaimed. The Gospels do not
stand simply because they have been uttered by divine man. They stand
because men longing to be divine have become convinced of their truth in

KNOWLEDGE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS. 183
actual doing. If they ceased to satisfy when taken as the actual guide for
men determined to do the will of God, nothing could keep them in the
thought of the world. They would have value only to the antiquarian or to
the historian. " If any man willeth to do the will of God he shall know
of the doctrine whether it be of God or whether I speak of Myself ". The
revelation which comes in Jesus is the very top and crown of all of God's
manifestations of Himself. The final witness to the truth of that revelation
is the feeling of satisfaction which it begets in submissive hearts.
After having dwelt thus on the meaning of the text, perhaps a word as
to some phases of the usableness of the principle here set forth may be in
order. The principle provides first of all for a basis of suitable modesty of
Christian claim as to knowledge. We are to be unflinchingly certain of the
truths which come to us as convictions begotten by feligious doing. Some
things will be and should be gripped with increasing tenacity as life goes
on, but some other things ought to be held lightly and contemplated from
the standpoint of a genuine Christian agnosticism. Truths which come to
us as the result of doing the will of God belong to the first class, while con
jectures which do not harden into conviction as the product and accom
paniment of the will's faithful activity may well be put in a second and
inferior class.
For example, Jesus taught us of immortality. The man who goes
forth to live as if immortality were actually reachable finds himself coming
to ineradicable assurance as to his own essential deathlessness. There are,
however, some items of the future life which we all guess at but which are
not forced into conviction out of Christian doing. The details of the
heavenly existence, the manner of " body " the soul shall have, the precise
character of the tasks that are to be ours, the final disposition of the
wicked, — matters like these do not come within the reach of the illumina
tion of Christian doing. If there are, on the other hand, implications which
follow by a sort of spiritual necessity from the underlying trust in immor
tality there is no reason why we should not hold them fast. If, for instance,
earthly friendships are lifted to the exalted spiritual realm where they are
eternally worth while, there is every ground for the trust that nothing in the
final shock can touch them. But let us always remember that declarations
as to hidden things which do not base themselves on convictions rising out
of the doing of God's will should be put forward merely as conjectures.
Again, consider the bearing of the Master's principle on some of the
profoundest speculations in Christian philosophy. The underlying basis in
this philosophy is a body of conviction produced in us by obedience to
God. We believe in the God Whom Jesus revealed because the assumption
of that God's existence as a working belief in our lives convinces us that
He is and that He is the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.
Active acceptance of Jesus Christ as the Son of God leads to the completest
acquiescence in His claims. Moreover, we can go further. On the basis of
our certainty as to the ethical life of God we can reach out into some legiti
mate speculations as to the inmost life of God. We put these speculations

1 84 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
to the same test as the more primary beliefs and if we find satisfaction in
them we hold them as true until we get something better. This is, of
course, mere philosophical commonplace, but it would be well if we stated
more often and more clearly just the ground on which many of our beliefs
rest. We need no better basis than this, — that the belief is forced upon us
by the doing of the will of God.
For illustration, look at the doctrine of the Trinity. What is the secret of
its persistence through the centuries in spite of all the intellectual scruples
urged against it ? Just this, — that we are forced to the belief in one form or
another through the strength of our conviction as to the ethical character of
God. We wish to make adequate provision for that ethical life, and as
ethical life calls for worthy objects on which to expend itself, we say that
the Father finds such objects in Son and Spirit. We even go further and
give the Son and Spirit personal life that there may be the social requisites
of highest ethical experience. The point upon which I now insist is that
the effective demand comes from the necessity, which we feel as we do God's
will, for some real basis for ethical fulness in the source of all moral and
spiritual doing. Of course we may profess to rest our belief on some other
foundation stones, but their masonry will not bear close scrutiny. We may
say that God must have an object equal to Himself in the very nature of the
mind's activity, — that an infinite subject is an absurdity without an infinite
object. But if God were not a moral being, the mere psychological demand
for an object could be satisfied without having the object worthy and without
making it personal. God might be a supreme Egotist glorying in unsocial
and loveless loneliness ; or He might grovel in an endless succession of
infinitely trivial, or infinitely silly, or infinitely wicked objects. No; the only
basis for belief in the Trinity is the pressure for the doctrine as we do the
commandments of God. If the pressure of these needs should lessen, our
hold on the doctrine of the Trinity would slacken. If the pressure should
still further decrease we would surrender the thought of the moral nature of
God, and complete removal of the pressure might do away with belief in
God altogether. Instead of trying to find some other foundation we ought
frankly to face our problem and insist upon the superior stability of a basis
which rises out of the mighty upward push of ethical needs. All we ask of
reason is that it shall help us express the implications which ethical con
victions carry with them; and that it shall free us from thought which is self-
contradictory. Instead of haggling with merely "intellectual" reasoners
over the technically logical standing of some belief in Christian philosophy,
we should make all reasonable allowance for the frailty of human reasoning
and then insist that these beliefs have something of the warrant of the
Master's utterance about doing the will and knowing the truth.
There ought to be some value too in the thought of the text for our true
attitude as reverent critics of the Biblical literature. We are living in an
age when science takes all things seriously; and scientific methods are
employed as never before in the test of the Scripture narrative. It would
be hard to say too much in praise of the results which have come from these
methods in the hands of many experts. But there is a danger lest the

KNOWLEDGE OF THE TEACHING OF JESUS. 185
methods become too entirely the methods of the merely professional investi
gator. The exclusive reliance on the strictjy technical tends to the deadening
of that spiritual sympathy which ought to be supreme in Biblical criticism.
"I never read anything about the Bible which is not critical" said a distin
guished theological professor recently. Some of this scholar's unreliability
is explained by the statement. Critical investigation ought to be accom
panied with that keenness of spiritual insight which is the deposit and
outcome of doing the will of God. This ethical insight will mean more than
months of technical scrutiny. If the merely textual critic of Shakespeare is
to be distrusted, why should not the merely textual critic of the Scripture
be distrusted? If a critic must steep his mind with the very spirit of
Shakespeare before he really becomes able to speak with authority about
the author and his work, why should not the same rule hold in the study of
the Bible ? If the one way to come into close understanding of the spirit of
Jesus is by doing the will of God, why should not religious devotion be
exalted as an indispensable equipment for the study of the word of God?
Let us see if this principle can be made of any practical benefit. Take
the narratives of the Virgin Birth, for example. The critics busy themselves
with minute technical and professional scrutiny of the Gospel account.
Many of them seem to think that their critical and scientific processes
are the final reliance in the attainment of whatever truth is to be reached.
But the man who, out of complete devotion to the will of God, has brought
his thought to sympathy with the fineness of the Spirit which is back of and
beneath the Book makes almost instantly this significant discovery, — that
whereas it would have been deemed apriori improbable that the narrative
could be told without shocking reverence, yet that very wonder has been
accomplished. The story is there, and is there with an exquisite delicacy
which is quite a considerable argument for its veracity.
Or take another incident even more detailed. We have in John the
story of the Master's treatment of the woman taken in adultery. The critics
tell us that the narrative did not originally have a place in John's Gospel, —
that it was put in at a date later than the date of the Gospel and by a hand
other than that of the apostle. This we are entirely willing to concede.
But when the critic goes further and insists that the narrative cannot
be true, we demur. We are perfectly willing to take any critical conclusions
forced upon us by the facts, but we insist, first, that this question be con
sidered. How does it happen that the narrative appeals to those who have
by righteous life come to closest understanding of the spirit of Jesus as per
fectly in harmony with what we should expect of His character? We cannot
believe that any one could have beforehand predicted what Jesus would do
in a situation like that of the story, but we feel that the narrative is true to
Him. We would not exalt this principle unreasonably, but we nevertheless
feel that in this case and in others like it the merely technical methods of
the profession alist are not the final instruments. The insight that comes
out of doing the will of God is no unimportant part of the furnishing of the
competent Biblical student. Instead of telling men to prepare themselves
with the latest technical knowledge so as to be able to meet destructive

1 86 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
criticism on its own ground, it would seem just at present to be in order to
call also for the development of a spiritual insight to which the destructive
critic does not attain. Better make the attack upon him from that higher
ground to which he does not come.
Not only has this principle philosophical and critical value, but it has
also homiletical value. It is our aim as teachers and preachers to instruct
men in the teaching of Jesus. How shall we do this? The important
method is that of this passage, — the stirring of the depths of the ethical life
to the doing of the will of God. I suppose that Jesus depended very little,
after all, on His direct oral teaching for the development of the twelve for
apostleship. He did not insist upon note book methods of instruction. He
aimed to get the disciples to doing the will of God. In the midst of all our
attempts to get the Gospel into some simple form so that men may see it at
a glance, we should not let go of this fundamental principle of the Master's
pedagogics, — that the truth worth seeing can only be seen as we do the will
of God, — that unless we rouse the wills of men to righteousness we cannot
get them to understand the Gospel. How this is to be done is a problem
that taxes us to the utmost, but if we can do it we have the essential thing,
not only for the salvation of the souls of the men with whom we work, but
for the enlightenment of the church and the world as to the truth of the
system which came with Jesus.
If it will not unduly extend a paper already too long, let me say in
closing that it seems to me that we have in this utterance of Jesus a glimpse
at the truth in that most fascinating of all realms of study, — the inquiry as
to the secret of the wisdom of Jesus and the unfolding of His mind. For
those who think that Jesus brought all His knowledge with Him from the
beginning, — that He surrendered nothing m becoming man, this question
has of course no meaning. But those of us who believe that it really cost
the Son of God something substantial to become man are not willing to
admit that all wisdom was His from childhood. We can see that the personal
thread of inalienable self-feeling must have been with the Master in all
phases of His existence, but we cannot think that His self-knowledge and
His penetration of the depths of the wisdom of God came without effort of
will. We feel that we have the key to the secret in this passage. From the
beginning the will of Jesus swung intuitively toward God. As He did the
will of the Father that infinite wisdom which is of God descended as a matter
of course. So far as concerns the essential body of His teaching He found
the truth not by miraculous revelation, but by profound conviction resulting
from perfect obedience to the will above. Out of the perfect deed came the
perfect knowledge. Jesus spoke out of His own experience when He said
that doing the will of God would bring certainty as to the truth.
The lesson brings not only enlightenment but encouragement. As we
approximate to His devotion to the will of God we shall approximate to His
understanding of the wisdom of God. The one thing that keeps back the
descent of the perfect wisdom is imperfect, half-hearted doing. If we could
go about doing good as He did we could more speedily come near the
wisdom which was His.

*^IRIT AND LIFE.
(St. John 7:37-39-)
by rev. amory h. bradeord, d. d.,
Pastor of the First Congregational Church, Montclair, N. J.
The doctrine of the Spirit as stated in the seventh chapter of John's
Gospel, impresses one even at the first glance with its vastness and its
mystery. What do these texts mean ? " If any man thirst, let him come
unto Me, and drink. He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said,
out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. But this spake He of the
Spirit, which they that believed on Him were to receive ; for the Spirit was
not yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified ".
Here are two distinct utterances ; the former was spoken by Jesus, and
the latter is an intrepretation of His words by the writer of the Fourth
Gospel. The Master was speaking to seekers after the truth rather than to
the disciples. He says in substance : If you are really athirst for God and
for reality, come to Me, trust Me, believe on Me, and you shall be so full of the
true life that it will flow out of you as waters from an overflowing fountain.
In other words if you really desire truth and right, come into personal con
tact with Me and you will receive what you desire in abundance.
If those who are athirst for truth and right will accept Jesus and follow
Him, they will be enabled to live the Iffe of the Spirit, to realize the power
of the Spirit, and to help others to do so. Let us consider spirit as life in
the history of mankind. Spirit is light because it is life. Spirit is uni
versal ; consequently light is universal. Spirit according to the Christian
usage of the word is everywhere that the Christian revelation has gone.
The spiritual life is the spirit in man which is spelled with a small s, touched
by the Spirit of God which is spelled with a capital S. Within all true
Christians, therefore, is all the light they need for illumination and guidance.
" Ye have an unction from the Holy One and need not that any man should
teach you ". This, as I understand it, is the doctrine of the Quakers.
" When He, the spirit of truth will come. He will lead you into all truth and
show you things to come". What does this mean? That some external
divine light in some strangely mystical way falls upon us and illuminates
our path ? Does it not mean rather that within the souls of all men there
is light, obscured, perhaps, but surely there, which is sufficient for all man's
duties ; that the candle in every soul is lighted by the sun which is God, and
that it is our supreme duty and privilege to use the light which shines

* Abstract of an address delivered at the Fourth Conference, held at Grace Episcopal Church, January
13, 1904.

187

1 88 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
within, and which will never fail those who are pure in mind and loyal in
heart. The chief spiritual difficulty of our time is that we are not willing to
know ourselves. The oracle was right, " Know thyself ", for thus, and thus
only may you hope to know God. I am well aware that it may be said in
reply : " Then all authoritative standards go, — then the guess of one man
is worth as much as the guess of another ". But there is the mistake. I
am not speaking of the guesses of any man, but I am insisting that the final
truth is written within as surely, if not as clearly, as without ; that it was
within before it was without; that it was expedient for Jesus to go away
in order that the eyes of His disciples might be turned inward rather than
outward ; and that we have no more sacred obligation than to study the
truth in the inner light, and that no man who is loyal to himself can, at the
same time, be false to God.
Our next point is that Spirit which is life is the cause of progress and,
may it not be said, the efficient force in evolution? What is evolution? It
is the gradual development according to inherent laws, of a resident force.
What is that force ? I choose to call it Spirit. Indeed evolution seems to
me to be the process by which the Spirit immanent in the universe responds
to the Spirit who transcends the universe.
Finally the spiritualization of all men and of all institutions is the goal
of history. All men are spirits ; but all do not live in the realization of their
spiritual origin and destiny. A spiritual being has been evolved, but
often turns back to fleshly conditions from which he has risen and does not
know himself to be a spirit. That is sin.
Individuals are spiritualized when they realize that they are spirits
come from God, and live according to their higher rather than their lower
natures. And this is the lesson of lessons — actually to appreciate that we
are spirits, and that, as naturally as flowers turn toward the sun, when we
are our true selves we turn toward God the Father of spirits, and are dis
satisfied with everything at enmity with Him. When men shall dwell in the
consciousness that they are partakers of God's very nature, and therefore
spirits, for He is Spirit, and are in harmonious relations with one another,
as God-like spirits must be, then the race will be spiritualized, and the
triumph of the Kingdom of God will be near.
The Spirit of God identifying Himself with the spirit in man is " The
inner light ", — the candle of the Lord, — the revealer of truth and duty.
He is the inspiration toward holy conduct, the power which makes
truth to become life.
He is the cause of progress in individuals and among the institutions of
men ; and the spiritualization of the whole race of man, until the vilest and
meanest shall think the thoughts and do the deeds and share the glory of
Christ, is the goal of history,
" The one far-off event
Toward which the whole creation moves ".

* THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS.
(St. John 8 : 29, 46.)
BY REY. -William: r. hxjntington, d. r>..
Rector of Grace Episcopal Church, New York.
Invited to address this Conference upon the subject of the sinlessness
of Jesus as evidenced by the contents of certain specified chapters of the
Fourth Gospel, I felt, for the moment, that I had been shut up between too
narrow limits. Why not Hsten to St. Peter and St. Paul, I asked myself, as
well as to St. John ? Or if, for sufficient reason, one must needs be confined
to a solitary New Testament author, why not be given access to all of that
author's writings, rather than be tied down to a fractional portion of a single
one of them ? Had not St. John dealt with this topic in his letters as well
as in his Gospel ?
Enquiry and meditation, however, soon convinced me that the range
given was amply wide, and that a single chapter out of the designated four
furnished enough, and more than enough material to supply all my need.
I even found it possible to narrow down the sources of information still
further, and confess myself, to-day, quite content to stake the whole issue
upon two detached sayings, one of them a question and the other an affirma
tion, — both of them together not covering more than twenty words.
The secret of this abatement in my demand upon Holy Scripture lies
here. I am convinced that certitude as to the sinlessness of Jesus is really
conditioned upon an act of faith. We declare Him sinless not because we
have critically reviewed His life and found no flaw, but because we have
yielded assent to what He says about Himself. In other words, "Christ
alone without sin " is a dogma, not a generalization, Absolutely to prove
the point from facts observed is impossible. We get at it by believing in
words spoken, by crediting, for sufficient cause, a solemn asseveration. I
learned this from James Mozley, one of the keenest as well as weightiest of
the nineteenth-century theologians.
In the course of a controversy waged with Professor Tyndall, late in the
sixties, over the subject of miracles, Mozley found occasion to show, and
did show most convincingly, the utter impossibility of proving in any case
inward sanctity from outward actions. He instances our Lord's denuncia
tions of the Scribes and Pharisees, and then remarks: "To those who
admit, upon the evidence which is laid before them, our Lord's sinlessness,
there is not the shghtest discord between such language and such sinless
ness, but common reason tells us that had we to judge of such language
without the assumption of our Lord's sinless character, we could not tell
but that some element of imperfection, some shade of prejudice, some pas-

*Delivered at the Fourth Conference, held at Grace Episcopal Church, January 13, 1904.
189

190 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
sionate excess, might enter into such censures. The majesty, the integrity,
the holiness of our Lord's character is indeed conspicuous and obvious upon
the facts of the case, but when we attribute absolute sinlessness to Him, it
is plain that by the laws of reason we must be going upon some further
evidence than that which is contained in His outward life and deportment",
The method to which Mozley in these words points us is so unlike that
commonly adopted by Christian apologists, that we shall do well to make
sure of understanding it. The more usual course with defenders of the
faith is, as we know, to marshal the facts and incidents which in the four
Gospels connect themselves, more or less closely, with the person of Christ,
and then to urge the conclusion that a life so luminous in its entirety must
necessarily have been in its details wholly without spot. But to one who
realizes the universality of sin, to one who discerns in sin a characteristic of
the human lot which none escapes or can escape, such reasoning is scarcely
satisfactory. It may and does suffice to prove the Son of Mary holier than
any other born of woman, but to be sinless, in the fullest and deepest sense
the word can bear, means to be what no man ever has been, unless we rec
ognize this one solitary exception. In a word, if Jesus was really sinless.
His sinlessness must count as the miracle of history, more marvelous than
any other recorded marvel, a wonder beyond all other wonders, signal and
unique. Surely if there be any phenomenon that transcends experience
and defies parallel it is sinlessness, and since under the most favorable of
circumstances it is confessedly difficult to authenticate a miracle, doubly
difficult ought it to be reckoned to establish in any given instance absolute
immunity from blame. A character may be so white and pure as literally to
dazzle us by the brilliancy of its perfection, (there have been such,) and yet
be far from sinless. Though the unaided eye discerns them not, there are
spots on the sun. " The very source and fount of day
Is flecked with wandering isles of night ".
Who, then, is this Light of the World, this Sun of Righteousness, that
of Him any should dare to say. He alone among the hundreds of thousands
of millions who have come into this world out of the unseen was sinless ?
The facts of His life do, indeed, prove Him to have been the holiest of men,
but there is a difference between being the holiest of men and being holy as
God is holy.
We are in a temper now to look at the two sayings out of St. John's
Gospel, one of them an affirmation, one a question, upon which I declared
myself willing to rest the whole case. They are these : " I do always those
things which please Him ". " Which of you convicteth me of sin ? "
These words unquestionably place Jesus of Nazareth in a class by Him
self. It is not known that any other human being ever used the like. The
two utterances differ in form ; the one is a positive assertion, the other is a
challenge, but in purport they are identical. Always to do those things
which please God is, ex vi termini, to be sinless, for on this same Evangelist's
authority "he that doeth righteousness is righteous".

THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS. 191
The question is, can we, and do we, trust Jesus Christ, when He thus
speaks? If we can and do, the entire question in controversy is for us set
tled ; the miracle of history is acknowledged, the unique exception recognized.
No longer do we find it necessary laboriously to examine and critically to
weigh the arguments for and against this point of sinlessness. We say, as
the Samaritans said to the woman who had brought them out from their city
to the place where Jesus was : " Now we believe, not because of thy saying,
for we have heard Him ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ ".
Depend upon it, friends, this whole matter of religion, as Christians
have to do with it, is an affair of personal confidence, to be settled like any
other affair of personal confidence — can I trust him or can I not ? "The
man believed the word which Jesus had spoken unto him, and went his
way ". That tells the whole story.
Clear-cut against the back-ground of the past stands Jesus Christ. We
talk about forgetting Him, ignoring Him, relegating Him to obscurity, vot
ing Him obsolete. It cannot be done. There He stands. His eyes, like
the eyes of a portrait on the wall, follow us whithersoever, in this narrow
room called human life, we turn. Thrust aside even ever so violently He
cannot be, waved aside even ever so courteously He will not be. He is here
to stay. Reckon with Him we must.
Well then, on the whole, shall we trust Him ? I say " on the whole ",
wishing by that phrase to intimate that I have no disposition to minimize
the difficulties of faith. But after making all the allowance that you please
or that the facts in the case demand for draw-backs and set-backs, after dis
counting the clatter of the critics, the cold neutrality of the literary guild,
the strivings of the many that oppose themselves by whatsoever name known
or called, — on the whole, all things considered, Christendom being what it
is, these nineteen hundred years having been what they have been, can we
do better, you and I, than take Jesus at His word ? If we do, the sinless
ness is part of it all. Which of us convicteth Him of sin ? Not one, and
why ? For the simple reason that He is innocent.
"I do always" He says, "those things that please Him". "Assertion,
pure assertion ! " — yes, I grant it, — but then we have just agreed that, on the
whole, we see our way to giving the asserter, Qur confidence. That settles
the matter. Even as those who first trusted in Christ, in Christ we trust.
I propose now to set opposite this statement, " I do always such things
as please Him ", three other New Testament affirmations, which, upon their
face, appear to contravene it. If we find after analysis and investigation
that these sayings, so far from being contradictory to, are really confirmatory
of the sinlessness of Jesus, we shall be in a position to declare that the men
upon whose teaching Christendom is founded, are, with respect to this all-
important point, of one mind.
" Why callest thou me good ? There is none good but one, that is God ".
Jesus Christ said this. Had He known Himself to be sinless would He
have so spoken ? Not unless He was conscious of being out of the category
which held the one whom He addressed, not unless He was intending to

192 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
bring out into clear light His own essential divinity. There is none good
but God, if I am good, I must be God, and conversely, Aut Deus, aut non
bonus. Recall the dialogue and note a point in it too commonly missed. The
questioner is the young man who has great possessions, but who would fain
add to them, if he may, the further treasure of eternal life. Christ says to
him, "If thou wilt enter into life keep the commandments". The young
man asks "Which?" Now we should naturally expect, should we not, that
in answer to this question Jesus would begin with the first commandment
and go on consecutively to the tenth. He does nothing of the sort. He
skips the entire first table. He omits the whole of the duty towards God,
begins, — " Thou shalt do no murder ", and confines Himself wholly to those
of the ten words which cover our duty towards our fellow man, — a strange
hiatus. But note what follows. "All these", the young man declares,
" Have I kept from my youth up, what lack I yet? " The obvious, nay, the
absolutely necessary answer would seem to be, "What thou lackest is com
pliance with that portion of the law which thus far I have not named, the
duty towards God". Such, I say, would seem to be the one reply which the
situation demands.
But that is not what we find. What we find is this, — " If thou wilt be
perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have
treasure in heaven ; and come, follow Me ". Come, follow Me. Who is this,
we ask, amazed, who dares to make the following of him, the one thing
lacking for a man who has only so far professed compliance with the second
table of the law ? Who can it be save the One" Whom to trust and Whom to
serve, is the same thing as to do our duty towards God? The hiatus is filled,
the gap covered, the whole law kept.
The second affirmation to which I made reference, as seemingly incon
sistent with the sinlessness of Jesus, is this. " Though He were a Son, yet
learned He obedience by the things which He suffered, and being made
perfect He became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey
Him '. You recognize the passage as quoted from the Epistle to the
Hebrews. Let us look at it. Disobedience to lawful authority is surely not
compatible with sinlessness. And yet, this writer seems to speak as if there
was once a time when it could be truly said of the Lord Jesus that He did
not know how to obey, in fact had to begin learning how ? But pray whither
should we go in search of evidence that such a time there was ? We have,
it is true, no authentic Gospel of the infancy, but we have a Gospel of the
childhood, and what do we there read ? Why, simply this — and it tells the
whole story,— "He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was
subject unto them ". And what of His later years ? In all that the Evan
gelists have to tell of that marvelous life, is there to be found the slightest
hint of a refusal to obey any rightful authority human or divine ? Is not
their whole narrative from first to last confirmatory of the, — "I do always
those things that please Him " ?
Clearly, unless we are to reckon Christ " among the transgressors " in

THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS. 193
a sense quite contrary to that in which His followers have all along been
interpreting the prophet's phrase, there must be some way of understanding
what it means to " learn obedience " other than that which makes it identical
with learning how to obey. A disobedient Christ could have no standing
room in the church's creed. It is the One Who says " I come to do Thy
will" Whom we confess, the keeper alike of God's least commandments and
of His greatest, the sinless One. But how shall we interpret learning obedi
ence in such a way as to make Christ's having done so not inconsistent with
such a faith ? In this way, I submit, by taking it to mean one's becoming
acquainted with the whole territory covered and included by obedience.
The man who has learned painting is other and more than the man who has
merely learned to paint. The man who has learned music is other and more
than the man who has simply learned how to play upon an instrument. The
man who has learned painting has explored the entire subject from first to
last ; he knows it historically, he knows it critically, he knows it practically,
he can tell you who the great painters have been, what were the character
istics of their various styles, and all about it ; he has covered the whole
ground. So with learning obedience, we may understand the phrase in the
narrow and limited sense of simply learning to do as one is bid, or we may
understand it in this larger and broader sense of learning how much a really
genuine obedience involves, learning, so to say, the whole cubic contents of
obedience, as obedience stands related to human life. This last is the way
in which Christ learned obedience. He grew to be master of the whole
subject and the method whereby this mastership was acquired was the
method of suffering. It is written of the child Christ that He " increased "
in wisdom as well as in stature, and part of this increase we may well believe
was in that particular kind of wisdom by which men come to know how much
a really complete obedience covers and involves. The only difference
between the Christ-child and other Nazareth children in this respect was
that He never disobeyed. Whatever least thing was taught by suffering
was straightway put in practice. With the ordinary child it is not so. In
the school of suffering the lesson has to be taught many times, it has to be
line upon line and precept upon precept before the pupil can be depended
upon to act up to it. Disobedience is an act of the will. There is no such
thing as disobeying without a conscious determination to do so.
Christ had only to know what obedience required of Him, and at once
He did it. But in this sort of wisdom, the learning what obedience did
require. He, from day to day, from year to year, "increased" until, at last
made perfect in it. He could say that it was learned, even though in the
whole process of learning there had been no single instance of transgression ;
and only when there is transgression is there sin.
The third saying which I quote as being seemingly in conflict with the
dog^a, Christ alone without sin, is also from the Epistle to the Hebrews.
In that Scripture we find Christ spoken of as " One that hath been in all points
tempted like as we are, yet without sin ". How can He, we ask, have been
without sin if tempted in all points like as we are. In us there is an

194 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
element of consent, which goes out to meet the temptation half-way so to
speak. We cannot say of ourselves as Christ said of Himself that Satan
cometh and finds nothing in us. He finds too much. But let us see
whether we cannot establish a parallelism between Christ's temptation and
ours, which while it shows us sinful at the same time leaves Him sinless.
It is common to explain the three temptations in the wilderness by
saying that the first of them, "Command that these stones be made bread",
was addressed to the animal element that is in every man ; that the second,
" Cast Thyself down ", was an appeal to spiritual pride, and that the third,
"All these things will I give Thee, if — ", was an attempt to work upon ambi
tion in the common, worldly sense. But I think it will be more to our present
purpose if we insist on looking at all three of the temptations as intended
to undermine the Son's confidence in the Father. You recall the wording
of the tempter's appeal, .^Thou be the Son of God, — do this; .^Thou be
the Son of God, — do that.
We must keep it in mind that this crisis in our Lord's life followed close
upon the baptism. Jesus had just been inducted, as we may say, into His
office as the Christ. The voice had said from heaven, " This is My beloved
Son", and John the baptizer had solemnly borne witness to the coming of
the greater than himself.
Full of this consciousness of a heavenly mission, awakened perhaps for
the first time to a clear understanding of all that He really was, the Son of
Mary had come into the wilderness to ponder these things, to feed upon
them, as it were, while denying Himself all other food. This, then, was the
grand point of attack, the confidence in the heavenly Fatherhood. If the
tempter could only shake this trust of Sonship, only break up this filial sense,
his bad end would be accomplished.
" If Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread ".
" If Thou be the Son of God, cast Thyself down from this pinnacle".
These are challenges, — challenges coupled with a sneer. The suggestion
is that the powers of God's world, the forces of His universe, are hostile,
not friendly, and that because of their being so the divine Fatherhood can
not be trusted or depended upon. Is there nothing in the experience of
modern man that tallies with all this ? Have not you and I, in our measure
and degree, to grapple with these same temptations ?
Who, we cry, can be counted upon to turn the stones that strew so
thickly the wilderness of this life of ours into bread that shall satisfy our
hunger? Who, in the midst of the many and great perils that compass all
our ways, will keep us from being dashed to pieces if we fall ? Not God,
surely, for God works through nature, and nature is under the hard rule of
law, and there is nothing for us save simple acquiescence in what seems to
be our doom. There is nothing very unfamiliar about this, — is there?
This is no strange temptation that thus befaUs us, but such a one as is com
mon to modern man, — the temptation to distrust God's love, the temptation
to disbelieve in His care, to repudiate the Sonship. But, after all, the only
thing we need to help us out of our distress is patience. In wonderful ways,

THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS. 195
and with a rapidity never before observed, the Author of Nature is making
nature plastic to our hands. She is no longer the cruel mistress she used
to be. When she presses us hard with her pains and bruises, her accidents
and sicknesses, and we feel moved almost to despair at the thought of all
her waves and billows going over us, let us say to ourselves : " This is my
temptation ; God is my Father all the same. For reasons of His own He
is letting these forces buffet me, letting me be tossed about, battered and
tortured, but He is all the while just as truly my Father, just as really my
friend, as if He were turning stones into bread at my appeal,or giving angels
charge to bear me miraculously in their hands lest I strike my foot against
gargoyle or capital. Be sure whatever voice bids us think otherwise is a
tempting voice, a scoffing voice, a voice against which we shall do well to
shut our ears.
The last of the temptations stands alone and by itself. The devil taketh
Him up into an exceeding high mountain, and showeth Him all the king
doms of the world in a moment of time. These, he says, are mine and to
whomsoever I will I give them, and Thou shalt have them, if Thou wilt only
fall down and worship me. But even in this case, different as the subject-
matter of the temptation is from that of the other two, even here we discern
the same bad motive lurking in the back-ground, the same malicious resolve
to break down, if it can possibly be done, the soul's confidence in the Father
hood of God. It is Satan masquerading as the King. " Consider all this
grandeur," the tempter says, " see all this magnificent paraphernalia of war
and peace, of enterprise and achievement. Look yonder at those parlia
ments and congresses, those armies and navies. Contemplate those huge
industries symbolized by factory and workshop and warehouse. Watch the
emigrations that are going on, the commingling of races, the peopling of
continents, and think of what it means to have the ordering of all this.
Think of the honor and the advantage of being my prime minister in the
government of so various and interesting a realm "
But this temptation like the others rests on the rotten substructure of a
lie. This that the tempter says, is false, utterly, absolutely, everlastingly
false. It is the power of goodness, not the power of evil, that really rules
these manifold affairs of men. God, not Satan, is the sovereign commander
of all the world. The vain pomp and glory of the world may be in Satan's
gift, but the true and solid glory of the world is God's affair, not his. The
great activities of human life are under the guidance of Him Whose never-
failing providence ordereth all things both in heaven and earth. This vast
administration which covers and comprehends both State and Church, is
carried on in the interests of righteousness, and any voice which whispers
in our ear that to succeed we must sell ourself to Satan, is cajoling us to our
ruin. The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof. Let us not imagine
that any save this supreme proprietor can ever give us a clear title to the
permanent possession of any single square foot of it. It is the meek-spirited
and they only who can expect to hold in perpetuity, these shall inherit the
earth.

196 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Thus was Christ tempted in all points like as we are. He stood it. We,
with varying degrees of failure, we succumb.
I have tried to show that His confident assertion, "I do always those
things which please Him ", finds nothing in the New Testament to contradict
it, and that the right answer to His question "Which of you convicteth Me
of sin ? " is this, " No man, Lord ".

* THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF MIRACLES.
BTT RKY. CHARLES "VY. RISHELL, PH. D.,
Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Boston University School of Theology,
Boston, Mass.
The topic assigned me assumes that miracles, presumably the miracles
of Jesus especially as reported in the Fourth Gospel, have an evidential
value. To one who stops to consider the assaults that have been made upon
the miraculous element in early Christian history, in the name of phi
losophy, science, history, and even of ethics, and the consequent elaborate
defence of miracles rendered necessary by those assaults, the question can
but suggest itself whether the recorded miracles are not rather a burden
than a support to faith.
Not a few have so thought, and have demanded that in the interests of
Christian propagandism, at least in these days, we shall confess that the
miracle stories of the Gospels are entirely incredible. I cannot agree with
those who so think, and I do not believe that any one who has thoroughly
mastered the principles of a sound philosophy, or who recognizes the
limitations of science, or who comprehends the fundamentals of historical
criticism, can doubt the reality of the miraculous element in the life of
Jesus. The denial of the miraculous is based on a philosophy now falling
rapidly into discredit, and upon a conception of science and history which
must fall when that philosophy falls, as fall it must, and that soon, for it is
now tottering. The flood of materialism in philosophy, science and history
has been outridden by the modern ark with its considerable family of those
who through all the storm held serenely fast to the truth.
Still to those who are influenced by that wholly absurd philosophy,
whether they be found in high places or in lowly, miracles must of necessity
appear impossible. Some of these people are to be pitied — perhaps all of
them. But some of them are to be condemned as pretenders, particularly
those who profess to be philosophers ; for they have never once looked at
the real problems of philosophy with open eyes.
But while some are to be pitied, and some are to be condemned, all
need laboring with ; and it is a great temptation to enter here rather upon
an argument in support of miracles than upon an argument which makes
miracles a support to faith. I desist simply and solely because I wish to
adhere to my topic, and because I presume that Dr. Strong did, a few
weeks ago, all that needs doing in this line, in a single course of lectures.
Nevertheless, even after philosophy, science and history have been
permitted to give their testimony, and have been cross-examined, and after

* Delivered at the Fourth Conference, held at Grace Episcopal Church, January 13, 1904.
197

198 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
it has been found that they have nothing to say against belief in miracles,
but that at least two of these three witnesses, philosophy and history, offer
practically compulsory evidence in favor of miracles, the question still arises,
what is their evidential value ? Not only what was it to those who saw the
miracles performed, but what is it to us ?
This question divides into two parts : First, as to the manner in which
the miracles buttress faith. The answer to this is found in the relation of
the miracles of Christ to the claims of Christ. Those claims would have
been mere idle boasts had He not wrought miracles. Any one can make
claims; not every man's deeds match his claims. When profession and
deed do not correspond we rightly doubt the validity of the claim.
There were at least two claims made by Christ that demanded miracle
for their support. The first is His claim of authority — authority to forgive
sin; to control the kingdom of God on earth ; to determine the destinies of
men. A claim to authority in these realms can be supported only by the
exhibition of the divine power requisite to the execution of such a divine
mission. There is not a little danger of confusion at this point. Not infrequently
we hear it said that the regular course of nature is a better evidence of
the divine operation in the world than any irregularity or miraculous opera
tions could be. And this is true. Some, however, fail to see that this does
not touch the question as to the attestation of Christ's mission. We do not
need miracles to show us that there is a God or that He is at work in the
world. What we need miracles for is to show us that Christ's relation to the
Father is what He said it was. And particularly did the people of His time
need miracles for that purpose. His ministry was brief. Time was not
allowed for the development of all those beneficent results which the reign
of Christ in the hearts of men has produced and which are our best evidence
of His right to reign. What was to be done for His generation had to be
done quickly. Hence miracles were a necessity at the first, though for
purposes of attesting Christ and His apostles they became less necessary as
time went on.
In view of all these considerations it is plain that the Jews were not
altogether in the wrong in asking for a sign. Jesus refused to give this sign
for several reasons ; but the legitimacy of the demand He did not apparently
deny. It was unfortunately a wicked and adulterous generation that required
the sign. The demand sprang from hostility, not from a spirit of honest
inquiry. Now suppose that with such extraordinary claims and such need of
attestation there had been no extraordinary deeds illustrative of His divine
power, what would have become of His claims ? The people of His day
simply could not have acknowledged them. The discrepancy between word
and deed would have been too great.
Especially true is this of the second claim referred to, — His claim of
being the highest conceivable manifestation of divine love. He who claims
practically infinite power and love must not fail to exhibit them in combi-

THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF MIRACLES.

199

nation if his claims are to be believed. His claims to be incarnate
omnipotence must be substantiated by omnipotent works wrought during
the incarnate state. The claim to be the incarnation of omnipotent love
must be substantiated by omnipotent works of a benevolent type. The
being who claims the power to do good and who does not do good is rightly
held to be either an impostor or unfeeling. In view of His claims Christ
without His miracles would be wholly anomalous. The profession of love
and power matched by the exercise of power in the interest of love is a
consistent picture.
The second phase of the question concerning the evidential value of
miracles pertains to the degree or amount of that value. This again divides
into two parts : First, do the miracles compel assent ? and second, are they
sufficient as evidence ?
The first of these questions does not admit either of a categorical
affirmative or negative. Very certain is it that those miracle stories do not
directly compel our assent to Christ's claims. Without them we could not
believe ; but for many they are merely the condition of belief, not its
ground. They are necessary to a consistent picture, and a consistent
picture tells for credibility. But the question still remains unanswered
whether the picture is imaginary or real, and the answer to that question is
to be sought in the whole realm of Christian evidences. It may be said,
however, that one who unhesitatingly accepts the fact of Christ's miracles
must accept Christ's claims ; and there are unnumbered multitudes who do
accept both His miracles and His claims. Those with whom tl^e miracles
are themselves a problem cannot, of course, use them as a strong support
of faith. With them the correctness of the consistent picture is still in
doubt. This leads to the second point, namely, whether the miracles are
sufficient evidence. It is plain that they are not. Nor are they the best
evidence. One might accept the miracles and so the claims of Christ
without becoming a practical Christian. Only that evidence which results
in practical Christian living is adequate. Miracles have their place, but
they cannot do everything. We must have them, but they are by no means
our sole reliance.
So much then for the general question of the evidential value of
miracles. It is time to come to the special question as to the evidential
value of miracles as seen in the Fourth Gospel.
It is a generally recognized fact that this Gospel was written with the
object of pioducing belief in Christ on the part of those who had never
seen Him and it is worth noting that it was the whole Gospel, not the
miracles alone, that was to produce faith. "These things were written",
says John, that is, all these things, "that ye might believe ". Furthermore
we find that Jesus appealed to His whole ministry in proof of His mission,
and not to His miracles alone or chiefly.
I think that at this point there is considerable misunderstanding. Jesus
says (10:37, 38) : — "If I do not the works of My Father, believe Me not

200 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
But if I do them, though ye believe not Me, believe the works : that ye may
know and understand that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father ". And
again (14 : 11) : — " Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in
Me : or else believe Me for the very works' sake "
These passages, with others, have, I think, been generally understood
as Christ's appeal to the convincing power of His miracles. Most readers,
when they read these passages, mentally substitute miracles for works,
as though He had said believe Me for the sake, or on account of the
miracles. I cannot help feeling that this is an erroneous interpretation. Doubtless
His works include His miracles, but His miracles are by no means the
whole of His works. The word translated "work" is ergon, 'pXxadX erga.
The word translated "miracle" \s semeion, plural semeia. Jesus is never
represented as appealing to His semeia, but always to His erga. Had He
meant to appeal to His miracles only as attesting His nature and mission.
He would have used the other word. Besides, His references to His works
in other connections show that they were not miracles alone. In chapter
5 :36, He says: "The works which the Father hath given Me to accom
plish, the very works that I do, bear witness of Me". And in 10:32,
" Many good works have I showed you from the Father ; for which of those
works do ye stone Me?" The Jews answered Him: " For a good work
we stone Thee not, but for blasphemy ". And in 10 : 37, " If I do not the
works of My Father, believe Me not". Also 9:4, "I must work the works
of Him that sent Me, while it is day ".
The works of the Father — the works that the Father gave Him to
accomplish ! Were these works miracles only ? Did the Father send His
Son into the world for the sole purpose of working miracles ? Great as they
were, and great as was their significance, it is impossible that the miracles
of Jesus exhausted His mission, and that everything He did and said over
and above this was no part of the Father's purpose in Him. It is unbelieve-
able that all those good works in the ordinary human sense of faithfulness
to duty, loyalty to principle, courage in the execution of one's tasks in the
midst of threatening danger, renunciation of the material in the interest of
the spiritual, manifestation of sympathy, love, and human interest in human
interests — I say it is unbelievable that these were no part of the works of the
Father given to Jesus to accomplish. If the miraculous works are necessary
as a credential, equally so are these ordinary, every-day good works neces
sary. And if we may judge from the record, it was just these plain and
homely good works that engaged the greater part of His time. The miracles
were the exceptional aspect of His activity. It is doubtless true that when
He spoke of His works He included His miracles ; but He certainly did not
confine His thought to them.
It is in strict accordance with this view of the case that men are repre
sented as believing in Jesus because of His words. Such a case we have in
the Samaritan mentioned in 4:41; also in the officers who were sent to
arrest Christ, but who returned and said: "Never man spake like this

THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF MIRACLES. 201
man '' (7 :46) ; and of many Jews of whom it is said that while " He spake
these words many believed on Him " (7 : 30). In line with this also is the
fact that His miracles did not always either produce or sustain faith in Him.
In 12:37 we read " That though He had done so many semeia before them,
yet they believed not on Him " ; and again in chapter 6, it is said that after
certain words of Christ, many of His disciples went back and walked no
more with Him. This, of course, was in spite of His miracles.
On the other hand many did, apparently believe because of His miracles.
We have accounts of such in 2 : 23 ; and in 3 : 2, when Nicodemus is repre
sented as recognizing the divine mission of Jesus through His miracles.
The woman of Samaria also believed Him to be the Messiah because of His
miraculous knowledge of her life. Furthermore, Jesus apparently felt that
His miracles ought to be taken into account in the determination of men's
relation to Him. " Though ye believe not Me, beheve the works " (10 : 38).
" If I had not done among them the works which none other did, they had
not had sin " (15 : 24). These passages do not refer to His miracles alone,
but they do, nevertheless, refer to the miracles. He had lived His life among
them on high levels. Deed miraculous and deed non-miraculous had matched
word in Him. His claims had been high, but His works had been high also.
There was no excuse for unbelief. So He thought and so we think. That
though they had seen Him perform so many miracles and so many other
good works, all correspondent to His demands upon men, and yet that they
should not yield to His demands, was reprehensible indeed.
And yet Christ did not work His miracles for the purpose of producing
belief in Him. I am aware that the assertion I have just made is contrary
to the received opinion, according to which He felt that in order to sustain
His high claims He must attest Himself by miracles which He wrought as
a credential of His authority.
I can, perhaps, express my own understanding of this matter in this
way : Jesus knew full well that His miracles would tend to produce faith in
Him, and He felt that it was right that they should contribute to this result ;
and yet those facts had no influence whatever in prompting Him to work
His miracles, all of which would have been wrought if they had been of no
evidential value in the sense of producing or sustaining faith in Him. I am
thoroughly convinced that this is so for all the miracles mentioned in the
Fourth Gospel, though I admit that one or two passages seem on the surface
to suggest a few exceptions.
In order that the facts may be all brought before you I take up first
those which militate against my contention, and then those which seem to
me to support it.
The first argument which might be used in favor of the ordinary view is
that the word so frequently translated miracle should be translated sign.
When Jesus turned the water into wine it is said, " This beginning of signs
did Jesus in Cana of GaUlee, and manifested forth His glory "(2:1 1). Nico
demus said : " No man can do these signs that Thou doest except God be
with him " (3 : 2). Jesus said to certain persons : " Ye seek Me, not because

202 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
ye saw the signs, but because ye did eat of the loaves, and were filled " (6 : 26).
Many of the people said : " When Christ cometh, will He do more signs
than these which this man hath done?" (7:31.) And so whenever in our
King James translation of John, we read " miracles ", we should literally
translate " signs ". In other words these miraculous works are unquestion
ably looked upon as signs — signs of the divine power and mission of Jesus.
Does not that seem to show that Jesus wrought these works in order to
prove His claims ? The answer to this must be an emphatic " No ". It is
one thing to say that they are signs and it is quite another to say that they
were wrought for the purpose of being signs. I think, therefore, that this
consideration has no weight.
There are two miracles recorded in the Fourth Gospel which are referred
to by Christ in language which seems to indicate that they were wrought for
the purpose of producing faith. The first one is the case of the man who
was born blind. When His disciples asked " Who sinned, this man or his
parents, that he was born blind ", Jesus answered, " Neither did this man
sin, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in
him " (9 : 2, 3). If we applied the ordinary view to this it would have to be
understood as saying that the blindness was not caused by the sin either of
the man or his parents, but was brought upon him in order that an opportu
nity should be presented for making manifest the works of God. But the
implications of such an interpretation are obnoxious in the highest degree.
We cannot, in this day, bring ourselves to believe that God would visit
blindness for a long term of years upon any one in order to show that He
had the power and love requisite to restore him to sight.
I pass this case for the present to take up the other similar one. When
Jesus was informed that Lazarus was sick. He said : " This sickness is not
unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified
thereby" (11 :4). Here again we seem to be told that a loved friend of
Jesus was made sick and a whole family of Jesus' dearest friends plunged
into heartbreaking sorrow in order to give the Father an opportunity to
glorify both Himself and His Son. So it appears to say, but really it does
not seem to describe the action of God as you and I think of God in the
light of the teachings of Christ. Was God so hard put to it that He had to
create cases of blindness and sickness and death in order to show what His
Son could do ? Without any disposition to employ ridicule, I must say that
one would have to think of Palestine as a remarkably healthy country if it
did not furnish blind and sick in plenty upon whom Christ could exercise
His miraculous power, without the necessity of bhnding and sickening men
in order to furnish opportunity for Him to prove His love and power.
There must be some other way of interpreting these passages more
consonant with the love and wisdom of God. And hints of that other way
we have in other passages. In 5 : 20, we read that " The Father loveth the
Son, and showeth Him all things that Himself doeth ; and He will show
Him greater works than these, that ye may marvel ". Here God is repre
sented as doing great works for the purpose of producing surprise, — a motive

THE EVIDENTIAL VALUE OF MIRACLES. 203
so unworthy of God that we feel practically sure there must be some mis
understanding. In 12 : 37-40 we read : " But though He had done so many
miracles before them, yet they believed not on Him ; that the word of Isaiah,
the prophet might be fulfilled * * * For this cause they could not
believe, for that Isaiah said again. He hath blinded their eyes, and He
hardened their hearts". If we take this language at what it literally says,
we shall be obliged to believe that God actually prevented some from
believing in order to secure the fulfilment of a prophecy. In 17 : 12, Jesus
says : " Those that Thou gavest Me I have kept, and none of them is lost
but the son of perdition ; that the Scripture might be fulfilled ". This is a
case in which one is even said to be lost in order that the Scripture might be
fulfilled. Works of God done in order to produce wonder ; men rendered
incapable of belief in order that the prophecy of Isaiah might be fulfilled ; a
soul lost in order that a passage in a psalm might be fulfilled ! If we take
the words " In order that" literally — if we understand them as expressing
the prompting motive — we must believe such teaching to be part of the
teaching of Christ Himself. I, for one, revolt, and refuse to take the
language literally. What is really meant is that great works of God shall be
done, and that men shall marvel ; that men did not believe and thereby
prophecy was fulfilled ; that a soul was lost, and thus a psalm was paralleled
in the history of Christ, or perhaps that thus we knew the psalm to be in
part Messianic.
But there is about as much reason for revolting from the literalness that
would have us believe that a man was born blind, or caused to sicken and
die in order that Christ might glorify Himself and secure the belief of the
onlookers by His works of restoration to sight and life. The words " in
order that " must not always be taken as expressing motive ; sometimes they
express result. Such is the case here. A man was born blind and as a
result some will believe in Christ when they see Him give the blind man His
sight. A man sickened and died and as a result Christ will be glorified
when men see Him restore the dead man to life. This interpretation is
rational and Christian, even if not warranted by the construction. The
other, though demanded by the construction is irrational and unchristian.
But if the rational and Christian interpretation is to be accepted, then those
passages do not teach that Jesus healed in order to produce faith. So that
there is nothing left to show that He ever wrought miracles for that purpose
or with that motive.
Taking up, now, the facts which seem to substantiate the view I here
maintain, it must be noticed that when asked to show a sign He either
avoided or declined the request. True, those who demanded a sign did so
in a spirit of hostility. But it is incredible that One Who could do the won
derful things recorded in John could not have turned hostility into faith if
He had chosen to do so. That He did not do so is the strongest evidence
conceivable that His miracles were never wrought with such a motive.
An examination of the real motives of Jesus in the performance of His
miracles, taking them one by one, shows that He was prompted by the

204 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
desire to bless and benefit men individually and collectively. His miracles
were credentials, but they would have been wrought if they had been
entirely barren of such a result. They sprang, not from His desire to
make men believe on Him, but from His desire to do men good.
But, it may be said, why should He not have wrought miracles for the
purpose of producing faith in Him ? Would it not have been a worthy use
of His miraculous power ? Surely it would so appear. And yet, while we
cannot give our Lord's reasons for holding Himself with inflexible firmness
to the thought of doing some good instead of winning their faith, we cannot
be too thankful that He did just as He did. In the first place, on the facts
as here set forth, must all attempts to discredit His miracles by placing Him
in the ranks of the wonder-workers go to pieces. It is just the motive of
the wonder-worker that his deeds shall in some degree or manner increase
the observers' esteem for the performer. Jesus sought nothing in return
for His miracles — not even the faith in Himself which would have resulted
in fresh benefit to the believer. We have before us in Christ the portrait of
one who did His good deeds, whether miraculous or not, out of a loving
heart, with absolutely no mixture of any other motive. Closely connected
with this is a second thought. The example of Christ as He is thus set be
fore us rebukes more effectually much of the unchristian effort of ministers
and churches in all ages. Is it not true that we seek additions to our
churches, in part at least, because of the strength those additions can bring
to the church ? And does not this lead to the feeling that as some can aid the
church more than others the stronger ones should be most coveted ? Yes,
the church does all its faithful adherents more good than they do it ; but
would not our methods and results be different if we were prompted as
Jesus was, wholly and solely by the spirit of love ? And this naturally leads
to a third thought, Jesus stands higher in the estimation of the world today
because He did His works out of a spirit of love than He would had He
mixed with it a desire to secure their faith in Him. And here is the
evidential value of miracles in its highest form. They prove His power,
but they also prove His love. Men might wonder at His power ; they adore
Him for His love. The world will be won to Christ not because He had
the omnipotent power of God in Him, but because He had in Him God's
infinite love. And this is the true evidential value of miracles.

* FREEDOM THROUGH THE TRUTH.
(St. John 8 : 31-36.)
by rev. everett id. burr, r>. d.,
Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Newton, Newton Centre, Mass.
In discussing this theme, which has its place in a series of expositions
of this Gospel, we must adhere rigidly to the terms of the Gospel in the
definition of truth, of freedom, and the relation between the two.
Truth in this Gospel is not an impersonal proposition, not a series of
definitions, no metaphysical statement, nor subjective conception, but
objectively real, personally embodied, livingly interpreted.
Freedom is not a deliverance from external shackles by mechanical
means, not the abrogation of control, but the emancipation of life to mani
fest itself in various forms, a process working not from without inward, but
from within outward.
As the truth is vital the freedom must be by process, evolutionary and
dynamic. Such a freedom will be the efflorescence of life and will follow
the truth as naturally and inevitably as the fruit results from the forces
resident in the root. From the point of view of John's Gospel, religion is
divine life in the human soul.
Definition of terms. Jesus always explained His Gospel in terms of
life. " I give unto them eternal life ". " I am come that they might have
life ". In endeavoring to explain the principles of His Gospel and the rela
tions which are to subsist between Himself and His followers. He chose
some vital thing, some living organism as, for example, the vine, as alone an
adequate explanation of the relation which is to exist between Himself and
the believer. The indictment of Jesus against the religious leaders and the
people of His day was that they would not come unto Him that they might
have life. They went to the philosophers for theories, to the rabbis for pre
cepts ; they went to the prophets for principles, and to the Mosaic code for
ceremonies ; but they would not come unto Him that they might have life.
This indictment is in force today. There is manifest reluctance to accept
the gift which Christ alone can give.
Through the Christian centuries men have been forming and reform
ing creeds while Jesus gave the truth which would transform character.
Even so learned a theologian and so prominent a Christian leader as
President Patton, of Princeton, was asked whether in his judgment Chris
tianity was a dogma or a life, and he replied, " It is a dogma "- We see
the fallacy of this definition when we take it back to Jesus and try to imag-

Delivered at the Fourth Conference, held at Grace Episcopal Church, January 13, 1904.
205

2o6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
ine Him saying, " I am come that they might have dogma, and that they
might have it more abundantly ".
But the learned president is not the only offender in this regard.
According to our own point of view we are apt to say that religion consists
in a method of organization, a mode of worship, or a statement of doctrine,
and so make it a thing of formulae, creeds, ceremonies, or priesthoods,
according to the degree of our religious susceptibility, or according to our
religious education, or according to our loyalty to tradition, as though these
things were in themselves the ends to be sought and not only means to one
single end. It was with reference to that sacred thing, the law, that Paul
said it is a " schoolmaster to lead to Christ ".
What was true of the most perfect expression of religious life in the
olden time is true of everything else religious, ecclesiastic, doctrinal, that
their only worth is in their usefulness in leading to a personal Christ.
Jesus found religion sinking into a creed and a ceremony. He presented
His Gospel not as a dogma to be believed, a statement to be discussed, or
a task to be performed, but a life to be lived. The beginning of religious
life is not the reception of a ceremony, subscription to a creed, or submission
to an ordinance, but contact with a person.
His invitations were always personal. " Come unto Me " was fre
quently upon His lips. The only truth which the believer was asked to accept
was the truth embodied in Himself. " I am the truth ". The code of
morals, the mode of conduct, the standard of life, were to be found in Him
self. " I am the way ". Indeed, the whole content of religion was defined
in personal relations to Himself — " I am the life ". He offered Himself as
Master and Lord, and relied upon the personal loyalty of His disciples to
sustain them in their obedience to Him. He offered the pleasure of associ
ation with Him as a sufficient compensation for the hardships of service,
even though it involved denial of self and the bearing of the cross. Devo
tion to the personal Christ was to be at once the impulse and reward for
every service. It is a person, not a dogma, that invites belief; a person, not
a law, which invites obedience. " In Him is life and the life is the light of
men " He inspires the thought, awakens the conscience, holds the heart,
energizes the will. He is Himself the life-blood of Christianity, and as such
the giver of life to those who receive Him. Nothing can create life but life
itself. " He that hath the Son hath life ". Jesus condemned the people of
His time because in the light of overwhelming testimony concerning Him
self they still rejected Him. He presents four witnesses as establishing His
claims upon the supreme attention of the thinkers of His day.
Pirst, the testimony of John. This is the more important and should
have been the more impressive because John was led to the acceptance of
Jesus by the resistless argument of His own personality. John was slow to
accept Jesus because of his religious preconceptions. He had planned a
program for Jesus in which he thought Jesus would perfectly acquiesce.
He was, therefore, greatly amazed to have Jesus adopt a different mode of
procedure, and could scarcely believe Him to be the promised Messiah. So

FREEDOM THROUGH THE TRUTH. 207
he sent messengers to ascertain whether He were indeed the Christ. He
had predicted the axe laid at the root of the tree, the winnowing fan and the
refining fire. But hearing of the beneficent services which Jesus was
rendering to humanity in healing the sick, cleansing the lepers, preaching
to the poor, he was perplexed beyond measure. Nevertheless, the testimony
of John when once convinced, was direct and unequivocal. He stripped
the veil which hid Christ's glory. He quickened the vision of his contem
poraries, stimulated their conscience, stirred the apathy of the people of His
time. The testimony of the works of Christ were even more convincing. The
activities of His hand had a divine but self-evidencing force which con
firmed and established His claims. The works of Christ were His normal
activities and deeds, which expressed the nature and compass of His will
and indicated the quality of His personality. These works were not limited
to the miracles of healing, the multiplication of the loaves, the increase of
the wine, the raising of the dead, but the whole of His service ; His total
activity He presented in testimony as a seltrevelation, the disclosure of His
consecration, and they are all of such a character as to proclaim His divine
commission. This entire service of Christ, reaching special expression in
certain typical acts and deeds could not but confirm beyond a challenge the
testimony of John.
But as though this were, not enough, the testimony of the Father was
added. Jesus was not content to present John's testimony or the evidence
of His works as the complete vindication of His claims. He said, " There
is another that beareth witness concerning Me ", " The Father which hath
sent Me ". At His baptism the voice of the Father proclaimed Him to be
His accepted Son, but, more than that, there accompanied Jesus in all His
life and service an incontrovertible evidence of a deific presence as, e. g.,
the angel song at His birth, the unusual providence which protected His
childhood, the opening of the heavens at His baptism, the pervasive pres
ence which was manifest in all His acts and made His ministry so influ
ential and impressive. He was the manifestation of the Father's glory, the
express image of His person.
As though to leave no witness unsummoned into court, there is added
to all the evidence the testimony of the Scriptures. " They testify of Me ".
Jesus' criticism is that in searching the written word they were missing the
living word. He admits their prolonged and eager study of the Scriptures,
approves their motives in the research, but He criticises the superstitious
idea that in the possession of the letter they had eternal life. " In them ye
think ye have eternal life, but they are they which testify of Me, and ye
will not come to Me that ye might have life ".
This, then, is the indictment of Jesus against the people of His time.
It is as true today. For, according to our point of view or our sense of
need, we look to the schools for theory, to the church for ceremony, to
philosophy for instruction, to priests for authority, to reason for light, to
ordinances for inspiration, to confession for peace of soul, but will not go

2o8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
to Christ that we may have life. And in consequence the religious world of
today is serving in many a house of bondage, the bondage of the letter, the
bondage of form, the bondage of tradition, the bondage of definition, from
which only the truth as it is in the personal Christ can ever give a real
emancipation, — that is, the emancipation of life.
The Romanist presents an infallible church as the end of all revelation,
the seat of all authority. The Protestant presents an infallible book, but
neither book nor church has life or can give life. They are but the staff of
the prophet laid upon the child of the Shunamite. They are but dead
sticks, — creeds, ordinances, doctrines, priests, preachers, — without the vital
and vitalizing contact with the living Christ. As the living person of the
prophet must needs be stretched upon the dead, lip to lip, nerve to nerve,
forehead to forehead, nostril to nostril, heart to heart, limb to limb, so must
the personal character, thought, purpose and life of the living Christ be
brought into touch with receptive souls. Jesus takes the high ground with
reference to the inspired Scriptures which He has also taken with reference
to other sacred objects, viz. : the temple and the Sabbath.
You call the temple sacred and the altar a heavenly shrine ? In what
does their sanctity consist ? There is One greater than the temple and only
so far forth as the sacred structure fulfills its mission in expressing the
presence of the greater One has it any sanctity. There is one Lord of the
Sabbath. The Sabbath is not an end in itself but is of worth only as it gives
evidence of the paramount claims of Him Who is its Lord. So of the Script
ures. They are not sacred in themselves except as they testify of Christ.
The bare possession of the written word, the prolonged examination of its
mere letter, neither nor both is the condition of eternal life. The study of
the Scriptures which is stimulated by the vague idea that it is religion, or
that it has life, or can give life, is illusive. We may think that in them we
have eternal life, but our Lord would undeceive us. The Scriptures are
not religion, nor do they contain religion any more than a captain's chart is
navigation, or contains the knowledge of navigation, or a book of tactics
contains warfare, or a knowledge of warfare, or a government treatise on the
rotation of crops contains agriculture or a knowledge of farming. The
Scriptures are a description of religion. They are a testimony to the personal
Christ. The Scriptures are not the truth. Jesus Christ is the truth. No
book, no church, no priesthood, nor ritual, nor creed, nor mode of worship
may diminish by one hair's breadth the immediacy of personal contact of
the human heart with the living personal Christ. When Jesus Christ lays
hold of a man so that the spirit of Christ becomes the determinative energy
of his life, that man is Christian and nothing else nor many things combined
can make him Christian.
" He that hath the Son hath life ". " If the Son make you free ye shall
be free indeed ". This is all there is to it — the personal relation with the
personal Christ. Christ is the one thing in the Christian life. The genius
of this experience called Christian is being wrought into Him. There is only
one thing which so connects a branch of the vine with the vine as to make

FREED OM THR O UGH THE TR UTH. 2 09
it a branch, and that is the life of the vine which makes itself felt in the
branch. There is only one thing which involves a limb in the body so as
to make it a member of that organic thing called the body and that is the
life of the body which courses through it. In the same way there is only
one thing which makes a man Christian and that is his vital contact with
Christ so that the thought of Christ shall inspire his mind, the love of Christ
move his heart, the purpose of Christ gird his will, the law of Christ confirm
his conscience. The weakness of Christianity is that we make it complex
and composite, and of our own conceits forge the chains which hbld us in
tether. Life is the thing. This simple fact is the whole of it. We make it con
sist of many things added together instead of one simple, oniriipotent,
supreme fact. We have heard so much about conviction and selitiment,
about doctrines and ceremonies that we have come to consider Christianity
as a matter of opinion, or of feeling, but Christianity is simply and solely a
matter of divine life in the human soul, and there is no matter of dogma, or
sentiment, or ceremony about it. Life is the thing. When divinely alive
we may find our emancipation and leave the burden of philosophy, the
thraldom of tradition, the shackles of superstition, the galvanism of emotion,
for we live. We may refuse to be satisfied with anything religious unless we
realize the life-giving touch of the Son of God. No picture of the sun can
illumine a landscape ; no richly colored wax or folded paper cari make a
flower bed. We may have our sunbeams hot from the sky and the fragrance
and beauty of life be the flowering of the in dwelling spirit of Him Who is
the life. When once this central truth is grasped it will go with us all the
way and lead us out of the tangles.
First of all, in the problems of conduct. Jesus Christ the teacher, taught
conduct, character, life, duty, — " By their fruits ye shall know them" was
His criterion of judgment as to behavior. " He that heareth My sayings
and doeth them " is the man whom He approved. The final tests in the
adjudication of destiny are ethical tests as seen in Matt. 25. — " Inasmuch as
ye did it — fed the hungry, clothed the naked, visited the sick and the like,
you may stand at the right hand of God in the judgment ". The problem
of the ethics of the New Testament is the kind of character illustrated in the
life of Jesus, and the first problem evident at the outset is the application of
this ideal of life to conduct and character.
He who accepts Jesus as the truth will follow His lead in the Scripture,
not studying the doctrines of the New Testament, not studying the theology
of the New Testament, not studying Christology. Nor will he be a New
Testament critic studying the books. These problems are behind and
beyond. No ! he will take the New Testament as it lies before him and the
one question before him will be what is the character exemplified and taught ?
What is the Christian character ? What sort of person is built on the New
Testament teaching ? These studies are preliminary, introductory. The
subjects are near and obvious ; they open the way to the remote. The first
thing in the New Testament is the appeal to life, conduct and character.

210 THE GOSPEL OF SI. JOHN.
The path to what is beyond lies through the investigation of the near.
Here is a method of approach which reverses the common method which
always begins with the remote, the obscure. Study the familiar hand-books
of Christian ethics, e. g., Dorner or Martensen. They begin with the specu
lative. The opening chapters are purely theological, metaphysical, and have
nothing to do with conduct and character. The whole discussion is of the
nature of God, then descends into the realm of conduct and lays down such
rules of conduct as are deducible from theological tenets ; but with Jesus as
teacher we take the other method of procedure. First the simple, the near,
the practical, the personal, then the greater visions of what lies beyond.
First ethics, then theology ; first life, then truth ; first the example of Christ,
then the person of Christ ; first the interpretation of Christ, then the know
ledge of Christ. "He who will do the will of God shall know". The
approach to the New Testament through the path of ethics is distinguished
from the usual treatment and more consistent with the New Testament
itself. The theology of the future is not prerequisite to the understanding
of the character of Jesus, but the very reverse. The character and life of
Jesus are fundamental to the theology of the future. Look at the ethics of
Jesus for a moment. In announcing His morality Jesus took three departures
from other systems : Mosaic, Pharisaic, Grseco- Roman. These were the
three moral systems of His time, the systems respectively of His ancestral
religion, the then principal sect, and that of the outside world. Every utter
ance of Jesus bearing on morals was spoken in contemplation of one or the
other of these classes. In departing from the Mosaic system He sought to
develop morality from its primitive rudeness and simplicity. In departing
from the Pharisaic system He sought to recall it from the ritualistic diver
gence to the proper subjects of morality, and in departing from the Graeco-
Roman He sought to substitute the tender for the heroic virtue.
His object, therefore, as viewed from these three points of departure
was respectfully to fulfil, to correct and to supplant, or to affect an exten
sion, a reformation and a revolution. The ethical classifications in the teach
ings of Jesus become clear when we understand His point of view.]
Jesus was infinitely patient toward some sins, but was terrifically severe
with the Pharisees. His estimate of the Pharisee and the Publican was a
subversion of all accepted standards of conduct. Jesus Christ wanted to
find one initial quality which the sinner might hold, and the typical Pharisee
lacked, namely,— docility, receptivity ; not the quality of wrong-doing in a
life, but the quality of self-sufficiency was the great hindrance to goodness,
the state of mind which knows no lack and is not open to modifications.
His commendation of another type — the child — is evidence of His estimate
of the worth of teachableness.
Childlikeness is this initial trait. It is not afflicted with self-sufficiency.
The chief obstacle to the Christian religion is satiety. This is hopeless. How
can we offer a feast when a man has fed ? Hunger, thirst, craving, openness ;
these are the qualities of mind on which Jesus lays emphasis. It is not the
sins of the flesh against which He inveighs, or the sins of the spirit. It is

FREED OM THR O UGH THE TR UTH. 2 1 1
the condition of being surfeited and therefore unteachable. Given teach
ableness, then His faith is in moral growth. He does not say that this is a
good man and that man is bad, but this man is moving toward an end, there
is hope of him. His movements are dynamic, evolutionary. Jesus always
looked for this openness toward growth. Consider, for example. His treat
ment of Peter. Jesus saw in him something teachable. This explains His
continued faith in Judas. He hoped for him ; there was something in him
to make Him believe in growth. He had not lost faith in him. Add to
openness of mind the principle of growth and you have the ground-work and
the standards of Jesus' ethics. Now compare the text-books on Christian
morals and make the contrast with the Gospel teaching in their mode of
approach. Dorner's system of Christian ethics so highly systematized is all
an inference from theology instead of as in the New Testament where ethics
' is propaedeutic to theology. As one of my teachers has said, " This process
is like drawing the fire down instead of lighting it on the ground. The
draught is the wrong way, and we cannot see because of the smoke ". In
the Gospel we trace the path of Jesus in His steps ; we listen to Jesus and
hear Him talk about conduct and character. To follow His simple, elemental,
inductive method of study takes us away from classification. We go through
life, not as the professional botanist, to pluck, dry, classify, put away in a
drawer, label, and perhaps exhibit the selected specimens of conduct. We
go rather as a nature lover who walks through the fields and watches the
lilies as they grow. Jesus is not a system maker, but an observer with the
highest qualities of insight. He watches the people as they act. His ethics
are based on the principles of growth ; He deals not with character as it is,
but with character as it may be. He considers the issue, like a bulb planted
in winter. He discerns the possibility of beauty in the spring. This is why
the nethermost sins are not hopeless from the point of view of Jesus. States
of mind interest Him. If the roots are dead there is no hope. So the
Pharisee and the Publican in ordinary estimates were clearly distinguishable.
So are the rose and the daisy. From all appearances and by ordinary
standards of value the rose is to be preferred, but the great question is what
will happen next spring ? Jesus looking on the Publican saw in him promise
and possibility and knew that he would come to something, but the Pharisee
was dead at the root. What hope is there in the character ? This is the
question. Is there to come something from the unpromising stem which
will justify keeping it ? If not, cut it off. " To be carnally minded is death,
to be spiritually minded is life ". Here is the promise of growth. So with
the lead of Jesus we are able to get at the real in character and find emanci
pation from the bondage of ordinary classifications of conduct in the discovery
of that which is vital.
Secondly. In the problems of doctrine. The history of religion plainly
reveals a tendency toward elaboration. In the process there is an inevitable
loss of some of the elements of original character. A change of base^is not
a change for the better. Religions deteriorate ; they lose their finer ingre
dients. The average Mahometan today is not nearly so good a man as

2 12 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Mahomet was. Judaism in the time of Christ was very different from the
Judaism of Moses. It is equally true of Christianity. The truth which
Christ declared is obscured in tradition ; the life which He emphasized is
lost in dogmatic systems. The most hopeful religious movement today is
the determined effort to get back to Christ, to unload the superfluous
baggage of theological dogma, to set back the roots of all Christian growth
into the original soil of the real life of God. It is a reaction from the exter
nal to the internal, from the accidental to the essential. Back and up the
stream of religious life the earnest souls of this latest of the centuries are
pressing their way in order that they may trace the current to the fountain
head and discover a clear stream. The longest dogmatic systems are the
atest. The Romish Church has continued the elaboration of its articles of
faith through fourteen centuries, adding the last in 1870. We have to go
back for brevity. The thirty-nine articles in the Westminster Confession
are more brief than the Catholic creed. The creed of Athanasius is shorter
still, the Nicene creed less elaborate. The nearer the source the simpler
the statements. The Apostolic creed is the simplest of all, but the pure
river of the water of life is today being traced back to the very altars of God
where the stream issues forth clear as crystal uncontaminated by the findings
of Augsberg, Trent, Chalcedon or Nicea, back to the New Testament itself
in which are the pure springs — there to find the personal Christ.
" Hushed be the noise and the strife of the schools,
Volume and pamphlet, sermon and speech.
The lips of the wise and the prattle of fools.
Let the Son of Man teach 1
" Who has the key of the future but He ?
Who can unravel the knots of the skein ?
We have groaned and have travailed and sought to be free.
We have travailed in vain.
" Bewildered, dejected, and prone to despair.
To Him as at first do we turn and beseech.
Our ears are all open I Give heed to our prayer I
O Son of Man teach ! "
The essentials of religion as defined by Paul who received his illumina
tion from the personal Christ are but two, — a person and a fact, Jesus and
the resurrection. Peter's succinct statement, the summary of which he had
learned after seven months with Jesus in northern Galilee was : " Thou art
the Christ, the Son of the living God ". And the final word of John reveals
the heart of the matter — " He that hath the Son hath life ''. In the atmos
phere of the New Testament there is the emphasis of life. The councils
of the centuries have been elaborating definitions, determining theories,
settling opinions, and have wrapped themselves round in the shackles of
paralyzing discussion.
Take up any system where you will. They have nothing to do with
character or conduct. They are metaphysical, not ethical. They discuss
the relation of the three persons in the trinity ; the relation of the divine and
human natures in the person of Jesus ; the relation of the sacrifice of Jesus

FREEDOM THROUGH THE TRUTH. 213
to the divine law ; the relation of the will of man to the will of God ; the
mysterious nature of the sacraments and many such like things they discuss.
Doubtless these ought they to have done but not to have left the other
undone. One breathes another atmosphere in the teachings of Jesus.
He speaks of a Father's love and care ; His beneficent providence ; the
freedom from care which comes from trust in that love ; the obligation of
children to be like their Father ; the importance of unselfish service ; the
excellence of the tender virtues ; the estimate of the inner quality of life as
compared with the merely external and formal. This is not theory nor
theology. It is life. As Henry Van Dyke has said: "Theology is not
religion for the same reason that biology is not life ". Wherever there is
this conception of what is vital in religion in the actual contact with the
living Christ there is life real, throbbing, essential. This emphasis of the
essentials has found expression lately in the chapel at Brighton where the
eloquent Robertson preached. There has been placed a memorial in the
form of Hoffman's " Christ Among the Doctors of the Law ", and as express
ing the attitude of mind of their beloved preacher, the givers of the tablet
have inscribed the legend — "They were thinking about theology, he was
thinking about God ".
Thirdly. In the problems of worship. The tendency toward elaboration
is as apparent in forms of worship and methods of organization until some
times it is difficult to discover the earnest, simple activities of the church of
the apostles amid the elaborate ritual and complex ceremony of today. The
unselfish ministrations of the apostolic church has been displaced by the
selfish administration of the church of the later centuries. We have to go
back for simplicity. The methods that have gradually come into use through
the centuries have obscured the simple ways of the apostles. The emphasis
of the church as an organization has given rise to an elaboration of ritual,
an enrichment of ceremony which makes the church appear as an end in
itself. Ecclesiastical form is thought to express the whole content of religion
and in the thought of the church as an organization is lost the more Christly
thought of the church as an organism. Simplicity is fundamental to all
religious life.
In recent explorations in Eg^pt it is recorded that Cailliaud found some
excavations in a mountain which on entering proved to be emerald mines
apparently unvisited since the times of the Ptolemies. There at the entrance
lay the lamps and the tools with which the ancient miners had worked appeal
ing with silent eloquence for other hands to take them up and dig for new
treasures which lay in costly profusion all around, and with the old instru
ments these new workmen in the latest of the centuries dug out the emerald
gems. The apostolic church, fresh from the hands of the Holy Ghost had four
great characteristics,— love of truth, love of one another, frequent remem
brance of Christ, and immediate connection with Him in prayer. They
continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, in the break
ing of bread and in prayers. There are some things in the church more

214 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
important than exactness of ordinances, or ornateness of worship, and one
of them is the divine breath.
A work among the mariners is carried on in New York harbor by the
Episcopal City Mission. The missionary was asked by an ecclesiastical
purist whether his church were high or low. He replied, "It depends upon
the tide ". There were some simple, great matters which inspired the
consecrated disciples in the first century and they engaged in a manifold
ministry, a ministry of life as penetrating as human need, as comprehensive
as divine love.
You will remember John Stuart Blackie's confession of faith. It has
the true ring. " Creeds and confessions ? High church or low ?
I cannot say; but you would vastly please us
If with some pointed Scripture you could show
To which of these belonged the Saviour Jesus.
I think to all or none. Not curious creeds.
Or ordered forms of churchly rule He taught,
But soul of love that blossomed into deeds
With human good and human blessing fraught.
On me nor priest, nor presbyter, nor pope.
Bishop nor dean, may stamp a party name.
But Jesus with His largely human scope
The service of my human life may claim.
Let prideful priests do battle about creeds
The church is mine that does most Christ-like deeds "
That church has the most divinity in it which does the most for human
ity. Humanity wants life, not theories about life. The church that will save
a world must be divinely alive. It will not be a rich church nor a poor
church, liturgical or non-liturgical. Life consists not in ornateness nor
plainness, "Neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncircumcision, but
a new creature "- Such a church will subordinate tradition to truth, will
insist that even Augustine and Calvin shall yield the throne to Jesus, will
insist that councils, creeds, priests and fathers combined shall not in the
least diminish the immediacy of the pressure of the very words of Christ or
divert the permanent and paramount authoritativeness of His word. Such
a church will keep the conscience of Christendom face to face and eye to
eye with our Lord, will provide an exhilarating atmosphere for Christian
activity and impart nerve to Christian enterprise. Such a church will
emancipate the thought of God's people from entanglements and complica
tions by its constant fealty to the personal and vital elements of Christian
truth. To the member of such a church Christ will be the one thing in the
Christian life. He will know Christ as a personal force. Christ will ener
gize him, inspire him, be the motive of all he does. He will yield to Christ
exact, absolute and prompt obedience. He will be in vital touch with Christ
by virtue of his own personal faith. To him Christ is the vine of which he
is a branch and all his Christian experiences are a matter of being wrought
into Christ, for Christ and Christ's spirit are the determinative energies of
his life. This is the church for which the world is waiting. This is the

FREED OM THR O UGH THE TR UTH. 2 1 5
simple vital truth which humanity craves. The ordinary mind with difficulty
understands the elaborate systems of doctrine which the centuries have
perfected, nor can it appreciate the elaborate cults of worship which are
maintained in the name of religion ; but the people know the life of Jesus
when they see it, and in Him Christianity consists not of many things com
bined, but one thing.
Once in immediate contact with Jesus Christ, the seeker for truth is not
confused with complicated questions of convictions or conduct. These are
incident, not essence. Life is the essential thing. Where there is life there
will be fruit. Life will surely manifest itself. The Christianity of Christ is
not a system of doctrine, nor a form of worship, nor a code of morals, but
divine life in the human soul.
To be sure, the Christ-filled man will think deeply and accurately ; he
will also behave well, but neither opinion nor behavior, neither creed nor
covenant constitute the essence of Christian experience. Life is the thing.
Let the truth as it is in Jesus be accepted in its simplicity and its entirety
and the world's emancipation is achieved. He did not formulate a definite
series of the necessary articles of faith, nor did He summarize the things
which it is essential to believe. Such a statement is not essential to the
religion of Jesus. He did not insist upon certain forms of worship. " God
is a spirit : and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in
truth " ; not in Gerizim, nor in Jerusalem is the place to worship, but
wherever and whenever the reverent soul lifts itself to God.
He did not fix a heirarchy of virtues and classify actions by any set and
fixed ethical standards. He seemed quite willing that the opinions of His
disciples should be flexible so long as their faith was firm and their life
eternal. He seemed to have anticipated the subtle temptation which has
overtaken the Christian disciple in all ages to emphasize the intellectual ele
ment in the religious life on the one hand, or the external on the other, and
so He taught, explained, and reiterated that life was paramount and prece
dent. He led His disciples to larger views of intellectual freedom and
responsibility. He bade them see that in the nature of the case opinion is
to life what letter is to spirit, what scaffold is to structure. The words
which He spake unto them, they were spirit, they were life. In the classical
passage (John 4) he teaches clearly that worship depends upon a true con
ception of God, that it must be spiritual as opposed to sensuous, that it must
be in truth, dealing with reality, giving adequate and veracious expression
to genuine desire and veritable emotions.
In the public worship which will accord with these simple principles
the Praise will not be rendered perfunctorily by certain lay figures arrayed
in the latest achievements of the dressmaker's art, conspicuously exposed
to the gaze of the curious, nor will it be the pyrotechnical vocalizations of
certain musical prodigies whose delight is in the law of the echo. It will
rather be the spontaneous expression of real emotion, gratitude, joy, rever
ence — praise in which every worshipper will participate and pour out his
soul in exultant song.

2i6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
The Prayer will not be an elocutionary discourse which brings the wor
shipper into communion with him who prays ; it will rather be the voice of
the heart, as natural an outbreathing as when the flowers swing their
censers in the temple of the morning.
The Preaching will present God, not the preacher ; will awaken the
conscience, not tickle the itching ear ; will ennoble and enrich the life of the
hearer till he will feel that his minister is the minister of Christ by whose
hand he has the gift of life and has that life more abundantly.
Fourthly. In the problems of social service. Who shall give humanity
the life and liberty it craves ? This opportunity belongs to the church of
the living God. What is the New Testament idea of the church ? It is
the body of Christ, the reincarnation of the Son of God, the incarnation of
the Holy Ghost. As such she must express in her conduct, her doctrine,
her worship, her service the spirit which animates her. Christ must be the
source of her life, Christ the body of truth which she teaches, Christ the
source of her power. There is only one simple fact which constitutes the
organism called church, namely, her living relation to Christ. There is
no church except as the members of the organism are livingly knit into
Him. The church is organism, not mechanism.
In the deepest sense, therefore, the church may embody the truth which
will give humanity the liberty and life it craves. She may demonstrate that
God localizes Himself in her. She may be the organ of the life of God.
For this church the world waits. Humanity wants life, the touch of omnip
otence, contact with God. The church of the living Christ today may be
the embodiment of divine love, wisdom and power. She may work in the
world as distinct amid the organizations of the time as the life of Abraham
was amid the materialistic civilization of the Mesopotamian Valley, as dis
tinct as the life of Enoch, who walked with God, who worked and wor
shipped in a spiritual temple invisible yet real and eternal. While other
men build theologies, settle definitions, elaborate theories and try by multi
plied and complex agencies to affect the life of men, the church may triumph
as Elijah on Carmel, or Peter at Pentecost, who linked their activities to
the dynamics of the skies and were personally moved by the omnipotent
energies of God.
Such a church may conquer mountainous difficulties, expel insistant
and rebellious evil, solve vexed and intricate problems, and bring in a new
heaven and a new earth. Herself delivered from the bondage of the letter,
and tradition, and form, having found the emancipation of spirit and life,
she can deliver humanity from the bondage of sin and death. The social
evangel of Jesus was spirit and life. He began with life at its sources. His
salvation of society, like salvation of the soul, was to save the body through
the soul. His methods in redemption were, therefore, vital, not mechanical.
He would transform the soul of mankind and so change the civilization in
which they live. Only the life of Christ can raise civilization from the
dead. The efficiency of Christ's method has been vindicated through 2000
years of history. Yet it is astonishing how difficult it is to get it practically

FREED OM THR O UGH THE TR UTH. 2 1 7
accepted by the social workers of to-day. The external method is so plausi
ble, so bewitching, so easy. There never was a time when some reformer
was not ready to suggest some Medea's bath, some Merlin's charm, or, with
Carlisle, some Morison's pill which can cure all the ills of the race. The
shores of the social sea are strewn with the wrecks of these futile and
mechanical attempts at changing the condition of men. It is less expensive
just to put a face on things. Some people are yet misled by the error that
the shell can form the organism, or the feathers grow the bird. There are
yet advocates of the theory that environment makes the man ; there are
yet reveries of sentiment and romance about the New Jerusalem builded
with jewels and paved with gold, and Jesus yet weeps over the city and
society because the people will not let Him build their Jerusalem for them.
These methods and agencies leave the essential difficulty of the problem
untouched. Only the truth as it is in Jesus can make men free. "The law of the
spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made us free from the law of sin and
death". We must bring to bear upon dilapidated and disabled souls
the quickening breath of the divine life and so awaken them to the appreci
ation of that better life which they may have abundantly.
To be sure, men will say they are not dead as the Pharisees declared
they had " never been in bondage to any man ", yet there was Eg^pt and
Babylon in their history, and the Roman eagles were visible in the temple,
flaunting their wings in the castle. Men are as ingenious as they in ignor
ing the disagreeable facts which blind so many to their fetters. Sin's fet
ters are riveted when the bondsman lifts his manacled hand and protests his
freedom, but slavery is not an affair of political or social arrangement. It
is a condition of the spirit. Death is not physical collapse, but separation
from God. Real bondage is that which enslaves the will and prevents
doing right. " Whoso committeth sin is the servant of sin ". The most real
servitude and the only terrible death is that perverted condition of soul in
which the better nature is incapable of casting off the chains woven by its
own acts, and in trying to do so throws aside the restraints of virtue only to
be bound the more tightly by the heavier fetters of vice. This deeper
human need is revealed as by a lightning flash in the words of John (i John
5:12) and the words of Jesus illumine the path into the larger liberty of the
sons of God.
"He that hath the Son hath life "— " If the Son make you free you
shall be free indeed "-

* THE HOME AT BETHANY AND THE FRIENDSHIPS OF JESUS.
BY REY. DONALD SAGE MAOKAY, D. D.,
Minister of the Fifth Avenue Collegiate Church, New York.
Friendship, as an influence in Christ's life, was neither trivial nor inci
dental. If it be true that a man is known by his friends, it may be said
with perfect reverence that the character of Jesus, in its human relations,
can be interpreted in the light of His friendships. Apart, therefore, from
their historical interest, the friendships of Christ have a definite psychologi
cal value. In ways most suggestive and illuminating they interpret cer
tain fundamental qualities in His nature, without which, indeed. His
humanity would be incomplete. On the one hand, for example, they reflect
Christ's capacity for creating friendship, a certain sympathetic power of
drawing men and women to Himself on the basis of loving intimacy. On
the other hand, they reveal the need of friendship itself as a feature of His
nature, a craving of His heart which demanded the sympathy and love of
kindred souls for its expression.
But more than that, in addition to this historical and psychological
interest, the friendships of Jesus must be studied in the light of their spir
itual and experimental value. Nothing would be more inadequate than to
think of these friendships as merely reminiscences of His human fife on
earth. They are, in fact, the pledge of His continuous presence in the
experience of His people. They are the historical type of. that mystical
communion which the believer enjoys as the supreme achievement of faith.
The friendship of Jesus, mediated through the Holy Spirit, is the dynamic
in the Christian consciousness. There is no simpler, yet more profound
definition of Christianity as a spiritual influence in the soul than in these
three words, '' Friendship with Jesus ". In these words lies the secret of the
divine life in man, transfiguring character and inspiring conduct. " Hence
forth I call you not servants but friends."
The Christian life, it may be said, passes through three distinct stages
— that of the bond-servant, where the radical motive is compulsion through
fear; that of the hireling, where the controlling elements are duty and
reward, and finally that of the friend, where spiritual experience has resolved
itself into personal fusion with Christ, in which the dominant influence is
love expressing itself in passionate devotion.
That is the flower of Christ's friendship. To that high destiny He
sought to lift every man who felt the touch of His spirit. Very beautifully
is that spiritual aspect of His friendship brought out in that verse in St.
Mark's Gospel which records the calling of the twelve. In Mark 3 : 14 we

* Delivered at the Seventh Conference, held at the Central Congregational Church, April 13, 1904.
218

THE FRIENDSHIPS OF JESUS. 219
read, "And He appointed twelve that they might be with Him ". A world
of spiritual suggestion lies in that preposition " with ''. Primarily he chose
these twelve men, not to cast out devils or preach the gospel or baptize.
Back of all these things was this fundamental condition : He chose them
" that they might be with Him ". Fellowship with Christ must antedate
service for Christ. Our friendship with the Master is the secret of our
activity for the Master. To know this atmosphere of personal communion
with Him is the highest culture of which the soul is capable. Friendship,
the reservoir of service ; lacking that, service becomes drudgery and duty
sordid. It is a frequent criticism of Christian ethics that the New Testament is
singularly reticent on the subject of friendship. While it is specific enough
as to duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and ser
vants, on the claims and duties of friendship, the New Testament, it is
often asserted, has no word to say. While Pagan thought found its noblest
utterances in its glowing apostrophes to friendship. Christian literature on
the other hand, in and out of the canon, has nothing that can compare with
the great classics on this theme. Jeremy Taylor, indeed, amongst the Puri
tans, has a charming essay on the " Pleasures and Offices of Friendship ", —
next to his book on " Holy Living and Dying ", his best piece of writing, —
but even Jeremy Taylor, writing from the Christian point ot view, draws his
most effective illustrations from the classic authors of Greece and Rome.
But the assertion that the New Testament has nothing to say on the
pleasures and offices of friendship is only partially true. What it omits to
say by precept or aphorism, the New Testament does convincingly by sug
gestion and example. If the word friendship occurs only once in the New
Testament, and then only as a term of condemnation, the atmosphere of
friendship in its highest and purest sense pervades the book like the aroma
of Mary's ointment. The new commandment is the charter of Christian
friendship. That we love one another as He loved us is to be the measure
of our spiritual kinship with all men, and from the passion of that divine
love. Christian friendship draws its inspiration.
The home at Bethany was the geographical center of the friendships of
Jesus. To the Fourth Gospel we owe an imperishable debt of gratitude for
that exquisite chapter in the Saviour's life. Bethany, lying peacefully
amidst the uplands of Judea amongst the vine-clad hills, and shadowed by
its spreading date palms, was the Elim in Christ's life, the quiet resting
place towards which in His weariest days He turned His feet, not doubting
the welcome of love which awaited Him there. Bethany brought the touch
of home to a homeless man. Over that village home there rests for the
Christian an almost idyllic light, peaceful, restful, like that of the early
morning before the birds are awake. With its tender memories it enshrined
the holy human sympathy of Jesus. His place in every home is made
secure by His presence in that simple household, a presence that con
secrates the family and makes the humblest home a sanctuary. His love
for man is made intense and personal by His love for Martha and Mary

220 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
and Lazarus— Mary, "whose eyes were homes of silent prayer" ; Martha,
whose heart was burdened down with care, and Lazarus, whose vision
pierced the night of death.
As one studies Christ's relations in that Bethany home, one becomes
conscious of a fourfold manifestation of His friendship with those whose
intimacy with Him had ripened into mutual confidence and love.
First, we see Christ there as the genial friend, when, with a touch of
half playful humor He rebuked, if one may use a word so strong, the
anxious worriment of Martha, busy with her household cares. To Luke we
owe that charming glimpse of the contrasted temperament of the two sisters,
amplified by John under different circumstances.
Second, we see Him as the sympathetic friend, when in the hour of
their great affliction He comes to them and mingled His tears with theirs at
the grave of Lazarus.
Third, we behold Him as the divine friend, when with voice of divine
authority He declared Himself the Resurection and the Life and com
manded Lazarus to come forth.
Fourthly, we witness in Jesus the grateful friend, when with imperish
able words of gratitude He acknowledged Mary's act of devotion in breaking
over Him the precious spikenard and vindicated her love for all time in the
face of the vulgar criticisms of Judas and his associates.
These then were at least four distinctive notes in the friendship of
Jesus as it unfolded in the home at Bethany ; geniality, sympathy, gratitude
and divine helpfulness from the shadow of death. Combine these qualities
and they reveal the intense and beautiful humanness of Christ's relations
with those He loved. His was a friendship that invited confidence and
disarmed fear. Take, for example, Martha's approach to Him (recorded
by St. Luke), when in a moment of petulance she appealed to Him to send
Mary back to her household duties instead of monopolizing the Master's
attention. The strong aorist verb, meaning literally " coming up suddenly '
to Him, betrays not merely a touch of temper on Martha's part, but a cer
tain familiarity of approach which is suggestive of the intiinacy which
existed between Christ and these two sisters. And it is in the light of that
unconstrained confidence that we are able to appreciate the geniality of
Christ's reply. It is hardly fair to call it a rebuke. It is rather the half
bantering response of one who, recognizing the anxious hospitality of a gen
erous hostess, seeks to relieve her anxiety, while at the same time defending
the more spiritually-minded Mary who sat at His feet.
But most beautifully this mark of utter confidence in His sympathy was
shown by these sisters in the message they sent to Jesus when Lazarus fell
ill. " Him whom Thou lovest is sick ". That is all. The message con
tained no request. It was enough, these grief-stricken sisters felt, to tell
the Master that His friend was sick. Friendship has no higher mark than
that. The silence, the reserves of a true friendship are more eloquent than
its speech. The language of the heart in the hour of its necessity fills up
the gaps of the broken speech, and what the lips cannot articulate, love
interprets and love fulfils.

THE FRIENDSHIPS OF JESUS. -it.s.
It is not without significance that the friendship of Jesus towards the
household at Bethany found its highest expression in the hour of a great
sorrow and through a great self-sacrifice. The eleventh chapter of John is
a life-commentary on the exceeding preciousness of Christ's presence in the
last and saddest moments of experience. To that grief-shadowed home He
came, even though He knew His coming meant the hastening of His own
death, as it proved, and forgetful of self, forgetful for the moment even of
His own power over death. He bowed His head in tears so deep, so intense
that those standing near could not but exclaim, " Behold how He loved him ".
Never, save on the cross, were the human and the divine in Christ so sharply
contrasted, and yet too, never so matchlessly blended as when, one moment
weeping in sympathy by the grave, the next moment He said: "Lazarus,
come forth ". Than that act of bringing back life from the tomb, friendship
could only go one step further, the laying down of His own life for His
friends. And that coronation of friendship Jesus reached on the cross.
Turning now for a few moments to Christ's friendships with His disci
ples, one is impressed at once by their variety. The friendships of Jesus
were not temperamental. They were not limited by the presence or
absence of certain qualities in those He invited to His intimacy. How
various and contrasted for example, were the types of character represented
in these twelve men, — the choleric Peter, the melancholic John, the phleg
matic Andrew, the cautious Thomas, the secretive Judas ; in each and all of
these men there was some distinct quality that called out the Master's love.
It is indeed a significant fact, that while John was the beloved disciple who
most deeply had caught the secret of Christ's love, Judas was the only one
of the twelve whom Christ ever addressed as " Friend". In that moment
of betrayal in the garden, as though in that last moment He sought to stay
the traitor's kiss, the last pleading of the Master's love and the final appeal
to the holy memories of the past could find no deeper expression than this,
" Friend, wherefore art thou come ? " It was, as has been said, the last
pleading of love, the appeal of a friendship that to the very end sought to
restrain the treacherous hands that destroyed it.
What then was the basis of this friendship of Christ? What was the
supreme condition of entrance into this holy fellowship ? The answer to
that question is found in the fifteenth chapter of John. If the eleventh
chapter, with its exquisite picture of the Bethany home is the historical
record of His friendship, the fifteenth chapter with its beautiful parable of
the vine and the branches is the spiritual record of His friendship. Picture
for a moment the scene. The fourteenth chapter ends with the words
spoken in the upper room, "Arise, let us go hence "- Immediately after the
fifteenth chapter begins with the memorable words, "I am the true vine".
What is the point of connection ? As Christ arose with the eleven disciples
and stepped out on the stairway leading down to the silent road, bathed
that Passover night in the radiance of the paschal moon. His eye would
naturally rest on the richly clustered vine that climbed against the wall of
the house. Instantly it gave the key to the thoughts of His heart. He was

222 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
aibout to leave those men. Never again could the conditions of intercourse
be precisely the same as in these years in which they had sojourned together.
But the love, the intimacy, the confidence was to be the same. How then
could He make clear to them that though separated in the flesh their kin
ship was not to lessen, but to deepen in the years to come ? And the vine,
growing there before them as they stepped out into the silent Passover
night, supplied the thought. As the vine drew its life from the root buried
out of sight, and as the branches brought forth their fruit through the unseen
currents of life which flowed from that hidden root, so henceforth their life
in Him and His friendship with them would be realized by their spiritual
communion with an unseen friend. So the great words were spoken,
" Abide in Me ; henceforth I call you not servants but friends ". That word
"henceforth" marked a cleavage line in their spiritual history. On one
side "servants"; on the other side "friends". Strange, surely, that not
till the night of His leaving them, when, according to human standards
friendship was to end, He admitted these eleven men to the high intimacy
of friendship. Now what was the condition of entrance into this richer
experience ? How were they to cross over the " henceforth " from servitude
to friendship ? The condition was obedience. Mystical in its character, this
higher friendship was to be supremely practical in its realization. The
ethical condition of obedience was emphatic. Here, indeed, we touch one
of the most suggestive features in the Fourth Gospel. I sometimes think
that a great work has yet to be written on the ethics of St. John. The most
spiritual of all the evangelists, the ethical note of his Gospel is as clear as
the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount. This is especially true of St. John's
doctrine of obedience. In John's Gospel, obedience has a threefold influence,
first as the condiion of intellectual illumination ; second, as the con
dition of spiritual communion, and third, as the condition of peace of soul.
"If any man will do the will, he shall know the doctrine, whether it be of
God", — obedience as the organ of intellectual illumination. "Ye are My
friends if you do whatsoever I command you ", — obedience as the organ of
spiritual communion. " If ye know these things, happy (blessed) are ye if
ye do them, — obedience the organ of blessedness and peace of soul.
Through that obedience, the friendship of Christ as a spiritual experi
ence was intended to produce a threefold blessing. First, transformation
of motive in service ; second, revelation of purpose in discipline ; and third,
assimilation of character through fellowship. These are the three distinctive
marks of that deeper life of fellowship to which on the eve of His departure
He admitted His disciples. First, transformation of motive in service. The
motive of service in the slave or bond-servant is either fear or reward ; the
motive in the friend is co-operative love. The friend anticipates his master's
word and rejoices in doing his master's will. Friendship is the transfigura
tion of service ; the creation of a new motive ; redeeming life from its
drudgery, and sending the pulse-beat of joy into the most trivial task.
Secondly, friendship in this spiritual interpretation, is the revelation of
purpose in discipline. " I call you friends " said Jesus, " for all things that I

THE FRIENDSHIPS OF JESUS. 223
have heard of My Father I make known to you". The slave works in
ignorance of his master's purpose. " His not to reason why, his but to do
or die ". But it is the privilege of friendship to share its plans, and to the
friends of Jesus there is given a constant unfolding of His purposes for them
and through them. Through all the web and woof of experience, the friend
of Jesus can trace the golden threads which reveal the pattern of the Father's
love. So suffering and sorrow became transfigured through the revelation
of a divine purpose in life, and submission to the divine will becomes the
soul's deepest joy.
Lastly, the friendship of Jesus as a spiritual communion, brings with it
assimilation of character through daily fellowship. The servant may grow in
faithfulness and sympathy with his master, but friendship, as an intimacy of
soul, brings with it, as its supreme blessing, the ever deepening assimilation
of life and character into the likeness of the Master himself. And that is
the coronation of the Friendship of Jesus.

*THE CROSS THE WORLD'S EVANGEL,
OR THE CHRISTIAN LAW OF SACRIFICE IN RELATION TO MISSIONS.
(St. John 12 : 20-32.)
by rb"v. henry c. ma-bih, d. d.,
Secretary of the American 3aptist Missionary Union, Boston, Mass.
The Occasion. — It is the third day of Passion Week ; it is the last day
of our Lord's public ministry to His own people Israel, — the day on which
" He departed and hid Himself from them". He had come " unto His
own, and His own received Him not ". Because the house of Israel knew
not the day of her visitation, she was left to herself desolate.
Just at this juncture an event of great significance occurs. Among the
multitude of those who had come up to the Feast of the Passover were
many Gentile proselytes to the Jewish faith, who at least half believed that
Jesus was "the desire of all nations". Among these were certain Greeks
who wished lo see Jesus. He had just made His royal entry into Jerusa
lem, and His name was on all tongues ; they must not miss the opportunity
of personal audience with One to Whom the hosannas had been sung. The
announcement of this visit fell on the spirit of Jesus in a psychic hour, and
it was the harbinger of a new epoch of universal evangelization.
Such a visit must have presented to Jesus a strong temptation. The
whole Roman empire was about to open to apostolic approach ; the coming
Europe would be a theatre for its operation. Britain would be His to exploit,
the new world His to pre-empt.
His vision, sweeping across all the oceans, embraced Japan, China,
India, Africa, and all the Islands of the sea, waiting for His coming. The
prospect was such as never greeted statesman or world-conqueror before.
But fascinating as was this prospect, it was not His to realize in a per
sonal, earthly career. A great summer with teeming harvest awaiting other
reapers than Himself, was ahead, but for Him — winter, death, the death of
the cross intervened. Even as these new Magi knocked at the door, that
cross loomed high on the horizon. Without pausing even to give answer
to the uncommon request. His reply was instant : " The hour is come that
the Son of Man should be glorified. Verily, verily, I say unto you, except
a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it abideth by itself alone ; but
if it die, it beareth much fruit". Not that Jesus did not appreciate the
appearance of this new day-star upon His dark horizon, nor that He did
not value the wealth of waiting harvests which the day would ripen : He
simply put them away for the present. Just now He is putting first things
first ; the atonement must be wrought ; that conditions everything. That

* Delivered at the Sixth Conference, held at the Trinity Union Methodist Episcopal Church,
March 9, 1904. 224

THE CROSS THE WORLD'S EVANGEL. 225
which lay in the Father's will as something eter,nally conceived, but now
historically to be accomplished, was of supreme moment. So Jesus drops
all other prizes that tempt His imagination, and in one cry of complete
abandon He breaks forth, " Father, glorify Thy name ". It is the most
consummate self-surrender in all history.
It is significant that the particular moment when Jesus so gave Him
self up to His cross, should have been precisely that at which these Greeks
came. Up to this time, Christ had magnified His errand as " unto the lost
sheep of the house of Israel ", but now, since its odor is to fill the world,
the alabaster box which contained the precious nard must be broken. The
enmity of the Jews was pressing Him up to the Roman cross, but the
Father's will working within Him was also constraining Him to His volun
tary self-sacrifice. All middle walls of partition, as between Jew and Gen
tile, must now be broken down ; Christianity must become catholicised.
Christ's foot was upon the border of a yielding world ; but before He can
advance an inch He must turn away to die. It was bitter, but it was sav
ing, as it was loyal to every moral reality. Such was the occasion.
Aspects of Sacrifice. We are now brought to the consideration of the
offering itself, in behalf of the world, which the unique death of Jesus con
stituted. It is the law which underlies this death, commonly called " the
law of sacrifice ", which we now study. We shall consider this law in two
aspects : —
First, as the atoning offering of Christ in behalf of the world, and
second, as the archetype of Christian self-sacrifice in behalf of others.
I.
And first, let us consider that objective offering which Christ made of
Himself for the redemption of the world. In the expression in v. 24,
" Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die ", all this is implied ;
but in V. 31 Jesus reiterates the principle in language most unequivocal, as
setting forth the character and bearing of the death He died. He exclaims,
" Now is the judgment of this world : now shall the prince of this world be
cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto
myself ". The plain meaning of the two passages just quoted will compel us
to conclude that the sacrifice of Christ in behalf of the world was a judg
ment-death. But before defining in what respects this is so, some prelimi
nary considerations are needful, in order to a clear understanding of terms.
The Scripture-Term Judgment. The meaning of this term " judgment "
has been grossly misconceived, and, in consequence, the most unhappy
revolt against its use exists in the modern mind. By many the term has
been regarded as synonymous with a sentence of reprobation or damna
tion. But this is due to an oversight of certain additional and very differ
ent and gracious senses in which the Bible uses the term. The word often
is employed in the sense of intervention, vindication, albeit it is a vindica
tion which has regard, also, to the divine holiness. For example, in the
fifty-fourth Psalm we find the prayer, " Save me, O God ; judge me by Thy

2 26 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
strength ". The Prophet Jeremiah declares of the coming Redeemer,
" He shall judge the cause of the poor and needy ". That is. He will
deliver them from the oppressor, reversing the false position imposed on
them by their cruel persecutors. Matthew, quoting from Isaiah, says,
" He shall show judgment to the Gentiles * * * the bruised reed shall
He not break, and smoking flax shall He not quench, till He send forth
judgment unto victory, and in His name shall the Gentiles trust". What
could be more tender ? It is like the opening of a dove-cote for the ingath
ering of heathen souls who are expected to come flying as clouds that they
may home themselves in God. After Christ's heahng of the man born
blind, described in the ninth chapter of John, Christ promulgates His
great law of grace in the expression, " For judgment came I into this
world " — a new kind of judgment, a judgment according to grace — " that
they which see not may see "
The Moral Acknowledgment in Christ's Work. But a second thing
which needs to be premised, in connection with the law of sacrifice is this :
that in the work of Christ, the emphasis properly belongs to the moral
acknowledgment therein made, rather than to the mere pain He bore.
In some conceptions of the atonement, supposedly most orthodox, too
large an emphasis has been put upon the sufferings of Christ as such ; as if
the sufferings won the pardon. The old view of a " limited atonement "
sprang out of the conviction that in the divine mind there was an exact
estimate of the amount of suffering required for the sins of a given number
of the race. That which is sometimes called " the commercial view " of the
atonement, is objectionable for a similar reason, that a certain amount of
pain is conceived as an offset to a definite amount of sin. Thus the atone
ment would be purely a matter of the exact payment of debt. But this con
ception would be incongruous with the necessity of any real pardon.
When Jesus was upon earth, while indeed He referred at times to the
depth of His sorrow, yet He did not magnify the mere suffering He was
called to bear, nor appeal for pity on its account. Even on the way to
Calvary, when " there followed Him the great multitude of the people, and
of women who bewailed and lamented Him ", He turned unto them and
said, " Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for Me, but weep for yourselves
and for your children ". Jesus would not have any mere compassion.
Some of the mediaeval conceptions expressed in portraits of the Christ, rep
resenting Him as an object of pity, convey most misleading impressions ;
they strike one as effeminate, and often as sycophantic. Christ, while the
greatest of sufferers, was only incidentally such ; up to the last moment of
His heart-break. He was ever actuated by the principles of the highest self-
respect; and He always conveyed the impression that with perfect self-com
mand He was moving towards the sublimest moral goal. There was some
thing unmistakably deeper to be affected by the cross, than the mere sym
pathy of mankind. The acknowledgment made in the moral realm, of the
righteous and yet gracious relations with which Jesus was dealing, was the
central thing. Says Dr. Godet : " When Christ gave out His last submis-

THE CROSS THE WORLD'S EVANGEL. 227
sive cry upon the cross, it was in one conscience alone that this judgment
of the world's sin, the echo of that which God pronounces in heaven, took
place. But as there is only one rationality in all intelligent minds, so in
reality there is only one and the same conscience in all moral beings ; and
thus it is that the cry which came from that one perfectly normal conscience,
is yet to re-echo in all other human consciences ". The most valuable
thing about the humiliation of Christ, was that He assumed it with unques
tioning submission. In the Epistle to the Hebrews it is called " the obedi
ence". This was its terminal point; it was the acknowledged propriety
of it all, that so vindicated God.
Christ's offering was thus an answer to something final in God's uni
verse. Dr. P. T. Forsyth, principal of Hackney College, London, who in
various recent papers " has thrown great light upon the atonement, has
pointed out that later theological thought, while amply recognizing the prin
ciple of sacrifice, — sacrifice as mere altruism, — has done scant justice to the
idea of judgment in its far-reaching Biblical sense ; a sense which has rela
tion to grace as well as law. This conviction is deeply shared by the writer
of this paper.
Judgment more Final than Sacrifice. Now, the idea of sacrifice as an
end is without warrant either in Scripture or reason. At best it can be
only a means ; sacrifice is never an end, except to the ascetics. A man has
no more right 1!b sacrifice himself in the sense of destroying or injuring
himself than he has to commit suicide. Whenever, as in monasticism, or in
the rites of self-oblation which characterize Hinduism, or in self-applied
legalistic rigors, the pains inflicted are thought to have a value or merit in
themselves, they are idolatrous rather than Christian ; they are morbid and
always end disastrously. Judgment, however, is a proper end in itself ; it
means the vindication of holiness, of righteousness, even of such righteous
ness as embraces in it all that we include in the terms love and grace ; and
beyond such vindication one cannot go ; the last standard of appeal has
been reached. It was to such a standard that the atonement had refer
ence. At the very basis, therefore, of the law of Christian sacrifice lies this
principle of judgment so needing to be restored to the thought of our day.
This term "judgment" is only another word for the redeeming realism of
God's universe with both a severe and a gracious bearing. When, there
fore, we shall shortly say, as we must, that Christ in the work of His cross
had a supreme reference to principles of judgment, we shall simply mean
that He was doing justice to all the moral and spiritual situation required
in His Father's endeavor to save the world. He was dealing with the
actual realities in the case — the realities of grace as well as of holiness —
such realities as the final judgment will disclose.
Christ's Death a Judgment-Death. We are now prepared, I trust, to
come to the consideration of Christ's sacrificial-death as a judgment-death
in behalf of the world. By the sacrificial-death, we mean something very

^ See Christian World Pulpit, Oct. i, 1902, and May 20, 1903.

228 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
different from the tragedy of the crucifixion." The crucifixion was an
expression of human sin at its worst, whereas the cross of the atonement
was the expression of God at His best. The crucifixion was the most
criminal act in the history of man, whereas the atoning act was the sub
limest act in the moral history of God ; it was the historical expression of
that which was voluntary and eternal in God's character, government and
practical attitude toward men. This atonement at its base was an invisible
thing. It dealt with factors like these : with the divine government, the
divine holiness, the divine love ; and all these as related to human sin in its
inmost essence. In all, then, that Christ was exacting on the divine side.
He was in some profound way experiencing not merely mortal death, but
that death which is immeasurably deeper, namely, that spiritual death, that
separation from God which is the consequence of sin. In this profound
sense He " tasted death for every man ". He was deserted for the hour,
that all who believe in Him may be forever received into fellowship with
the divine. It is well known that William Cowper, the poet, passed much of his
life under clouds of melancholia, and that in his death he morbidly felt
that he was deserted. On a visit to his grave, Mrs. Browning took up this
morbid thought of Cowper's and thus wrote correcting it : —
" Deserted I God coald separate from his own essence rather :
And Adam's sins have swept between the righteous Son arid Father;
Yea, once, Immanuel's orphaned cry His universe hath shaken —
It went up single, echoless, ' My God, I am forsaken 1 '
•' It went up from the Holy's lips amid His lost creation.
That, of the lost, no son should use those words of desolation ;
That earth's worst phrensies, marring hope, should mar not hope's fruition.
And I, on Cowper's grave, should see his rapture in a vision I"
The death of Jesus was intrinsically a judgment-death. Perhaps the
term "judgment-death" which' we employ, or, to use a broader term,
"judgment-infliction " would be better understood in the light of a concrete
example. Of course, the judgment-death which Jesus bore was a matter so
original and unique that no human illustration of it can be adequate. An
illustration, however, may help. An acquaintance of the writer had a noble
young son, who, however, on one occasion disobeyed his father and then
sought to cover disobedience by falsehood. The father, on ascertaining the
facts, summoned his son and asked him what he thought should be done about
it. The son replied, "you should whip me". The father assented, and
took the boy aside to inflict the chastisement; when, however, the father
came to use the whip his great heart broke and, instead of striking the boy,
he said, " I cannot think of whipping you ; you are a small, delicate boy,
* It is indeed true that the New Testamsnt references to the crucifixion seem, at first sight, to place
value on the crucifying act. It appears to us, however, that Christ simply adopted that which was intended
to be the mark of His shame — His execution upon a cross — as the symbol o! His moral enthronement secured
through a deeper dying and its consequent resurrection; and thus "by the most exalted irony of history,"
the New Testament represents Christianity as glorying in the cross: glorying not in what criminal men
intended, but in what God purposed and accomplished on the ground of what He Himself had wrought on the
divine side of the Calvary enactment.

THE CROSS THE WORLD'S EVANGEL. 229
and I am a large, strong man. I can better bear the whipping than you ".
So, removing his own coat, the father bade the boy to lay the whip on his
own back. The boy struck a blow or two, but becoming overwhelmed
with grief ran away to his chamber, where he was shortly found begging
the divine forgiveness. It will be readily believed that such a form of cor
rection needed no repetition. Bronson Alcott, the transcendental philoso
pher, at one time introduced a similar form of discipline in his boys' school
in Boston. For certain transgressions, the master, instead of the pupil,
was to receive the punishment. The first time it was applied the culprit
broke down, and the school broke down. So marked was its influence that
it seemed likely to eventuate in an evangelical revival. Both these forms of
judgment-infliction referred to, the one in the family and the other in the
school, in principle are akin to that which under grace is employed in the
divine government, and for moral power the principle is unequalled.
On the basis of the judgment-death, or infliction, which God in Christ
endured, human salvation was made possible. By this we mean that in
effect certain great judicial results affecting God's government over men —
His Sfwing mastery of men — were achieved, results which could have been
secured in no other way.
Four Objective Achievements of the Atonement. We name four of these
results, results which enter into the objective side of the atonement. The
first result was the acknowledgment, made in Christ's experience, of the due
judgment or condemnation which belongs to the collective evil of the race —
that judgment which the sin-principle merited : " Now is the judgment of
this world ". The second result was the casting out of the self-principle, or
the false philosophy which characterizes Satan himself, and on which he
also depends for the subversion of God's ideals in human life ; the fallacious
world-principle of which Satan is the author, by Christ's moral attitude up
to the moment he expired, was set at nought, was judged to its potential
destruction, as having no rational or moral justification. " The prince of
this world hath been judged ". " The prince of this world cometh and hath
nothing in me ". " Now shall the prince of this world be cast out ". This
meant the ultimate destruction of Satan himself objectively, as well as in us.
The power of Christ's cross achieved it. The third result was this : Christ's
death was a judgment-death in the sense that it potentially destroyed the
nexus whereby sin and spiritual death had been bound together. So now,
through what Christ effected on His cross, notwithstanding man's sin, we
need not spiritually and eternally die. This, of course, works subjectively
in us, but it was first in principle a historical achievement, and so objective
also. Christ came " to destroy the works of the devil ". Thus redemption is
deeper than natural causation. And the fourth result was this : Through
this judgment-death on the cross, mankind was bought in as a reversionary
treasure, and so became adjudged to Christ forever as His peculiar posses
sion. At all these points the atonement in principle was substitutionary,
and so really vicarious : it was more than vicarious ; it was vicario-vital,
inasmuch as in the atoning work of Christ it is always implied that its

230 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
benefits inure to those who are presupposed to become through faith vitally
one with Christ.
In all this work of the judgment-death the divine love was peculiarly
shown. Divine love in the Scriptures, in fact, " has no meaning apart from
the consideration that it took hold of the central situation of man's sin and
guilt ". Love dealt with these in grace, instead of according to their strict
merits. Perhaps we need to pause here, for this needs to be emphasized.
Nothing in current thought is so misunderstood as the divine love. Divine
love has a peculiarity : it is utterly unlike any other form of love in the
world, because it enters into responsibility for human sin and guilt, as the
moral situation, as the divine grace and the saving work require. Accord
ingly, divine love can deal with man in complete holiness, and at the same
time safeguard his endless future. So it is that Christ shall " bring forth
judgment unto victory ", that judgment becomes the foundation of a system
of grace. Thus, the salvation of the Gospel is a salvation by judgment
rather than from it ; nothing can go behind it ; it is a basis of adjudication,
a method of settlement in grace and righteousness, of all the claims of the
holy God upon the fallen sinner.
Through this fourfold achievement, we understand that the judgment
enacted by Christ on His cross extended to the deepest realities of the
moral universe, in this world and the next. In effect, it anticipated every
essential moral issue that can cause dread to the human soul in anticipation
of the last day. The penal difficulty with respect to past transgressions has
been potentially met. Satan, man's great accuser, his arch enemy, has
been potentially destroyed. The death doom entailed by sin has been
potentially cancelled. And we all in the intent of God have been adjudged
to Christ as His potential possession. We are regarded as Christ's own,
ransomed unto Himself, His bride, as dear to Him as the apple of His
eye. With such results as these in principle accomplished, and personally
appropriated by the vital faith of the believer, all fear of the last day is cast
out, so that with confidence we may sing :
" Bold shall I stand in that great day.
For who aught to my charge shall lay ?
Fully absolved from these I am.
From sin and fear, from guilt and shame"
That day is to become our coronation day, a day in which Christ Him
self has vastly more at stake than have we. Thus in the profoundest sense
Christ's judgment-death was an anticipation of all possible expressions of
judgment in the future ; and it becomes for all men the touchstone of
character and destiny. II.
The Secondary Form of the Law of Sacrifice. We now pass to that
secondary form of the law of sacrifice, which springs out of the primary
one we have just considered, and is conformable to it; that self-sacrifice in
behalf of others which the followers of Christ are to exhibit. As for their
Lord, so for them, " except a cori) of wheat fall into the ground and die.

THE CROSS THE WORLD'S EVANGEL. 231
it abideth alone ". Not that any portion of the disciples' suffering was
needed to complete the atonement. That, as a finished work, stands ever
by itself, albeit it has implications which involve the disciple. We are to
" fill up on our part that which is lacking of the afflictions of Christ in our
flesh for His body's sake ".
This occasion of the visit of the Greeks, and the utterances it evoked
from Christ, is one of three momentous hours in His career, in which He
was authenticated by an audible voice spoken by the Father right out of the
blue. The first occasion was at the baptism ; the second was at the trans
figuration ; and the third was this occasion when the Greeks came. There
is something common to the teaching of each of these outstanding hours ;
and that common teaching is fundamental. It concerns Christ's coming
death and resurrection. These two things are really twin parts of one indi
visible fact, the consummated atonement. For in the Scriptures the cross
always eventuates in the resurrection, and the resurrection always presup
poses the atonement. The resurrection is not conceived as a mere survival
of a Jesus who was slain, but rather as the affixing of heaven's seal to the
validity and value of the judgment-death endured. It was "not possible
that He should be holden of death", because through His supernatural
judgment-death. He had destroyed him that had the power of natural death,
that is, the devil. At the Jordan, on the mount, and at the coming of the
Greeks, Christ was striking the keynote of His complete gospel, namely,
this law of sacrifice, — the one only law which the Father emphasized with a
voice, nay with a thrice repeated voice, from the eternities ; — He could not
withhold this emphatic approval when Jesus His Son was accepting His
own unique dying and living again as central to all His mission.
At the baptism, the approval concerned Christ's official perfecting as
the last Adam ; on the mount the voice concerned the message essential to
be preached, if demons were to be cast out and mankind transformed into
divine Sonship; the message of " His decease ", or "exodus" — that trium
phant passage of the Red Sea of His judgment-death — " which He was to
accomplish at Jerusalem ; " while the voice on this third occasion accentua
ted the only principle on which Christ's successors could gain power for
their world-wide task, namely, the principle of sacrificial love. As Christ
had gained His authority to redeem through His cross, so the disciple would
gain His power to impress the salvation in that cross through a similarly
surrendered life, and the spiritual quickening which would follow it. Hence
those words in vs. 25 and 26 : " He that loveth his life loseth it; and he
that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. If any man
serve Me, let him follow Me ; and where I am there shall also My servant
be : if any man serve Me, him wfll the Father honor ".
But here again we need to be on our guard in interpreting the law of
sacrifice, that we do not fall into ascetic error. As with Christ, the emphasis
was primarily upon the acknowledgment made by His conscience rather
than the pain He bore, so in the life of the disciple, the acknowledgment
of the moral claim in love, whatever its cost to self-gratification, is the main

232 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
thing. The moment one imagines, in a line of missionary service, for
example, that he is performing some excess of devotion, some work of super
erogation, or acquiring merit with God, he is false to Christ's law. The
highest form of self-abnegation, even of martyrdom, ever expressed by the
most heroic devotee, whether in a Francis of Assisi, or in a Paton of the
New Hebrides, is at its best only the manifestation of an elementary relation
to Christ. In this realm, heroics are wholly out of the question.
Why the Necessity of Sacrifice at all. But some one will ask, where is
the moral necessity for this law of sacrifice? This law is really the deepest
paradox in Christianity. The necessity for it Ues in the fact of sin. Upon
the foreseen certainty that sin would come into the world, God saw it could
be overcome in no other way than through a great judgment-death on the
part of His Son, and through a new habit of life engendered in His people,
conformable to that death. If there were no sin, it would be unnecessary
in the moral realm for the "grain of wheat to fall into the earth and die".
Angels follow no such law; unfallen beings would not need to. But "as
through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin", so
through death, in another form, the havoc sin had wrought was undone,
" that through death He might bring to nought him that had the power
of death ". Through obedience to this law by the Spirit, the sin-principle,
the self-centered principle of being which Satan brought in receives its death
blow, and evil is progressively overcome and eliminated in so far as place is
given to the working of the higher law of vicarious love.
Sin, how Expiated? It is in these deep two-fold senses, — through the
work of Christ objectively on the cross, and subjectively in the believer, —
that sin is expiated ; it is potentially destroyed. The moral difficulty with
which God in Christ was dealing in His law of sacrifice, was that of estab
lishing a consistent method of bestowing pardon on the sinner, and at the
same time of creating within him a loathing of his sin. Be it observed that
this is not expiation in any pagan sense of that term ; it should never be
confounded with it. It had no reference to God's disposition as if that
needed to be placated or appeased ; it had reference to the moral necessities
of the case. Had there been no proper regard for these, the moral sense of
mankind, quite apart from what was demanded by God, could not have
been satisfied. To have forgiven sin without such a work as was wrought
by Christ upon His cross would have legitimized it. But now, since in
connection with this objective achievement of Christ's atonement, a new
energy by the Spirit of God also works within the soul, a positive righteous
ness establishes itself upon the neck of sin and in the end will overcome
and destroy it.
Of course the death principle for the believer in this law of sacrifice or
expiation above referred to is itself also a deep paradox, because it is a
unique form of death, a death which in Christ's case was a judgment-death,
but which in the disciple's case is a regenerating death. This issues not in
self-destruction but in self-recovery through the spiritual resurrection which
accompanies it. Death thus becomes a process not of burial in order to

THE CROSS THE WORLD'S EVANGEL. 233
decay, but of planting in order to harvest. We bury dead refuse; we plant
living germs ; that which perishes is the mere husk, the outside wrappings ;
this sets free the springing principle of higher, even divine life. Through
the transformation in this law of sacrifice, we realize a productiveness alto
gether transcending any processes of mere self-preservation. It is at this
point that a new spontaneity of righteousness is begotten by the Spirit of
God, so that in the loyalty of its Redeemer, the ransomed and renewed soul
avows new fealty to God as expressed in the psalm, "Lo, I come to do Thy
will, O God". A dying which thus results is not a waste, but is the highest
economic recuperative force in the moral universe. A soul thus recovered,
has a safeguard also against a second fall which the first Adam never knew.
Moreover, through the operation of this law issues the potency of the new
heavens and new earth having for their capital the new Jerusalem.
Relation of the Atonement to World-Evangelization. But we cannot leave
this law of sacrifice without accentuating its intended application, as Christ
Himself did to the matter of world-evangelization. Our Lord having uttered
His homily concerning the secondary expression of His principle of sacrifice
thus soliloquizes : " Now is My soul troubled and what shall I say ? Father,
save me from this hour ? " This would have been the natural thing to ask
but for the problem of sin. The sin problem, however, cannot be ignored.
Accordingly, Jesus instantly adds, " But for this cause came I unto this
hour". This was the distinctive goal for which " the Word became flesh and
dwelt among us ". Then in a passion of absolute loyalty to the divine
purpose, Jesus throws Himself into the prayer, " Father, glorify Thy
name ". It was at that moment that " there came a voice, out of heaven,
saying, ' I have both glorified it, and will glorify it again ' ". This meant not
merely that the Father would glorify Himself in the resurrection of Christ
to follow, but it implied also, as we think, that in the new epoch of Gentile
evangelization into which Christ's successors would be brought, the divine
name would be further glorified through them. And as if to put beyond all
doubt what was intended by this miraculous utterance, Jesus made the
decisive comment, " This voice hath not come for My sake, but for your
sakes"; and if for their sakes, the Saviour impUed that God the Father was
putting upon them the work of continuing Christ's expression of vicarious
love for a lost world.
Once then, of the three times in whicli' the audible voice came forth from
the Father right out of heaven, it came for the benefit of those who were to
build upon the foundation of Christ in the work of evangelizing the nations.
Precisely the same emphasis which was afforded to Jesus Himself at the
Jordan, and to the gospel message on the transfiguration mount was now
given to the principle of their missionary task. This voice was the Father's
accent upon that task. Moreover, it was to be conceived by those who
apprehend it as perpetually reiterating itself till the end of the dispensation.
The Father's Accent. We justly magnify the great commission of the
Son, uttered just prior to His ascension. We habitually dwell upon the
commission of the Holy Spirit given at Pentecost — upon the import of that

234 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
day with the descending breath, the heavenly fire and the supernatural
tongues, empowering the church for high execution, and we do well. But
there is a commission of the Father — the first person of the Holy Trinity,
also— uttered direct from heaven on the significant day we are now contem
plating, which comes to us with the emphasis of the first person of the
Godhead. This commission was intended, not for Christ, but for the
disciples who stood about Him, and for their successors, and for theirs, and
for theirs, repeating itself right on through each generation up to our own ;
and through us to be passed on to all our successors until the work shall be
finished and the kingdom shall have fully come. And yet multitudes among
us in the modern church seem never to have heard this all-commanding
voice at all. Some who heard those august tones said that " it thundered ".
Sometimes in the summer time when the conditions have faVored, we have
been in the midst of an electric storm, the concussions of which became
continuous. A peal breaking from one part of the heavens rolled into
another arising from a different quarter, and that melted into one imme
diately above our heads, which again reverberated to all the surrounding
points of the compass ; this woke yet other sounds, until really for hours
there was one long roll like the reveille of the eternities. So it seems to us
in the thought of this climacteric teaching of the third day of our Lord's
passion, God would be understood as sounding through the heavens above
our heads a long continuous thunder call summoning His followers of all
times and places to universal cooperation with His glorified Son in the work
of the world's salvation. That voice has never ceased to sound since our
Lord passed it on to His church.
Bearing of this on Missions. The work involved in the sublime com
mission growing out of the law of sacrifice in a few brief sentences is this.
To give to the heathen world the benefit of the anticipatory judgment set up
in the cross of Christ to prepare them for the final judgment of the last day.
It was for this that the great judgment-death on Calvary was enacted and
promulgated, — that every last moral issue that can arise in the last assize,
might be met and settled in advance. Without the knowledge of that
judgment enacted on the cross the heathen are shut up to that poor blurred
judgment which exists in their own fallen natural consciences. That indeed
God will not despise, "in the day when He shall judge the secrets of men
by Jesus Christ". But this is utterly inadequate; it lacks dynamic. It
affords no certainty of salvation to the heathen who universally live under
the torture of their guilty and superstitious fears ; it has little educative and
transforming power. At the best it can only afford a low form of embryonic
salvation, infantile in character. It certainly can furnish no such full and
glorious salvation as God has prepared for everybody in Christ's cross.
It is the denial of the benefit of this anticipatory judgment in Christ's cross
through long ages to the heathen world that is their spiritual poverty and
the church's crime. Evangelical Christians — a few of them — have entered
upon work for the heathen to the degree they have, because to some extent
they perceive the force and value of Christ's judgment-death as related to

THE CROSS THE WORLD'S EVANGEL. 235
human destiny. Like Paul, they know that that death has potentially
changed the moral status, the divine possibilities in grace for all mankind.
Hence they are zealous to render actual the potential in the real experience
of the heathen. It is this that creates the evangelical motive for missions.
This it is also which raises the obligation to evangelize the heathen to an
entirely distinctive plane. It is the obligation to give being to the church
among peoples to whom as yet it is impossible.
To us, therefore, who through Christ have received mercy, God looks to
extend that mercy to every groping pagan mind. To the degree that we
also in the performance of that task die with Him and rise again to newness
of life and service on the whole world-wide field, will the church become
possessed with power to transform the earth.

*THE ATTRACTING POWER OF THE CROSS.
(St. John 12: 32.)
by re'^. a.vki1y a.. sha-w,
Pastor of the Baptist Church in Brookline, Mass.
We are all familiar with the three possible ways of reading the Bible :
to read into it what we wish it to mean, to read out of it what we do not
wish it to mean, or to let it say what it evidently does mean. No doubt we
have found it much easier to read the Bible in either or both the former
ways than in the third. It is especially hard for us to rid our minds of
prepossessions in the subject now before us. To the great multitude of
devout believers, this chapter is the watershed of John's Gospel, as the
thought of the 32nd verse is the watershed of human history. In the minds of
many, however, possibly of some here today, an exception will be taken to
using the words of the subject assigned to me as an interpretation of the text
before us. It will be objected by some that Jesus did not refer to His death
at all but to His exaltation, John's interpretation being more or less of an
impertinence. Others, while admitting that Jesus here refers to His death,
would hold that He in no sense thinks of it as being the power of attraction.
His death was a necessary incident to His heavenly exaltation, but it is the
exaltation that attracts. So, for the present, let us lay aside the subject as
stated, and, so far as possible dispossessing our minds of bias of all kinds
except a bias toward the truth, let us try to discover our Lord's meaning in
these words: "And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto Myself ". On the face of these words is our Lord's evident desire to
draw all men to Himself. This will take place He declares if He " be lifted
up from the earth ".
John interprets these words as follows : " Now this He said signifying
by what manner of death He should die '', an interpretation that in many
quarters is treated with scant courtesy. It is difficult for the ordinary reader
to understand why John may not be as well qualified to interpret the words
of Christ correctly as any one in a later age. But without entering into this
controversy, let us see if there is any light we may discover for ourselves.
Twice before, as recorded by John, Jesus used this same expression
concerning Himself, with the omission in each case of the words " from " or
"out of the earth". To Nicodemus (3: 14) He said: "And as Moses
lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be
lifted up, that whosoever believeth in Him may have eternal life ". In John
8 : 28 He said to the unbelieving and hostile Jews : " When ye have lifted
up the Son of Man, then shall ye know that I am He ".

* Delivered at the Fifth Conference, held at the Central Baptist Church, February lo, 1904.
236

THE ATTRACTING POWER OF THE CROSS. 237
The word hupsoois used literally of place and means "to lift up", "to
lift up on high ", and so comes to mean " to exalt ", " to raise to eminence".
From the reference in the first quotation to the pole on which the brazen
serpent was hung, from the fact that the unbelieving Jews did lift up Jesus
upon the Cross, and thus fulfil literally the prophecy of the second reference,
and remembering that the literal meaning of the word refers to place, it ought
not to be considered a sign of unwarranted bias to accept at its face value
John's interpretation of the third use of the expression. That the words
"from "or "out of the earth "would totally change the significance of the
word, making it refer only to the heavenly exaltation, would seem unwar
ranted, unless the whole tenor of the passage positively demanded it. That
it may give to the passage a double significance so that it includes the death
on the Cross and the exaltation to the Father's right hand is quite open to
belief. To understand this verse clearly, however, we must take our stand with
Jesus and, if possible, face the situation from His point of view. The great
confession had been made ; and immediately after this Jesus had told the
disciples that He must go up to Jerusalem to suffer many things of the
Chief Priests, the Elders and the Scribes, and be put to death, and the
third day rise again. Three times over with solemn emphasis is this
repeated. When the natural supposition would be that He would stay away
from Jerusalem where His claims were derided or ignored and remain in
Galilee among friends. He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem. At
this time there was no hostility that He could not, if He wished, have
easily escaped. But He insists that He has a mission to fulfil. He
evidently sees in the shame and death the purpose for which He came.
He entered Jerusalem by His own deliberate choice in such a manner as to
draw the attention of the multitudes to His Messianic claims. He receives
with apparent satisfaction the plaudits of the multitudes and the hosannas
of the children.
And now some Greeks, evidently proselytes, though of pagan birth,
had requested to be introduced to Him. At their request we hear Him
say, "The hour is come that the Son of Man should be glorified". Fre
quently during His ministry He had said (or it had been said of Him)
" Mine hour is not yet come ". Now He sees that hour at hand. It is an
hour when He is to be glorified ; yet it is an hour so filled with darkness
and horror that we hear Him saying, " Now is my soul troubled and what
shall I say ". " Father save me from this hour ". Light is given us here
from the parable of the wheat. "Except a grain of wheat fall into the
ground and die, it abideth by itself alone, but if it die, it beareth much
fruit ". The very reason of the existence of the wheat is that it may die and
in dying reproduce itself. Its life is of value only as it dies, and is to be
interpreted only through its death. The hour then is the hour of Glory,
but of a Glory that is inseparable from shame and death and the horror of
great darkness more bitter than death. In the request of the Greeks, He
sees the waving grain ripe for the harvest, but He sees that before the

238 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
harvest, if He would live and give enduring life to others He must first
apply to Himself the law of the wheat and die. His first vision is that of
Glory. Then the picture dissolves into a picture of the blackness of death
incomparably terrible, and His soul shrinks for a moment, but presently the
vision changes to that of a redeemed world, and in the center of it is the
Cross reflecting the halo of eternal glory which it creates.
One other point gives further light. If the Cross is to be His triumph,
then it must be the final defeat of him, who through it, aimed his last and
deadliest blow at the sacred head. "The prince of this world" shall be
overcome and cast out from the place of power he has usurped over the
lives of men. The blow aimed at the head of the Son of Man will rebound
upon his own head to his final and complete undoing. Like the serpent
that so firmly fastens its fangs in its victim that it cannot withdraw them
till all their venom is exhausted, and its victim is not only too strong to be
overcome, but rather crushes the serpent's head ; so Satan will exhaust his
power to hurt, and, unable to overthrow the Son of Man, will be himself
defeated and dethroned. "And /, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto
Me ". And I, victor just where I will be thought to be vanquished ; I lifted
up upon the Cross as upon a throne of tiiumph, will draw all men unto
Myself. It is not at all necessary to exclude the Resurrection and Ascen
sion. They are integral parts of the one transaction without which the
death would be an ignominious defeat. The essential point here, however,
is that Christ speaks of His death not as a painful incident in the course of
His high calling, but as the very fulfilling of His mission ; not as a shameful
trial to be undergone before He can attain His Glory and win men to Him
self, but as the means of His glorification, reflecting the Glory it accom
plishes, and itself drawing men to Himself.
IE now it has become plain that John has interpreted Christ correctly
in this verse, we may go on to discover what are the essential elements in
this lifting up that constitute it so great a power over men.
Without going at length into the apostolic interpretation of Christ's
death, which would be beside our purpose, let us simply note in passing,
that in Paul and Peter and in the Epistle to the Hebrews, with such
variations as differences in writer and purpose and destination would justify,
we have a unanimous interpretation of Christ's death as a vicarious sacri
fice, related to God's love, but also made necessary on account of sin and
itself the condition of man's forgiveness. They declare that Christ delib
erately laid down His life. That this course was necessary. That its need
lay in man's sin. Paul differs from the others in carrying the question one
step further back in its logical course and relating it to God's righteousness,
which is that attiibute in God which takes cognizance of sin. "That He
might be just and the justifier".
It has been claimed that in John there is an entirely different concep
tion. That here we have Redemption through Revelation, not Revelation
through Redemption. It is true, as Dr. Geo. B. Stevens expresses it, " That
John dwells less than most of the New Testament writers upon the legal

THE ATTRACTING POWER OF THE CROSS. 239
aspects of the divine nature, but there are not wanting evidences that the con
ception of the divine love which underlies all his religious ideas includes the
idea of righteousness, that self-respecting attribute of God which occasions
His holy displeasure at sin, and requires it to be expressed and vindicated
while sin is forgiven ". When John speaks of the Lamb of God, he is speak
ing of a sacrificial lamb. He speaks of Christ as the "propitiation for our
sins ". True, he does not enter into controversy over this point. He speaks
as though this were commonly understood and accepted as fundamental.
In the Gospel he is less concerned with the method by which salvation comes
than by its actual realization. But we are assured that this apostolic inter
pretation was largely dogmatic, reflecting the mental characteristics and
training of the Apostles and the exigencies of the times. It was, we are
told, an apologetic designed to meet the reproach of the Jew, to whom the
Cross was a stumbling block, and of the Greek, to whom it was foolishness,
rather than a fair interpretation of the teaching of their Lord.
The question resolves itself into this: Did Paul entirely misunder
stand, and so misrepresent, the meaning of the death of Jesus, and did the
other Apostles " paulinize ", or have they all alike sat at the feet of Jesus ?
We know what they said, " That which we have seen and heard and our
hands have handled declare we unto you ". " I delivered unto you first of
all that which I also received ". "And we are witnesses of these things ".
It seems to the plain man quite impossible to walk with Jesus as
His steps are traced by the Synoptists, from His baptism where
He accepts His mission, into the wilderness where He is tempted to
exchange it for an easier and less worthy one, or at least to use unspiritual
means to fulfil it ; to hear His prophecy of the bridegroom being suddenly
snatched away in the midst of the festivities (Mt. 9 : 14) to catch His hint
in reference to Jonah ; and then to follow Him, as we have already done,
from Caesarea Philippi to Jerusalem to hear Him say that He gave His life
a ransom for many ; to go with Him to the upper room, where in memo
rable words He relates His death to the founding of the new covenant
sealed by His sacrificial blood ; to watch with Him in Gethsemane and to
stand beneath His Cross until we hear Him cry, " It is finished ", — I say it
is quite impossible for the plain man thus to follow Him through His life
and be content with any interpretation of that death short of the Apostolic.
In John's Gospel we find Christ represented, as in the synoptics, as
early in His ministry revealing His consciousness that His mission on earth
was to die for men. To the Jews in the temple He said (2 : 19) : " Destroy
this temple and in three days I will raise it again ". And I have no dispo
sition to sneer at John when he interprets these words as referring to
Christ's death. To Nicodemus He said (3 : 14) : " As Moses Iffted up the
serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up ". After
the feeding of the five thousand, we have in chapter 6 His long discussion
concerning His flesh and blood, where His sacrificial death is the very heart
of the passage. In 8 : 28 we read : " When ye have Hfted up the Son of
Man, then ye shall know that I am He". In 10: 11, 17, 18, He is "the good

240 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
shepherd who giveth his life for the sheep ". John strongly emphasizes the
malignity of the Jews which caused Christ's death.* Yet at the same time
he records Christ's repeated words : " No man taketh it from Me ; I lay it
down of Myself ; I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to
take it again ".
A common method of discrediting the strength of Jesus' testimony to
Himself is to take each separate passage often apart from its connection,
and reducing it to its smallest conceivable meaning, to declare "This is all
that Jesus meant ". " But," as Stalker puts it, "it is not often the natural
meaning, and one gets tired of this perpetual shallowing of everything Jesus
said".t What reason is there for thinking that the most superficial sense
of profound words is most nearly true ? Why should we assign to the words
only that possible meaning that divests them of all their original associa
tions ? There may be single passages where the meaning is so nicely bal
anced, that a slight bias of mind will turn the scales. But when we see the
scales tipped in a single direction in every case, however weighty the words
may be on the other side, and this always in the direction of divesting those
words of all their deepest meaning, we may be pardoned for a suspicion that
the scales are loaded.
But now leaving the general significance of our Lord's death, let us ask
what it is in particular that constitutes the Cross of Christ so mighty a power
over men ? In the first place I would say, the Cross is the supreme revela
tion of God's love to men. " God so loved the world that He gave His Only
Begotten Son " is our Lord's explanation of the motive prompting the sacri
fice. Men spare those they love ; they seek to shield them from harm.
Fathers and mothers seek to shield their children from the chilly winds and
biting frosts of life. God "spared not" His Son, but freely gave Him,
because He loved the world. It is an exhibition of Christ's love. Volun
tarily and gladly He laid down His life for the sheep. Because He had a
mind of love toward men, " He did not insist on retaining His equality
with God ", but freely humbled Himself even to the death of the Cross.
Though He was rich, yet for the sake of men whom He loved better than
His riches. He beggared Himself, pouring out His soul unto death. Here
in the Cross we see the aching heart of God laid bare. Here we see the
very throbbing of His love.
The parable of the Prodigal Son is a graphic and beautiful picture of
God's love painted in colors drawn from human life. The Cross is the final
proof of God's love set forth in overwhelming reality. No mere picture of
love, even when painted by the Master Artist Himself can ever satisfy the
heart of man. But for the man who has the love proven to him by the
Cross, the picture is of inestimable value "Lest we forget". We do not
know love in its length and breadth and height and depth until we see it
making cost to itself. For this reason the parable of the Prodigal cannot be
taken as an epitome of the Gospel, for although it beautifully portrays the

*(5: i8; 7; 19-30: 8: 57-40: 10: 31, 33; 11: 50.)
t The Chrtstology of Jesus, p. 121.

THE ATTRACTING POWER OF THE CROSS. 241
freeness and fulness of God's love, it is absolutely silent as to its depth and
cost. No words however fair and strong could ever tell the cost to God of
expressing His redeeming love. And let us remember that as Dr. Denny
has so well said : " If there is no atonement in it, neither is there any Christ
in it ". If that parable is an epitome of the Gospel, then as Harnack has
affirmed, " Christ has no place in the Gospel He proclaims ". But we know
that this parable is a beautiful picture whose interpretation is the Cross.
The only light in which it can be properly seen is the light that radiates
from the Cross. The Cross alone gives it proper perspective.
It was this amazing love that mastered the apostles and inspired them.
They never felt that they could take salvation for granted. To them salva
tion was a miracle of miracles, the wonder of which never ceased. A gospel
which could be taken for granted would be for them no gospel. But here
was the infinite and holy God sending His only-begotten Son into the world
to save them. Here was their loved Master, Whom now they see to have
been from eternity, the Creator of all things, sharing their earthly lot, and
freely laying down His life for them. This amazing love of their living
Lord they cannot ever hope fully to comprehend. It overpowers them and
binds them to Him by ties stronger than death.
Perhaps some of you will remember the story of the two street arabs
Rag and Dan, whom Mrs. Mason received into her class in the Mission
Sunday school. They were well versed in the life and language of the
slums, but knew as little as a Hottentot about the Bible and the love of
God. One Sunday afternoon the lesson was on the sufferings of Jesus for
the sins of men. Very tenderly Mrs. Mason told them of His patienG«>f~.
under persecution, and His quiet yielding of Himself to the power of His
enemies, who were plotting to kill Him. " Don't believe it," came sud
denly from Rag. A painful and yet delicious thrill shot through the
class. But the teacher went over the story again, patiently and tenderly,
only to meet another even . more uncompromising denial. " Nflw look-a-
here! Me 'n' Dan don't believe no such thing as that. It's a fake,
that's wot it is. 'Tain't accordin' to reason for anybody to act that way.
You go down on Fourth street, and you hit a feller over the head, and
he'll give you one back, he will for sure, if he's big enough. But you
say this Man you're talkin' about could do anything He wanted to ; and
yet He let them galoots around Him get Him into a corner, and do Him
up ! Well, I guess not I " and the worldly wise young cynic smiled a know
ing smile — the smile of one who isn't taken in by children's stories ; while
his pal nodded his head in acquiescence, and echoed, " Not much ! "
Mrs. Mason was driven back as never before to the foundations of her
faith ; and for the next few months her heart went into her work and out to '
her boys, her two pagans especially, as never before, until one blessed day,
as the story goes. Rag said, looking her steadily in the eye :
" Is this all straight, teacher? Are you sure that you ain't givin' us no
bluff?" And looking him as steadily in the face she answered, in his own dialect :

242 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
" Yes, Rag, I'm sure. It's no bluff, it's straight".
For a moment the boy sat in thoughtful silence. Then he said :
" Wot d'you think of it, Dan ? "
And ior once little Dan spoke out for himself, without waiting for his
cue from his leader :
" I tell you. Rag, it's straight goods, just as she says. She's never went
back on us yet, an' you bet she ain't going back on us now. I believe it ".
And Rag said slowly, with the look of one who sees the dawning of
light: " Yes, I guess it must be straight. But, say, if He done all that for a
fellow, how a fellow ought to love Him ! "
And the woman who had helped him, and whom he had no less helped,
placed her hand on his, and said through her falling tears:
" Yes, Rag ; and O, I do so want you to love Him ! "
And, still thoughtfully, the lad replied :
" I don't see how I'm goin' to help it".
The loyal Dan echoed, " Neither do I ".
For many, this may be all that is needed in explanation of the Cross to
constitute it the mighty attracting and regulating power in their lives. For
most people, however, there must be further explanation.
Love, to be convincing and commanding, must be no mere display
irrelevant to our need ; it must relate itself to our peculiar circumstances.
If I am standing by the rapids of Niagara, above the falls, and my friend
stands by me protesting his love, and to prove it plunges into the rapids
and is swept over the falls to his death, I am impressed only with the pity
and the folly of it. But, if I am in the rapids struggling for my life, my
strength almost gone, and just at the awful brink, and my friend plunges in,
and, at the cost of his own life, rescues me from death, then I know the
meaning jnd reality of his love. It was a love that proved itself by meeting
my need, by taking my place at the utmost cost to itself.
The very essence of the attracting power of Christ's Cross is that it
meets my deepest need. By it He takes my place. "I am the good
shepherd". He said; "The good shepherd layeth down his life for the
sheep ", and the plain man reading that, has seen it to mean that the
shepherd dies to save the sheep from dying. And applying it to Christ has
seen that He took the sinner's place and rescued Him from eternal death.
The sinner was not only under the power and the stain of sin, but under its
penalty and doom. Christ, though without the stain of sin, yielded Himself
to its power and bore its doom, that the sinner might escape. " He died
forme" was Paul's constant wonder and joy. "The love of Christ con-
straineth me, because we thus judge that one died for all". This reveals
the inspiration of His life of marvelous devotion and sacrifice.
You recall Bunyon's pilgrim as he climbed the hill bounded on either
side by the walls of salvation, weighed down with the heavy burden on his
back. " Upon that place stood a Cross, and a little below in a hollow a
sepulchre. So I saw in my dream, that just as Christian came up with the

THE ATTRACTING POWER OF THE CROSS. 243
Cross his burden loosed from off his shoulders and fell from off his back,
and began to tumble, and so continued to do till it came to the mouth of
the sepulchre, where it fell in and I saw it no more. Then was Christian
glad and lightsome, and said with a merry heart, 'He hath given me rest by
His sorrows, and life by His death /' "
The reason why this exhibition of God's love, God taking upon Himself
our ill desert, and at infinite cost to Himself making it possible to forgive
us freely, is so marvelous an attracting power is that it starts at the right
place by begetting repentance in the human heart. When we are brought to
see, in the crucifixion of the Holy One, what awful work sin can do, that
He died not for His sin but for ours ; if that does not break the heart and
stir the conscience to commanding action and bring the will into subjection,
nothing can. This moral revolution there must be in order to make the
attraction permanent. It is not enough that the prince of this world be
formally judged and cast out. Not enough that his reign over the hearts of
men should be externally and artificially broken. There must be generated
in the hearts of those who rendered him allegiance a deep-seated hatred of
his reign, and a bitter repentance for allowing him any place in the heart,
then there can be attraction and allegfiance to the new Saviour King.
" He hangs a dead corpse on the tree,
Who made the whole world's life to spring:
And, as some outcast, shameful thing
The Lord of all we see.
" Darkness falls thick to shroud the time :
Nature herself breaks up, and cries :
Even from the grave shocked ghosts arise,
At this tremendous crime.
" Speak not : no human voice may tell
The secrets which these hours enfold:
By treacherous hands to traitors sold,
God yields Himself to Hell.
" Speak not, draw close : through stricken heart
Drink in the sense of all that's here :
The shame, the cross, the nails, the spear,
Rending His soul apart.
" Ah I and far crueller, far, than they,
(Tools and mere symbols these) our sin I
Breathe to thyself, soul, deep within
' 'Twas I that caused this day '
" Speak not : He speaks not : no reproach
Falls from those dying lips on thee :
No vengeance, muttering ills to be.
Bars thy devout approach.
" Stricken, unmurmuring, dead, divine.
This day He hangs, as He hung of old ;
Only the dire sight cries ' Behold I
Was ever love like mine ? ' "

244 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
And this is the interpretation the history of Christian experience puts
upon the Cross.
" Is He a Redeemer or a mere dreamer, preaching a kingdom that can
not come? " Ask history. It is not as a hero that the world has thought
of Christ. On a little hill outside a city wall, between two other crosses, a
young man hung upon a Cross, all three dying a shameful death. A few
weeping friends were gathered about the Cross of the young man. A little
later they bear the body away and put it in the tomb, and the stone is rolled
against the door, and life and hope and joy are shut in, and darkness and
despair reign without. It is a mournful dirge we hear rising from the
broken hearts of the few friends and followers. But listen ! Presently you
catch another note. The same voices, still few in number, but how differ
ent the song ! You hear it spreading like a grand hymn in a mighty out
door congregation. In Samaria and in Galilee the strain is taken up. It
spreads to Antioch, to Asia Minor. It leaps the Hellespont. It is taken
up in Macedonia, in Greece, in Rome. It becomes the national anthem of
the Roman Empire, its echoes reverberating around the Mediterranean.
But such narrow limits cannot confine this song. It is borne on the wings
of the wind across the channel, across the Atlantic, until America takes up
the strain. Back it floats to Africa, to India, to China, to the uttermost
parts of the earth, until today a mighty chorus from every tribe and tongue
joins in the one harmonious song of triumph. And what is this marvellous
song ? None other than that which John heard on Patmos when he had a
vision of a redeemed world joining with the heavenly hosts. " Worthy is
the Lamb that hath been slain to receive the power and riches and wisdom
and might and honor and glory and blessing ".
As nothing else in the world's history has done it, the Cross has domi
nated the minds of men of all nationalities, of all classes and conditions, by
drawing them into the fellowship of Jesus Christ. It has transformed relig
ion from that dead and barren thing it was into the living and fruitful
thing we see it today. It has transformed society. It has produced civili
zation. It has inspired literature and art to their highest uses. Never are
men so nearly at their best in any of the works or walks of life as when the
Cross is their theme and inspiration. We must not ask those who have
looked upon the Cross only from without , as one might look from without
on the storied windows of a cathedral, and complain at the dulness and
flatness of the picture because he had not seen them glorified by the light
of heaven streaming through them ; but let us ask those who have been
redeemed, from whose minds the image of the Redeemer departed not, who
are sharers in His joys and in His sufferings; ask these, and their verdict
will be that He was no dreamer, preaching a kingdom that could not come.
He is the world's Redeemer, and because He is its Redeemer, He is build
ing up a kingdom that shall have no end.
But this attracting power is purely moral and therefore is not irresist-
able. " I will draw all men unto Myself ", Christ said, using a word that
speaks of inner constraint, not of outward compulsion. An Alexander, a

THE ATTRACTING POWER OF THE CROSS. 245
Caesar, a Napoleon, or a Nicholas may dream of a world-empire, but the
mailed fist is their highest conception of the unifying principal of their
kingdom. But into the Kingdom of Heaven men are to be drawn by
sweet persuasion, not " dragged in " against their wills. No outward con
straint could be effective. That the attracting power of the Cross is not
irresistable was never more manifest than today. The quite common view
that the theories of the apostles concerning Christ's death were simply
their adroit efforts to get over the difficulty of Christ's death as a stumbling
block proves one thing at least, that the Cross is a stumbling block today,
and any expedient that will explain it away will be gladly hailed.
The strongest niagnet cannot exert its attractive power through perfect
insulation. And no one who attempts to preach the Gospel of the Cross in
these days as Christ and His apostles taught it can fail to see that there is
much that insulates the minds and hearts of men against it. Are we to give
up the preaching of the Cross and seek some magic solvent to apply to men
that once more they may become susceptible to its power? By no means.
We must continue to preach it, but we should seek such a method of preach
ing it that it will act as its own solvent and find its way to the hearts of
men. It is of no use for us to say " we must preach the old Gospel ", and
thus excuse ourselves for our failure to meet the problems of our own day.
We must preach the old Gospel in the language of our times so as to meet
the problems of our times. In order to that we must understand what
these things are which especially alienate men from the Gospel of the
Cross. The old problem of man's pride, his unwillingness to humble himself
in the dust, acknowledge his helplessness and put himself under so great
obligation to Christ is intensified in our day by the deification of humanity.
The Incarnation, we are told, is no new thing, but simply the historic
expression of the eternal humanity of God. This is no doubt a theory very
attractive to the pride of man and one that leaves no room for an atone
ment. It is a theory that is immensely popular in these days when an-
attractive theory is preferable to stubborn facts.
Again, many men of our time are enamored of a method of historical
research which finds in the patent circumstances of an event its full explan
ation and forbids applying to the event universal significance. If Jesus of
Nazareth aroused the antagonism of Jewish authorities so that they sought
and compassed His death, that is enough to explain the fact and we must
not seek ulterior causes. Nor must we translate that event, so easily
accounted for, into an event of universal significance. This is like assert
ing that we understand all about the life and growth of a tree because we
can explain the constituent elements of the soil in which it grows. A his
torical method that fails to account for all the facts is unhistorical and
unscientific. The true historical method must take account of the facts of
sin and redemption and the triumphs of the Cross in the last 1900 years. It
must account for the Christianity of today. Its foundation can be neither the
fog of mythicizing tendencies in the early church, nor the rottenness of con-

246 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
scious deception on the part of the apostles. No building of such magni
tude could stand on so slender a foundation. It is far more reasonable to
recognize all the facts in the case and seek to conform our historical
theories to the facts, than to eliminate the facts in the interest of any theory
whatsoever. Then, there are popular theories of human life which make man so
absolutely a part of the " Cosmic Process " as to lead to a denial of the
reality of sin, as that word is understood in the New Testament. It makes
the atonement appear, as Dr. Denny puts it, "like a rock in the sky".
To a far greater degree than we are apt to suppose, the Rubaiyat is
revered above the Bible ; and even among many who have never heard of
Omar Khayyam and who profess to know the Bible, the Rubaiyat expresses
their belief concerning sin.
" Oh Thou Who didst with pitfall and with gin
Beset the Road I was to wander in.
Thou wilt not with Predestined Evil round
Enmesh, and then impute my Fall to Sin I
" Oh Thou, Who Man of baser Earth didst make.
And ev'n with Paradise devise the Snake:
For all the Sin wherewith the Face of Man
Is blackened — Man's forgiveness — give— and take I "
But more than by anything else perhaps, men are insulated against the
preaching of the " True Cross " by what might be called " an irreligious
solicitude for God ". God is revealed by Jesus as the loving Father. Why
cannot He forgive as the earthly father does ? What justice can there be
in His asking an innocent being to suffer in our stead ? "An innocent one
cannot take the place of the sinful one anyway " we hear. As a matter of fact,
however, the innocent do in human life suffer for the guilty, and often much
more than the guilty. Illustrations are before our eyes daily of such suffer
ing of the innocent not only with but in the place of the guilty. The father
shields the guilty son and suffers in his stead. He rejoices to do it.
Taking the great problem by this small end we may work our way back
through the human approach to a partial comprehension of it, though its
majesty and mystery are unsearchable.
And God does not take an unwilling victim unrelated to Himself and
force him to take the sinners' place. It is God Who is in Christ, at infinite
cost, reconciling the world unto Himself. And why can He not forgive
without this cost as the earthly father does ? We need to remember that
however freely the earthly father forgives the wrong against himself, he
cannot forgive the sin, for the act was not only a wrong to the father but a
sin against God, and only One can forgive sin. God cannot forgive without
this atonement, just because the word Father as we commonly use it does
not fully represent God to men. For the sweet and beautiful teaching of our
Lord concerning the Fatherhood of God, men have in these days substituted
a doctrine that some one has irreverently called "the Papahood of God"-
Let us quote here from Denny, words that this generation sadly need

THE ATTRACTING POWER OF THE CROSS. 247
to hear. " The relations of father and child are undoubtedly more adequate
to the truth than those of judge and criminal. They are more adequate,
but so far as our experience of them goes, they are not equal to it. If the
sinner is not a criminal before his judge, neither is he a naughty child before
a parent whose own weakness or affinity to evil introduces an incalculable
element into his dealings with his child's fault. * * * it ought to be
apparent to every one that even the relation of parent and child if it is to be
a moral relation, must be determined in a way which has universal and
final validity. It must be a relation in which ethically speaking, some
things are forever obligatory and some things forever impossible ; in other
words it must be a relation determined by law, and law which cannot
deny itself. But law in this sense is not legal ; it is not ' judicial ' or ' statu
tory' or 'forensic'; none the less it is real and vital and the whole
moral value of the relation depends upon it. What would be the value of a
forgiveness which did not recognize in its eternal truth and worth that
universal law in which the relations of God and man are constituted ? With
out the recognition of that law — that moral order or constitution in which
we have our life in relation to God and each other — righteousness and sin
and atonement and forgiveness would all alike be words without meaning ".*
These things enable us to see how grave a problem we have to meet.
It is not preaching a glad message to men who have never heard it, and w ho
are stretching out eager hands to receive the blessing. We preach and see
little if any response. It is as the poet expresses it :
"As if a well that lay
Unvisited, till water-weeds had grown
Up from the depths, and woven a thick mass
Over its surface, could give back the sun I
Or, dug from ancient battle plain, a shield
Could be a mirror to the stars of heaven I"
If we are to meet these conditions and overcome them ; if our preaching
and teaching are to form any part of those moral agencies which will result
in drawing all men to Christ, we must at the outset avoid such presentation
as will needlessly add to the thickness of the weeds or rust upon the minds
of men that prevent their response to the appeal of the Cross. In our use of
terms we must discriminate between their Biblical use and other uses that
may be very different. For instance, to use a single illustration, the idea of
propitiation often needlessly alienates men from the Cross because they do
not understand what the Bible means by the word. " In the heathen view,
expiation renders the gods willing to forgive". By sacrifice the personal
anger of the god is appeased and his favor bought. Nowhere in Old or New
Testament however is there any hint that God has any feeling or disposition
averse to forgiveness. " He does not have to be made willing by expiation
to forgive sins. He is and always has been willing ". " In the Biblical view,
expiation enables God consistently with His holiness to do what He was
never unwilling to do ".t The problem is simply this. How can the Holy

* The Atonement and the Modern Mind, p. 71.
t Stevens' Johannine Theology, p. 183.

248 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN
One take the impure one to His arms and yet remain the Holy One ? That
problem has been solved. The Holy meets the unholy over the Blood of
the Atonement. There is death for evil doing. The evil desert of sin is
recognized, yet there is mercy for the repentant. Sin is not encouraged,
innocence is not confounded with guilt, and yet the fallen are lifted up.
It is interesting and to many cheering, to notice that in England where
we are led in theological thought by fifteen or twenty years, the evangelicals
are preaching the atonement in its fullest saving sense. The English dele
gates to the Congregational Council held in Boston a few years ago almost
without exception emphasized and re-emphasized the full atoning significance
of Christ's death. As they declared, they have had their Bushnellianism,
and safely passed through it twenty years ago. A writer in the Independent
at that time said that he asked one and another of the visiting delegates :
" Do these men represent the dominant thought of your pulpit? ", and the
answer was an emphatic affirmative r " That is what our young men are
preaching " said Dr. John Brown of Bedford. " We hold to Christ's
Redemptive significance. We have now a firmer grasp on the supernatural.
We have passed through the stage which laid weight on the moral view.
It is something deeper than that. The foundation rests here. ' He was
made sin for us Who knew no sin '. Compared with this the mere ethical
conception is secondary. As MacLaren said : ' Christianity without a
Christ is a dying Christianity ' ".
To have moving and persuasive preaching we must have a moving and
persuasive Gospel. Let us take heart, and hope that our period of sentimental
inefficiency may soon be superseded by a time of great power and refreshing
from the Lord, growing out of a re-habilitation of the old yet ever new
Gospel of the Cross.
But before all and through all, if we would effectively preach and teach
the Gospel, we must ourselves be living examples of what the attracting
power of the Cross can do. We must be manifestly under the sweet con
straint of His love Who died for us. We rriust apply the law of the wheat to
ourselves as fully as He applied it to Himself before we can expect our
message to bear fruit in the lives of others. We must not only be willing to
cast our lives into the earth of human need, but we must do it. But when
we do show our understanding of Christ's love and sacrifice by ourselves
entering into the living sacrifice of His service, holding not our lives dear
unto ourselves, that we may fulfil our ministry, then we will have the joy
unspeakable of having so commended Christ and His cross to men that the
winsomeness of His love seen through His Cross will master their hearts and
wills, and will bind them to Him by invisible and unbreakable bonds, and we
will have hastened the day when by the Attracting Power of the Cross He
shall have drawn all men unto Himself.

*THE COMMANDMENT OF GOD AND LIFE EVERLASTING.
by ricv. ste"wa.rt means, t>. t>.,
Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church, New Haven, Conn.
St. John 12 :49, 50.
For I have not spoken of Myself : but the Father which sent Me, He
gave Me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak.
And now I know that His commandment is life everlasting : whatsoever
I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto Me, so I speak.
Revised Version.
For I spake not from Myself : but the Father which sent Me, He hath
given Me a commandment, what I should say and what I should speak.
And I know that His commandment is life eternal : the things therefore,
which I speak, even as the Father hath said unto Me, so I speak.
One of the most striking things to the thoughtful student of human
speech is the constant growth and expansion of any language which is the
possession of a vigorous and progressive people. The wide range and
extension of its thought is met, in most cases at least, by an increase in the
terms of its expression. The creative intelligence gets for itself new words
to set forth the new ideas. Yet the continuity of the language is preserved
by giving to the old forms a new meaning or if not a new, at least a larger
and in many respects a different meaning. The obsolete significance of
words is one of the characteristics of every old literature. When we enter
upon the circle of ideas and the field of the new Christian consciousness,
we find here all the characteristic features that are manifest in all literary
expression. Old words are loaded down with new meaning and it is often
more necessary to understand the mind of the writer than it is to get a
definition of his words or phrases. This passage in the Gospel of St. John
s a striking illustration of this fact. The first word which meets us as
significant is " entola ", " commandment ". It is not a new but an old word
and the common association is also very old. In its religious significance
it is notably characteristic. All religions without exception, with which the
world was then familiar, were at bottom legal in their idea. No man had
any other conception of religion, and in Judaism it was stamped upon every
phase of the religious life. It might be said to be one of the fundamental
elements of human consciousness everywhere. It was the presence of this
preconception, along with many other inherited mental and spiritual atti
tudes, that quickly made itself an influence in determining how Christianity

* Delivered at the Eighth Conference, held at All Saints Memorial Church, May ii, 1904.
249

250 • THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
would be understood by the mass of men. For men do not and cannot
divest tnemselves of all which they have inherited in the way of thought and
feeling, of temper and atmosphere of soul. Knowing therefore the accus
tomed associations of the word "commandment", the attentive reader is
met with the thought, immediately upon his reading this passage, that St.
John is introducing a conception which he had inherited as a Jew and
which was native to his mind and thought before he had ever heard of the
Gospel or known his Lord. But while there are no philological or gram
matical reasons for rejecting this interpretation, there are the strongest
indications present through an analysis of his thought which render such a
meaning utterly improbable.
In the first place, he is giving the words of Christ. Knowing the atti
tude of Christ on this way of interpreting religion we know that such a
conception could not be His and there is no reason for thinking that St.
John has given any turn to this thought in order to establish a view of his
own. Christ presents Himself to His disciples as a Son who has a commis
sion from His Father and this commission includes not only what He should
say but also how He should say it. Here is where our words begin to
cumber the thought and make it hard to penetrate with speech into the real
meaning which He was endeavoring to make clear to them. We have the
hard objective way of looking at His life and give the common turn of
meaning to His words. He does not think of Himself as a messenger sent
out alone to deliver the law of the Judge and Ruler of all the earth. He is
preeminently and fundamentally a Son. The commandment of God is not
an external law under which He is forced to act, but the power of it and the
imperative character which belongs to it come from His own inward sym
pathy and harmony with God's will. It constrains Him not as an alien
force but by the very roots which it has in His own will and nature. It is a
law to Him because it is also the very principle of His own life. He mani
fests and obeys the commandment or the will not because He is compelled
to, but because it is of the very essence of His own inner nature. It is the
absolute impossibility of wishing or doing otherwise that makes in the
forms of human speech a commandment, but it is lifted by the very nature
of Jesus into the transcendental atmosphere of filial relations. And so it
is likewise with the setting forth of this commandment or the obedience to
it. However much emphasis we may lay upon the articulate and verbal
expression of this commandment, we know that the words fall back for their
meaning and power upon the life which they express and out of which they
issue. The teaching of Jesus has its chief if not only value in its relation to
His character and consciousness. His nature is the perfectly revealed will
of God. He is the commandment of God. The contents of His very words
are Himself. If we use the word commandment here in anything like the
way He wishes us to understand it, doubtless it means that it was a com
mandment to Him not to speak what He spoke only, but to be what He was.
Now speech may be but the executive presentation of a foreign will, but
"to be" means the inward and joyful assent of the nature and the consent

THE COMMANDMENT OF GOD. 251
of the entire will to the life that wishes itself to be expressed. The man
datory character of this will lies in its perfection and its inward command
over the sources and energies of the soul's noblest thought. It is not easy
to measure the words of Christ, and when we pass beyond the speech into
the consciousness out of which it issued and try to analyze the interior
volitions and spiritual affinities and affections, we are oppressed with our
own ignorance and dulness of vision. Yet out of our own Christian exper
ience come some gleams of light which help confirm us in the conviction
that His own life and His own words have roused within us. We can and
do say that Christ commands us to be pure and gentle and loving. Any
noble soul could do this. All great souls have been one in this high
demand. Yet what makes His command not a command for us, but a
command to us ? Here is where we pass into the region of what is real and
vital. It is the irresistible pressure of His perfection, the revelation of the
supreme beauty of that which He commands, that wrings from the soul in
its first reluctance a deep consent. Not to be at once perhaps, but to wish
to be. We do not discuss or dispute His right. The beauty of goodness is
imperative to the soul and its right is acknowledged instantly by the recog
nition which the soul confesses of its power and glory. There is no com
mandment like this that the soul has ever known. Christ presents Himself
to us and we cannot help it. He is completely and perfectly all that we
feel is noblest and most holy, and the soul instinctively rushes out to consent
to His appeal. For appeal is the one word we use here to describe the
tenderness and gentleness with which He gains us, but at bottom this
appeal has a moral and spiritual imperativeness transcending Kant's
" Categorical Imperative ".
That is the testimony of the soul's submission to the high moralities of
life. This is the passionate assertion of the spirit of man to the lofty
sanctities of the character of Jesus Christ. God simply is in His love for
men what He is, and Christ feels His being as a command to express the
same character. Jesus simply is to us what He is, and we feel His being as
a command. A command not because it is a legal requirement, but because
we feel its insistence exerted immediately over the will and spring of all
our finest desires. It is here in this spiritual and psychological form, and
not in its legal and objective character, that we are to understand and
interpret this use of the word " commandment " by Jesus. For we know
that the supreme object of His life was to renew the filial mind in men and
to re-establish the filial relation as a conscious element of the soul's life.
Now a spiritual relation cannot be enforced by an outward requirement
or a legal statute, and even the common moralities of life rest upon the in
ward capacity of men to feel their beauty and echo their assertion of the
moral law. The utter sterility and emptiness of all legal conceptions with
reference to the production of spiritual life are made manifest the moment
we attempt to go to the roots of character or the springs of action. It is in
spiration that counts here and not the barriers of the law. It is the opening
of new fountains in the soul, and not the flat dictation of supreme power.

2S2 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Nothing is more characteristic in the life of Christ than the inwardness
of His real life. " I have meat to eat, that ye know not of ", He says, and
we feel the presence there in the secret of His will of the divine love lifting
it and feeding it with the energy of the infinite goodness. The mystery of
the Gospel is the mystery of the mind of Christ becoming interior to the
mind of man and forming a new consciousness which has as its foundation
and fullest expression the realization of the sonship of man to God. This
new relation and this new consciousness determine the life and character
with an accuracy which no external dictation could enforce. It is the
spiritual energy within the life which is more potent than any thunders from
Sinai. It is when this word " entola " or "commandment " is used by Christ
as issuing from a relation and an outflow of spiritual activities that it has
this interior meaning and this spiritual basis. In the Gospel of St. John it
is used several times. May I ask you to spend a few moments examining
these passages ? In John lo : i8 occurs that remarkable passage which lifts
us into the very face of the spiritual strength of Christ. Beginning with v.
17, He says : " Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My
life, that I may take it again. No one taketh it from Me, but I lay it down
of Myself. I have power (or right) to lay it down and I have power (or
right) to take it again. This commandment received I of My Father ". It
was the love of the Father, the will of salvation which were imperative for
Him. Love always commands us with its own power which is of perfect
appropriation. It re-creates our will and the new will becomes the law of
our being. No other meaning is possible for this passage. On the other
hand in John 1 1 : 57 we meet with the common use of the word : " Now the
chief priests and the Pharisees had given commandment, that if any man
knew where He was, he should shew it, that they might take Him". This
is external in all its aspects. It is social or statutory authority laying its
demands without the least reference to character or the interior disposition ;
it is the legal demand which asks only for an automatic response. In John
13:34 we are swept back again into the stream and sphere of spiritual
relations and activities. "A new commandment I give unto you that ye
love one another ; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one another ".
No one can possibly understand the word commandment here as equivalent
in quaUty or range, corresponding in meaning or character with the legal
authority of the Pharisees. Its meaning and efficacy lay in the inward
persuasion which the perfection of His love exerted upon their dispositions,
and the creative energy of His affection, It is not an injunction, but a new
spirit, the spirit of His love, filling them too with a similar love. Even the
most rigid and narrow legalist among His hearers could not but feel that
the word commandment had a new meaning and a loftier and more awful
authority than even the law of Moses. For the spirit of God was testifying
to the spirit of man and the heart of man felt the new life urging its own
necessities. In the 14th chapter we have three passages in which this phrase
is used: " If ye love Me, ye will keep My commandments". "He that
hath My commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me ; and

THE COMMANDMENT OF GOD. 253
he that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and
will manifest Myself unto him ". " But that the world may know that I
love the Father, and as the Father gave Me commandment, even so I do "-
In all these passages there lies back behind the sense of command the
authority which creates it. This authority is not external to the man or to
the Son Himself. It is love that in its re-enforcement of the spiritual
energies proves its own authority. For the highest feelings are a law to the
soul which no ordinance of man or tradition can coerce or destroy. The
floods are risen up and sweep the soul on into new channels. It is not
authority based upon outward claims, but the principle of the real life of
man responding to the presence of the divine life that floods it with its
regenerating power. It is the determining power of a new love, the passion
of a new affection. Loyalty to duty carries men to death, but the Son of
God goes to the cross with a joy no man can measure, in obedience to the
very law of His being, and reveals the strength of the inward demand which
is the ultimate fact in man's true relation to God.
In the ijth chapter the same phrase occurs three times again. " If ye
keep My commandments, ye shall abide in My love ; even as I have kept
My Father's commandments and abide in His love ". " This is My com
mandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you ". The secret of
His love is the foundation of their new lives. It is a secret because it is
that which is felt and in the inward stores of the soul's affections makes its
claims. This is its only and supreme authority. No man can prove the
necessity of obedience to Christ, for it rests upon no outward claims. This
obedience which ranges free above all the prescriptions of man and all the
ordinances of religion is the fountain of all pieties of life and heroisms of
character. It is always aspiring to new elevations and reaches forward to
larger and nobler living. Its aim is the full realization of its filial relation,
and it drives the soul with the pressure of an ever expanding affection. It
is the most baffling and puzzling thing in the history of the human soul and
is the despair of the world, for it stands upon nothing but its inward expe
rience and deep conviction which can never be set forth in decrees or laws.
The more the soul feels the love of God, the more the spirit of the Son
grows into fulness and power, the more imperative and complete becomes
the insistence with which the spirit plunges on into the fullest possession
and expression of its filial character. This is the unique and mysterious
fact of the new Christian personality. In the immediate contact of God
with the human soul conscious of its sonship, there is an enormous expan
sion of vision and power. The spiritual capacities are vitalized by the
energy of the divine life and each life unfolds itself under the creative force
of the divine love and gives full and joyful obedience to the inward pressure
of the new life that is seeking realization and expression. This interpreta
tion of the commandment will be confirmed if we regard the' obedience not
from the point of view of the external act, but of the inward disposition and
assent. The human will in relation to a legal demand stands clearly dis
criminated and separate from that requirement. There is a certain mechan-

2S4 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
ical adjustment on the part of the individual, and his personality is by no
means merged in the law. In the case of the obedience of Christ there is
the steady and easy flow of the nature forward along the divine will, with the
purpose of God working dynamically as an interior energy and not a
mechanical or even a moral compulsion. The Divine will is His will, and
the manifestation of His nature is the revelation of the nature of God. They
are not two separate things, two factors combined in a given result, but the
organic unity in which it cannot be said that the elements can be separated
and distinguished as the particular contributions of two distinct personali
ties. We do not say of His life or act, this is the special issue of the
character and disposition of Christ, and this other is the clearly defined
manifestation of the will of God. The obedience of Christ we feel to be the
essential will of God, for that obedience is set forth in a moral nature and a
spiritual character that is congruous with the character of God. This being
the psychological and internal order of the spiritual facts, it throws the legal
estimate of the words "commandment" and "obedience" under a new law or
principle of interpretation, and that law or principle is found in the essential
unity of the will of God and the mind of Christ. But the full sig^nificance of
this order of interpretation comes more fully into the light, when we consider
the entire passage as setting forth the law of the life of man in its organic
and fundamental relations with Christ.
" I know His commandment is life everlasting", or as the revised ver
sion has it: " I know that His commandment is life eternal". The two
terms of " life eternal ", or " zoe-aionios ", mutually qualify and define each
other. Let us take the adjective first. Like all great words, " aionios " has
its popular and its scientific meaning. It is a phrase not only of common
speech, but of philosophical significance. In its primary meaning as used for
a term of accurate thought and definition, it means that which is apart and
above time. That is, the category of time has no relation whatever with it.
It is neither a limitation nor an extension of the conception which is planted
in the idea of time. Kant tells us that the categories of time and space are
the necessary laws or conditions under which all knowledge of sensuous
things, taking the term in its widest extension, must be attained. Now, I
am not trying to introduce the Critical Philosophy into the Gospel of St.
John, or smuggle Transcendental Ideas into the speech of Jesus, but I am
using these distinctions in order to reach back to the fact that super-
sensuous facts, spiritual realities, ought not to be treated as lying under the
same conditions of apprehension as those which belong to the physical
phenomena or the ordinary mental processes of everyday life.
Only in its most popular and derivative uses does the term have a
quantitative meaning. It specifically, and particularly in the Gospel of St.
John, has a qualitative significance. " Eternal life " is a special kind of life
that only in a loose and rhetorical way can we say admits of quantitative
increase or decrease. Goodness is goodness always, and any increase in
it means, not by dimensions or measurement, but by vividness, intensity
and reality. Its character and its quality are always the same. It is with-

THE COMMANDMENT OF GOD. 255
out succession. There was no time when goodness became goodness. It
neither increases or decreases by age or term of years. So with all moral
and spiritual facts. They are truths, and the reality of truths of this order
lies in their quality and the energy with which they act in the world of
man's spiritual nature. But the most important word in this phrase is
" zoe ". It occurs in the Gospel of St. John 34 times. It is generally recog
nized as one of the significant words in this Gospel. It is moreover almost
never used to signify mere physical hfe or even mental activity. There are
many ways in which we can approach it and find at least some phases of
its meaning. As contrasted, for instance, with death, it means union and
fellowship with God. For death is separation from Him ; not separation
in the sense of being outside of Him physically or metaphysically, but as
having different moral ideals and spiritual purposes ; an atmosphere in
which the mind and will of God are not the prevailing and dominating
characteristics. Outside of God, hence, means outside of the world of
His spiritual life. His affection, love, purity, holiness. And not to have
these as the contents of the soul is to be dead. There is only one life in
the thought of Christ, and that is, God. The word is lifted to its highest
significance. The pallid existence of men whose spiritual natures are
stunted and dwarfed, in whose veins the sluggish flow of weak spiritual
purposes hardly keeps alive the moral will of the man, is not life. It lacks
that essential fulness and blessedness which are of the very essence of
God's being. His perfect glory and our perfect joyl Now the fulness of
life does not consist in our recognition of the fact. It is not the mere indi
vidual apprehension, the feeling of the presence of an existence in which
the person has no part or share, but the divine life flows into the human
life until the divine consciousness of its own character and sweetness and
power become the consciousness of the individual soul that has become
partaker of this life. The qualifying adjective " aionios " is not therefore a
quantitative term, but rather a distinctly spiritual one. " Eternal life " is
the qualitative essence of the character, not continuity or quantity of life.
The adjective is used with the noun in this Gospel nine times and, without
examining each passage in detail, we may assert without much danger of
contradiction that it has this specifically spiritual meaning. Life is eternal,
because in the first place it is life real and actual as no other life is. It inten
sifies the conception of life by showing its real and spiritual origin. We
can the more readily see this inasmuch as the word or adjective, "eternal",
in St. John's Gospel is only used with life. It is the distinctively qualifying
adjective of that word. Eternal life is therefore the inseparable condition
or accompaniment of the entrance into the real life of the spirit. It has no
date, or rather, if it has, it is reckoned from the moment of entrance into
Christ, or spiritual acceptance or inward appropriation of the Gospel as the
matter is presented to us as a personal appropriation of Jesus Christ, or the
inward consent of the nature to the law of His being. All adjectives repre
sent qualities, and it is not a correct use of words to convert an attribute
into a cause and say that eternity is what makes the life eternal. Nor, on

256 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
the other hand, is it possible to place the terms in the order of antecedent
and consequent and affirm that life being in eternity it becomes partaker of
its character. Further, we may affirm, that the acceptance of the Gospel
does not confer eternal life. The matter is more closely and organically
related. Eternal life is the subjective state represented by the objective
statement of the knowledge of God or the reception of the Gospel. Christ
is life. The reception of Christ or God is the actual acceptance of life.
It is the dynamic activity of the Divine life that constitutes the life of the
believer. " This is life eternal, that they might know God and Jesus Christ
whom He hath sent ". The knowledge here is not used in any intellectual
way whatever. It means that inward and spiritual recognition which is
equivalent to the term "faith" in St. Paul. The contents of life, which
are God and Christ, have nothing to do with the physical experiences of
men. Death is not the beginning of eternal life, nor, on the other hand, is the
resurrection the date of its origin. Christ had life in Himself from the very
beginning. He also gives life in giving Himself. It is this personal and
immediate participation in eternal life which distinguishes the words of
Christ in this Gospel from the conventional use of the phrase. " I know
that His commandment is eternal life", Jesus says. Eternal life is, not
shall be. It is the presence and the revelation of the Divine will in the life
of man. But it is the life of man as consciously determined by the will of
God, and the consciousness of its supreme beauty and truth. The moral
and spiritual evidence of this beauty and truth are found by men in Jesus
Christ, who is the incarnation of this holiness and love, grace and truth.
These are His revelations, revelations not of Himself but of God. His Self
is the expression of the Divine Self. The submission of the soul to Him,
the obedience of the heart to His inward disposition, creates a new moral
and spiritual consciousness. The union wrought out between the soul
Christ loves and the soul that loves Christ is not a merely external union,
but is like that which exists between the Father and the Son. In this
blending or transforming of the inward consciousness issues the sense and
certainty of Christ. So at the end, each through his own spiritual experi
ence is able to affirm as a member of Christ that which Christ declares is
the heart and meaning of His own life. "For I speak not from Myself:
but the Father which sent Me, He hath given Me a commandment, what I
should say, and what I should speak, and I know that this commandment
is life eternal : the things therefore, which I speak, even as the Father hath
said unto Me, so I speak ".

*THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET AND THE LAW OF SERVICE.
(St. John 13 : 1-17.)
B'Y RK-^. KD'WIN' .A-LONZO BLiAIiE, PH. D., r>. E.,
Pastor of the Tremont Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Boston, Mass.
The event which we are to consider at this time, is one of very great
importance. Largely so, if I mistake not, because it is the embodiment of
a law that underlies all Christian civilization. We are to consider it of
course as generic in kind and not specific. There are those I believe who
actually do upon occasion wash one another's feet. I ceitainly would not
be willing to question their Christianity as thus manifested, for I have the
most profound respect for all who " profess and call themselves Christians" ;
but it seems to me we are to seek here the spirit rather than the letter, to
discover the law embodied in the act rather than perceive the act alone.
The scene also marks the closing events in the history of our Lord's
personal work on earth. The opening sentence of chapter 13, " Before the
feast of the Passover ", would preclude the thought that it is the Pascal
supper that is being described. Neither could the action have taken place
according to the King James' translation, "after supper was ended ", neither
as the Revision has it, "during supper", for it will readily be observed that
at either time it would have been inopportune. Rather is the thought that
supper time had arrived. In coming from the bath, probably with unsandled
feet, they had become somewhat dusty again. According to the usual custom
they found the basin of water prepared for them. It might have been the
duty of the youngest disciple to perform this service, or possibly the one
whose turn it was from the last meal, as was not unfrequently the case. A
conversation had taken place, however, which turned the whole trend of
things and presented to our Lord a most remarkable opportunity to impress
a great lesson. So great was the lesson of service to mankind impressed
upon him or from some other cause, that John omitted that most interesting
story which to me seems the pivotal point of the Master's act.
For this we must turn to Luke, and there we have it in chapter 22,
V. 24. Although they had traveled so much with the Lord and had so long
listened to His teaching, they had as yet failed to grasp the meaning of
greatness in His kingdom, and they had been contending who should be
accounted the greater. By referring to Luke you will observe that Jesus
had told them that one of them had it in mind to betray Him. This causes

* Delivered at the Fifth Conference, held at the Central Baptist Church, February lo, 1904.
257

2s8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Professor Dods to remark, in regard to this strife among the disciples, that
" the juxtaposition of this strife among ihe eleven with the announcement of
the traitor gives to it by comparison the aspect of a pardonable infirmity
in otherwise loyal men, and it is so treated by Jesus ". If it were the custom
of the younger to do the feet washing upon such occasions, we can see a
very forceful meaning to the words of our Lord in Luke, when He said,
" He that is the greater among you, let him become the younger, and he
that is chief, as he that doth serve "
But it is not necessary for us to pause long over the interpretation
of causes which led to the Saviour's action at this time. I think we will all
agree that the great Teacher seized upon the circumstances to impress
a lesson in serving for His disciples then and for all time to come. I think
I can also observe that it was to be the key note to the highest type of all
coming civilization. There is one predominant feature in Christianity,
which, if I mistake not, differentiates it from all other religions, viz.: it has
an ideal to which it is ever tending. You will recall that the Lord at one
time remarked that His mission was not to destroy but to fulfil. The
thought is that we have as it were the seeds of the future ideal in the old
dispensation, and that He came to add new life and vigor that it might
attain the ideal. To this end He bent the energies of His short life, and
sought so to instruct His followers that they might carry on the same work.
It is in this unfolding that we behold the beauty of this little story under
consideration. If this new church was to look for a new kingdom, where
were they to search for the foundations? In other words, what was to be
the governing principle or law that was to control it ?
When the time arrived when the most menial service was to be per
formed, with the conversation of dispute still ringing within His ears. He
disrobes Himself according to custom, takes the basin of water and the
towel and stoops to the humble work. When He had completed the wash
ing and reinvested Himself with His garments and recHned with them at
the table. He explained the meaning, and then added as recorded in v.
15, "For I have given you an example, that ye also should do as I have
done to you ". Here, then, we behold the law of service, which is to be the
law of all Christian civilization.
In this act the Leader, the acknowledged King, has shown by actual
example what He rightfully expects of every subject. It needs but a
cursory glance at His life from His entrance upon His mission to its com
pletion, that service for others had been the rule of His own life, and why
should He not expect it of those who were to be called by His name ?
Before entering upon the application of this law in various modes of
life, I wish to direct your attention to a few circumstances which to me
seem very significant.
I. Our Lord was fully conscious that His end was near and that the
shadow of the cross was dark athwart His pathway. This is indicated in
the first verse of chapter 13, "Jesus knowing that His hour was come that
He should depart out of this world unto the Father ".

THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET. 259
Such times are usually occasions of ceasing from labor. He had done
all He could to impress the grandeur of His missicn upon the world, but had
been repulsed at every point, and now His very life was to be required
at the hand of His enemies ; and what would seem to make the matter more
serious, was the fact that at the very table with Him was the man who was
to betray Him. But it was the last opportunity that was to present itself for
impressing this great law upon their minds, and with that calmness and
self poise always characteristic of the great Teacher, He faltered not.
2. I notice again thai Jesus was conscious of His greatness. The
third verse of this chapter reads, " Jesus knowing that the Father had given
all things into His hands, and that He came forth from God, and goeth unto
God ", etc.
Consciousness of power, of divine power withal did not hinder Him in
the performance of this service, ¦ Such being the case. He must have been
aware that at His command He could have escaped the cross and have
destroyed His enemies. Greatness and condescension are here brought
face to face. None but the great could successfully face such difficulties.
The act was the natural outcome of that greatness and not the greatness of
the act. I presume many of us could recall deeds performed by men which
of themselves were noble. These men may have done many such deeds, still
no one considered them great men. Sinister motives seemed to lurk beneath
the action depriving it of its apparent greatness. It is only when we keep
in mind that the great purpose of Christ was to reveal the way of God to
mankind, to show us the great Father-heart of God as exemplified in His
own life that we can understand why when conscious of His divine origin
and power He did not resent the manifold indignities so often manifested
toward Him, and at once seek retribution. This has too often been the spirit
shown by His followers. He might frequently have said to many of them,
" Have I been so long with you and yet hast thou not known Me ? " But
as life or death were before Him it certainly must have been within His
power to take either one or the other. From subsequent expressions we
are to judge that life had its charms for the Holy One as it does for you
or me. We must not be oblivious of His humanity when we exalt His
divinity. But He also discovered the import of the law which He was about
to emphasize, and for the moment turning His back upon His conscious
greatness He performs the act under circumstances of the greatest trial.
3. The intensity of Jesus' love is worthy of attention. John of all the
disciples seems to have most appreciated the loving heart of Jesus. It
impresses him more. The only commandment of Christ which seems to
impress John is that of love. In his first epistle (4:21), he thus writes:
" And this commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth God love
his brother also ". Then when writing to the " elect lady ", he refers to a
commandment which they had had from the beginning, and that command
ment was love to one another. God's love thus manifested through the Son
was a constant wonder to John. " What manner of love " he exclaims. By
this the Apostle sees that we are called the " sons of God ". In his Gospel,

26o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
in the very beginning, he declares that it was love that brought Christ to the
world, and that belief in Him would bring the life eternal. Not content
with such assertions he rises to the more wonderful declaration that "God
is love ", and that he that would abide in God must abide in love (i John
4: 8, 16). I suppose that the assertion that God is love is a description
rather of the character than of the being of God. One has well said, I think,
that "this truth was for John a simple conclusion from the mission and work
of Jesus. It was the inference regarding the unseen from the seen ".*
We are unable to fathom the immense influence that the act of feet-
washing by our Lord had upon the " beloved disciple " The statement in
the first verse of the chapter under consideration is significant: " Having
loved His own that were in the world, He loved them unto the end ". The
words " His own " must be considered in a little more restricted sense than
the same words in the first chapter and eleventh verse. Here it would seem
that He is referring to that little band of twelve whom He had selected for
their instruction in taking up the work which He was soon to leave in person.
If this be accepted, it will make it a little more interesting. We commend
the love of God in Jesus Christ for the race, but when we realize that the
love is for the individual, that very concentration makes it more valuable.
I think our admiration of Jesus' love and for the menial act is height
ened and deepened when we remember that he who was to betray Him was
in their company and received this service from the hand of his Master. It
had already been put into Judas' heart to betray. I cannot quite agree with
Meyer that Satan put it into his own heart, for it was his intention to destroy
the work of the Son of God from the beginning. The Saviour knew full
well at that time who was to betray Him, that he was already pondering it
within his heart, and yet despite this, He loved him and yearned for his soul.
Our Lord saw the events about to transpire, and yet. His
" Love alters not with His brief hours and weeks,
Btit He bears it even to the edge of doom ''-
II. The Washing of the Feet. We now come to the distinguishing act
of that eventful hour. The act of that occasion was but another illustration
of the law of service which the great Teacher had at all times sought to
enforce. You will remember that John and James, the sons of Zebidee,
came to Him upon a certain occasion seeking important positions in His
coming kingdom, but that without attempting to disabuse them of their
error in regard to the character of that kingdom, He at once showed them
thaffor the attainment of that or any position in His kingdom, there was
service to be done. It matters little which Greek word is used which we
translate "service" or any of its derivatives; He at all times seeks to
impress the thought that we must serve humanity and thereby we are serving
God. ' Recall for a moment the scene of the 12th chapter of this Gospel.

?Gilbert: ** Interpretations", p. 313.

THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET. 261
Certain Greek philosophers had been seeking an interview with the Lord.
This little band of Greeks were well versed in their own mythology, and
taking advantage of this, Jesus made use of an illustration probably based
on the Eleusinian mystery, and by it they were enabled to comprehend the
teaching of the coming of a new life from an old or former life. They were
perfectly familiar with the legend of Dionysus, his second birth with Semele
as his mother, and acquainted with the myth of Persephone. From these
came the symbol of vegetation shooting up with such verdure at spring time,
and apparently withdrawing into the earth as autumn approaches. When,
therefore, the Teacher used the illustration of v. 24 they understood its .
meaning. " Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die it abideth
alone". Then followed what would have been a paradox without the pre
ceding assertion, "he that loveth his life loseth it". Here is the law of
service taught which our Lord is about to illustrate to His disciples and
finally to the world. If you have no service to render, no death to die, you
will remain alone, would seem to be the thought there expressed.
You well know, as the margin indicates, that for the word here trans
lated " life ", two different words appear in the Greek. If you are anxious
to keep your individual life, your manhood, you must be willing to; sacrifice
it in doing good for others. This done, you will gain the life eternal.
This He failed not to apply to Himself as He beheld the darkening
athwart His pathway. Although He did say " Father, save Me from this
hour''. He immediately exclaimed: "For this cause came I unto this
hour ". He felt then, as ever, that His life was one of service for humanity,
even unto the death of the cross.
Let us take, if you will, that wonderful parable known as that of the
Good Samaritan. It has been an inspiration for hundreds of years to all
Christendom. Orders have been formed upon it as a ruling principle, and
charitable institutions have received their life from it as a foundation. It is
within the very warp and woof of all working Christianity. But what does
it record ? A little act of service whose immediate teaching is to reveal the
meaning of neighbor, but whose ultimate end is to teach us that that
neighbor needs our service.
The principal record of the eleventh chapter is the raising of Lazarus,
but the ground thought for us to learn is that Christ served in that hour of
trouble. But to me one of the greatest representations of this law of
service by way of teaching is given by the great Leader in His description
of the judgment. They are represented as coming to Him after He has
told them that they are to inherit the kingdom prepared for them. So
greatly are they astonished that they are represented as crying out to Him :
"When did we do this? We have no remembrance of seeing Thee in such
condition and ministering unto Thee "- The answer is significant. " Inas
much as ye did it unto one of these. My brethren, even the least, ye did it
unto Me ".
To me it has seemed that Jesus illustrated all these teachings by the
feet-washing. It would almost appear that He might have said to His fol-

262 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
lowers, " You have been with Me for a long while now. You have heard
what I have said about service in the world. I have been Seeking to show
you that it lay at the very foundation of all greatness. It is at the very
entrance of My kingdom and you must understand what it means. You are
all seeking greatness in that kingdom. You are thinking as did the lawyer,
' What good thing may I do ? ' I can say no more. I want you to scan My
life, it has been one of service from the beginning. You must allow Me to
wash your feet as the symbol of what I mean ". After saying this they saw
the light, and Peter cried out, " Lord, not my feet only, but my hands and
my head ".
In this act shines the light of which Professor Beardslee spoke, " The
study of Christ's mission, if it follows the lead of John, will center around
one word, — light. Christ is the light of the world ". So here He becomes
our light, and there is no need of walking in darkness.
I might emphasize here the value of doing over feeling, I have known
people to wander in the dark for weeks and all because so much stress was
placed on " how do you feel ", and when the candidate could claim no bet
ter feeling he was told he must feel a little worse, plead a little more, and
then he might feel a little better. Just what this meant, or just what was
the process thro.ugh which he was to pass was never made quite plain, but
it was fully taught that his acceptance dependt d largely on feeling.
The teaching of Christ, so far as I am able to see, calls upon us first to
do something for God, and the feeling will naturally follow. It will be
observed that the Master was constantly telling men to give, even if it were
but a cup of cold water to the thirsty, as well as many other things, and
when they had done these righteous things in the name of Christ or
because they had accepted Him as their guide they would receive the
righteous man's reward. Feeling will undoubtedly follow in a majority of
cases, but we are to do something first and consider the feeling as a result.
Application of the Law. — If the act of feet-washing embodied a law, as
I have already stated to be my belief, it must be universally applied.
When we studied arithmetic or the higher mathematics, it was the custom
to state the rule and then illustrate it by some appropriate example. But in
reality, although I do not remember that the teachers told us so, the rule of
course followed from the example. It could not be otherwise. So here
from the great Teacher we have first the example, and from that follows
the rule. You have observed that the disciples wanted to know why He
should do this act, and He told them to allow the act, and He would after
ward explain. This was also the case at the time of the baptism of Jesus,
when John was about to forbid His coming to him, " Suffer it to be so
now ", was the answer, waiting for subsequent developments to substanti
ate the assertion, " It becometh us to fulfil all righteousness "-
I. Nations. The law must be applied to nations in their dealings
with each other.
This was the one great lapse in the grasp of thought among the
Hebrews. Accept to the full extent that they were a "chosen people",

THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET. 263
that God had given them a revelation superior to what had been received
by the nations about them, they never seemed to comprehend the fact that
such privileges demanded a service on their part to their neighbors. They
grew to be more and more exclusive, and finally thought no one was fit for
existence but their own nation. It would seem that they were sufficiently
warned of this fault of exclusiveness. There are those who beheve that the
story of Jonah was written to show them the larger opportunities which
they might embrace, but the "hermit" thought possessed them so thor
oughly that it controlled them to the days of the promised Messiah. If we
are to follow out this law there can be no hermit nations.
In our time this law is manifesting itself nationally in reciprocity
treaties. It may be doubtful if the greedy politician recognizes the source
or feels its full import when he is arguing such national measures, but it is
most certainly an exhibition of serving one another.
In the same category must be classed the boards of arbitration, of
which we hear so much in this century.
You may recall that President Woolsey, in his " Introduction to the
Study of International law ", says that the Roman Imperial Power origi
nally fulfilled this function, and that it was feebly perpetuated by the popes
in the mediaeval times. Henry IV of France sought by some such means
to avert religious wars, and so on through the succeeding years it has been
the strenuous efforts of many national leaders to confederate the nations in
such a manner that war might be averted and the weaker nations pre
served. It was reserved for those living at the close of the nineteenth
century to witness a mighty nation espousing the cause of a despised
people, fighting their battles for them, and then raising them to the honor
and dignity of statehood among the nations of the earth. I opine, however,
that the world has not yet seen the full outcome of the application of the
law of service among nations. I contend, without approving or disapprov
ing of recent methods, or without entering the arena of politics at all, that
it is a service which this country has owed to all the nations of the earth for
more than a half century to construct and maintain a waterway across the
Isthmus of Panama. I also maintain that all intercourse of one nation with
another should be based on this Christ Law of Service. It would not be
politic to study this law at this time in all its ramifications in these direc
tions, neither is there time ; but if ever any nation attains to the highest
possible Christian civilization, it will only be by accepting and working
upon Christ's Law of Service.
One has well said, " That the principle of service sees the world no
longer as divided, fragmentary, a disconnected series of spheres * * *
but as one world, an organism, a cosmos, a single sphere in which is no
higher or lower, no academic aristocracy or detached group of the learned,
but an interdependent, associated, common life, involving the researches of
the recluse and the bent back of the man with the hoe ".*

* Professor Peabody: " The Religion of an Educated Man ", p. 8i.

264 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
2. Literature. This brings us naturally to the application of the law
of service to literature.
Possibly there is no better illustration than the service of literature
rendered to England in the middle of the last century. It was one of the
great factors which assisted in bringing about the great revolution without
recourse to arms. Carlyle seemed to catch the spirit of the law and was
willing to apply it to himself. Those were immortal words which he wrote,
and worthy of inscription in gold and to be placed in the sanctum sanc
torum of every aspirant in literature :
" We are here to do God's will. The only key to a right life is self-
renunciation. The man who lives for self, who works for selfish ends is a
charletan at bottom, no matter how great his powers. The man who lives
for self alone has never caught a vision of the true meaning and order of
the universe. * * * Life shall be a barren, worthless thing for me unless
I seek to fall in with God's plan, and do the work that He has sent me
here to do ".
Scarcely less important are the words of that noble Italian patriot who
providentially sojourned an exile in England at that time, and who espoused
the cause of liberty of that strange land: Joseph Mazini. He wrote: "Life
is a mission. Every other definition of life is false and leads all who accept
it astray. * * * Life is a mission, a duty, therefore its highest law.
In the comprehension of that mission, and fulfilment of that duty, lies our
means of future progress, the secret of the stage of existence into which we
shall be initiated at the conclusion of this earthly stage ".
What could be truer to the law of service than the expression of these
two leaders in the literature of their times. But they were not the only
ones who used their pens for what to them seemed for the good and exalta
tion of their country and their fellow men. If you are at all familiar with
Mazini's life {Joseph Mazini, His Life, Writings, Etc. pp. 129-200), you will
recall that it was not enough for him to be engaged in these public benefac
tions in the cause of liberty. Finding that there were hundreds of Italian
children in London who were extremely ignorant, his great loving heart
was so moved that he induced men of means to assist in founding a school
for their instruction.
At this period Charles Dickens was just entering upon his career, which
was to make him one of the foremost instrumentalities in bringing light to
darkest England. Elizabeth Barrett, Thomas Hood and a host of others
were heard in verse and prose sounding the note of freedom ; legislators
heard the cry of humanity and consecrated their pens to its services.
It is impossible for one to trace the far-reaching influence that the true
literate has had in moulding and fashioning society. There are no more
hopeful signs of the times than the fact that such men as Ely, and Vincent,
and Zeublen and many other men of letters have been wilUng to use their
pens and time in what is termed the Citizen's Library Economics, Politics
and Sociology, whose aim is to make scientific work in the field of the
humanities clear and interesting to ordinary intelligent citizens. And I

THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET. 265
doubt if the world ever saw the day when so many of our men of education,
college presidents and professors, noted clergymen and leaders of society
offered themselves in free service for all mankind. Never were so many
books published, and good ones, too, to help the rising generation. I well
remember when " Todd's Students' Manuel " was not only the best but
about the only book of its kind, but now it is not so. Almost every man of
any standing in literature gives us the benefit of his education. You can
well imagine my chagrin the other day when your secretary asked me what
books I had written. All I could do was to remark, in the language of the
celebrated Dr. Daniel Curry, that I know too much to write a poor one but
not enough to write a good one. I rejoice that so many educated men are
consecrating their knowledge and pens for the public good.
4. The Church. We now ask ourselves the question, what service
shall the church render to humanity ? The day of controversy has very
nearly passed. Heresy is little thought of except now and then when the
superior light of some noted professor shines so brightly that it blinds our
eyes and we think he is in the dark when, forsooth, it is ourselves, and we
wish to try him for heresy. But, generally, all is at peace and the church
stands confronted with tremendous problems.
You may recall that Canon Fremantle* claims that the fourth and
fifth chapters of John's Revelation reveals the ideal or destination of the
church of God. In the center is the slain lamb, that is God made known
through the self-renouncing love expressed in the cross of Christ. Sur
rounding these are the elders representing the redeemed humanity, then the
four living beings which represent the animate creation. He claims that we
must take this vision as representing a world right about us, and not far
away, that is being slowly but steadily transformed by the expansion of the
Christian church. Whatever definition we may give to the church, its mis
sion is a service for humanity. As Christ came to the multitudes to help
them, so are we to go to the multitudes in His stead today and render them
the service we are able to give.
I wish especially to call your attention to the latter part of v. 15, and
the whole of v. 16. They seem to me to be significant: — "That ye should
do as I have done to you. Verily, I say unto you, a servant is not greater
than his lord : neither one that is sent greater than he that sent him "
This of course will be seen to refer directly to the scene of washing that has
just transpired. Turn now if you will to v. 34, and there you will read : —
"A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another ". It would
almost seem that the great Exemplar paused for a moment to get their
attention, for what He was about to say was what there was new in this
commandment. Their attention riveted upon Him, He continues : — " Even
as I have loved you, that ye love one another ".
The word " even " denotes conformity rather than a simple compari
son. Their love, to be forever manifested, is to be of the same nature.

* Fremantle: ** The World a Subject of Redemption", p. 8.

266 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
The two ways of rendering this passage are : i. "I give you a new com
mandment, that ye love one another with the same devotion with which I
have loved you". 2. "I give you a new commandment, that ye love one
another, even as up to this moment I loved you, in order that you may
imitate My love one toward another ".* While the first rendering gives the
character, the second rendering gives the ground of that mutual Christian
love. The revised version gives this in the margin. That love which was
to be the characteristic of the new commandment was on that occasion
manifested in the act which at first Peter so strenuously deplored.
Indeed He had manifested His superiority, not only to them, but His
superiority to the age in which He was living. His words so fitly spoken at
all times ; His self control under the most trying circumstances ; His fear
lessness, yet gentleness of bearing had all disclosed to them that superiority,
while now the closing act of His short life had clearly demonstrated to them
that He was willing to use that transcendent greatness in lifting the race to
its rightful position. His very coming to the earth. His denial of the glory
which He had with the Father, would and did demonstrate this ; but they
could not then understand that any more clearly than we do now, and so to
give the example that all might understand, He stoops to the menial service
of washing the disciples' feet.
We sometimes hear the cry, "give us the old time religion", and it is
doubtful, if many who are sounding this through the land understand what
it means. Mr. Ely in one of his lectures t says that while the metaphysicians
are crying : — " Back to Kant I " or " Back to Plato I " let the church raise the
cry: — "Back to Christ!" This is what I understand by the "old time
religion ", and not one of noise and emotionalism. It may, and will to a
certain degree possess both of these, but it will be because the church.
Christian people are willing to bring aid as Christ did to the degraded
humanity by being its servant.
In the light of this interpretation, there is a place for every follower of
Jesus Christ, and when he is out of that place, he is of no use to the world.
If one has gained education beyond one's fellows, it is the imperative duty
for that one to use it among the ignorant or those who are not as enlightened.
The thanks of this whole land, yea, of the whole Christendom, are due to
President Eliot and a score of other men of like character, who, in the
plenitude of their research are willing to meet their opponants on social
questions in open fair debate.
It certainly has a tendency of removing the " caste " feeling which our
Lord so greatly deplored, and which the act before us so greatly wounded.
We are living in an age of service, a service of love for mankind, and it is
the opinion of many eminent men that it has never been equaled in its com
prehensive love of man. The rich are beginning to realize as never before
that wealth means more than self-aggrandizement. It means that they, as

* Vincent: "Word Studies in the New Testament ", p. 236.
t Ely; " Social Aspects of Christianity ", p. 149.

THE WASHING OF THE DISCIPLES' FEET. 267
its possessors, are but stewards to do service for humanity, and. so the last
year surpassed all others in its gifts of beneficence. In this renaissance
appears the Young Men's Christian Association, the University Settlements,
the Students' Volunteer movement and other methods of helping humanity,
all of which show that we are catching the spirit of Christ when He laid
aside His garments, and He took a towel and girded Himself, and poured
water into the basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet.
I believe with Dr. Rice that " the Man of Nazareth has still a message
even for those who rejoice in the discovery and possession of the new
worlds of truth revealed by modern science ".*

* Professor Rice; " Christian Faith in an Age of Science ", p. 6.

* THE GLORMCATION OF THE SON OF MAN.
BY REV. s.a.:m:uel hart, D. D., D. C. Xj.,
Professor of Doctrinal Theology and of the Prayer Book in Berkeley
Divinity School, Middletown, Conn.
St. John 13 :3i, 32.
" Now is glorified the Son of Man,
And God is glorified in Him ;
And God shall glorify Hitn in Himself,
And straightway shall He glorify Him ".
St. John 17:5.
"And now glorify Thou Me, Father, with Thyself,
By the glory which before the world was I had with Thee"
I. As we pass on in the study of St. John's Gospel, we see more and
more distinctly how the beloved disciple was led to know the Master
and to interpret and record His works. Especially as we come under
the shadow of the cross and catch a glimpse of the light which lies
beyond it, we see how one of whom we think as most closely following and
understanding the Lord, learned the meaning of the great revelation of the
life, the death, and the life resumed. He saw in it all, as he traced it out
from the beginning, a great progress from God to God, of one who came
forth from the Father and came into the world, and again left the world
and went unto the Father. A later Apostle noted the steps of humiliation
from the assumption of human nature to the acceptance of the death of the
cross, and then as following upon this the exaltation to the right hand of
the Father ; and as he wrote, St. Paul thought of the glory as a compensa
tion for the humiliation and a reward of the obedience. Such, indeed, from
the standpoint of man it was, and in this way the facts are doubtless
rightly represented to our minds and rightly understood. But St. John
looked at these same events as he knew that Christ Himself looked at them,
arid he saw them in the light of the divine plan and counsel ; and in their
Godward aspect he learned that the cross was not an interruption of the
great work, nor was the Resurrection an undoing of the power of the death,
or even a recompense for it ; from Bethlehem to Olivet, nay, as I was saying,
from God to God, it was a great progress, the triumphal march of a com
batant and conqueror, the revelation of the inherent glory of the Son of God,
the assumption of the merited glory of the Son of Man. " I, if I be lifted
up from the earth, will draw all men unto Myself " ; the Lord spoke these
* Delivered at the Sixth Conference, held at the Trinity Union Methodist Episcopal Church,
March 9, 1904. 268

THE GLORIFICATION OF THE SON OF MAN. 269
words as He entered into the last tremendous conflict, and He spoke them,
St. John himself tells us, " signifying by what death He was about to die " ;
but the " lifting up " was not upon the cross alone ; it was that, indeed,
but it was that as a step in the ascent to the Father. And, in point of fact,
it is not the Christ dead upon the cross who has drawn and still draws
humanity to His worship and obedience ; it is the Christ in heaven, " the
Lamb as it had been slain ", the accepted sacrifice, the living priest, the
head over all things tq the church.
And this expression of one of the greatest of all truths, although we
find it most clearly stated in the argument and the words of St. John's
Gospel, is not pecuhar to him. St. Luke, when entering upon his long
record of the events of our Lord's last journey to Jerusalem, says that He
steadfastly set His face thitherward " when the time was come that He
should be received up" ; so that he, too, looked upon the way of the cross
as the way of glory. And there are many phrases which show that even
St. Paul wrote sometimes more like a mystic than Hke a scholastic
theologian, and centering his thoughts upon God saw the one great plan
which was purposed from eternal ages, not interrupted but furthered by
the cross. Thus, indeed, it must have been for all who entered into the full mean
ing of the Lord's teaching about Himself. They saw the childhood, the
youth, the opening manhood of the holy Man follow in the wonderful
naturalness of perfection ; there was no change of purpose, no break of con
tinuity, when upon them there followed the public ministry with its gracious
teaching and its deeds of love, its conflicts with sin and error, its mighty
testimony to this truth ; and they saw that it was a step to the greatest vic
tory when the life submitted to death that it might gain new power, that it
might enter upon a loftier state of existence, and that it should then be
communicated to those who could receive it. Christ Jesus lived and taught,
suffered and died, that He might attain and impart the new life.
Thus it was that when. His earthly ministry having ended. He had dedi
cated Himself to death, He knew and declared that He had reached the
time of His glorification. He had shown Himself to be the Lamb without
blemish and without spot ; He had, before the hands of wicked men had
been violently laid upon Him, devoted Himself to death when He presented
to the Father the bread and the wine of the last Paschal feast and the first
Eucharist, or at least — for we cannot be certain of the exact sequence of
events — He was about to offer this great sacrifice of Himself and to bid His
disciples to continue a memorial of it until He should come again ; Judas
had left that little company, in which he no longer had his place, and had
gone out into the night to fulfil the awful part which he had chosen for him
self ; and Jesus said to the eleven who were left, waiting in hope and fear
for what might prove the issues of that night, " Now is the Son of Man
glorified "- A day or two before, when the conflict with His own people
was at its height, and Gentiles had come to ask for Him, He had said that
the hour of His glorification was at hand ; but now the sacrifice was in true

270 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
symbol and in full intent offered, or to be offered, and the Lord spoke of
the act as just completed : " Now was glorified the Son of Man ".
II. " The Son of Man ". Thus He spoke of Himself, as showing the
place which He held in the great economy of the Father, declaring His
identity with humanity and His place as the head of humanity, affirming
that He v.'as really man and at the same time representatively man, not one
among men but one who was the life of all, who was the one real man
because He was the one ideal man. And He, the Son of Man, was now
ready to receive a glory such as had never reached humanity before. He
saw before Him the agony in the garden and the bloody sweat ; He knew
how near to Him were the cross and the passion, with all that they meant
of shame and pain, of contempt and dereliction ; but He saw beyond them,
and — most important — because of them, the mighty resurrection and the
glorious ascension, the enthronement in heaven and the kingly return ; He
knew, too, that this was the true way — we need not hesitate to say the
natural way — in which He, the Son of Man, was to complete His work and
to attain His destined place; and He uttered in the hearing of His apostles
words which they could not rightly understand then, but words which it
was impossible that they should forget :
" Now was glorified the Son of Man,
And God was glorified in Htm ;
And God shall glorify Him in Himself,
And straightway shall He glorify Him ".
These were not, then, the words of a perfect man who, coming to the
end of his appointed work, felt that he might expect a reward. Even the
perfect man must, indeed, — paradoxical as it may seem — advance in his
perlection. Even the perfect man must meet the conditions of advance in
physical and mental and spiritual development, and must prove his place
and stand forth as being that which he reaUy is. Even the perfect man
must be perfect because he has become perfect, and none can be made per
fect without trials and sufferings. And Jesus Christ was certainly perfect
as man, and His humanity was made perfect. None before Him had ever
attained to unspotted holiness, as none before Him had ever offered com
plete obedience. He stood pre-eminent among all who have ever trod this
earth in the many generations of its history, and as such there must have
been a glory especially and peculiarly His. That glory, if I understand the
record aright, was shown to Him on one memorable occasion ; and had He
been no more than man, had He been but one among the millions of human
kind. He might have accepted it as His due and have entered upon it then.
On the holy mount, when not only His life of preparation was past, but
also He had received the discipline and made the progress which belonged
to His public ministry. His glory was revealed to chosen men of both the
ancient and the new dispensation, and also (I think we may rightly say it)
to Himself. That glory our Lord did not then accept, and its vision faded
away ; but it left in the memory and the convictions of two apostles who

THE GLORIFICATION OF THE SON OF MAN. 271
saw it — the other early laid down his life and left no record of his teach
ing — a powerful testimony as to the reality and the might of their Master's
majesty, whom they had for a brief moment seen as indeed He was and is.
But the Lord came down from the mount, and entered again and at once
upon His work as the healer of men's woes, and presently upon His other
work as teacher and His conflict with sin. He accepted not the transfigu
ration glory which belonged to Him as man, because He would await and in
due time gain the resurrection glory, which should be His as the Son of
Man. The hour was not yet come that the Son of Man should be glorified.
III. Now the reason for this, as I understand it, is two-fold ; or, to
speak more accurately, it is a reason which can be stated and considered in
two ways. Our Lord at the time of the transfiguration had accomplished
the work of man, as man might have been had there been no need of
redemption. He had, indeed, encountered sin, and had known its opposi
tion, and had removed some of its results ; but He had not delivered men
from its power, nor had He as yet known in His own experience the utter
most of the power of that which He had come to bear. If the words are
rightly understood, it may be said that He had fulfilled the destiny of man
unfallen, but not as yet that of man fallen. For, though He knew no sin,
and the stain and corruption incurred by human nature did not reach to
Him, yet He was sent " in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin " ; and it
was necessary that His holiness should reach down and take hold of the
weakness and sin of those whom He vouchsafed to call His brethren. To
help man fallen. He must humble Himself to the destiny of man fallen ; and
that He would not have done if He had accepted the glory of perfect man
hood and entered the presence of the Father from the mount of the trans
figuration. And this really implies the other reason which I had in mind,
that even in the supreme hour of His ministry, regarded as only His minis
try, Christ had not identified Himself with us ; He had not become the
head of the church, and through the church the head of mankind. The life
of no mere man, be he even the man who alone should be perfect among
the children of men, could be communicated to all others as the one source
of their true life. None but a mere man could have accepted a glory which
was not to be shared with others ; none but the Son of Man could have
left the vision of the spiritual world and of the eternal life, and calmly faced
the evils and sorrows that remained on earth, and turned His steps to
Gethsemane and Calvary, even though it was with sure faith that through
them a path would be found to the opened grave and the parted heavens.
Christ our Lord, because He was the Son of Man, must needs seek to tread
as deliverer the way along which man, weak and fallen, was stumbling, and
He must needs gain for man a life not only perfect but victorious ; and life
completely victorious— we may be not able to give the reason, but we are
convinced of the truth — is the only high life which is by its nature communi
cable to others and able to extend to all. And no life is completely victo
rious except that which bows itself down to death and rises again in the
might of the resurrection.

272 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
IV. Transfiguration glory was therefore not all that was meet for the
Son of Man. Because He was the Son of Man, He would not accept that
which could not be shared with His brethren ; because He was the Son of
Man, He would not enter into glory without us. He came back into this
world's life that He might take us with Himself into the life of the world to
come. How, then, was He to be glorified as the Son of Man ?
The answer has been already in part suggested ; but that it may be
truly stated and apprehended, we must keep in our minds the full meaning
of glory as the word is used constantly in the Scriptures.
Glory is the manifestation of that which has a moral worth ; it belongs
only to that which is in itself real and true ; it is the necessary effulgence of
light, the revelation of true excellence, that by which a rational being recog
nizes in a rational being the qualities of holiness and reality, of justice and
love, and of all that goes to make up moral and spiritual perfection. It is
thus essential to the nature of that to which it belongs and which it reveals ;
it may be hindered in its manifestation, but it cannot be created and it can
not be destroyed. It follows that it is not, and cannot be, something
extraneous, as a golden crown which may be put upon an unworthy head,
or a stately garment which may be used to cover up rags and unseemliness ;
glory, in any right sense of the word, is as necessary to him in whom it is
seen as is brightness to the sun, or beauty to the flower, or order to the
system of the universe. And in a true sense we may say that God Himself
does not bestow glory. We do not, of course, mean that He does not first
create that which is noble and pure and true ; we do not for a moment deny
that it is His hand which shapes and His spirit which gives life to all that
has perfection of any kind, or that even makes any approach to perfection;
but as He did not first create the sun or the flower or the world, and then
give to each its attribute of brightness or beauty or order, but made each
to show in itself that which belonged to its very constitution, so it is in
regard to that moral excellence of which we are speaking ; it does of very
necessity reveal itself, it cannot but be glorious. The glory of God is His
holiness and His love, those two elements which specially enter into our
thought of what we venture to call His character ; and the holy and loving
God must needs have the glory which enters into any true conception of
holiness and love, a glory which none can fail to see and recognize who
knows these divine attributes. In like manner, the glory of a man is in his
character as he is true to that which he was created to be and to the ideal
toward which he was meant to advance ; and even with our bodily eyes we
catch traces of it on the faces of the saints, and our souls are conscious of
it when we are in their presence. So the glory of the Son of Man is to be
seen in the completion of His work, in the perfection which He was to
attain through life and death and life again, through obedience and its
reward, by completing as Son of Man His double service, that of the Father
and that of His brethren.
The words, then, on the Lord's lips, " Now is the Son of Man glorified",
declared that He had as Son of Man finished His work here and had fulfilled

THE GLORIFICATION OF THE SON OF MAN. 273
the destiny of man on earth. They witnessed to the completion of that for
which He had cast in His lot with those whom, though fallen and sinful.
He had from very love called to become His brethren. Dedicating Him
self to death, and accepting the path of life along which alone He could
lead man with Himself, He had made that great act of self-surrender which
was the only way of true victory for Him and for us, and had acknowledged
that in this He would find His sufficient reward. The inward victory had
been gained in the surrender of the holy will to do and to suffer all that man
needed to accomplish and to endure ; and upon the inward victory, so the
Lord knew, the outward triumph must follow.
Thus, as in one great act, the Son of Man was glorified by life and by
death, by resurrection and ascension, and is yet to be glorified by that
return for which His church is waiting. Thus in the self-surrender and the
deserved exaltation, a death accepted because only through it could life
be attained, life possible only as springing out of death, did He who had
for our sakes identified Himself with us fulfil His destiny and ours. Thus
did He gain His true reward, the reward of greater service and of greater
consequent honor, the ability to serve us by giving us His resurrection life
as He had given for us the life in which He lived on earth. Thus, to use
His own words, was He glorified, and God was glorified in Him ; for in His
work was a new revelation of the Father, made known in His wonderful
perfections of holiness and love ; and thus was fulfilled that which He added
by way of emphasis and assurance, " God shall glorify Him in Himself, and
straightway shall He glorify Him". They are words rather for devout
meditation than for critical examination and exposition ; and marvellously
do they tell us of the eternal Son of God, as Son of Man, bringing glory to
the Father, and the Father glorifying His only begotten Son, when His
work as Son of Man was completed, in Himself,
And somewhat thus may we venture to apprehend the meaning of the
petition which I read at the beginning from the Lord's high-priestly
prayer; "Now glorify Thou Me, Father, by the glory which before the
world was I had with Thee ". The words in which the eternal Son, who
had come forth from the Father, addressed the eternal Father to whom He
was about to return, must needs be words above the full understanding of
men ; but they do at least contain the prayer, which on the Lord's lips was
a prayer in full assurance that it was the Father's will that it should be ful
filled — the prayer that He who had been made and had become the Son
of Man, might in His perfection as the God-Man, uniting in His one
Person two natures never to be divided, have the glory which belonged
to the God-head ; that the glory which before the Incarnation had been
His, might be given Him as the Incarnate Son, who by the depth of
His humiliation and the completeness of His obedience had gained for
Himself the name that is above every name, and for man the privilege of
becoming the son of God and even partaker of the divine nature. What
one says in trying to grasp the meaning of these great words must needs
be said after the manner of men and most imperfectly; but the thought

274 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
inspired may lead to worship and to that lofty faith which is the spring of
all true action.
V. Thus, as He had declared and as He had prayed, the Son of God,
made Son of Man, was glorified by the Father as in the path of the Cross
He entered upon the life which had hitherto been the uncommunicated life
of the Godhead, to make it communicable to men. Thus did He gain a
victory, not for Himself alone, but for all who should be in Him, for His
body the church, and for all humanity. Thus did He not only point out
the way of man's perfection, but prove it a real thing; thus did He make it
possible for us to enter into His perfection and into His glory.

* OBEDIENCE TO THE NEW COMMANDMENT THE PROOF OF
DISCIPLESHIP,
(St. John 13:34, 35.)
by rev. rock^well h. potter,
Pastor of the First Congregational Church, Hartford, Conn.
Brethren in the Conference : You have asked me to speak upon
the words found in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John in the
thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth verses, "A new commandment I give unto you,
that ye love one another ; even as I have loved you, that ye also love one
another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have
love one to another ". Those who have read thoughtfully these chap
ters of the Gospel will have noted that the chapter division which con
cludes the thirteenth and opens the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel
gives to us at the opening of the fourteenth chapter those great words
of comfort which are dear to the heait of every Christian. Yet it is
unhappy in that it separates those words of Jesus from the other words in
His answer to the question of Peter, and that it separates the related ques
tions of Thomas and Philip and Judas from the question of Peter. They
will have noted that the real division of the thought occurs at the thirty-
sixth verse of the thirteenth chapter with the first of the interrupting
questions. So we see these verses to which our thought is called this
evening standing as Jesus' own word at the conclusion of the institution of
the Lord's Supper and as His only introduction to the great words of the
fifteenth to the seventeenth chapters — the discourse of the vine and His
prayer for the church. So that I bring to you one of His great words
spoken at a great moment in His ministry.
The supper had been instituted. That simple yet profound ceremony
summed up in itself great Christian truths that laid hold of the thought and
heart of the group of disciples. At its close in that tragic moment Jesus
had made the delicate disclosure of him who should betray Him, and the
steps of Judas had just died away as he had descended the stair from the
upper room. It is as though we had crossed the passion threshold and
were now in the great and holy place wherein was to be enacted the sub
lime mystery of the Christian faith — as though the traitor being unable to
pass that threshold having just departed, had left behind him the group of
the disciples whose hearts were loyal to Jesus and to whom could be dis
closed the great and eternal truths which were then to be wrought out. So

* Delivered at the Sixth Conference, held at the Trinity Union Methodist Episcopal Church, March
9. 1904.

276 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Jesus speaks now the word which is to be the constituting principle of
the Christian church. The supper being concluded He speaks of the glo
rification of the Son of Man which is to be wrought in Him, speaking of His
relation to God. Then He speaks of the Church through which He is to be
glorified, and announces the principle which is to constitute that Church in
human society — the principle which is to organize human society so that
the great work to which He has laid His hand shall find its full fruition in
the brotherhood of man. This then is His word. "A new commandment
I give unto you that you» love one another, as I have loved you ; that you also
love one another. By this shall all men know that you are My disciples,
because ye have love one for another ".
What then is the content of this great commandment which is
to become the organizing principle of the Christian Church? What
then is the content of this commandment by which men are to be
known as His disciples? We read the word, "that ye love one another",
and we recognize that this is no new word falling from the lips of Jesus.
The disciples had already heard that message. Time and time again had
He repeated the ancient command of Israel in their ears. Moreover, in
the parable of the Good Samaritan He had given such large interpretation
to the word neighbor that they understood something of the breadth of the
love that was demanded of them by Jesus. What then constitutes this
command, " A new commandment ? " Wherein is it that Jesus speaks these
words on the threshold ot His passion? Wherein is it that, reserving this
word for this moment. He speaks of it and says, " This is the new com
mand " ? "I have stated many things. If you forget other things which I
have said, forget not this. I have given many precepts. If these all fall
from your lives, let not this fall. This is the commandment ". What does He
mean ? Let us divest our thought of those unworthy conceptions that cluster
around these words. A large part of the meaning of the passage we are apt
to lose. We love so many things. We speak of that which is beautiful to
the artistic sense and say that we love it because it is a delight to the eye,
or pleasant to the ear, or because in deeper meaning it satisfies the aesthetic
impulses of the soul. Again, with more of real meaning we say of our
friend, "I love him; he is my companion, my trusted friend, I love him"
Yet we know that love such as this cannot be commanded. Or leaving
behind the lower meanings of the word, we apply it to that range of affec
tion upon which the home is constituted, the love of husband for wife, of
father for son, the love of the mother for her child, and by this word we
cover all the range of those sacred relationships which constitute the home
and give unto life the sweetness and richness which there is in the home
we know. And yet, when we strive to interpret these words by these usages
of it, we find that it is impossible for us to derive from it the significance of
the text. We cannot be commanded so to love all men, we cannot be
commanded so to love our brethren in the Christian Church. These affec
tions which are the center and bond of union in the home, are not the
range of affections that are brought into play in the Christian brotherhood.

OBEDIENCE TO THE NE W COMMANDMENT. 277
They cannot be commanded, and our Loid never laid that commandment
upon us. How then shall we interpret these words but by reading more
closely, and by comparing this word here with those in the parable of Jesus
by which He has borne it in upon the heart of humanity ? We love our
neighbor when we, like the good Samaritan, are willing not to pass by
on the other side but to go where he is, and put the arm of sympathy under
his wounded head, and to lift him in his weakness to the bosom of our
strength, and to pour the balm of comfort into his wounds, and to bear him to
safety and shelter. We find that we love our neighbor when thus we seek
his good, — that Jesus does not command for us a passionate affection, that
He does not command us to find the man robbed and at once feel towards
him as we feel towards our brother in the flesh ; but that we enter into his
life with sympathy and seek his welfare and minister unto him in love. So
Jesus means in this great word, " that ye love one another ", as He means
always in the interpretation of that great word to Israel. Jesus means,
when He says you should love one another, " seek always the welfare of
your brother ". Consistently in life and word, in deed and thought, seek
the welfare of that brother. "Ah ", you say, " you have taken the meaning out
of that great word, what is there left in it?" Have I? Then you have
never striven to live up to that commandment ; take it home and live up to
it in Providence for one week, and see if the meaning is gone from it when
I say that Jesus says we shall always seek the welfare of our brother man.
This is the commandment that Jesus lays upon the heart of the Christian
Church, and He utters the great and fundamental law of redeemed human
society. But He has given us here the phrase that makes His word the new
commandment, " Love one another as I have loved you ". And so saying.
He has given us the type and measure of the Christian obligation. "As I
have loved you ". How loved He men? Spiritually first, spiritually, always
spiritually. But you say, " He fed the hungry. He clothed the naked. He
unstopped the deaf ears, and He caused light to shine in the eyes of the
darkened. He made the lame to walk and the dead to live ; His ministry
was a physical ministry". Yes, He fed the hungry, but He said to them,
" Ye seek Me because you ate of the loaves and fishes and were full " ;
" Labor not for the meat which perisheth but for the meat which endureth
unto life eternal "- " But you are taking all the kindness and sympathy
out of the gospel", some one exclaims. No, I am not. God forbid that I
should utter a word which should be interpreted to mean that I say unto
my brother, " Go, be ye clothed and fed " while I turn about to put on my
broadcloth coat and eat my dinner of roast beef, while he walks naked and
hungry ! But this is true that in all our ministry for the welfare of our
brethren, it is the welfare of their lives that we seek and not the welfare of
their bodies. You think of him, not as a beast ; you think of him as a child of
God. You seek constantly his welfare, you love to put clothes upon his back,
you love to heal his wounds, you love to make the lame to leap and the blind
to see, but you will do this because by so ministering, you serve his whole

278 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
life and you redeem his soul. The Christian Church must always assert
that her love for men is spiritual as was the love of Jesus.
To what point are we to love our neighbor ? Up to the point of sacri
fice. That is what Jesus did. "Love one another as I have loved you".
Seek always, consistently, the welfare of your brother's life, and seek it
until it hurts. That is what Jesus means, up to the point of sacrifice. "As I
have loved you '', said Jesus when the shadow of Gethsemane was falling
upon His brow, and when there was graven before Him in feature of flame,
the dread figure of the' cross. And by this He teaches His Church that
they are to love their fellowmen. The Church is to show her love for
humanity by loving their lives, and loving their lives to the point of sacri
fice — that is the meaning given by the new commandment. Because we
tiave divested it of those associations of sentiment and of affection which
cluster around the word in our ordinary usage of it, will you not bear wit
ness with me that we have deepened and strengthened its claim upon the
human heart, when we have interpreted it to mean, "Thou shalt consist
ently seek the welfare of thy brothers's life up to the point of sacrifice " ?
It was a solemn moment when Jesus spoke that word. He reserved
it until the traitor, Judas, had gone out, because only faithful souls could
bear the blaze of the white heat of that new commandment. It is the solemn
command which Jesus gives to the Christian Church in every age. " Thou
shalt always seek the welfare of thy brother's life, his spiritual life, up to the
point of sacrifice ". It is a claim that stands in the world today, a claim
that has in it a divine compulsion. " Thou shalt love one another ". " That
ye love one another as I have loved you ".
Oh, but you say : " It is limited. It was just Andrew, Peter and James
and John and Philip and Thomas and the rest of them, that were to love one
another. It did not mean the Roman soldiers in the street. It did not
mean the centurions ; it did not mean the scribes and Pharisees ". Jesus
was speaking to His disciples. But with the full light of these twenty cen
turies blazing in upon those words, with Jesus' own teaching by precept
and proverb as He has interpreted the ancient command of Israel, we
know that wrapped up in that "you" was potentially the human race. It
takes in all mankind. And who dares to draw a circle of limitation around
the command of Jesus and say we shall love this one as He loved us but
that one is outside of the Church and we need not practice the law towards
him. The scope of His command was potentially universal. And in this
age the Church must give her allegiance to the universal command or the
world will laugh her to scorn. Save as we learn to love humanity as Jesus
loved us, spiritually, sacrificially, we deny the word of our Lord. Jesus
knew human nature. He knew that He could not command His disciples to
have affection for the stranger, for the foreigner, the man of different tem
perament, but He knew He could command them always to seek consistently
his welfare. I cannot command you to love the man who lives across the
street from you. His education and training are different from yours. All
his interests and sympathies are different from yours. I may not ask you to

OBEDIENCE TO THE NEW COMMANDMENT. 279
love him as you love your brother, but I can ask you to seek always, con
sistently, the welfare of that man's life, even if it hurts you to do it. And
you can do it, and you know that you can do it. He does not dress as you
would like him to dress ; he is more or less ostentatious in his manner of
living, but if you always consistently seek his welfare you will find value in
that man's life. You will redeem him. You may not put a limit around
the command of Jesus when you interpret Him fairly; for He includes
within the scope of it all men. And those people who to you are unpleasant
and disagreeable are bound up in it. And if your allegiance to Him is from
the heart, you will recognize His claim, you will see their welfare, and you
will scorn to do the thing which would injure them.
What is the design? Why did He give it to His disciples? It was a
strategic, apologetic and military command. " By this shall all men know
that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another ". This is the great
apologetic of the Christian Church. This is the great weapon of the
Church's warfare. Are we asking wherewith shall the Church go forth?
Are we reading in the papers of great congregations of men who cheer the
name of Jesus and hiss at the mention of the Christian Church ? Are we
talking about the unchurched masses who live in our cities and are scattered
upon our plains, and who know the name of Jesus to bow in reverence, but
who know the Church only to hiss at it? And are we asking wherewith shall
we meet these men and win them to the Church ? Jesus tells us in John 13 :
35 — " By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one
to another ". If you love, if you seek consistently their welfare in life to the
point of sacrifice, they will know that you are His disciples indeed. It will
be evidence sufficient when they find you at the point of sacrifice seeking
their welfare and they will be found within the Church of Christ. Why are
you in the Christian Church ? Not because some eloquent man set forth the
claims of the Scriptures. These are not those who won you to the Christian
Church, but because you knew a life that loved some one, that sought always
another's welfare. Some man who stood in the community a commanding
figure, the law of whose life was integrity and in whose lips was the law of
kindness, who sought always the welfare of his brother, who scorned to
take a dividend on watered stock, if he knew that it was coined out of the
tears and blood of his brethren ; who scorned to speak a word harshly to
the man who served him because he knew it would injure his spirit;
such a man you knew always and consistently sought the welfare of his
brother. It was enough for you. You said of him, "He follows Jesus
of Nazareth and is obedient to His commands". Or it was some sainted
woman whose life and ministry bore witness to the sacrifices with which
her life was poured out for others. She won you into the Christian Church.
This is Jesus' plan of campaign. Do you know how to take Providence for
Christ? Love. Do I know how to take Hartford for Christ? This is His
pledge. This is His way of evangelism. When the Christian Church fully
lives out the new commandment, then all men shall know that the Church is
the Church of Jesus, and all men shall be found within her walls in worship,
and go forth from her portals in service, for He Himself hath promised it.

"MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTEENTH, FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH
CHAPTERS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL.
BY REV. ALERED "WILLIAlklS ANTHONY, D. D.,
Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Criticism in Cobb Divinity
School, Lewiston, Maine.
Mysticism is a term which has been used to cover, but not to hide, a
multitude of views and vagaries. Quietism, Pietism and Gichtelianism, —
strange expressions of religious feeling now wellnigh forgotten — are
arrayed urider the term ; the Beghards, the Beguins, the Euchites, the
Hesychasts, the Illuminati and the Omphalopsychites, who gazed in
abstraction at their navels, have borne the designation. Good men, too,
have been classified as mystics, men like Erigena, Eckhart, John Tauler,
Thomas k Kempis and George Fox, the father of the Quakers, disciples of
the " Inner Light." Emerson in writing upon representative men, took
Swedenborg as the type of the mystic. The transcendentalists, even Carlyle
and Emerson, have been called mystics. Many of our poets are mystics.
What is mysticism? A dictionary definition gives it as "Any mode of
thought, or phase of intellectual life, in which reliance is placed upon a
spiritual illumination believed to transcend the ordinary powers of the
understanding ". The Encyclopedia Britannica declares, " Mysticism is a
phase of thought, or rather peihaps of feeling, which from its very nature is
hardly susceptible of exact definition. ' It appears in connection with the
endeavor of the human mind to grasp the divine essence or the ultimate
reality of things, and to enjoy the blessedness of actual communication with
the Highest". This writer in the Encyclopedia Britannica, Professor Andrew Seth of
University College, Cardiff, Wales, is not wholly consistent with himself,
although he consistently describes mysticism. In 'one column he says,
" The type of character to which mysticism is allied is passive, sensuous
and feminine, rather than independent, masculine and ethically vigorous ".
In another column he states, " When a religion begins to ossify into a sys
tem of formulas and observances, those who protest in the name of heart-
religion are not unfrequently known by the name of mystics '', and again,
" Mysticism instinctively recedes from formulas that have become stereo
typed and mechanical into the perennially fresh experience of the
individual". So mysticism maybe stigmatized with epithets which are
uncomplimentary, and at the same time be extolled as the reforming spirit
which is independent, pervasive and virile.

^ Delivered at the Fifth Conference, held at the Central Baptist Church, February lo, 1904.
280

MYSTICISM IN THE FO UR TH G OSPEL. 281
William Ralph Inge, of Oxford, England, who delivered the Bampton
Lectures for 1899 on Christian Mysticism, uses expressions like the foUow-
ing.in descriptive definitions of mysticism : it is " the dim consciousness of
the beyond, which is part of our nature as human beings " ; "a higher
instinct, perhaps an anticipation of the evolutionary process " ; " an exten
sion of the frontier of consciousness " ; " the voice of God speaking to us ".
I would define mysticism as the direct cognition of spiritual verities
without the intervention of the senses on the one hand, or of logical pro
cesses of reasoning on the other.
Can God reveal Himself directly to the human soul ? Can man enter
into immediate communication with the Divine, unaided by external forms
and symbols ?
It is not my task to attempt now to answer this inquiry either on the
side of psychology or of philosophy, but by simple exegetical methods to
show the teaching of the Fourth Gospel in three of the five chapters which
Canon Bernard considers contain the central teaching of Jesus Christ.
(" The Central Teaching of Jesus Christ ", by Canon T. D. Bernard, Mac-
millan, 1892.)
These chapters, the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth, contain the
Johannine account of the final discourse of our Lord to His apostles. The
words are spoken in the upper room on the last Thursday evening, after the
institution of the Lord's Supper, and the hour probably is tending well
toward midnight.
Those apostles still entertained the sensuous conception of the Mes
siah's kingdom. They thought of the Messiah as destined to rule a temporal
kingdom, as Kings David and Solomon had ruled, though now with greater
splendor and wider sway. Two of them, — the two who should have under
stood Him best, — had come with their mother making request for political
honors, that one might sit on His right hand and the other on His left in
His kingdom ; they had disputed and quarreled, even in this last meal,
respecting place and preferment, and the Master, to teach them a lesson in
humility and service, had girded His loins with a towel and had washed
their feet. But yet they did not learn, for, two score days later, they ask,
" Lord, dost Thou at this time restore the kingdom to Isreal ? " thinking
still of a political reign, — this on the eve of the ascension.
But now, in that upper room. He gives them sad forebodings; He
speaks of treachery and betrayal: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, that one
of you shall betray Me" (13:21); He declares His departure as at hand,
" Little children, yet a little while am I with you ; ye shall seek Me, and as
I said to the Jews, where I go ye cannot come, I say also to you now "
(13:33); and He predicts the denial of Peter, His staunchest friend and
their brave leader, " Verily, verily, I say to thee, the cock shall not crow
until thou hast denied Me three times " (13 : 38).
These three declarations, of betrayal, of departure, and of denial, dash
their expectations of Messianic triumph in a physical kingdom, — dash them
for the time being. If He is treacherously betrayed, if He leaves them

282 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
alone and they cannot follow, if Peter, foremost of them all, is soon to
repudiate Him, what can they hope ? what can they expect? Their hearts
are heavy, — their hearts are troubled, filled with sorrow and consternation.
It is against such a background that the mystic utterances of these chapters
are spoken. " Do not let your heart be troubled ", said the Master, " ye are believ
ing upon God, upon Me also believe " (14 : i). The Greek verbs for
" believe " here are alike ; both may be in the indicative mode, both may be
in the imperative mode, or one may be indicative and the other imperative ;
so far as form is concerned there is nothing decisive ; but, since Jews
believed devoutly in Jehovah, — and they were Jews, pre-eminent in relig
ious opportunities, — we doubtless are correct in taking the former as a
statement of fact, and the latter as a corrective of their trouble and dismay :
" Ye are believing upon God; believe also upon Me ", for ye have as good
reason to rest your confidence upon Me as upon God, My Father. Link
the invisible with the visible ; link the visible with the invisible. In seeing
Me you see God ; and when I go, you then may have as calm confidence in
Me as you have in the invisible God ; God, the Father, and I are one.
This is obviously His thought a little further on, when He says, " If ye
had known Me, ye would have known My Father also, and from henceforth
ye have known Him and have seen Him " (v. 7). And Philip's protest of
dull understanding brought out the plainer answer, " Show us the Father
and it sufficeth us '' ; " So long a time have I been with you and hast thou
not known Me, Philip ? He who hath seen Me hath seen the Father ; how
sayest thou, show us the Father ? Dost thou not believe that I am in the
Father and the Father in Me ? " (vs. 8-10).
To recognize in the visible the invisible is essentially a mystic act. To
see God in nature, in man, in Christ, is essentially mysticism ; it is the
pushing of consciousness through the sensuous to the supersensuous ; it is
more than experience, it is discernment ; it is more than philosophy, it is
vision. The incarnation really requires mysticism.
Though I am betrayed, yet am I unharmed ; though I go away, yet do
I remain ; though you deny Me, yet am I unchanged ; — these are the assur
ances of the Christ.
" I go to prepare a place for you * * * i vvill come again * * * "
(vs. 2, 3). Great errors have been associated with this promise to return.
Men have looked for a physical advent, and have set days and hours for the
fleshly Jesus to appear. But it is a mystic act ; the promise is for fulfilment
in a spiritual sense. We have Pauline warrant for asserting that the things
of the spirit must be spiritually discerned. He went in the flesh; He
returned in the spirit. It was expedient for the flesh (16:7) to disappear,
that they might forget the mere flesh and receive the spirit.
" I will ask the Father and He will give you another Comforter, that
He may be with you forever * » » i will not leave you as orphans, I am
coming to you" (vs. 16-18). That the Paraclete is spoken of as another
Comforter plainly implies that Jesus, while in the flesh, was the first Com-

MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 283
forter and that the Paraclete who came was to continue the functions of
Jesus, though invisible now, as spirit.
"A little while ", — this caused perplexity because they did not under
stand it in the mystic sense,—" Yet a little while, and the world beholdeth
Me no more ; but ye behold Me : because I live, ye shall live also. In that
day ye shall know that I am in the Father, and ye in Me, and I in you"
(vs. 19, 20); — a mystic union. "He that hath My commandments, and
keepeth them, he it is that loveth Me and he that loveth Me shall be loved
of My Father, and I will love him, and will manifest Myself unto him "
(v. 21) ; — a mystic union and mystic acts. Against this Judas (not Iscariot)
expostulated as unintelligible, " Lord, what is come to pass, that Thou wilt
manifest Thyself unto us and not unto the world ? " (v. 22.) In the reply of
Jesus are three mystic acts, love, obedience, union : — " If any man love Me,
he win keep My word : and My Father will love him, and We wifl come
unto him, and make Our abode with him " (v. 23). Love is the projection
of self toward another being; obedience is the surrender of self to another
being ; and through the outgoing to, and the incoming of, another being a
mystic union results.
To the apostles, specific mystic assurances were given. The Master
went in order to prepare abodes for them. We have read the text, " In My
Father's house are many mansions" (14: 2). The margin of the American
R. V. gives "abiding places" for mansions. I think the clause well
rendered by the paraphrase, " where My Father lives, there are many abodes
for you." Usually we have supposed, this referred to heaven and glorious
habitations therein. But this word for mansions {monai) is the same word
rendered " abode" in v. 23 of the same chapter: "We will come and make
our abode with Him ". It is used only these two times in the New Testa
ment. Its root is the same as the root of the verb used so many times in
the 15th chapter, "abide" (meno), "except the branch abide in the vine;
abide in Me ", etc. Where My Father is, there are abiding places for you.
This is not the promise of a far distant future glory but of present fellow
ship and safety for the immediate future and for all the hereafter. While I
go in the flesh, yet I but the better prepare for your spiritual safety in union
with the divine.
To the apostles greater works are promised (14: 12) because of this
mystic union ; to them the inseparable divine presence is assured ; God
comes and abides; the Comforter will abide; they may abide in Christ,
drawing sustenance and strength from Him as a branch depends upon its
vine. The ^verb to abide occurs ten times in the first ten verses of the
fifteenth chapter. Though He goes away, yet union with Him is still possi
ble. That is the emphasis of these chapters.
This teaching has a bearing on the doctrine of the trinity set forth and
implied in these chapters. The Holy Spirit seems to be the name of God
in this mystic relation. God is in Jesus ; note such passages as these :
"Believe in God, believe also in Me" (14: 1); "he that hath seen Me hath
seen the Father" (14: 9); "the Father, who abideth in Me, He doeth the

284 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
works" (14: 10); "believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in
Me " (14 : 1 1). The Father and the Son are with the disciples. See passages
like these: " In that day (this little while) ye shall know that I am in My
Father and ye are in Me and I in you" (14 : 20) ; "if any one love Me, he
will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We wiU come to him
and make Our abode with him (14 : 23). The Holy Spirit is with the
disciples; Jesus said, "I will send Him" (15: 26), and the Father would
send Him (14 : 26) ; He will lead into all truth (16 : 13) ; He will convict the
world of sin, of righteousness and of judgment (16: 8-11). The Father, the
Son and the Spirit abide in union with the disciples.
Let us recapitulate the thought of the Master which undergird these
chapters :
I. The betrayal is at hand. The divine can be delayed, but not
thwarted, because the divine does not depend upon the flesh.
2. Peter may deny, yet this is but an episode, not the conclusion.
3. The Master will leave them, — yes, in the flesh; but even more fully
does He remain with them in the spirit. It was expedient for Him to go, in
order that they might the more clearly see Him, not as king, nor priest, nor
prophet, not as the Messiah long expected, but as God, immortal, eternal,
more than earth can contain, more than flesh can reveal or the senses per
ceive. There was no separation ; after the garden, and after the trial, after
Calvary there was the opportunity for the closer, the real union with Him.
Such appears to be the main import of these three chapters. Union in
a spiritual sense is the key word.
We may well inquire now, whether this is the mysticism of Jesus or of
John. Has the subjective element of this Fourth Gospel so thrust itself
forward in these chapters as to color completely the phrasing and the con
ception and consequently distort the teaching of Jesus ? Is this the mind of
Jesus which we here find? or is it the thought of the author? Has the
writer stepped into the Teacher's place ? Does he lay words on the Master's
lips ? Three simple answers may be given :
I. The description of Thomas and Philip in these chapters accords
with all other descriptions given of them ; and it is but fair to assume that
if fidelity and consistency exist in the lesser details they exist also in the
main features of the narrative.
The Thomas who here says, " how can we know the way ? " is as slow of
discernment as the Thomas, who, in the synoptic narrative, must needs put
his finger in the nail-prints and thrust his hand into the wounded side.
The Philip who here exclaims, " show us the Father and it sufficeth us",
is the man of practical affairs, who sees material things, the man unto whom
certain Greeks, seeking Jesus, found readiest access, and the man who, off
hand, could quickly compute the amount of bread and the cost for feeding
five thousand people.
2. Such mysticism as we find here is present also in substance in the
Synoptic Gospels. The Sermon on the Mount, though largely practical, yet

MYSTICISM IN THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 285
is permeated with mystical elements. The beatitudes have such elements
as this: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God". The
great judgment, recorded.by Matthew, recognizes a mystical service, which,
while not at the time apprehended, is nevertheless real: "Inasmuch as ye
have done it unto one of the least of these, My brethren, ye have done it
unto Me ".
"Lo, I am with you all the days, even unto the end of the world", is
the promise of the Great Commission, — the assurance of a mystic union,
repeated in the words, "where two or three are gathered together in My
name, there am I in their midst ".
In the synoptic narrative Jesus repeatedly exhorts him that hath an ear
to hear, to hear, — that is, to hear more than is said in mere phrase, to under
stand the principle and to enter into the spiritual sense.
3. In all the Gospels, the immediate presence of God is the special
message of Jesus. He is our Father ; He cares for us ; He knows even the
hairs of our heads ; not a sparrow falls to the ground without His notice,
and His solicitude for us is even greater and more constant.
Really, the religion of Jesus Christ, like every religion which is more
than mere casuistry or ethics, has mystical aspects and elements. It points
to the unseen as real; insists upon a spiritual presence, unknown through
the senses, unperceived by reason alone.
A mysticism, such as we find in these three chapters, is the Christian
mysticism especially suited to the needs of our day. A few considerations
will make this apparent :
This is pre-eminently a commercial age, when materialism, not as a phil
osophy — that is past — but as a method of life, is dominant. To offset it,
stress must be laid upon the unseen as the most real and the most valuable.
Transitions in progress today in church and theology tend toward and
demand a rational mysticism. The doctrine of inspiration in its dynamic
form now becoming prevalent, thinks not of impartation from external
sources so much of an internal illumination which opens inward vision.
According to the modern view, now widely prevailing, the Bible is regarded
as a record of what man has discovered respecting God, — a record of how
God has touched man and of man's comprehension of that contact, — mystic
relations more or less perfect of which man has been in varying degrees
conscious. The distinction between things sacred and things secular tends
to vanish because of a mysticism extending amongst men. To the Jew,
who saw little more than things of sense, one place (the temple), one day
(the Sabbath) and one portion of possessions (a tithe) were holy. Now we
are recognizing all places, all times and all possessions as essentially holy,
because of the invisible, mystically recognized. Men are beginning to
learn that God is everlasting and that fellowship with Him and service unto
Him should be continuous. Indeed we are beginning fairly to accept the
doctrine of the immanence of God: " He is not far from every one of us ;
in Him we live, move and have our being" ; He occupies all space, is ever-
present, and is excluded not even from His finite creatures.

286 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Perhaps some of these tendencies might lead one legitimately to philo
sophical monism ; but this is certain : a recognition of the validity of mysti
cism, if we keep ourselves back from reliance upon mere feeling and the
weird imaginings of disordered brains, may prompt us to push the frontier
of consciousness further out into the infinite, to keep the heart' holy in order
that we may discover therein the image of its divine maker, to see in the
visible the invisible, and in the vision find grounds for confidence and hope,
even when misfortune and disaster impend or overwhelm us. If we are in
fellowship with the divine, we may breathe the pure atmosphere of heaven,
even while still on the earth. "As, in life's best hours, we hear
By the spirit's finer ear
His low voice within us, thus
The All-Father heareth us ;
And His holy ear we pain
'With our noisy words and vain.
Not for Him our virlence
Storming at the gates of sense,
His the primal language. His
The eternal silences "-
— 'Whittier, "The Prayer of Agassiz".

* JESUS THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER.
(St. John 14 :6-ii.)
B-5r REY. HENRY C. SHELDON, S. T. D.,
Professor of Systematic Theology in Boston University School or
Theology, Boston, Mass.
Stress upon revelation, or the disclosure of truth, is especially charac
teristic of the Fourth Gospel and the Epistles, which, together, form the
proper Johannine group of writings. Revelation is rated therein not merely
as a means of intellectual illumination, but still more as a means of moral
and spiritual transformation. The office of Jesus as a revealer is empha
sized, and a large part of His redemptive agency is located in His imparta
tion of truth. He is described as the true light which lighteth every man,
the light of the world, in following whom men shall escape from darkness
and have the light of life (i :9; 8 : 12). He is the manifested truth and the
manifested life (14 : 6 ; 1 John i : 2). The true knowledge, in which lies eter
nal life, is mediated through Him (17 : 3, 4 ; 1:18; 14:9). His economy is
an economy of truth as well as of grace (1 : 17). To this end came He into
the world, that He might bear witness to the truth (18:37). He is a bearer
of life as a messenger of truth ; His words are words of eternal life (6 : 68).
While His flesh is described as the bread given for the life of the world,
the explanation is added : " It is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh profit
eth nothing; the words I have spoken unto you they are spirit and are life "
(6 : 63). The message of truth is thus identified with the meat which the
Son of Man giveth and which abideth unto eternal life (6 : 27). A like
efficacy is assigned to His message in the declaration to the disciples :
"Already ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you "
(15 : 3). He cleanses by the virtue of His word. And this office of a saving
disclosure of truth is not confined within the limits of His earthly life.
The Spirit sent in His name has the work of vitalizing in men's souls the
revelation given in and through Him. The specific function of the Com
forter is to take of the things of Christ and show^them unto men (16 : 7-15).
Thus a mighty stress falls upon the element of revelation. Doubtless it
was not in the mind of John to ignore the element of atonement, the worth
of the supreme sacrifi-c e of Christ as a fundamental and conditioning factor
in the economy of grace. In referring to Jesus as the Lamb of God, and
in speaking of Him as dying for the people, he gives expression in his Gos
pel to that element. Even more explicitly he refers to it in the Epistle in

?Delivered at the Seventh Conference, held at the Central Congregational Church, April 13, 1904.
287

288 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
naming Jesus Christ the propitiation for the sins of the world. Still, the
more frequent reference is to the transcendent agency of Christ in making
known the truth. With full warrant, we may say that, according to the
Johannine representation, Christ came into the world as a truth-radiating
personality, and fulfilled in large part His saving office as a bearer and
impersonation of the truth.
With logical propriety, John makes the summit of the revealing work
of Jesus to consist in the disclosure of the infinite Father. As the only-
begotten Son, dwelling in the paternal bosom, and dwelling also in the
visible flesh. He declares the unseen Father and makes Him known by a
superlative and authentic message (i : 14, i8). By the work accomplished
in His eartMy vocation He glorifies the Father (17:4). He is the way to
the Father, the sole means of true access to inner and saving fellowship
with Him (14:6, 13,23). So fully does He reveal the Father that He is
qualified to say, " He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father" (15:9;
12:45). The character and activities through which Jesus furnishes the full
revelation of the Father, though not discussed in the Johannine writings
after the manner of a dogmatic treatise, are intimated quite positively and
fully. First of all under this category is to be placed the holy humanity of
Jesus. While John, it is true, does not assert in so many words that Jesus
possessed complete manhood, he affords ground for inferring that he recog
nized this truth. He assigns to the Master the full complement of sensibil
ities, affections and experiences which belong to the proper human subject.
He declares explicitly that He came in the flesh, and denounces the oppo
site opinion as the warped and wicked contention of antichrist. "The
Word became flesh and dwelt among us " (i : 14). " Every spirit that con-
fesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit
which confesseth not Jesus is not of God " (i John 4 : 2, 3). " Many deceiv
ers are gone forth into the world, even they that confess not that Jesus
Christ cometh in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist"
(2 John 7). Affirmations of this order, it is to be granted, are not distinct
assertions of the complete manhood of Jesus, but they point in that direc
tion. For, in the dialect of the writer, " flesh " is capable of a larger refer
ence than to the mere body. In at least one instance it is used where the
term men might have been employed (17 : 2). There is a suggestion, there
fore, that in John's thougfit the incarnation, or the coming in the flesh, may
have been understood to imply the assumption of manhood in its entirety.
And this suggestion is confirmed by the application to Jesus of the designa
tion " Son of Man" (^5 : 27 ; 6: 27, 62). Whatever may be the primary or
foremost association of this term, it would not naturally have been applied
to a personality that was not conceived to be genuinely implicated in the
race or truly participant of human nature.
That the humanity in Jesus was perfectly pure and guiltless was evi
dently the staunch conviction of John. He represents Him as claiming to
be entirely void of unrighteousness and as doing always the things pleasing

JESUS THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 289
to the Father (7 : 18 ; 8 : 29). Moreover, he pens the unqualified declaration :
"Ye know that He was manifested to take away sins; and in Him is no sin "
(i John, 3: 5). With John, as with the other New Testament writers, the
complete sinlessness of Jesus was the axiom prefixed to the whole doctrine
of salvation. Now an exceptional humanity like this is fitted to be in an exceptional
sense a mirror of the divine. It reflects the higher realities as the calm,
clear water takes the image of the sky. In the unsullied soul of Jesus, there
was opportunity for divine thought, will, purpose and disposition to be
pictured in authentic colors. And the demand for this pure medium is not
to be regarded as nullified by any transcendent factor in the incarnate Lord.
As the divine thought came to expression from the lips of a prophet only
through the medium of his psychical nature and activity, so in Christ, any
content from the timeless sphere of divine thought and life may be supposed
to have gained the forms of human conception and speech only by being
mediated through His human soul. The purity of this finite medium must
therefore be counted, as well on the catholic as on the humanitarian con
ception of His person, a prime condition of an authentic revelation of the
divine. The holiness of the man Jesus must be reckoned a condition of the
perfect manifestation of the Father in and through Him. John may not
have directly enforced this point of view ; but he provides for it in so far
as he postulates the humanity of Jesus, since he profoundly emphasizes the
intrinsic connection between spiritual enlightenment and holy character.
No writer has ever surpassed him in the intense expression of the conviction
that the seeing faculty is with love and righteousness, while darkness is the
inevitable legacy of hatred and sin.
Whatever consideration may have been given to the holy humanity of
Jesus as a medium of divine revelation by the author of the Fourth Gospel
and the related Epistles, that consideration by no means exhausted his con
templation of the qualifications of Jesus to make known the Father. He
regarded his Lord as vastly transcending in nature and essential relations
the common human scale, and estimated his competency to reveal the
Father in the light of this transcendence. In a variety of ways he affords
unmistakeable intimation that this was his point of view.
In the first place this Johannine standpoint is strongly asserted in the
description of Christ as the Logos, or Word. As in Greek usage this term
connotes both thought and its manifestation, so in the description which
goes with it in the prologue to the Fourth Gospel we have this double refer
ence. On the one hand the Word, much after the pattern of Philo's con
ception, is the archetypal idea, in which the world is potentially existent,
the rational antecedent of all things, divine in relation and in nature. He
was in the beginning, that is, as far back as thought can go in its effort to
interpret the world. He was with God, that is, in living union with Him.
He was God, that is, the adequate image and counterpart of the eternal
Father. On the other hand, the Word is the medium of manifestation. He
bridges over the interval between the invisible Father and the visible system

290 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
of things. " Without Him was not anything made that hath been made ".
Within the world thus dependent on His agency. He has been, and is con
tinually a source of illumination. He is "the true light, even the light which
lighteth every man coming into the world ".
That in this lofty characterization of the Word, John was giving
expression more or less directly to his conviction of the competency of the
historical Jesus to reveal the Father cannot fairly be questioned. In his
view, the Word became flesh. The Word was in the historical Jesus. And
He was there as a transcendent factor in the historical personality, not as
something eclipsed, quiescent, robbed of characteristic powers, and lost to
self. Who can read the discourses which John attributes to the Master,
even in the early part of his Gospel, and not discover there, in the order of
self-consciousness ascribed to Jesus, a reflex of the transcendent rank and
position of the Word who was with God in the beginning ? His designation
of Himself in the third chapter as the only begotten Son ; His description
of Himself in the fourth chapter as able to give the living water springing
up into everlasting life ; His expression of a sense of unlimited copartner
ship with the Father in the fifth chapter — all this, with much besides, is
clearly indicative that Jesus, at least in the era of His public ministry, was
credited in Johannine thought with a knowledge and sense of prerogative,
•correspondent with the exalted rank and relation of the Word. In the
character of the Word He was accounted to have been with the Father in
the beginning, to have come forth from Him, and, therefore, to have been
pre-eminently qualified to reveal Him.
The terms used in the prologue of the Gospel are most reasonably taken
as amounting to an ascription of personality to the Word. The conclusion
therefore follows that, in so far as the indwelling Word was viewed as con
stitutive of Christ, personal pre-existence was predicated of Him. It is to
be noticed, too, that evidence of faith in Christ's personal pre-existence is
not confined to the prologue. John the Baptist is represented as saying of
the Christ, "He was before me". Of Himself, Christ is said to have
declared: "No man hath ascended into heaven but He that descended
out of heaven, even the Son of Man which is in heaven ". " He that cometh
from above is above all * * * what He hath seen and heard, of that He
beareth witness ". "The bread of God is He that cometh down out of
heaven, and giveth life unto the world ". " Not that any man hath seen the
Father save He which is from God. He hath seen the Father ". " What
then if ye shall see the Son of Man ascending where He was before".
¦ Before Abraham was, I am ". "Glorify Me with Thine own self, with the
glory which I had with Thee before the world was" (i : 30; 3 : 13, 31, 32;
6:33,46,62; 8:58; 17:5). Now the collective force of these texts is
decisive, and one and another of them taken separately may well work
despair in the critic who is minded to impute a merely ideal pre-existence to
the Johannine Christ. For instance, how on the supposition of nothing but
ideal pre-existence can Christ be said to have dealt fairly with the Jews in
making such an affirmation as is recorded iri 8 : 58 ? His Jewish questioners

JESUS THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 291
understood a preceding statement to imply logically that He was contempo
rary with Abraham. Instead of correcting their inference. He approved it,
or rather transcended it by explicitly affirming an antiquity superior to that
of Abraham. Who can imagine that the evangelist designed to represent
Him in this saying as merely throwing dust in the eyes of His opponents by
using terms in a sense foreign to the occasion ? Again, it is quite over
taxing to expel the thought of real pre-existence from the language of 17 : 5.
It has been alleged, indeed, that, inasmuch as Christ asks for glorification
as a reward for the faithful fulfilment of His mission, it could not have been
His by right of original position. But this reasoning rests upon an arbitrary
premise. Nothing in the context enforces the conclusion that Christ asks
for glorification simply and solely as a reward for fidelity. In His perfect
filial submission. He recognized that the times and the seasons were in the
Father's hand. It seemed to Him that His work was approaching a con
summation, so that soon the state of humiliation might properly give place
to the state of exaltation. Very naturally, therefore. He gave expression to
the aspiration by which His spirit was upborne. 9o far from standing in
the way of His confident request, the perfection of His title to heavenly
glory gave all the freer scope to His communion with the Father respecting
His investment with that glory. Once more it has been urged, that the
glory to which Christ looked may be compared to the treasure reserved in
heaven for believers, or to the kingdom prepared for the faithful from the
foundation of the world ; and that consequently it is only a conceptual pre-
existence with which we are here confronted. But this way of arguing
overlooks the broad difference between the things brought into comparison.
It is one thing to conceive of a treasure, a sphere of glory, a heavenly king
dom, as standing ready for foreordained subjects. It is another thing to say
of a given subject that Repossessed or enjoyed that glory or that kingdom
before the world was. A statement of the latter order is never made in the
New Testament respecting God's redeemed children. Christ's reference to
a glory, which He had with the Father before the world was, stands apart
from and in antithesis to any scriptural language ever applied to the simple
human heir to a prepared estate. (Compare the author's System of Christian
Doctrine, pp. 613-615).
The conviction was evidently sun-clear in the mind of the evangelist
that the personal existence of Christ preceded His earthly life. No less
certain is it that He thought of this exalted and prior existence as a source
of authentic knowledge about things heavenly and divine. This point has
already been brought out in the interpretation of the Johannine thought of
the incarnation of the Word. A further enforcement might be drawn from
the third chapter of the Gospel. For, here Christ is placed in contrast with
every other messenger among men. He is the one who alone has descended
out of heaven, so that when He speaks of heavenly things He speaks of that
which He has seen and heard. Because He had ever had His home in the
l)osom of the Father He was qualified to declare Him.
A second transcendent qualification of Christ to reveal the Father, and

292 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
one closely related to the foregoing, appears in the Johannine thought of
His unique sonship and co-partnership with the Father. The conviction
that in Christ an extraordinary sonship came to manifestation may be
observed in John's choice of terms. He reserves the designation " Son of
God" {Uios ton 7%^^«) for Christ, styling all other participants in the
filial relation simply children of God {tekna Theou). That this usage should
prevail without a single exception may reasonably be regarded as indicative
that sonship in some special and extraordinary sense pertained to Christ.
The same belief is likewise attested by the employment of the phrase " only
begotten ". Whatever interpretation may have been claimed for this phrase
by one and another exegete, Meyer expresses its natural implication when
he says : " Only begotten designates the Logos as the only Son, besides
whom the Father has none, who did not, like the tekna Theou (i : 12, 13),
become such by moral generation, nor by adoption, but by intrinsic relation
inhering in the divine essence, whereby He was in the beginning with God,
being Himself divine in nature and person ". (Comment on John i : 14.)
In this point of view, the natal day of the Son was antecedent to the world.
He was the Son as the ever-uttered Word. To borrow a phrase from the
Epistle to the Hebrews, He was the Son as " the effulgence of the Father's
glory and the express image of His substance ".
In harmony with this assumption of a transcendent sonship, we meet in
the Johannine teaching with a mighty emphasis upon the complete co-part
nership of the Son with the Father. Few things in the whole content of the
Fourth Gospel come to more frequent and energetic expression than this
fact of full co-partnership. John the Baptist is represented as saying:
" The Father loveth the Son and hath given all things into His hand "
(3 '¦ 3S)- From the lips of Christ such sentences are placed on record as the
following: "The Father loveth the Son, and showeth Him all things that
Himself doeth " (5 : 20). " The Father hath given all judgment unto the
Son, that all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father " (5 : 22, 23).
" As the Father raiseth the dead and quickeneth them, even so the Son
quickeneth whom He will" (5 : 21). "As the Father hath life in Himself,
even so gave He to the Son also to have life in Himself " (5 : 26). " I am the
bread of life ". " As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of
the Father, so he that eateth Me, he also shall live because of Me " (6 : 48, 57).
"He that sent Me is with Me; He hath not left Me alone" (8: 29). "I
speak the things which I have seen with My Father" (8:38). "I know
Mine own, and Mine own know Me, even as the Father knoweth Me, and I
know the Father" (10: 14, 15). " I and My Father are one" (10: 30). "If
I do not the works of My Father, believe Me not. But if I do them, though
ye believe not Me, believe the works ; that ye may know and understand
that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father" (10: 37, 38). "Believest
thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in Me ? In that day ye
shall know that I am in My Father, and ye in Me and I in you " (14 : 10, 20).
"All things whatsoever the Father hath are Mine" (16: 15).
It may be admitted that in some of the Johannine sentences which
accentuate the union of the Son with the Father the thought of moral union

JESUS THE REVELATION OF THE FATHER. 293
is prominent. Indeed, it would be a distinct loss to withhold recognition
from this thought or to allow it to be displaced by any competing notion.
The oneness of Christ with the Father in the sense of perfect conformity to
the Father's ethical nature and will is of the highest practical moment. It
is revelation of the divine on this side that we want above all to receive in
trustworthy and adequate form. But still it is quite without warrant to sup
pose that John made a gap between the moral and the metaphysical, and
gave his contemplation exclusively to the former when he spoke of the one
ness of the Son with the Father. On the contrary, it is every way probable
that he thought of the exceptional nature and divine relation which he
affirmed of the Son as being auxiliary to the unique moral unity. We may
say, indeed, that it is certain that he supposed the transcendent knowledge,
which pertained to the Son from His residence with the Father before the
foundation of the world, to have qualified Him in an extraordinary degree
to embrace the moral purposes of God in all their reach and compass. The
intrinsic connections of Johannine thought assure us that, though the pri
mary stress may have been on moral unity, there was a certain reference in
the expressions under consideration to the truth asserted at the opening of
the Gospel : " The Word was with God and the Word was God ".
It scarcely needs to be stated that no higher qualification for divine
revelation can be conceived than this unique sonship and co-partnership
with the Father. Who should know the Father so well as the only-begotten
Son ? The servant may not know what his lord doeth, but the son dwelling
in bosom companionship with the head of the house may be supposed to
share his counsels fully. Who should be able to represent the Father so
well as the one having such community with Him that He could say of
Himself : " I and My Father are one " ? Then, too,'it must be remembered
that perfect sonship is in itself, by virtue of its essential characteristics, a
medium for revealing God in so far as the fatherly character is truly
descriptive of Him. Sonship and fatherhood are normally correlated. The
one reveals the other. When we see the child who has had full opportunity
to know the parent, yielding to that parent hearty reverence, clinging love,
and unqualified confidence, then spontaneously we image to ourselves the
parent as characterized by tender dignity, exemplary largeness of heart,
and great fervency and constancy of affection. Under the supposed condi
tions the filial mirrors the paternal. So we look upon the sonship of Jesus,
and as we feel the charm of its beauty and perfection we pass up spon
taneously to the fatherhood to which it responds, and feel in like manner
the charm of its beauty and perfection. The realized ideal of sonship
touches us with a vital impression of the ideal fatherhood. In this way,
from the beginning to the end of His career, Jesus shows us the Father. It
is impossible for us to walk with Him and take note of His filial spirit with
out being introduced to the paternal counterpart.
Once more Johannine teaching awards to Jesus a special prerogative to
reveal the Father in consideration of His extraordinary vocation and works.
His coming is set forth as the sun-burst of eternal love upon this world of
sin and misery. Back of advent, doing, suffering, propitiation, everything.

294 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
was the free, unbought love of the Father. " God so loved the world that
He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on Him should
not perish but have everlasting life " (3 : 16). " Herein was the love of God
manifested in us, that God hath sent His only-begotten Son into the world,
that we might live through Him. Herein is love, not that we loved God,
but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins "
(i John 4: 9, 10). Thus the sacrifice of the Son was inaugurated in the
sacrifice of the Father. Indeed, Bushnell kept fully within the warrant of
Johannine teaching when He spoke of the cross as being in God's heart
from eternity. According to most emphatic declarations of the evangelist,
the love of the Father was but given visible expression in all that the Son
did and suffered for men.
Not merely in its general tenor and import does the life-story of Jesus
serve to reveal the Father, but also various single features of that story may
be regarded as mirroring the feeling and attitude of the heavenly Father
toward men. When we note the tenderness with which Jesus ministered to
the suffering and distressed, we have an object lesson on the compassion of
the heavenly Father, and are encouraged to believe, in spite of the hard
appearance of nature and history, that His tender mercies are over all the
works of His hands. When we observe the patience which Jesus exercised
toward disciples who were short-sighted and slow of heart, we have disclosed
to us the forbearance of the heavenly Father toward His blundering and
imperfect children. When we read the parable of the good shepherd, and
consider the wealth of affectionate solicitude and care for the sheep which
it portrays, we know that all the Psalmist said about the Lord as a shepherd
is gloriously true for every soul that has a purpose to follow His leading.
When we come upon the record that Jesus having loved His own which
were in the world loved them unto the end, or hear His own declaration
that no one shall ever snatch His sheep out of His hand, we have pictured
to us the tenacity of that love with which the heavenly Father cleaves to
those who have ever entered into filial relations with Himself. In short, in
all the typical scenes and events of the ministry of Jesus, we may note the
application of His own comprehensive words : " He that hath seen Me
hath seen the Father."
The aspiring mystic is inclined to think of the direct flight of the soul
to God as his high privilege, and to rate any intermediate agency as a
superfluity. At times he is even tempted to give slight recognition to his
dependence upon the Christ. But in the continual use of this method he is
likely to discover that his impression of the divine is becoming vague, and
his sense of fellowship with the divine is waning in vitality. It answers to
a deep need of the human heart to have the divine set forth through a con
crete historic medium. So the author of the Fourth Gospel felt, and he
considered that the need had been perfectly met in his Lord and Master.
The revelation of God in Jesus Christ flooded his soul as with the radiance
of a sweet and holy morning. May the responsive heart be in us, that the
same revelation may bring to us also a full measure of illumination and
rejoicing.

•THE PRESENCE OF THE FATHER, SON AND SPIRIT THROUGH
OBEDIENCE TO THE COMMANDS OF CHRIST.
(St. John 14 : 21-26.)
BY RE"V^. R^OBERT J^. ASH;-W0RTH,
Pastor of The First Baptist Church, Meriden, Conn.
Luther used to call the Gospel of John " the child's Gospel ", because
of its simplicity. It is as simple as are all the great things of earth and
heaven, and it is also as profound. It is as lucid and translucent as the
ocean, and as fathomless. It is as bottomless as the Utgard horn, which
Thor once tried to drain, for its sources are hidden in the depths of divine
love. We shall never exhaust the meaning of this Gospel of heaven. It is
a text-book for time and for eternity.
In the three verses which we are to consider together, though they are
not cast in the form of the syllogism, there is a logical progression of
thought. The third verse is an epitome of the whole : "If a man love Me,
he will keep My words; and My Father will love him, and We will come
unto him, and make Our abode with him ". Three key words serve to
unlock its meaning: obedience, love, manifestation. First, obedience to
Christ's commands proves man's love for Him ; second, such obedience and
love is rewarded by the love of the Father and the Son ; third, this mutual
love of God and man furnishes the conditions of the revelation of the •
Father and the Son in the loyal soul through the abiding presence of the Holy
Spirit. I. First, then, obedience to Christ's commands proves man's love
for Him. Obedience is at once the outgrowth and the test of love to Christ. " If
a man love Me he will keep My words " Love to Christ must always, if it
be worthy of the name, issue in obedience. It divines the wishes of the
Master and springs to fulfil them. It needs no compulsion nor any code of
rules : it serves the spirit, not the letter.
Love for Christ, you see, is a very practical thing indeed. It is not a
mere emotion in which "to sit and sing ourselves away to realms of ever
lasting bliss ". It is not the luxurious and enervating atmosphere of which
the sentimentalist and the poet prate, though it might well form the theme
of the poet's song. It " bids, not sit nor stand, but go ! " It is obedience
to the demands of a strenuous life of sacrifice. It places Christ above
every worldly good, above father or mother, brother or sister. The life it

* Delivered at the Sixth Conference, held at the Trinity Union Methodist Episcopal Church,
March g, 1904. 295

296 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
demands is no easy, rose-strown path, warmed by a mawkish sentimen
tality. It may lead a man to darkest Africa or China. It may mean the
dengue fever, or a hostile Boxer mob and a cruel death in a lonely land.
Love is not a notion of the brain, but a set of the will. It lives in deeds,
not words ; life service, not lip service. It says, " I'll go where you want
me to go, I'll do what you want me to do, I'll be what you want me to
be " It is the foundation of all morality, the inspiration of all self-
sacrifice. And obedience is not only the logical consequence and fruit of love, it
is also love's supreme test. " He that hath My commandments and keep
eth them, he it is (and no other) that loveth Me ". We cannot conceive a
fairer test than this. There are many false and sentimental forms of affec
tion in the world, masquerading under that name, from which these words
of Jesus strip the disguise. There is a moral and intellectual admiration of
Jesus which is not love because it will not obey ; it resides in the head, and
never lays hold of the springs of action ; it doffs the cap and bows the
head, but does not do the will. Love is obedience. All other so-called
love is spurious. To love is to obey ; to obey is to love.
" Obedience I 'Tis the great tap root, which still
Knit round the rock of duty, is not stirred
Though storm and tempest work their utmost will I "
2. Such obedient love is rewarded by the love of the Father and the
Son. This form of devotion, a love which serves, attracts as the earth the
lightning, the love of God. Obedience is love's law of gravitation. In a
sense, God loves all men : " God so loved the world ", we read — the world
alienated by wicked works, disloyal. In this one-half God's heart, its giv
ing impulse, is satisfied. This is the love of benevolence, which loves while
it cannot approve. But God's is a moral affection, and He loves in a
special sense those whose regard for Him is proved by obedience to the
commands of His Son. " How can two walk together except they be
agreed ? " Love which is not mutual is incomplete. " He that loveth Me
shall be loved of My Father " God's love for the Son includes all who are
loyal to Him. This is the love of complacence, which also approves its
object. It differs from that of benevolence, which God cherishes toward
all men, as one's pity for a guilty and unresponsive neighbor differs from
the love of a father for a worthy son who returns his affection. In it the
whole heart of God finds satisfaction, the craving as well as the giving
impulse. He who obeys Christ, then, loves Him ; he who loves Christ shall be
loved of God. The third step in this progression is a very blessed one —
''And I ", says Jesus, " will love him ". A new and more tender affection
springs up in the heart of Jesus as He sees the eye of the Father resting
upon His disciple. The loyal soul is now enfolded in love as in an atmos
phere ; he is bathed in it as in a sea. Three arcs make up the perfect
circle : man's arc of love is the shorter, yet it reaches a part of the way ;

PRESENCE OF THE FATHER, SON AND SPIRIT. 297
Christ's love and God's love are the larger arcs which overlap each other
and the love of man, and wrap him round and round in a perfect sphere.
3. The two thoughts which we have traversed thus far are: 1. Obe
dience — of man to Christ. 2. Love — of the Father and the Son for the
obedient soul. By these two steps on the ladder of love we have reached
the third stage in the thought of the text—" Manifestation ". " He that
obeys Me loves Me, and he that lovingly obeys Me shall be loved by My
Father and Myself, and I will manifest Myself to him ".
Let us consider, first, the condition on which this manifestation of the
Son is promised, and, second, the form which it takes.
The condition of the revelation is love in the recipient soul. Jesus
will not reveal Himself to all men. " Judas (not Iscariot) saith unto Him,
Lord, what is come to pass that Thou wilt manifest Thyself unto us, and
not unto the world ? " Judas was not of that group of the disciples who
understood most keenly the mind of their Master. Only lately Jesus had
shown Himself openly to the people in His triumphal entrance into the holy
city. Judas thought that something must have happened that Jesus should
now confine His manifestation to a chosen few. Jesus does not answer
Judas directly, but proceeds as though He had not heard the question.
Yet He does in effect answer him by reaffirming the promise and emphasiz
ing again the condition on which the revelation of Himself may be received.
"Jesus answered and said unto him. If a man love Me, he will keep My
word ; and My Father will love him, and We will come unto him ". Jesus
will reveal Himself only to those who love and obey Him. He can reveal
Himself only to such, for without love in the heart no man can receive the
revelation of God.
The intellect alone can never know God. The brain is .agnostic. The
question of Job, " Canst thou by searching find out God ? " has never been
answered with satisfaction to the intellect. The astronomer sweeps the
heaven with his telescope and declares that he cannot find God there.
The geologist with his hammer breaks up the rocks and delves into the
earth, but does not discover the Creator. The anatomist with his scalpel
divides the tissues of the body, and traces nerve, and vein and artery to its
source, but the God in man eludes him. The psychologist ponders the
processes of mind and formulates the rules of its action, but fails to find
the guiding hand.
But the intellect was never meant to be the only organ of discovery.
Man was made to soar toward truth on the two pinions of intellect and
heart. When he beats the air with either wing alone he flutters, but he
cannot fly. A certain fondness for a matter will do much to aid us to
pierce to the central secret of it. Without the lubricant of love the edge of
mind grows dull. A little warm sunshine will sometimes bore farther than
an augur, no matter how much brute force there may be behind it. All of
which are but different ways of saying that the heart will often guide us to
truth which the head would never discover. The artist detects beauties in
nature, delicacies of color and form to w hich we are blind, because he is

298 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
endowed with the insight of love. The musician hears harmonies to which
we are deaf, because the whole man vibrates in unison with them.
" Earth's crammed with heaven.
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes ".
" Ever the words of the gods resound ;
But the porches of man's ear
Seldom in this low life's round.
Are unsealed that he may hear"-
It is love that enlightens the eyes and unseals the ears. Love is the
eye of the soul. They tell us, love is blind ! No ! there is nothing else in the
universe so clear sighted !
We cannot know man until we have learned to love him. We do not
know our acquaintances ; only our friends, and these in proportion to our
affection for them. In the better world, if men should be stripped of the
bodies by which we have hitherto recognized them, we shall know only
those with whose souls we have become intimate here. And we cannot
know souls except as we love them. Without love is no sympathy, there
fore no knowledge.
It is the loving heart alone, then, that can receive the manifestations
of God in Christ. There must have been, I think, in the mind of John,
some reminiscence of the thought of our text when he declared in his Epis
tle, " Everyone that loveth, knoweth God ". We must come toward Him
from this angle before we can understand Him. If the brain is agnostic,
the heart is theistic. Christ cannot reveal Himself to a loveless world
simply because it lacks the organ of apprehension. Affection is the only
soil in which knowledge of God grows to its rarest heights. Paul, the
philosopher, introduces us to God, tells us many things about Him ; John,
the beloved disciple, puts into our hand the key which unlocks the chamber
in which He dwells and ushers us into His presence, and the name of that
key is love.
If we would, then, have this manifestation of Jesus in our lives, we
must love Him and obey Him. Every act of loving obedience will make
the vision clearer. This is the indispensible condition of knowledge of
God, a love which reverently keeps His word.
We pass to the form which this promised manifestation will take : "We
will come unto Him and make Our abode with Him".
Two points attract our attention. First, the manifestation of Christ is
made from within the soul, not from without. This inwardness of the
revelation is what troubled Judas. " What has come to pass ", he asks,
" that Thou, as Messiah, will not shovv Thyself openly as we have expected,
so that the Gentiles may come to Thy light, and kings to the brightness of
Thy rising? " It is, however, a spiritual presence of which Jesus is speak
ing. It is no sudden or magical revelation, but one that comes by the slow
process of living and loving. It is not accompanied by the signs of earthly

PRESENCE OF THE FATHER, SON AND SPIRIT. 299
power or by the trappings of earthly state. Men cannot say of it, " Lo,
here ! " or " Lo, there ! " It is a revelation within the soul.
Second, the manifestation is permanent, not transient : " We will come
unto Him and make Our abode with Him ". Jesus has been telling His
disciples that He must soon leave them, but He now answers them that
His absence is not to be for long. In exchange for the physical presence
of the Master, with its limitations of place and time, they are to have the
spiritual presence, which is free from these limitations. The loving heart
is to become the dwelling-place of the Father and Son.
We associate, and rightly, this passage with the promise, which came
earlier in the chapter, of the gift of the Holy Spirit. In the verse immedi
ately preceding the text, Jesus has said, " In that day ye shall know that I
am in My Father and ye in Me and I in you "- The expression " in that
day" is held by most to indicate a precise moment rather than a period,
and is referred to Pentecost. We are to recognize, then, in the coming of
the Holy Spirit, the advent of the Father and Son to make their abode in
the human heart. The thought most grateful to us is, that in the presence
of the Spirit we may recognize the presence of Jesus. " The Lord is the
Spirit" (2 Cor. 3:17). This Jesus whom we have learned to love comes in
the Spirit to dweU with us.
This blessed promise of the Saviour irradiates life with a new hope.
Jesus is not merely a good man who has passed away, leaving only an influ
ence behind Him. Our God is not the unknowable God of the agnostic,
of whom we can learn no more than of the further side of the moon. God
and Christ dwell in the obedient soul.
" Nearer is He than breathing.
Closer than hands or feet ".
Having seen the vision, man is not to be left to fight the battle with sin
alone. There is to be an abiding presence within the soul to inspire, and
guard, and guide.
In ancient Greece, so runs the legend, a prize was offered for the best
statue of a certain god. Faith in the gods was almost gone, but in a coun
try village, near a marble quarry, lived a youth who still believed in them
and loved them. He aspired to win the prize for himself. Choosing a
rough block of marble, he set to work with all his skill. But, though he
had in his soul the highest ideal of the majesty and beauty of the god
whom he would portray, his clumsy fingers made little progress. At last
the statues were gathered to be judged, and among them the rude, uncouth
attempt of the boy. The critics ridiculed the inartistic figure, and the boy
hung his head in shame. But the god in whom the youth believed had pity
on him, and entered into the pathetic failure. Then the head was proudly
raised, the harsh lines fell away into perfect symmetry and grace, and the
statue took on the vigor and harmony of life. So Christ enters the soul
that loves Him and redeems its failures, working out within it, in wondrous

300 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
beauty, the ideal of which it despairs. So the obedient soul triumphs
through the indwelling Christ.
The promise of Jesus fills life also with a new purpose. How well
worth striving for is the fulfilment of the promise of the Saviour's presence.
How vain and empty in comparison the prospect which the world holds out
to its votaries, of wealth, or fame, or ease. To gain Christ and be found in
Him, to have His abiding presence in our hearts, is the noblest aspiration
of the soul that loves Him.
It makes forever impossible also any lower aim. If Christ will dwell
in us, the house must be swept and garnished, and other guests, whom He
cannot know, must be expelled. How can selfishness, or greed, or any
baseness find a home with us ? We can never be satisfied now with anything
less than the highest.
A Roman sculptor once began a statue of the Christ. After weary
months of toil he brought a friend into his studio and unveiled the statue
with the question, "Who is this?" The friend replied, "That is surely the
figure of some very great and good man ". Profoundly disappointed, the
artist set to work again, and after other months of labor, bringing into the
room a little child, he again asked the question. The child clasped her
hands and said, " Suffer the little children to come unto me ". Then the
' sculptor knew that he had succeeded. A little later came an order from the
emperor that he should make a statue of Venus for the palace. But the
sculptor proudly refused, sending back the message, " I have conceived a
statue of the Christ ! I can no longer carve statues to Venus ! " So the
vision once seen, the presence once felt, we can no longer live upon the
lower plane of the past. We are driven forward to ever new heights of
achievement and experience.
It raises man, finally, to a new dignity. To be capable of such fellow
ship with God as Jesus here suggests, predicates something of man that is
very wonderful indeed. What less does it mean than the essential unity of the
nature of God and Christ and man? It draws man out of time and sets him
in eternity. It finds him on the earth and leaves him in heaven. It is the
last and greatest word that can be said of man, and sets him off from the
rest of created things in exalted isolation. It arouses every ambition of the
soul, sanctifies it and satisfies it. This is our heritage from God, heirs, not
only of what God has to give, but heirs of God Himself. "What is man
that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou visitest him?"
The grateful soul exclaims, "Thou hast made him but little lower than God,
and hast crowned him with glory and honor ! " " Thanks be unto God for
His unspeakable gift!"
"The very Godl think Abib; dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All- Loving too —
So, through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying, ' O heart I made, a heart beats here I
Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself I
Thou hast no power, nor mayst conceive of Mine,
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love.
And thou must love Me who have died for thee I "

* FRIENDSHIP WITH JESUS THROUGH OBEDIENCE TO HIS COMMANDS.
(St. John 15:14, 15.)
BY REY. J0H;N 15. PldvLiES, PH. T>.,
Pastor of St. John's Methodist Episcopal Church, Boston, Mass.
I have been assigned the exposition of John 15:14, "Ye are My
friends if ye do the things which I command you ".
The topic as formulated is "Friendship with Jesus through Obedience
to His Commands ".
I regret that I have not had the privilege and the benefit of all the
Conferences dealing with the Gospel of John, which Dr. Sears so aptly
termed the " Heart of Christ ". And especially would I have enjoyed Drs.
Sheldon and Mackay, as in your last Conference they treated specifically of
matters closely and even vitally related to the topic assigned me.
All the utterances of Jesus are of importance, but especially are those
accentuated which fell from His lips as He moved tenderly yet resolutely
forward into the deepening shadows of Gethsemane and Calvary. They
were the farewell words, the dying legacy, of One who in a few short hours
would breathe out His life amid the awful agonies and bitter humiUations of
the Cross. We would come then into this chamber of the dying with bated
breath and utmost reverence, and listen with deepest attentiveness to the
words which hold in themselves an immortality of significance. Among
them are the words immediately before us, " Ye are My friends if ye do
whatsoever I command you ".
Four things emerge out of my study of this statement.
I St. The Absolutism of Jesus, involving His possession of Deity.
No mere man would dare assert himself in this form. For any com
pelled obedience, as between man and man, leads not to friendship, but to
serfdom and to slavery. It is but the prelude to shackles and to stripes
and to hatred. But as we throw our thought over the larger area of Christ's
teaching throughout His whole ministry, we find this indirect yet vital
assumption fully and positively maintained in the discourses of our Lord.
In His masterly " Sermon on the Mount", which title Prof. Gibson dis
claims as being altogether too inadequate and for which he would substitute
Matthew's own term, " The Gospel of the Kingdom ", as " the grand char
ter of the commonwealth of heaven ", Jesus directly makes the issue as
pertaining to authority between Himself and others, when He says again
and again, " Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time, * * *
but L say unto you" (Matt. 5:21, 22, 27, 28, 33, 34, etc.). In the tenth
chapter of this Gospel, He declares, "All that ever came before Me are thieves

* Delivered at the Eighth Conference, held at All Saints Memorial Church, May ii, 1904.
301

302 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
and robbers ; /am the door " (John 10:8,9). One day, when great multitudes
were following Him, He startled them and has challenged every generation
since, by the sweeping words, " If any man come to Me, and hate not his
father, and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea,
and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple " (Luke 14:26). These
are but samples of many direct and of more indirect, but none the less
forceful claims which Jesus makes upon men for their recognition of the
supreme place which He must hold in their affections and service growing
out of the divine nature which inheres in Him, and to which His life. His
teachings and His achievements give witness.
To an ordinary human being possessing only the attributes and powers
of our common humanity, yet making such a tremendous claim as this upon
his fellow mortals, the answer would be disdain and contempt, and if per
sisted in, would mean either an asylum for the insane or the walls of a
prison. But when made by this one unique world-shadowing character,
whose influence augments with the centuries, who is being recognized by
increasing millions as " very God of very God ", as the " eternal Son of the
Father ", as " God over all, blessed forevermore ", then this claim, abso
lute as it is, and all inclusive as it is, in its nature and in its duration, is
recognized as being indeed most reasonable, and appeals in the strongest
manner to the thoughts and affections of men. Only as Christ possesses
all that is involved in Thomas' confession, " My Lord and My God ", has
he any right to say or any power to enforce, " Ye are My friends, if ye do
whatsoever I command you ".
Another look at my topic, " Friendship with Christ through Obedience
to His Commands" seems to suggest —
2nd. A reversion of the natural order.
Obedience is a product, not a cause. If we have read our New Testa
ment aright we have held that Love is the mother of obedience and at once
a kindred passion to that we are interpreting springs to the surface. " If
ye love Me, ye will keep my commandments" (John 14:15, R. V.), and
another of similar import, " If a man love Me, he will keep my words " (14 : 23) ;
and Paul in his famous and unequalled panegyric of Love in the thirteenth
chapter of i Corinthians, makes it the inner and potential seed out of which
everything springs and apart from which everything is valueless and fruit
less. And yet obedience as productive of love finds weighty indorsement
not only from the passage before us, but from others. Do we not find in
the discussions and differences between Paul and James as regards faith
and works, a kindred distinction to this between love and obedience?
James insists that works are productive of and necessary to the salvation of
men, while Paul insists that faith, and faith alone, is the basis of man's ac
ceptance with God. Jesus says in the fourteenth chapter and twenty-first
verse of this Gospel, " He that hath My commands and keepeth them ; he it
is that loveth Me "; he and no one else, for that is the real significance of it.
The man who has taken the commandments of Jesus into his heart, made
them a part of his very nature, woven them into the very texture of his

FRIENDSHIP WITH JESUS THROUGH OBEDIENCE. 303
moral and spiritual being ; this man to whom the commandments of Jesus
are a delight, a joy, yea, have become the very passion of his soul, "he it
is ", and he only, says Jesus " loves me" May we not say then that love
dictates obedience, but obedience issues in a higher love ? There was a
time in the relations of Jesus and His Apostles when He considered them
as " servants ". But in the progress of their intercourse as they grew to
know Him more clearly and to discern His nature and His mission, and
He to know them more closely and mark the steady growth of their recep
tivity and the taking on of likeness to Himself, He recognizes their fitness
for still closer relations, and says, " Henceforth, I call you not servants,
but friends ". Their obedience had led up to a higher friendship.
The truest view, rather should I say, the true view, looks upon these
relationships, not as separate or as antagonistic, but as merging into a
higher unity and characterized by —
3rd. Co-ordinate and alternating interaction.
Love incites obedience ; obedience intensifies love, and so on through
the varying experiences of life, deepening confidences, developing friend
ship, producing and enhancing likenesses, changing from glory to glory by
the Spirit of God. And thus the onward, upward, outward processes of the
spiritual life move, bearing the soul steadily and blessedly into the deeper
intimacies and mysteries of a friendship which has eternity for its field of
action and God for its eternal object. One has likened this growth to a
benefactor who has rescued a maiden from poverty and misfortune, has
placed her in favorable conditions, has given her educational advantages,
has watched her remarkable development in intellectual acquirements, in
graces of manner, in qualities of character, in all womanliness of nature,
until philanthropy has changed into sympathy, and sympathy into friend
ship, and friendship into affection, and affection has laid himself and all
that he possesses at the feet of his erstwhile ward and in wedded love the
highest happiness of life has found expression. And so the soul, redeemed
by the philanthropic love of Christ, won to service by its own great needs
and the knowledge of the divine compassion, responds in obedience and
enlarges in affection and becomes increasingly worthy of confidence until
all the wealth of Deity — is poured out upon it, the human becomes divine
and God is all in all.
A strong if not conclusive suggestion of this interaction and mutual
dependence is seen when you place in close contact the cognate passages,
" If ye love Me, ye will keep My commands," and, " If ye keep My com
mandments, ye shall abide in My love ". Love leads to obedience and
obedience makes love permanent, and incidentally here is a sovereign rem
edy for, or preventive of, the lamentable experiences of backsliding. In
the equilibrium of both hemispheres, the one of love and the other of obe
dience, is found the rounded, the completed, the symmetrical, the balanced,
the resplendent globe of finished Christian character. In these inter
actions may be traced the shining stairways ascending to God ; the grades
of growth in the spiritual processes ; the rungs in the ladder from the stony
pastures of Bethel to the ladder's summit, on which stands God.

304 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
One other element, and that the most important remains to be con
sidered, and that is —
4th. The personal element.
This is not a service of things, nor of institutions however venerable,
nor of truths however definite and definitive. It is not obedience to creeds,
however logical, nor to churches, nor to Bibles, nor to dogmas, which is
first demanded of man. His first service, his primary summons, is to a per
son : " Come unto Me" ; "As many as received Him, to them gave He power
to become the Sons of God ". The apprehension and appreciation of Christ,
philosophically and theologically, both as to His nature and His work,
may, and do differentiate themselves in a thousand and one forms, but the
essential, vital thing is to get to the person personally, to come into contact
with the living, breathing, triumphant, eternal Christ.
This was the power of apostolic preaching. Would you have the secret
of Paul's impassioned and imperial ministry ? He takes no pains to conceal
it, but blazens it abroad in utterances that have stirred the centuries, in
words that carry in themselves a deathless significance. " I know Him
whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that He is able to guard that
which I have committed unto Him against that day " (2 Tim. i : 12, R. V.).
The dying Alexander, Professor at Princeton, recognized the majestic
meaning of that saying, when, having asked a friend to read to him the living
word, the friend read this passage: "I know /« whom I have believed".
Professor Alexander put his trembling hand upon the arm of the reader and
whispered, "Stop, I will not have even a preposition between me and my
Lord ". But still closer even than this, and even more significant of the
source of Paul's magnificent ministry, is that other utterance, "I live; and
yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh,
I live by the faith of the Son of God " (Gal. 2 : 20). This personal love of
Jesus Christ gave the initial impulse, the tidal force to the message of the
Gospel as it has come rolling down through the centuries. It is the vin
dication of its presence and its power today.
Dr. Van Dyke sets this forth strongly when, speaking of the power of
this Gospel of a Person, he says, "St. Chrysostom, St. Francis of Assisi
and Savonarola had it ; John Wesley and George Whitefield had it. In
different ages and under different conditions, these men had the primal
message which moves men to believe. And in our own age, under our own
conditions, a like message has been proclaimed with power. Pere Lacor-
daire preached such a message in Notre Dame, and Canon Liddon in St.
Paul's to listening thousands. Bishop Brooks made it thrill like a celestial
music through the young manhood of America, and Dwight L. Moody has
spoken it with vigorous directness in every great city that knows the English
tongue. One thing only is the same in all of them and that is, the source of
their power. Their central message, the core of their preaching, is the
piercing, moving, personal Gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and
Saviour of mankind. This, in its simplest form ; this in its clearest expres
sion ; this presentation of a person to persotis in order that they may first

FRIENDSHIP WITH JESUS THROUGH OBEDIENCE. 305
know, and thus love and trust and follow Him — this is pre-eminently the
Gospel for an age of doubt "-
In this summing up of the contents of his great book, Dr. Van
Dyke only expresses the simple truth. In this fact of personal contact with
the personal Christ lies the hope of the race. Every individual, rich or
poor, learned or unlearned, master or slave, Saxon or Slav, male or female,
Jew or Gentile, can come directly, personally to Jesus Christ and He meets
him on his own level. Is he the hardened, cruel, pitiless jailer at Philippi ?
Jesus meets him in the midnight hour and before morning gives him the
new name and the white stone. Is he the cultured, religious, phylactery-
wearing Pharisee, who under cover of darkness seeks the Master ? Jesus
meets him with the statement that " as Moses lifted up the serpent in the
wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth
in Him should not perish but have eternal life ", and in the Sanhedrin, this
man, in the very face of the Lord's enemies befriended Him, and when His
sacred body was laid in the solemn tomb, it was Nicodemus who brought a
hundred pound weight of myrrh and aloes that he might attest his loving
friendship for his Lord. Is it the blind man at the gate of Jericho that cries
out in his wretchedness, "Thou Son of David, have mercy upon me!"?
The Master speaks, and lo, the blind man sees, and there bursts upon his
astonished gaze the beauties of the earth, the sea and the glorious heaven,
and better than these, the faces of friends, of children and of wife, and best
of all, the radiant face of Jesus, the Christ, the Healer and Saviour of men.
Is it contemplative Nathaniel sitting under the fig tree ? He responds at
once to the evidences inhering in the Master, and cries out, " Rabbi, Thou
art the Son of God, Thou art the King of Israel!" And so it has been
through the centuries. Whatever divergencies of thought and divisions
ecclesiastical, the irenic ground on which all could stand in sympathies and
in mutual appreciation, has been that of personal knowledge of Jesus Christ,
the personal contact in profoundest experiences and spiritual illuminations
with the Lord Christ. Out of the depths of these personal experiences
and these divine friendships, men have spoken with power to their fellow-
men, for they have spoken of that which they have seen and heard, of Him
with whom they have had sweetest communion, and through whose power
manifested in them, they have stormed intrenchments and pulled down
strongholds, driven back the armies of the aliens, marched triumphantly
across life's battlefield, and at length have furled their victorious banners
by the great white throne. It is because of " having not seen, they love,
and in whom, though seeing Him not, they believe ", that He takes them
into this divinest friendship, this holiest intimacy, and makes known to
them the resources of His Kingdom, the infinite wealth of His own nature,
and still says to them, " Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have
entered the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them
that love Him ".
Such friendship transforms obedience into passionate service and.
makes life all luminous with the presence and power of God.

* "THAT THEY ALL MAY BE ONE."
(St. John 17.)
by hienry 1. eo"wler, bh:. d.,
Professor op Biblical Literature and History in Brown University,
Providence, R. I.
In that unique composition, the interpretation of which occupies these
Conferences, there are dominant notes and chords — the grace and truth
that came, light and darkness, life and death, the Father, Saviour, Com
forter — and these have been struck by skilled hands during the past
months. Today I would touch on a minor theme in the Gospel.
As I understand the purpose of those who have instituted these gather
ings, it is, in part, to secure interdenominational sympathy by common study
and meditation upon a portion of Scripture which gives the deepest insight
into the heart-life of Christ and the Father. In part, the purpose is to
bring together professional students of the Bible, with preachers and peo
ple, for that communion which must develop when men speak often together
of the Lord whom they love, even as he is revealed in this wonderful Fourth
Gospel. If I am right in my apprehension of the purpose in this Con
ference, is not the thought which is so prominent in the seventeenth
chapter of John, the thought of unity, a peculiarly appropriate one for our
consideration ?
The conception of uijiity between Christ and the Father is a prominent
element throughout the Gospel of John from the opening section, where
the Word is declared to have been with God from the beginning, on
through such assertions as "I and the Father are one" (10:30), "I have
kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love" (15:10), and
through such appeals as, "If you do not believe me believe the works, that
you may know that I am in the Father and the Father in me, or else
through the very works believe" (14:10, 11). Through these, on to the
last discourse and prayer before the betrayal, we may trace this theme,
coming out again and again.
The unity between Christ and the disciple, too, appears somewhat,
even outside of the seventeenth chapter, — " He that abideth in me and I in
him, this one beareth much fruit, because apart from me ye are not able to
do anything ''. Another phase of unity, that of man with man, is also pre
sented here and there in John's Gospel. It appears in the picture of one
fold, one shepherd (10 : 16), or " the gathering together into one the chfldren

* Delivered at the Sixth Conference, held at the Trinity Union Methodist Episcopal Church, March
9, 1904. 306

THA T THE Y ALL MA Y BE ONE. 307
of God that are scattered abroad" (11 :52). The bond of triple unity is
likewise emphasized, " If ye keep my commandments ye shall abide in my
love, even as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his
love " (15 : 10). We find, then, in the Gospel of John, the unity of Christ
and the Father, the unity of Christ and the disciples, the unity of the dis
ciples with each other, and the bond of this threefold unity.
Paul, as well, emphasizes the necessity of unity among the followers of
Christ. He beseeches them to walk worthily of their vocation, endeavor
ing to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, urges upon them
their one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father
above all, through all, and in them all (Eph. 4 :3 ff). For the Romans he
prays that they may be of the same mind one with another, according to
Christ Jesus. The writer of Acts emphasizes the fact that the multitude of
them that believed were of one heart and one soul. The thought of the
unity of Christians and its bond in the common hope and common Lord,
is, indeed, confined to no one chapter and to no one writer in the New
Testament, but this comes nowhere else to such beautiful and complete
expression, I think, as in the chapter which we are to consider this
afternoon. The constantly widening circles of inclusiveness in the divine prayer,
recorded in John 17, give opportunity to develop the complex relations of
the theme with all possible clearness. In the opening verses, when Jesus
prays for himself, his essential and eternal oneness with the Father is
assumed, — " I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And
now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self, with the glory which
I had with thee before the world was ". The circumference of the peti
tion soon widens to include those to whom Christ had manifested his
Father's name, to whom he' has given the words which were given him,
who have known that he came out from the Father and have believed that
God sent him. As he contemplates his departure from the world, view
ing it as though it were already accomplished, he prays, "And now I am
no more in the world, but these are in the world, and I come to thee.
Holy Father keep them in thy name, which thou has given me, that they
may be one as we are one ". The next verse makes even more definite the
ground of his anxiety for them, " While I was with them in the world I
kept them in thy name "
With the widening of the prayer to include his followers, as well as
himself, the unity of Jesus with God, which has been his strength and
power through all the years, becomes the norm of the union which must
exist among the disciples now that their leader is to depart and leave them
in the world, — " Keep them in thy name that they may be one as we are ".
Marcus Dods explains this phrase, " Keep them in thy name, that they
may be one", as meaning that the retention of the knowledge of the
Father which Christ had imparted to them would make them one. The
name seems to be the knowledge of the Father which had been given to
Christ for revelation to the disciples, and this knowledge it is that will make
them one, as Christ and God are one.

3o8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
In commenting upon the inaugural vision of Isaiah, George Adam
Smith exclaims: "The vision of God — this is the one thing needful for
worship and for conduct". That seems to be nearly the thought of the
eleventh and twelfth verses here, if we adopt the older text, on which the
Revisers' translation is based, not "Keep through thine own name those
whom thou fhast given me", but " Keep them in thy name, which (name)
thou hast given me ". " While I was with them I kept them in thy name,
which (name) thou hast given me, and I guarded them ". The name, we
know, signified quite generally in Biblical writings the attribute, the function,
or character. If the Christian church could but have kept with singleness
of vision in the name of God, that is in the knowledge of his character and
work as the one thing needful, its history would have been far other than
one of so much discord ; then we might have been one, even as God and
Christ. I hope we are learning in these latter days that we may differ
about the nature and manner of inspiration ; that we may differ about forms
of government and forms of worship, even about forms of ordinances or
the exact method of salvation, and yet may be one in his name; one in
the effort to know God ; one in our faith that whatever else may be revealed
to us or not revealed, we have a revelation of God in his name, in his
essential character.
Again the circle of Christ's loving prayer widens, " Neither for these
only do I pray, but for them also that believe on me through their word,
that they may all be one, even as thou. Father, art in me and I in thee,
that they also may be in us ". As Meyer says, " This ethical unity, to be
specifically Christian, must correfpond to its original type, '^w;? aj thou
Father, art in me and I in thee'". We have noted already how, in the
Fourth Gospel, abiding in the Father's love is the state of that unity
(15 : 10, 11), doing the Father's works is the expression, nay, it would seem,
the proof of that unity (10 : 38). The prayer is that all who believe through
the word of the disciples may live and move in the Father and Christ as
they in each other.
Thus the thought advances, enlarging in the inclusiveness of its hope
for Christian fellowship, and then it rises to a higher plane, in the thought
of the possible grace that can effect such inconceivable union, — "And the
glory which thou hast given me, I have given unto them, that they may
be one even as we are one ".
What is this glory given by Christ to make believers one, even as God
and he are one ? Perhaps we cannot answer with certainty. Many have
been the suggestions from the days of the fathers onward. Their very
number indicates the wide variety of aspects that the Christian's glory dis
plays — the glory of the apostolic office (Chrysostom), the glory of the
Christian life, of the life of Christ in believers, of sonship, of love, of grace
and truth, or the glory on which the believers are to enter at the coming of
Christ. It has even been ventured to interpret glory here as the same as
that in v. 5, " O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the
glory which I had with thee before the world was", or in v. 24, "I would

THAT THE Y ALL MA Y BE ONE. 309
that where I am they also may be with me ; that they may behold my glory
which thou hast given me ". If this be the true interpretation, then the
words in v. 22 carry us far indeed, to the glory which cannot be com
pletely and actually bestowed until we are where he is, — "And the glory
which thou hast given unto me I have given unto them, that they may be
one even as we are one ; I in them and thou in me, that they may be per
fected into one". We may well join in the exclamation, "What a strong
bond of unity must lie in the sure warrant of fellowship in eternal glory ! "
We have traced imperfectly this increasing thought through the widen
ing circles of the chapter. To recapitulate briefly : Christ's unity with God
is assumed as he prays, thinking first of his immediate departure to the
glory which he had with God before the world was. Next he passes to
those who are left in the world unguarded, and his unity with the Father
becomes the standard of their unity with one another, in which they are to
be preserved in the name of God revealed by Christ. The thought next
includes all who are to come after, and the same standard of union with
one another is anticipated for this vast company. Then the hope expands
to include not only union of man with man, like the union of Christ with
God, but the growing, deepening vision adds to the prayer that they all
may be one, the fuller hope that in this unity they may be in God and
Christ as the Father is in Christ and Christ in the Father. At last the
divine prayer takes wings. With the thought of the glory that had been
given to him, and which he had already, in his loving purpose, poured out
upon man, comes the final stage of the vision we are following, — ^" I in them
and thou in me, that they may be perfected into one ".
We may observe that in this latter part, another thought of John's Gos
pel appears inwoven with that which we have considered: "That they all
may be one, in order that the world may believe that thou didst send
me ". In earlier chapters we have seen Christ appealing for belief in him
self because of what he is ; but if his personality fails to win conviction,
demanding belief because of the works he does, the works of the Father
(10:38; 14:10, 11). Now his audible voice and visible hand are no more
to work the works of God among men. He is no more to move among
men in physical presence, winning them as his divine character expresses
itself in his human personality. After coming out from the upper room,
he had given his disciples a badge by which they might be known as his
followers. (Read John 13:33-35.) Now in the prayer we advance to the
thought that this unity, which he anticipated for all believers, shall be the
legible record to the world, not only that they are disciples, but that he,
their Master, was sent from God. Even after the final expression, that they
may be perfected into one, the result, that the world may know " that thou
didst send me, and lovedst them, even as thou lovedst me ", is again enforced.
I have drawn out to view only one or two threads of the wonderful
weaving of this seventeenth chapter of John, which has been styled " The
simplest in language, the profoundest in meaning in the whole Bible ".
That which might be called the central thought of this chapter has hardly

310 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
been alluded to, but the few verses considered may open to the attentive
eye prophetic visions of possibilities for humanity which stagger the imagina
tion. We can see how such truths overwhelmed the great soul of Paul
when he wrote in the Epistle to the Ephesians of the unsearchable riches of
Christ; in that third chapter the mystery of it all finds such wonder
ful expression : the riches of his glory, the possibility of Christ's dwelling
in their hearts, the length and breadth and depth and height, the love of
Christ passing knowledge, the fulness of God who is able to do above all
that we can ask or think. Paul's great soul was flooded when the possi
bility of Christ's dwelling in men's hearts swept over him.
Such, Christian friends, is the possibility for humanity pictured in this
seventeenth chapter of John. We have all contemplated it before, our
eyes have grown accustomed to the light, perhaps, so that it no longer daz
zles, and yet, if we stop and look once and again, we may see here the very
face of God shining out between dark clouds of human sin and weakness.
On the one side stands the record of the betrayer gone out into the night;
on the other, the trial and death. And so down through the history, even
to our own day, this light from God shines out, showing to man the possi
bility of a life at one with God and man, the possibility of a witness for
Christ that cavil can not gainsay ; and all through the history follow the
black clouds on either side, the clouds of betrayal, denial and crucifixion,
for we have not been one as God and Christ are one, we are not yet per
fected into one, that the world may know that God sent Christ to make
men at one with their fellow men and at one with their God.
If we view the ideal held before us in this vision of Christ and then
view conditions as they are or have been, it may seem that the prayer of
Christ can never be answered ; but the signs are surely about us that we
are at last beginning to turn toward a developing into unity. May we not
read in the history of the church that is now making about us the promise
that all who believe through the spread of the apostolic word will at last be
perfected into one ?
I am not discussing the detailed question of the advantages of unity or
of multiplicity in church organization and creed. I have faith that when
at last we cease to fight against God's keeping us simply in his name,
those questions will be decided in accordance with the need of that future
age, and just what that need may be human wisdom today can hardly
venture to affirm. Rather I would desire that the words of this prayer, in
their depth and simplicity, might ring on and ring ever in our hearts, that
no one of us may have any part in delaying the answer to the prayer. God
help each one of us so to live in our place that we may speed the day when
all shall be one, even as God and Christ are one.

* THE UNITY OF CHRISTIANITY AS REVEALED IN THE PRAYER
OF CHRIST.
(St. John 17.)
by rey. henry s. nash, t>. d.,
Professor of New Testament Interpretation in the Episcopal Theological
School, Cambridge, Mass.
I shrink from trying to lead your study of this great chapter. There
comes into my mind a saying of the great German pietist, Spener, that he
never presumed to preach from a text taken from this chapter. But I
guard myself against the strength of this quotation by venturing to think
that he did not have the right idea about the house of God. His con
ception of the mysteries of God reminds me of certain houses wherein
children are not expected to play for fear they will break the furniture. I
do not believe that the house of the Lord God has been built upon that
plan. I do believe that the Lord is willing to take the risk of a certain
amount of broken furniture in his house, to the end that his children may
learn to play, if they fully remember that they are playing, and do not pre
sume to put on the airs of popes in his house.
Before one enters the chapter there are certain features of the Fourth
Gospel of which I trust you will permit me to remind you. The first one
is that, according to John, the Gospel is the mind of Christ. This book
among all the books that have ever been penned by man is the most
singular in its monotony, if one chooses to use that word. Nothing
happens, — one may venture to say, — in the Fourth Gospel; nothing
happens, but everything is. The whole Gospel is the mind of Jesus.
From that point of view it is exceedingly becoming and beautiful that the
culmination of the self-revelation of Jesus should be a prayer. For prayer,
when we come rightly to understand it is the deepest of all our thinking.
That, of course, is not true regarding the bulk of our prayers. I fancy that
regarding the large part of our prayers the child's opinion about praying is
largely true. You know what the child is apt to think about prayers. He
believes that praying is an easy way to get things. The average child
thinks that prayer is a substitute for hard work. And I am not sure but
that one carries that conception of prayer a good way on his pilgrimage
through time and space. But prayer rightly understood is the deepest of
our thinking, it is the severest of all our labors. The very last petition of
our life is " Lord, teach me to pray ". " Teach me to pray, I care not
what else Thou givest or takest away, teach me to pray", we say to the
Master.

* Delivered at the Seventh Conference, held at the Central Congregational Church, April 13,1904.
311

312 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
So it follows, if we understand prayer aright, that it is natural that in
this wonderful book, the final self-revelation of the Master should be a
prayer. What happens to us when we truly pray? Why this is what
happens, the divine and the human come together. It is in prayer, if it be
vital, and in prayer alone, that we know what revelation is. We do a little
talking, but very little do we feel about vital praying, about vital revela
tion. But so far as we feel revelation with our hearts as well as theorize
about it with our heads, it is in those rarer moments of real praying
that we feel it, because it is in prayer that the mind of God presses irre
sistibly upon our minds ; and it is in prayer that the word of God makes
of our thought its medium, and through our lives publishes itself in terms
of our experience. And therefore it is with noble propriety that in this
book the last word of the self-revelation of the Master should be a prayer.
As we enter the chapter, this one thing should be carefully remem
bered regarding it, namely: that the Master's mood is not one of sorrow,
but rather one of triumphant peace and joy. A good many of the standard
commentaries on this book have gone astray at this point, in that they have
found here and there a suggestion of melancholy in the Master's mood.
But the key to this chapter is the last verse of the sixteenth chapter, and
the key-word there is the word "peace". It is therefore in the mood of
triumphant self-possession and exulting certitude that we enter chapter 17.
In the first verse Jesus says to His Father, "The hour is come,
glorify Thy Son, that Thy Son may glorify Thee ". Now we must be careful
to get that word glory by the right handle. What does it mean ? To
glorify God means, — does it not ? — to make Him intelligible. To glorify a
great picture is to make it intelligible, to interpret it. To glorify a great
man by some splendid biography is to make the man's mind and purpose
plain to his fellows. So, there is but one way to glorify God, and that is to
make His mind plain to His servants and children. To glorify God is to
make His being and will intelligible to His children. Naturally, then, this
is the way that Jesus sums up His work. He has made the mind of God
luminous and intelligible to man. So His prayer is that God may glorify
Him, that is to say, that God may crown Jesus as the interpreter of God to
man. Now is not this what we mean when we call Him the Saviour?
How are we saved ? Why, we are saved by understanding God. We are
saved by understanding what is deepest in life and God is the deepest
thing in life. Salvation consists in apprehending God's mind about us,
and Christ's prayer is that God may crown Him with the single glory of
being accepted by man as the interpreter of God to man.
In vs. 2, 3, we are given Christ's definition of eternal life. "This is
life eternal that men may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ
whom Thou hast sent "- Now let us try to give to ourselves a simple defini
tion of what we mean by eternal life. What I mean by it is a kind of life
wherein life completely controls the machinery of life. That, to me, is the
life eternal, a kind of life so rich and deep that life controls its machinery.
One does not realize eternal life very often in this world, but once in

THE UNITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 313
a while one does realize it, live it out. There are certain rare moments
when the machinery of life is totally lost sight of in living : and life eternal,
simply defined and apprehended, is just the art of so living that all the
machinery of life is controlled by life itself. As a rule, we Christians so
live that the machinery controls life. Any pastor who does not know this
knows very little about his trade. It is the disease of the ministry — we
ministers know it to our shame — it is the disease of the ministry that the
machinery of the ministry oftentimes controls and dominates the life of the
minister. Committees and societies of all kinds sometimes take the heart
out of a minister. But there are rare moments when life controls all the
machinery of life, and that is what we mean by the life eternal. So, life
eternal is to know deeply the mind of God as Jesus publishes it, and only
so can one have eternal life.
The central thought in the next section into which I have divided the
chapter for the purpose tonight, namely, vs. 4-8, is the thought of the
church. The language here does not use the term church. Sometimes the
best way of thinking about a thing is not to name it. Jesus had not read
Hobbes. But He was too great a teacher not to know the law which
Hobbes lays down, that words are wise men's counters and the money of
fools. The best way, sometimes, to think about a great thing is not to give
it a definite name, for, when once you have named it, you are apt to think
that you know it. How amusing it is sometimes to watch children. They
come up to you with a problem and ask you to name it, and the moment
you name it you settle it for them, and they put it aside. Names are some
times the soporific of thought, so it is well that the church should appear
here in thought and not in name.
I venture to think that the thought of the section is this : the ultimate
heresy is our unwillingness or inability or incompetency to believe the best
things about ourselves. Now, at first blush, that may seem a very foolish
assertion to make. Slow to believe the best things about ourselves ? Why,
are we not filled with egotism ? Are we not consumed with pride and
vain glory? Do we not spend our lives in mutual admiration societies
on the basis that we are to say pleasant things about other people
with the understanding that they will reciprocate by saying pleasant things
about us ? And does not the church resemble such a society ? Is it not an
absurd thing to say that we are slow and unwilling to believe the best
things about ourselves ? Not a bit of it. It depends upon what we mean
by the " best things ". The best things are righteousness and truth, and
they mean unlimited capacity for God and the good. This we are very
slow to believe in and trust ourselves to. But this is the very essence of
the Christian church, to teach men to believe the very best things about
humanity. For the church rests upon the Incarnation, and unless the
Incarnation is a big word covering up a very small meaning, this is the sum
and substance of it. It is God's way of teaching us that God believes that
we, sons of God, are capable of understanding God, of imitating Him, and
of obeying Him to the uttermost. That is what the church of God is, a

^14 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
society which Christ has ordained to make men believe the very best things
about themselves.
In the next section of the chapter, vs. 9-1 1 , the central thought is that
it is through the church that Christ is to be glorified. " I have been glori
fied in them ", He says. That is to say, without the church, Christ is as a
man whose right arm is gone. Without the church, the Incarnation is like
a blow under the water. The church is Christ's means of making His
mind intelligible to the human race. And the church is to look to it that
she does not, by her false definition of God, by her false conception of
authority, by her false conception of unity, rob her Lord of His crown.
And she robs God of His crown when she puts her interpretations of Christ
between Him and the race He is seeking to save.
In the next section of the chapter, vs. 12-18, there are two main
thoughts, that is, two main thoughts for my purpose at this moment. The
first of these is the thought of Christ's joy as being fulfilled in those who
believe in Him. Now, what is Christ's joy ? I believe there are two ele
ments in it, and that ultimately there are two elements in the joy of every
imitator of Christ. First of all, it is the joy of a man who believes with all
his heart in God. I repeat, it is the joy of a man who believes in God with
all his heart. There is no joy like that of surrender to a great object. What
is the true joy of a seeker after truth ? That he may find the truth and
surrender himself to it. What is the joy of the artist, seeker after beauty,
but to find beauty and give himself to it? And what is the joy of the
soldier when he has found the chance to offer his life for Fatherland, but to
surrender to it? The joy of Christ is the joy of complete surrender to
God. And this is the joy of the imitator of Christ.
The other aspect of Christ's joy is that of complete faith in man. I
repeat, complete faith in man. How apt we have been to disconnect these
two things. Faith in God we have been constantly talking about, but faith
in man, how little we have spoken about that. But we cannot separate the
two. What the Christ wanted to do was to make the two inseparable in
our thought and life. Complete faith in God leads to absolute faith in man.
What joy is there like unto the joy of him who, believing perfectly in God
and in the capacity of man for what is best, can devote himself to making
what is best intelligible to man ?
In V. 19, we come to the deepest waters of the chapter, or, if one may
change the figure, we come to the summit point of the context somewhat
abruptly. We see the great High Priest offering up to God our humanity,
which He has taken upon Himself. The Son of God takes our humanity
upon Him, and by His offering to God rids it of its vanity and imperfec
tion. We see the Son of God in His prayer to God saying for us, " I for
My friends' sake consecrate Myself". Now, what does consecration
mean ? The scientist consecrates himself when he absolutely surrenders
himself to the energy and power and law and mind of this mighty universe.
Christ consecrates Himself when for love of His fellow-men He absolutely
surrenders Himself to the power and mind and law of God. And it is all

THE UNITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 315
done for the church's sake, that the church, they who call themselves
Christians, may through Him be consecrated in the truth. Our English
language here is defective and at fault in translating the Greek, for the
Greek word aletheia, is a very large word. We need two words to render
it, " truth " and " reality ". This, then, is the prayer Christ makes, that we
may be hallowed and consecrated by complete self-surrender to the truth
and reality of God.
In the next section, vs. 22, 23, we come upon the objective point of the
chapter, namely. Christian unity. " That they may be one as we are one ".
How are we to reach unity? God forbid that in these days, which have no
theology, and which are so conceited that they think they do not need it, —
God forbid that I should say a word to decry theology. For a man who
goes about the church today with his eyes open, sooner or later must make
up his mind that what the church needs above all things is a sane theology.
Just at present our theology is in a mental state that might fairly be called
mush, and we sometimes call our lack of clearness and definiteness toler
ance and charity. We need theology. You will not misunderstand me,
then, when I say that we cannot reach unity through theology, if theology
be the primary thing ; and we cannot reach it through definition, if that
be the primary thing. We need theology, but woe be unto us if our theol
ogy masters us instead of our mastering it. Woe be unto us if our defini
tion dominates us, for the object of a definition is to be the tool and servant
of the mind. We need our definition, but it must be kept in its proper
place and controlled by life. And I take it that the only way in which we,
divergent members of the body of Christ, can be brought together is through
a living revelation. It is well for us that, temporarily, we have lost our
grip upon theology. It is well for us that, at present, we have lost our grip
upon definitions, because the end of it all, if we know and believe that
God's hand is guiding us, the end of it all will be that we shall gain, some
how, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, a mighty feeling of the
invading and penetrating and healing power of God. Experience is always
greater than definitions, and definitions must go back into experience to be
made over again. Our theology, our definitions and creeds, must descend
into the truth and reality of God, if we are to come together and stay
together. I must hasten on. The chapter closes with the great words, "That
the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be in them, and I in them ".
It is only through the sense of the indweUing power of the personal Christ
that we Christians of diverging creeds, of widely diverging ancestors, of
hostile definitions, can come together. That means, I take it, that we must
all strip our minds of our infallibility. There is nothing better than a good
definition, and there is nothing more helpful than a clear and sane theology
to keep the heads of Christians free from vanity and sentimental nonsense.
But the bane of theology and definition is infallibility. We have to strip
ourselves of that. I wonder if we can do it. We sons of men are born to
infallibility as the sparks are to fly upward. Thus there is a tremendous

3i6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
lot of infallibility around. We all believe we. are infallible, though our
sister church, the Roman Catholic church, alone makes a profession of
it. Steele's witty saying about the difference between the Church of Rome
and the Church of England is worth quoting at this point. " Yes ", he said,
" the Church of Rome is infallible and the Anglican Church is never wrong ".
That is the difference. We are all infallible in that sense, or pretty
nearly so.
Now I wonder if we can strip our minds of this infallibility which is
just man's cheap substitute for God's truth, man's cheap and easy substi
tute for God's reality. If we are to reach anything like real church unity
we must substitute the hard thing for the easy thing, and the costly thing
for the cheap thing. But the hard thing and the costly thing is the real,
vital sense of the invading and prevading and redeeming revelation of the
living Christ. The easy thing is an infallible church, an infallible priest,
an infallible theology. When once we have made up our minds that we
have got it, we can put an insurance policy in our pocket, lay our heads on
our pillow and go to sleep ; and when we wake up, we shall waste some of
our time in damning and excommunicating those who have not put their
heads upon the same pillow.
But this is ecclesiastical unity ; the unity that Christ speaks of is the
unity of Christians who have taken the hard and costly thing for their task
and heritage. It is the unity of men who believe with all their hearts in
God, and in man, and who, by means of that vital faith, keep their tra
ditions and their preferences under control. We are not called on to
belittle our traditions. Mine are exceedingly precious to me, and so are
yours, I doubt not, to you, or you would not be here. But the beauty of it
is that we can, by the help of the living Christ, make our traditions our
servants, keep them from dominating us. From this point of view, one
object of a good definition is that we may outgrow it. Put a definition
between you and revelation and you block up the entrance to revelation,
you shut yourself off from its growth and stunt yourself. But keep your
definition under control, and then it is a road over which you go to a
wider definition, if it please God to let you- live long enough to find it.
Your difference from your fellow Christian will inspire you to seek for your
unity with him. Then you will thank God that all Christians do not think
as you think. You will convert what you honestly believe to be your
superiority over him into a means of approach to him. You will learn that
in the kingdom of God as Christ has built it, the objective point is differ
ence in unity. We are to abound in our differences from one another.
We are not to be ashamed of that aspect of truth which the living God hath
disclosed to us. Rather we are to be proud of it, to publish it by every
means in our power. But we shall control it. We will not let it control us.
The love of God is in us all. His living revelation fills our hearts.
Because we differ, we agree to glorify Him who causes us to differ. So,
s^all He, like the master of a great chorus, bring out of our diverse tradi
tions and interpretations, a grand hymn of praise to the only true God and
to Jesus Christ whom He hath sent.

* SANCTIFICATION IN THE TRUTH.
(St. John 17 : 17-19.)
by rey. d. w. ea.xjnob, e). d.,
Providence, R. I.
The committee has assigned to me the central petition in Christ's great
High Priestly prayer, as recorded in the seventeenth chapter of John's
Gospel at the seventeenth verse. It reads as follows : " Sanctify them in
Thy truth, Thy word is truth ".
Let me read, that you may have the connection, the verses that imme
diately precede and follow. I read from the Revised Version, v. 14,
" I have given them Thy word " ; v, 16, " They are not of the world even as
I am not of the world"; v. 17, the verse we are to consider, reads:
" Sanctify them in Thy truth ; Thy word is truth ". And this is followed, in
V. 19, by the words : " For their sakes I sanctify Myself that they also may
be sanctified in truth ".
In reading these tenderly expressive words, I have not heeded the
request of one of the most intelligent and devout Christians I have ever
known. "Pastor", she said, " please never read that prayer in the seven
teenth of John in public again ". The pastor supposed there had been
some mistake in emphasis. "Oh no, not that", was the quick reply, "but
this : that prayer of love and agony should only be read when one is alone,
on his knees and in tears ".
We sympathize with the devout feeling so earnestly expressed. But
we are permitted, also, to remember that devotional study may be as
devout as prayer itself. Our Lord, in the gift of the promised Holy Spirit
to John, caused this prayer to be put into the record. We may, then, be
permitted to read it, to study it, and to attempt its devotional interpreta
tion. Devout students in all ages have felt that through these central
words in this central part of this great prayer, we get further back into the
depths of Christ's own soul than through any other words that ever fell
from those holy lips, — " Sanctify them in Thy truth ; Thy word is truth. For
their sakes I sanctify Myself".
In this devotional interpretation notice, first of all, that this prayer is
the one true " Lord's Prayer ". In it He prays. By a mistake which it is too
late in the centuries to correct, we are accustomed to call the prayer that
begins "Our Father, which art in heaven", "The Lord's Prayer". But
that prayer should have been called "the disciples' prayer". Our Lord
does not even once use it Himself. He the rather puts it into the mouth of

''Delivered at the Eighth Conference, held at All Saints Memorial Church, May ii, 1904.
317

31 8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
His followers who had said, " Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his
disciples ". That prayer is now known to be a compilation in part from
Jewish prayers of that time. The Jews of that age, following their Old Testa
ment, called God "Father" in their prayers. Jesus could never Himself
have employed one of the petitions in that prayer, — " Forgive us our tres
passes ". No perfect soul can truthfully make use of those words. On the
other hand this prayer — this sinless prayer of the seventeenth of John,
which should have been called "The Lord's Prayer", was prayed only by
Him. It is so holy that on any other lips than His it would be profane.
Even He could pray it but once. In it His heart found its holy vent.
Though in one part of it He prays for His disciples. He does not notice that
they are present. He is in His closet alone with God. They two, the
Holy Father and the Holy Son are speaking with each other. They are in
the very act of communing. Let us be still. The time, the place, the per
sons are sacred. " Let all the earth keep silence before Him ".
Only that He left on record this prayer should we dare speak of it.
But here it is; and therefore in no sense acting as spies on our Lord's
communings with His Father, we may, with hushed heart, venture to look
and listen.
And the time when He offers this prayer is especially significant. He
has so nearly completed His work that He conceives of it as already done.
"I have finished", " I come to Thee", He says. He is through with
Calvary and the resurrection and ascension, in His thought : " I come to
Thee ". Contrast with this prayer the petition popularly called the Lord's
Prayer, as to the time of their respective utterances. In the prayer He
puts into the lips of disciples — the one commencing " Our Father", He is
teaching beginners in discipleship. Had that prayer been given further on
in their development, would He have omitted from it the very things for
which He afterwards told them to pray, viz.: the gift of the Holy Spirit, and
the asking of all in His name ? The prayer at that earlier time could not
have had the fulness of the New Dispensation. Let me not be misunder
stood. That prayer, that "disciples' prayer", was absolutely perfect for
them at that time ; and it is in its general form and its whole spirit, not
so much a stiff mould as a generous and blessed model of prayer for all
time. But what a contrast between that "disciples' prayer" and this
"Lord's Prayer" in the seventeenth of John. It is not in John "Our
Father", the united petition of disciples, but it is "Holy Father", the
single separate term of sole use in the intimate intercourse between God
and His " Only Begotten Son " as that Son is about to resume the native
heaven and the dateless years of His eternity in the bosom of His Father.
Notice, also, the order of the petitions in this prayer. He prays first,
(vs. 1-5) about Himself that God will glorify Him. He prays second, (vs.
6-19) for the Twelve exclusively. He prays third, (vs. 20-26) for a.\\ future
believers. Now it is of the utmost importance that we notice that the seventeenth
verse, the verse which we are studying, comes in the second division, viz.:

SANCTIFICATION IN THE TRUTH. 319
that of the petition for the Twelve. He asks two things for His Twelve (a)
negatively, that they may be "kept from the evil" — or as the Revision has
it, and very many other versions — that they may be "kept from the Evil
One ". Then (b) comes the positive petition, " Sanctify them in Thy truth ;
Thy word is truth ".
"Sanctify them"; the word "sanctify" itself means to separate —
simply that. The root idea of the word, taken alone, is not holiness but
separation — separation not from what is impure but from what is common.
It is constantly used in the Old Testament, not only about persons, but
about things no longer common, because set apart for God's peculiar
service. Twice only does Jesus use the word about Himself. He says
(John 10 :36) that He "was sanctified" i. e., "set apart", and "sent into
the world ". In this prayer (v. 20) He says " I sanctify Myself " God has
" sanctified " Him, /. e., set Him apart ; and now, in view of the culminating
cross and resurrection. He sets Himself apart, dedicating His final hours to
His distinctively redemptive work. And here and now. He prays that the
God who had thus sanctified, i. e., dedicated Him to a peculiar mission,
would in like manner sanctify, dedicate, consecrate them to their mission,
in furtherance of " the truth ".
And now with this idea of sanctification as a dedication and a conse
cration to one's work, a meaning gained from Christ's own use of the
"sanctify", we can come back to our seventeenth verse, "Sanctify them in
Thy truth ".
He has the Twelve in their peculiar needs exclusively in mind. See the
exact position of these men. That they had been regenerated before He
ever met them seems almost certain from His words " Thine they were " —
/. e., they were Thine before they were Mine. Then, next, they became His
disciples, by believing that He was the Messiah. Next, they were chosen
to become His apostles. They are soon to enter upon that apostolic work,
and He prays for them. He says not one word about their personal
character ; not that personal character was unimportant. But He has, just
now, another matter in view. Never such a mission before committed to
any human being. And unless something special is done for His Twelve,
His Gospel will fall stillborn, and the world will never know anything
accurately about Him. He might almost as well never have come. Up to this
time they had constantly blundered, not about the facts — there they were the
best of witnesses about matters of fact. But they had blundered about
the meaning of the facts. They had lacked any comprehensive grasp of
them. They had no idea of the relation of part to part and of each part to
the grand whole of His mission. It needed something vastly more than
that, that they should be perfected in personal character. They saw the
things and heard the words ; but He had to tell them, not in any impatience,
but in profound pity, " How is it that ye do not understand ? " Moreover,
the greatest Gospel facts had not yet occurred — facts that would be the
key to all the others. The Lord's death and resurrection, clear to Christ's
forseeing eye, were hidden from the Twelve at that time. And Pentecost,

320 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
which would bestow upon them new vision, giving Ihem the lacking grasp
of related fact and correlated doctrine, had not come to them. But soon
there would be fight flashing back on all He had ever done and said.
Soon — very soon — there would be a fulness of truth into which they would
enter, as some of them had entered into that radiant Shekinah cloud on the
Mount of Transfiguration. And this is His prayer, that when this time of
revelation comes, they may enter into it ; " Sanctify them in Thy truth ; Thy
word is truth". Notice the preposition our Lord uses. Scholarly criti
cism, as in the Revised Version, discards the word "through" not so much
as erroneous, but as lacking in fulness, and unites in translating " in Thy
truth " instead of " through Thy truth ". The conception is not only more
correct but more significant. It is " in the truth " as a man stands in the
atmosphere that surrounds him on every side, and breathes in the vital air ;
" in the truth" as a man comes out of mist and even out of darkness and
stands in the sunshine where all things are flooded in the light from the
heavens above him ; "in the truth " as a man emerges from the loneliness of
a solitary existence into a region throbbing with a new and intense life ;
" in the truth " as in a shoreless ocean filled with the God whose great
name is the God of truth, and whose Only Begotten Son can say " I am the
Truth "—the Truth itself.
And notice how our Lord divides men, putting their moral positions in
sharpest contrast. He says " in the world ", and over against it He puts
" in the truth ". He names the dominion of the Evil One as " in the
world", and puts over against it the "in Thy Truth" of His Holy
Heavenly Father. Here, as in all His teachings, He sees two antagonistic
kingdoms, with their respective heads and members, their opposing
principles and potencies, their utterly unlike aims here and ends here
after ; and His conception is that every man is in the one or the other.
And Jesus prays that these twelve men, while they must remain on this
material earth so as to carry out His purposes, may not be morally and
spiritually in the element which He calls " in the world ", but may be
submerged and absorbed in that opposite element which He calls " the
truth ". You will notice that Jesus uses first the definite article " the "
truth, and then uses the personal pronoun " Thy ". The exact order of the
Greek words is this: "Sanctify them in the truth of Thine" — literally,
"in the Thy — truth". The Greek language has nothing more intense,
distinctive, definite. The conception is one of separateness in that kind
of truth which is itself separated from every other ; that truth in which the
mind of God especially works in the redemptive kingdom.
And this point gained in our discussion, we may ask reverently and yet
specifically, just what was comprehended by the term He uses in this
prayer when He says "the Truth " or "the Thy— Truth", /. e., God's truth.
Plainly what He means here by " Thy Truth " is expressed by the phrase
He makes exactly equivolent, "Thy Word"; "Thy Word is truth".
Remember our Lord's Jewish birth and training. Our Old Testament
was His Bible. He knew it, as none had ever known it before. Its

SANCTIFICA TION IN THE TR UTH. 321
phrases came easily to His lips. He modeled His forms of speech on those
in His Bible. He found in its earliest pages the idea of a God revealed
as the "I am God"; a personal, and so a real God, over against the
unreal and shadowy gods of heathendom ; a God, who because He was a
real God, was God over the whole realm of truth, and so was the very God
of truth itself; and therefore the personal truth Himself. This God of
truth Jesus found in His Bible, was always revealing Himself, manifesting
Himself, uttering Himself in words — words that through the vocables of
human language, became, whenever God used them, sanctified words as
indicating their source and their consecration. Common words whenever
used elsewhere, they were words set apart to a purpose when God em
ployed them. They were words of God's truth, i. e., God's word. Jesus
found in His Bible constant formulas like this, " the Word of the Lord ",
" the Word of God ". They were iterated almost to weariness ; so that where-
ever not used they were always understood. They were not only in His
Bible, but were in constant use among all the people He knew, as their
names for their Bible. On occasion He quoted to them certain words in
their Bible, and then called their Bible, as they themselves did, " The
Word qf God ", saying as He quoted from it, — " The Word of God cannot be
broken "- Quoting continually. He gives His Bible as final authority. He
sharply distinguishes it from the ordinary Jewish literature, which He calls
" The Tradition of the Elders ". In His Bible the longest Psalm, cut into
portions under the letters of the alphabet for the temple service, contained
not a verse in which this usage did not appear. Jesus born, bred, think
ing, teaching, in house and temple and by the wayside, in public, in pri
vate, was familiar with such terms. And can any honest man have one
lingering doubt but that however much more He meant by His phrases
" Thy truth " and " Thy word ", He meant this much in His prayer, that the
sanctification of His Twelve was in part to be accomplished in connection
with the Book which He revered as "the Truth" — the Book He set
men to studying so that they might see in its predictions " the things con
cerning Himself ". He said, "Search the Scriptures" — the Scriptures,
in distinction from that vast mass of Jewish literature current in His time.
Jesus saw in His Bible what the prophets themselves did not always see,
the scarlet thread interwoven through all the fabric ; the event to which
every event recorded on its pages looked forward. And from the day
when John the Baptist said, " Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away
the sin of the world ", each step of our Lord's life was a step towards that
lifted cross and that emptied tomb. God had put the prophecy of it in the
written Word. Jesus was to turn prophecy into fulfilment by the death He
should accomplish at Jerusalem. But the Twelve did not yet see what the
death and " the rising from the dead should mean ". And so He prays
that they may have the sanctification in which they can see His true
mission and so see their own. And then came Pentecost, with its first
instalment of the answer. Then their vision was purged — then they saw
as through God's eye, as through Christ's eye. Then their Bible was alert,

322 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
in every book of it, with their newly understood Christ. Then the isolated
events had related meaning in which He, and they with Him, were sancti
fied to a peculiar mission among men.
Nor was the understanding of these events the all. Accurate record
was needed, as a companion document for their Bible. For all the coming
centuries there would be as much need of the record of the Christian facts
as there had been of the occurrence of the facts themselves. Left alone to
inexact human remembrance of them and to an unassisted sorting of what
to record and what to omit ; left to blunder about their meaning as they
had done during His lifetime, their inaccurate narration of such tremen
dous facts would be worse than nothing. We can make mistakes enough
without employing a mistaken guide. Such facts as these, as they must
have more than human warrant, so the record of them must have more
than human superintendence. It is plain that the only religion that can
hold its place in the later centuries must he one that founds itself on
historic facts recorded in authentic documents. Such documents must and
will show something of the personality of their respective authors. God's
inspiration, securing accuracy, would no more change their individual
style of writing than change the features of their individual faces. They
would still be men, but men " moved of God, and led by the Holy Spirit into
all the truth "; — the Greek has the definite article " the," i. e., " all the truth ".
There would then be two things : First, a progressive document ; one that
goes on through the Old Testament into the New Testament ; and then
goes on through the New Testament as these men should give to the long
centuries the facts and doctrines and duties that make up the Christian
religion. A book that should give us only the Zeitgeist or " age-spirit " of the
era when written, would show us only the degree of moral and religious
development the world had then attained. So that, second, there would be
need of a book which, while a progressive volume, should have in addition,
that divine inspiration and revelation which would ensure its absolute
trustworthiness ; its human and its divine guarantee alike given to the world.
Take this perfect prayer of Jesus in the seventeenth of John, which so
needs its perfect record. One sentence omitted, through John's lapse of
memory, one phrase supplied by him, and the whole devout world would
feel the difference. The prenticed hand may spoil perfection of the statue
as surely as the mailed fist of the iconoclast. The need of perfect record
may be more conspicuous in this perfectly holy prayer of our Lord, but it
is not less real elsewhere. Do you wonder, then, that Jesus prays
especially for men with such a unique mission — " Sanctify them in Thy
truth ; Thy word is truth " ?
Such was His prayer. And now what was the answer? It was this:
Their first apostolic work was their personal testimony as to Christ's
resurrection. They publicly testified that they themselves had seen Him
alive after His death on the cross ; had seen the healed wounds, had eaten
with Him, talked with Him and had been commissioned by Him, after
His resurrection. That fact established, all Christian facts would be

SANCTIFICATION IN THE TRUTH. 323
comprised in it. Resurrection proved previous and peculiar death,
previous and peculiar life, previous and peculiar birth, previous and pecu
liar existence in a dateless eternity. There was to be a granite basis of
veritable fact for Christianity. And this was it. Paul, in order to become
an apostle and so be able to bear this witness with the others, had to see,
on the way to Damascus, the Christ risen after His death, and to get from
His lips the apostolic commission. First of all these men preached an
oral Gospel. It was about " Jesus and the resurrection ". But, by and by,
when chosen men came to write out the facts, doctrines and duties they
had preached, their writings took two forms ; the factual or narrative form,
and the doctrinal form. Paul, whose four great Epistles were written
before any one of our four Gospels, took the great facts, and looking back
upon them through the lens of Christ's resurrection — remember He saw
the risen Christ — conceived of them in their grandly comprehensive
meaning in these Epistles which are the most primitive of our Christian
documents. So that to get "back to Christ" — nearest to Him through
the earliest of the Christian documents — we must go back through Paul.
Subsequently the four evangelists, giving us the great facts also, fill in
with their delightful detail the sacred story of their ever blessed Lord.
Those who wrote were supported by the consenting testimony of the
other apostles ; and so there was given to men, the world around and the
ages through, the imperishable record of Christian fact, of Christian doc
trine and duty found in this New Testament. And so Christ's prayer for
them was answered and they were " sanctified in the truth " as they entered
into the new domain, breathed in the new atmosphere and felt the new
vitality of this Gospel.
Some interpretative inferences may be briefly named :
I. Sanctification, whether for an ancient apostle or for a modern
believer, is through a knowledge of the " Word of God ". Contrasting the
transient and imperfect Mosaic Dispensation with the perfect and per
petual Christian Dispensation, an inspired man has said, " By one offering
Christ hath perfected forever them that are sanctified ". We must know
our Bibles ; since the degree of sanctification must bear a relation to our
knowledge of God's Word. This peculiar Book must have its peculiar
study. Some of us can remember that when in the district schools, Mil
ton's " Paradise Lost" was used in "parsing", so called; the old fashioned
grammatical exercise. But did any one ever come in that way to know
Milton's sublime Epic ? To study the Bible merely as " literature ", as an
exercise in "historic knowledge" or in " pedagogic method ", is even less
likely to give one an understanding of the Sacred Volume and to sanctify
the man who does it. " Literary study " alone, or " historic study " alone,
in college, in seminary, in Sunday-school, or even in the closet, is liable to
result in misapprehension. You may not, must not study it as you study
any other book. Unique, let it have its unique method. Christ is the focal
point to which every thing must be seen as converging, if you would know
your Bible. "To Him give all the prophets" — and every historian was

324 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
also a prophet — " witness ". All gathers in Him. Among the mountains
in summer I meet men who are making sketches. They transfer to one
canvas a rock, to another a tree, to a third that mountain and that cloud.
By and by these bits of loveliness are all to be assembled into one completed
picture. So each separate virtue shown by any man mentioned with ap
plause in this volume, is gathered up, made perfect and exemplified in Jesus
Christ. It is the same with all events in Biblical history. Seen with anointed
eye, they are to be studied in their inexhaustible connection with this inex
haustible Christ. We are to be "sanctified in the truth" " Thy Word ",
said Jesus, looking up into the consenting eyes of His Father — " Thy
Word is truth ".
II. Sanctification is also the experience, in the depths of the human
soul, of God's truth. The only subjective Christian experience that has
any value is that wrought by the objective Christian facts made potent by
the Holy Spirit. Hence we distrust all visions, dreams, impressions, im
pulses to do strange, unauthorized things. All is to be tested by the Word.
And because you have not as yet come up and on and into the experience
of a clearly narrated truth, do not discard it. To do that would be to make
your own Bible rather than to take God's Bible. The man who puts his
intellectual understanding, his moral intuition or even his alleged Chris
tian experience as the sole test, is a man who allows God to teach him
nothing. Nor hesitate, because, like all other truth, God's revealed truth
has its mysteries.
A scout, when an exploring party was seeking the Pacific, mounting
a hill, cried out, "I see it". "See what?" shouted the leader. "The
Pacific", was the answer. "How wide is it?" "About ten miles",
answered the scout. "Ah!" replied the leader, "if it were the Pacific
you could not see across it ". Let us learn that truth is always wider than
our present experience of it. Truth, distrusted ^n the impatience of youth,
gets itself believed in the stress of middle life, and fully trusted, as the
very sheet anchor of hope, in the experiences of age. Much of God's
Word awaits our better understanding of it in the experiences of eternity
when we shall study it in the light of the countenance of God Himself.
A few parenthetic words just here, may not be out of place about
things outside " the Word ", which are sometimes thought to have sanctify
ing power. In the presence of Niagara, there is awe ; but the man who experi
ences it may be an infidel. In the presence of Munkacsy's " Christ
Before Pilate ", sympathetic emotion may be stirred in any unregenerate
man. A song on " Calvary " drew tears from the one who had wept as
freely at the theater over the play, the same evening. Touched by the
tones of a soprano in a church choir a man swore that the solo was finely
rendered. Esthetic feeling is not to be confounded with Christian ex
perience. But when, first of all, the soul in its deepest depths has been
really regenerated by the Holy Spirit, as He applies to it the great Chris
tian truths, then esthetic feeling, like every other natural impulse, receives

SANCTIFICATION IN THE TRUTH. 325
its sanctification through the vital experience of God's truth. Mountain
and plain, river and sea, God's sunrise and His sunset, man's picture and
song are seen by the vital eye, looking through the new moral atmosphere
of God's revealed Word ; are seen as " sanctified " objects, and so are made
subservient to the soul's sanctification. Last night at midnight a sharp eye
could dimly discern a few things close at hand. This morning the sun rose,
and the wide prospect from horizon to horizon was visible. Any single
acre of it was worth more than the whole round world perpetually sunless.
Well might Bushnell exclaim, "This is another world since Christ came
into it ". Jesus said, " I am the light of the world ".
But there is a further sanctification, in which all knowledge in the
realm of divine truth and a// profound experience of it in the human soul,
leads a man on to the sanctified doing of God's will. Jesus calls His fol
lower " the man that doeth the truth ". Sanctification is not only of the
head and the heart, but of the life. Only let us remember that the life is
vastly more than the outward conduct. Life is that interior principle, the
motions of which rule the exterior act. With this prayer of Jesus before
us, let us seek to " practice the presence of God " in the deepest activities
of the soul when we are alone with Him, when He opens His heart to us
and we open our hearts to Him ; when we tell all our souls out to Him as
never to nearest earthly friend, and He gives such communication of
understanding in His revealed Word that we appreciate holy Rutherford's
phrase when he speaks of " revelling in the truth ". Such inward spiritual
activity will ' save us from any superficiality in our religious life. Such
" practice of God " in the depths of the soul will make us grow, not as the
dead stone by accretion of particles to its surface, but as the plant grows,
by absorbing into its inward life that on which it can thrive. We shall crave
seasons of prayer and of meditation, in which the closed door of the closet
will shut out the world and shut us in with God. Then there will be given
at one time the experience of "the green pastures and the still waters" of
God's own peace ; at another time, the experience of " the unspeakable
joy " ; at still another time, the consciousness of a strength not our own to
to do or to suffer ; and yet, again, some verse of God's Word wiU be for us a
Mount of Transfiguration, and heaven will seem to be opened. And it will
be opened for us soon, not only in sanctified feeling but realized fact. One
after the other we go into that world of eternal truth, to practice our
selves in those larger revelations that there await our coming. And what
if our Lord, on the departure of each believer from the earthly service,
looking up once more into the face of His Father, utters anew the final
words of this wonderful prayer, now making it specific and personal, as He
says, — " Father, I will that [this man] whom Thou gavest Me be with Me
where I am that [he] may behold My glory ".

*THE SELF-SURRENDER OF JESUS CHRIST.
(St. John 18: ii.)
b"s' rev. g-eo. m. stone, t>. d.,
Pastor of the Asylum Avenue Baptist Church, Hartford, Conn.
In the crisis of his Eden trial the first Adam surrendered to self, in the
interest of pleasure. In the trial of the second Adam He surrendered to
God, when the certain issue was suffering. Eden and Gethsemane are for
ever set over against each other in the spiritual history of man. One act
drove the man forth to look backward upon a gate policed by the cherubim,
the other " opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers ". The Self-
Surrender of Jesus Christ is inseparably connected with three truths. The
Will of God, The Problem of Suffering, and The Salvation of Man.
I. The immediate background of our Lord's question, — " The cup
which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?" was the Father's ex
press will. " My Father presents it. It is not My natural human preference ".
This gives us a humanity in Christ so genuine and essential as to be
beyond impeachment. Paul holds fast by this when he says, in his great
legal argument to the Romans, — " For as by one man's disobedience many
were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made right
eous ". Besides, the whole hinge of Christ's self-surrender turns upon His
being truly man. The only and sole element in this cup, which made Him
willing to drink it, was the will of God. The cup was bitter of itself, beyond
any ever before presented to man. The angels yet desire to look into it.
Notwithstanding, it was mixed by the Father's hand, its contents have
never been brought under human analysis in the full depth and range of
their severity. Hence the difficulty in formulating a satisfactory statement
of the Atonement. The Nicene Council, led by
" The royal hearted Athanase,
With Paul's own mantle blest ",
was able to fix in the enduring form of sound words the truth concerning
the person of Christ. But when our Substitute was passing towards the
shadow of His Cross, He said to His disciples, "Whither I go ye cannot
come ". As there were bounds set about the fiery mount of the law, lest
any should break through to gaze, so about the sacred precincts of the
suffering and death of Christ, there were fixed bounds, which the human
mind has not passed. There were unexplored remainders, and unrevealed
abysses, in the chalice of the Garden and the Cross. The transaction was

' Delivered at the Seventh Conference, held at the Central Congregational Church, April 13, 1904.
326

THE SELF-SURRENDER OF JESUS CHRIST. 327
cosmic in its reach, since " He tasted death for every man ". It was no
less sufficient to obliterate time periods, for " this Man, after He had offered
one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down on the right hand of God ; from
henceforth expecting till His enemies be made His footstool. For by one
offering He hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified ". An earthly
king can do, only the Prince of Peace can undo, and thus turn back the
retributive sanctions of human sin. In the mid-sea of His agony on the
cross, when the air was thick with portents, charged with the penalties of
the world's sin massed into one awful cloud. He cried out, " My God, My
God, why hast Thou forsaken Me ? " For once He dropped the Father's
name and in those preternatural hours fell back upon the naked justice of
a holy God. Let Mrs. Browning speak of the impossibility even there of
His desertion : " Deserted I God could separate
From His own essence rather.
And Adam's sins have swept between
The righteous Son and Father ;
Yea, once Immanuel's orphaned cry.
His universe hath shaken.
It went up single, echoless.
My God, I am forsaken ".
The voluntary element in the self-giving of Christ must not be over
looked in any just estimate of it. The objection to the idea of one man
suffering in the place of another has overlooked the fact of personal will
and deliberate choice in the matter. Even yet, it is difficult for men to see
that our Master was not compelled to suffer by the decision of the Jewish
Sanhedrin or the sanctioning injustice of the Roman governor. One of
the most notable of His sayings, in view of the cross, was His word to His
own zealous disciple, Peter: "Put up again thy sword into his place; for
all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. Thinkest thou
that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He shall presently give Me
more than twelve legions of angels ? But how then shall the Scriptures be
fulfilled, that thus it must be ? "
In effect He informs Peter how paltry his defence must be, when the
serried columns of the celestial host were waiting to move upon His foes at
the slightest signal from Himself. Earlier than this, Jesus uttered the
classical declaration upon this fact of voluntariness in His suffering :
" Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I
might take it again. No man taketh it from Me, but I lay it down of
Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again.
This commandment have I received of My Father ".
II. Not otherwise than by voluntary suffering could our Lord fill up
the outline of prophecy. The animal sacrifices of the Jewish system failed
in this voluntary element. For 1,500 years "dumb driven cattle "were led
unwillingly to the altar and slain. And yet the offerer laid his hands upon
the victim before its life was yielded up, thereby indicating that guilt was
transferred to it, as in a picture. But these repeated offerings were only

328 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
symbols used for a term to foreshow One who should take our burdens and
do so of His own free and self-chosen will. How clearly is this stated in
the great historic comparison made by the author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews. " For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats
should take away sins. Wherefore, when He cometh into the world, He
saith, sacrifice and offering Thou wouldst not, but a body hast Thou pre
pared Me : In burnt-offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou hast had no pleas
ure. Then said I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of Me)
to do Thy will, O God "-
Frequently the law did not look beyond the shadow to the Coming
Person of the Messiah. But when He appeared, men of insight, like the
Forerunner, immediately saw it. Most clearly of all, our Divine Master
recognized this suffering and dying for others, as an essential part of His
mission. It was very difficult for the disciples — especially in view of
Christ's manifested power — to understand this. They could not see how,
with such reserve of power at command. He could submit to His enemies.
The same principle of help and suffering for another's sake is found
embedded in nature, in society and in individual human life. Throughout
the whole sphere of the natural world one thing seems to exist for another.
The forces of nature join hands for mutual help. It is Ruskin, who says,
" It is the working, and walking and clinging together, that gives their
power to the winds, and its syllables and soundings to the air, and their
weight to the waves, and their burning to the sunbeams ".
Society is knit together by bonds of helpful union. The exchanges of
commerce are the contribution of one part of the world to make up the
deficiencies of another. What is the whole system of insurance, fire and life,
but a plan to enable those who are fortunate to aid those who may be less so ?
The flame-swept city of Baltimore is now receiving millons of money from
outside insurance companies to rebuild its desolate sites, because this prin
ciple has been organized into avast business system. Even the professions
are built in good measure upon the same basis. The physician studies the
human body in my behalf — I have not time or opportunity.
And how in the whole range of common life, in the family and with
individuals, we are living and dying one for another! Mothers yield up
their lives for their children. How willingly are such sufferings endured !
" Many waters cannot quench love '', and many barriers cannot interrupt its
mission. The noblest part of natural history is connected with the fact of a
bitter cup. The flag we honor has been baptized in blood in manifold
wars and revolutions. It is like a palimpsest upon which one period of
sacrifice has been written over another, until it bears successive legends of
sacrifice. III. The rank of Christ in this procession of those who love and
suffer for others' sake is the highest. As " the Bloody Angle " on Ceme
tery Hill, at Gettysburg, was the high-water mark of the civil war, so His

THE SELF-SURRENDER OF JESUS CHRIST. 329
cross was the highest stage ever reached by sacrifice, of one persen for
another's good. If we consider the dignity of the sufferer as the Son of
God, and the depth of His sorrow as our surety. Calvary is the central
spot in this world of sin and suffering. Even the dying thief discovered
the innocence of Christ and said to his companion, " We suffer justly, but
this Man hath done nothing amiss ". The cross cannot be explained as
something endured by our Lord on His own behalf. This deed of expi
ation was for us. If we raise the question, why could not God forgive
without it ? We reply, something was due to law broken, and society
injured. Even the civil state does not forgive upon repentence simply.
It requires an expiation, a time of liberty restricted, and service rendered
for the damages inflicted upon the social order broken. The expiation of
Christ was witnessed by other than human eyes. The company grouped
around the cross constituted only a small part of " the great cloud of
witnesses ".
For ttiis event was to reach depths in the heart of God which no one
of the heavenly host had known, and hence, "peace through the blood of
His cross, reconciles all things unto Himself, whether they be things in
earth, or things in heaven ". Now we behold the Father moved by the sin
and sorrow, the distress and anguish of men to such a degree as to take it
upon Himself as His own suffering burden. For it is His burden. The
Son of God was a personal volunteer, dying at the same time for man's sin
and God's holiness. " The Saviour, what a noble flame
Was kindled in His breast.
When, hasting to Jerusalem,
He marched before the rest !
" Good-will to men, and zeal for God,
His every thought engross ;
He longs to be baptized with blood.
He pants to reach the cross.
" With all His sufferings full in view.
And woes to us unknown.
Forth to the task His spirit flew;
'T was love that urged Him on ".
The question of the Father's implication in the sufferings of the Son
cannot be dismissed at this point. A great scholar has said of the mystery
of the Trinity, that our lips can only stammer when we attempt to define it.
And the question of the Father's sufferings is one about which we may
humbly employ the Psalmist's words : " Such knowledge is too wonderful
for us ; it is high, we cannot attain unto it ". Still it remains true for us
that He who suffered, said, " He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father"
If it be so that the mystery of suffering reaches up to the highest form of
being in the universe, and inflicts its profoundest pains in the heart of the
Eternal Father, we may discover here the most effective motive and lever
age to induce the sinner to repent.

33° THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
A late writer furnishes me with this incident :
" In a boys' school in Boston a form of discipline was once introduced
which might be called a judgment infliction of unique character. For a
certain transgression, the master himself, instead of the pupil, was to receive
the punishment. The first time it was applied the guilty scholar broke
down, and the school broke down. In principle, this gracious judgment-
infliction was akin to that which under grace is applied in the Atonement ;
and for a saving mastery over human nature, the principle is unequalled".
The contention of Professor A. R. WaUace in his bold speculation enti
tled " Man's Place in the Universe ", has been in brief terms summarized by
a personal friend. This is its contention: "That our earth lies near the
center of the Milky Way ; that it is the only inhabited or habitable spot in
the physical universe ; that man is the consummation of the whole cosmic
process ; that the whole ordered creation comes to its crown on this planet
and in the human species. I say it may be a mere speculation, though he
is one of the foremost scientists of the world who has indulged in it.
Whether it be a speculation or not to say that the earth is the focus of the
cosmic movement, it is not speculation to say that the focus of the historic
human movement is the Incarnation of the eternal Son of God in the
person of Jesus of Nazareth. The learned man, therefore, is the man who
recognizes Christ, not only as 'the sublimest image ever offered to the
human imagination ', but as the heart of the heart of the universe, without
Whom, and apart from Whom, knowledge is empty of life, a formula vacant
of power, a shell without a kernel ; in Whom the physical creation finds its
bond — for in Him all things hold together — and in Whom the world of
human knowledge finds its glory and its crown ".
There is a majestic sweep of vision in the conception, which is not an
unworthy echo of the highest attitudes of inspired thought in Paul, and
which suggests a possible outcome of the bitterness of Christ's cup, quite
as inclusive as anything in the present Epistles of the great Apostle.
IV. Our last general consideration leads up to the relation between
Christ's self-surrender, and our recovery from sin. Self-surrender is the
crucial point for the sinner. Here, indeed, the King sets the fashion of the
court. When a few years since a distinguished theological teacher affirmed
that the supreme business of the preacher was to induce men to obey Christ,
considerable adverse criticism was aroused. But there is no gospel in Old
or New Testament for the disobedient man. The heaviest burden of a soul
confirmed in sin is God Himself, and so the fool hath said in his heart,
" There is no God "- He refuses to agree with his adversary, either quickly
or slowly, but he is unable to dislodge Him, and hence his misery. I have
heard of a new convert to atheism, who said to a coterie of fellow unbe
lievers, " I have gotten rid of the idea of a Supreme Being, and I thank
God for it ". The God driven out at the front door re-enters at the back
one, for the intellect of man is in revolt against the ungodly heart, and will
assert its rights under the eternal franchises of reason.
It is Browning who says: " I report as a man may of God's work —

THE SELF-SURRENDER OF JESUS CHRIST. 331
all's Love. Yet all's law " ! Herein the disciple is not above his Lord, or
the servant above his Master. But if the cup with its bitter ingredients is
presented to us by our Father, as that of our Saviour was presented to Him
by His Father, we may avail ourselves also of His sufficient consolation.
In His memorable prayer before the Garden and the Cross, He bridges
over both, as His holy soul rests upon the consummation of both, in the
measureless joy which was to succeed " the sharpness of death ". The cup
was not an end for Him, great as it was, and it behooves us to relegate it
habitually to its place. The greatest of modern essayists has said, " The
pencil of the Holy Ghost hath labored more in describing the afflictions of
Job than the felicities of Solomon ". But the felicities of Solomon were
not to be reckoned with the glory visioned by Paul. In the light of the
latter, we may even challenge Longfellow's couplet,
" Not enjoyment, and not sorrow.
Is our destined end or way ",
for our gospel carries the golden bribe of righteous, enduring joy. Not the
wilderness, but Canaan, was the end for Israel. The first question and its
answer, in the old Catechism, is the summary of the best theology : " What
is the chief end of man ? To glorify God and enjoy Him forever ".
Beautiful words are those of Lanier, in his Ballad of Trees and the
Master : " Into the woods my Master went.
Clean forspent, forspent.
Into the woods my Master came.
Forspent with love and shame.
But the olives they were not blind to Him ;
The little gray leaves were kind to Him ;
The thorn tree had a mind to Him,
When into the woods He came.
" Out of the woods my Master went.
And He was well content.
Out of the woods my Master came.
Content with death and shame.
When Death and Shame would woo Him last.
From under the trees they drew Him last ,
'Twas on the tree they slew Him— last
When out of the woods He came.

*THE CRUCIFIXION-" IT IS FINISHED".
by rt. rey. thojvtas a. ja.ggar, 17. d.,
Bishop of Southern Ohio.
(St. John 19:30.)
When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar He said, " It is finished ". And
He bowed His head and gave up the ghost.
I have approached with awe the study of this, the most pregnant word
in all history. How should I presume to look into the depths of the
consciousness which, with almost its last breath in time, sounded the trumpet-
note— ^^^w.^^;/.'' To speculate has seemed to me presumption. I have not
dared to adopt the method of critical exegetes, who seem to jostle one
another with fierce disputings around the cross. Many of them interpret
it by the glory which followed — the Resurrection, Ascension and coming
of the Holy Ghost.
I have chosen to " learn of Him " and by all that He has revealed of
His consciousness, to travel up from the human side to all that we may
know of this last word. I would find in the Christ His own interpreter and
put no more into the word than He permits me to see there.
We are to ask, then, what this word must have meant in His conscious
ness, when, with a loud voice, " He bowed His head and gave up the
ghost ".
The words I shall use will be largely the words recorded of Him or
spoken by Him.
The words which tell us all that we know of His childhood and youth
are like the lines of some fine etching — few but strong and full of meaning.
" The Child grew and waxed strong, filled with wisdom and the grace of
God was upon Him ". There was a genius for divine things and a divine
inspiration which kept it alive, and made it more and more appreciative as
His years increased. His quiet home at Nazareth afforded no great oppor
tunities for religious instruction. But nature was beautiful, and the train
ing of a Jewish home, and certainly the home of Joseph and Mary, would
insure that from a child He would know the Scriptures. Probably He went
with other children to the synagogue school, and sitting at the feet of the
scribe, learned/ His earliest earthly lesson from the Book of Leviticus. He
would attend the services of the Synagogue, where Moses and the prophets
were read and occasional addresses delivered. A mind like His would be
open to all the religious discussions around Him ; and all the story of Israel

* Delivered at the Seventh Conference, held at the Central Congregational Church, April 13, 1904.
332

THE CRUCIFIXION— "IT IS FINISHED". 333
and Israel's hope would be a growing wonder to Him. It is said of Schu
bert, the German composer, whose musical genius, like that of Mozart, was
born with him, that " his teachers had nothing more to do than to enhghten
him as to that which lay in a state of semi-consciousness, as law, within
him ". The phenomenon, on the natural plane, of genius like that may
reverently be used to illustrate the genius of Jesus for religion. We can
understand how, from a child, as He was hearing of sacrifices, and burnt
offerings, and sin offerings, there would be a semi-consciousness of some
coming harmony — the harmony predicted by the Psalmist, " Lo, I come ; in
the volume of the Book it is written of Me, to do Thy wifl, O God ! yea, I
delight to do it. Thy law is within My heart ".
We are not surprised to find Him, at twelve years of age, in the " midst
of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions ". He passes
by the sights of the holy city and seeks the schools of the Rabbis. The
promise of the Child — the wisdom and the grace — is budding in the Boy.
I need not dwell upon the familiar incident. " The law in His heart " finds
expression in the penetrating questions which He asks. The learned Rabbis
are astonished at His understanding and answers. He feels that there
must be larger meanings, some fuller inspiration beneath the letter of the
law, which, with all its subtleties, they expound to Him. They wondered
where this Galilean Boy had acquired His wisdom. He does not presume,
but He is deeply stirred. A consciousness that He has something to teach
and to do for God and His people deepens within Him. It speaks when
His seeking parents find and gently chide Him : " Wist ye not that I must
be about My Father's business?" or, in My Father's house? "My
Father ! " His mother, at His birth, had kept all the wonderful sayings
about Him, and pondered them in her heart. But think of the distance
now between His conception of God's purpose in Him and His relation to
God, and even a mother's thought. We find the word Father used of God
in a very few passages of the Old Testament, but never to describe His
relations with the individual. Jesus says " My Father " with perfect artless-
ness and freedom from presumption. He thinks aloud, and the truths
which have been stirring in Him are revealed. The spirit of the Boy has
been growing into a conscious fellowship with God — a fellowship so close
that, when He speaks now. His earthly ties seem far away and the Father
of His spirit the only reality.
But He patiently goes down with them to Nazareth and is subject
unto them.
Eighteen years pass before " The voice of one crying in the wilder
ness, prepare ye the way of the Lord ", revived the dying hope of Israel.
It seems to have been to our Lord the signal for action. The conscious
ness that He " proceeded forth and came from God " had been deepening
within Him, and now the time had come to put Himself on the side of the
reform which John preached. The "repentance", I need only remind
you, was " a change of mind " It meant, as a preparation for the king
dom, a thorough revolution and readjustment of thought in the earthly

334 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
minds of the multitude. They must change their earthly, selfish, ambitious,
literal and formal conceptions of the kingdom, and expect a kingdom which
would account him only a descendant of Abraham, who is one inwardly,
cutting down the proud pretensions of those " who bring not forth good
fruit ". There could be no such change of mind in our Lord. This was
His mind. But John was preaching that preparation, which the ideal king
dom of His dreams demanded. It was clear to Him, that to do His Fath
er's will, to " fulfil all _ righteousness ", He must put Himself openly into
conformity with that preparation. He avowed, therefore, in baptism the
change of mind. "And lo, the heavens were opened unto Him and He saw
the Spirit of God descending as a dove and coming upon Him, and lo, a
voice out of the heavens saying, this is My beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased ".
The moment He adjusted Himself to John's baptism " unto a change
of mind". His mission as the God-man dawned fully upon Him. Whatever
we may think about the objective appearance to Him and His forerunner,
something happened which convinced John that this is the Son of God —
"He that baptizeth with the Holy Spirit" — and realized to Jesus the ful
ness of His Father's presence and His anointing to be the Messiah of
Israel. The law and the Gospel met in their representatives, and the Gos
pel was manifested at His baptism. " The law and the prophets were ", said
the Lord, " until John ; from that time the Kingdom of God is preached ".
" Immediately the Spirit driveth Him into the wilderness to be tempted
of the devil ". It was the crisis of His life. Here He would determine
how He should act in view of the opposition which He knew awaited Him.
It is not essential to my purpose that I should delay here to enter fully into
the circumstances, and the many interesting questions which invest the
incident of our Lord's temptation. I have to do with it, on its subjective
side, as an inward conflict which it certainly was, whatever the form may
have been. It is natural to suppose that, absorbed in a communion and
rapt in meditations beyond our power to conceive. He remained long
oblivious to the needs of the body. When He came back to the earthly
realities, " He hungered ". Immediately the tempter whispered, " If Thou
be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread ". Why
not ? He could do it, for He was the Son of God. To feel the force of a
suggestion which does not seem in itself to be evil, is not sin ; but to see
the evil in it, and even for a moment to acquiesce is sin. " He was tempted,
yet without sin ". The sense of His moral responsibility was too strong in
Him for the pangs of hunger to overcome it. The suggestion was enough.
For a moment He felt its power, but more probably in His reason than His
appetite. But immediately the law in His heart disclosed the evil and
answered for Him, and through Him to the tempter, " It is written, man
shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the
mouth of God ". Because He was the Son of God, He would not command
stones to be made bread for His physical needs. He was in the world to
realize a kingdom which should not be " eating and drinking, but right-

THE CR UCIFIXION—" IT IS FINISHED ". 335
eousness and peace and joy in the Holy Ghost ". He must realize it by
subjecting the prerogatives which He might exercise as a Son to the condi
tions of the humanity in which it was to be His sole business to manifest a
life of the spirit. He must not save Himself. The flesh must be subdued
to the spirit at every point where He might be tempted to help Himself.
Adroitly the tempter adapts himself to the " discovered mood " of the
Saviour's soul. If you may not use your power for personal ends, surely
you may presume upon your Sonship to cast yourself down from this pin
nacle of the temple, and, by one splendid exhibition of your divinity, pro
claim your Messiahship — for is it not written, " He shall give His angels
charge concerning thee : and in their hands shall they bear thee up ". It
did seem as if some miracle like that might aptly introduce His work, and
command at once the reverence and attention of the jDeople. But, immedi
ately, the word in His heart detects and repels the suggestion. " Thou
shalt not tempt the Lord thy God ". To determine where trust ends and
presumption begins was for Him a difficult problem. He would not use
His Sonship to save Himself. Could He dare too much upon His Father's
love and power? The point to be strongly emphasized is, that in all these
temptations. He holds Himself firmly in the human relation, He meets and
defeats them as a man, and in the obedience of God's law for man. The
temptation to presume is overcome by the determination to do His Father's
will as a man, never presuming, never challenging a miracle by exposing
Himself wantonly or unnecessarily to danger or death, never assuming that '
He may dispense witli prudence, forethought and the plodding drudgery of
obedience. Satan, in the last temptation, boldly unmasks himself. He
showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, "All will
I give Thee ", he said, " if Thou wilt fall down and worship me ". Won
derful issue — whether it be objective reality or vision. The anointed
Christ — -young and human — conscious of divine power — all the kingdoms of
the world and the glory of them — ripe for a great leader — but the cost a
compact with evil — the alternative a cross with such light of the unseen
and eternal beyond, "As never was on sea or land".
The temptation was too coarse — it could only flash out its lurid blaze
long enough to be seen, and then came the indignant reply, through which
the God in Him gleamed like lightning, though it was still from the law in
His heart that He spake, "Get thee hence, Satan, for it is written, thou
shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve ".
Completely dispersed from that hour was every doubt as to the method
which He must employ to prove Himself the Christ of God. He sees
clearly that He may not save Himself — presume upon God's help, nor win
by popularity, compromise or conforming to the world's ways. He is put
upon His manhood. He knew that the world would be against Him. He
is determined, now, to meet and overcome it as a son of man in fellowship
with God, but walking with Him by faith, not by sight, and learning obedi
ence by the things which He must suffer. In all His ministry, from that

336 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
time to the end, this conception of His work as something to be done in the
body — subject to its limitations, needs, infirmities and pains is always
present to Him. He put away from Him, as from Satan, the suggestion
that He should assert Himself outside of those limitations or attempt to
escape them when they pressed too hard. The words of the Psalmist, as
they are rendered from the Septuagint, in the Epistle to the Hebrews,
express at least the idea which possessed Him : " Sacrifice and offering
Thou wouldest not, but a body didst Thou prepare for me ".
What, we may ask now, was His conception of the work to be done in
the body ? It is clear that, from the hour of His temptation. He was com
mitted to self-sacrifice. The shadow of the cross was upon Him, and it
deepened in His consciousness down to the end. But the work to be done
at such a cost ; what do we know about that ?
I do not find it necessary to limit myself, in the study of this question,
to the Gospel of St. John, though I might properly do so, as the word
"Finished" appears only there, and the authority of that Gospel is, I
assume, accepted by this Conference.
As I study the story of His life variously recorded, I find that He
began His ministry by preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom. I ask myself
what is this " Good-news " ? Many people, I believe, read the New Testa
ment, and are perplexed to know what the Gospel really is. I do not find it
in the law of His kingdom, which He announces in the Sermon on the
Mount. I am rather alarmed by its searching principles. But I do begin
to catch some glimmering of the light in the words, " Think not that I came
to destroy the law or the prophets ; I came not to destroy but to fulfil — for
verily I say unto you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle
shall in no wise pass away from the law, till all things be accomplished ". I
remember hov,', in another place. He ventures to make this same claim for
His own words : " Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My word shall
not pass away ". He speaks as one who embodies in Himself the right
eousness of the law. The one lawgiver is, to Him, " My Father which is in
heaven ". " I came to fulfil ". Through all the teaching of the Sermon on
the Mount, there is implied a fellowship like His own, with the Father who
is in secret, or, " your Father which is in heaven ".
I read on, and there is much about wonderful works, which are always
done to help, not for mere display. I read of Scriptures to be fulfilled,
which, I can understand, would be of special interest to His Jewish hear
ers. I find parables distinctly Jewish in their application, but, through all,
there is " One speaking with authority and not as the scribes ". I hear Him
saying not only "A greater than Jonah " and a " Greater than Solomon",
but " One greater than the temple is here ". He claims "power on earth to
forgive sins ". And then I meet this saying, which is not surpassed in the
depth of its spiritual meaning by anything in the Gospel of St. John : "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 ". And then the gracious

THE CR UCIFIXION— "IT IS FINISHED ". 337
words, which show to whom He would reveal the Father and in that fellow
ship the secret of rest — " Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy
laden and I will give you rest " !
Reading on, I am struck with the suggestive difference between His
sermon on the bread of life in the synagogue at Capernaum, and His talk
to publicans and sinners later, as He went through the cities and villages
teaching and journeying toward Jerusalem, and the last Passover. The
sermon at Capernaum is a baffling enigma to His hearers, and undoubtedly
He meant it to be so. He uses language entirely outside of their compre
hension. He leaves them baffled and asking, " How can this man give us
His flesh to eat ? " But when He talks to publicans and sinners, while He
is not unmindful of the Pharisees who stand by, criticising, He appeals to
their hearts in parables which they could understand, — of the shepherd
seeking the one sheep which was lost, of the woman seeking diligently until
she finds the lost piece of silver, of the prodigal son, that pearl of parables,
in which the Father-heart which Christ came to manifest is so beautifully
pictured. He did not put Himself into it because He was the Word from
the Father, the Revealer, making known the Father's heart to the sinner.
In Him the Father was " going out to meet the prodigal while yet he was a
great way off "-
Matthew, Mark and Luke agree in their witness to the words which He
spake at the last supper, " He took bread and blessed it and brake it ; and
He gave to the disciples and said, take, eat, this is My body : and He took
a cup and gave thanks and gave to them, saying, drink ye all of it : for this
is My blood of the covenant which is shed for many for the remission of
sins ". John omits the institution, but the same conception appears in the
sermon at Capernaum. " He that eateth My flesh and drinketh My blood
abideth in Me and I in Him ".
The doing and the teaching of Jesus find their unity in His person.
The teaching, apart from the revelation of Himself, is fragmentary and
unsatisfying. All is clear, when we perceive the " I " in Whom all centers
and from Whom the whole truth radiates. The good news of the kingdom
is in Him. Law, temple, poetry and prophecy all converge in His person.
He is the focal point of the historic past, and " I am the light of the world "
is His own word to all the future. When we read that Jesus did and said
many things which are not recorded, we wonder that in a life so important
more was not told. This is explained when we realize that the supreme
purpose of the Gospels is to manifest a person, and not merely to record
His sayings and doings. He Himself said to the disciples, " I have yet
many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now — howbeit when
He, the Spirit of truth is come. He will guide you into all truth ". " He
shall glorify Me ". He was to be in His own person, through death, the
fuller revelation of the Gospel.
When we pass from the Synoptists to the Gospel of St. John the spirit
and the life appear in aU their beauty. "We behold His glory as of the
only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth ". It is distinctively

338 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
the Gospel in a person. His own conception of God's purpose in Him is
clearly revealed. It is expressed in so many forms that we are bewildered
in our effort to collect the scattered rays into some point of light where we
may intelligently define it. Sometimes He has in view the objects of the
purpose, and we hear Him saying, " Come unto Me, afl ye that are weary".
" I am come to seek and to save that which was lost ". " I came not to call
the righteous, but sinners to repentance " " If any man thirst let Him
come unto Me and drink ". Sometimes His mind is full of the blessings
consequent upon God's purpose in Him, " Ye shall know the truth and the
truth shall make you free ". "I am the way and the truth and the life ".
" I am the resurrection and the life ". " This is the will of My Father, that
every one that beholdeth the Son and believeth on Him should have eternal
life". "I am come a light into the world, that whosoever believeth on
Me may not abide in the darkness ".
Eternal life seems to have been the one inclusive end of the purpose ;
and that life, manifested in and to be realized through faith in the Son.
When, therefore, we ask, as we approach the cross, what the work was
which the Father had given Him to accomplish on earth, I think we may
without presumption sum up the answer in these statements : —

He was to show in Himself the creative idea of God in humanity. His
being was to be a revelation. The purpose in Him went back before the
law. He dared to say to the baffled, outraged Pharisees, "Verily, verily, I
say unto you, before Abraham was, I am ". They accused Him of breaking
the Sabbath law. He justified Himself in the unearthly way of putting
Himself with the eternal, above the laws of time, and into the moral and
merciful purpose of the Creator Himself, saying, " My Father worketh
hitherto and I work".
It was in a like consciousness of being above time that He uttered the
words of the high priestly prayer before His death : "I am no more in the
world and these are in the world and I come to Thee. O righteous Father,
the world knew Thee not, but I knew Thee ; and these knew that Thou
didst send Me ; and I made known unto them Thy name and will make it
known ; that the love wherewith Thou lovedst Me may be in them and I in
them ". Who but a Jesus could have had this mind — a mind which soars to
the glory which He had with the Father before the world was, and yet
gathers humanity into a purpose which He here clearly reveals — the making
known God's name — Father — the manifestation in His own person of the
filial oneness (as Thou, Father, art in Me and I in Thee) and a wholly new
relation, and indeed creation to be completed in a fellowship with the
Father and the Son so real that the " love wherewith Thou lovedst Me may
be in them and I in them ". Here is the whole divine idea. No mind of
man could have invented it. In this spiritual oneness of the human spirit
with the Father, through the Son, is the life eternal which He promised.

THE CR UCIFIXION— "IT IS FINISHED ". 339
" This ", He said, "is life eternal that they might know Thee, the only true
God and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent ".
St. John in the proem of His Gospel formulates the creative purpose
and carries us back to the Genesis. " In the beginning was the word and
the word was with God and the word was God ". He was in the world and
the world was made by Him and the world knew Him not. He came unto
His own and His own received Him not. But as many as received Him to
them gave He the right to become the children of God, even to them which
believe on His name ; which were born not of blood, nor of the will of the
flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God ".
II.
The Christ was to make the creative purpose which He incarnated real
izable by man. His obedience in the flesh was to be not a revelation only,
but also a redemption. Sacrifice was present to Him from the beginning of
His ministry. He was not like His disciples, " slow of heart to believe all
that the prophets had spoken ". He felt the shadow of the cross darkening
upon Him in all the fierce antagonism of the world's moral evil, personified
in the rulers of His own people. How fully He realized the meaning of
this antagonism. His own pathetic words show : "I am come to send fire on
the earth and what will I, if it be already kindled? But I have a baptism
to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be accomplished". It
was at a later period when He was moving for the last time toward Jeru
salem that He taught His disciples the lesson of His great humility. " Even
the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give
His life a ransom for many ".
It is evident that God's purpose of realizing for humanity the life of
Sonship with Himself, could, in our Lord's view, be accomplished only
through His death. How through death He would accomplish it. His
words in the high priestly prayer seem to show — " Father, glorify Thy Son,
that Thy Son may glorify Thee. Even as Thou gavest Him authority over
all flesh that whomsoever Thou hast given Him, to them He should give
eternal life ". He had said before that, " As the Father hath Hfe in Himself,
even so gave He to the Son also to have life in Himself and He gave Him
authority to execute judgment because He is the Son of Man ". Clearly
His idea is, that the life-giving authority committed to Him as the Son of
Man, must be gained through and by His death as its inevitable condition.
We have the same idea expressed in His words to the disciples, " It is
expedient for you that I go away, for if I go not away the Comforter will
not come unto you".
He was to die, not merely to convict men of sin because they had killed
the Prince of life and so to leave them more hopelessly remote from God.
But He had put Himself into their case as the Son of Man, committed to
bear all the consequences of their sin even to the shame and pain of being
reckoned with the transgressors. He was empowered by the Father to act
for man, judgment was placed in His hands, but there was no way by which

340 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
He could gain His spiritual throne as the rightful head of a new, redeemed
humanity save the way of perfect subjection to the eternal righteousness as
man and for man, which was the way of the cross. His purpose was to
" save, not to destroy ", but to gain this power, which the Father had com
mitted to Him and which was the Father's purpose in Him, He could not
save Himself.
Why it was necessary that He should bear our sins in His own body
on the cross of a malefactor remains in all that He has revealed of His
own consciousness a hidden mystery. But in some of His sayings there is
a depth of insight which penetrates to the fundamental law of things. When
they told Him that certain Greeks " would see Jesus ", He answered
saying, — " Verily, verily I say unto you, except a grain of wheat fall into the
earth and die, it abideth by itself alone, but if it die it beareth much fruit ".
He had identified Himself with the temple, saying in the full fruition of the
Boy's vision, — " Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up "-
Now He identifies Himself with the order of nature itself, in its deepest
processes of evolution, and show's that sacrifice is a law of universal opera
tion and only out of a " self-renouncing, self-sacrificing resignation of all,
the benediction of a richer fruitfulness, of a glorified and multiplied exis
tence, springs forth ".
He was the grain of wheat to be harrowed deeply into the earth. The
harvest of that sowing would be bread for the world. Alford truly says that
the symbolism here lies at the root of that in Chapter 6 of St. John where
He represents Himself as the bread of life and interprets it to be " His flesh,
which He will give for the life of the world "-
He had been born into the human conditions to reveal God's creative
purpose, to show to men, in Himself the possibilities of Sonship with the
Father, to prove the reality of God's loving purpose by bearing upon His
own feeling their sorrows and sicknesses, by enduring their scorn with
patience and making Himself the friend of publicans and sinners. But He
was the grain of " wheat abiding alone by itself " while He remained on the
surface history. If He continued so. He would simply be living out the life
of His divine kind apart and unproductive. It was a law inherent in the
constitution of all nature, that the life of God in Him, in order to multiply
itself in harvest upon harvest of elect souls, should in its human form be
planted into death.
He was thinking deeply into the same natural order, which was His
Father's creative order, and as much His Father's will, as the " it is written "
of Scripture, when He said to His sorrowing disciples — " a woman when
she is in travail hath sorrow because her hour is come, but when she is
delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish for the joy
that a man is born into the world ". His sorrow and theirs were all one,
but the reality was in His deeper pain, and only through the travail of His
soul could the new man be born into the world.
That He did not fully understand the necessity which compelled the
suffering of the cross. His own words show. Three times as He approached

THE CR UCIFIXION— " IT IS FINISHED". 341
the end. His troubled soul speaks. He had compared Himself to the grain
of wheat, and then the black realization settling like a thunder-cloud upon
His soul. He cries : " Now is My soul troubled and what shall I say — Father,
save Me from this hour ? But for this cause came I unto this hour. Father,
glorify Thy name ". We are reminded again of the temptation in the wilder
ness. " Shall I pray as all My human dread of death impels Me to do.
Father save Me?" The spirit triumphs in the brave determination,
" Father, glorify Thy name ! " What thoughts are stirred as we realize the
consequences which seemed to depend upon His unfaltering courage in
that hour. He was so truly human in the struggle here as elsewhere that
we cannot doubt the reality of it, but being human, how one almost trembles
to think that the second Adam was here put upon His trial, and what if He
had faltered and " saved Himself" ?
He became obedient unto death, but the death of the cross was only
the physical ending of His " suffering oi death". That He made His
" soul an offering for sin " in some mystery of mental anguish is apparent
from the hour that He set His face toward Jerusalem. The sweat of blood
in Gethsemane was the manifestation of an agony, greater than the pain of
the actual cross. We cannot escape the conviction that the death which He
died for us, was this mysterious death in His feeling, the " suffering of
death ", for He cried " finished " before He bowed His head and gave up
the ghost. He bowed His soul to the inexorable " will" in Gethsemane. " If this
cup may not pass from Me except I drink it — Thy will be done ". Deep in
the moral order was the will that so it must be the " just for the unjust to
bring us to God".
But He was comforted in all the agony that was gathering upon His
soul by this thought, to which He gives expression three times in the course
of His ministry: " I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men
unto Myself ". The depth of insight which these words contain and \yhich
the event has proved, I may only suggest. The power of the cross in
making men know themselves, melting them to contrition, speaking pardon
to their convicted souls, honoring the righteousness which their own moral
sense demands ; satisfying the exactions of their consciences, making them
more afraid of the love which forgives than of the wrath which threatens,
bringing the Father-heart of the universe into a real sympathetic pulsing
against our hearts, quickening new life, inspiring a passionate enthusiasm,
glorifying the law of sacrifice as the way to life for all His followers — this
is a theme which never grows old and which no eloquence can exhaust.
" Did e'er such love and sorrow meet ? "
" Or thorns compose so rich a crown ? "
IIL
I need only state in words as few as possible that the Christ was also to
initiate a society in and through which His word and work should be perpetu
ated and witnessed for in the visible world down to the end of time. This
purpose appears in His choice of the twelve recorded by the synoptists and

342 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
assumed in the Gospel of John where they constantly appear. His sacer
dotal prayer shows God's purpose in them : "As thou didst send Me into
the world, even so sent I them into the world ". Through them the Gospel
must be preached in all the nations. He would give them the two simple
sacraments — the outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual
grace — the initiatory baptism and the perpetual bond and sacrament of
fellowship — the Lord's Supper. The law of their service should be this :
" He that will be chief among you, let him be your servant".
Their unity, and, through their witness, the unity of all in all time who
might " believe on Him through their word ", should be in their Spiritual
Head. " I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected into one,
that the world may know that Thou didst send Me "-
As we follow Him to the cross, shrinking so humanly, and yet in His
sensitive nature so superhumanly too, we are brought to words which seem
to disclose something of His consciousness during the dark hours of suffer
ing. "Jesus, knowing that all things were now accomplished, that the
Scripture might be fulfilled, saith, ' I thirst ' ". At every step of His approach
to the cross, as indeed from His boyhood, doubtless, the Scriptures to be
fulfilled had been in His mind. "The law was in His heart". He said to
the disciples, you remember, at the Supper, — " the Son of Man goeth as it is
written of Him ". When they went out into the Mount of Olives again. He
said: " All ye shall be offended because of Me this night, for it is written,
I will smite the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered
abroad ". When they came to take Him, He forbade resistance, and said :
" Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to My Father and He shall pres
ently give Me more than twelve legions of angels ? But how then shall the
Scriptures be fulfilled that thus it must be ? " The dawning consciousness
of the Boy in the Temple had grown to this, as the consummation on earth
of the work His Father had given Him to do.
In all that tragedy He was not posing to fulfil the Scriptures, but sus
tained by the confidence that in all His suffering the Scriptures were being
fulfilled in Him. It was His meat to do the Father's will, and that
will was unrolled to Him in every experience even to the moment of
darkest, deepest depression, when His heart was overwhelmed within Him;
but He " could complain ", in words which were pressed out of His soul's
anguish: "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" When the
burning thirst consumed Him, He would naturally think in the very words
of another of those psalmist experiences which had always been as parts of
Himself. He remembered that this was the last drop in the cup. He
could express His last human need, and so He gasped, " I thirst". They
gave Him the vinegar to drink, and, with the physical strength revived for
the moment. He cried with a loud voice, — " Finished ".
We cannot doubt that this consciousness which He would not stupify
was in full vigor for that moment. The whole meaning of His past had been,
we may suppose, in His thought during the long dark hours.
He had counted off the history He had been making by the clock of

THE CRUCIFIXION— "IT IS FINISHED" 343
time. He had spoken repeatedly of His times. His hours. His day. He had
said in words best construed in their simplest meaning, " I must work the
works of Him that sent Me while it is day, the night cometh when no man
can work ". The night had come to Him and He was passing through it to
the new morning of His glory.
Finished therefore was His day's work in the body. He had put Himself
as the manifested God into human history, making a new day which
Abraham rejoiced to see, and beginning a new creation in the "Word"
made flesh, and saying to the moral chaos of a world, " Let light be ".
Finished was the Jewish age. In another moment the veil of the Temple
would be rent in twain. The scroll of law, psalm and prophecy would be
closed and sealed with His blood. It was complete in Him even from the
beginning, for the " seed of the woman had bruised the serpent's head".
Finished was the manifestation in His person of God's creative idea in
humanity. It had been evolving from the beginning in and through all the
Jewish history. He had caught the inspiration of the larger purpose, the
poetry of all the past and made it a reality in Himself. He had revealed
the new name " Father " in a real human relation made perfect by suffering,
achieved by faith, patience and courage. God was no longer to be remote
in the mocking beauty or the awful inexorableness of nature. He had been
brought near. " So loving the world that He gave His only begotten Son,
that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting
life ". Finished was the full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice for the sins of the
whole world, in His perfect obedience even unto the death of the cross.
Ebcacted in the eternal counsels of the divine righteousness, God was satis
fied in Him, and He had won the right in righteousness to bring men out
of the bondage of the old condemning law into the freedom of the Spirit,
even the " glorious liberty of children of God ".
Finished was the founding of His church in the hearts of His chosen
ones. " Other foundation could no man lay than that which was now laid "
in humanity. All that should be erected upon it in the history of organized
Christianity should be abiding only as it is built upon the "foundation of
the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner
stone". St. Peter, distinguished by our Lord Himself as the confessor of
a true faith, is entitled to tell us of our Lord's mind, and he has done it in
the words : " Unto whom coming, a living stone, rejected indeed of men, but
with God elect, precious, ye also, as living stones, are built up a spiritual
house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to
God through Jesus Christ. Because it is contained in Scripture,—' Behold,
I lay in Zion a chief corner stone, elect, precious, and He that believeth
on Him shall not be put to shame ' ".
All this was finished for us through the splendid faith of a perfect Son
of Man, who, in all and through all His work embodies the essential princi
ple of the faith He requires of us as essential to salvation. " Whosoever
will save His life shall lose it, but whosoever will lose His life for My sake,
the same shall save it ".

* THE RESURRECTION THE CROWNING FACT OF CHRISTIANITY.
t BY RE~^. HERBERT "WELOH:, D. T>.,
Pastor of the Chester Hill Methodist Episcopal Church, Mount
Vernon, N. Y.
It will be recalled that Harnack began his celebrated lectures on the
nature of Christianity by telling his students how important it was "to
remind mankind again and again that a man of the name of Jesus Christ
once stood in their midst ".t May not we add that it is likewise immensely
important to remind mankind again and again that one named Jesus Christ
once died and rose again from the dead ? For Strauss was not far wrong in
thinking that the doctrine of the resurrection was "the centre of the centre,
the real heart of Christianity ";§ at least this is true if the first Christians
understood at all adequately the religion which they were set to preach.
The two main topics of apostolic teaching were the death and the resur
rection of Jesus. "We preach Christ crucified", was the declaration of
Paul (i Cor. I : 23), but side by side with "the preaching of the cross"
(i Cor. 1:18) was the preaching of the empty tomb. In the synagogue of
Antioch in Pisidia (Acts 13:30-34), in that at Thessalonica (Acts 17: 3),
before the philosophers of Athens (Acts 17: 18-31), and before Festus and
Agrippa at Csesarea (Acts 26: 23), to Jew and to Gentile, learned and igno
rant, high and low, Paul made known his faith in the resurrection of Jesus,
and put that fact in the foreground of his preaching.
In doing this, he was making no new Gospel. " I delivered unto you",
he writes to the Corinthians, "that which also I received, how that Christ
died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried ;
and that He hath been raised on the third day, according to the Script
ures" (i Cor. 15:3, 4). Peter in the first Christian sermon ever preached,
did not forget repeated emphasis on the resurrection of Jesus (Acts 2 : 24-32) ;
and in Solomon's Porch (Acts 3 : 15), before the Jewish rulers (Acts 4: 10),
and in the house of Cornelius (Acts 10: 40), he bore like testimony. He
and Paul may fairly be taken as representing the drift of the public utter
ances of the apostles. "The Gospel of the kingdom", and "the word"
which they proclaimed must have included a large and emphatic statement
of these pivotal truths. The men who preached "the Lord Jesus" (Acts 11 :
20) at Antioch with such remarkable results doubtless gave in their story
as much prominence to the passion and the resurrection as the evangelists
give. Indeed, when the apostles were assured that they were to be "wit
nesses " of Christ to the ends of the earth (Acts i : 8), they obviously under-

*Delivered at the Eighth Conference, held at All Saints Memorial Church, May ii, 1904.
t President-Elect of Ohio Wesleyan University.
X What is Christianity ? (Eng. trans.), p. i.
§ Quoted by Mair, Stitdit's in tlie Christian Kvidi'nces, p. 232.
344

THE RESURRECTION. 345
stood that the chief fact (distinguishing fact from doctrine) to which they
were to bear witness, was His resurrection from the dead (Acts i : 22) ; and
we are shortly told that " with great power gave the apostles their witness
of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus" (Acts 4: 33).
The fact thus strongly and continually asserted occupied an eminent
place in the minds of those who heard and believed. The recognition of
the Lordship of Jesus, which Harnack calls one of the three characteristic
features of the earliest Christian society, grew, as he says himself,* from the
acceptation of the death and resurrection of Christ as fundamental facts.
To quote his own words, "The primitive community called Jesus its Lord
because He had sacrificed His life for it, and because its members were
convinced that He had been raised from the dead and was then sitting on
the right hand of God ".t By reason of its place, then, in the apostolic
preaching and in the primitive Christian faith, the resurrection may justly
be called the crowning fact of Christianity. In the matter of the death of
Jesus, the interpretation — the doctrine — is the vital thing ; while with the
resurrection, the question of the fact itself is crucial.
But in the second place, the resurrection occupies its pre-eminent
position in the Christian scheme, because as a fact it is most solidly attested.
In the presentation of the evidence John does not greatly differ froin the
other Gospels. The purpose of them all, as some one has remarked, is not
to give a history of the events of those eventful days, but to present proofs
of a central fact. Naturally, John, as Dr. Sanday puts it, " selects what had
taken the most personal hold on him ".t His attention seems to be concen
trated on a few individuals. He speaks of Mary Magdalene as if she went
alone to the sepulchre ; he adds to Luke's account of Peter's visit the state
ment that he himself was also there; and he gives details of both these
incidents which are elsewhere lacking. He teUs the story of Thomas'
doubt and faith ; he paints the picture of the seven by the Sea of Galilee, in
which Peter and himself again are prominent. His characteristic thoughts
and phrases appear, but his purpose is one with the other evangeHsts.
John's story is in harmony with the declared object of his whole Gospel
(John 20:31) — that of convincing his readers (i) of the historic truth of his
statements, as in the case of Thomas, and (2) of their spiritual value — "that
believing, ye may have life in His name" — as in the case of Peter. The his
toricity of the resurrection, then, is a thought which John shares and
enforces with the rest.
The prevalence of the belief has been already suggested. The Gospels
and the Epistles alike are stamped with it. And that it was the universal
conviction among the Christians of the second and the first generations is
confirmed, not, to be sure, by the observance of an Easter day, for though
it is quite possible that this began in the time of the apostles, it can not be
traced back farther than the second century with any certainty; but the

» op. cit., p. 166.
t Op. cit., p. 165.
t Art. Jesus Christ in Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, vol. -j, p. 640. Cf. Westcott, Introduction
to the Study of the Gospels, pp. 327-333.

346 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
inauguration of a weekly day of rejoicing on Sunday did take place at once,
and can have no other explanation than the belief that on this day the Lord
arose.* Strongest of all evidence, however, is the very existence of the Christian
Church itself. The disappointed, timid and disheartened disciples of Good
Friday were not material out of which to build a conquering church. Their
sudden transition from sorrow to joy, from gloom to hope, from weakness to
strength t can be explained only by some new faith which had been born in
their hearts. What could have instilled into them such vigor and such
confidence for their impossible task ? Let Baur answer ! " Nothing but the
miracle of the resurrection [by which he evidently means a belief in such
a miracle] could dispel the doubts which threatened to drive away the faith
of the disciples after its object into the eternal night of death * * * it
was in this faith that Christianity acquired a firm basis for its historical
development ".t Gibbon's five causes for the spread of Christianity are not
enough.? The " compact church organization " was good, but how did it
come about that there was any organization? The "pure morals" and the
" zeal of the early Christians " were good, but whence did they emerge into
life ? The " power of miracles " and the " belief in future rewards and pun
ishments " — did they spring from a Christ who was dead, buried, lost? The
apostles would have had no heart to preach a dead Christ and the world
would never have received Him if they had. Without the transformation
wrought by the belief in the resurrection of the Lord there would have been
no preachers, no converts, no church. All admit today that the Christian
Church was built upon a tomb believed to be empty — that the faith in the
resurrection of Jesus Christ created Christianity. It was more than a clever
retort which Talleyrand is reported to have made to the benevolent ration
alist who lamented to him the failure of his philanthropic propaganda. " What
was he to do? " he asked. And the witty ex-bishop "politely condoled with
him^ feared it was a difficult task to found a new religion, more difficult than
could be imagined, so difficult that he hardly knew what to advise 1 ' Still',^ —
so he went on after a moment's reflection, — ' there is one plan which you
might at least try: I should recommend you to be crucified, and to rise
again the third day ' ". II It was in this way that the disciples believed Jesus
Christ to have founded His religion, and it was this confidence which made
them fearless, persistent and triumphant.
This belief needs to be made clear, for let it be remembered that it is
upon this belief of the early Christians that we later Christians are depend
ent '"^ for our knowledge of the fact which underlies our faith. Harnack
would have us hold "the Easter faith", — "the conviction that the crucified
one gained a victory over death ; that He who is the first-born among many

*Art. Lord's Day in Hastings, op. cit,, vol. 3, p. 140.
t See e. g., Mair, op. cit,, p. 245.
X Church History, Eng. trans., vol. i, p. 42 (quoted by Stewart, Handbook of Christian Evidences,
p. 50). §Cf. Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2, pp. 17-19,
11 Natural Religion, p. 181 (quoted by Mair, op. cit., p. 231).
If Mair, op. cit,, p. 233.

THE RESURRECTION. 347
brethren still lives ", — even though " the Easter message " of the empty
tomb and the appearance of a transfigured Lord may be taken from us *.
The great thing, he would say, is to know that Christ now lives — not to dis
cover that He had a physical resurrection in the garden of Joseph. Now,
it is certainly true that the knowledge which particularly concerns us is not
that of the disposition of the Lord's body, but that of His continued life.
But how are we to gain this knowledge ? As Paul gained his, Harnack
would seem to answer. His faith was based upon a personal revelation of
the Son of God in him and to him. To rest our belief on anything less
personal and direct than this, on the unstable foundation afforded by the
stories of Paul and of the evangelists concerning the post-resurrection
appearances of Christ, is to expose it to destruction at the hands of criticism.
But, we ask once more, how are we to know that Christ is living, save
through the medium of these very appearances ? Our personal experience
does not bring an original knowledge of that fact. However much this
experience may at last cause the outward evidence to seem superfluous,
" none the less ", as Dr. Mason of Cambridge urges in his suggestive little
book, t "the first step to this blessed assurance [for the disciples] was that
they had seen, or believed that others had seen, the appearances of the risen
Lord ". And so it must be for us. Our faith, to be sane and sound, must
be based upon no mere impression, but an established fact.t The vision
of Paul, which caused him to declare at once that Jesus was the Son of
God (Acts 9 : 20), was of a quite exceptional character, never repeated there
after, as Harnack admits.? And yet, even this vision might not have been
so plain had the report of the empty grave not come to Paul's previous
knowledge, as Harnack himself will not deny. If our religion is to have
both positiveness and reasonableness, the question becomes one of supreme
importance — was the belief of the early Christians, which has come to us as
the foundation of our own faith and experience, based on literal truth or on
a delusion ?
If we go into the details of the Gospels to answer that question, we
seem to be in the midst of confusion. Ten discrepancies in these narratives
of the resurrection have been dwelt on since the day of Celsus, so Dean
Farrar tells us. II We read the four accounts, and find it hard to obtain an
exact story. How many women came to the tomb on that first Easter
morning, one or two or three or more? In one party or two? At what
hour precisely was the pious pilgrimage undertaken? Did the women
behold one or two mysterious visitors, and within or without the tomb ?
Did Peter only, or Peter and John make the journey to the garden in answer
to their summons ? Was the first appearance of the risen Christ to Peter,
or to Mary Magdalene, or to a group of women ? Were the later appear-

* op. cit,, pp. J73, 174.
t Christianity— What /r It > p. 98.
tCf. Dr. R. W. Dale, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels.
§ Op. cit., p. 174.
II The Life of Christ, vol. 2, p. 432.

348 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
ances chiefly in Galilee or around Jerusalem ? * Was the resurrection body a
material body, as the eating and drinking would suggest, or a spiritual body ?
In no part are the Gospel records so variant as here in the story of the
resurrection. Some of the difficulties can be reconciled by a fair and judi
cious study ; possibly all could be accounted for by a fuller knowledge than
is afforded us. But granting that some may remain, what facts are estab
lished by the testimony of these independent witnesses, who are not solici
tous to display an exact harmony in minor details, so confident are they that
they follow no cunningly devised fables ? Why, obviously, the great facts,
the essential facts — the third day,t the early hour, the women's visit, the
lack of expectation in the minds of them or of the apostles, the empty tomb,
the repeated appearances (nine or ten in all) of the Master Himself, the
slow yielding to unquestionable evidence by those who at first disbelieved.
To these momentous facts we have a united witness. How, then, otherwise
than on the basis of truth, can these recorded experiences be explained ?
All who deny the fact of the resurrection — if they are to be reckoned
serious students at all — hold to one of four theories : trance, legend, vision,
or telegram, t (i) The trance theory, maintaining that Jesus did not really
die, was killed by Strauss in an incisive passage, and need not be further
referred to. (2) The legend theory, which claims that the belief in the resur
rection was a later growth — the result of certain vivid and picturesque state
ments of the apostles' faith that Jesus was surely alive — is too evidently in
contradiction to the records and the facts to need consideration. (3) The
vision theory, which has found many adherents, was fathered by Renan,
who made Mary Magdalene the giver to the world of a risen God, and by
Strauss, who argued from the visionary character of Paul's sight of Jesus on
the Damascus Road that the other post-resurrection appearances of Jesus
were of the same sort, subjective and unreal. The objections to this theory
of hallucination are briefly: {a) that there was not tne preparation for such
visions, the lapse of time or the state of expectancy which would make such
visions natural ; (b) that there was not the duration or form which would
characterize such visions, the appearances being confined within six weeks,
being few in number, indoors and out, to groups and even crowds of men,
and, to a degree, as Keim has remarked, cool and unfamiliar ; and {c) that
there was not the termination which would naturally come to such visions,
bringing on a reaction, leaving the subjects dull and apathetic, but that
these limited, clear and tested appearances left the disciples resolute, pur
poseful, active. (4) The telegram theory, as Bruce has termed Keim's
proposed solution, would make these visions still unreal, but objective — a
kind of picture message from heaven to assure the disciples of their Lord's
continued life and love. But this theory, while involving supernatural

* Sanday, op, cit,, p. 640.
t Cf. Acts 10 ; 40; T Cor. 15 : 4.
J On the general subject of these theories, see Mair, o/. cit., pp. 249-253 ; Stewart, op. cit., pp. 53-55 ;
Sanday, fl/. c^y., p. 641 ; Gilbert, The StudcnC s Life of Jesns,-^\t. 0,01,^02; Edersheim, The Life and Times
nf Jesns,the Messiah, vo\, 2, pp. 625-629; Bruce, .^/(j/fl.^c^/(\s-. pp. 385-398; Barrows, The Gospels Are
Trite Histories, pp. 103-146.

THE RESURRECTION. 349
action as fully as the resurrection itself, labors under the great disadvantage
of tampering with the Gospel narratives, and, in addition, of making the
divine sender of these messages responsible for a sure misunderstanding on
the part of the disciples and the consequent propagation of a false notion.
On the other hand, if the natural explanation of the early Christian
faith be accepted, if Jesus in very truth did rise from the dead, how easily all
things fit together!* The character of Jesus, holy and unique, encourages
us to believe of Him what we would not believe of others. t " It was
not possible that He should be holden of death " (Acts 2 :24). The proph
ecies of Jesus Himself, contained, as they are, not only in the triple
tradition of the synoptists, t but in isolated passages § and in the fourth
Gospel as well (John 2 : 19-21), help us to believe the angelic word, " He is
risen, even as He said " (Matt. 28 : 6). The testimony of the astounded
guards, the sober character of the discrepant records, with their unconscious
witness to the excitement and confusion of the time;ll the belief of the
disciples, after tests by eye and ear and hand as to the reality of the bodily
presence of their Master — these unite to make plain that we are dealing
with fact, not fiction. The adaptation of the Gospel of a risen Christ to
humanity makes for the truth of the teaching, and the broad conviction that,
whatever incidental errors might find their way into believers' minds,^ the
God of truth would not allow the religion of Jesus Christ to be founded on
a delusion. Despite all the unwillingness to accept a miracle that may mark
this age of science, we may heartily agree with a scientist like Prof. W. N.
Rice in his conclusion : " When we consider that, but for the faith in the
resurrection, Christianity would have been buried forever in the rock-hewn
tomb in which the Master lay, and when we try to measure what Christianity,
with its revelation of divine fatherhood and human brotherhood, and
redemption from sin and life immortal, has been to mankind in these cen
turies of Christendom and Christian civilization, and what it promises to be
in the glory of a millennial future, we cannot deem it ' a thing incredible '
that, in that transcendent crisis of man's moral history, ' God should raise
the dead"'.b Yes, the interests to be served were vast. The resurrection is the
crowning fact of Christianity not only because of its place in apostolic
preaching and primitive Christian faith, not only because of the solidity of
its evidence, but because of its relations to the doctrine and continued life
of the church.": Four such relations may be specified as illustrate the out
come of the resurrection :

* Mair, op. cit., pp. 234-249.
t Barrows, op. cit., pp. 64-67; Rice, Christian Faith in an Age of Science, pp. 357-359.
JMatt. 20: 19 with Mark 10: 34, and Luke 18: 33; Matt. 16:21 with Mark 8: 31 and Luke 9:22.
§Matt. 12 : 40; 27: 63; Matt. 17; 9 with Mark 9:9; Matt. 17: 23 with Mark 9: 31; Matt. 26: 32 with
Mark 14: 28.
II Stewart, op. cit., p. 52.
a See e. g,, McGiffert, The Apostolic Age, pp. 36-44.
b Op. cit,, p. 360.
c Cf. Sanday, op, cit,, p. 642. The results of a loss of belief in the resurrection are depicted in strong,
but hardly too lurid, colors by Mr. Guy Thome in his recent novel, *' When It Was Dark ".

35° THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
(i) The relation of the resurrection to the miraculous. If this one
miracle is once firmly established, the a priori improbability, of which
Hume made so much, may be considered fairly met and mastered ; the way
is open for an impartial consideration of all alleged miracles on their indi
vidual evidence. Professor Rice, in the able and stimulating volume
already quoted, goes so far as to say that " our chief reason for believing
in any other miracle as historic, is that the strong evidence for the resur
rection suffices to establish a probability that miracle is a part of the
divine plan of revelation ";* and I believe he is right. Nay, more, it sug
gests in a wider way that the observed and experienced order of nature is
not so limited by our knowledge of it, or so fixed and invariable by some
eternal decree concerning it, that nothing unprecedented can be expected
or believed. It makes one humble and teachable to remember that he has
to do with the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Harnack may believe
in an " inviolable " order of nature, and may insist that the feeling of free
dom in God's world which the religious man enjoys — the certainty " that he
is not shut up within a blind and brutal course of nature ", but that he
deals with a power who sometimes (as we see it) breaks through or arrests
that order — that this feeling is but a fancy or a metaphor;t but if he
accepted the resurrection as literal truth, he could strike out the word
"inviolable" Historically, God has manifested Himself for special ends
in miraculous works wrought through human hands ; in present experience,
God does manifest Himself in ways that are startling and incomprehensible
to the little thoughts of the finite. Christianity is something more than the
feeble human attempt to obey the teachings and to imitate the spirit of
Jesus of Nazareth. If it means anything, it means " God with us ". A
Christianity with no surprises, no incredibilities, is a Christianity with no
power. But the resurrection of Jesus Christ opens the door to faith in the
supernatural in human affairs. Spiritual experiences are real. Providence
and prayer are real, temporalities as well as spiritualities are in the hands
of a Father, unto whom " in everything " our requests may be made known.
The " order of nature " is His servant, not His master, and the universe
shall be moulded to meet His children's need.
(2) Look, again, at the relation of the resurrection to the teaching of
Jesus. It is asserted by many today that the only test of religion is experi
ence — that a truth must become to us truth as it shines in its own inherent
light, that it must commend itself in the fashion of an axiom, so as to be
recognized when seen. By none has this teaching been more strongly and
persuasively set forth than by the late Auguste Sabatier, in his monumental
work, " Religions of Authority", only recently translated into English. He
will have nothing of a religion based on external authority, authenticated by
miracle and the like. The appeal must be the direct appeal of the Spirit of
God to the spirit of man. Jesus, he says, brought in no new religious ideas.
His one secret was in His consciousness of Sonship in the Father, and His

* op. cit,, p. 352.
t Op, cit,, pp. 29-30.

THE RESURRECTION. 351
one work was to communicate this consciousness to His followers. The
historical element, as concerns both the works and the words of Jesus, is
depreciated, as it was earlier by, for example. Professor T. H. Green, of
Oxford. The ideas of God and man and their relations which we Christians
have, are, so this school contends, " self-evidencing and eternal, and possess
an inherent truth and vitality entirely independent of the accidental vehicle
through which they were introduced into the consciousness of mankind ".
Such teachers, we gladly admit, have a spiritual message which is whole
some for our age, even in its defects ; but such teachers, we must urge, do
not know men as Jesus Christ knew them. He also laid stress upon the
direct appeal to the human heart — " Beheve me". He cries, "that I am in
the Father, and the Father in Me " — as if He would ask, " Can you not see
it ? Do you not feel it to be so ? " And yet He recognized that men could
not all and everywhere and always rise by pure hearts and clear eyes to see
the truth immediately as it was in Him. And He adds a second reason —
" Or else believe Me for the very works' sake " (John 14 : 1 1). He does not
disdain the testimony of external signs and witnesses. To the. multitude of
the ignorant and the sinful the pure message needs to be authenticated by
the works — stamped with the authority of the Teacher sent from God.
And many profess, with Nicodemus, " We know that Thou art a teacher
come from God ; for no man can do these signs that Thou doest, except
God be with him " (John 3 : 2). The miraculous accompaniments of
the life of Jesus may prepare the way for His message, and then add
impressiveness to it. This has been weU put by Professor Rice, whose
words I must once more quote : " The evidence of miracle is still valid and
still needed. We stand in an upper room in Jerusalem, and listen to the
words with which the young Prophet of Galilee comforted His disciples on
the last night of His life : ' Let not your heart be troubled ; ye believe in
God, believe also in Me. In My Father's house are many mansions : if it
were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And
if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto
Myself ; that where I am there ye may be also '. Beautiful words, in their
sweet simplicity, and in their accord with our highest moral sentiment, our
holiest aspirations. Words so beautiful ought to be true. But are they the
words of one who speaks with authority and whose word can be trusted, or
are they only the sweet dreams of a spirit too pure and gentle for this hard,
rough world ? To us, as to those disciples who heard Him, the evidence of
the authority of His teaching is found in the fact of His resurrection ".*
(3) Consider, also, the relation of the resurrection to the question of
the person of Jesus Christ. Whether the secret of that personality be con
ceived as residing in the filial consciousness of Jesus, or in His metaphysi
cal relation to the Father, the full declaration of the personality awaited this
supreme event in His history. He was " declared to be the Son of God by
the resurrection from the dead " (Rom. i : 4). The intimations of His Mes
siahship had been repeatedly given, and statements had been made bearing

* Op. cit., p. 384.

352 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
upon the deeper mysteries of His nature. But the truth did not yet become
plain to His disciples. " The conviction was gradually formed ", writes
Dr. Mason,* "until at last, after the resurrection, the disciple who had,
perhaps, been slowest to believe the Easter tidings, because he felt more
than others the stupendous nature of the Easter belief which he instinctively
felt must lie behind it, gave expression to that which was thenceforth the
belief of Christendom. ' My Lord ', he said — as he had doubtless said
many times before — recognizing the identity of the risen Jesus ; and then he
sprang to the height of that confession which human lips had never as yet
uttered, although every disciple's heart had silently been ripening to utter
it — the confession that his Lord was his God ". It was only the risen Lord
whom the disciples knew as divine. It was Christ with the majesty of the
opened tomb upon Him who commanded the reverential awe of the apos
tles, so that He who for three years had been the object of love now became
also the object of worship. It was after the resurrection and because of
the resurrection that, to borrow Dr. Sanday's words, not here and there,
one and another, "but the whole Christian Church passed over at once to
the fixed belief that He was God "-
(4) Finally, let not the relation of the resurrection to the saving work
of Jesus be forgotten. Without the death of Jesus there is no Gospel ; with
out His resurrection there is no assurance of the Gospel's truth. The resur
rection put the seal on the work of Jesus, as well as on His person. His
death and resurrection were both " according to the Scriptures " (1 Cor.
15:7), that is, they had a divine meaning, a setting in a long providential
order.t They completed and authenticated the plan of redemption. The
work of Jesus was now not only humanly finished, but divinely accepted.
The "martyr" became evidently a Saviour.
The question of the victory of goodness was settled once for all. Jesus
had bidden the disciples "be of good cheer", for He had "overcome the
world" (John 16:33). But hard upon the words followed the awful death,
the seeming failure and defeat. Sadly they confessed to a hope for God's
kingdom which had died and been buried with their Master (Luke 24:21).
Utter purity had seemed to be helpless in a world of sin, and righteous
ness, in its one supreme manifestation, to be impotent. But then comes a
change. Jesus Christ is to be "placarded before the eyes " of men (Gal,
3 : 1), not simply as the crucified, not as the dead leader of a lost cause, but
as a living king under whose feet one more enemy — the last and greatest —
has been trampled (i Cor. 15 : 26 ; 2 Tim. i : 10). His crucifixion has seemed
to be a token of weakness ; His living again is a token of God's might (2
Cor. 13 : 4). There is a power behind and in His resurrection (Phil. 3 : 10),
a " mighty power " shown in that working "which God wrought in Christ
when He raised Him from the dead " (Eph. i : 20) — a power sufficient to
every need of the great enterprise which is now begun. "All power is
given unto Me ", cries the risen Lord, " go ye, therefore " (Matt. 28 : 18, 19).

* Op, cit,, p. 106.
t Mason, op, cit,, p. 84.

THE RESURRECTION. ' 353
Nothing is now too good to be believed, nothing too great to be attempted.
Righteousness is vindicated as the mastering force of the universe. The
death of Jesus is seen to be only an example under the general rule of
" dying to live ". Obstacles can be despised, enemies loved, death itself
faced without terror, for Jesus Christ has confronted and conquered all.
To the disheartened soldier comes the glad tidings that his captain has not
quit the field. In the exultant words of another, "All the wealth of His
deep interest. His spacious human sympathy. His rich tenderness of dis
position, His inspiring hopefulness. His invincible energy, and the strength
of His redemptive purpose, have been untouched by the desolating hand of
death. There they are just behind the veil, which half conceals and half
reveals them. The world's greatest asset is still valid. The one Spirit
whom failure could not daunt nor despondency enervate is still there. The
one Being whose beauty could subdue the worst, whose love could melt the
hardest into contrite penitence, and who held the key to every man's heart,
is alive, interested, active, sympathetic. That surely is the spring of our
largest hope, the root of our assured confidence, the ground of our invinci
ble optimism ". He was " declared to be the Son of God with power by
the resurrection from the dead " (Rom. i :4).
But this power of God, exerted in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, is to
be the pledge not only of the victory of the kingdom, but of the transforma
tion of the individual believer. The kingdom is to spread within as well as
without. Jesus " was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for
our justification " (Rom. 4 : 25). So close is the truth of the resurrection to
the spiritual life that he who accepts with his heart the resurrection of Jesus
(with all that that implies of Saviourhood and Lordship) shall be saved
(Rom. 10:9; Col. 2:12). The resurrection of Jesus was more than a figure
of the rising from the death of sin to the life of righteousness ; it was also a
means to this resurrection of the believer by his mystical union with the
risen Christ (Rom. 6 : 4-10). It was a Gospel of the death and resurrection
of Jesus by which the Corinthians were saved (i Cor. 15 : 1-4), and it will be
such a Gospel that will in every age have power enough to transform lives,
and vitality enough to transmit itself to a generation yet to come. "The
God of Peace " it is, " that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus ",
who will " make you perfect in every good work to do His will, working in
you that which is well-pleasing in His sight " (Heb. 13 : 20, 21).
The resurrection of Jesus, moreover, is a pledge of the completion of
His work of grace by the coronation of the spiritual life with the final
gift of immortality. Jesus is but "the first-fruits of them that slept"
(i Cor. 15 : 20). " Because I live, ye shall live also " is His message to His
own.* The thought of the future was purified and elevated above the
material plane by the exhibition of that resurrection body with its strange
pneumatic qualities, and the obvious suggestion that the resurrection life
was no return to former condition, as the Jews had naturally thought, but the
beginning of a new and glorified life.t But more than this, the resurrection

*Cf. 1. Thess. 4: 14; I Cor. 6: 14; 2 Cor. 4: 14.
* Mason, op. cit., pp. 95-98. Gilbert, op. cit., pp. 400 ff.

3S4 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
of Jesus has given to the world its clearest assurance of any life beyond the
grave. The Gospel through which " life and immortality were brought to
light" (2 Tim. 1 : 10) was the Gospel of the empty grave. Even Harnack
says, in words that glow with feeling: "Whatever may have happened at
the grave, and in the matter of the appearances, one thing is certain : This
grave was the birthplace of the indestructible belief that death is vanquished
and there is a life eternal. It is useless to cite Plato ; it is useless to point to
the Persian religion, and the ideas and literature of later Judaism. All that
would have perished, and has perished, but the certainty of the resurrection
and of a life eternal which is bound up with the grave in Joseph's garden
has not perished, and on the conviction that Jesus lives we still base the
hopes of citizenship in an eternal city which make our earthly life worth
living and tolerable ".* In the confidence that He has gone to prepare a
place, we may still repeat the unwavering words of Browning:
" O Saul, it shall be
A Face lilce my face that receives thee ; a Man like to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by forever ; a Hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee I See the Christ stand ! " t
The Christianity that in history has proved a conquering power lies not
merely in the things which Jesus said, as Harnack would have us believe ;
not merely in the things which Jesus felt as a Son of God, as Sabatier would
teach us ; but in what He said and felt and was and did ; and these aU find
their climax and their' crown in His resurrection from the dead. " Blessed
be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which, according to His
abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrec
tion of Jesus Christ from the dead " (i Pet. i : 3).
" One thing
Remained, however, — one that tasked
My soul to answer; and I asked
Fairly and frankly, what might be
That History, that Faith, to mel^X
" In the biography of Dr. Dale there is the record of an experience
which is one of the great things in our modern Christian life. He was
writing an Easter sermon, and when half way through the thought of the
risen Lord broke in upon him as it had never done before. ' Christ is
alive ', I said to myself; 'alive', and then I paused; ' alive ', and then I
paused again ; ' alive ! Can that really be true ? Living as really as I
myself am ? ' I got up and walked about, repeating, ' Christ is living, Christ
is living ! ' At first it seemed strange and hardly true, but at last it came
upon me as a burst of sudden glory ; yes, Christ is living. It was to me a
new discovery. I thought that all along I had believed it, but not until that
moment did I feel sure about it. I then said, ' My people shall know it ; I
shall preach about it again and again, until they believe it as I do now ' ".

* Op. cit., p. 175.
\,Saul, 18.
X Browning, Christmas Eve and Easter Day, 14.

THE RESURRECTION. 355
The need of the hour is to make the resurrection not simply a historical
fact, accepted by the intellect as proved, but a real truth in the heart and
conscience, manifested in a life surrendered to the dominion of a risen
Lord and spent in the fellowship of a living Friend.

* THE TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER OF THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO
ST. JOHN.
by rev. henry q. -weston, x>. x).,
President of Crozer Theological Seminary, Chester, Penn.
There has been some difference of opinion among learned men as to
the writer of this chapter, the time of its composition and its relation to the
preceding portion of the Gospel. A study ' of the chapter will show that it
constitutes an organic part of the Gospel, that it is the appropriate epilogue
demanded by the prologue, if these terms may be used, and that it has all
the peculiar characteristics of the Gospel. The external evidence against it
is weak, and the internal evidence decisive in its favor.
The Gospel of John is the Gospel of the manifestation of Christ. This
chapter contains an account of His final manifestation to His disciples. It
is the third manifestation (not appearance) after His resurrection. It differs
from the two preceding, first, in that it is not made to the assembled disci
ples, but to a select number — seven ; second, that it is a manifestation by a
miracle. The miracles in this Gospel differ in several respects from those
recorded by the Synoptists. They are much fewer in number, only eight ;
with the single exception of the court officer's child, they are self moved,
not demanding faith on the part of the recipient, nor wrought primarily for
the recipient's benefit. There is no prohibition of publicity ; on the contrary,
they are signs, and as such, are wrought for the express purpose of being
known. As the Gospel of John is the Gospel of the future, the miracles are
all promises and prophecies. They are manifestations of His glory, of the
glory that is to be revealed, of which His church is to be partaker (i Peter
5: 1,4, 10).
The miracle with which this chapter opens is a manifestation of the
glory that shall be revealed. Compare it with a similar miracle wrought at
the beginning of the church's work. You will find the account in the fifth
chapter of the Gospel according to Luke. It is the prophecy of the work of
the church during this age. Christ is in the boat ; a great number of all
kinds of fishes are caught ; the products of the cast are taken into the boat,
which begins to sink ; the church is imperiled by its very success. These
fishes are good and bad ; the separation awaits the time when the angels
shall come forth and sever the wicked from among the just. In the miracle
we are studying, the Lord is on the shore ; the fishes are drawn, not into the
boat, but to the land; they are not an unknown multitude, of unknown
quality, good and bad; they are all great fishes the exact number of which
is known, a hundred and fifty and three. It is the manifestation of the

* Delivered at the Seventh Conference, held at the Central Congregational Church, April 13, 1904.
356

THE TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER. 357
glory of that morning when the night shall have been spent and the long
looked-for day has come ; when Christ appears to consummate salvation ;
when the church, holy and without blemish, without spot or wrinkle or any
such thing, takes her place as Christ's bride. At the marriage feast, there
is manifested that peculiar characteristic of the work of salvation, the blessed
union of the human and divine, the joint results of those who have been
workers together with God and of Him who has been working in them of
His good pleasure. " As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a
fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon and bread, and the Lord said to
them, bring of the fish which ye have now caught ". So may God grant
that He speak to us.
But if He is so to speak to His church, there must be time for the
church both to make herself ready for the marriage supper of the Lamb, and
time to provide for that portion of the feast which she is to furnish. The
marriage feast was not possible on the day of Pentecost ; it could not come
in the first century ; the delay of our Lord's coming, as Peter tells us, is for
salvation (2 Peter 3 : 15). There must be long years of faith and hope and
prayer and work during which the church must fit itself and be fitted for its
high estate, and its members be gathered in from the ranks of the world-
This long time is a season, not of idle expectation, gazing up into heaven,
but of work and warfare and suffering for Christ, of laying hold of that for
which the church was laid hold of by Jesus Christ, a time in which every
building, fitly framed together is growing into a holy temple in the Lord,
all Christians being builded together into a habitation of God through the
Spirit. To this end Christ sanctifies Himself. He continually works in His
people by the washing of regeneration and by their daily renewal by the Holy
Spirit. The end at which He is aiming can not be attained without the
constant co operation of the church itself. This principle holds in every
form of human attainment. No money, care, or effort can educate a boy
without the boy's own earnest endeavor. To the church Christ gives the
commission with which the Gospel according to John closes, just as the first
Gospel closes with the other great commission to disciple all the nations.
But, you say, Christ is here addressing Peter. Yes, but not to Peter as an
individual were the three directions which we are about to study given any
more than the commission in Matthew is given to the eleven. The apostles
did not go into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature ; on
the contrary, when the first persecution broke out against the church in
Jerusalem, all were dispersed, except the apostles.
A careful perusal of the Gospels will show you that wherever Christ
segregates the apostles, or a portion of them, and gives them instruction.
He always addresses them as the prospective church, and the directions He
gives cover the whole dispensation. The threefold trust committed to Peter
when they had breakfasted is no more committed to him as an individual
than were the keys of the kingdom as related in the sixteenth chapter of
Matthew. The keys of the kingdom were committed to the church which

358 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
still holds them ; no man enters the kingdom except through the instrumen
tality of the church. Peter was chosen by Christ to be the representative
and mouth-piece of the twelve apostles who stood before him as the pro
spective church.
In the words addressed by Christ to Peter as the representative of the
church there are a threefold question, a threefold answer, and a consequent
threefold charge.
Why is this question asked, and why is it asked three times ?
Because the one fundamental, essential, indispensable qualification for
those to whom the church is to be intrusted is love to Christ. The charge
is the committal of love, by love, to love.
The first question differs from the other two. " Simon, son of John,
lovest thou Me more than these ? " Scholars tell us that " so far as grammar
goes ", this may mean either " Lovest thou Me more than the other disciples
love Me ? " or, " Lovest thou Me more than all thy earthly possessions, all thy
earthly loves?" Grammar may not decide, but something higher than
grammar does. Can any father imagine himself asking his child, " Do you
love me more than your brothers and sisters do ? " Would any father, if
such a question were put, desire a child to say "yes " ? Is a candidate for
the ministry ever asked whether he loves Christ more than his brethren in
the ministry do ? If he were to answer in the affirmative, he would surely
show his unfitness for the office to which he aspires. No, the question of
Christ is, " Do you love Me so much that you will forsake all and follow
Me"? This question Peter could answer with all his heart, " Yea, Lord,
Thou knowest that I love Thee".
Three times is this question repeated. I am sorry to say that nearly all
the commentators whom I have consulted agree that Christ intends in this
way to remind Peter of his threefold denial. It is presumption in me to
differ with such, a body of learned men, yet I confess that I can not adopt
their opinion. I can not believe that this question, never a proper one
except from the lips of love, was repeated three times by Christ in order to
mortify and humiliate Peter by reminding him of the one awful sin of his
life. It seems to me inconsistent with the nature of Christ, with the methods
of God, and with all the dealings of Christ with Peter before and after his
denial. And I ask you, do you believe it? If you had been in Christ's place at
this time, if you had a friend to whom you were about to entrust those whom
you loved more than life ; if this friend under the pressure of temptation in
the darkest hour the world ever saw, an hour which above all others was the
hour and power of darkness, had denied that he knew you, if your one
prayer for that friend in view of that hour had been that his faith in you
might not fail, and that prayer had been answered, so that one look from
you had broken his heart and he had hastened to your side, would you, in
the presence of his and your friends as you were about to confer on him
the greatest possible mark of your love and confidence, would you remind
him of his fault? You would not allow him to allude to it. You would

THE TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER. 359
despise yourself if at such a time you would thus humiliate him. All that to
you is as though it had never been.
Beloved, do you know how God forgives ?
Some time ago, I had a grandchild spending a year in my family. One
day, little Grace came to the daughter who had the special oversight of her,
with a request for some favor. " No " was the reply, "you have been a
naughty girl and you can not have it ".
She came to her the next week and said, "Aunt, I have been a good
girl now. May I not do that? "
" Yes, you may, but you were not a good girl last week".
" Oh, aunt Dora, you are not a bit like God. When God forgives any
one. He does not keep flinging it up to him afterwards". Out of the
mouths of babes and sucklings God ordains praise.
Oh, beloved, do you know how God forgives ? Hear Him : " I have
blotted out as a thick cloud thy transgressions ". You have seen a dark
cloud on the face of the sky with its clearly defined outlines ; you turn away,
think of something else, look back again and the cloud has disappeared.
There is no scar on the fair face of the heavens ; no man can ever tell where
it has been or trace its outline ; it has vanished. You have stood on the
deck of a steamer and cast something into the ocean. The waters close
over it. It has left no seam on the bosom of the waters ; no eye will ever
again see it. Listen, "Thou wilt cast all their sins into the depths of the
sea ". You have read that wonderful prayer recorded in the fifty-first Psalm :
"Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow". I have ridden through the
forest on a bright winter morning after a snowstorm, and as I admired the
beauty of the snow glittering in the sunlight, I have said, " Snow, thou art
dazzlingly white, but I know something whiter ; my soul washed in the blood
of Jesus ".
Are you still unconvinced ? Look at the way in which our Lord dealt
with Peter before and after his denial. At the last supper, Christ says,
" Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to have you that he may sift you as
wheat ; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not ". Mark the " you "
and the " thee " ; mark also, that He does not pray that Peter may be kept
from the commission of the sin, but that after the sin his faith may not fail.
What place that sin had in the great work wrought on Calvary we can only
conjecture. At any rate, the question which God asks the sinner is not,
" What have you done ? " but, " What will you now do?" The decisive question
with each one of us will be, not " Did you sin ? " but, " What did you do after
you sinned?" Those of us who have had experience in dealings with our
brethren who look back on a life spent in the professed service of God with
such bitter condemnation as is sometimes felt, know what it is to pray and
exhort "that thy faith fail not". This made the difference between Peter
and Judas. Both had fearfully sinned. Both repented. The repentance of
Judas, tried by the best human standards was unexceptionable. He con
fessed to his partners in sin the awful crime he had committed. He would
not retain the wages of his wrong doing, but flung the pieces of silver down

36o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
on the pavement. He had no faith that God would forgive him and so he
could not forgive himself. You know the result.
How does Christ treat Peter before and after his denial ? In Matthew,
as we have seen. He prays that his faith may not fail. In Mark, Christ's first
message to His disciples is, " Go tell His disciples and Peter that He goeth
before you to Galilee " ; in Luke, " The Lord has risen indeed and has
appeared unto Simon ". Paul tells us that " He appeared to Cephas, then
to the twelve ".
It is very strange when one sees how Christ dealt with Peter, what
special affection He lavished upon him, with what great interests He
entrusted him, that public speakers so often seem incapable of pronouncing
his name without prefixing some opprobrious epithet. He is characterized
as "impetuous Peter", "fickle Peter", and I know not what. Why not,
once in a while, follow the example of Him who said, " Blessed art thou,
Simon Barjona ; flesh and blood hath not revealed this to thee, but My
Father, who is in heaven". I wish I could once hear from the pulpit,
"Blessed Peter".
The reply of Peter to the inquiry of Christ is the best possible ; " Lord,
Thou knowest all things; Thou knowest that I love Thee ". Christ's reply
is His first charge to Peter, " Feed My lambs ". What words could be more
welcome to Peter's ears. Love's one wish is to be asked to do something
for the person loved. What words could be sweeter than those which Christ
here speaks ? It would be difficult to imagine another sentence of the same
length that would convey more of the heart of Christ, of His feeling toward
Peter, of the place which those for whom He is providing hold in His
affections, " My lambs ". I commend these words as themes of meditation
to those of you whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditate in
that law day and night.
The word " feed " in this charge is by no means to be restricted to
instruction. That the young Christian needs instruction goes without saying.
But the food which a child eats may be of the best, and yet the child become
a source of grief and shame. The moral atmosphere which he breathes, the
influences which surround him, the example which is continually before him,
these are the things which determine whether he is to break his parents'
heart or be a comfort, an honor and a blessing. Character is determined
by the family nurture and training. Wherever there is a Samuel ministering
before the Lord, there is always a Hannah. Even our Lord Himself, if He
is to come into the world as a child can not come until there has been time
to produce a father, a righteous man, and above all, a mother, blessed of
the Lord, who could sing to Him those songs which have been the canticles
of the church in all ages. The character of the church in which the young
Christian is nurtured determines his character and destiny. If he receive
the right influence, example, instruction, he will be, in his sphere, what the
church is, the light of the world.
It is very important to remember that Peter is not addressed here as an
individual, not as a minister, but as the representative of the church. This

THE TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER. 361
direction of our Lord, " Feed My lambs ", is given to the church ; to all in
her who in their various relations and with their various gifts and graces
have to do with shaping in any way the character and conduct of the young
members. These words are as binding on parents, Sunday school teachers,
experienced and influential members of the church, on all who can be of
service to the young Christian.
" He saith to him the second time, Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me?
He saith to Him, yea. Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee. He saith to
him. Shepherd My sheep ".
The verb and the noun are both changed. Lambs have become sheep,
the persons for whom Christ is making provision are no longer children
under the constant care of those who love them and watch over them; they
are out in the world, bearing the burden and heat of the day, contending
against wickedness in the church and the world, exposed to all the influences
which Satan can bring to bear upon them, breathing the atmosphere of a
world at enmity with God, walking necessarily in its soiling paths, needing
— Oh, how much ! — shepherding. In this Gospel of John you will notice that
the favorite terms which Christ uses to express the relation between Him
self and His church are " shepherd " and " sheep ". Why is this ? A sheep
is notoriously the most irrational, if I may be pardoned for the word, the
"dumbest" of animals. All other animals maybe trained; I have heard
even of trained fleas, but who ever heard of a trained sheep ? If a sheep
wander from the fold, which it is certain to do if left to itself, it does not
know enough to return ; unless the shepherd seek it, it will perish ; it has no
means of defence; it is the most helpless, as it is the most foolish of
animals. The only thing that can be said of it, and, blessed be God, the
only thing that need be said of it to make it very dear to the heart of Christ
is, "They hear the shepherd's voice and they follow him"
The office of shepherd, outside the Bible, carries with it no idea of
honor or comfort. The shepherd's duties are unending. Other men, how
ever arduous their duties, have their hours of rest. The darkness summons
them to the place to which they hasten where they sit in quiet and comfort
with those they love, and then lie down for the sleep so sweet to the laboring
man. But the duties of the shepherd are unending. The darkness summons
him to more vigilant watch against the wild beast prowling around the
sheepfold and the robber watching his opportunity to steal and kill and
destroy. Nay, the good shepherd must give his life for the sheep. The
man who will not do this is a hireling and not a shepherd. Can you wonder
that in this Gospel of love the favorite terms of Christ are shepherd and
sheep ? I can not better describe the manner in which the charge of Christ
is to be obeyed than by repeating the words which are constantly in the
mouth of Paul as he urges upon those to whom he writes the duty of comfort
ing, (in the old sense of the EngUsh word— strengthening), encouraging,
rebuking, reproving, exhorting. What can I do better than to quote the
words in which Paul enforces his idea of the duties of a shepherd in his
solemn parting address to the elders at Ephesus ?— " Take heed to yourselves

362 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
and to all the flock in which the Holy Spirit appointed you overseers, to
shepherd the church of God, which He purchased with His own blood ; I
know that after my departure gfrievous wolves will enter in among you, not
sparing the flock; and from among yourselves will men arise, speaking
perverse things to draw away the disciples after them. Wherefore watch,
remembering that for the space of three years, night and day, I ceased not
to admonish every one with tears ".
Guarding the flock is not the only, indeed not the chief, duty of the
shepherd. He must lead his flock in green pastures that all their spiritual
wants be met. This, it is needless to say, can be done only by Christ fill
ing the soul. His flesh is meat, indeed, and His blood is drink, indeed.
He satisfies all the instincts of the renewed nature.
The guide of the flock must so love Christ that those to whom he
preaches must have Christ fill their hearts. This can be accomplished only
by a loving heart presenting the object of love. Doctrine and dogma and
theory and philosophy and argument, however correct, will not convince the
opponent or meet the necessities of the inquirer or the indifferent. Christ
must be preached in love, by love. The one question comes home again to
any wishing a commission from Christ, " Lovest thou Me ? "
This is the reason why Christ asks this question three times. It is to
emphasize the all-abiding necessity of this one qualification for Christian
service, a necessity essential in every form of service to every age and con
dition. Peter was grieved at the threefold repetition of the inquiry, natur
ally grieved, because he did not understand the great compass of the words
addressed to him. He did not dream that these questions and charges
stretched over centuries, that they would be the guide of the church for all
coming time.
One class of Christ's sheep yet remains. Our Lord has given special
directions for the young and for the fuUgrown ; there is a class for which
in our ordinary church life no special provision is made. We take care
for the young, the various organizations formed for their benefit are before
us continually. Next to them our sermons, our prayers, our efforts are
inspired by the men and women in active life. When a pastor is to be
chosen, I need not repeat the inquiry which is sure to be heard. Yet the
Bible lays great stress on the duty which is owed to the aged, inculcates for
them great respect, and breathes its blessing on those who love and care
for them. One may be sure that in our Lord's provision for His church the
aged will not be neglected.
" He saith to him the third time, Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me ?
Peter was grieved because He said to him the third time, Lovest thou Me ?
He said to Him, Lord, Thou knowest all things. Thou knowest that I love
Thee. Jesus saith to him. Feed My sheep ".
Again the verb and the noun are changed. The verb is the same that
is used in connection with the lambs, for the duty is very much the same ;
the noun, scholars tell us, is the diminutive of the noun translated sheep, in
V. 16, a very appropriate designation for the aged Chiistian. For, in many

THE TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER. 363
respects, and those most important ones, old age must, in the vast majority
of cases, be a second childhood. No matter by what loving and considerate
care surrounded, no matter how carefully the shield is thrown around the
aged Christian, with what tender anxiety watched, the old man can not but
be conscious of the decay of his physical strength, and, far worse than that,
of his mental faculties. No gratitude to his heavenly Father for a sweet
and peaceful and sunny old age, devoid of care, his wants all supplied, can
blind him to the fact that his day of active service for his Lord and his
brethren is passed, that all those with whom he once was in the thickest of
the fight have passed away, and in the midst of friends who could not be
kinder he is alone in the world. The cup is put to his lips by the hand he
loves most and best ; he receives it with a gratitude for the past and present
which can not be expressed in words. But all this, most precious as it is,
can not change the ingredients of the cup. And as, under the pressure of
accumulating years, possibly of sorrow and misfortune, the thoughts of the
aged Christian concentrate in their own grief, he becomes suspicious, queru
lous, and makes exorbitant demands on those who have to do with him.
But there are others whose face, on which divine grace has been work
ing these many years, is an inspiration to the minister as he looks over his
congregation, or enters the room where the aged saint is sitting with the
Bible before him. There is no pleasanter part of a minister's duty than to
feed Christ's aged sheep. He can minister to their faith and hope, he can
open to them that word which they love so well, he can give them the cup
of cold water which is to them so welcome, and he finds oftentimes that in
attempting to bring courage and strength he is the one who has been
encouraged and strengthened. He came to impart a blessing ; he goes away
feeling that his own soul has tasted of the goodness of God in a way entirely
unanticipated. In every case love will show mercy with cheerfulness, will
bear another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. The aged Christian
is one of Christ's sheep, and the greater the need the more will love desire
to perform its work, and the more will that love find in doing its work its
prized reward. Love never faileth.
How well Peter understood the directions of Christ, and how faithfully
he followed them may be seen from his two Epistles. The first is addressed
exclusively to babes in Christ. They are described as newborn, and are
bidden to desire the pure milk of the word that they may grow thereby.
The duties inculcated in the first Epistle are all passive virtues — obedience,
submission, patience under unjust censure, subjection to rulers, husbands,
masters, to the elder, to one another, and to be clothed with humility. The
second Epistle is addressed entirely to mature Christians, to those who
have received the great promised blessings, who have become partakers of
the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through
desire. They are bidden to develop a full, round-sided, symmetrical, per
fect character, and to be ready for an abundant entrance into the heavenly
kingdom. Those critics who have doubted the authenticity of the second
Epistle because of the difference from the first, will find their difficulties

364 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
removed if they study the two Epistles in the light of Christ's charge to
Peter. The wisdom which has been manifest in the words of Christ to Peter
thus far, will shape the manner of their fulfilment. Peter's life will be what
the life of every faithful Christian is, a plan of God. The young minister
looks upon the world and studies his own field of labor. He asks, " Where
can I best glorify God ? Shall I go to an eastern or a western field in my
own country, or shall I seek a foreign missionary's work ? '•' At first he
chooses apparently according to his own convictions and wishes. But as
he grows in years, more and more is he conscious that his place of labor is
not determined by his own will. Another girds him and carries where he
did not wish to go. As in our families when our children are learning to
walk, we care not where they turn their steps. From chair to chair we
watch their little footsteps, and are pleased with their efforts to use their
new found powers, but when they are older they walk in ways not of their
own choosing, often sorely against their own inclinations, but in ways which
show the wisdom of their parents, ways which are indispensable to the
accomplishment of the purposes which the parent has in view. And in this
the Christian rejoices. It is his chief joy that in the midst of all his toil
and perplexities and difficulties he can devoutly say, " I am here not by my
own choice or desire or plan ; I am here because God put me here, and
whatever is the outcome I will be glad and grateful ".
As we look at the response of Christ to Peter's answer to the question,
" Lovest thou Me ? " can we conceive of an)^hing more blessedly welcome ?
" Peter, do you love Me ? Then you may work for Me. Peter, do you love
Me ? Then you may live for Me. Peter, do you love Me ? Then you may
die for Me ". Heaven can provide no honor more to be coveted by the
Christian than these three things.
In the great crises in the foundation and spread of Christianity, Peter
and John are associated. They are sent together to make preparations for
the last Passover. When Mary brings the news of the deserted tomb, they
run together to the sepulchre ; Peter and John go together to the temple to
work the first Christian miracle ; both are imprisoned and brought before
the Sanhedrin in consequence ; both reply to the accusation ; when Samaria
received the word of God, Peter and John are sent to lay hands on the new
converts and impart to them the Holy Spirit. Most naturally Peter, having
received his commission, asks what part in the development of Christianity
is John to have. It would have been most unbrotherly in him not to show
this interest in his brother. Christ's reply is not a rebuke. He would not
chide Peter for a manifestation of a love which He had Himself created.
The phrase, " What is that to thee? " and similar ones elsewhere, convey no
censure ; they declare the clear distinctness of two spheres of office or work.
Christ says, " If the manifestation of Me through John abides till I come,
that does not affect your work ".
In this light read the respective Epistles of Peter and John. Compare
or contrast them. Peter addresses strangers and sojourners. There is

THE TWENTY-FIRST CHAPTER. 365
nothing in his Epistles which can and is not now fully realized. Almost
every sentence in John's Epistles is an echo of his words, " Beloved, now are
we the children of God, but it is not yet manifested what we shall be. We
know that if He be manifested, we shall be like Him, because we shall see
Him as He is ".
"And there are also many things which Jesus did ; the which if they
should be written every one I suppose the world itself would not contain the
books that should be written ". To which we will all say, "Amen ". For
when one is reading the Gospel and Epistles of John he seems to himself
like a man in whose hands are the lower links of a chain of gold let down
from the throne of God. He values as beyond price what he sees, but he is
conscious that there is infinite wealth beyond his vision. May that untold
treasure one day be ours.

* THE IMPORT OF ST. JOHN 21 : 15-J7.
by rey. galusha anderson, s. t. d., ll. d.,
The University of Chicago, Chicago, 111.
It seems to me to be probable that the Gospel usually attributed to the
Apostle John close with the twentieth chapter. Its concluding sentences
are, — " Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples,
which are not written in this book : but these are written, that ye may believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing ye may have
life in His name "- Here the author refers to certain events which he has
not incorporated in his writing; calls what he has written "this book",
and specifically states the object which he had in view in writing it. If
there were not another chapter, every intelligent reader would regard
this as a very natural and fitting close to all that goes before in this
Gospel. Still, what is presented in the opening sentences of the twenty-first
chapter is very closely and vitally linked with the events before related:
" After these things Jesus manifested Himself again to the disciples at the
Sea of Tiberias". It is not, therefore, surprising that some thoughtful
interpreters should conclude, that, notwithstanding the last words of the
preceding chapter seem to note a formal close of the Gospel, it did not end
there, but instead, the author wrote right on without lapse of time or break
of thought to the close of the twenty-first chapter. Nevertheless, to my own
mind, the most natural and satisfactory view is that the Gospel really closes
with the last words of the twentieth chapter ; and that after a longer or
shorter period the author added what we have in the twenty-first chapter as
a postscript. By the concatenation of events it is vitally linked with the
preceding, but in form it appears to be something added to that which
had been considered as finished. This view satisfactorily accounts both
for the juxtaposition of thought and the form of literary expression.
The author's motive for writing this postscript seems to have been twofold.
First, his Gospel may have been criticised as fragmentary and incomplete.
He therefore decided to add an account of the very important manifesta
tion of the risen Lord to His disciples at the Sea of Tiberias. Having done
this, at the close of the postscript he formally defends the incompleteness of
his Gospel by saying, "And there are also many other things which Jesus
did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the
world itself could not contain the books that should be written". But, in
the second place, from what transpired at this third manifestation of Christ

^ Delivered at the Eighth Conference, held at All Saints Memorial Church, May ii, 1904.
366

THE IMPORT OF ST. JOHN 21:15-17. 367
to His disciples, a report sprang up and had gone abroad among believers
that Jesus had declared that the author of this Gospel should not die. It
was a false report and on that ground alone, an honest man would be
strongly moved to contradict it ; but the report put the writer into wrong
relations with his fellow disciples. As the brethren of Joseph regarded
him as a favorite of their Father, so, if this false rumor should remain
uncontradicted, the disciples might regard the writer of this Gospel as one
on whom Jesus had conferred special honors. If the report should not be
corrected, it might awaken jealousies, jeopardize the success of the apostle's
labor, and stand in the way of the establishment of the Kingdom of God.
So, near the close of his postscript he takes pains explicitly and positively
to contradict it.
If it should be asked why the author did not in his postscript simply
deny the false rumor concerning himself, without treating at considerable
length the third manifestation of Jesus to His disciples after His resurrec
tion, the obvious answer is, that he felt it to be important to place fully
before the disciples all the circumstances out of which such a rumor arose.
Thus all could see how naturally it sprung up, and that it was simply a
perversion of a very important ethical lesson. This lesson we shall consider
later in its proper relation.
That the body of the Gospel and this postscript were written by the
same hand scarcely admits of a doubt. Both were evidently penned by an
eye-witness. We grant that there may be some incidents delineated in this
Gospel of which the writer may not have been personally cognizant and
which may have been reported to him by Jesus Himself ; but nearly the
whole of this Gospel is manifestly the testimony of what the writer saw and
heard. Take for instance the record of the first miracle at Cana of Galilee,
where as invited guests at a wedding were Jesus, His mother and His
disciples. During the progress of the feast the wine is exhausted. On
account of it the family is greatly embarrassed, and Jesus' mother, sharing
in their anxiety, hastens to her Son and delicately suggests to Him that He
should work a miracle to meet the exigency. He gently rebukes her. She,
however, nothing daunted, said to the servants, " Whatsoever He saith unto
you, do it". In due time He said to them, "Fill with water the six stone
waterpots ", and they filled them up to the brim. Then in the presence of
its Lord the water blushes into wine ; whereupon He commands them to
draw it out and bear it to the ruler of the feast. He in astonishment com
ments on the superior excellence of the wine. If any one should now tell a
story of a wedding, artlessly painting the scene in all of its interesting
details, the hearer would instinctively exclaim, " Why, you were there then ! ";
and the hearer would think for the nonce that he was there too. What may
be said of this, we are also constrained to say of most of the scenes depicted
in this Gospel. Jesus at Jacob's well, in the household at Bethany, at the
grave of Lazarus, in the upper room when He said to Thomas, "Reach
hither thy finger and see My hands ", and many other notable incidents
are so narrated that ordinary, intelligent readers never for a moment

368 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
doubt that we have here the words of one who saw and heard what
he reports. If we turn to this postscript we find the same subtle, convincing evidence
that the writer of it declared what was presented to his eye and ear. There
were together seven disciples ; three of them are named by the writer and
partially described ; two are not named but are so described that we know
who they were ; two others are not identified. Then we have the declara
tion by the foremost disciple that he is going a fishing, and the quick response
of the rest that they would go with him. Then follows their fruitless toiling
during the night, the Stranger on the shore just at the grey dawn. His
friendly salutation, and His direction as to handling the net which brought
instant success, the swim of Peter to the shore, the burning coals, the
bread, the fish, the breakfast, the colloquy that followed, — all so ur.mistakably
suggest the words of an eye and ear witness, that a fool could not err in
reference to it. If an eye-witness wrote this Gospel and this postscript of
it, they were not written by some elder, whose name was John, who lived
about the middle of the second century.
Again, the style of both the Gospel and the postscript shows that the
same hand that wrote the one wrote also the other. The style of this writer
is distinctive, unique; it is distinctive in its severe simplicity ; in its clear and
subtle distinctions ; in its suggestions of vast unexplored regions of thought.
The critics say that he did not write good Greek, classical Greek ; grant it,
but he so wrote that he has impressed and stirred the profoundest intellects
of all the ages of the Christian church, and has also been read with special
delight and profit by the lowly of all lands. And this simple, subtle, sug
gestive style characterizes both the Gospel and its postscript.
Moreover, this eye-witness with his unmatched style sets forth in both
the Gospel and the postscript the same great thought. While fully and
unhesitatingly presenting to us the humanity of Christ, he wrote that he
might set forth with special emphasis His divine nature. His deity. So the
first sentence of his Gospel is: "In the beginning", in eternity, " was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ". " And the
Word became flesh, and dwelt among us (and we beheld His glory, glory as
of the only begotten [begotten as no other being ever was] from the Father),
full of grace and truth ". In His conflict with the Pharisees He announces
Himself as that bread that came down from heaven, of which if a man eat
he shall never hunger ; He claims that He shall raise the dead and judge
the world, and calls upon all men to honor Him even as they honor the
Father; He declares that He existed before Abraham, that he that hath
seen Him hath seen the Father, that all that the Father possesses He
possesses, — "All things that are Mine are Thine, and Thine are Mine "; He
prays to the Father, " Glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory
which I had with Thee before the world was ". And just at the close of the
Gospel, Thomas, delivered from all doubt of Christ's resurrection, said unto
Him, " My Lord and my God ". Then the writer of the Gospel adds : " These
things are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God".

THE IMPORT OF ST. JOHN 21 : 15-17. 369
The great truth that Jesus is the Son of God, the divine Lord, is also
the central, unifying thought of the postscript. It is the risen Lord that
manifests Himself on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, provides food for
His hungry followers, controls the fish of the sea, presents Himself as the
supreme object of their love, commands the foremost disciple to follow
Him, unveils to him the manner of His death, and speaks of His own future
coming. Who is the eye-witness that wrote both this Gospel and postscript
alike in style, dominated by the same great vitalizing thought of a divine
Saviour? The writer himself replies: "lam he who leaned back on His
breast (on Jesus' breast) at the supper, and said, ' Lord, who is he that
betrayeth Thee ? ' I wrote these things, and know that what I have written
is true ". And after all the hair-splitting criticism of the past and of today,
on good and sufficient evidence we hold fast to the position that John the
apostle wrote both the Gospel and the postscript.
But a more important matter demands our attention. What is the real
significance of this postscript? What is its central, unifying idea? Is it
not Peter's confession of supreme love to the divine Christ and his public
restoration to the office that the Master had called him to fill, and from
which, by his denial he had fallen ? So far as we are able let us grasp the
meaning of this great passage of Scripture.
Since His resurrection, Jesus had already appeared twice to the eleven ;
once to ten of them on the evening of His resurrection day, in the upper
room at Jerusa;lem, Thomas being absent ; one week later in the same room
to them all, Thomas being present, when with all the ardor of his nature he
said to Christ, " My Lord and my God ". Now for many days Jesus left
these disciples to their own reflections. At last time began to hang heavily
on mind and heart; for their own happiness they needed employment.
Most of them also were poor. It is not unlikely that their purses needed
replenishing. In these circumstances it was very natural for them to turn
to that calling with which they were most familiar. And just as we should
reasonably expect, the energetic, impulsive Peter was the first to say to his
fellows, " I go a fishing ". It needed only this declaration from him to
elicit their prompt response, "We also come with thee ". They got into a
boat in the evening and pushed out a little way from shore, and began their
toil for the night. There were only seven of them, Peter, Thomas, Nathaniel,
James and John, and two others whose names are not mentioned. As it is
sometimes with fishermen, their toil during the live-long night was bootless.
Just at the break of day they saw, as they supposed, a stranger on the shore.
But this stranger evidently had a lively interest in them, for His voice came
sweetly across the waters, " Children, have ye aught to eat ? " They respect
fully answered the questioner, " No ". Did not the address, " children " make
them think that He was not wholly a stranger ? He cried to them, " Cast the
net on the right side of the boat, and ye shall find ". There was something
commanding and compelling in the words that He uttered, for they at once
do His bidding. Immediately the net is filled with fish. It is so heavy that

370 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
they are not able to draw it up into the boat ; they can only drag it along in
the sea. What passed through John's mind we do not certainly know.
Perhaps he remembered a similar draught of fishes from that same
sea soon after they began to follow the Lord. Perhaps he thought,
there stands the one who is Lord of " whatsoever passeth through the paths
of the seas ". But whatever was the process of his thought, as soon as the
net was filled with fishes, John said to Peter, " It is the Lord ! " When
Peter heard that, he girt his coat about him, plunged into the sea and swam
straight to the shore. He must be the first to greet his Lord ! Peter's
feeling was vastly different from what it was when, near the beginning of
Christ's ministry, obeying the word of Jesus he let down his net and enclosed
a multitude of fishes. At that time he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying,
" Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord " ; but Peter had grown
spiritually since that day. Now, instead of praying the Lord to depart from
him he swims to the shore that he may at once be with Him. What passed
between them we do not know. The rest of the disciples came in the boat
dragging the net with fishes. Stepping upon the shore an unexpected sight
greeted their eyes. There were at their feet glowing coals, toasting bread
and broiling fish. Their Lord had not been unmindful of their hunger, and
had bountifully provided for their wants. But since it is His will that men
should ever co-operate with Him in meeting their necessities. He said,
" Bring of the fish which ye have now taken ". It is now the ardent, zealous
Peter, who, before any of his fellow disciples, steps onto the boat, grasps
the net and drags it to the shore. How natural the action that follows I
They all gather about the full but unrent net and count the fishes taken out,
perhaps more than once, and find that there are one hundred, fifty and
three. Some of them are now probably dressed and broiled that the repast
may be abundant for these hungry fishermen. And when all is ready, the
Lord, the provider of the table, says to them, " Come and break your fast ",
just our familiar, " Come to breakfast ".
But thus far in the passage there is no hint that the disciples talked
with Jesus. There is a strong indication that they did not. They seemed
to have been filled with reverential awe. They knew that it was the Lord ;
but as gratifying as it would have been to have their positive conviction
confirmed by a declaration from His lips, no one of them ventured to ask,
" Who art Thou ? " And at the moment when the breakfast was fully pre
pared, Jesus seemed to have been standing a little aloof from them, for He
" cometh and taketh the bread and giveth them, and the fish likewise ". He
who provided the feast is both the host and the servant of His hungry
brethren. We come now to the great central lesson of the Scripture in hard. The
preceding lessons are of high import. The waiting of these disciples after
their risen Lord showed Himself to them the second time must have seemed
to them long and weary. It must have been a severe trial to their faith.
But His third appearance to them showed them that their Lord had not
forgotten nor abandoned them. Ever watchful over them, and still training

THE IMPORT OF ST. JOHN 21 : 15-17. 371
them for their future labor. He once more taught them by this draught of
fishes that their future success in catching men, lifting them out of this
world and bringing them into His kingdom, depended on prompt obedience
to His word; not by their toil alone, however persistent, but by His accom
panying and energizing word should they realize their mission. That
draught of fishes was putting into concrete form the old, but ever vital
prophetic message, "Not by might nor by power, but by My spirit saith the
Lord of hosts ". He had also taught them by the breakfast which He had
prepared for them on the shore that it was His purpose to care even for the
bodily wants of His toiling disciples. They were not to expect luxury, but
such wholesome food as would fit them for the most efficient labor in saving
souls. But all this simply led up to a still more important lesson for them
all, and especially for Peter, to whom it was particularly directed.
The breakfast was over. The appetites of all were satisfied. The
divine host, the risen Lord, turned His eyes full upon Peter. It may have
reminded that disciple of the look which the suffering Saviour gave him in
the palace of Caiaphas, which melted him to repentance ; and as the risen
Lord looked way down into the depths of Peter's heart, the searching words
were poured into his ears, " Simon, son of John (R. V.), lovest thou Me more
than these ? " This disciple had received from his Lord the name of Peter,
but in this interview Jesus discards it and goes back to the old name of His
disciple. In view of what he did at his Lord's trial before Caiaphas, to have
called him Peter, Rock, would have been little short of cutting, bitter sar
casm. This, in probing Peter's conscience, the Lord avoids.
Also in this first question Jesus used the phrase, " More than these ".
The interrogatory was, "Do you love Me more genuinely, more truly than
do your fellow disciples ? Is your love superior to that of these brethren
with whom you have just partaken of this frugal meal?" This carried Peter
back a few days to the time of his self-confidence and self-assurance, to the
hour when his Lord said, "All ye shall be offended in Me this night", and
he in his overweening trust in himself had contradicted his Master and
declared, "If all shall be offended in Thee", if all shall stumble into sin
because of Thee, on account of what Thou art or dost, " I will never be
offended", I will never stumble into sin, thus putting himself above his
fellows. And when in spite of his lofty and loud profession of fidelity Jesus
said to him, " This night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny Me thrice ",
he vehemently affirmed, " Even if I must die with Thee, yet will I not
deny Thee ". But while his boastful words still rung in the ears of his
fellow disciples, he, on account of what his Lord was passing through,
stumbled more deeply into sin than any of them, cowardly denying his Lord,
even with cursing and swearing. Of his assumed superiority over his fellows,
of his boastfulness and shameful fall, those words, "more than these",
forcefully reminded him. But when he answered the heart-searching question ,
he made no allusion to others, but simply affirmed his love to his Lord,
justifying the sincerity of his profession by appealing to the Lord's knowl
edge of his heart: "Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee". Boast-

372 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
fulness over others is gone ; trust in the omniscient Lord has taken the place
of trust in self. On the basis of this profession of his love, the Master bade
him, " Feed My lambs ".
But the Lord said the second time, " Simon, son of John, lovest thou
Me ? " and received the same answer as before ; and on the basis of Peter's
twice-professed love. He bade him, "Tend My sheep". %
But the third time the same question came from the lips of the risen
Lord, and " Peter was grieved because He said unto him the third time,
lovest thou Me? " Why was he grieved ?
Ordinarily such repetition of a question would suggest to the one inter
rogated that the questioner doubted his truthfulness. But Peter's twice-
repeated "Thou knowest that I love Thee " seems to me to preclude the
entertainment of any such notion by him. And Jesus' commands, " Feed My
lambs, — tend My sheep ", apparently show that Jesus thoroughly believed
that Peter was honest and that his love was genuine. So Peter could not
have been grieved by entertaining the notion that the Lord doubted him.
His grief arose from the fact that the third repetition of the question
brought back vividly and powerfully the whole scene of his cowardly denial.
Before his fall Jesus said to him, "Thou shalt deny Me thrice " — three times.
When he had entered into the court of the palace of Caiaphas, the maid
that kept the door accused him of being a disciple of the Nazarene, and he
denied it. He now retreated from the fire in the open court, where he was
warming himself, into .the shadow of the arch that led from the street to the
court ; but very soon another maid saw him and said to the crowd in the
court, " This man also was with Jesus the Nazarene ", and he denied it with
an oath. He again joins those who stood by the fire, and they at once
question him, " Art thou also one of His disciples ? " He denied, and said,
" I am not ". Twice now, before all those in the open court he has denied
his Lord, confirming his last denial with a solemn oath.
About an hour after, they in the open court declared to Peter, " Of a
truth thou art also one of them, for thy speech betrayeth thee", thou art a
Galilean. And one of them directly appealed to him, " Did I not see thee
in the garden with Him ?" Peter now lost his balance, began to curse and
swear, and declare between his oaths that he did not know Jesus. This is
the third denial. Now the Lord turned and looked upon Peter. Then the
crowing of the cock brought to the mind of the faithless disciple Jesus'
words, " Verily I say unto thee, that this night, before the cock crow, thou
shalt deny Me thrice" — three times. Keenly conscious of his threefold
denial Peter wept, and went out of the court and found some secret place
and there wept bitterly. That three-fold denial prophesied by Christ,
enacted by Peter, was branded upon the very substance of his soul. He
could never forget it. Tradition says that ever after there was a tear in his
eye. Jesus by the words, " more than these ", had already carried him back
to the hour of his boastful self-confidence, and the whole sad history that
followed was vividly before him. He heard the Master again, " Thou shalt
deny Me three times ", — his three awful denials sounded through the halls

THE IMPORT OF ST. JOHN 21 -.is-iy. 373
of his memory ; nothing so aroused and touched him to the quick as that
three times. This the Master knew ; and that he might probe His disciple's
conscience to the core, three times He asked, "Simon, son of John, lovest
thou Me ? " But when He asked it the third time, Peter's soul was pierced
with the sharpest grief, and he answered, very likely with tears and sobs,
" Lord, Thou knowest all things ; Thou knowest that I love Thee ". " Jesus
said unto him. Feed My sheep".
What was the Lord's object in all this ? Surely He would not have
caused His disciple to feel any unnecessary pang. But Peter had greatly
sinned. The fact that all things considered he was the foremost disciple
made his offence all the greater. So the Lord determined thoroughly to
probe his conscience ; that through and through he might be contrite and
might realize in the very depths of his consciousness that he had repented
of his great sin. And it was important also that he should make this three
fold confession of his love for Jesus before his fellow disciples, that they too
might be fully and impressively assured of the depth and genuineness of his
compunction. Nor must we forget that he had been openly chosen by Christ to do a
great and specific work, and had been put by Him into the most exalted
office of the infant church. On the one hand he was called to be a fisher of
men — that was his distinctive task ; but on the other hand, he with others
had been separated from the rank and file of the followers of Christ and
made an apostle, — that was his high station.
Moreover, with two others he had been distinguished even from the
twelve and drawn into closer personal relations with his Lord than they.
On account of this intimate relationship he went with Jesus up into the
Mount of Transfiguration. In an ever memorable interview he had been
foremost in confessing that Jesus was "the Christ, the Son of the living
God ", and in turn had received the special blessing of his Lord. When
Jesus felt the sorest need of human sympathy, Peter with James and John
had gone with Him into the shadow and gloom of Gethsemane. But by
his open and thrice-repeated denial of the Lord who had so highly honored
him, he had miserably fallen from his high vocation and office and brought
discredit upon his great confession. It was therefore necessary that his
restoration to his work and office should be, if possible, as public and con
spicuous as had been his denial and fall. He himself needed to know that
his Lord had not only forgiven his great sin, but had recalled him to his
work and had put him once more into his former position. If in the future
he was to work effectively for the salvation of men, there must not be so much
as one faint, lingering doubt of his complete pardon by his Lord and full
restoration to his "work and apostleship. This was necessary, not only for
him, but also for his fellow apostles. To insure their faith in Peter and in his
leadership, they too must know beyond a peradventure that the past had been
blotted out by Christ, and that he who under stress and in fear had denied
his Lord, had once more His full confidence, and was re-commissioned by
Him to do the work and to fill the office to which he was originally called.

374 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
So the Master, in the presence of six of Peter's apostolic associates,
bids him three times, answering to his threefold denial and threefold con
fession of love, to care for and nourish the lambs and sheep of his flock.
If, in the future, some one objecting should say, " Why is this apostle, who
thrice denied his Lord, so prominent and aggressive in service? " — six men,
associates with him in labor, could bear witness that the risen Lord, in
their presence and hearing, three times commanded him to do this work;
He solemnly re-commissioned him thrice over to care for those who believe
in Him and follow Him ; over against each shameful denial He placed His
renewed commission, " Feed My lambs ; Feed My sheep ". And if, there
after, the conscience of Peter at times should accuse him afresh for his
recreant acts and words in the palace of Caiaphas — as it doubtless did — he
would hear over against his repeated denial the Master's repeated re-com
mission, and be reassured and comforted and enabled to go on in peace
with his great work.
While his work was one, it was two-sided. He was under Christ to bring
men out of the world into the kingdom of God ; according to the terms of
his original commission he was to catch men — and then nourish them and
build them up " into the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ ".
Peter certainly did the first ; how successfully the results of his preaching at
Jerusalem on the day of Pentacost, and subsequently in the house of Cor
nelius in Cassarea testify. But it is worthy of note that when the risen Lord,
at the Sea of Tiberias, re- commissioned Peter it was the second phase
of his work that he specially emphasized, the nourishing, the caring for the
sheep. Jesus had intimated to Peter, even before his denial, that this was
to be his pre-eminent task. Predicting his temporary downfall. He said —
oh, with what tender solicitude — " But I made supplication for thee, that
thy faith fail not ; and do thou when once thou hast turned again, establish
thy brethren ". The Epistles of Peter bear witness that the apostle gave
himself with great assiduity to the work of feeding "the elect who are
sojourners of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and
Bithynia ". And in his first Epistle the once self-confident apostle strength
ened the brethren not only with the great central truths of the Gospel, but
also out of the depths of his own experience as he wrote : " Yea, all of you
gird yourselves with humility, to serve one another ; for God resisteth the
proud " — that is the cry from Peter's soul, when he went out and wept bit
terly — " but giveth grace to the humble " — an echo of what was granted to
contrite humble Peter when his risen Lord, forgiving and forgetting His
great sin, said to him, " Feed My lambs "-
And we must not fail to notice that the Lord in this personal colloquy
with Peter made love, just as Paul did, the supreme grace. He did not ask
his penitent apostle whether he beUeved in Him, or had hope of eternal
life, but whether he loved Him, and on the emphatic confession of that
grace He publicly restored him to his work and office. The Lord demanded
positive, unmistakable love because that grace pre-eminently determines
character. What a man loves reveals unerringly what he is.

THE IMPORT OF ST. JOHN 21 : 15-17. 375
Moreover, the object towards which we must exercise supreme love is
here clearly presented to us. "Lovest thou Mel" Jesus did not ask,
" Dost thou love God ? " — although He had taught with iteration and
emphasis that the first great commandment is, " Thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind "
(Matt. 22 : 37). Did He then in this colloquy with Peter repudiate what He
had before taught ? Nay, verily ! He who talked with penitent Simon,
"in the beginning" — in eternity — "was with God, and was God ". It was
He concerning whom Jehovah said: " Let all the angels of God worship
Him ". He had become flesh and dwelt among us. He had conquered
death on our behalf. Just because He was God, He claimed for Himself
the absolute love of Peter. "Lovest \ho\x Me2" Before His crucifixion
He said to Philip: "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father"; and
with His reiterated question to Simon before us, without any fear of making
a mistake, we can add : " He that loves the risen Lord loves the Father ".
That the Father is well pleased when we render supreme love to Christ,
Jesus declares in these words : " He that loveth Me shall be loved of My
Father" (John 14:21).
But in the report of Christ's conversation with penitent Peter on the
shore of Tiberias, do the words used by John to designate the act of loving
throw any special light on this great transaction ? In the first and second
questions we have agapao ; this word signifies loving with esteem ; it usually
involves the notion of admiration of righteous character, and the purpose of
bestowing kindness on the one esteemed and admired. Its Latin synonym is
diligo. It is a word that pre-eminently expresses the Christian conception
of loving. In the third question we find. phileo. This signifies love which expresses
itself through feeling, emotion ; it conveys the notion of instinctive, warm,
personal affection. This verb is found in every one of Peter's replies ;
probably expressing his warm personal affection for Jesus. Its Latin syno
nym is amo. Some interpreters think that Jesus' use of phileo instead of
agapao, in the third question, was what caused the grief of Peter ; they sug
gest that the word made Peter think that the Lord called in question his
personal attachment to Him, and this broke the heart of the ardent disciple.
But all such interpretations, it seems to me, inject into the text what it
does not contain. We grant freely that there is a distinction between the
two verbs, agapao and phileo ; but the demarcation between them is not
rigid and absolute. The classical Greek writer expressed by phileo not only
warm personal love, but also love of esteem for character. But, confining
ourselves simply to the writings of the New Testament, it is clear that in
them these two words were sometimes used interchangeably. To be sure,
agapao is used in a very large majority of the passages where the act of love
is set forth, but not in all. And it is not always used to express esteem for
righteousness or righteous character, but sometimes to express the love of
self and pelf. For example, the Pharisees loved (agapao) the chief seats in
the synagogue (Luke 11:42), and Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved

376 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
{agapao) the hire of wrong-doing. And while agapao is more frequently
employed by New Testament writers '&i.2ur\ phileo, the latter is often used by
them to set forth love not only in the lower but also in the higher relations,
and they employed both alike to express love on the same plane and for the
same object. For example, Jesus says of the Pharisees (Matt. 23 : 6) they
love {phileo) the chief places at feasts and the chief seats in the synagogue ;
whereas Luke reports (Luke 11 :43) Jesus as saying to the Pharisees, "Ye
love {agapao) the chief seats in the synagogue ". In these passages the
two verbs are used interchangeably ; the one regarded as fit as the other to
express love for that which ministers to personal vanity.
It has been claimed that agapao is the word used to express love in all
the higher and more sacred relations of life, and we grant that in the New
Testament it is by far the most frequently employed to set forth love in such
relations, but by no means exclusively. For example, while Paul (Eph.
5 : 25) in one Epistle exhorts husbands to love {agapao) their wives, in
another Epistle (Titus 2:4) he directs that the young women be trained to
love {phileo) their husbands and their children. Phileo is also used in the
same Epistle to express brotherly love (Titus 3:15): " Salute them that love
{phileo) us in faith ". And in i Pet. 3 : 8 we read : " Loving {phileo) as
brethren " ; the Greek word is a compound, " brethren-lovers ".
Phileo is also used in the New Testament to express the love that men
should have to the Lord. Paul wrote to the Corinthians (i Cor. 16:22):
" If any man loveth {phileo) not the Lord, let him be anathema ". And it
is also employed to set forth Christ's love both to His special friends and to
His children. Of His love to His special friends we have two examples, in
both of which the two verbs are used interchangeably (John 11:5): " Now
Jesus loved {agapao) Martha, and her sister, and, Lazarus " ; but as Jesus
went weeping to the grave of Lazarus, the Jews who were looking on said,
" Behold how He loved {phileo) him ". But, if possible, we have a more
striking example of the interchangeable use of these verbs in the charac
terization of Jesus's special love for John. In John 13 : 23 we read : " There
was at the table reclining in Jesus' bosom one of His disciples whom Jesus
loved " {agapao) ; but on the morning of the resurrection, we are told by the
same writer (20 : 2), that Mary Magdalene " cometh to Simon Peter and to
the other disciple whom Jesus loved " {phileo).
But in the Revelation the love of the exalted and glorified Jesus for His
followers is expressed by phileo (Rev. 3 : 19), ".\s many as I love {phileo) I
rebuke and chasten ". But our argument is cumulative, since, in the New
Testament the love of God the Father for His children is expressed by
phileo. Jesus, in His great farewell discourse, said to His disciples (John
16:27): "For the Father Himself loveth you {phileo), because ye have
loved {phileo) Me ". Here we have both the love of God to His children
and their love to His eternal Son expressed by phileo. But phileo was
regarded by John as a fit vehicle for the expression of the love of God the
Father for His only-begotten Son (John 5 : 20). In reporting Jesus' words
he says, " For the Father loveth {phileo) the Son ".

THE IMPORT OF ST. JOHN 21 : 15-17. 377
We see, then, that phileo is employed by New Testament writers, and
especially by the writer of the Fourth Gospel, to express love even in all the
highest and most sacred relations of men to one another and to God, and
of God to men, and even of the Father to the Son. Moreover, we have
seen how the author of the Fourth Gospel, at times, uses the two verbs,
agapao and phileo, interchangeably. If he did this in the body of his Gos
pel, in all probabUity he did it also in the postscript of his Gospel. And
such marked distinctions between these verbs as the critics have made, dis
tinctions of which John evidently never dreamed, loads a simple and impor
tant narrative with far-fetched philological speculations which obscure its
real meaning, which shroud its light in mist. John probably instinctively
used both of these verbs, which are substantially synonymous, just as any
writer would do now, simply to give variety to his diction and avoid monot
ony of style.
But still another consideration, it seems to us, ought to check the
speculations of commentators on the difference in the meaning of these two
verbs. Whether Jesus in His colloquy with Peter used one word to express
the act of loving or two words we cannot tell.
If He used two, whether there was a shade of difference between them
we cannot now ascertain. We have no conclusive evidence that He spoke
Greek. That He possibly might have done so we must of course grant,
since both John and Peter, a few years later, wrote in that tongue. But
scholars generally hold that Jesus spoke Aramaic. In that dialect of the
Hebrew He and Peter probably spoke with each other on the shore of
Tiberias. That John has faithfully reported the conversation I, for one,
have not the shadow of a doubt. But if in the colloquy Jesus used two
words to express the act of loving, nobody now knows what they were, so
no one can now intelligently speculate about them. While the two verbs
found in John's report, we have already shown, were used interchangeably
by him in his Gospel and in all probability in the twenty-first chapter,
which we have treated as a postscript to his Gospel.
It still remains for us to inquire what is meant by the love on which
Jesus so strenuously insisted. Not, certainly, simply emotion excited by
some object and lavished upon it. That emotion attends love is true, but it
is not the love itself. In the last analysis love is pre-eminently preference.
One who loves prefers some object above all others, and that preference
bends all the powers of the one preferring to the service of the object
supremely preferred. Such a preference, leading all the activities of the
soul in its train is always attended with pleasurable sensibility, often with
powerful emotion ; but to mistake the sensibility or the emotion for the love,
for supreme preference, frequently leads to mischief. Now, this is the pur
port of Jesus' question to Peter. " Simon, son of John, lovest thou Me, pre-
ferest thou Me above all others ? So preferest thou Me that every energy
of thy being flows full- tide into glad service to Me ? "
This question leads us finally to ask, What are the fruits of such love ?
Regarding Christ as the one supremely preferred, such preference, such

378 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
love, naturally expresses itself in obedience and service. And here we dis
cern another ligament which binds this postscript with the body of the
Gospel. Christ in His last great discourse to His disciples before His
agony in the garden said : " If ye love Me ye will keep My command
ments ". He here calls on Peter to illustrate this general principle in his
Hfe. By His probing questions He makes His disciple more profoundly
conscious of love to Him ; He still further deepens Peter's consciousness of
love by leading him ardently to profess it again and again, and at each pro
fession of it He calls upon him to manifest it in obedience and loving
service. "Thou knowest that I love Thee", says the penitent Peter;
" Then ", says the risen Lord, " show your love by tenderly caring for My
sheep ".
But such love not only expresses itself in assiduous toil for others, but
it enables those who exercise it to endure without murmur the severest
hardships and sharpest trials in the service of their divine Lord. Jesus
had no sooner said in response to Simon's third confession of his love,
" Feed My sheep ", than, without a break. He went straight on to say to
him : " Verily, verily, I say unto thee, when thou wast young thou girdedst
thyself and walkedst whither thou wouldest ; but when thou shalt be old, thou
shalt stretch forth thy hands and another shall gird thee and carry thee
whither thou wouldest not. But this He spake, signifying by what manner
of death he should glorify God. And when He had spoken this. He saith
unto him. Follow Me ".
The writer has not left us in doubt as to the main import of these
words ; they were a prophesy that Peter, after he had grown gray in his
Master's service, should suffer a violent death. " Thou shalt stretch forth
thy hands and another shall gird thee ", may be a distinctive prophecy that
he should be taken into custody by the officers of the government, who
would bind his hands with cords, just as they bound Jesus' hands when they
apprehended Him in the Garden of Gethsemane, and carry him whither he
would not — take him away to his trial in the court — or the words may refer
to death by crucifixion. When one was crucified he was not always nailed
to a cross, but sometimes lashed to it by cords. The cross was laid on the
ground, the victim was bound to it; it was then lifted with the victim upon
it to an upright position and made fast in the earth. The few words of
Jesus may have been an outline picture of this. But if reasonable objection
may be made to any specific interpretation of the words, John, by his com
ment has made it clear that they refer to Simon's martyrdom. And that
reveals their vital connection with what goes immediately before. For
when Jesus had predicted Simon's violent death He said to him, " Follow
Me " " Your love must be such that it will lead you to follow Me, what
ever awaits you. You may have manifold and bitter trials ; a violent death
when you are an old man will be your lot, nevertheless, follow me ; if that
love that you have thrice so emphatically confessed is genuine, you wiU not
only gladly feed My sheep, but for My sake you will die without a murmur,
lashed to a cross ".

THE IMPORT OF ST. JOHN 21 : 15-17. 379
" But last of all, if your love is genuine it will enable you to be stead
fast in My service irrespective of what I do to others "- Peter followed
his risen Lord as He walked along the shore of the Sea of Tiberias,
and looking back he saw John a little behind them, also following.
Now as the Lord had lifted the curtain and revealed to Peter something of
his future, his curiosity was excited to know what was to be John's career
and fate; so he asked: " Lord, and what shall this man do?" Jesus saith
unto him, " If I will that he tarry till I come what is that to thee ?" Then
again Jesus said to him, " Follow thou Me ". " No matter how I may order
the life of John, his career and fate do not change your duty. If I will that
he tarry on the earth until I come again, that will not absolve you from My
service. If you indeed love Me you will follow Me, however much the
condition of others may differ from your own ".
This chapter, then, so full of varied and interesting incident is instinct
with one great thought, the genuine love of the disciple for his Master.
All the events in the first of the chapter lead directly up to the question
which the risen Lord asks Simon. It is an inquiry as to the fact of his love
to Him. His love for Jesus is thrice confessed. Its fruit is obedient serv
ice, no matter how bitter the trials such service may involve, or how the
Lord may see fit to make our condition to differ from that of others.
We have considered not merely an interesting fact of Gospel history,
but a truth which "takes hold on our business and bosoms". Simon's
risen Lord is ours also. He asks us, as we read this Scripture, the same
question that He asked him. "James, son of Charles, lovest thou Me?
Yea, Lord, Thou knowest that I love Thee. Then nurture those children
that I have given thee 'in the chastening and admonition of the Lord'".
" Theodore, son of Christopher, lovest thou Me ? Yea, Lord, thou knowest
that I love Thee. Then use honestly your talent for making money, and
gather wealth not for selfish ends, but for the betterment of your fellow
men ". " Jacob, son of Robert, lovest thou Me ? Yea, Lord, Thou knowest
that I love Thee. Then go out into the streets and lanes of your city, find
those who do not know Me and tell them of My love and My salvation ".
" Martha, daughter of Alfred, lovest thou Me ? Yea, Lord, Thou knowest
that I love Thee. Then, make home for your children the most attractive
place on earth, and so far as possible minister to the sick and cheer the dis
consolate in your own neighborhood, remembering that inasmuch as ye do
it unto even the least of these ye do it unto Me ". Both our usefulness and
our destiny are determined by the answer that we can truthfully give to our
risen Lord's soul-testing question, " Lovest thou Me ? "

* THE TEACHING FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH.
by rey. eran"!?: js.. sanders, ph. d., d. d.,
Professor of Biblical History and Arch/eology in Yale Divinity School,
New Haven, Conn.
A theme of great interest, but not as novel -as many imagine. More
than 200 years ago our Congregational churches of New England called to
their service both a pastor and a teacher. It is forced upon our careful
attention by the far-reaching changes of the past decade or two in methods
and principles of instruction. While the phrases are overworked, there is a
new psychology and a new pedagogy to be reckoned with. Each bases its
advocated principles upon accurate observation of data taken from life.
They are in a true sense practical. Behind each of them is the historical
foundation laid today for every subject of human knowledge and, in partic
ular, for the study of the Bible.
Two principles find broad application in the consideration of the theme
of the teaching function of the church. The first is that no hard and fast
line can be drawn between religious and secular education. All instruc
tion should have a broad religious setting. No pupil should be able
to distinguish the two kinds of education by any marked difference of atti
tude or method. The second is that education is, to borrow Professor
Coe's expressive definition, " training for self-expression ". Knowing is
not the only fundamental quality of mind, and knowledge is not the only
end of education. The older education gave intellectual training a dispro
portionate place ; it cultivated the memory and logical powers. Hence a
man might become well-educated religiously without necessarily becoming
religious. We recognize today the importance of the will. Education is
the harmonious development of the personality.
The chief responsibility for religious education today rests with the
church. Neither the home nor the public school achieves the needed
results. It is a pastor's problem, since he is the one person who stands in
a working relationship to every contributing factor. Such a pastor must of
necessity be a trained pastor, acquainted with actual needs, capable of
critical leadership. It is a problem never actually settled, yet nearer a
working solution today than ever before.
The available avenues of religious impression, instruction and training
are the home, the church and the school.
The problem of religious education in the home is a serious one. With
unequalled advantage for fostering a religious consciousness, the natural

* Abstract of address delivered at the Seventh Conference, held at the Central Congregational
Church, April 13, 1904. 380

THE TEACHING FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH. 381
opportunities of home life are being yielded or ignored. The grace at
meals, family prayers, the familiar discussion of religious themes, the com
mon study of a weekly lesson in the Bible — all are passing, not so much
because of indifference or timidity as because of a subtle change in the
attitude of people to religious obligations.
The problem of religious education in the church is more complicated.
All ages, all methods, all objects must be kept in mind : ideals, knowledge,
habits, artistic impressions. The crying problem of today is that of the
Sunday School : its scientific gradation, the distinction of working depart
ments, the adoption of effective courses of study, the training of teachers.
Attention is now being called to the need of a trained superintendent, of
the increase of the time allotted to the Sunday School, of the variation of
instruction, of the adaptation of courses of study, of the broadening of the
curriculum, so that it may include, beside the Bible, an opportunity in
special classes to receive instruction upon missions, church polity, church
history, the distinguished men and methods of the church, a religious inter
pretation of national history and of the life of today.
The problem of religious education in the school is insistent. In the
college it is in process of solution. In the private school a start has been
made. In public schools the principles which must govern the solution of
the problem are still in debate. Denominationalism and theology may well
be barred from our public schools, but why religion ? To refuse the teacher
the opportunity of giving simple expression to the common religious needs
of mankind is deliberately to secularize the growing mind. A simple open
ing service and the freedom to interpret religiously the workaday world is
sufficient and unobjectionable.
The Religious Education Association has already exhibited such
strength that there are signs of real promise for the future. An organized
attempt to study these problems will lead to their thorough discussion and
rational solution.

*THE METHOD OF JESUS WITH INDIVIDUALS.
(St. John 3:1-16; 4 : 5-26.)
BY REY. W. DOTJGH-A.S I«IA.0K:ENZIE, D. D.,
President of Hartford Theological Seminary, Hartford, Conn.
None of the Gospels is more carefully planned than the Fourth. And
in nothing is this care more apparent than in the many contrasts which it
contains between persons and ideas of different classes. We are now con
cerned with one of these most striking comparisons between the treatment
of Nicodemus, the Pharisee, and of the sinful woman of Samaria by one and
the same Master and Saviour, Jesus Christ. For nothing seems more clear
than that in the arrangement of the material it is intended to bring these
persons into contrast and to display the power of Jesus over both.
Nicodemus has had the most scholarly training of his day and his
country. He has lived the self-respecting life of integrity which men would
expect from one who made his professions and occupied his position.
There is no reason to suspect that he belonged to the class of Pharisees
who were hypocrites, but, rather to the class of Pharisees who were sincere
Puritans, and very earnest, religious men. He belonged to the best kind of
learned teacher and authoritative ruler in the morally purest society of the
ancient world; and he came to Jesus, not, perhaps, without a touch of
condescension in his tone, and yet not without an undercurrent of very
earnest inquiry, which we feel as the conversation proceeds.
In the other conversation, we have one who belongs to the lowest
classes, considered, not in relation to possessions, but to character; one
who has been accustomed for years to meet the contemptuous gaze of her
fellow citizens, and who has learned with a brazen face to outface it all;
one whose name probably was notorious in that little city for the kind of life
she had been living, utterly careless of the ordinary standards of self respect
and honor amongst her fellow citizens. She, to whom religion must seem
to be a very strange thing, and the claims of the higher life a matter for
mockery and raillery, rather than for appreciation and interest, she also
comes in contact with Jesus.
How does Jesus become the teacher of two people who stand at the
opposite extremes of moral self-respect, of intellectual education, of social
position and influence? Can He, does He become the real teacher, the
inspirer of two hearts so entirely diverse, the one in almost every particular
the contradiction of the other? Is He able to adapt the eternal truth so
that it shall take hold of the cold dignity of Nicodemus, and take hold also

* Delivered at the Sixth Conference, held at the Trinity Union Methodist Episcopal Church, March o
1904. 382

THE METHOD OF JESUS WITH INDIVIDUALS. 383
of the passionate abandonment of the woman of Samaria ? Can He so
reveal God to each of these, that the same God shall make them other than
they have been ? Where shall He insert the sword of the Spirit into the
linked armor that encases the self-righteous heart of Nicodemus, and how
shall He touch the open, festering sore of the heart of the woman of Sama
ria? How shall one man become the divine Teacher and Saviour of Nico
demus and the divine Teacher and Saviour of that woman? Is it possible?
Is it conceivable? The disciples gradually learned from this Teacher that
it is possible, and John has here presented to us the way in which this
Teacher, this Master, this Saviour can let in light into all hearts, can bring
people from all quarters of the moral universe to the feet of the one God,
and can flash everlasting truth alike upon the ignorant and dark mind of
the debased, and upon the dark mind, also, of the most thoroughly trained
intellectualist of His generation. How is it that He does this ?
I. Observe that when Jesus meets with Nicodemus, He meets with
one who has come with inquiry concerning Him upon his lips. The first
words which Nicodemus says to Him are "Rabbi, we know that Thou art
a Teacher come from God, for no man can do these signs that Thou doest,
except God be with him ". He belongs to those who have been watching
Jesus as He lived and worked there in Jerusalem. From that class, as we
are told in the immediately preceding verse, " Many believed on His name,
beholding the signs which He did ". He belongs to those who watched
Jesus, alike, when He healed the sick and when He appeared, solitary, in
the grandeur of moral indignation, to cleanse the temple courts of all their
irreligious and immoral foulness, and saw that He proved Himself master of
every moral situation. And these men, who are all trained to watch the signs
of the times and who are quick to interpret every deed that He does and
every word that He speaks, as a religious claim, these men say : — " Who is
this and what can He tell us ? We listened some time ago to John the Bap
tist, and he told us that the Kingdom of God is at hand. Here is One who
comes after him and carries on his work, not now down at the Jordan, but
up here at the very heart of Israel's life. He does not dwell there, dipping
men in the water. He comes here to wash out the temple courts with His
own Spirit. He comes here to bless people in the midst of their sorrows, in
the midst of their sins, in the midst of all their daily life. Who is this and
what has He to say about the Kingdom of God? When is it coming? Is
it any nearer, now that He speaks instead of John the Baptist? Has it
come closer to Jerusalem, closer to us all ? ShaU our eyes see it ? Shall
our feet bear us into its glorious reality ? Shall we behold the kingdom and
be members of it ; we, who live and breathe now, members of the eternal
Kingdom of Jehovah ? "
These are the questions that are in the heart of Nicodemus, ready to
pour forth from his lips, one after another, in rapid, eager haste. And
Jesus, piercing at once to the heart of the situation, answers him and says, —
" Verily, verily, the most real thing and the most essential thing I have to
say to you, Nicodemus, the starting point of all, the thing you must know

384 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
before I can explain anything else, the thing you must understand and lay
ho d of before I can describe the Kingdom of God and answer any ques
tions about it, the first essential thing to know is, that, except a man, except
you, Nicodemus, be born again, you can not see the Kingdom of God ". It
was an astounding blow to give Nicodemus, a blow that staggered him ; and
he talked like a little child and stumbled about the meaning of the words
that Jesus was using, — " Except a man be born again, he cannot see the
Kingdom of God".
" He can not see it "- The Kingdom of God may be all around you and
you are blind to it. The Kingdom of God might fill the atmosphere with its
glory and your eyes remain untouched by one of its rays. The Kingdom of
God might be sending its thrilling fires into hearts all round you, organizing
its membership, gathering to itself the kingdoms of the earth, and you,
you might be deaf to all the praises that were being shouted towards its
throne, and your heart be impervious to all the influences going out from its
center of power. You might be living in the very kingdom of heaven itself,
in earthly presence, and be as far from its actual presence as the farthest
star from the earth we walk on. That was the doctrine taught by Jesus.
That was an astounding blow to that man's religious consciousness at that
point in his career ; but it was the very thing he needed. No farther step
was possible in understanding Jesus, in approaching the Kingdom of God,
until Nicodemus's own heart should deal frankly, deal earnestly, deal suc
cessfully with that first condition which Jesus lays down, " Except a man be
born again, he can not see the Kingdom of God ", — far less, " enter into it ",
as He says a few verses farther on.
That is the first thing Jesus teaches him. Then, according to John,
He goes on to teach him concerning Himself. It is very hard to tell in
John's Gospel exactly where history ends and where comment begins, and
whether the words he writes down are to be understood as words attributed
by him to Jesus, or words that he draws out of the teaching of Jesus, explain
ing and developing it. This passage (from v. 14 to v. 21) illustrates the
difficulty. These words, I believe were intended to give us the substance
of the teaching of Jesus, which is this: That Jesus, Himself, is the one
person with whom Nicodemus must deal, if he would have anything to do
with that kingdom. He, in fact, tells that man, who is one of the most
powerful men of his day in the whole country, tells him frankly, " Unless you
come into right relations with Me, the door is shut, the kingdom is unattain
able, invisible. You can not enter into it, you can not see it, until you have
dealings with the King, who speaks to you".
These, then, are the two main points that Jesus Christ compels Nico
demus to consider. The one concerns himself inwardly. The other
concerns Another and his relation to that Other. The one is that a change
must come upon his own inner nature, and that change must be wrought by
God. The other is that he must come into a changed relation with God
through that Person, outside and above himself, even Jesus Christ.
Now, there are those, of course, in every age, who feel, as Nicodemus

THE METHOD OF JESUS WITH INDIVIDUALS. 385
must have felt at first, — as the young ruler felt at first, when the same
demand was made upon him, — that it is an extraordinary and an inadmiss
ible assertion that every man, in order to get into heaven, to get into the
Kingdom of God, must undergo a change so momentous, that it can only be
described by Jesus Himself, as "Being born again". Time after time in
the history, — not of the world, for the self-satisfied, irreligious worldling
always denies that, — but in the history of the Christian church itself, move
ments have come which have had the denial of this for their mainspring. I
do not know anything more interesting or more entertaining here than
certain chapters of Professor Barrett Wendell's " Literature of America".
Turn to his chapter on intellectualism in New England and the chapter on
transcendentalism in Boston, especially in relation to literature. Som.e of
the freshest and most epigrammatic reading I have found for some time in
new books, has been found in these chapters. Professor WendeU puts his
finger upon the real spring of literary and religious life in New England in
the beginning and in the middle of the last century. As a matter of fact.
New Englanders had been living shut up in a corner, away from the main
currents of history for a number of generations. They were the direct
descendants of the finest stock that could be, Puritan stock, on its relig
ious and moral side. There were not many people that were too rich and
not many people that were too poor. They were all on somewhat of a social
equality. They had the advantages of good education, of religious training,
of quiet and average prosperity in the things of this world, the very con
ditions of life that would make for continual satisfaction and peace. The
result was the development of an average society which was, perhaps, more
moral than any the world has seen anywhere else. And, therefore, a sort of
consciousness of excellence arose, out of which they judged even religion
itself, a consciousness of excellence that led them to turn round upon the
doctrines of the Puritan fathers, the very doctrines that made them what
they were, and at last condemn them and pass them by. Professor Wendell
puts the feeling, the spirit that was wide-spread in New England at that
time in a number of different paragraphs from which I will take these
sentences: "Human nature is good. You are made right. Mind, body,
soul, spirit are all made right. Obey yourself and you need have no fear.
All things worth serious and earnest thought transcend human spirit, but a
trustworthy clue to them is to be found in the unfathomable excellence of
human minds, souls and spirits ".
Now, this "unfathomable excellence" that some of them were con
scious of possessing, not as individuals but as members of a society, was
something like that " unfathomable excellence " of religious consciousness
and moral life which Jesus found possessed by large numbers of the Phari
sees of His day. And Jesus, to one of the most excellent of these, one of
the most really excellent individuals among them, comes down with that tre
mendous blow, " You must be born again ". It is an assertion that goes
deep into the heart of things ; Jesus shows how deep it goes when He says,
" That which is born of the flesh is flesh " ; the natural flow of life down the

386 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
race history " is flesh ". " That which you would call spirit, spiritual in
human experience, must come from spirit ; it must come out of the Spirit of
God Himseff ".
Religion is not flesh growing up into spirit. Religion is the spirit com
ing down into the flesh. Religion is not man scaling the ladder boldly,
breaking the gates of heaven down and advancing, as IngersoU said he
would advance, bravely to the foot of the throne. Religion, the Christian
religion, is God coming from the throne down the ladder, on which angels
ascend and descend, coming down to man, taking hold of human nature.
The Kingdom of God comes to human life as the God of life came to a
world of mechanical or chemical dust, — from above. The Kingdom of
God comes and takes hold of human nature, conscious, living, intelligent,
as intelligence came and took hold of the dull, dead life of the plant world
— from above. The spirit of the Eternal God, Jesus Christ said, must come,
if any man would enter that kingdom, to seize that man and lead him in.
Only that which is of the spirit can be spiritual.
2. And now, let us look at the opposite. Here there comes to Jesus
a woman whose moral need is confessed and open. She can not think, like
Nicodemus, that she is fit for the presence of God, just as she is. Poor
Nicodemus, with his eyes unopened, thought that as he was he might see
God, he might enter the kingdom. But poor Nicodemus must be taught by
Jesus that, until his eyes were opened, he could not see God ; until his
heart was changed, he could not enter the kingdom. But this woman, are
her eyes opened ? Are her feet moving towards that kingdom ? Almost
the last thing she is thinking of is religion, and the very last thing she is
thinking of is righteousness. She is not there on a religious errand. She
is not there expectant of amoral blessing. She is there just because she
has put off and put off coming for water, until she had to do so in the very
heat of the day. For her slothful, indolent life always ends in inconven
ience for. herself, and, instead of coming out when others did, she waited,
either lazy or ashamed, until the others had gone back to town. And under
the burning sun she came out alone, and found another Sunlight at the well.
When Jesus arouses her curiosity, she expresses her surprise. He
begins at the root of the matter. He says, "If you had known who was
speaking to you, you would have asked Him for water and He would have
given you living water". She could not understand this saying, of course,
but Jesus was the most perfect Teacher which the world ever saw. You
can never have success in teaching until you have personal interest aroused,
and personal interest involves some measure of curiosity. He arouses,
therefore, her curiosity and personal interest by the very form of the
words in whicti He makes His most wonderful declaration. He says to
that woman, " I could give you living water ". And still, because she is
confused among the symbols of things, she tauntingly laughs and says,
" You have nothing to draw with, and the well is now very deep. How can
you do that? Are you greater than Jacob, our father?" She boasted of
the antiquity of the well, and the honor of the man who had given it to the

THE METHOD OF JESUS WITH INDIVIDUALS. 387
history of her people for so many hundreds and hundreds of years. Jesus,
coming a little closer to the matter, says to her that this water which He is
speaking of is not the kind which she is thinking of, and, therefore, the well
is not one that can be compared with that of Jacob. " Everyone that drink
eth of this water shall thirst again ", — and oh, how she knows that. How
she wishes that she and they of her household did not get thirsty so quickly,
so that she would not have to come out so often to draw this water in the
heat of the day, — "but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give
him shall never thirst, and the water that I shall give him shall become in
him a well of water, springing up into eternal life ". She does not under
stand that, and Jesus knows it. He is still quickening her curiosity and
leading her on and on. She thinks, "What a strange man is this, talking
about having a well of water inside oneself, springing up into everlasting
life ? What strange words are these ! " And yet there is something so
earnest, so authoritative, in the tone of the Speaker that she presses on to
ask further questions and to get into the heart of the meaning of this strange
Jew, who not only speaks to a woman, contrary to all etiquette, but even to a
Samaritan woman, contrary to all national prejudices.
When the woman says to Him, with laughter still in her voice, without
much earnestness, and yet beginning perhaps to be half shy, as if in the
presence of an Authority she had not expected, "Give me this water",
Jesus deals another astounding blow. " Go, call thy husband and come
hither ". Go and bring him into my presence ! And she knows, after a
few instances more, that He knows more about her than she did herself.
She has been brought right down from considerations of etiquette and from
enigmatic words into the heart of the moral universe. Being there she no
doubt is asking herself now more rapidly than she can speak, — you all know
how you ask questions in your heart faster than your lips can utter them in
the intensity of your soul at some great crisis, — she is asking questions that
never can be uttered, faster, faster, about Him and her, and her past and
the future, and the kind of woman that stands there, and how she could
stand before that Face, if that other man was with her. Then when she
tries to turn the conversation aside to sectarian controversies about worship,
because she perceived that He was a prophet, Jesus leads her mind up to
heights unreached by human minds before, in all the history of man's
climbing search for God.
To that poor woman, now feeling forlorn and ashamed, astounded by
this blow that has come upon her, Jesus speaks of God in phrases sublime
and of eternal glory. " God is Spirit ", He says, and from that word to that
degraded woman Ught pours upon us all today. He had not said "Father"
to Nicodemus, but He says " Father" lo the woman at the well. "Father"
is the great key-word that He would employ when He speaks to souls like
hers, to consciences working like that conscience now, in hearts like that
heart. "The Father". Oh, what wealth of good tidings flows from that
name, as it falls from His lips ! She never heard it applied to God in all
her life. She never dreamed that the Everlasting Jehovah, whom Samari-

388 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
tan and Jew alike worshipped and dreaded, could be named by any individ
ual as "Father". And here. One whom she feels to be a prophet. One
whom she recognizes as speaking from God, with that instinctive recogni
tion of the soul that is surer than anything else. He speaks to her of that
God, as " Father ". He says, " The Father does not care whether you pray
in that mountain there, or whether you pray at Jerusalem, from which I
come. The Father does not care for place and time. The Father cares for
spirit and heart and truth. It is a question of whether you kneel down in
the world of truth, not in the world of matter ; whether you kneel down in
spirit and in faith, not whether you kneel down in ceremony and in fear
The question is not whether you kneel down to speak in the language of the
Samaritan or Jews. The question is whether the words go to Him out of
your heart, for the Father seeketh the sincere to worship Him".
And then, thinking with a new eagerness, but shrinking from the
immediate demands which God's Fatherhood at once makes on her, she
seeks postponement by reference to the Messiah, who will clear up all these
difficulties for her. " There is One coming, some day, who will make it all
plain ; the Jews are expecting Him, the Samaritans are expecting Him ;
and it does not matter whether He comes into Samaria or Jerusalem, He
will make it all clear ; He will solve all doubts ". She can not dispute with
Him as to whether He is preaching orthodoxy or heterodoxy ; she will not
proceed into these mysteries farther ; but she says, "All the same I hope,
like the rest of my people, for the Messiah. When He comes He will make
it all plain and then — " " I that speak unto thee am He" !
Jesus has disclosed to that woman, more explicitly than to anyone else,
the great mystery of His person. He is the Messiah. He is the explainer
of all things. What He has been saying to her, promising to her, of the
well of water that He could strike from the rock of her hard heart, hardened
by a life of sin. He has said because He is the Messiah. He can make the
water of life spring up even in that heart unto everlasting life.
Jesus, then, has with this woman proceeded upon the opposite plan
from that adopted in relation to Nicodemus and reached the same point.
Nicodemus had not committed gross sins, and, like the young ruler was
living in the self-satisfaction of what his people would call a clean life ; as
touching the law, blameless, and yet Jesus says that "he must be born
again". His moral need was deeper than he ever dreamed. With that
woman, whose moral need was very evident to herself and to all, He takes
it all for granted. He does not require to prove to her that she needs the
great change. The change will come to her when she calls God her Father,
on the authority of Jesus the Messiah.
So varied and so sure is the way of Jesus with the souls of men. How
dare we ask Him to lead any two persons alike, when here, in the Gospel of
John it is shown so plainly that He treats people in such opposite ways to
reach the same result?
At which end have you been living? At which end does your con
science find you this morning? Can you sit here in this church of God and

THE METHOD OF JESUS WITH INDIVIDUALS. 389
say, — " I am like Nicodemus. I do not feel that I have committed any great
crime, that I have any great shame upon my life ; and that is one of my
difficulties about religion"? The message of Christ, I take it, to you and
to all of such a class is this; Nevertheless, if you want to enter the Kingdom
of the Spirit, the Spirit of God must come down upon you, and when that
Spirit touches your heart the change will be so great that you yourself will
say, "It is a being born again". Are you ready to face it? Your moral
need, however good you be, is greater than you know, and when that Spirit
has touched your heart, He will wake up a sense, even of sin, that you never
dreamed it possible that you could have. Perhaps there is some one sitting
here who is conscious of having done great wrong against conscience in
some direction in the past, the long past or the near past. To you the
message of Christ is just that which He gave to the woman. Your heart
can only be cleansed, that open sore have the festering poison washed
away with living water. There is a spiritual antiseptic for the wounds of
the heart, and it is given by the Spirit of God. When that comes washing
through the heart, the horrid abscess is cleansed and the healing is begun.
Will you all, shall we aU, wherever Christ finds us, shall we aU unite in
saying, " Good or bad hitherto, at the top or the bottom of the scale, we all
meet, meet in one great need, meet in one earnest prayer, meet in one living
trust in God the Father, through Jesus Christ, the Son of God " ?

* THE PERSONAL EQUATION OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL.
BY REV. EREDERIC PALMCER, M;. A.,
Rector of Christ Church, Andover, Mass.
(St. John 20 :3i.)
"These things are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the
Son of God, and that believing ye might have life through His name".
A brisk discussion took place some years ago as to whether a novel
should have a purpose. " See the inartistic, namby-pamby stuff", said the
one party, " which is produced when your novelist tries to advocate tem
perance or social reform or some theory about women. He pretends to
come open-handed, but all the time he is keeping one hand behind him, and
all the time you can see that he is doing so, and it makes him awkward and
you disgusted. You demand to have your pill and your sugar separately "
" Well ", says the other party, " the thing, it is true, may be done badly,
but without a purpose your novel degenerates into a newspaper. You
merely bind together some scenes and conversations and call them a story.
but they are a bundle of sketches with no unity. They are not even a
chronicle, for that has in it a unifying thread of time. True art will no
doubt keep a purpose where it is in well-ordered life, not thrusting itself
forward in long-haired men and short-haired women, but hidden, yet dom
inant in every act and word. A novel without a purpose is like a life with
out a career. In order to be a story it must have something to say.
Merely to record facts without pointing out their significance, is to be
simply a car conductor's bell-register".
A recent writer in the "London Spectator" has been extending this
view to history. It is impossible, he maintains, for true history to be uncol-
ored. Take, on the one hand, the historian who aims to show events in the
bare, cold light of science, and, on the other, one who is so much inter
ested in a man or a cause that he follows the leading of this and sees events
in its light, and you are more likely to learn the real state of affairs through
the latter than through the former. For in the latter case the historian's
" control " as the Spiritualists would say, can be seen, generally plainly seen,
and its influence allowed for ; while in the former case the historian has not
sympathy enough with his man or his time to enable his imagination to
reconstruct its inner life. For it is imagination that must take data and
rebuild the past. The copying, or even the sifting, of records is not suffi
cient. To fill the dry bones of the past with life requires almost as much
creative power as to shape life out of the duties and events of the present.

* Delivered at the Fourth Conference, held at Grace Episcopal Church, January 13, 1904.

THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 391
Both demand a hold upon ideals and a constant adjustment of facts to them.
And this necessitates imagination. Imagination has its dangers, its ten
dencies to romance and to preaching, but it has its compensations. Like
oxen, it makes a muss and also wealth. " Where no oxen are, the crib is
clean ; but much labor is with the strength of the ox ".
Such considerations occur to us as we consider the Gospel of St. John,
especially its differences from the Synoptic Gospels. And in no part of it
are these differences more apparent than in the chapters from the fifth to
the eleventh. Compare this section with almost any part of the Gos-pel of
St. Mark, for example. The latter is comparatively simple of thought, not
analytic, not theologic. There is an atmosphere about it that is fresh,
glad, young. You can see the blue Lake sparkling in the morning sunshine,
and the golden fields of Galilee, rich with lilies and vocal with birds. It is
concerned with facts ungarnished, unrelated to any scheme of thought.
The utterances of Jesus in it are deep and spiritual, but there is in them no
touch of mysticism ; they say little about His nature, or His relation to man
or God. On the other hand, the tone of the Fourth Gospel is mature, medita
tive, mystical. The life it reflects is subtle and complex. It is full of the
ology. The events it narrates are given apparently not so much for their
historical value as for a purpose, a purpose of instruction and edification.
It appears as if aiming to set forth and illustrate a theory. Its gaze is
dreamy, far-distant, so far that on its horizon the line between earth and
heaven is indistinguishable. The Synoptic Gospels are full of brief, epi
grammatic sayings of Jesus, and of stories of His, illustrating the Kingdom
of God. The Fourth Gospel, with one possible exception, contains no
parable, and the discourses of Jesus in it are involved in style, and are
occupied with setting forth the spiritual relations of men to Him and His
relations to His Father. The Synoptics and the Fourth Gospel are not
merely different; they are in some respects contradictory. In the Fourth
Gospel there is no development in the history of Jesus' public ministry.
His Messiahship is at once announced by John the Baptist, recognized by
the disciples, and exhibited to the multitudes assembled at Jerusalem. On
the other hand, in the Synoptic Gospels His Messianic character is
unfolded only gradually. Those who discover it are bidden to keep it con
cealed. His closest disciples are slow to recognize it, and it is openly
announced only at the close of His career. Again, the character of the life
is different which the followers of Christ will share through their connec
tion with Him. In the first three Gospels it is a blessed existence in some
distant sphere in the future. The present is only preparatory to it, for this
life will pass away before the Kingdom of Heaven will begin.
In the P'ourth Gospel the reward of the followers of Christ is eternal
life ; and this is conceived not so much as waiting upon a future day as a
matter of here and now, for it consists of union of spirit with Him. The
Christ of St. Luke places the resurrection and the moral assessment of life
far distant at the world's end. St. John makes the Christ repudiate this

392 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
view, and declare that He is Himself the resurrection and the life, and that
belief in Him carries life with it immediately.
Such differences and contrarieties must spring from a difference of
view in the writers. They must have regarded Jesus differently, and they
must have had different aims in writing. To examine the aim of each of
the first three writers is not possible to-day. But in case of the author of
the Fourth Gospel we cannot but suspect before we reach the end of his
book that he has a special purpose ; and when we reach the last chapter
but one we find it distinctly stated. " These things are written that ye
might beheve that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing,
ye might have life through His name " His work, then, is not a biography
of Jesus, not a history of the events of His time ; but the author aimed to
demonstrate that Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God, and this not
so much for intellectual conviction as for spiritual edification. He alone
speculates on the relation of Jesus to the Almighty Creator. He alone sees
in Him the representative in human conditions of a side of God's nature
which forever existed. The Synoptists exhibit Jesus as preaching the
truth. The Fourth Evangelist regards Jesus as being Himself the Truth,
the eternal Thought and Reasonableness of God. It is not merely the case
with him, as with the others, that following Christ's precepts will result in
a life which exemplifies that of Jesus ; but with him, Jesus is Life itself, all
that gives wealth, joy, and worth to existence. Christ is not only an objec
tive, historic being who once lived and died, but He is the subjective prin
ciple of life within the soul. The First and Third Evangelists give tradi
tions of the birth of Jesus, though even they ignore them afterwards and
sometimes contradict them. The Second Evangelist hears the beginning
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in the voice of John the Baptist. But the
Fourth Evangelist could have nothing to do with traditions of the birth of
Jesus, for to him the history of Christ went back through the ages and be
gan in the beginning with God.
When we have apprehended how widely different the portrait of Jesus
is which is given in the Fourth Gospel from that of the otlver three, we
hastily turn and ask, " Is it authentic ? How far does it represent the real
Jesus of Nazareth, or how far was it owing to the peculiarities of the author,
whoever he was ? This special tinge which the Fourth Gospel has through
out, is that the artist's coloring, or is the portrait trustworthy ? May we
assume the historic character of the Gospel ? "
I think we must answer in some respects. No. When an author disclaims
the writing of history, we may not hold him to historic accuracy. He has
his face set in another direction. Moreover — and this applies to other parts
of the Bible as well — the conditions of what we know as historic accuracy
did not then exist. There were no means of making immediate and exact
reports of conversations or events. When recorded afterwards, it was their
substance which the writer endeavored to embody, not their form The
discourses of historic persons in ancient writings, for example, are rarely
authentic in form. The author takes certain utterances which may have

THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 393
been genuine or certain ideas appropriate to the occasion, and weaves
from them a speech which he puts into the mouth of the one he is describ
ing. This is noticeable in some of the speeches in the Book of the Acts.
Tertullus, a noted orator, is hired to conduct the case of the Jews against
Paul. To justify engaging a professional advocate, the speech must have
been a long one. It takes less than one minute to read it. The part of a
long and weighty speech which would be apt to be retained would naturally
be the opening rather than the after-parts ; and in ihe Acts the preamble of
this speech occupies almost half of the whole. Such an instance shows
that in the Bible, as in other ancient writings, speeches especially were
freely treated. And this we must bear in mind in considering the speeches
of Jesus given in the section from the fifth to the eleventh chapters of the
Fourth Gospel. It adds to the improbability of their stenographic accuracy
that the style of them is wholly different from the utterances of Jesus as
given in the other Gospels. The brief, pithy sentences and vital metaphors
which the earlier Gospels ascribe to Him, all bear one sharp and individual
stamp ; but these are widely different from the close involutions of argu
ment of the Fourth Gospel and the intricacies of metaphysical thought
underlying them. And what is true of historic data and of style, may be
also true in some respects of the underlying theology, for it partly is
conditioned by them. Was this theologic view of Jesus a peculiarity of
the author, or was Jesus in reality the mystic being here portrayed ?
The evidence to decide this must be largely internal ; that is, we must
take features which seem unquestionably historic and see whether others
which are asserted harmonize with them. If they do not melt into a unity,
the presumption is that they were inaccurately reported or come from the
peculiarities of the author.
In our judgment of the authenticity of the portrait of Jesus given in the
Fourth Gospel, we shall consider whether its special features are harmo
nious with the best type found elsewhere.
Now there is another source of information with regard to Jesus besides
the Gospels. Half a century at least before the writing of the Fourth Gos
pel, and a quarter-century or so before the earliest of any of our four, St.
Paul began sending epistles to his distant friends. He made no attempt to
describe the events of the life of Jesus, for he was but little interested in
them ; but Jesus' character impressed him profoundly. Now it is most
significant that with him, too, as well as with the author of the Fourth
Gospel, it is the subjective, spiritual side of Christ with which he is mainly
concerned ; it is Christ's part in the great world-process of union between
God and man. He contemplates Jesus as embodying the human side of
God and the divine side of man. "Christ" with him has passed from a
title of Jesus of Nazareth to a designation of the ideal man, the consumma
tion of all that is best in the world, the typical instance of the possibilities
of the soul and of the human race. He is the spiritual expression of
humanity. He is the complete embodiment of God under human condi
tions. At one time St Paul refers to Jesus as a historic person who

394 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
lived and died at Jerusalem. At another time Christ is a spiritual being,
but external to the soul, the giver of all its true life. Again He is within
the soul, its very life and essence. From one to another of these great
conceptions he hurries, as it is now this, now that aspect which attracts his
attention at the time. They tangle his thought into inextricable sentences.
The mystery of the mingling of human and divine in the soul of the indi
vidual and in the race so overcomes him that he bursts out into poetry and
a torrent of prepositions : ' For of Him, and through Him, and to Himi
are all things ; to whom be glory forever. Amen ".
The similarity of these two conceptions, of course, suggests the question
whether the later was borrowed from the earlier. But this is a question of
little importance. Whether the Fourth Evangelist came across this view
in his travels among those churches of Asia which St. Paul had founded ;
whether it was struck out in his conflict with Gnostic speculation as the
only method of reconciling the infinity of God with the finiteness and evil
of the world ; or whether it came to him after long years of quiet meditation
as the necessary development of certain germs of character he had seen or
learned of in Jesus of Nazareth ; this is of secondary importance. The
chief thing is- that he deliberately adopted it, endorsed it, and made it the
basis of his portrait of his Master.
Portrait — that is the word we must keep in mind in considering this
Gospel. It is not a photograph of Jesus. How do a portrait and a photo
graph differ ? The one gives the fact of the moment and from one point of
view. Place yourself at the camera and put your sitter in a given position,
and this photograph is precisely what you see. It is the scientifically
correct record of these particular conditions. But as a complete report of
the man it may be gravely inaccurate. " He never takes well", we say of
this or that person, " his face has so much expression". Where a subject
is complex, the photograph, by recording only one aspect, may convey an
absolutely false impression. But the portrait-painter endeavors to show the
full, the real man. The greatness of a Rembrandt or a Watts portrait does
not lie in the fact that it tells us of what color the subject's eyes were or
what kind of a coat he wore. We care very little whether the artist was
historically accurate in these details or not. But we stand in amazement at
seeing a human soul gazing at us from the canvas — a soul calm or frivolous,
humorous, vain, or profound. It is the man himself that we see ; not his
clothes, not his appearance at one time or under special circumstances, but
the composite, complete man. Before the artist can create his likeness he
must create him. The sitter presents himself before the artist's judgment-
seat and the artist gives sentence upon him with every stroke of his brush.
" Your character is thus and so. You are a coward here, a hero there.
Thus I strip off all accidentals of time and circumstances, and behold, your
real self stands revealed ". It must require much confidence to have one's
portrait painted by a great artist.
It is such a likeness of Christ that the Fourth Gospel gives us. St.
Mark, with his loving eye for details, records this and that circumstance

THE PERSONAL EQUATION. 395
which we welcome as furnishing the fact-basis for our conception of our
Lord. And then comes St. John ; and upon this background he paints so
wonderfully that we behold the light of the knowledge of the glory of God
beaming forth in the face of Jesus Christ. It is a presumption in behalf of
the accuracy of His portrait that it is not a summary of facts, but it is the
impression which Christ made as a whole upon an artist of constructive
imagination and profound spiritual insight. The greatness of the character
thus revealed, is, it is true, not of itself a proof of its historic accuracy.
Moving as it is, it might yet be no revelation of the historic Jesus, but a
product merely of the writer's lofty imagination. But when we see that the
figure it presents is the Jesus of the Synoptists, raised to a higher degree of
spiritual development; when we see this conception buttressed by the first
Epistle of St. John and the later Epistles of St. Paul; then we feel we have
a right to reckon as evidence for its accuracy its mastery over our souls and
its call upon our worship ; then we exclaim, " My Lord must have been noth
ing less than that". We recognize that the author has attained his purpose.
"These things", he said, " are written that ye might believe that Jesus is
the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, ye might have life through
His name ". Life comes to us through the name he has written large.
See it there — his conception — the Incarnation — opening to its wealth
of meaning in the Fourth Gospel. If we had possessed no more than the
first three Gospels, we should have had a wonderful Christ, an example and
an inspiration. But He would have been a historic being only; we should
have had no warrant for identifying Him with the divine life of our souls,
dwelling with us and abiding in us. But the Christ of the Fourth Gospel is
the connecting link between the outward and the inward, between the
historic and the spiritual. He is the representative in bodily conditions, in
terms of time and space, of that human side which existed forever in the
nature of God. The life of Jesus was in time ; but the divine sonship, the
existence in God of a human side, was independent of time and humanity,
being eternal. This was authentically exhibited in Jesus of Nazareth. Not
that He is Himself the Almighty, for neither in this Gospel nor elsewhere
in the New Testament is it asserted as a theological proposition that Jesus
is God. But He is the representative of God. If God had lived, a man on
earth, He would have done just as Jesus did. He showed thought and love
and goodness as existing forever in the bosom of the Father, and constitut
ing in Him the ground of connection with humanity. And, on the other
hand. He showed this same goodness and thought and love as the true
nature of men, and constituting in them the ground of union with God. He
brought God down to men, and raised men up to God. And as He is God's
representative, so whatsoever things in the world are true, pure, just, lovely,
these are His representatives. In Him is life, and the life is the Ught of
men. The soul of the world, all the calls to noble desire, all that makes life
worth living, this is the presence of the Spirit of Christ. It is such a con
ception of Jesus as this that is the characteristic gift to us of the Fourth
Gospel.

396 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
The question is sometimes asked, " How do we know that Jesus will
not be superseded in that unique position which the Gospel of John assigns
Him, just as He Himself superseded the prophets which were before Him ? "
Or, to put it in spiritual language, "How do we know that He is God's only
Son ?" Certainly He is not such in the sense that God has no other sons ;
for we too are sons of God as really as was Jesus. But certainly He is, in
the sense that His revelation of God is unique and final. However this may
be further developed^and St. Paul points out how one may " fill up the
measure of the sufferings of Christ " — He cannot be superseded. Develop
ment must consist in applying in new departments this same idea of God
which Christ set forth. This renewal of the Incarnation is the Christian's
path in every age for following his Master. And in every noble man or
woman we have known we see a partial incarnation of Christ. But its funda
mental lines cannot be changed. For the united Christian consciousness,
perhaps one may say, the consciousness of the whole world, asserts that
Christ's conception of God is the deepest, the highest, the truest, and there
fore the ultimate conception. There are some things in which finality has
been reached. Goodness will undoubtedly show itself differently under
different conditions ; but our idea of the nature of goodness can never be
reversed. So Christ's conception of God may be amplified, but it can never
be altered. It is final. He is the only-begotten Son of the Father.
Belief in God depends more upon moral than intellectual grounds. It
is founded upon the insistence of the soul that the highest intellectual and
moral ideal shall be real. The cogency of this demand will therefore be in
proportion to the urgency with which the moral pressure is felt. So belief
in the authenticity of St. John's conception of Christ will depend largely
upon whether such a conception is demanded by one's spiritual nature. To
some the figure which appears in the Synoptists may be a sufficient explana
tion of the person of Christ and of the way of their own approach to God ;
for, whatever view is taken, these are inevitably bound together. Others,
to whom it seems that there must of necessity have been a human side in
God from all eternity, that this must of necessity have become at some time
embodied as completely as is possible under human conditions, that this
ideal must stand in vital connection with the life of their own souls today —
such will recognize in the portrait of Christ, drawn by the author of the
Fourth Gospel with the purpose of presenting to the soul its master, features
intrinsically probable as those of the historic Jesus of Nazareth, and essen
tial to the Saviour of the world.

* THE AUTHOR OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL.
by rey. olark s. beardslee, d. d.,
Professor of Biblical Dogmatics and Ethics, Hartford Theological
Seminary, Hartford, Conn.
Many remarks, in apology and explanation, call for utterance as I take
up this much-contended theme. But for these there is now no time or
room. You good people will appreciate what such remarks should be, and
when they would be in place.
'This one thing needs, however, to be said, and I hope it will offend no
one. It is not going to be my primary purpose to name the author of this
Gospel, or to tell where he lived, or to intimate his ancestry or training.
Rather, I am going to seek to gain some knowledge about this author
by studying his work. This Fourth Gospel is some man's monument. It
must of necessity embody some evidences and disclosures of his personal
qualities. In some true sense the author's portrait must be outlined in his
work. His heart must be beating there, if only our fingers are deft enough
to find its pulse. His eye must be glowing there continually, if only our
sight is keen enough to catch its light. His immortal being must leave
traces through his wonderful work, if only our immortal spirits have the
requisite affinity for sharing in his fellowship. Somewhere within this
Fourth Gospel the man who gave it shape stands beckoning toward our eye.
As we read these chapters, the very presence and person of their original
penman stand nearer than we think. And we may cherish the precious
confidence that main plain outlines of his noble form can never be effaced.
Where this Gospel stands, its author may be seen immediately.
Here open grand suggestions. At best, all that can be said here will
have to be mere suggestion.
In the first place, people are always saying that this Fourth Gospel is
so unlike the other three. True. And precisely here this author comes to
view. He is unlike those other men. He seems to have had his attention
fastened upon a special round of facts in the Master's life. And this prone-
ness of his toward just these things, if only we con it well, is deep and clear
with meaning. Those other men were mainly held by scenes in Galilee.
This man was mainly held by scenes in Judah. Here is a dominant note.
And in this dominant note ring echoes of the very voice of him who brings
this closing testimony to our ears.
And for one feature of our author it shows that he was selective. He
omitted hosts of facts. He chose with carefulness, just these few. Ponder
that remark of his in 20:30, 31 : "Many other signs did Jesus * * *

* Delivered at the Eighth Conference, held at All Saints Memorial Church, May ii, 1904.
397

398 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
But these are written, etc "- Selection. Definite selection. Resolute selec
tion. There rings a purpose, a thoughtful purpose. This yields no hint of
the author's name, to be sure. But it introduces us intimately to his inner
mind. He is no easy rover. He prattles no distracted and distracting
speech. He can pick and weigh and lock together and concentrate what
he treats and what he says. Think of this. It shows a master instantly.
Then see his motive : " These are written that ye may believe ". That
ye may believe. Faith. Walk around that word. Dig under it. Look
within it. Trace it to its origin. Who said that ? Here is a man who aims
to engender faith. That means truth. And truth that stands clear, and
rests firm. There looms a sublime proposition. It is an appeal to man's
inteUigence. It is girt with mighty confidence. It is strong with an unvary
ing patience. Think into it. There rings a sovereign. No finer, kinglier
challenge could be made by any man. The man who poised these two
verses on the apex of his work was a master-builder. Keep thinking of
this. " That ye may believe ". The man who utters that brief phrase, as
it is uttered by this author, needs to hold a steady footing, needs to have
his vision clear, his conviction sure, and the parts of his total theme well
arranged, as he voices a challenge 1 ke that. No outburst of his being
could be more dignified, no undertaking could require a grander momen
tum, no proposition could show a finer personal character, or attest a loftier
ambition. Read those two verses over and over. More features of the author are
resting there than you suspect. Feel the throbbing of his heart as he men
tions " Jesus ". See whither his fancy soars as he writes down " Christ ".
Follow up the far rangings of his thought as he carves that phrase. " The
Son of God ". Get the posture and energy of this man as he bows down
over his great endeavor and writes : " These things I have set down in
writing that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and
that believing ye may have life in His name ". Set every phrase apart.
Scan every word. Then combine the whole. Press into this. You are
drawing near the warm presence of the very man you seek.
Then put close beside these verses those verses with which the Gospel
opens. Explore the grand interior of that word " Word " There shines a
precious stone. None finer was ever found in all the Orient. The "Word ",
/. e., the very voice of reason, and the very light of revelation. Will you
properly inspect those terms? Then hear that declaration about the
"Word": It "was in the beginning". This reasoned revelation, this
revealed reason is eternal. What an affirmation ! So examine the spaces
and masses which bulk and spread so marvelously in that Prologue. The
man who penned that Prologue was a man of vision and a man of thought.
He had seen, and he had pondered. It was a master who framed those
ponderous words together. There is in that Prologue a resumd of the
earthly life of Christ, a deep reach into His eternity, an outline of an ulti
mate metaphysics, a true philosophy, a thumbnail compend of theology,
and an ample base for perfect ethics. These are superlative affirmations.

THE AUTHOR OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 399
and only affirmations, to be sure. Time fails to show their warrant. But
test them. Work them out. And again you will begin to be finely aware
of the very presence of the man who penned this Gospel.
Then meditate for a little upon the phrase, " Without Him was not
anything made that was made ". Stop right here. What ever moved this
author to coin this claim ? Think of this. Here is another disclosure of
himself. He was a watchful, thoughtful man. He was a man of vision and
reason. For example : He saw Jesus turn the water into wine. He saw
Jesus feed the 5,000 men. Just such scenes as these were seen by all the
other men. But this man pondered as he gazed. He thought. And as he
pondered, he was led to see and say, " Lo, here is the Creator ".
Study in a similar way that other phrase : " I am the light of the
world ". Or this : " In Him was life, and the life was the light of men ".
How did that idea and figure of light get so firm a place in this Fourth
Gospel ? It is another mark and impress of its author. He saw Jesus deal
with men. He heard Him talk. He saw violence fly against Him, and
observed the Master's plain and strong and mild replies. And as he saw
he thought. And as he thought he said: " Lo, here is reason streaming
into human minds. Here is original and ultimate instruction. Here is the
light that lighteth every man coming into the world ". Do you see ? The
man who penned those words was a closely watchful, deeply thoughtful,
finely docile, truly original mind. Suppose it be allowed that man cannot
be sure about his name or nature, place or training or daily whereabouts.
Despite all that ignorance, we may know this man. He lives and speaks
right before our eyes.
And I would say that these last mentioned instances are characteristic
of this Gospel and this man. The other Gospels record similar deeds of
Christ. But they do nothing more. But this man, who pens this fourth
account, takes from those common actions a chosen few, and thinks of
them, and grows into them, and gets the weight of them, and sees their size,
and penetrates to their philosophy. He peers and ponders tiU he sees them
whole, till he finds their meaning, till he stands within eternity. Such was
the man who wrote this Gospel.
Another introduction to this author can be gained by noting all he says
about the Holy Spirit. In this regard he stands grandly unique. Once
Jesus said: "If any thirst, let him come unto Me and drink, and out of his
beUy shaU flow rivers of living water ". The author of this Gospel caught
that great saying and wrote it down. And he knew well what he was doing.
And then he got another saying, — that one, uttered when Thomas was absent,
where Jesus breathed on them and said: "Receive ye the Holy Ghost".
The author of this Gospel watched that little drama through and made a
record of it. And in those wonderful conferences of Jesus and His friends
in chapters 14-16, he has put down repeatedly at the sharp point of his
accurate pen the Lord's allusions to the Spirit. Mind this. This author
made a note of all of them and put them in his book. Read them over and
over if you really seek to know this man. For here is precious aid, I feel

400 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
sure. The author of this Fourth Gospel had deep conceptions of what
Jesus meant and did when He promised and imparted the Holy Ghost. The
mighty energies of that infinite Holy Spirit of wisdom and grace and conso
lation wrought freely and for long upon his plastic nature, he freely sub
mitting all the while to the silent transformation, until its fruitage ripened
in this golden record which we read. Through that inworking Spirit, all the
Master's word and life were inwrought into this author's being. And this
Gospel is the living issue. The Gospel unfolds the author just as truly as
it unfolds the Christ. And I will put in right here that, if I know at all what
Christ's Gospel actually is, it is in this Fourth Gospel. And it is all here.
And in its record is the very soul of the Christian honor of its author. To
the very core it is genuine, authentic, true. The penman of these para
graphs was inspired. The Holy Spirit, the boon of Christ, reigned within
his life and work. He drank deep draughts from the spring of life, and
hence he wrote this Gospel.
Another sign of who and what he is appears in that same scene when
Thomas was away. Read it through and get the drift of that statement of
the Lord: "As the Father hath sent Me, so do I send you". There is
apostleship. Tarry here till you get the force and outlook of that word.
Then test this Gospel by that thought. Read also this : " You have not
chosen Me, but I have chosen you, etc. ". The man who wrote this book
was a man who felt that mission. His impulse hailed from Christ and God,
and it aimed at all humanity. If ever an apostle of Christ has been seen by
men, he is the author of this book. This is really a taking clue to his
identity. And it runs all through this Fourth Gospel, if there is any honor
in it. Now study the relation of events and discourses in this Gospel.
Remember the events — those miracles, those criticisms and challenges — and
then remember the addresses that foUov/. For example take chapters 5 and
6. Here is a phenomenon of which much is being made. Study this. Men
say the discourses wander and get lost in unearthly metaphysics. But look.
See how simple those discourses are. They are profound, indeed. Yes.
But they are simple. And they do grow out of the event. They really do.
They are expository of the inner meaning of the event. They are comments,
a master's comments. Examine this. You are as capable of doing this as
anyone. You search and see. The fact is, event and discourse cohere.
One produces the other. One rises from the other, simply, naturally.
What does this mean touching the author? Why, it means that in the
writer of this Gospel, we have a man who hung about Christ with an
exquisite insight and attentiveness, and that he was peculiarly prone to be
close by the Lord when He was drawing eternal meanings out of common
things. Here is a disciple who saw the Saviour's philosophy of things.
Test this by an honest study of the word " Son" in 5 : 19, and "love"
in 5 : 20, and " bread " in 6 : 33. Test it in that ninth chapter. Study into
these suggestions. Jesus did deep thinking all along there. Follow it if
you can. Keep your hold of the event. Traverse through its discourse and

THE AUTHOR OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL. 401
you will find a marvelous characteristic of this author. He can take an item
that is in itself an incident, such as the evangelists would merely name, and
show how Jesus' mind adjusted itself to that item's deepest bearings.
Now John is full of this sort of thing. Do not refuse to study it out.
Get into his simplicity. Get into his profundity. The fact is, this writer
stands at once the friend and the follower, the peer and the leader of the
plainest and the most finished men of our race. He may be classed, and
properly classed among the stoics and the gnostics, the artists and the
rustics of the ages. Wonderfully plain, wonderfully deep. I praise heaven
that there was one who had the eye to see the Messiah's discernment of the
mighty meanings in common things.
One could well spend a whole afternoon verifying this. I have alluded
to that impotent man in John 5. There is a cure just such as you find in
the other Gospels without a comment. Its Sabbath desecration, too, is simi
lar to repeated synoptic scenes. There is an independent, authoritative act
of love. Now see how deep thoughts unfold. Out of the cure, an allusion
to the Sabbath. Out of that, an allusion to the Father. Out of that, some
words about the Son. Out of that, some words about Love. Out of that,
some words about Life and Judgment. Out of that, some words about
Faith, and so on. Now think; whither have you run? From that poor,
impotent man by the pool, you have almost instantly traversed infinite
realms, until at the end you stand face to face with the ultimate realities of
personal being in God and man alike. Here is a sublime and impressive
trait of the author of this work.
Another study worth the while of any man is the search to see how
many sides, how many different sides of the Master this author has defined.
It is a most wonderful study. But there is no room for its examination here.
Still another phase of this Gospel, reflecting finely on the author's
qualities, is its quality as a piece of literature. There is high art here, art
of the finest type, — literary art. Look at it as a drama. Study its personnel.
Study its scenery. Study it as a tragedy. Mark its unity.
Then try to grasp the whole as a unified portrait of Christ. You know
it is possibly this same author that drew that picture of Christ in the closing
book of our canon. That picture shows rapt vision and deep meditation,
and you have the substance of it all in this book.
Then conceive the whole Gospel as a composition of fine music, a
symphony. Get its sweet, appealing, persuasive melodies; get its dreadful
discords. Move out into the swing of its triumphant harmonies. It is a
majestic work in range and balancing.
And now try to make some clear description of this man — the author of
this book. He must have had a deep and limpid eye. He must have had a master
intellect. He must have had a mighty heart. He must have had the
sobriety and poise of a philosopher. He must have had a fine sincerity.
His mind must have been as spacious and pure as the vault of heaven.
You may hear him in his music, for it will never grow mute. You may see

402 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
him in his portrait of his Lord, for there are tracings of himself that will
never fade.
Do you ask who he was ? Well he must have been one who nestled
near to his Lord ; I think he must have leaned upon His breast. He must
have imbibed his Master's warmest affections ; I think he might be termed
the beloved. He did absorb great draughts of his Master's teachings ; truly
he was a disciple. He did follow and obey the Master's impulse to go and
tell what he had seen and heard ; I think he was an apostle. And he must
have pondered these things many a long year ; I think he was an aged
follower when he wrote. And if you ask his name, I must reply that most
fittingly it would be woven out of two Hebrew words — Grace and Jehovah —
Jehovah's grace. Johannes, in the Greek; in the English, John.
Such is the author of this Fourth Gospel. A free soul, of a regal pur
pose, sincere, mature, refined, profound, artistic, spiritual, an apostle, a
disciple, a beloved friend, an exponent of Jehovah's love, — John.

APPENDIX

?REMARKS AT THE BUSINESS MEN'S LUNCH,
JANUARY 13, 1904.

MR. LITTLEFIELD. " Gentlemen :— I think that business men honestly
and sincerely desire to know the truth, so far as my experience goes. I am
reminded in that connection of a little church in Western New York that had for
its principal supporter a David Harum. A new minister was called to the church
and in his first sermon he preached pretty vigorously against certain evils, and the
good deacons became alarmed and feared that Brother Harum, who was not a
member of the church but a large contributor to its financial support, might be
very much offended and withhold his aid. And so they told the pastor the circum
stances. Soon after the pastor met David on the street and he took occasion to say
to him that he certainly had no reference to him in his sermon. ' That is all right.
Parson', said he, 'it is a mighty poor sermon that don't hit me pretty hard some
where. Go ahead and preach what you believe to be the truth and I shall be satis
fied' I think that is the attitude of business men generally toward the truth.
They desire to have thoughtful and free expression of it.
" Now we are very fortunate to have with us today a number of men who have
devoted their lives to the study of theological questions. They are what we lawyers
call experts in their line; and one of these gentlemen will address us on the sub
ject of the ' Indebtedness of the Churches to the Conference Speakers '. I need not
say that this is an indebtedness that cannot be discharged in dollars and cents ; an
indebtedness far deeper and broader than pecuniary indebtedness is involved here,
and I am sure we all recognize it. But I wish to take occasion now to express
my thanks to the gentlemen present and absent who have so generously and freely
given their financial assistance and made it possible for us to enjoy this lunch and
these Conferences.
" It gives me great pleasure to present at this time Rev. Dr. Carter E. Cate,
Chairman of the Conference Committee".
DR. CATE.
" Mr. Chairman and Fellow Citizens : — 1 am sure we all feel that it is a
very great distinction for Providence to have these successful Conferences held
here; and we feel that we are privileged in this above most cities. We are making
these Conferences a focusing point for the best thought and the deepest experiences
of the leaders of New England and beyond. And I am sure it would be unfort
unate, if some one did not express better than I am expressing, our deep and sin
cere appreciation. And I refer to the gentlemen who have come to us today as
well as those who have addressed us in the past Conferences. We have been very
fortunate in the readiness with which the speakers have followed along
the distinctive ideas of these Conferences ; the idea of constructive work, the idea
of interpretation. They have lifted up the whole truth in a very clear manner.

* A very pleasant feature of the January Cenference was the Business Men's Lunch, held at the
Trocadero between the morning and afternoon sessions. Several of the Conference speakers were in
attendance and made brief addresses. Hon. Nathan W, Littlefield presided. About 150 of the business
and professional men of the city were present. The occasion was greatly enjoyed.
405

4o6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
They have made the Conferences immensely inspiring and helpful to us. We only
regret that we have not been able to reach a larger audience. We must circulate
the reports, put them into the hands of the people, and by inviting and urging
the young men and women of our churches, make a special effort to bring them
under the inspiration and help of these Conferences. They combine all the quali
ties that ought to command the respect and interest of the young men and
women in our churches — scholarship, personal character, culture, all these qual
ities are there which taken together make them unusually inspiring and uplift
ing". MR. LITTLEFIELD.— " The criticism used to be made on the religious
schools and seminaries of our country that they turned out men who were deep in
the knowledge of books and literature, but did not have a knowledge of men and of
life. I think that criticism has ceased to be applicable to the work of the sem
inaries of our day, and in many ways I think a great deal has been done to
bring the student into touch with real life. One of the best seminaries today is the
Hartford Theological Seminary, and we shall now have the pleasure of listening
to one of its Professors on 'The Service of the Seminaries to the Churches'. I
take great pleasure in presenting Professor Jacobus "
PROFESSOR JACOBUS.
" Mr. Chairman and Fellow Citizens : — I have sometimes been asked the
relation of the seminary to the churches, and I have never failed to answer that
question by saying that the relation of the seminary to the churches is the relation
of the seminaries to their students, because it is manifestly impossible that an insti
tution should be established to prepare men for the ministry which would not
measure its relationship to that ministry by its relationship to the affairs of the
church. Times have changed in these last twenty-five years. I imagine as long
ago as that Hartford Seminary would have been considered an ultra-conservative
institution ; and there are some who consider it such today, and some who con
sider it ultra-liberal. I am glad to say that it does not stand upon either a con
servative or a radical basis. It stands upon a basis for which it was chosen, the
work of a constructive thinking, a thinking which brings a man face to face with
the truth, and directs him in the best way of seeing both sides of it, and then
trusts him to his manhood to find his way out. There are a great many of our men
who do not find their way out as we wish they would, but there are many who do.
But we have the inestimable self-satisfaction of saying with reference to every man
who goes out, ' He is what he has made himself, and not what we have straight-
jacketed him to be '-
"We have kept out of controversy because we have held that Christ has
entrusted us to train these men to know His truth through knowing Him, and
through knowing Christ to bring His truth to the hearts of men ; so that the
relationship of Hartford Seminary to its students lies in this one great ambition
and desire, that she shall so impress her students that in that impression she
shall impress upon them Jesus Christ. Manifestly, gentlemen, that is not possible
unless there be impressed upon us who sit in the Professors' chairs the spirit of
Christ. And I stand before you with a consciousness born of the humilitj' of
experience when I say that the yearning desire of those who sit around the faculty
table at Hartford is that Christ shall be so impressed upon us that our impres
sion upon our students can be nothing less than the impress of Him. That is
the relationship and the service of the seminary to the chvirch ".

REMARKS AT THE BUSINESS MEN'S LUNCH. 407
MR. LITTLEFIELD. — "Quite a number of years ago, so many years ago
that I will not tell you how many lest it might appear that the gentleman upon
whom I am about to call has passed what has been termed the dead-line of fifty,
there was a young man in Phillips Andover Academy in the best class that ever
went out from that academy, who is present here today as a speaker. It was the
best class because Mr. Palmer and myself happened to be inembers of that class. I
now take great pleasure in presenting to this body of business men my friend and
classmate, Rev. Frederic Palmer, who will speak upon ' Church Unity' ".
MR. PALMER.
" Mr. President and Gentlemen : — Your president has introduced me to
speak upon ' Church Unity '. And in introducing my brief remarks I would like
to ask what does one want more than to look upon this assembly, for a living pic
ture creates a greater impression than a picture of words. I can say nothing more
impressive than to ask you to look around you. Every one of us is heartily loyal
to his own church, and yet coming here we find a union that is underlying the dif
ferences of the outside. It seems to me that these Conferences are a very remark
able indication of the way in which the unity of the church is being worked out.
This is a kind of guage which tells us the point that unity has reached. It tells us
also what we have not reached. The old idea was that of uniformity, bvit that was
a mistake. For the moment you try to impress uniformity upon men, that moment
you increase the difficulty of the problem. Whatever church unity may be it is not
uniformity. " I think we have also come to the conclusion that uniformity is not desirable,
because we are all seeing that beneath our differences there is a response to certain
inherent and necessary differences in human nature. I am glad to think that there
is a Roman Catholic Church near mine that is full every Sunday morning. I do
not desire to see it closed ; if it was closed, I do not think its inembers would come
to my church, or to any of the other churches. It is ministering something to that
congregation, and we each are ministering to something in human nature ; one, it
may be, to the social side, anothe*- to the spiritual, and another to the intellectual
side of human nature, but each making its contribution. What we are coming to
hope is that we may get the religious ideas of each one of these churches and pre
sent them to the community as a whole. At a meeting in Boston one of the speak
ers said, ' If you could get Methodist fire under Baptist water, you could get enough
steam to run all the Presbyterian machinery throughout the United States '-
" I think we are recognizing that we have a great degree of common unity at
present. I wish the unreality of many of our differences was not so much over
looked. We do business together, we play golf together, and on the great and
serious matters of life we come together and unite with each other ; but when we
enter the door of the church there is some strange difference there that we do not
recognize anywhere else. This is conventional ; we are doing it from past example,
and are allowing it to rob us of a great good. When a person can jest about a sub
ject, that shows that it is not fundamental with him. When Phillips Brooks was
rector of Trinity Church he asked Professor Park to come and visit him. He
wrote that he could not come, for, as he said, ' I have just learned from an Episco
pal clergyman that I have not been.properly baptized' ' Come', Dr. Brooks wrote
in reply, ' I have a little room in a remote part of the house which I keep for just
such cases '. When men can talk of their differences in that way, you may be sure
they are not real. In one of the little towns out west some years ago, a new clergy
man had gone in there who was a ritualist, and after a short time he was introduced

4o8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
to the Methodist minister, an aged, saintly man. In the course of the conversa
tion the young clergyman said, ' Of course I recognize you as a gentleman, though
I cannot regard you as a clergyman '. And the other replied, ' Of course I recog
nize you as a clergyman, though I cannot regard you as a gentleman '- What is
the difference between those two incidents, the one between Professor Park and
Phillips Brooks ; the other between the ritualistic clergyman and the old saint ?
There is a difference as wide as heaven is from earth. The difference between
the first two men was but slight, but the difference between the other two was
wide. The difference is one of spirit, the different spirit of the men, and that is
the thing which constitutes the difference between churches. It is not so much
ecclesiastical difference as a difference of spirit that divides men. Now, wherever
we can recognize a common spirit, there we have unity; and that is where we have
been making the greatest advances during the last few years. It is not so much
that you can call men by the same name and they will be all of a kind, as that the
men of one spirit in a given church are like the men in the other churches of the
same spirit. It is the spirit that makes the difference, and that is the important
element here. It is not a man's profession in the church which he belongs to ; it
is. Is he filled with the spirit of Christ.? That is what is important and funda
mental. So of any church. The question is not primarily of the validity of its
orders; it is. Does this church bring men to Christ and fill them with His spirit?
Recognizing this as fundamental, we can look upon the members of our churches
and yet recognize the something deeper and higher than their church membership.
" Now, you here in Providence are taking the second step in Christian unity.
It is impossible that we should ever come together on the ground of external unity,
— any one form of worship, or any one organization, or any one creed. That is
impossible, and it is undesirable that it should be so. But we are uniting on
matters of practical work; on that basis we are coming together. This is so in my
own town. Together we are seeing that temperance legislation is carried out, and
the charity of the town taken care of. Our town is being cared for as if it were one
parish. We have been taking the first step ; you have been taking the first step.
But it is a second step when we come together and study the question. There is
one phrase in the service of my church which I always say with the greatest satis
faction, because it seems to me to give the key to the situation. We pray that we
may hold ' the unity of the spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of
life'". MR. LITTLEFIELD. — " We have with us today a gentlemen who has been
foremost in organizing the party that is about to leave our shores for the Holy
Land. I understand that during this trip among other places of interest the party
will visit Jerusalem and Ephesus, the earlier and the later homes of St. John, and I
am sure we shall be glad to hear from him something of the purposes and plans of
this pilgrimage to the most interesting shrines of the Christian world. I have great
pleasure in introducing Mr. A. B. McCrillis, of Providence "-
MR. McCRILLIS.
" Mr. Chairman and Fellow Citizens : — I am glad to have the opportunity
of making a brief statement in regard to the approaching pilgrimage to the Holy
Land. The International Sunday School Convention, at its meeting in Denver,
appointed a committee of three to arrange for a World's Sunday School Convention
at Jerusalem next April.
"One of the finest steamers afloat, the 'Grosser Kurfursf of the North
German line, has been chartered for a trip of 72 days.

REMARKS AT THE BUSINESS MEN'S LUNCH. 409
" We shall land at Madeira, Gibraltar, Algiers, Malta and many other Mediter
ranean ports, and make extended stops at the five great cities that have each been
recognized in turn as the World's Capitals, — Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem,
Cairo and Rome.
" The company will be made up wholly of representative persons who are in
hearty sympathy with the great cause we represent. Already more than 800 dele
gates have been booked, 31 from Rhode Island and some from every state and
territory in the Union, and all but two of the provinces of the Dominion of Canada.
" It is already known that there will be representatives from Mexico and one
or more of the West India Islands ; and a number of missionaries who have been
on furlough in this country will return to their fields with us, taking in the con
vention en route.
"This is not in any sense to be a pleasure excursion. Nearly 200 ministers
are already booked for the trip, and the rest of the company consists of Sunday
School superintendents, teachers, and earnest Bible students, who are making the
trip that they may better understand the Bible from studying it on the spot where
so much of it was written and so many of its scenes enacted.
"We shall cross and recross several times the routes of Paul and John in the
Mediterranean, passing the Isle of Patmos, and spending a day in Smyrna, one of
the cities to which John wrote, and where Polycarp, John's disciple, received his
Martyr's crown, and where his authenticated tomb still remains, a tangible con
nection between the time of John and our day, connecting the first and twentieth
centuries. We shall spend a day at Ephesus distinguished by its theatre and the
temple of Diana, but still more by the residence and sufferings of John and Paul.
" The ship is to be our home from our start till our return. We shall have
continuous convention work in all departments of Sunday School training, with
daily lectures by some of the foremost Bible students in the world-
" At the same time that we go from America, another palatial steamer will start
from England for the same destination, with a company that will be at least the
equal of ours in its scholarly attainments and its enthusiastic interest in Bible
study. " It is already known that a great many missionaries and Christian workers are
coming up to the convention from all over the East, from many points in Europe,
Asia, Africa and Australia.
" Seventeen days will be spent in the Holy Land, and a horse-back trip taken
the entire length of the land from Damascus to Hebron.
" Our convention tent will be pitched at the foot of the Mount of Olives,
within a few hundred feet of Calvary and our Saviour's tomb.
"There will be sectional meetings of great interest at the sea of Galilee,
Shechem, the Mount of Olives, and many other places closely associated with the
life and work of our Lord and the disciples.
" We shall visit the excavations in progress by various exploration societies at
Ephesus, Gezer, Heliopolis and Rome.
" The American Consul General at Constantinople has secured for us special
privileges in the city of Constantinople and special protection in our trip through
the Land. " The great Ottoman Museum in Constantinople and the great Boulak Museum
in Cairo, and the priceless collections of the Vatican and other museums in Rome,
are all to be thrown open to us.
" My time will not permit more than this brief reference to a few of the prom
inent points covered on our cruise. I should be glad to tell you of the arrange-

41 o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
ments for the great convention and for valuable side trips. I can only say it is
the opportunity of a lifetime and every one who can should avail himself of the
privilege ".
MR. LITTLEFIELD.— " I wish at this point to call upon Rev. Dr. Charles
M. Melden, Pastor of the Mathewson Street Methodist Episcopal Church, who
will address us upon the ' Relation of Christ to the Church'".
DR. MELDEN.
' ' Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen ; — It is said that Carl3'le and Emerson were
walking one day together during Emerson's visit to Scotland, and during their
conversation Carlyle, pointing to a church in the distance, said, ' If Christ had not
died, that church would never have stood there and we would not have been walk
ing here together now.' And that is emphatically true. If Christ had not lived
and died we would not be here in this delightful fellowship to-day. And it seems
to me, as the last speaker has so admirably said, that the secret of Christian unity
is allegiance to Jesus Christ. Our religion, if it is anything, is loyalty to Christ,
a personal relationship, and everyone of us stands true to our profession, if we are
true to Jesus Christ, the great Founder of our Church. And in proportion as we
are true to Him and loyal to Him will we be loyal and true to each other in delight
ful. Christian fellowship. This I conceive to be the relation of Christ to His
Church. He is the Head of His Church. He fills it with His spirit. The Church
is bound to Him by ties of personal loyally. It is sometimes said that the Church
is losing its grip on men. I don't believe it. It is sometimes said that in working
men's assemblies the name of Christ is applauded and the name of the Church
hissed. I do not believe that this is true. Nor do I believe that these assemblies
always represent the working men of our country. I believe that the Church has
its support very largely from the laboring classes. But I want to say that if the
name of Christ is applauded, and the name of the Church is hissed in any country
or land, I believe it is because we do not represent the spirit and characteristics of
the Lord Jesus Christ faithfully to men. And it is our business as members of
the Church of Christ to show our loyalty to Him by reflecting as far as possible
His spirit and characteristics in our lives ".
MR. LITTLEFIELD. — "It is said that Dean Stanley was once calling upon
an eccentric man who had arranged around his reception room a large number of
mirrors, and as Dean Stanley entered the reception room he looked calmly around
upon the multiplied reflections of his form and remarked, 'A very respectable col
lection of the clergy '- We are all familiar with the fact that a book has recently
been written entitled the 'Ascent of the Soul', and probably some of us know the
author of that book. Recently this order came from England, the edition having
been exhausted there, ' Please send us a thousand copies of Dr. Bradford's souls^.
This was the multiplication of the mirrors as applied to the Dean of Congregation
alism, Dr. Amory H. Bradford. We shall now have the pleasure of hearing from
Dr. Bradford on ' The Light of the World in Japan ' "
DR. BRADFORD.
" Mr. President and Gentlemen : — I do not know how that cable found its
way to Providence, but I shall never cease to be surprised at anything which I find
in this city. Our time is nearly up, and I shall detain you with my remarks for
but a single moment. Your subject, as it is now stated sounds differently from
what it did when it was given to me earlier. This morning I was told that I was to

REMARKS AT THE BUSINESS MEN'S LUNCH. 411
speak on ' The Present Crisis in Japan ' ; but it makes verj' little difference which
way the subject is phrased. In any case it is too large for an after-dinner
speech. " I shall mention but a few of the many thoughts which press for utterance to
us at this time when our eyes are turned toward the Eastern coast of Asia. A great
struggle between thejapanese and the Russians now seems to be inevitable. What will
be the result .'' No one can tell. A few facts however, may be stated without fear
of contradiction. The Japanese, by the most remarkable tests to which any people
could be subjected have proved theinselves the inost patriotic people in the world.
The surrender by the Daimios of the land and authority which they had possessed
for generations in order that the unity and greatness of the Empire might be pro
moted, was the most magnificent act in modern history. If all the governors of
the various states of our Union instead of being mere rulers were the owners of
their territory, and they, in order that the nation might be spared, should volun
tarily surrender all their rights and all their possessions, their act would be
parallel to the sacrifices which the Daimios and the Shogun made for Japan.
They literally sacrificed everything for the Empire ; — many of them were after
ward rewarded but their action was not stimulated by the prizes which were
offered. "Japan is the most progressive nation which the world has ever known*. It
has come to its place of power more swiftly than any other nation ever did. It is
only about fifty years ago that Commodore Perry opened her doors to the outside
world. The fifty years since then have made her one of the most intelligent, well
governed and civilized people on the face of the earth.
" If the conflict which now seems impending must go on, I plead for sympathy
for the Japanese. One of their leaders said to me a few years ago when I was
there, — ' We were not the enemies of China during the late war ; we felt that we were
called upon to be the teacher of China, and now that the war is over we are as good
friends as ever' That remark indicates their spirit. They stand for an open door,
for the larger commerce, for a progressive life and for a more generous civilization.
If the war must come the welfare of the world in the immediate future depends
upon their success in the struggle.
"But will they be successful.' Ah, there is the question! The Japanese are
more like the French than the Germans. They are as brave as it is possible for
men to be. They care nothing for their own lives ; but they are dealing with
Russia, that power which seems never to be in a hurry, that never rests, that is
pushing on for the possession of Manchuria, and ultimately for parts of China.
What the outcome will be none of us know, but I fear that at the first victory will
be with the Japanese and then later that it will be the crushing of Japan. Let us
pray God that this may not be the result.
" Gentlemen, we here in Providence today have little influence; our meeting
will not be heard of in London, Paris, Berlin or in St. Petersburg, but even we
may do a little in the way of influencing. A whisper sometimes will start an
avalanche, and our whisper may yet be heard even on the continent of Europe. There
is one thing at least that we may do, and no American citizen has a more sacred
privilege or duty. We may demand that all the powers shall submit their inter
national questions to the Court at the Hague instead of to an arbitrament of arms.
I trust that in some way even Russia may be made acquainted with our profound
conviction that the questions now at issue between herself and Japan should be
referred to that Supreme Court of the world, in that city which, in the order of
Providence will some day be the capital of all the nations of the earth. We may

412 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
send our conviction as to what should be, and thus do our small part in preserving
the world's peace ".*
MR. LITTLEFIELD.—" We arc fortunate in having with us the chief magis
trate of our State whom I am sure we are all delighted to honor, and although I got
him here under a promise not to call upon him for a speech, I hope he will use his
executive clemency and pardon me for breaking that promise. The Governor will
now address us "¦
GOVERNOR GARVIN.
"Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: — As the chairman has said, I came for
the purpose of listening and learning. But for two reasons I am interested in the
Conference which is going on in this city. In the first place, because as a layman
I look at it very much in the way it has been presented to you by Mr. Palmer, as
an evidence of the growing unity in religion. In my early days as a boy I remember
that there were very great antagonisms among the various protestant denominations.
There was a narrowness on the part of individual clergymen in their theological
views, and a keen opposition to one another on the part of the various denomina
tions. That has all changed in a very radical way. The evidences of it are not
morfe marked than those which we see here today. And we see this clearly in the
Young Men's Christian Association which combines so many different denomina
tions. For this reason your Conference is of great interest to me.
And for another reason. For sometime I have been endeavoring in one way
or another to urge upon our citizens the necessity of not relying upon the past,
that we should not be all the time referring to what Roger Williams did. We
ought to do something as a state that will show that we are progressive and have
something to give the world. I feel that this Conference is unique, and I hail it as
a promising thing for our state, and trust it will be another impulse for the state
itself and will enable us to set an example to posterity as we have inherited one
from those who were here first "-
MR. LITTLEFIELD. — "I was fortunate in securing the attendance of
another oificial, but he pleads the lateness of the hour, and also my promise not to
call upon him. Yet I feel that we must have a word from him before we adjourn.
I take great pleasure in presenting the Mayor of our city "-
MAYOR MILLER.
"Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: — I was very happy to come here today,
when I was told by your chairman that I would not be required to speak. It was
pleasant to feel that I would not have to do so. I noticed, however, as I sat here,
that during the remarks of one of the speakers, the attention of the audience
seemed to turn in my direction ; and he was speaking then of the former require
ments of a minister. I was reminded of a former friend of mine, a very excellent

* In accordance with this suggestion of Dr. Bradford, the following resolution, offered by Rev. Frank J.
Goodwin, was passed unanimously by a rising vote:
" Whereas, The question of a possible war between Russia and Japan is one which concerns the inter
ests of all Christian people throughout the world, who dread the sufferings and horrors of international
strife, representatives of different Christian churches, including c'ergymen and laymen, assembled in the City
of Providence, the Governor of the State of Rhode Island and the Mayor of the City of Providence being
present, do hereby express their profound conviction that the dispute between the two nations should be sub
mitted for settlement to the court of arbitration at The Hague, which was so wisely constituted a few years
ago at the suggestion of the Czar of Russia".

REMARKS AT THE B USINESS MEN'S L UNCH. 4 1 3
man who lived in Massachusetts, and he said to me once, " Do you knoAv that less
than thirty years ago T moved into a certain town (naming the town in Massa
chusetts), and I was transferred to the church of that town by letter. And a little
while after that the clergyman came to sec me and said, — ' Mr. Jones, I understand
you are a Democrat', and I said, ' Yes, sir, I am of that political faith ' And he
said, 'Mr. Jones, how can you reconcile your profession as a Christian with being
a Democrat ? ' "
" But things have changed somewhat since then. There has been an advance
in civilization throughout New England for which I think we are all happy. I am
very glad to be here today to listen to the remarks that have been made by the
gentlemen present. And I am further reminded of what a change there has been
in the religious world since I was a boy. When I was a boy up in a New- England
town and my parents were Baptists of the strictest type, there was a Methodist
church also in the town and I think there was a great controversy between these
two churches continually. It did not seem to me then that the members of the one
thought there was any chance of the other being saved. I can remember distinctlj'
the bitterness that existed when I heard it as a boy, but fortunately that is all gone
by, and today we think we are actuated by different motives, and I am very glad to
welcome to the City of Providence the clergymen from other cities and other towns
to attend a Conference like this. I am proud for the City of Providence, as the
Governor has said heis for the State of Rhode Island, for such a Conference in
the midst of us "

*AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL OF JOHN.
BY RKV. iril.Br)ER.IOK; I^. ANDERSON, D. D.,
Professor of New Testament Interpretation in Newton Theological
Institution, Newton Centre, Mass.
Preface.
An analysis is an effort to take a literary work to pieces for the sake of finding
out just how it was put together, and why it was put together in just the form it
bears. The purpose of this task is, therefore, to think the author's thoughts after
him, to discover the fundamental ideas underlying the gospel, to show how and
why one thought follows another, and to reveal the plan of the whole as it lay in
the author's mind.
Nothing could be easier than a topical or subject analysis of John, i.e., the
Prologue, John's Testimony, the First Disciples, etc.; and the same thing could
be said of a chronological and geographical analysis, except that some details of
chronology are difficult of decision. Such analyses are no analyses at all. No one,
who has thoroughly studied the gospel, supposes that John planned it in any such
external or chronological way, even though he follows a chronological order.
The work is a philosophical one, the results of reflection on the character and
words of Jesus. The author is convinced by his experience with Jesus that He was
more than He appeared to the world to be, and this book tells us how not only the
author but all the disciples came to this conviction. This story of growing
belief and final assurance is told by a selection of typical and significant incidents
and discourses, which manifest the true inner character of Jesus, as God-sent
Messiah, only begotton Son, Divine Word. From beginning to end the purpose
is to detail how Jesus manifested His divine glory, how the disciples beheld it, and
came to believe (i : 14 ; 2 : ii ; 20 :8, 28, 29, 31).
So, of course, Jesus is the one central sun of the gospel around whom all the
other characters revolve, and from whom they gain significance. He is the sub
ject of every paragraph, the dominating figure in every scene. Even when He
does not personally appear, as in i : 19-28, and 9 : 8-34, Jesus and His deeds are
the focus of discussion. This fact gives the book a wonderful unity.
The inner thought of the book, already described, is to be traced by certain
characteristic and typical words. These words indicate, as it were, distinct strands of
thought, which the author weaves together to make his gospel, (i) The first
and most important strand of thought is Jesus' manifestation of His glory. This
runs through the whole book, and is the thread on which all else is strung.
Several characteristic words mark it : Glo/y and Glorify, Manifestation, Sign,
Worles, Light, Word. He manifests Himself as the God-sent, divinely foretold
Messiah of the Jews (a subordinate representation), as the only begotten Son of
God, as the Divine Word, who was in the beginning with God and was God.
He manifests Himself in signs of divine power and love, in words which disclose

• Embodying also address on " How the Gospel was Made", delivered at the Fifth Conference, held :
the Central Baptist Church, Providence, R. I., February 10, 1904.
414

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 415
a divine character, and in the providentially ordered circumstances which reveal
Him. (2) The second strand, closely connected with the first, is Jesus' relation to
the Father, especially His union with Him and revelation of Him. The Prologue
contains this strand as indeed it contains all the others, and greatly emphasizes it.
See i:i, 14, 18. The profoundest chapters, like 5, 7, 8, 10, 14, 15, 17, are
full of it. The thoughts are most clearly expressed in 1:18; 10 : 30 and 14 : 9.
The characteristic words are Father and Son. (3) As Jesus moves through the
various scenes, manifesting His glory, some see that glory and believe. This
belief continually intensifies throughout the history until it becomes absolute
assurance, deathless love and divine adoration. On the other hand, others refuse
to see, and do not believe. This unbelief also intensifies throughout the history,
growing from questioning into opposition, deadly hatred and, finally, apostasy
on the one hand and murder on the other. The characteristic words of this strand
are Believe, See. The unbelieving mass is called the World, which is Blind.
(4) So, naturally between these believers and unbelievers comes a separation,
which grows wider and cleaner until, with the departure of Judas, Jesus is left
alone with His little company, while outside is the great, hostile World. The
little company has no characteristic name in the gospel. They are His otuti.
His friends. His sheep, those luhom the Father has given Him out of the -world.
And yet it has a characteristic and significant word, that word is Love ; beloved and
loving. {5) Belief constantly manifests itself in testimony to the truth. John
the Baptist is the first witness ; the disciples and all believers constantly testify ;
Jesus Himself is the great and chief witness to the truth ; the Holy Spirit shall
testify to Christ as the Spirit of Truth. The characteristic words here are
Testify, Testimony and Truth, Unbelief manifests itself also in questioning,
opposition, persecution, hatred, and finally in the rejection of the truth, and the
crucifixion of Jesus. (6) The final issues are also set forth. The believer has
Eternal Life, begun here, lasting forever. This life comes from Jesus, who is
Himself the Life, and so the Giver and Sustainer of it. The unbelieving world
already rests under Judgment, which is a state of Death. The characteristic words
here are I^ife 3.nd Judgment a.nd Judge. Death appears only infrequently.
The following work is an attempt to recognize these strands of thought in the
Gospel, and to follow their lead in making the analysis. So far as the writer
knows, this is the first attempt to follow this principle. The significant -words
have seemed to the writer to be guide-posts, and to indicate the author's inmost
thought. Still, care has been taken not to be led aside from the real argument by
exceptional and insignificant uses of characteristic words, nor on the other hand
to grope when the words fail and the thoughts remain as in chapters iS-20.
These words -will be printed in italics. Constant notes will inform the
reader of the reasons for the analysis at critical and difficult points. Side
by side with this analysis of the thought, brief remarks will supply what is
needed in the way of chronological and geographical interest. No one can recog
nize more clearly than the writer how imperfectly the general plan has been carried
out. The authorities whom I have found most useful are Luthardt, Reynolds,
Godet, Westcott and Professor Riggs.

THE GENERAL ANALYSIS.
Note. — This is inserted before the detailed analysis for convenience of refer
ence for those who wish to examine merely the larger divisions. The wording is
exactly the same as in the detailed analysis.

41 6 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Introduction. —The Prologue, i : i-i8.
The The.me of the Gospel. — -The Manifestation of the Glory of the Word
become Flesh and its effects of Belief und Opposition, i : 19 — 20 : 31-
I. The Preliminary Manifestations of the Word become Flesh,
1 : 19—4 ¦¦ S^-
A, The Initial Manifestation by Testimony, i : 19-51.
B, The Initial S&\t-Manifestations, 2 : i — 4 : 54.
II. The Fundamental Se\t-Manifestations of the Word become Flesh,
resulting in growing Belief and I^ove oyer against growing
Unbelief Bl-ciA Hate, and a consequent increasing Separation of
Believers from the World. 5 : i — 12 : 50.
A. Jesus Manifests Himself in Union with the Father as the
source of Life. 5 : 1-47.
B. Jesus Manifests Himself as the sustainer (the Bread) of
Life, 6 : 1-71.
C, The Waverings, Questionings and Attacks of the People
in view of past and fresh Se\i-Manifestations of Jesus,
mostly defensive. Whence He comes, whither He
goes, who He is (7:25-36; 8:21-57) is the subject of
discussion. The effects are at first confused and the
decision doubtful, but the final Result is open rupture.
7 : 1—8 : 59.
D. Jesus Manifests Himself as the Light of the ll'orld and
the Good Shepherd of His Flock in Union ^vith the
Father. 9 : i — 10 : 42.
E. Jesus Manifests His Glory as the Resurrection and the
Life in word and in deed with results of final Cleavage.
II : 1-57.
F. The final effects of the fundamental Se\t-Manifestations
of Jesus in the World. 12 : 1-50.
III. The Final Se\t-Manifestations of the Glory of the Word become
Flesh, Manifestations of His Love and Conquering Life in
Word, chapters 13-17, and Deed, chapters 18-20.
A. Jesus Manifests His Love and Life in Union with the
Father to those who Love Him and, joined with Him
m Life-Union, are now Separated iroui the ll'orld, with
a constant view to the future (especially- the immediate
future) of Himself and His disciples. 13 : i — 17 : 26.
B. Jesus Manifests the Glory of His Zory and victorious
Life in voluntary surrender to Death at the hands of
the Unbelieving World, 18 and 19 ; and the Glory of
His victorious Ltfe in the Resurrection, producing the
climax of Belief, 20.
Api'i'.NiMX. — Chapter 21.

THE DETAILED ANALYSIS.
iNTRODllfTION. — TiiK Prolo(;ue. I ; 1-18.
I. The Pre-existence, Personality and Deity of the Word,
the nature of the fCorrfand His relation to God.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 417
2. The Word, the agent in the creation of the entire Universe, for He
was the Life, vs. 3, 4a, or the relation of the Word to the
Universe.
3. Because the .Z^//e, He is the X?]^/// of men, vs. 4b-i3, or the relation
of the Word to men.
«. But that Light has always been met by the obtuseness
and opposition of human darkness, v. 5.
b. John testified to the Light to the end that all might
believe, vs. 6-8.
c. That Light, continually streaming into the world, lights
every man, v. 9, with two-fold result.
(i) He is not generally recognized or received in
His own -world, vs. 10, 11.
(2) Some receive Him, ie/jewe, and become children
of God, vs. 12, 13.
4. The Word became flesh, and we beheld His divine glory, vs. 14-18,
or the relation of the Word to us, i. e., the author and his fel
low disciples.
u. This interpretation is in accord with John the Baptist's
testimony, v. 15.
b. And with our personal experience, as recipients of the
fulness, grace and truth of the God-revealing Son, vs.
i6-i8. (v. 18 returns on v. 14 and v. i).
Note on i : 1-18.. — These verses, usually called the Prologue, are evidently
introductory. In one sense they stand by themselves ; in another sense they contain
the whole Gospel in miniature, and explain all that follows. We must read the
Gospel in the Hght of this introduction. Indeed we shall find much of the Gospel
a somewhat detailed development of the Prologue. These verses, especially the
first five, are the author's final convictions about Jesus Christ, the result of lifelong
reflection on the historical manifestation of the Word, which he is about to relate.
So the author begins with his conclusion, vs. 1-5, and in this introduction sketches
in a few bold strokes the main facts, vs. 6-14, and the effect produced by those facts
on the world and on himself and on his fellow disciples. This effect he then pro
ceeds to relate at length in the Gospel, ending, 20 : 28, with the conclusion with
which he begins in i : i.
Adopting another more topical analysis, some one has called the Prologue the
great gate into the Gospel, with three doorways: the first, vs. 1-5, theological;
the second, vs. 6-13, historical; the third, vs. 14-18, the doorway of experience.
So the whole may be called the philosophic conclusion drawn from an experience
of the facts of the life of Jesus Christ.
Note that we have in the Prologue the following characteristic and significant
words: glory, light, -word, (first strand); Father, Son, cf. vs. 1, 18, (second
strand); believe, -world, (third strand); the -world, vs. 10, 11, and believers, vs.
13, 14, are set over against each other (fourth strand); belief finds expression in
testimony, vs. 7, .15, and mention is made of truth, vs. 14, 17, while the opposition
of the -world to light and truth is emphasized (fifth strand) ; the sixth strand is
undeveloped; its characteristic life appears, and that life is described in men, but
not in terms, vs. 14, 16. Judgment, however, is not mentioned, though the sepa
ration of judgment is made plain. Thus all the strands of thought in the Gospel
appear in the Prologue. Of their words, love and jtidgment are wanting, though

41 8 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
the ideas are here; also sign and -xvorks, which belong to the more detailed develop
ment. Word, in the sense used in i : i-i8, is peculiar to this passage.

Preliminary Note on the Great Divisions of the Gospel. The Gospel
falls easily into three great divisions, excluding chapter 21, which is as clearly an
Appendix as i : 1-18 is an Introduction. The first is i : 19 — 4 : 54 ; the second, 5 : i —
12 :50; the third, 13 : i — 20 : 31. Chapter 12 is evidently a transition chapter, yet it
belongs more with the Ministry than with the Passion. It sums up the issues of
the conflict before entering upon the final self-revelations of love and victorious
life. Chapter 13 is evidently the historical introduction to the discourse to the
disciples, nay even contains the beginning of it. The reasons for placing 18-20
with 13-17 will be discussed at i8. Chapter 20 evidently goes with 18, 19. The
historical, literary, and thought connections are very close.

THE THEME OF THE GOSPEL. 1:19—20:31.
The Manifestation OF the Glory of the Word Become Flesh, and Its
Effects of Belief and Opposition. I.
The Preliminary Manifestations ov -rwe. ff'orrf Become Flesh. 1:19 — 4:54.
Note. — These manifestations are varied and fragmentary, and so, in a sense,
general, compared with those of chapters S-n.
A. The Initial Manifestation by Testimony. 1:19-51.
1. The Testimony of John the Baptist to Christ, i : 19-34.
a. His testimony to the Pharisees who knew not Christ, though in
the midst of them (v. 26). Vs. 19-28.
Note. — Here is the first believer, John, testifying to unbelief, which is as
yet only non-recognition.
(i) Negative testimony. John is not the Christ, but a proph
esied herald of Him, vs. 19-23.
(2) Positively. The Christ is here and is immensely superior to
John in dignity, vs. 24-28.
b. Another testimony of John, vs. 29-34.
(i) Jesus is the sin-removing Lamb of God, v. 29.
(2) Jesus superior to John on account of His pre-existence (cf.
V. 15), but John came that Jesus might be manifested to
Israel in baptism, vs. 30, 31.
(3) John's testimony to the Spirit's descending and abiding on
Christ, a divine testimony that it is He who baptizes with
the Spirit, vs. 32, 33.
(4) John's testimony, Jesus is the Son of God, v. 34 (cf. 20:31).
.;. The Belief atid Testimony oi the YirsfDisciiiXes. 1:35-51.
Note. — The little circle of believers now begins to grow. Their belief springs
out of their experience with Jesus (1:14); cf. " come and see", vs. 40, 47. So
there is self-revelation of Jesus here, cf. vs. 47-51 ; but it is very subordinate.
K. John testifies again, and Andrew and one other follow Jesus and believe
(cf. V. 41), vs. 35-40.
b. Andrew testifies that Jesus is the Christ, and Simon Peter believes,
vs. 41, 42.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 419
<-. Philip's belief and similar testimony to Nathaniel, vs. 43-46.
d. Nathaniel believes (v. 50), and testifies that Jesus is the Son of God,
the King of Israel, vs. 47-50.
Larger revelations promised, vs. 50, 51.
Note on Place and Time. — Bethany beyond Jordan, i :28 (cf.io :40). Prob
ably about opposite Jericho. After the Temptation. Four days (vs. 19, 29, 35, 43)
in later February, A. D. 27, if Jesus was baptized, as is most probable, in early
January. Jesus probably not present on first of these days (cf. vs. 26, 29).
B. The Initial S^i^F-Manifestations. 2:1 — 4:54.
1. By the Sign oi turning the water into wine. 2:1-11. He thus manifested
His glory as kindly Lord of Nature (cf. 1:3). Increase of belief in
His disciples, v. 11.
2. Jesus manifests Himself as the Purifier and Lord of His Father's house,
reminding His disciples of prophecy. 2 : 12-22.
Note. — A minor strain of thought — that of fulfilled prophecy and divine pre
determination — runs through the Gospel, cf. 12:14,15,37-40; 13:18; 15:25;
17: 12; 19:24, 36, 37, etc.
a. In the opposing Jews, Jesus already sees the murderous outcome of
unbelief, and enigmatically gives them the sign oi His victory in
death and resurrection, vs. 18-21.
b. After the event, this prophecy increases the disciples' belief, v. 22.
Note on Time. — Passover, beginning April 11, A. D. 27.
3. Jesus declares Life, through belief in Him, not belief in signs, the prime
necessity. 2 : 23 — 3 : 36.
Note. — The transition to the third chapter and that chapter itself are very
difficult of analysis. Is Nicodemus one of the untrustworthy believers, who believe
the signs and yet do not believe? It seems so, cf. 3 : 12. In contrast with the
Sadducees of 2 : 18, Nicodemus and his Pharisee friends can read the signs and see
that Jesus is a teacher from God, 3 : 2. Yet, like those in 2 : 23-25, he and they
lack one thing, on which the gospel lays greatest stress, i. e., life, birth from the
Spirit. This Nicodemus has not yet. He has not seen the Kingdom of God, much
less entered it, for he has no life, which expresses itself in obedience (water, v. 5).
He knows not the a, b, c of spiritual religion, v. 10. This is all true despite the fact
that Nicodemus afterwards became a real believer. The whole passage is remark
able in depicting the effect of Jesus' first appearance in Jerusalem. There is a lack
of clear understanding, a fluidity in the situation, which marks the time before
men begin to take sides.
Nicodemus beginning to detach himself from the Jews of 2 : 18 — the woman of
Samaria and the nobleman of chapter 4 doing the same thing more decisively —
might suggest an analysis. Yet this is too thin a thread on which to string this
whole section. So too, placing chapters 3 and 4 in opposition to 2 : 12-22, we
might see how Jesus, rejected by the nation, turns to individuals. But He does
not turn to Nicodemus, Nicodemus turns to Him ; and the baptizing in Judea,
3 : 22, is not in line with such an analysis. Moreover in this chapter Nicodemus
does not become a believer and so can hardly be classed with the Samaritan
woman and the nobleman. The difficulties are so great that Meyer suggests the
external expedient of regarding this as an important incident in Jerusalem at this
time, related merely because of its historical interest. The better way probably is
to regard the Nicodemus incident as the foundation of the teachings about spir-

420 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
itual life (cf. i :33) — here as the prime necessity to real belief. This is further
developed in 3 : i6 sq. and chapters 4, 5 and 6. Chapter 3 : 1-13 does not consti
tute a self-revelation of Jesus (cf. however i : 33 ; 3 :34b. Westcott), but vs. 14, 15
do, and are the text from which vs. 16-21 are developed (cf. vs. 31-36). The chapter
partakes of the varied and fragmentary character of the whole preliminary section
I : 19 — 4 : 54, and cannot be pressed into any mold of analysis without violence.
Still life seems to be the thread, which connects it with 2 : 23-25, on which most of
chapter 3 is strung, and which extends into chapters 4, 5, 6.
Chapter 3 : 1-15 contains Jesus' first extended discourse, but it is not long,
and should not turn us aside from the thought-analysis, which underlies both
incident and discourse.
3. (Repeated.) Jesus declares Life, through belief in Him, not belief in signs,
the prime necessity. 2 : 23 — 3 : 36.
a. The historical introduction. Many signs produce many untrust
worthy believers. Nicodemus a notable example. 2:23 — 3:2.
b. Jesus tells Nicodemus plainly that he who merely believes because of
signs, does not even see God's Kingdom ; that the prime necessity
is new life, a spiritual rebirth (cf. i : 13), which shows itself in obed
ience and joining the company of faith (water, v. 5) ; vs. 3-8. (Note
that it is Jesus who baptizes with the Spirit, cf. i : 33.)
(i) To this truth testimony is borne by (a) the body of Jewish
teaching, vs. 9, 10. {b) Jesus, John the Baptist and the
disciples — "we", v. 11. (Note the " we " and " ye " begin
to show the separation of the -witnessing company from
the -world.) (c) Jesus who knows heavenly realities as
none other can, vs. 12, 13.
(2) This eternal life belongs to him, who believes not in signs,
but in the crucified Messiah. (This crucifixion a part of
the divine purpose, " must".) Vs. 14, 15. Cf. the Lamb of
God, I : 29, 36.
c. The author's reaffirmation and development of the thought of vs. 14,
15. Vs. 16-21.
, (i) The source of the gift of His only begotten Son, is God's
love for the -world, a desire that all might have this eternal
life through belief on the Son and so should be saved, not
fudged. Vs. 16, 17.
(2) Belief, or lack of it, the ground of present acquittal or judg
ment before God ; judgment because of rejection of light,
due to an evil life. Vs. 18-21.
d. Excursus. Over against the rejection and half-hearted reception in
Jerusalem, which drives Jesus into Judea, record is made of John the
Baptist's final testimony to Christ and His ultimate victory, vs. 22-36.
(i) Circumstance leading up to it, vs. 22-26.
( 2 ) The testimony. Jesus' God-given success is fitting tlie Christ,
the bridegoom of His people, and will continually increase,
vs. 27-30.
(3) The author's comments, reaffirming and developing this tes
timony, (a kind of climax and review of the whole section
cf. 3 : 18-21). The spiritual supremacy of the Son and of
His testimony. He who believes counts God true and has

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. i\,-2.\
eternal life. He who does not believe rests under God's
abiding wrath. Vs. 31-36.
4. Jesus manifests Himself as the Life Giver. 4 : 1-54.
Note. — Chapter 4 is more easily co-ordinated. Vs. 7-15 are the heart of it.
Jesus presents Himself as the Giver of the New Life, a distinct advance on chap
ter 3. Vs. 16-42 show Him actually giving and the woman and the people actually
receiving the new life. And without a sign, save of knowledge, vs. 17-19, 29, they
confess Him Messiah and Saviour of the World. That sign, belief, and life are
still in mind is shown in 43-54- Here the nobleman believes in Jesus before he
sees any sign at all, and Jesus is seen again in twofold manner, as Life-Giver. So,
on the side of growth in belief, the last incident is the climax of 2 : 23 — 4 ; 54. It
seems a mistake to think the principal interest here historical ; the historical enters
in indeed, and modifies the thought-analysis, but the incidents and discourses are
selected for the purpose of manifesting ]es\is.
a. To the Woman of Samaria, 4:1-42.
(i) Circumstances leading up to the manifestation, vs. 1-6.
(2) Jesus manifests Himself in word as the Giver of Life, the
Giver of the living water and leads the woman to desire it
(vs. 10, 13, 14), vs. 7-15.
(3) His divine insight convicts the woman of sin and leads her
to recognize Him as a prophet, vs. 16-19.
(4) His word on spiritual worship leads to His self-disclosure as
Messiah, vs. 20-26.
(5) Thus leading her to belief in Him, He actually gives new
life to her and her people.
{a) The woman's testimony (cf. v. 39), vs. 28-30.
(1^) Belief of the people, who testify that He is the
Messiah, the Saviour of the World, vs. 39-42.
(6) Excursus. Jesus tells His disciples of the satisfaction, joy
and reward of the harvest to eternal life, vs. 27, 31-38.
Note — The woman and the Samaritans believe without any sign, save
that of divine knowledge, vs. 17-19, 29. ,
b. To the nobleman in Cana, 4 : 43-54.
(i) Circumstances of favorable reception in Galilee, founded on
signs seen in Jerusalem at the feast, and leading up to the
following incident, vs. 43-46a.
(2) To the nobleman who believes the simple word of Jesus,
V. 50, without any sign at all, Jesus reveals Himself as Life-
giver, V. 51. Resulting increased belief. Vs. 46b-54.
Note — The author does not sharply distinguish between the giving
of physical and spiritual life, cf. 5 : 21-29; " -25, 26, and chapter 20. A
great truth may lie hid here.
Note on Time and Place. — Notes of time are indefinite. The conversation
with Nicodemus probably occurred during, or better, shortly after the Passover,
April, A. D. 27. The Judean Ministry, parallel with John's, probably was at
least six months long. This brings Jesus back through Samaria into Galilee
about December of 27. No one knows where Aenon, near to Salim, was. For
Sychar, see Geo. Adam Smith's Historical Geography, pp. 367-375.

422 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
II.
The Fundamental SB.r.v-Manifestations of the Word become Flesh, re
sulting IN growing Belief and Love over against growing Unbelief
and Hate, AND A Consequent increasing Separation of Believers from
the World. 5 : i — 12 : 50.
Note on the Second Great Division. — All recognize the preliminary,
fragmentary, general character of the First Division, i : 18 — 4 :54, which makes it
difficult to analyze. Most of the fundamental self-manifestations found in 5-12
appear earlier, and all are hinted, but in this section, which constitutes the body
of the Gospel, they are presented in more massive form, are discussed and defended
at greater length and from different points of view. The Self-Manifestations
seem to be the ruling thought of these chapters as a whole. They run through
them all, and except in 7 and 8 hold the place of first importance. Another great
strand of thought is the growth of Unbelief and Hate, so that some have named
the whole Division, the Period of Conflict. This strand must not be minimized if
a true view of this division is to be maintained, and yet it is only in 7 and 8 that
it becomes dominant, the self-revelations taking the second place. The increasing
Separation between Believers and the World rises to the dignity of a third parallel
strand, and is especially emphasized in 9 and 10, if indeed it does not dominate
there. These last two strands have also appeared in i : 19 — 4 : 54, as, of course, also
in the Prologue, but only occasionally and merely in embryo. On many grounds
connected with the analysis, the question has been raised whether chapter 5 did
not originally follow chapter 6. More will be said on this in note preceding
chapter 7. For a brief and clear discussion of this view, see Burton's Purpose and
Plan of the Four Gospels, John, pp. 12-20.
A. Jesus Manifests Himself in Union with the Father as the Source
OF Life. 5 : 1-47.
Note on Time. — The correct reading of 5 : i is "a" feast of the Jews. This is
so indefinite as to preclude any dogmatism about it. Possibly the best guess is the
Pentecost or Passover (.?) of A. D. 28.
1. By the -work of giving new life to the impotent man. Vs. 1-9.
z. The Opposition urging a charge of Sabbath-breaking, vs. 10-16, Jesus reveals
Himself as the Son acting in perfect unity with the Fattier in thus giving
life on the Sabbath, v. 17.
a. This evokes the charge from the Jews that Jesus claims a peculiar
divine Sonship and an equality -with God; they therefore desire to
kill Him, v. 18.
h. Jesus does not deny their charge, but reasserts an absolute unitv of
action with God, and a perfect knowledge of the inner thought and
purpose of God, vs. 19, 20a.
Note — The following discourse is on these two lines — ^^Jesus' union and
equality with the Father, and His consequent status as a Source of Life.
(1) On the ground of this unity and knowledge He promises
greater works, v. 20b, viz ; —
(a) Spiritual resurrection of whom He will, v. 21.
(/i) Judgment, which has been given Him that all men
may honor Him even as they honor the Father,
vs. 22, 23.
(2) Returning to 2 (v. 17, cf. v. 21), Jesus reveals Himself as a
self-existing source of life, for both spiritual and corporeal
resurrection, vs. 24-29.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 423
(3) V. 30 reaffirms vs. 19, 20a, as the ground of the foregoinj^
self-assertions.
3. Jesus cites the /e.s^/wzoKy for these claims. Vs. 31-47.
a. The Father's testimony, vs. 32 and 37.
b. John the Baptist's, which He does not need, though they may. vs. 33-35-
(.. His divine -works testify, v. 36.
d. The O. T. Scriptures, which testify oi Him, and which they do not
believe on account of their love of human applause, vs. 37-47.
B. — ^Jesus Manifests Himself as the Sustainer (the Bread) of Life. 6:1-71.
Note op Time. — This is near Passover of A. D. 29. See v. 4.
1. By the Sign of His feeding the multitude. Vs. 1-24.
a. The Story of the Feeding, vs. 1-13.
b. Effect. In mere carnal belief (which is unbelief) the people think Him
the prophet and wish to make Him a political king, but He with-
draw-s, vs. 14, 15.
c. Episode. Jesus walking on the water, a mere historical item, trans
ferring Him to Capernaum, whither the people come also, vs. 16-24.
2. By His discourse on the Bread of Life. Vs, 25-59.
a. First conversation, leading up to the statement, "I am the true heav
enly bread", /{/e giving, satisfying, given to faith with result of
eternal life and resurrection at the last day. Result, unbelief {y. 36).
Vs. 25-40.
b. Second conversation, reaffirming the first, especially enlarging on
their unbelief, and leading up to the declaration that this bread is
His flesh, which He will give for the life of the -world, vs. 4i-Si-
1. Third conversation. To the perplexed and unbelieving Jews, Jesus
emphatically reenforces the former statement, declaring eating His
flesh and drinking His blood the pre-requisite of eternal life, and
the basis of a ///e-union between Himself and the believer, vs. 52-59.
3. Results. Vs. 60-71.
a. Unbelieving disciples, unable to bear this spiritual teaching, which
dissipates all their worldly Messianic hopes, walk no more with
Him, vs. 60-66.
b. The Twelve testijy their belief in Him and cling to Him, but one of
them is a devil. Note the separation, but not complete till the
withdrawal of Judas (13 : 30). Vs. 67-71.
Note. — In 5 and 6 Jesus interprets His own signs, tracing the power which
heals the impotent man to His union with God, and declaring that His feeding of the
bodies of the multitude is but a hint of His power to sustain the life of the soul.
Some of Jesus' hearers interpreted His signs, but only superficially. Jesus Him
self gives them their deepest significance.
Note on Chapters 7 and 8. An analysis here meets insuperable difficulties,
and every scheme is justly open to criticism. The self-revelations of Jesus do not
cease, indeed are probably more important in the author's mind than many think.
Jesus certainly asserts most strongly His divine origin, mission, function and
nature. Yet, after all, these self-manifestations are mostly defensive, brought out
by the questions and attacks of the people. So it is the situation which is most
prominent. The attitude of the people for the time gets the upper hand in the

424 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
drama. The conflict is here at its height, the attack is persistent. Jesus meets it
by determined and unflinching self-assertions. The results are at first doubtful ;
the varying and varied thought of the mixed multitude is strikingly depicted.
The confusion of the time has penetrated the narrative itself. The attacks first
from one side and then from another, and the fragmentary nature of this report
account perhaps for the dislocations, and are true to just such a situation. But in
the end the result is open rupture. The Jews hold the field and Jesus retires. In
9-1 1 He more and more withdraws Himself. His final death and the separation of
His sheep from the world are seen to be inevitable.
It would be a great aid to clearness of analysis if the theory of displacement of
various sections of the Gospel should prove true, for the difficulties of the present
.arrangement of the matter are insuperable. In Burton's Purpose and Plan of the
Four Gospels, John, pp. 12-20, already referred to, the following rearrangement
is proposed: 6:1-71; 5:1-47; 7:15-24 (which evidently refers to chapter 5);
7:1-13, 25-36, 45-52, 37-44; (8: i-i I, interpolation); 8:21-57; 9:1-41; 10:19-21;
8 : 12-20, which evidently has close relations to chapter 9. This rearrangement
should be studied carefully, but, as it is still merely a theory tentatively held, the
following analysis, of course, proceeds on the basis of chapters 7 and 8 as we have
them. However, we ask the reader to note that the confusion in the analysis is
only the reflection of the confusion of the material.
Note on Time. — This chapter 7 is dated, vs. 2, 14, 37, as at the Feast of
Tabernacles, Sept.-Oct. A. D. 29. Chapter 8 seems to have the same date, though
there is no certainty.
C. The Waverings, Questionings and Attacks of the People in view of
past and fresh s-EUE-Manifestations of Jesus, mostly defensive.
Whence He comes, whither He goes, who He is (7:25-36; 8:21-57),
is the subject of discussion. The effects are at first confused,
AND THE decision DOUBTFUL, BUT THE FINAL RESULT IS OPEN RUPTIIRE.
7:1—8:59.
I. Jesus goes up to the Feast of Tabernacles, an historical introduction with
three significant points, describing the character of the following scenes.
7: 1-13.
a. His time. His final hour, has not yet come, vs. 6, 8.
b. The -world hates Him, v. 7.
(,. The differing opinions of the multitude concerning Him, v. 12.
2. In reply to questions and attacks, Jesus defends His claims and acts, and
makes new manifestations of Himself. Varying results. Vs. 14-52.
a. Jesus asserts the divine origin and the truth of His teaching, vs. 14-18,
and defends His acts, especially His healing of the impotent man
(chapter 5), vs. 19-24.
b. Questioning, leading to Jesus' assertion of His divine mission, has
varying results, vs. 25-31.
(i) Some would take Him, v. 30.
(2) Many believed, v. 31.
I. The Sanhedrin send officers to take Him, vs. 32-52.
(i) Jesus, seeing in this, the prophecy of His arrest, predicts His
early return to the Father, a statement which confuses the
Jews and gives no occasion for the arrest, vs. 33-36.
(2) He reveals Himself as the Living Water and the Giver of the
Spirit, vs. 37-39.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 42 j
Note. — Vs. 37-39 come in abruptly; see proposed rearrange
ment in note above. Still they seem needed here. The
officers report His wonderful words, v. 46. They can
hardly refer to the words in vs. 33, 34, which, though mys
terious, would not be particularly impressive. They prob
ably heard vs. 37-39, and referred to them. On this ground
these words are grouped with vs. 33-36 in the Analysis.
(3) Varying results, especially of the words of vs. 37-39. Vs.
40-52. (Note the strain of separation.)
(a) A division in the multitude, vs. 40-44.
Some say a prophet or the Messiah, vs. 40, 41a.
Some confused by a misapprehension, would have
taken Him, vs. 4ib-44.
(3) A division in the Sanhedrin.
The officers, impressed by vs. 37-39, do not take
Him, vs. 45, 46.
The Pharisees expostulate with them, vs. 47-49,
cf. V. 52.
Nicodemus deprecates their prejudgment of Jesus,
vs. 50, 51.
Note. — ^John 7 : 53 — 8 : 1 1 is not an original part of this Gospel. It is omitted
by R. V.
3. Discussion involving the nature and mission of Jesus, the outcome of the
conflict, the true character of discipleship and of the Jews. 8 : 12-58.
Note. — 8 : 12-58 might perhaps just as well have been made into subdivisions,
d. e. f. g. under C. 2, whose necessarily general heading would cover the contents.
A new heading is substituted for convenience of analysis and clearness of presen
tation, and because the break at 8 : 12 seems more decisive than any other in these
chapters. In this chapter, too, the self-assertion of Jesus grows more positive and
important, emerging more clearly from the confusion of the conflict.
a. Jesus' se\i-manifestation as Light of the World provokes a discussion
of the testimony on which such a claim is based. Jesus defends His
own character as -witness, and claims His Father as another -witness.
Vs. 12-20. In the treasury, v. 20.
b. Foreseeing the end of this determined and captious opposition, cf.
7 : 33, 34, Jesus prophesies His own departure, and His opponents'
death in sin, vs. 21-30.
(i) Their taunt, v. 22, leads Him to trace this difference in des
tiny to a decisive difference in moral character. Only
belief in Him can save them, v. 24. This is only one of
man-y judgments oi them which He must speak, v. 26. Vs.
22-27.
(2) At the time of His " lifting up ", they shall come to under
stand who He is, cf. v. 25. Result, many believers. Vs.
28-30.
c. Discourse on discipleship and spiritual sonship, vs. 31-50.
(i) Discipleship, vs. 31-36.
(a) On condition of abiding in His word, disciples shall
know the truth and shall gain spiritual freedom,
vs. 31, 32.

426 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
{b) Developing the thought of spiritual freedom in con
nection with the idea of Sonship, Jesus declares
the slavery of sin and the ability of the Son to
make them sons, not slaves, vs. 34-36.
Note. — The Jews in v. 33 add the idea of descent or sonship to the idea of
freedom. The contrast between Jesus' spiritual idea and the people's carnal
thoughts is here brought out as strikingly as in chapter 6. The great spiritual
truths of this section stand isolated, further elaboration being prevented by
materialistic objections, and barren discussion on a lower plane.
(2) Sonship, vs. 37-50.
(a) Jesus acknowledges them Abraham's physical seed,
but asserts that their character shows another spirit
ual parentage, vs. 37, 38.
(5) They are not the spiritual children of Abraham, for
they are unlike him in character, vs. 39, 40.
(c) They are not the children of God, else they would
love Jesus and receive His teaching, vs. 41-43.
(rf) They are the children of the devil, for they are
morally like him, vs. 44-47-
(e) The Jews' retort, which Jesus repudiates, leaving
His glory to the great fudge, vs. 48-50.
d. Jesus' promise of eternal life, leads to a discussion of whom He makes
Himself, vs. 51-58.
(i) The promise, v. 51, cf. vs. 31, 32, 2i, 12, is met by the Jews'
scornful objection of the universality of physical death, vs.
5i-S3a.
(2) And the question, whom He makes Himself, 53b, vs. 53b-58.
(a) Jesus replies that He needs not glorify Himself.
Their God, His Father, whom He knows and obeys,
glorifies Him, vs. 54, 55.
(5) Their Abraham rejoiced to see His day, v. 56.
(c) In answer to their inverted question. He declares —
" Before Abraham came into being, I am ", vs. 57,
58, cf. I : 1-3.
e. Result : An attempted stoning, an open rupture (cf. 7 : 32, 45), v. 59.
Note. — Violence the last argument ! cf . 9 : 34.
D. Jesus Manifests Himself as the Light of the World and the Good
Shepherd of His Flock in Union with the Father. 9:1 — 10:42.
Note on Time. — Chapter 7 : 2 dates that chapter and probably chapter 8
also, at the Feast of Tabernacles, Sept.-Oct. Chapter 10: 22 dates the following
verses at the Feast of Dedication, December. Now 10 : 27-29 connect vs. 22-42 so
closely with 10 : 14-18 that I cannot think that several months intervene. But
10 : i-i8 are evidently closely joined in thought with chapter 9. So, although the
break at chapter 9 : i is not decisive, I am inclined to make 9 : i — 10 :42 one section
in time as well as in thought, and date it all about Dedication, December, A. D. 29,
three or four months before the Crucifixion. This is confirmed by the seriousness of
the rupture of 8 :59, with which the comparatively mild tone of chapter 9 does not
agree. This whole question raised at 9 : i, shows how little our author was writing
annals.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 427
1. The Sign and its results.
a. Jesus in the -work, vs. 3, 4, of giving sight to the man born blind,
manifests Himself as the Light oi the World, v. 5. Vs. 1-7.
b. In the questioning and investigation of it, which follow, after some
wavering, v. 16, the Sign makes a clear cleavage, v. 34, betw-een the
believing, testifying, ever bolder, once blind man on the one side
and the truth-resisting Pharisees and the worldly-wise parents on
the other, vs. 8-34, cf. i : 10-13.
c. Jesus finds the outcast, who confesses his belief and worships Him.
He sees in this an instance of that judgment, one of the features of
His mission, which nitimateXy separates the humble believer -with
spiritual. 'tz^^/, cf. Matt. 11 :25, from the self-sufficient wise with their
spiritual blindness. With the latter, rejected light increases guilt.
Vs. 35-41.
2. The consequent se\i-manifestation. Jesus' relation to the true Israel in contrast
with the Pharisees. He is the Good Shepherd of His Flock. 10 : 1-21.
Note. — ^The idea of Light of the World is now dropped and the seli-manifes-
tation con-nects itself with 9 : 34-38. Here the idea of the separation of believers,
Jesus' sheep, from the unbelieving -world, to which Israel according to the flesh is
reckoned, becomes dominant. In this outcast (9:34) blind man, Jesus sees the
first member of the new community or flock, who has entirely and decisivelyhro^en
with the old Israel and the unbelieving -world. The Shepherd seeks His persecuted
sheep, and reveals His relation to the flock, which He foresees, v. 16, will not be
made up only of those who have come out from the Jewish fold.
a. The illustration. Contrast between a real shepherd and his relation
to the sheep, and thieves and robbers ; especially the real shepherd
leads the sheep out through the door and they follow him, vs. 1-6.
b. Interpretation from two entirely different points of view, vs. 7-18.
( I ) Jesus reveals Himself as the Door, the Door by which the
sheep may go out of the fold into more abundant life, vs.
3, 4, 10, and through which alone true shepherds gain
access to the sheep, v. 9, in contrast with thieves and rob
bers. Vs. 7-10.
(2) Jesus is par excellence the Good Shepherd, vs. 11-18.
(a) His characteristics in contrast with the hireling;
especially, He lays down His life for the sheep,
vs. 11-15.
(A) He has other sheep, not of the Jewish fold, whom
He must (divine necessity) bring to make one flock
with one Shepherd, v. 16.
(c) This death, V. 15, is voluntary and will issue in Jesus'
resurrection, according to the Father's will, vs.
17, iS.
c. Result of this disclosure — division among the Jews, vs. 19-21.
3. The supplementary and final manifestation of His Unity with the Father, in
answer to the Jews' demand that He be plain about His Messiahship,
10 : 22-42.
Note. — Possibly this, instead of 3, should be E, co-ordinate with the self-mani
festations of chapters 5 and 6 in importance. Probably, however, it belongs to
9 : 1 — 10 : 21, as a final manifestation of His unity with the Father in such work as

428 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
the healing of the man born blind. Vs. 26-29 have an intimate connection with
vs. 1-18, and the "then" of v. 22 seems to connect quite closely. This ending
reminds us continually of chapter 5.
a. The demand of the Jews : — -Tell us plainly if you are the Messiah,
V. 24.
b. The reply, vs. 25-30.
(i ) Jesus appeals to His former statements and -works, v. 25.
(2) Their unbelief due to their character, they are not of His
sheep, V. 26.
(3) The real reply. He is the Shepherd of the God-given flock,
and gives them eternal lije, vs. 27-29.
(4) In this redemptive work He and the Father are one, v. 30.
c. As they are about to stone Him, Jesus remonstrates, especially
answering their statement that He makes Himself God, vs. 31-38.
(i) Their law justifies His assumption of the title. Son of God,
vs. 34-36.
(2) Thevjorks prove'the mutual indwelling of the Father and
the Son, vs. 37, 38.
d. Result. They seek to seize Him. He escapes to Bethany, beyond Jor
dan, where many, who had heard John's testimony , believe. Vs. 39-42.
E. Jesus Manifests His Glory (v. 4) as the Resurrection and the Life in
word and in deed, with results of final Cleavage. 11 : i-57-
I. The historical introduction leading up to the manifestation in w-ord, I am
the Resurrection and the Life, v. 25, /. e., the Life which conquers death
for those who love and believe in Me. Vs. 1-32.
Note. — Chapter 5 reveals Jesus as the Source of Life ; chapter 6 as the
sustainer of Life; chapter 11 as the Life overcoming Death. Nor is there
wanting a look forward- He who can thus conquer death is surely not conquered
by it later. His death is voluntary, 10 : 17, 18, and for others' good.
2. He proves Himself the Resurrection and the Life by raising Lazarus. Vs. 33-44.
a. The sympathy of Jesus and His indignation at the woe and ruin wrought
by death. Vs. 33-38a.
b. The obstacles, vs. 38b-4ia.
c. The thanksgiving, vs. 4ib-42.
d. Jesus gives life to the dead Lazarus, vs. 43, 44.
3. The results. Vs. 45-57.
a. Many believe, v. 45.
b. The Sanhedrin, representing the Jewish nation, decides on Jesus' death,
vs. 46-53.
Note. — This is a solemn and decisive climax in the grow-th of opposi
tion, exceeded only by 19 : 14-16.
t. Jesus retires to Ephraim, v. 54.
Note. — Ephraim on the East of the Jordan (.?).
d. The people are curious about the situation, which they know to be
portentous, vs. 55-57.
Note. — Vs. 55-57 constitute a transition passage which could just as well
go with chapter 12, to which it is introductory in a sense.
F. The final effects of the S^l^F-Manifestatious of Jesus in the World.
12 : 1-50.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 429
Note. — This is a transition chapter, both a conclusion of the ministry and an
introduction to the passion , but more the former than the latter, and so placed here ,
though not strictly co-ordinate with A, B, etc. The note of cleavage, finality,
judgment, makes the chapter solemn, though final victory is never more confidently
predicted. It is, however, victory through death.
I. In relation to the Disciples. The Feast at Bethany. Vs. 1-8.
a. On the one hand, a group of loving disciples, braying the Sanhedrin's
edict, 11:53; Mary's act expressing the acme of devoted Love,
vs. 1-3.
b. On the other hand, Judas, covetous and hypocritical, about to betray
Him, vs. 4-8.
2. In relation to the Multitude. The Triumphant Entry. Vs. 9-19.
a. The historical situation. The people of Judea, curious and beginning
to believe; the Sanhedrin condemning even Lazarus to death, vs.
9-1 1.
b. The people, unable after all to understand His spiritual teaching, are
still genuinely enthusiastic for Jesus as an earthly King, vs. 12, 13,
17-19.
(,. Jesus openly manifests Himself as Messianic King, vs. 14-16.
3. In relation to the Gentiles. The Coming of the Greeks. Vs. 20-36a.
Note. — The Greeks seek Him, when the Sanhedrin has rejected Him. It is
a prophecy that He shall be the Saviour of all men.
a. The historical introduction, vs. 20-22.
b. The coming of the Greeks shows that the hour has come and glorifies
the Son of Man as universal Saviour, cf. v. 32, but only by the
way of self-sacrifice and death, the road to glory for both Lord and
servant, vs. 23-26.
c. In view of death, Jesus' soul is troubled, a foretaste of Gethsemane,
vs. 27-29, but —
d. The passion (and resurrection) will he ; {\) a judgment oi the -world,
(2) a casting out of Satan, (3) a drawing of all men to Himself. Vs.
30-33-
e. Jesus meets the Jews' last theological question with a final, practical,
solemn warning to walk while they have the Light, vs. 34-36a.
4. In relation to the Nation. Final Judgment on a review of the Ministry.
Vs. 36b-50.
a. A judgment by the evangelist. The heads of the nation have finally
rejected Christ in spite of His superabundant authentication in
signs, and the intellectual conviction of some of them, vs. 36a-43.
b. K judgment made up of sayings of Jesus. In rejecting Jesus, they
have rejected God, for His message is wholly divine and not at all of
Himself ; and in rejecting God, they have rejected eternal life for
themselves. Even though rejected. He will not be their judge in any
personal sense, but the divine message which He has spoken will
be. Vs. 44-50. III.
The final ssLiE-Manifestaiions of the Glory of the Word become Flesh,
Manifestations OF His Love and coN<y.iERiNG Lij'e in Word, chapters
13-17, AND Deed, chapters 18-20.

430 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
A. Jesus Manifests His Love and Life in Union with the Father to those
who Love Him and, joined with Him in Life-Union, are now Sepa
rated FROM THE World, with a constant view to the future (espec
ially THE immediate FUTURe) OF HiMSELF AND HiS DiSCIPLES. I3 : I
17 : 26.
B. Jesus Manifests the Glory of His Love and victorious Life m voLtiN-
tary surrender to Death at the hands of the Unbelieving World;
and the Glory of His victorious Life in the Resurrection, produc
ing the climax of Belief. (i8:i — 20:31.;
Note. — B is here. put down for convenience of reference. For discussion of
its place in the Analysis see note at chapter 18.
Introduction to Chapters 13-20. Motives of the following scenes, 13 : 1-3.
1. The hour has come for Jesus to return to the Father, v. i.
2. Jesus' love for His disciples, v. i.
3. This return accomplished through the treachery of Judas, and the opposition
of the World and the Devil, v. 2.
4. Jesus' consciousness of His divine mission, dignity and destiny, v. 3.
A. Jesus Manifests Yi\s Love and Life -rs Union -with the Father to those
WHO Love Him and, join'ed with Him in Life-Union, are now Separated
FROM THE World, WITH A CONSTANT VIEW TO THE FUTURE (ESPECIALLY
THE IMMEDIATE FUTURE) OF HiMSELF AND HiS DiSCIPLES. 13 : 1  17 : 26.
I. Historical introduction to the words of iowe and i«ye, chapters I4-I7' 13=4-38-
a. The example of condescending Love in lowly service, and inculcation
of it, vs. 4-17.
' b. Final separation even within the inner circle, vs. 18-30. The treach
ery of one is announced. A deep grief to Jesus' love, and the traitor,
undisclosed save to John, departs leaving Jesus alone with those
who love Him.
c. Some more or less detached sayings, arising from the occasion, vs. 31-38.
(i) In view of His imminent glorification and departure, now
rendered certain by Judas' withdrawal, Jesus exhorts His
disciples to mutual love, cf. vs. 4-17. Vs. 31-35.
(2) To Peter's profession of love to death, Jesus opposes a
prophecy of his denial, vs. 36-38.
2. Jesus manifests His love to the saddened hearts of His disciples, in words of
comfort addressed to belief. 14 : 1-3 1.
Note. — Vinet called chapters 14-16 a divine confusion, but an attempt is here
made to thread the maze. These are merely the most precious fragments of a simple
childlike conversation, broken by question and answer. An easy external analysis
may be constructed by making the breaks at the questions. We think that John
selects and arranges the material on a profounder plan.
a. By and by they shall be with Him in His Father's house, vs. 1-3.
b. He Himself is the way to the Father, vs. 4-6.
(1) For he who has seen Him has seen the Father, vs. 7-ioa.
(2) The proof is in His divine words and works, vs. lob, 11.
(.. Because of His departure the disciples shall do greater -works and shall
prevail in prayer, vs. 12-14.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 431
d. On the ground of loving obedience, another Advocate will be given,
who shall abide with them forever, vs. 15-17.
e. He Himself will manifest Himself to them and abide with them, and
love them and so will the Father. The condition is loving obed
ience. The Holy Spirit will explain all. Vs. 18-26.
f. He gives them His peace and shows them reasons even for joy. His
words have forearmed their/az'if;4. Vs. 27-31.
Jesus manifests to His disciples the fulness of His love, as a life-nnion. 15 :
I — 16: 15.
«. Under the figure of vine and branches. He declares that there exists
a life-\inion between Himself and His disciples on the basis of
abiding. There will be pruning indeed, but also fruit. Vs. 1-6.
b. Description, conditions and results of abiding, vs. 7-17.
Note. — Probably it is best to unravel the section by following this thread.
(1) Description of abiding.
(«) His words abide in them, v. 7.
{b) They abide in His love, v. 9.
(c) The measure of His love. As the Father hath loved
Him, V. 9, He lays down His life for them, v. 13.
(2) Conditions of abiding.
Loving obedience to Him, v. 10, and mutual love among
themselves, vs. 12, 17.
(3) Results of abiding.
(a) Prevailing prayer, vs. 7, i6. {b) Much fruit, vs.
8, 16.
(c) His joy in them, v. 11. {d) They are His intimate
friends, vs. 14-16.
c. They are so much one with Him that they must share the World's
hate with Him, 15 : 18 — 16 : 15. Note. This might be analyzed as
one of the results of abiding, b (3) above.
(i) For you are not of the World, as I am not, vs. 18-21.
(2) The World's hate is inexcusable and gratuitous and has its
root in opposition to the Father. The testimony of the
Spirit and of the disciples will be given in the face of such
a World. Vs. 22-27.
(3) The World will excommunicate and kill them, because of its
ignorance oi the Father and of Christ. His words are
meant to forearm them in view of His departure. 16 : 1-5.
(4) But just on account of Jesus' departure, the Spirit will come,
vs. 6-15.
(a) To convict the wor/rf, vs. 8-1 1.
{b) To guide the disciples into all truth, thus aiding
them in their testimony to the -world, vs. 12-15,
cf. IS :27.
Closing words of hope and warning. Vs. 16-33.
a. They shall see Him again with never ending joy, vs. 16-22.
(i) The characteristics of that time, vs. 23-27.
(a) There will be a new relation between them in which
they shall pray to the Father in His name and re
ceive, vs. 23, 24.

432 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
{b) A perfectly clear revelation of the Father and His
love to the disciples, vs. 25-27. This leads up to —
b. Jesus' plain declaration about His coming into the tvorld and return
to the Father, v. 28, cf. 13 :3.
(i) Accepted by the disciples with believing joy, vs. 29, 30.
(a) But Jesus prophesies their defection, vs. 31, 32.
c. The final word of peace and victory, v. 33.
5. Jesus' Final Prayer. 17 : 1-26.
Note. — In this prayer, Jesus restates and breathes to the Father all the
thoughts of chapters 14-16. It is, therefore, not an addendum, but the climax of
the whole section. Much repetition demands an almost topical analysis, gathering
similar thoughts under one head.
a. Prayer for His own glorification. Glorify Thou Me, v. 1, with the
glory which I had with Thee before the world was, v. 5. Vs. 1-5.
(i) In order that I may glorify Thee, v. 1.
(2) For, (a) the hour has come, v. i.
{b) This glorification necessary to His universal author
ity as life-gi-ver, v. 2.
(c) He has finished the -work given Him, v. 4.
Transition Verses, 6-8.
Describing (i) the -work Jesus had done on earth, vs. 6a and 8a, and
so connecting with vs. 1-5, especially v. 4, and (2) the characteristics of
the disciples for whom He is about to pray, vs. 6b, 7, 8b, and so con
necting with vs. 9-19. (2) is by far the major chord, and in any analysis,
if choice must be made, vs. 6-8 must go with b rather than a. Still it is
best to represent them just as they are, transition verses. These charac
teristics in (2) also constitute the ground of the subsequent petitions.
b. Prayer for the disciples, vs. 9-19.
( I ) Grounds of the prayer.
(a) They are mine and thine. They are my glory, vs.
9, 10. They are not of the -world, vs. 14, 16.
{b) Their need as in a hostile -world, especially in view
of my departure, vs. iia (cf. v. 12), 13a, 14, 16.
(2) Petitions. (a) Keep them in Thy name with a view to spiritual
unity, V. lib.
(i) Keep them from the evil while in the -world, v. 14.
(c) Consecrate them in Thy truth, v. 17, with a view to
a mission like mine, vs. 18, 19.
c. Prayer for those who shall believe through their word, that they may
be one as -we are, that the world may believe that Thou hast sent
Me, vs. 20-23.
d. Prayer for all whom Thou has given to Me, that they may be with Me
in My glory. Vs. 25, 26 furnish the grounds of this petition, and
restate the grounds of the whole prayer. Vs. 24-26.
B. Jesus Manifests the Glory of His Love and victorious Life in Vol
untary surrender to Death at the hands of the Unbelieving
World; and the Glory of His victorious Life in Resurrection,
producing the climax op Belief. 18:1 — 20:31.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 433
Note. — Chapters 18-20 appear at first sight to be merely historical. Here
the strands traced through the Gospel seem to stop short. The words, life, light,
and glory disappear. Love, truth, belief, testimony, -world, death are used, but do
not dominate the narrative and often lose their characteristic significance. It
seems as thovigh the inner and higher thought had been abandoned for mere exter
nal narrative. This is, however, only seeming. Though the word, glory, dis
appears, iire glory oi Jesus shines through every scene. In dying for the people
(18 : 14), He victoriously finishes the work of love given Him to do (19 : 28-30), and
manifests His love for the World. His love for His own dominates the arrest and
the trial before Annas, and shows itself on the cross (19:25-27). His calmness,
courage, conscious innocence, voluntary submission and obedience to the will of
God clearly understood by Him, the majesty of His character, in other words the
glory ot His victorious Life or Spirit, manifest Him as Judge of His judges, and
spiritual King of all men. In these chapters, the manifestation of Jesus as Mes
siah, so frequent in the earlier chapters (i : 11, 20, 32-34, 41, 49 ; 4 : 25 ; 7 :4i ; 9 : 22 ;
II :27), again comes to the front as it naturally would in this historical situation.
He appears as Messianic King for the Jews (18:33-39; '9 = 3' 12-15, 19-21, — the
King of Truth for the Romans, i8 : 36, 37). As such He is rejected and murdered
by them, and in the act they accomplish a final apostasy. He came unto His
own and His own received Him not (i:n). This is the ultimate issue of un
belief, and the condemnation, the judgment, oi the Woi-ld. Belief appears fitfully
in 18 and 19, but only in contrast. Its full bloom is seen in 20. Arrest, trial,
cross, burial are all lenses through which the glory of Jesus shines. Through
them the Father begins to glorify the Son ( 12 : 31-33 ; 17:1). See remarks intro
ductory to chapter 18 in Westcott and Godet.
Chapters 18 and 19 are sometimes made the fourth of five prime divisions of
the Gospel, chapter 20 being the fifth. We shall argue strongly against such a
separation of chapter 20 at that point. Whether a new prime division is to be
made at chapter iS depends largely on the point of view. If the view-point is
merely historical and external, then the break will be made here, as the change
from discourse to narrative, from the inner circle of love to the hating world is
obvious enough. If, however, we allow the manifestations of Jesus to rule our
analysis, we find in the whole section 13-20 the supreme manifestations of Jesus'
love, first in word and then in deed, an inner and an outer revelation. Nor are the
contrasts between the attitudes of the Believing Company and the great hostile
World, one full of love, the other of hate, to divide the sections, nay, they knit
them together in one. So we make the third and final grand division 13-20, with
a deep cleavage at 18.
1. Jesus manifests the Glory of His Love and victorious Life in voluntary surren
der to Death at the hands of the Unbelieving World. 18 : i — 19 : 42.
a. The story of the arrest, 18: 1-12, revealing —
(i) Jesus' perfect knowledge of the immediate future, vs. 4, 11.
(2) His love protecting His disciples, vs. 4-9.
(3) His calm superiority to His foes, vs. 4-6.
(4) His voluntary surrender to death, according to the Father's
will, vs. 10-12.
b. The Jewish trial, including the denials of Peter, vs. 13-27, revealing —
(i) Belief and love, in Peter, at their lowest ebb (vs. 17, 18,25-27)
over against the faithfulness of the shadowy John, vs. 15, 16.

434 THE GOSPEL OF ST. fOHN,
' '' "' (2)] Unscrupulous inilu-lief craitily bent on murder, vs. 13, 14,*
19-24, and beginning to show violence, v. 22.
(3) The openness and calmness of Jesus in reply, vs. 20, 21, 23-
(4) His love protecting Ills disciples, v- 19, cf- Jesus' reply-
c. The trial before Pilate, 18128— 19 : 16, revealing —
('i ) The unbelief of the Jews, rejecting and demanding the death
of their Messianic King, whose claim to be the Son of God
they are forced to declare, 19 : 7, preferring a robber, 18 : 40,
and filially apostatizing from Jehovah by denying any king
but Csesar, 19 : 15-
(2) The glory of Jesus in Hi's words and His silences. His calni-
ness in trial, and His patience in suffering-
(a) His^^ri'as spiritual King in the realni of truth,
18:36,37-
{b) A King despite, indeed in the midst of, scourging
and mockery, 19 : 1-3, and shouts of hatred, 19 : 6.
(c) As Pilate's Master and fudge, 19 : 11 — (a), {b) and
(c) — in contrast with the vacillating and finally
beaten governor.
(d) As perfectly innocent of every wrong, iS : 39 ; 19 : 4-
(3) All this is in accord with God's will and voluntary on Jesus'
part, 18:31, 32; 19: II.
d. The crucifixion and death, 19: 17-37, showing —
(i) How Jesus gets His rightful title on the cross, despite objec
tion by the Jews, vs. 19-22.
,(2) How all the incidents, of the crucifixion fulfilled. God's will,
vs. 23, 24, 28, 36, 37.
(3) Jesus, still master of the situation, loving and beloved, vs.
25-27-
(4) Jesus finishing His God-given mission in suffering and
death, vs. 17, 18, 28-30.
Note. — (i) (2) (4) all show defeat of the Jews and victory of
Jesus even on the cross,
c. The burial, 19 : 38-42, showing —
(i) How belief grows strong in the darkest hour. Belicz-er^
come forth from the very ranks of the Sanhedrin to bury
Him, vs. 38, 39.
(2) The beginning of Jesus' exaltation. He has befitting burial.
taken down from the cross with loving hands, swathed
with clean linen and costly spices, buried in the unpol
luted tomb b\- rulers of Israel.
2- Jesus in Love manifests the Glory of His victorious Life in Resurrection, pro
ducing the clima.-:of Belief. 20 :;i-3i- This the last sign, 20 : 30; cf. 2 : 1S-21.
Note. — Chapter 20 is to be taken as the second part of a division, iS-20. iS
and 19, tell the climax of Unbelief; 20 tells the climax of Belief. They are two
halves of one whole. Still, through the halves run many connecting strands. The
note of victorious life is not absent from 1S-19, cf. the analysis. Even the cross
witnesses the beginning of victory, and the burial is the first step in the exaltation-
Tht glorifiralioii of Christ (l 2 : 28, 32 ; 13:31,32; 17 : i) includes both death and
resurrection, and what Christ has joined in this word, we must not put asunder.

AN ANAL YSIS OF THE GOSPEL. 435
Chapter 20 is the climax and crowning joy of the whole section beginning with
chapter 13, which is so sombre with death for the most part.
a. The facts of the Resurrection morning, 20 : 1-18, showing —
(i) How Peter and' John saw the empty tomb and the grave
clothes, and how John came at last to perfect Belief, vs. i-io-
(2) How Mary's sorrowing Love was turned into adoring and
triumphant Belief hy Jesus' appearance to her, vs. 11-18.
See Professor Riggs' Outlines for v. 17.
/). The facts of the Resurrection evening, showing how the saddened and
fearful Eleven came to Belief, peace, joy, purpose and power through
the appearance of the glorified -^e^ni, to them, vs. 19-23.
c. The facts of the meeting with Thomas, showing how the last doubter
among the Eleven came in Belief to utter the supreme declaration,
"My Lord and my God", through the appearance of Jesus to him,
vs- 24-29.
Note. — " My Lord and my God" is the climax of the Gospel, to which the
author has led us up through its whole development. The disciples,
through their experience with Jesus, come at last to believe not only
that He whose glory they had beheld was the JVord made flesh,
I : 14, but that " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God", i : i. So the Gospel at the
end returns to its beginning, and all that lies between is to be inter
preted in view of this beginning and this end.
Epilogue. — Final statement of the purpose of the Gospel ; Belief in Jesus
as the Messiah, the Son of God, and through Belief, Life in His
name, vs. 30-31.
Note. — In these verses we find again the characteristic and significant
words and phrases in profusion.

Appendix. 21 : 1-25-
Note- — This is evidently, cf. 20 : 30, 31, an appendix, an afterthought, and has
its motive in the correction of the false report that John should not die before the
Second Coming, 21 : 2 1-23- It seems at first purely historical, like chapters 18-20,
and like them, lacks almost entirely John's significant and characteristic words.
Has it then no inner meaning, such as we have found in the Gospel hitherto.' The
presumption is all the other way. The motive in writing was the correction of a
false report, that correction led to the narration of the conversation from which the
report started, and that conversation called up the scene and the circumstances -
This scene and Christ's words did not merely seem significant to John ; like all the
others recorded in the Gospel, they viere actually full 0/ deep meaning- So the
fishing scene is more than the annals of a miraculous catch (cf- L- 5: i-ii,
especially v- 10), and the other scenes likewise. To be sure, we lose the strands
which run through the Gospel. Both Unbelief and Belief have reached their
climax; the one in apostasy, the other in clear insight into the deity of Christ, and
there is nothing more to be said in those lines. The scenes of chapter 21 deal
with the future work of the church.
1. The fishing scene, vs. 1-14, manifesting, v. i, —
a. The presence of the risen Lord with His disciples in their
daily toil.

436 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
b. His loving direction of their labors to a successful issue,
cf. IS : 5.
1.. His gracious supply of their need.
2. The reinstatement of Peter, his work and his end (cf. his boasts,
'3 '¦ 36-38 and his denials, 18 : 15-27), manifesting the Lord's-
loving, yet thorough dealing with Peter's sin, and His gracious-
restoration of him. Deeply showing the work of the church,
the perils it must encounter, and its one duty of following Jesus,
vs. 15-19.
3. How the false report about John arose. Its correction. Vs. 20-23 _
Final attestation by another hand (.'), vs. 24, 25.

Note. — In finishing this analysis, involving a careful review of the inner-
thought and construction of the whole Gospel, I cannot refrain from declaring my
increased belief in its trustworthiness as history. Recognizing to the full its phil
osophic view-point, I have ever found the historical situation impregnating, modify
ing, interrupting the philosophical trend. This is just what would naturally occur-
in writing with the design of presenting the inner meaning of a real historj'.
FREDERICK L. ANDERSON.
July I, 1904.

SUGGESTIVE STUDIES AND REFERENCES.
BV RB-.-S-. CT..A.RIi: S. BEARDSIjEK, D. T>.,
'Prokessor of Bim.rc.M. Do(;matics and Ethics, Hartforu Theological
Seminary, Hartford, Conn.
CHAPTER I-
I. The Word- Find out His qualities here- Compare ch- 17.
2- The Flesh- Trace out its fellowship with us. Compare the sympathy
and help in chs. 5, 6, 9, 11, etc-
3. The Revel.\tion. To find its content weigh and open the words " glory ",
"grace", "truth", the "Father declared". Trace parallels to these themes in
chs- 3, 4, 5, 6, II, 17.
4- The Sonship — "made sons of God"- Study the agent, the birth, the
faith, the life. Compare with this gift of sonship, the gift of "eternal life'' in
ch. 6. 5. John the Witness. His traits. His task. His fortune. Compare chs.
3 : 22-36: 5 135.
6. John's Testi.monv. Christ's enduement, v. 32. Christ's work : bearing
world-sin, v. 29; baptizing with the Holy Ghost, \. 33. Compare chs. 3 : 14-16;
10 : II ; 12 132, and 7: 38, 39; 16 : 7.
7. The Tr.vgedv in vs. 10, 11. Trace its development in chs. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, and its a\rful end in ch. 19. CHAPTER II.
I. Christ's Social Fellowship. See other instances in chs. 6, 11, 13, 21.
Trace out the strength of this social impulse in Christ-
2. The M.\king of the Water into Wine- Study this as an illustration
of ch. I 13. Find other illustrations in chs. 5, 6, 9, ii. Study here the meaning
of His claim to be the " Bread of Life", ch. 6, and of the fact of His resurrection.
3. The Passover, v. 13. Study meaning of Christ's attendance at Jewish
feasts. Compare chs. 5 : i ; 6 :4 ; 7 : 2 ; lo : 22 ; 12 : 12.
4. Cleansing the Temple. Note how this act honors the temple. What
was Christ's aim .'' What did the temple mean ? How deep is the contrast between
trade for gain, and worship with prayer and sacrifice ?
CHAPTER III.
I. Study Nicodemus- He is curious, but dull; a teacher, but crude; a
leader, but inert; religious, but unbelieving; inquiring, but obdurate- Compare
and contrast him with other characters in the book.
z. The World. Gather all that is said of it in this chapter. Trace the
same study through the Gospel.
3. God's Gift, 1. 16- Search out God's part in providing Christ, especially
ch- 17- 4- The .Si'irit-Birth. v- 5. Show connection of this with teaching about
437

438 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
"living" Avater in ch. 4, bread of "life" in ch. 6, the spirit-fountain in ch.
7:37, etc.
5. John's Witness, vs. 22-36. John's ministry. Christ's 'primacy. John's
moral kinship Avith Christ. CHAPTER IV.
I. Describe this Woman. Coy, cold, narrow, shallow, crude, pliant-
Compare and contrast her with other women in this Gospel.
.:. Study into the Samaritan-Jewish Feud. Their view, the Jew's view.
Christ's view, their changed view, its real roots. Find signs of kindred narrow
ness and enmity in this Gospel.
3. Christ's Breadth, v. 42. Define this carefully here. Cite signs of it
eLsewhere. 4. Christ's Solitude. None could appreciate His love and zeal, v. 27.
5. The Woman's Sin. Her shyness. Christ's sharpness. Find other sim
ilar instances.6. Spiritual Worship of One Spirit God. Contrast false, unspiritual
religion in chs. 2, 3, 5, 6, 9.
7. Sowing and Reaping. Division of labor. Unison in joy. Compare ch.
3 : 28-30. CHAPTER V.
i. A Case op Extreme Need. Coinpare other sorts of need, in chs.
6, 9, II.
2- Jewish Sabbath Rules. A lifeless, inhuman code. Compare signs of
cold formality in chs. ,2., 3, 6, 9, 18 : 28. ;
3. The Contest. Define closely the charge. Trace carefully the defence
and counter charge. Study out the power of the argument in the w-ords Father,
Son and Love. Compare other contests in chs. 8, 10 and 18.
4. Scan Christ's evidence, vs. 31-39. Detect the nature of His proofs. Com
pare the nature of His arguments in chs. 7, 8 and 10..
CHAPTER VI.
I. Study the physical need and the physical supply, comparing similar
instances in chs. 2, 4, 5, 9, 11. Note how fundamental and proper all these cases
are. 2. Study the parallel spiritual need and the spiritual suppU. comparing, chs.
3, 4, II and 16.
3. Take the outside measure of Christ's own consciousness in this chapter
noting specially v. 51, and marking his repetitions- Trace this same consciousness
in chs. 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.
4. Make special study of the arguments on both sides in this chapter. Define
sharply all the prime postulates. What was to be proven on Christ's side.' What
was the final evidence.'' Study similarly the arguments in chs. 3, 5, 9, 11, 21.
5. Frame briefest possible definition of Christ's worth and work in terms of
this chapter. Then cite as many synonyms for this as the chapter will yield-
CHAPTER \1I.
1. The Untaught Te,\ciier, \ . 15- Look into Christ's ;ibsolute originalit^ -
Sec this in chs- 5, 6, 12, 16, i8-

SUGGESTIVE STUDIES AND REFERENCES. 439
2. The True Teacher, v. iS. Look into Christ's emphasis on genuineness,
verity, fidelity to His commission. See this fine and jealous and supreme appreci
ation of Truth in the talk with Pilate, and in the parables of the " true" vine and
the "good" Shepherd.
3. The Bold Teacher, v. 14, vs. 25. 26- Mark thi.s same fine courage in
chs- 10, II, 18-
4. The Exhaustless and Satisfyix(; Teacher, v. 37. Compare ch. 4,
14-16. 5. The Divine Teacher, v. 16, vs. 28, 29- Find signs throughout the
Gospel of Christ's claim to speak for God.
6. Obdurate Pupils, v. 47.' Note their presence and attitude in chs. 5, 6, 8,
9, 10. CHAPTER VIII.
1. Study into the Emphasis upon "Truth" in this Chapter.
a. The True Light, v. 12- Note the phrases, light of the "world",
light of " life ". Weigh them. '
b. The True Witness, vr. 14. Look into the argurnent here.
t. The True Judge, v. 16. Test the link of logic here also.
d. The True Prophet, v. 28. Note the ground here.
e. The True Emancipation, vs. 31, 32. Here is the core of this chapter,
and the well-head of all good morals.
/. The True Son of God, vs. 54, 55. See how ultimate an avowal this
is in this whole argument. , '
In all these assertions see how sure, and plain, and strong, and calm the
Master is. Then mark the relation of these qualities to this ''Truth".
2. Study into the State and Plight of His Enemies-
a. They are in Darkness and Ignorance of Vital Truth, v. 19.
b. They are in Error, v. 13, vs. 52, 53.
c. They are in Sin of Unbelief, vs., 24, 46; Murder, v. 40.
d. They are in Bonds, v. 34.
e. They are in Hopeless Doom and Guilt, v. 21.
f. They are of the Lineage of the Lord of Murder and Lies, v. 44.
In all this chapter see ho\v set, and hard, and blind, and bad these antagonists
are. 3. See in this chapter the typical and final contest. It is light »5. darkness,
truth vs. lies, love vs. hate, sure testimony vs, unbelief, Christ f5. Satan. Note
how the same battle is set in chs. 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 18.
CHAPTER IX.
1. Stuity Christ Here.
a. His Insight, v. 3. Here is a glint of a real philosophy of life.
Read 8: 12, the words occasioned by the visit of the Greeks in ch.
12, and the conversation with Pilate in the light of this.
b. His courage, V. 7. Braving sacred, religious traditions.
c. His mingled Judgrnent and Tenderness, vs. 35-41-
2- Study the Blind Man.
a. His condition before the healing^ — a blind beggar in the Orient -
Weigh each word. Feel his sad plight.

440 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
b. Mark the outburst of his latent manhood after the healing. This is
splendid. Ponder what it means.
c. Try to conceive his subsequent history.
3. Study the Parents, noting their cautious fear, how it prevails above
parental solicitude and joy.
4. The Pharisees.
a. Their bondage to rude rules.
b. Their ideas about Christ.
t. Their excommunication of the man. Trace the arguments. Esti
mate their strength, their futility. Define their views of character,
of authoritj', of government.
d. Outline carefully and in detail Christ's view of them.
5. Compare chs. 5 and 11 along these lines.
CHAPTER X.
I. The Shepherd Parable, vs. 1-21.
a. The Shepherd's duties : to guard, feed, save.
b. The Shepherd's traits : watchful, faithful, bold, good, sacrificial,
familiar.
c The Shepherd's method : folding, calling, leading, knowing each
one.
d. The Shepherd's cost and reward.
e. The Shepherd s counterfeit : heedless, thievish, sly, timid, strange,
destructive.
f. Special study of Christ as Shepherd : His lordliness. His devoted-
ness. His defamation. His honor from God.
g. The sheep — making your description correlate carefully with that of
the Shepherd; their need of protection, guidance, etc., and their
peril from neglect, attack, etc.
2. Show how the scheme of this parable comprehends the entire career and
ministry of Christ. This whole Gospel is here in a beautiful miniature.
3. See how the whole is condensed again in vs. 22-39. Spoken very likely at
a different time. CHAPTER XI.
A STUDy OF Christ's Splendid Mastery of all things in the sickness,
death and resurrection of Lazarus.
a. His mastery in interpretation of meaning of disease, v. 4-
b. His mastery of the order of events in delay, v. 6.
t. His mastery of peril in a calm daring, vs. 8-16.
d. His mastery evinced in majestic self-consciousness, \. 25.
e. His mastery of the future in His promise, v. 23.
j. His mastery of others in authority, vs. 39, 40.
g. His mastery in supplication, v. 41.
h. His mastery over death in resurrection, vs. 43, 44.
/. His mastery over the Sanhedrin, driving them to desperation, vs.
47-,'; 3-
j. His mastery of the final crisis by flight and hiding, v. 54.
See how in this chapter Christ forced and yet held in full control the Phari
sees' fear and hate. Compare chs. 5, 10, 12 : 12-19.

SUGGESTIVE STUDIES AND REFERENCES. 441
CHAPTER XII.
1. The Mingling of Honey and Gall in Christ's Lot, vs. i-ii ; anointed,
quarreled over, hunted. See how their enmity is the outgrowth of His friendliness.
Study His companionableness. It is ideal. Watch how He cherished friendship.
But see how hate smites Him in the midst of His joy. His lot was always a medley.
I. TThe Triumphant Entry, vs. 12-19.
«. Mark its engaging gentleness.
b. Note its matchless daring.
c. Estimate its compelling energy.
d. Study the act as the culmination of all the series of events from the
sending of the Seventy.
e. Discern how resistlessly it bears on towards the cross.
3. The Remarks at the Visit of the Greeks, vs. 20-36. Here again is
profound philosophy. a. Its occasion — a visit from aliens.
b. Its statement in parabolic form, v. 24.
c Its illustration in Christ, vs. 32-33.
d. Its application to disciples, vs. 25, 26.
«j. Its agony, v. 27.
/. Its conflict, V. 31.
g. Its rewards — fruit, v. 24; life, v. 25; fellowship, v. 26; honor, v. 26;
glory, V. 28; world conquest, v. 32.
Here again is the whole Gospel in brief. Show this true.
CHAPTER XIII.
An All- Round Study of Love.
I. The Blessedness of its Humble Ministries — The feet washing. Note
the contrasts here in the petty jealousies over scant worthiness in the disciples, and
the easy humbling of a mighty dignity in Christ. Keep in sight the near-impend
ing sacrifice and ascension, vs. 1-20.
2. The Awful Havoc of Love's Absence — The outrageous betrayal, vs.
21-30. Study into its easy action, its essential abhorrence (what are its marks?)
and its Satanic inspiration. Can you trace its infection still .'
3. The Validity of Love as the new and final counsel and command of
Christ, vs. 31-38.
a. Study it in view of Christ's glory, vs. 31, 32.
b. Study it in view of Christ's absence, v. 33.
c. Study its adequacy for world-witness, v. 35.
Compare this paragraph with ch. 17.
CHAPTER XIV.
I. Mind the Great Themes. God, Christ, God in Christ, Christ in God,
the Holy Spirit, the mansions, prayer, peace, life, the greater works, the mansion-
ing together of Father and Son and disciple.
Study each theme searchingly, e, g.:
2. The Disciple. His obedience, his love, his prayer, his insight, his works,
his earthly tranquillity, his heavenly home, his companionship with God and Christ
and the Holy Spirit.
3. The Holy Spirit. His full equipment to do Christ's work, his mission

442

THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.

of solace and defence and tuition and grace, his wealth of knowledge and goodness,
his deep indwelling, his respect for Christ-
So explore all these themes. Full tides abound in this chapter.
CHAPTER XV.
I. The Vine. \'s. 1-17.
a) Study until you can name and sharply define each^a''^ of this para
ble. b) Study until you can see what Christ, was at, what was His aim,
what it all means. 
c) Studv until you warm with admiration of Christ's skill.
z. Vs. 18-23-
a) The WoR1-»- , Ignorant of God^ hating God, hating Christ, hating
, Christ's elect, but stripped of all excuse- Study in particular into hate, its
nature, its genius, its propensity, its fruitage.
b) Christ. Study His deep insight,. His plainness. His innocence,
His intrepidity. Try to sense His poise and beauty of character. See how
all His radiance is heightened by all the world's abhorrent iniquity.
c) Trace out how other scenes in this Gospel brought out just these
fine qualities- CHAPTER XVI-
1- Vs- 1-16.
a) Get an outline of Christ's full prevision.
b) Mark His frankness- in disclosing to His band their, coming lot.
excommunication, offense, death.
c) His careful thoughtfulness, to forewarn, fortify, provide, re-assure,
adapt teachings to capacity and needs.
d) His triumphant calm. His ways are orderly and timely ; He
handles like a real master the ultimates — righteousness, sin, judgment,
faith, Satan, God ;' He makes full unfolding of the Spirit's work.
2. Now see how these features unfold through the rest of the chapter-
CHAPTER XVII-
1. Note Christ's Attitude— -eyes lifted up to heaven.
2. His Logic — See how He argues.
3. His Facts. List His statements. They constitute most of the prayer.
4. His Petitions. Get them exactly. They are surprisingly few.
5. His Momentum. Try to measure the passion, the eagerness, the pres
sure, the onset of the praver.
6. His Faith. Just what was Christ trying and expecting to do.'
7. His Outlook. Try to get His range. What was in His eye r Take the
girth of these words: "truth", "belief", -'life", "world", "evil", "glory ",
those little words " in" and "one" in v. 23-
8- Describe the inner and outer ;ispect of this pra\er. Is it mostly radiant, or
docs it stand in shadows? Are its inner deeps tranquil or troubled ?

CHAPTER XVIII-
1. The Arrest. Measure all the indignity of that "binding . Study
Christ's majesty and beauty, and pity and patience in it- Look w ithin His mind.
Find His point of view- What would He be thinking of the manacles, of the
soldiers, of the Jews, of the discijiles, of Himself, of God?

SUGGESTIVE STUDIES AND REFERENCES. 443
-. Peter's De.nial- There were reasons for this- Try to find them out-
What was Peter's philosophy, point of view, standard of judgment ?
3. Before The High Priest, "iNanje the essentials of a proper, judicial
procedure. Did the high priest /rt-i'cwrf to recognize them ? In what respect was
he unfair? 1 , , 1 -, , ¦ ,, : . :•
4. Before Pilate.
a) Study that little quarrel between Pilate and the Jews.
b) Explore that conversation between Pilate and Christ. What was
the secret of Christ's art here? What main idea was in. Pilate's mind?
c) How' many qualities of "Truth "can 3-ou name ?
¦ i/y-' How many qualities of Christ can you name ?
e) How many qualities of Pilate can you name?
CHAPTER XIX. ; ,
" i'. Make as full a description as you can of Chi-ist with the crown of thorns,
or' While being scourged.
1. How manifest \\a% Christ's innocence?
3. What different reasons can yoli suggest for Christ's silencd?
4. See if you can explain yft/Zv the High Priest's rage.
5. Describe the weakness and the power of a " throng".
6. List all Christ's burdens Cin the cfoss.
7. The soldiers — how does a soldier's life in arms affect his manhood?
8. See hbw far you can define " death" as endured hy Christ.
9. Write a contrast of the two i^cehes : the Crucifixion, and the Bui'ial of
Christ. (pijAPTER XX.
I. Name the traits, displayed' by the disciples at the tomb— ^as eagerness, sor
row, love, ignorance, 'Wdnder, timiditj',, honesty, confusion, unbelief. Probe each.
2. Study these things together- — the tomb, its order, the angels, the fact Of
the resurrection. Find out the nature oi this whole transaction.
3. Hold together the risen Lord's farniUarity and majesty. His triumphand
tenderness. His authority and companionship. Look deeply into each. Bring
them all to blend.
4. Note Christ's themes — ^the Father, His hrethren, the ascension, Hi's
woundsi His own identity, the mission of the Spirit, sin, faith, forgiveness,
peace.
CHAPTER XXI.
I. The Morning, Meal.
a) Dwell upon the disciples' futile toil.
b) Ponder the Master's efficiency.
c) Weigh Christ's concern for men's bodily needs. , Cite other cases
d) Study the Master at the meal. Did He eat? How would you char
acterize, in general, Christ's view of bodily comforts?
2. The Searching of Peter.
a) Contrast, the Christ and the Peter of this chapter with the Christ
and the Peter of ch. 18.
h) Study Peter's pliability, caution, devotion.
c) Study Christ's insight, insistence, frankness, supremacy.
d) Study love — its nature, its value, its energy, its efficiency.

*THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN.
b-s- re-v. henr-^ g. -weston, d. tt., jsl,. t>.,
President of Crozer Theological Seminary, Chester, Penn-
The Gospel of John is the Gospel of the manifestation of Christ. The opening
sentences glow with that ineffable Light which in the Holy of Holies overhung the
Mercy Seat between the cherubim ; we behold " His glory, the glory as of the only
hegotten of the Father, full of grace and truth" (i : 14). John begins where the
¦other evangelists end, with the rejection of Christ by the Jewish people : '" He
¦came unto His own and His own received Him not" (1:11). Throughout the
Gospel the Jews and Jesus are arrayed against each other in uncompromising
hostility. In the Synoptic Gospels all Christ's intercourse with His disciples
until His last journey to Jerusalem is designed to answer the question, Who is the
Son of Man (Matt. 16 : 15 ; Mark 8 : 29; Luke 9 : 20) ? The nature and person of
Christ as the Son of the living God having been revealed, He announces for the
first time the method of redemption, by His death, burial and resuirection (Matt.
16 : 21 ; Mark 8:31; Luke 9 : 22). But John's Gospel begins with the declaration
¦of Christ's divine character and atoning work ; in the first chapter He is the Lamb
•of God that taketh away the sin of the world ( i : 29) ; on Him the angels of God
are ascending and descending (i :5i) ; He declares the character and secret actions
of Nathanael (i : 47-50) ; He needs not that any should tell Him of man, for He
knows what is in man ( 2 : 25); He is the Son of Man who came down from Heaven
and is in Heaven ( 3 : 13 ). The first miracle which John records is the Marriage
feast (2 : ii); the first public act the cleansing of the Temple (2: 16) ; the first dis
course the revelation of the Heavenlies (3:12); — all pertaining to an order of
things which comes only at the close of the other Gospels. In Christ's discourses
to the Jews, in His prayer recorded in chapter 17, in the account of the crucifixion,
the point of view is that of a finished work. The death on the cross is not so
much the process of dying as [the results of death ; it is not defeat, but victory.
In the other Gospels, when Christ speaks to His disciples of His approaching
¦decease, He emphasizes His humiliation and suffering. His delivery to the Gentiles
(Matt. 16:21; 20:18; Luke 18:32); here His death is voluntary, "No man
taketh My life from Me but I lay it down of Myself" (10: 18); it inheres in the re
lation He has assumed, " I am the good shepherd, the good shepherd giveth his
life for the sheep" ( lO: 11 ) ; it is the reason for His Father's special love, "There
fore doth My Father love Me because I lay down My life that I ma}' take it again "
( 10:17, 18); and it results in universal appreciation, " And I, if I be lifted up
from the earth, will draw all men unto me" ( 12:32 ). In this Gospel there is no
account of the Transfiguration with its Moses and Elias, the encouragement for
the coming Calvary. There are here no apprehensions of the cross, no Gethsem
ane ; no angels strengthening Him. When the band of men and officers ap
proach Him in the garden to apprehend Him, when He says, "I am He," they go
backward and fall to the ground ( 18:6). Throughout the whole scene of the

¦^ This and the following articles were contributed (or the series in the press. One or two of these were
[received after the series were concluded. 444

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. JOHN. 445
crucifixion the same wonderful character is preserved. He does not receive testi
mony from men ; no company of women bewail and lainent Him ; no Judas con
fesses, "I have betrayed the innocent blood"; no Pilate's wife says, "Have thou
nothing to do with this just man" ; no dying malefactor testifies, " This man has-
done nothing amiss"; no Roman centurion says, " Truly this man was the Son
of God". And He who needed no help or sympathy or testimony from men or
angels would have none from nature ; in this Gospel we read nothing of rocks
rending, or of the earth quaking, or of the darkness covering the land. From the
cross is heard no cry, no prayer, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken
Me ?"^" Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit"- He speaks but three
words — the first, as if on a quiet death-bed, provides for His mother ; the second is-
a fulfilment of Scripture ; the third is the shout of the conqueror.
The final Gospel is the personal Gospel. The divine 'persons. Father, Son and.
Spirit, are presented in their order, each in His distinct sphere and each in His
relation to the others. The personality of Christ, the personal character of the
relations He sustains are everywhere emphasized. He speaks rather than acts
(8:12). His fundamental assertion is, " I am — I am the Life, the Truth, the Way,.
the Vine, the Door, the Shepherd, the Resurrection ". Few miracles are recorded,.
and the discourses are occupied with the nature of God, the essential oneness of
Christ with the Father, the mystical union of Christ with His people. In the per
son of Christ all things find their fulfilment ; not only the predictions of the Old
Testament but the Old Testament itself; the Shekinah and the tabernacle (1:14);.
the temple (2:19-21); the ladder on which the angels of God ascend and descend'
(1:51); the serpent in the wilderness (3:14) ; the manna (6:32) ; the paschal lamb
(i: 20; 19:36) ; in Him all nature finds its fulfilment — life (1:4) ; light (1:9) ; water.
(4:10); bread (6:50); all offices and relationships — the vine (15:1); the door
(10:7); the shepherd (10:14) ; the way (14:6). The reason and vindication of all
Christ's actions are found in Himself. The eight miracles in this Gospel are, with
ii single exception (4:46-53), self-moved — wrought without any request from those
to be benefitted, and in that exception the cure transcends the faith of the peti
tioner. In the discussion on the Sabbath there is no argument, as in the synop
tics, from David or thetemple, or the conduct of man : His one justification is,
"My Father worketh until now, and I work" (v. 17). In the one thought of
belief in Christ center all the requirements of God (6: 28, 29). A personal rela
tion to a personal Being comprises all that is necessary for perfect conduct and
character; this meets every possibility of the soul (1:4); satisfies every desire
(4:14); fills every capacity for time and eternity (6:35). The personality of the
thought moulds the style of John ; it shows itself in the avoidance of abstractions,,
in the absence of all reference to law as now in force, in the continual recurrence
of the personal pronoun, in the precision and accuracy with which words are used,
in the continual repetition of words which this precision requires, in the ever-
recurring antithesis, in the scrupulous restriction of terms. Believers, e. g., are
the children of God ; only Christ is the Son of God.
It is the universal Gospel, "All things were made by Him and without Him
was not anything made that was made" (1:2); He "lighteth every man that
cometh into the world" (1:9); He is "the Lamb of God which taketh away the
sin of the world" (1:29). "The hour is coming in which all that are in the
graves shall hear His voice and shall come forth " (v. 28).
The final Gospel is the Gospel of the essential and eternal. There is here no-
Sermon on the Mount, with its explanation of law; no Sermon on the Plain, with
its ethical directions. In the conversations with Nicodemus (3 : 1-2 1), and with

446 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
the woman of S:nnaria (4:7-26), in the discussions and controversies with the
Jews (chs. 6-10), in the farewell discourses with the disciples (chs. 13-16),
there is no mention of duties which are by their nature restricted to this life.
Directions with regard to conduct found in all the other Gospels disappear ; the
heavenly, the spiritual, and eternal are the subject of discourse- The church is
viewed In the same light- Christ institutes no ordinances, ordains no apostles,
appoints no officers. He breathes on the disciples the Holy Spirit which is to be
the eternal life of thechurch (20 ; 22)- The Gospel begins with the declaration of
the intrinsic nature, of Christ, with His relation on the one hand to the uncreated
and on the other to all that comes into being- The antagonisms are the ultimate
and permanent — light and darkness, life and death- The relationships are not his
toric, but ideal (8 : 39). . Times and places disappear ; God is Spirit, and is wor
shipped in spirit and in truth (4 : 21-24) i while Christ returns to the glory which
He had with the Father before the world was (17 : 5).

THE MOST REMARKABLE GOSPEL.
JB-i- RE^-. DORElVtUS A.. HA-TES, PH. D., S. T. D., I^L^. D.,
Professor of JSTew Testament E.xeoesis, Garrett Biblical Institute,
Evanston, Illinois.
The Fourth Gospel gives us no adequate biography of Jesus. It is too small a
book. My Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson has 1824 pages. The Life of Phillips
Brooks on my library shelves has 1596 pages, and the Life of Henry Drui-nmond
534 pages. The Life of our Lord by the Apostle John occupies less than 30 pages
in my Revised Version ; and yet John says that if all had been w-ritten which might
have been written, the world itself could not contain all the books covering the
theme. Evidently much has been left out. Some of the omissions are most
remarkable. John omits the whole record of the first thirty years of the life of Jesus, to
begin with. He gives us no genealogy, no account of the annunciation, and he
never suggests that there was such a thing as an immaculate conception. He tells
us nothing about the infancy and youth of our Lord, nothing about His develop
ment of mind and soul. His early environment and teaching. These' were the
most important years of His life to Jesus Himself, but John says nothing about
them !
Jesus meets John the Baptist at the Jordan, but the evangelist has told us noth
ing about the early life or ministrj' of the forerunner, as he tells us nothing about
his later iinprisonment and death ! , ,
There are some ver^- capital events in the life of our Lord, which we would
think any biographer would not fail to mention, as, for example, the temptation in
the wilderness, the transfiguration, the institution of the Lord's Supper, the Geth
semane agony, and the ascension. John tells us about none of them !
There are no children in this Gospel, and there are no scribes, and no lepers,
and no publicans !
There is no casting out of demons in this Gospel. His enemies say of Jesus,
"He has a demon " But this unreal, falselj'-charged, demoniacal possession is
the only one recognized or mentioned in this book.
There are no eschatologies in this Gospel, such as we find in the Synoptics-
Here, instead of their predictions of the Parousia, we have the promises of the
Paraclete- The coming of the Comforter, is substituted for the coming of the
Judge and King-
, There are no proverbs in this Gospel, and there are no parables! Jesus acts
.parables here, but He does not narrate them.
The Greek words for repentance and faith are not found in this book. These
words represent chief themes in the other Gospels. John never uses the terms !
How could anybody write a Life of Jesus that would be of any account and
omit all, mention of the temptation, transfiguration and ascension, of the demons,
and the lepers and the publicans, and the parables? Here is a most remarkable
Gospel without any of these things.
Yet Origen said, "This Gospel is the consummation of the Gospels, as the
447

448 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Gospels are of all the Scriptures". And Luther said, "This is the unique, tender,
genuine, chief Gospel, far preferable to the other three. * ¦* * Should a tyrant
succeed in destroying the Holy Scriptures, and only a single copy of the Epistle ta
the Romans and the Gospel according to John escape him, Christianity would
be saved". Biedermann calls it "the most wonderful of all religious books "-
Another writer says, " It stands out from the other Gospels as the Sabbath from
the other days of the week, as the office of the priesthood from the functions of the
Levites, or like the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim, which was better than the
vintage of Abiezer".
What gives the book its unique value ? What makes it the most remarkable
and the most valued of all the Gospels ?
I. Its Artistic Form. It has been called "the supreme literary work of
the world". It observes all the finer laws governing the artistic composition of
the ancient classical tragedies. As in these, the catastrophe is announced in the be
ginning, and the whole action of the narrative tends irresistibly toward the tragic
close. As in the Iliad and the Niebelungenlied, and as in the tragedies of ^schylus
and Sophocles, the terrible outcome is kept always in sight. The shadow of the
cross falls athwart the first page. The certainty of the hero's horrible death con
fronts us at every turn. The first time the Man Jesus appears He is heralded as a
Lamb appointed for sacrifice. At the marriage feast His " hour'' is not yet come,
but its dread significance is present in His mind. When He feeds the multitude,
that joyous occasion is marred in their memory by His discourse on eating His
flesh and drinking His blood. Most of the action is confined to the doomed city of
Jerusalem. Galilee might lie bathed in the sunshine, filled with the glory of lilies-
and the singing of birds ; but over Jerusalem the clouds were gathering, big with
thunder, and the lightning flashes darted through them like travail-pains. John
did not consciously compose a tragedy. He was telling a true story. He was
recording a genuine biography. But in the telling he is artistic in fuller measure
than the Synoptics ever were. In the recording he follows the laws of the highest
literature. He gives life, color, movement to his narrative. His book has the
freshness and the sii-nplicity of the primitive masterpieces of the world's writing.
II. Concentration of Action. Note how the action is concentrated in the
progress of the story. There are two great divisions of the book. In the first
division, chaps. I-I2, both time and place are manifold. The public ministry of
Jesus touches the three provinces of the land and the three j-ears of His activity.
In the second division, chaps. 13-20, the action is centered in the one city of Jeiii-
salem, and a large part of it is confined to one room ; and the time is limited to
one evening and a few days. More and more the scene narrows from the whole
land to Judea, and from Judea to Jerusalem, and in Jerusalem to the one upper
room of the farewell discourses ; and the interest intensifies as the narrative
lengthens and the crisis is nearer and nearer at hand.
III. Symmetry. The symmetry of the composition is noticeable in the recur
rence of certain characters and the nice balancing of the parts. Nathanael's name
appears in the preface and the appendix, in the introductory and in the concluding
chapter, and nowhere else. The mother of Jesus is seen only in the beginning and
at the end of the Gospel. At the opening of His public ministry Jesils attends a
feast with His disciples and gives a demonstration of His power. At the end of
His ministry He is again at a supper with His disciples, and He gives to them a
demonstration of His love.
IV. Contrasts. This balancing of parts over against each other is accom
panied by continuous contrasts throughout the narrative. The great contrast be-

THE MOST REMARKABLE GOSPEL. 449
tween Faith and Unbelief runs through the whole book, and the new characters,
as they are introduced, range themselves alternately between believers and un
believers, friends and foes. First, the spying, critical representatives of the Phar
isees, then the faithful and obedient disciples of John. The blinded leaders of the
people stand over against the seeing blind man with his bold witness to the
Messiahship of Jesus. The confession of Peter contrasted with the betrayal of
Judas. The raising of Lazarus to life results in the dooming of Jesus to death.
These contrasts occur in every chapter and help to give to the narrative its striking
variety. V. Its Striking Variety, i. Notice the variety of the seasons presented in
this Gospel. In the beginning of the activity of Jesus it is the Spring, the time of
the sowing of seed and the germination and growth of the grain. Later in the
narrative we come upon the Autumn and the feast of the ingathering of the fruits
in the Fall. Then at the very height of the conflict between Jesus and the Jews we
are expressly told that it was Winter. Finally, with the resurrection and the glori
fication of Jesus, it is the Spring again. 2. A great variety is added to the com
position by the alternation of incident and interlude, of story and sermon, of
action and discourse. In the beginning we have two pictures introducing the light
side and the dark side of the public ministry, the marriage feast at Cana, and the
scourging of the sellers in the temple. These two vivid presentations are followed
by two conversations, one in the darkness of the night and the other in the glare
of the full noonday, with Nicodemus and with the woman at the well. Through the
Gospel there is this alternation of word and deed. At the end, there are the solemn
discourses with the disciples, followed by the still more solemn incidents of the
trial and crucifixion. There is a constant changing from action to speech and
from the brighter to the darker aspects of the history. There is a continuous
variety that never allows the interest to flag. It is an artistic composition as well
as a narrative true to the life.
VI. Ideal Grouping. John had an incalculable wealth of material, from
which he has made a selection of scenes and sermons that will fit in with His purpose
and be most suitable to his plan. It is in this selection and arrangement of material
that the literary artist, as well as the saint and the seer, appears. He has brought
this wonderful fulness of words and works into an amazingly brief compass. He
has omitted all that seemed to him accidental or unessential. He has united the
ideal moments of the life of Jesus into one harmonious presentation of the Ideal
Life. He has made a work of art as well as a Gospel of the Son of God.
VII. Spiritual Insight. John was a literary artist and he was a saint.
This is the Gospel of Spiritual Insight. It has more of the words of Christ, and
it has more of the mind of Christ, than any other. It has the most profound depths
of thought in most simple and clear expression. It has reached the hearts of men
in all the Christian centuries, and it will be regarded by them as the most remarkable
and the most valuable of the Gospels to the very end of time.

"IN THE BEGINNING".
BTT REV. JAMES LEE lytlTOHELL, PH. D.,
Pastor of the Second Congregational Church, Attleboro, Mass.
Along the northern boundary of the United States, bordering upon lower
Canada, runs a low line of hills called the Laurentian mountains — the first land
that ever lifted itself above the great deep, the beach of an otherwise boundless
ocean. Whether the Garden of Eden was there I do not know, but it is certain
these hills were the beginning of land, the beginning of life upon the earth. Is it
this beginning then to which John refers when he says, " In the beginning was
the Word " ?
There is an earlier beginning than this that we know about. Geology-
reports long eras before even those Laurentian hills made their appearance,
nebulous ages, ages of cooling and condensation; and a voice speaking long
before John's said, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth", —
a beginning that before ever there was even an ocean for the Laurentian hills to
rise above, a beginning in utter formlessness. Is it that beginning to which John
refers when he says, " In the beginning was the Word"?
To John's vision the creation was a modern incident, a current event, an
associated press dispatch of a happening in time. John's beginning was a begin
ning before the creation, a. beginning before there was a beginning, a. beginning
before there was a time in which to begin. The " In the beginning" of Genesis
is the mere "once upon a time" of the story teller. The "In the beginning" of
John is that point of light in the fathomless depth of eternity which always has
been. If you would put this date down in your history book, you must start that
book with eternity.
Is it history ? That is the question that rises right here. Is it history or the
flight of poetic imagination? What right has any man, the infinitesimal fragment
of a race whose generic life is a mere wink in these infinite distances, to date his
narrative " in the beginning"? What can he know of the beginning? A few lines
later "there was a man sent from God whose name was John", — there starts the
indubitable record of an eye-witness; but this "in the beginning" — he was not
an eye-witness of that. There is not even a pretence that he is following records
or traditions either ; and certainly he is not speculating, for there is not a prefa
tory word such as the most confident philosopher would feel bound to use. He
writes as one who knew, and knew what could not be, disputed. "In the begin
ning was the Word" Surely this man is writing history, not poetrj' nor phi
losophy. But how did he know it ? Why doesn't he tell us how he kne\v it ? For he
must know also that this is a tremendous statement for anybody to make or to
receive. The answer is that all Ephesus knew how he knew it, and all those that
ever would read his Gospel would know how he knew it. Was he not John?
No ! not John. John was the man of long ago buried in the dark before the dawn.
Was he not the disciple whom Jesus loved, the intimate friend of that Word who
was there in the beginning, saturated still w-ith His spirit? Did not all the world
4SO

"IN THE BEGINNING". 451
know of his experience on Patmos? Indeed the line which introduces the Apoca
lypse, " I was in the spirit", is the introduction to all John's writing. It is all
revelation from God. In short the historical integrity of this first verse of John's,
-which antedates every other verse in the Bible, and every other fact of science,
rests on the historical integrity of Jesus. Jesus being what He claimed to be, and
what His words and works prove Him to be. His intimate friend was of course
perfectly competent to write the first verse of the first chapter of John without
other introduction. Yes, we have here an historical date antedating all other
dates — " In the beginning".
Well, what in the beginning? "In the beginning was the Word"- Mat
thew takes pains to trace Christ's genealogy for us to Abraham. Mark, the first
written and most consecutively historic of the Gospels, shows His life as the
fulfilment of prophecy. Luke traces Christ's genealogy to Adam, for Luke's
conception of Christ is as humanity's Saviour. He is the one promised to the
mother of all.- But John deals not with Adam, refers not to Abraham, takes no
pains to strengthen his position with prophecies in time, passes by the creation as
though it were an event of yesterday, penetrates the eternal past and shows us
Jesus as one with the infinite Father. " In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was with God, and the Word was God "-
Extremely interesting arguments and so simple that u child can understand
them have been formed to show that Jesus was not the product of His times.
None but a legal expert with a case to make out of nothing ever supposed that He
was. He is the antithesis of His times. At every step He does violence to
Judaism, the land and ideas in the midst of which He was born. He is absolutely
unaccountable, the despair of evolution, an evolution which starts with the world.
He is the product of His times or all times about as much as the spring is the
product of winter's ice and snow.
These have their purpose and the spring follows them, but the spring is not
of them. Spring is from her own source of light and heat. John, not less his
toric than the historians but more so, not less scientific than the scientists but
more so, reaches back, out and up to that real source whence Jesus was, and of
whose passion He can be indeed the natural, the scientific, the historic product.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God" The world's spring
time is not of the world's winter, but of that warm core of Eternity — God.
There is a nautical term which beautifully describes the position of this verse
of the great evangel in its relation to our poor plodding confusions, our utter
failures to get a real start — "cleared". When a vessel has got all through with
unloading and loading cargoes, with troublesome landsmen and agents, with
docks and tugs and officialdom's red tapes, cast off her last cable and turned her
prow to the great free seas, she is spoken of as "cleared". John wrote that
Gospel in the midst of as wild a shrieking of human voices, as mad a confusion of
human thoughts as ever was. If ever worldly businesses and rocky despairs and
narrow channels and official humanities surrounded anything, they surrounded
that Gospel, but at the very first verse it cleared for the eternities. "In the
beginning was the Word and the Word was God"- It cleared "in spite of rock
and tempest's roar, in spite of false lights on the shore ". The centuries have not
called it back, nor the seas washed it down. There is not, nor ever will be, any
thing better for us than to follow in its white wake out to sea.
« «« * «?«*«*
Is it not great for you and me who are not great scientists nor mighty think-

4S2 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
ers and yet must start somewhere, must have a foundation for thought and hope
somewhere, if there is to be any manhood in us, to have this unshakable Verse, a
secret knowledge from the heart of God to our hearts ? " In the beginning was the
Word and the Word was God." I once lived in a room where the sun rose before
it was morning. Before my window a glorious old steeple shot its fearless spire
hundreds of feet up into the sky and caught the sun's beams before it was over
the city's horizon and fiung them down into ray room. Many a humble heart this
day walks in faith because of this majestic high Gospel. It flings down into the
depths of the soul some of the light of the yet unrisen sun of perfect vision.

A LESSON IN METHODS.
*B^' KE'V^. ED-WIN Mi. POTE-A^T, T>. Ti.,
Pastor of the Broad Street Memorial Baptist Church, Philadelphia, Pa.
The Gospel of John may be conceived as a manual of method in Christian
work. Just after the temptation in the wilderness ( Matt. 4: i-ii ) our Lord ap
pears a second time in the Jordan valley to begin His work. In the wilderness He
had seen great visions, and the horizon around Hiiu widened until it embraced all
the kingdoms of the world; and He knew them to be His.
How now will He begin to enact His claim ? How will He announce His
Messiahship ? When men see Him again will they see Him assuming the title and
the prerogatives of the Prince of Israel ? No ; it is a day of small things which
succeeds the day of great visions. In the Jordan valley He is seen walking alone,
then talking with two men, then with three others. And thus is ushered in the
^vork of the world's Teacher and Saviour.
This way of going to work on a world enterprise was either consummate folly
or supreme wisdom. That it was a deliberately chosen method appears from the
rest of the Gospel of John, which is largely taken up with private interviews and
the direct results of these. Chapter 3 is occupied with Nicodemus ; chapter 4 is
occupied with the woman of Samaria ; chapter 5 is occupied with the man at the
pool of Bethesda, and a king's officer ; chapter 9 is occupied with a man born
blind; chapter 11 is occupied with Lazarus; chapter 12 is occupied with certain
Greeks; chapters 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17 are occupied with the Twelve; and chapter
21 is occupied with Peter and John. Thus we see how large a share of His atten
tion our Lord bestowed upon individuals. A group of fishermen, a leading citi
zen, a woman of the street, a king's officer, a hospital cripple, a blind man, a sick
friend — these, in their turn, are given all the heart and help of the Son of Man.
And in chapter 7, His brothers, impatient of His method, are insisting that He
must get out among the people more, and make a more public display of His
powers. In the method He adopted to accomplish His work, we have two things : —
u. Our Lord's estimate of the individual. Jesus Christ discovered the single
soul, and stamped its value. He said it was worth more than all the world of
things. Before He taught, the individual was hardly more than a grain of sand in
a sand hill. After He had spoken men saw the awful halo of personal account
ability encircling the head of every member of the race.
/). The true method of propagandism. The only way for anything to spread
through the living organism of humanity — whether an idea, a plague, a salva
tion — is by personal contact. And the results of our Lord's method are an
abundant vindication of His wisdom in choosing it. Trace these results, for
example, in the case of John, who had his first interview with his Lord there in
the Jordan valley, and who lived to give the world the Gospel we are studying.
Or take Peter as your example, and recall Pentecost and the subsequent history.

^Now President of P'urman University, Greenville, S- C.
453

454 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Thus while individuals occupy the foreground and seem to absorb the Saviour's^
attention, crowding up behind them, coming to its light, we see the world.
A LESSON.
If this was the method of our Lord, it is the true method for us, His disciples,
" Individual work for individuals ', as Dr. H. Clay Trumbull put it in the title of
his charming little book. Our low estimate of the individual lurks in every such
excuse as " There's nothing I can do ! " But you can win a child to Christ. That
seems to us a small thing — yet a little weaver lad, the only one received into the
church at Blant^'re in a 3'ear, grew to be David Livingstone.

THE CONDITION OF ENTRANCE INTO THE KINGDOM OF GOD.
AN EXPOSITION OF ST. JOHN 3: I-I6.
B-y REV. -WILLIAjVI C. -WHIITEORr), A. jM.,
Professor of Biblical Languages and Literature in Alfred Theological
Seminary. Alfred, N. Y.
The precise nature of the Kingdom of God baffles definition. Our Saviour
began His preaching with the theme, " Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand " ;
and He had this kingdom as the principal subject of His teaching all through His
earthly ministry. Although students of the New Testament can not agree as to the
content of this expression, "Kingdom of God", it can not be said that we know
nothing of it. The teachings of our Saviour .and the enlightenment of the Holy
Spirit have not been in vain. This kingdom is so great and grand that our earthly
words fail to encompass it. It is a heavenly kingdom and has its origin in God.
We know something about it just as we know something about God Himself; and
we may know more and more if we fully follow the light that is before us, and are
true to the God that loves us.
In the third chapter of the Gospel according to John, our Saviour is speaking
of entrance into this kingdom. Two fundamental errors in regard to citizenship
in the kingdom were cherished by the men of that day as well as of this, (i) It
is hard to become a citizen of the kingdom, and (2) it is easy to become a citizen of
the Kingdom of God. Contradictory as these statements may seem, they are both
alike errors, as may he inferred from the words of our Lord.
The moral man thinks that entering into the kingdom is so easy that he almost
fails to consider the question of entrance for himself.
Nicodemus, a doctor of the law, was greatly interested in the teaching of the
new prophet from Galilee. He was doubtless a very devout man, and was natu
rally moved by the evident sincerity of Jesus and His earnestness of purpose. He
came therefore by night to express approval of this young Teacher and His work,
and to inquire further of His teaching. He took it for granted that he, himself, as
well as all other good Israelites were already within the Kingdom of God. Were
they not the children of Abraham? Were they not the chosen people of God?
Nicodemus was startled when Jesus said to him, "Except one be born from
above he can not see the Kingdom of God" Students have been long discussing
the meaning of the word which King James' translators rendered, "again", and
our American Revisers, "anew". The former translation certainly failed of
expressing the meaning of the word; we must choose between the renderings,
"anew" or "from above". The characteristic feature of the birth referred to is
not that it is another, but that it is of a different origin.
In his amazement that anything should be required of him, Nicodemus grasps
at the idea of birth and ignores or misapprehends the adverb. Even according to
the tenor of the foolish question which Nicodemus asks, the requirement is stupen
dous, — to think that a man must be born again in order to enter the Kingdom of
God. But this new birth is of a higher character than the earthly and physical.
455

456 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
" As many as received Him, to them gave He the right to become children of God, —
even to those who believed upon His name, who were born not of blood, nor of the
will of flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God". There could be no merit or
utility in rebirth in a physical sense, even if such a thing were possible. The new
birth of which Jesus speaks is of the Spirit.
A new principle and motive of life must enter into the nature of man : in fact
his nature must be changed. We are very apt to think of this statement as applying
to a heathen Chinaman or to a cannibal of the Southern seas, or perhaps to the
criminal and drunkard of our own land. But Jesus was speaking to one of the most
cultured and religious men of his time, a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin.
This condition, we maybe sure, rests upon everyone. No matter how refined a
man is, no matter how moral, no matter how devoted to the law, he must be born
from above in order to inherit the Kingdom of God and attain new life, the real life.
This new life is of the Holy Spirit, and is therefore independent of every earthly
element; it is within the soul, a life from God. We are not, however, to ignore
the fact that our Saviour uses another word along with Spirit in v. 5. "Verily,
verily, I say unto thee, except one be born of water and the Spirit, he can not enter
the Kingdom of God "- Although the new birth is entirely spiritual it is associated
with an external element. Jesus does not intend to speak of two distinct means in
bringing about this birth. It is a mistake to translate as King James' version, " Of
water and of the Spirit". The water is the subordinate, external, and, perhaps,
merely figurative element. We may speak of the birth of the Spirit ; but we can
not properly speak of the birth of water. Christian baptism is to be exalted because
of its symbolical reference ; but it is not to be unduly made prominent, because its
efficacy, — its very reality indeed, depends upon the presence of the personal Holy
Spirit. The doctrine of baptismal regeneration, or the teaching that baptism is a
saving ordinance is not of God but of man. Simon Magus was baptized ; but Peter
said to him, " Thou hast no part nor lot in this inatter".
Our Saviour enforces the truth that this new birth, — the entrance into the
kingdom, — is not of man but of God by referring to the phenomenon of the wind.
" The wind bloweth where it will, and thou hearest the voice thereof, but knowest
not whence it cometh, and whither it goeth ; so is every one that is born of the
Spirit ". We can not see nor understand the wind ; but we can observe that which
is occasioned by it, and so believe its existence, even if we can not explain it.
Shall we conclude then, that entrance into the Kingdom of God is altogether
beyond our control and so no occasion of thought for us ? Shall we despair at once
because the new birth is from above and not of ourselves? Our Saviour evidentlv
intended to teach Nicodemus that entrance into the kingdom was not as easy as he
supposed, but He had no desire to lead him into the opposite error. He gave a
shock to his present feeling of security in order that he might come to a realization
of his own lack.
The great mistake of many a poor sinner in regard to entrance into the kingdom
is that the way is by far too difficult for him, and that he might as well despair at
once. But there is another aspect of the commencement of the new life that appeals
directly to the activity of those who would enter. Continuing His teaching to
Nicodemus, our Lord says, " And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
even so must the Son of Man be lifted up ; that whosoever believeth may in Him
have eternal life ". Belief in a crucified Saviour is the way into the Kingdom of
God. The promise is broad and the condition is in the heart of the one who would
enter : Whosoever believeth.
The Evangelist John adds a word of explanation, which is indeed an epitome

CONDITION OF ENTRANCE INTO THE KINGDOM. 457
of the whole message of Good News, — the Little Gospel, as Martin Luther calls it.
" For God so loved^the World, that he gave His only begotten Son, that whoso
ever believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life ".
From the human point of view the one requisite for entrance into the Kingdom
of God is faith, — that is, belief in the promises of God and acceptance of them.
Faith is not mere credence. An intellectual belief in the statements of the Holy
Scriptures with no acceptance of them is no faith at all. Faith in Jesus means
nothing less than an active trust in Him, a personal allegiance to Him as Lord and
Master. Some have wondered that we have in John 3 : 16 no mention of repentance, and
indeed that Jesus spoke to Nicodemus nothing about repentance. This omission
is not because repentance is not needed : it is alluded to in the reference to the
water of baptism, and is involved in faith. The teaching of John the Baptist was
for Pharisees as well as for others. The cultured doctor of the law that came to
Jesus by night must enter the kingdom by the same door as any other man. It is
impossible that one shouldreally accept Jesus as Master, — that is, have faith in Him,
and StiU cling to sin. He Himself says, " Ye cannot serve God and Mammon '.
As long as we try to serve both, we are serving only the latter; and as soon as we
have the genuine purpose to serve God alone, we have not only ceased to serve the
god of this world but have turned our backs upon him.
With this understanding of the conditions of entrance into the kingdom, we
need not fear to say that our citizenship is of our own choice. We have felt our
lost condition and have accepted the promise. We have repented of our sins and
have entered into eternal life. On the other hand we must say also, we know of
a surety that salvation is not of ourselves. " For by grace have ye been saved
through faith ; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God" (Eph. 2:8). We have
been born from above, we have passed from death into life, surely not by any power
of our own, but through the Holy Spirit. He looked upon our low estate and has
lifted us up. Our Redeemer, the Son of God has left His exalted place and emptied
Himself. He took upon Himself frail flesh, lived among men, suffered, and died
upon the cross. He was buried in Joseph's tomb ; He arose from the dead, and
ever liveth at the right hand of God to intercede for us.
There is but one condition of entrance into the Kingdom of God, although this
condition has two aspects. We are saved through acceptance of the redemption
wrought for us.

* THE GOSPEL OF THE CONVERSATIONS.
B-y REV. JAIVIBS &. VOSE, T>. D.,
Pastor Emeritus or the Beneficent Congregational Church,
Providence, R. I.
The Gospel of John may be called the Gospel of the Conversations, for, more
than any other, it reports particular interviews of our Lord with individuals. In
the first chapter we have the conversation with Nathanael ; in the second, with the
mother of Jesus ; in the third, with Nicodemus ; in the fourth, with the woman of
Samaria ; and passing by others less striking, we have the interviews with Mary
and Martha, and the words spoken at the Supper ; until after the Resurrection, the
history closes with question and answer, as they passed between our Lord and
Mary Magdalene, and Thomas, and finally with Peter and John.
These conversations, too, are real conversations, for Jesus was not like some
famous men, who discourse in monologue. Even His addresses to the multitude
were often interrupted by the inquiries or remarks of others, and, in smaller com
panies He guided the conversation, while apparently taking the lesser part. The
"golden silences" of Jesus are very marked, and George Borrow, in that fasci
nating book, "The Bible in Spain," relates that the taciturn people of the little
Republic of Andorra noticed these silences, and said of them, "Jesus played the
Andorran." While He spoke with authority, yet He dispelled all feeling of re
straint, and even seemed to awaken in others unwonted freedom. Not unfre
quently He gave the thought, and let them do the talking. He had the rare quality
of a good listener, and He heard with such deep penetration that His answers, as is
sometimes plainly stated, were directed to the thoughts of men rather than to their
words. It is often said that Jesus was the greatest of preachers, but not so often that
He preferred to converse. Then indeed He appears to have been most truly Him
self, when, in direct appeal to some individual heart, or in the effort to comfort or
instruct a few. He utters those great sayings which shine like the fixed stars in the
firmament. He never appears to have saved anything for a large audience, nor
feared that any utterance of truth, breathed into the receptive heart of however
humble a hearer, could fail of its effect. Thus, if you would seek for the doc
trines of Jesus, the great and distinctive revelations which mark His career on
earth, you will find them in His private interviews with Nicodemus, and the sisters
of Bethany, and the woman of Samaria.
And these conversations all have a personal turn. They attach great prin
ciples to common life, and they lead people through their own needs to the grand
est spiritual truths. Jesus evidently has confidence in the living power of truth,
and therefore does not press it, but leaves His hearers to follow out the idea and
make the application for themselves. We are surprised at the dialogue which is
taken up with the sayings of others, until we learn the geniiinant power of Jesus'
words, and see them, as it were, growing before our eyes in other minds.
With the woman of Samaria, Jesus opens the conversation with a simple re
quest. He asks a favor, almost the only one that is recorded of His asking, and
¦'' Printed originally in the Andover Review. 458

THE GOSPEL OF THE CONVERSATIONS. 459.
the smallest that could be asked. Thus throwing Himself on her sympathy, and
willing to be dependent on her for the relief of His manifest weariness, He opens-
the way for interchange of thought. But the prejudice that is strong in her people
cannot be repressed, and she utters it not scornfully, but with a feeling of surprise.
Indifferent to this narrow prejudice, and seeing that the time is not yet come to
overthrow it, our Lord passes into what we may call the beautiful parable of " The
Water of Life," which the woman, taking half literally, and in deep amazement at
the power of His speech, answers with a counter petition, that He would give her
this water, "that I thirst not, neither come all the way hither to draw." The
favor that Jesus asked is forgotten. The relation is changed, or rather, each has
shown a willingness to trust the other, which is the closest bond of sympathy.
But Jesus, perceiving that He has made no definite impression upon her, save that
of friendliness and a curious interest, turns suddenly to the woman with the per
sonal command, " Go, call thy husband, and come hither" ; and when she denies
the existence of such a relationship. He turns the leaves of her past history with
an unsparing hand. To all this she humbly rejoins, as being no longer able to
evade the truth, " Sir, I perceive that Thou art a prophet"; and then, as if still
wishing to turn the conversation, she hastens to recall the distinction between her
own people and the Jews. We can almost see her confusion, which she attempts
to hide in this manner. Coleridge somewhere says that " Multitudes never blush,"
and that it is safer to appeal to the honor and conscience of an individual than to
a crowd. At any rate, she drops the subject, but the thought still lingers in her
mind. The personal matter is the central point of the conversation, as we shall
afterwards more clearly see ; and yet she prepares for herself a further humiliation
by bringing up the great subject of dispute between the Jews and the Samaritans^
And now our Lord, referring no more to the personal charge which He has
brought home to her conscience, addresses her with a sublimity rising to the height
of His grandest utterances, describing the nature of worship, and the approach to-
the Father that is open to every longing heart in all the world. But in the midst
of it He meets and overthrows the prejudice which she first introduced, and sweeps
it out of the way with a lofty and decisive sentence that leaves no room for answer :
" Ye worship ye know not what. We know what we worship, for salvation is of
the Jews ". Why does she not resent this humbling sentence ? Why does not her
Samaritan hatred rise in defiance, as it would have done, one must think, had Jesus
thus addressed her at the first ? Ah, it is because of that stroke with which He had
smitten her conscience when He laid bare the deformity of her past life. She has
no heart to contend against this. Her quick intuition brings up the thought of
the promised Messiah, and the revelation of herself that He has made compels hef
to answer with docility, "When He is come. He will tell us all things" Whirt
does she refer to? What is in her mind as she gives this answer, half musingly?
The great and spiritual truths of which Jesus has spoken? Yes, but much more
the revelation of her own heart and life. She may seek to change the subject ; our
Lord may forbear, as He did, to press it any further, but the arrow has hit the mark
and clings to the wound. The revelation of the Christ to her, as to every one, is
in what He has told her of herself. This is what Paul means by " being appre
hended "of the Christ. And that w-e have in this the true impression that was
made on her mind appears from her own description of the interview : " Come, see
a man which told me all things that ever I did. Can this be the Christ?"
Here is the triumph of the conversation, that she had been made to see her
self, and acknowledge the heart-searching power of the Redeemer. Says Thomas
a Kempis, " It asketh great skill to know how to hold converse with Jesus " ; but

46o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
he adds, " Be thou humble and peaceable, and Jesus will be with thee." In accept
ing His searching rebuke, she has discovered the glory of His character and mis
sion. If, then, we would understand the effect of our Lord's conversation with the
woman of Samaria, we must read it in the message she bore to her people : " Come,
see a man which told me all things that ever I did. Can this be the Christ?"
She says nothing of His promise of never-failing water, nor of His grand sen
tences about worship, still less of His being a Jew and proclaiming their super
iority. The one thought which fills her mind, and gives a glow and a fascination
to her report that cannot be resisted, is what He has told her of herself. This is
her message, her watchword, so to speak, that passed from lip to lip as she hur
ried on among her townsfolk, so that we read : " Many of the Samaritans of that
city believed on Him for the saying of the woman, ' He told me all that ever I
did'". It were hardly needful to bring into clearer light those principles of human
nature which are here involved. We need a friend who knows us altogether, and
to whom we can be perfectly joined. Such sympathy and a thorough comprehen
sion are vainly sought in mere human relations. As says the author of the
" Christian Year" :
" Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knr WS half the reasons why we smile or sigh "-
This thorough comprehension our Lord Jesus only can supply. He knows
every thought and feeling. He holds the threads of our past life, seeing every error,
every crime. And He is ready to interweave His own love and knowledge, upon
which we may rest. He interprets with personal love and power the language of
the writer of the 139th Psalm: "O Lord, Thou hath searched me and known
me. * ? * Thou understandeth my thought afar off. ? * ? Thou art
acquainted with all my ways "
It seems at first a startling hyperbole, that the woman should have gone
through the town saying to every one, " He told me all that ever I did". Why, it
was but a single sentence in which He had spoken of her personal relations. But
there was no other way to describe the truth. How tame, and false even, had she
said, " He knows some things about me", or, " He knows the chief things" ; for
His knowledge covers all and admits no less a compass than this — " He told me
all that ever I did"
The truth which is here made known to us and answers to every Christian
experience is, that Jesus reveals to us the hidden life. He enters our conscious
ness, and becomes another self within us. A little child, tired of play, sits down
by his mother, and she tells him something that happened years ago ; stories
of his infant days, and of his little brothers and sisters, and of the household pets.
He is amazed that she can tell so much of what has gone on about him ; that she
knows more of him that even he does himself. From other lips he would scarcely
believe it true ; but he listens, with rapt amazement, to some story of the earliest
opening of his mind, and when it ceases, he cries out, "Tell that again". This
is the nearness of a mother's love. It is a consciousness that enwraps our own ; a
memory that encloses ours, and holds it in custody. What we were from the first,
and what were the earliest movements of thought and feeling — these are in her
keeping more than our own. But there is a higher than human consciousness
that enwraps ours. There is a deeper love, as there is a more far-reaching knowl-

THE GOSPEL OF THE CONVERSATIONS. 461
edge. It is Jesus who comes and sits by us, as He sat on the well of Sychar; and
into our ears He pours the story of our life — the wasted hours, the false and self
ish passions, the unthinking chase after worthless toys. To us, also. He will
reveal all things. Rightly listening, we shall say, with humble yet with glad
surprise, " He told me all that ever I did".
Thus Jesus becomes another self within us. There is that familiarity of inter
course which is the highest delight of the soul. And He does not hesitate to use
figures regarding it which present the simplest picture of intimate acquaintance
with us. " Behold, I stand at the door and knock ; if any man hear My voice and
open the door, I will come in to him, and sup with him, and he with Me". It is
no class of men, no favored few, to whom He offers His inmost heart ; but to
each, in just the present state of character and knowledge, with the faults of
to-day still cleaving, with the crimes and follies of the past still in memory. Nor
can He ever afterward reject us because of past shame ; for the first thing He does
is to tell us all that we ever did. Other friends might grow cold when they came
to know our history ; our past associations and misdeeds might alienate them or
breed disgust ; but not so with Jesus. He knows us altogether, and, accepting
Him, we enter into full fellowship with a forgiving and faithful Lord.
This perfect knowledge of the Christ is our greatest safeguard. It is needful,
to defend us from plunging farther into sin, that we have the confidence of a
loving Saviour. When we are on the verge of temptation, the thought that He
knows and grieves over our past sins may win us back. When ready to despair of
His favor, or to think it impossible that such as we should be accepted or enabled
to do anything for His honor, we may remind ourselves that, when He gave us the
invitation to repent, He weighed the full burden of our transgressions. He did not
undertake a work of which He knew not the magnitude. With joy we may press
close to our hearts the saying of the woman, " He told me all that ever I did".
The conversation of Jesus with the woman at the well throws light on the
subject of confession. That the practice of auricular confession, which pre
vailed in the Mediaeval church, had a basis in the sincere longing of the penitent,
there is no doubt. Indeed, confession was regarded as a part of repentance, or at
least the outward manifestations of it. The danger arose from magnifying the
outward until it absorbed and drew away the life of the inward. This could
hardly be otherwise, since human confessors are too prone to claim authority, and
the idea of having fulfilled a painful task makes men ii-nagine that their guilt is
relieved. But when the confessional is abolished, there remains often a slavish
view of repentance, which takes away its true blessedness. Some are troubled
because they know not how long they ought to repent. Ought they to mention in
words every sin they have ever committed ? If they forget or omit any, will God
pardon? If they do not rightly estimate the guilt of all, and consider some their
chief sins which are not so, will God have patience with their mistakes ?
How happily is all this relieved when we learn the noon-day lesson taught at
the well of Sychar, that it is the Christ who reveals us to ourselves ! It is not for
you to find out your sin, but for Him to reveal it to you. With the Psalmist, you
ask God to search you, " that you may be led in the way everlasting ". You are to
become acquainted with your own heart by having Him read it to you ; and all
you can tell Him will be of that which He has told you before. Repentance now
loses its bitterness, because it is the revelation of the Christ. "Once", saj's
Luther, " I thought no word so bitter as repentance ; now there is none more
sweet, and those passages in the Bible that used to terrify me now smile and sport
about me". In the same spirit, Augustine says, in his " Confessions", " I will

462 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
now call to mind my past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul ; not
because I love them, but that I may love Thee, O my God. For love of Thy love I
do it ; reviewing my most wicked ways in the %-ery bitterness of my remembrance,
that Thou mayst grow sweet unto me" The power of such a revelation of the
Christ is manifest in the fact, that the largest harvest of souls ever gathered while
on earth was reaped in the two days He spent at Sychar. A soul brought face to
face with Him, beholding His glory by being self-revealed, is a fit instrument to
convey to others the advent of the Christ. Here is the song of Bethlehem, " Peace
and good will". The woman waits not for a full rehearsal of all the windings of
her guilt, for He has known and felt it all.
For us there is the same freedom of approach. Listening to Him, you also,
shall learn to confess. Receiving into your heart His love and sympathy, your
lips shall be opened to tell Him every want and grief, and prayer shall be only the
•communion of kindred minds. The saying of the woman shall become your
saying, " He told me all that ever I did ".

THE- PRINCIPLE OF MISSIONS IN THE GOSPEL OF JOHN.
B-y REV. -W. C. BITTING, D. D.,
Pastor of the Mount Morris Baptist Church, New York, N. Y.
There are many motives for missions, among which we may mention : —
1. The imperial motive of loyalty to the king (Matt. 28 : 19).
2. The theological motive (Luke 14: 19, 10) of the "lost" condition of
men. 3. The philanthropic motive (Matt. 22 : 39) of the wish to share what we
have with others.
4. The fiduciary motive (Matt. 10 : 8a) of stewardship of what we have (Matt.
24:45-51)- 5. The biological motive which is emphasized in the Fourth Gospel.
John refers to the " Kingdom of God" only twice, (i) In the account of the
talk with Nicodemus, who was looking for a kingdom (3 : 3, 5), and (b) in the
account of the trial before Pilate (18 : 33-38), when our Lord is answering a charge
of sedition. According to the first three Gospels the great blessing brought by the King to
the world was the Kingdom of God. How natural, then, for them to record those
imperial words in which the Holy Monarch commands His followers to conquer the
world. According to the Fourth Gospel, the great blessing brought by "the life
which was the light of men" is everywhere described by the writer as eternal life,
or the life of the Eternal One in us. From this conception he gets his favorite
word life. How natural that he should carefully observe the workings of that life
which is from above, when it enters into human hearts ! His Gospel is a study in
spiritual biology. What the synoptists conceive of as the spreading of a kingdom,
John contemplates as the reproduction of a life. "The Kingdom of God is like"
is the great parabolic preface in the first three Gospels which introduces us to a
wealth of analogies from many realms of organic existence. No such verbal herald
announces a coming simile in the Fourth Gospel. John leads us immediately into
the presence of life. He records not parables, but incidents ; not figures which
illustrate separate functions, but facts that unfold to our delighted eyes the life
itself, active in all its functions. Indeed, his entire narrative is a missionary docu
ment of the most striking character. He avows this and nothing else as his pur
pose. " Many other signs therefore did Jesus in the presence of the disciples,
which are not written in this book : but these are written, that ye may believe that
Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing ye may have life in His
name" (John 20: 30, 31).
All life (a) organizes itself, {b) grows by assimilation of externals, (c) wastes
in the exercise of selection, (d) reproduces itself. In the last of these functions we
find the missionary principle according to John's Gospel. Let us take some illus
trations : —
(i) John 1. The first chapter is in part missionary autobiography. It
records introductions and reproductions. On a Sunday morning the Baptist stood
with two of his disciples on the river bank. He loses no time in pointing his com
panions to "The Lamb of God". They leave the guidepost to follow "the way",
463

464 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
and the same day discover the Messiah. What is the first impulse that masters
these new disciples of Jesus ? Each runs with haste to find his own brother. It is
a race of rivals. Andrew first finds his brother. He brings Simon to Jesus, and
does a good day's work for the world.
Again, Jesus finds Philip, and at once Philip finds Nathanael. Not a day is
allowed to pass. With noble words, the fullest meaning of which he could not
have understood, he affirms that Moses and the prophets wrote of Jesus. When
objection is made to Nazareth as a source of good, the only answer is that born
from experience, and calling to experiment, " Come and see ".
Why is it that on the opening day of the ministry of our Lord these four men
begin their effort to bring others ? No " Great Commission " had been uttered, no
hope of reward had been stimulated, no crowns or thrones had been offered, no
punishment had been threatened for the fruitless. Not a motive usually urged
today for evangelistic work and missionary activity- had been revealed. So far as
the narrative gives light, their eager words and swift feet and cordial hands were
the pure expressions of that spontaneous, free, automatic new life which had begun
to throb in their hearts. This new life, uncultured, deficient in true apprehension
of the Messiah, but strong in its vitality, begins hy asserting its reproductive
instinct. It will have another. So close is the bond between finding for one's self
and finding another, that the birthday of the church is its first missionary day also.
The church and the propaganda were born together. Its initial impulse is evan
gelistic. This propagating instinct controls their souls at the same time that their
affection for Jesus awakes. We are convinced after reading in v. 41 the glorious
" Eureka ", " I have found Him ", that immediately afterward we will read, " And
he brought him to Jesus " Apostles are evolved from disciples, as the full corn in
the ear from the seed. So normally does bringing grow out of finding, so organ
ically does missionary work develop as the bloom, flower and fruit of discipleship.
It is only the beautiful effort to reproduce in others the joy we ourselves have
experienced. " That which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes,
that which we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Hfe ? » *
declare we unto you also, that ye also may have fellowship with us ; and our fellow
ship is with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ" (i John 1 : 1-3). So this
John writes a half century afterward concerning the motive of His life, begotten on
that first day.
(2) John 4. Nearly a year after this time, Jesus "must needs "go through
Samaria. Beside the historic well He meets a woman. Absolutely no tangential
point existed between the Christ and this woman but their common desire for
water. Through this coincident want, in a conversation matchless for delicacy and
tact. He reveals Himself as the Messiah. All consciousness of her purpose at the
well is eclipsed for the moment, as truly as the hunger of the preacher is forgotten
in His ministry to the single, needy heart. She leaves her waterpot, enters Sychar,
and becomes the first city missionary mentioned in the New Testament. She is
not content with relating experiences, but must couple with them an invitation. It
is the same old story of the automatic life — " Come and see ". The crowds follo\v.
In great procession the people stream out of the city gates, and, beholding them,
Jesus points His disciples to the opportunity, and says: "The fields are w-hite
unto the harvest". The very figure He uses suggests the sowing and reaping.
This is indeed what had occurred. There was no command to the woman. No
more unlikely field for missionary work was ever entered than Samaria. Yet no
miracle was worked there to prepare for or authenticate the message. The agitation
of the city .arose from the earnest and profound impulse of one soul to bring others.

THE PRINCIPLE OF MISSIONS. 465
There was the instinct of vitality to reproduce in them the same consciousness
which she herself possessed. The story of the first chapter of John is thus repeated
in the fourth chapter. The steps in both are {a) hospitality to testimony, (i)
investigation, (c) experience and {d) proclamation of truth. All honest hearing
ends in preaching.
(3) John 9. A man born blind was healed. He knew Jesus only as healer.
With what sviperb wit he refutes the charge that Jesus was a sinner, and what
magnificent confidence underlies his creed concerning his benefactor. Severe
cross-questioning, acute efforts to entangle him in criticism of Jesus, all fail.
Asked once more about his blessing, he begins to preach, " I have told you and ye
did not hear, why do you wish to hear it again ? Do you also wish to become His
disciples ?" What are the step.s of his ascent from receptivity to activity? A blind
man, a healed man with an invincible experience, a witness and an advocate.
These are the stages of his swift progress. He will not wait for the belated phil
osophy of his blessing. His vital experience flies on rushing wings to bear the
tidings of blessing, and gratefully to win other hearts to love his deliverer, while
his slow theology is putting on its shoes. All the more forceful is this incident as
an illustration of our principle, because not until after his appealing question did
he believe on Jesus as the Son of God. The impulse immediately follows the
blessing and precedes the enlightenment. He would have others know what he had
discovered. Once more, in the ninth chapter, faith is fruitful, and to the list of the
Judean Baptist, the Galilean sons of Zebedee, Andrew and Philip, and the woman
of Samaria, we must add the Jerusalem blind man as illustrations of our principle.
(4) John 12. On the last Tuesday of Jesus' life certain Hellenes, or pure
Greeks, not proselytes, desire to see Jesus. The same Philip who found Nathanael
is ready to lead them to the Great Teacher. Here again, as in the first chapter, we
find together introduction and reproduction. Of what did Jesus speak to them ?
Of that which filled His mind at the time. What words convey His view of the
great event on Calvary? When He speaks to Nicodemus, the Jewish ruler, He
chooses a familiar illustration from Hebrew history : "As Moses lifted up the ser
pent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up " But to those
Greeks, who probably cared little for that history. He speaks the great parable of
nature. " Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die it abideth by itself
alone, but if it die it beareth much fruit"- "So it is with life" He continues;
"whoever saves but does not sow his life will lose it. Whoever sows but does not
save his life, will eventually receive it back multiplied indefinitely. It is true of all
life, and therefore of yours and Mine. If I be not lifted up, I abide by Myself
alone. If I die I reproduce Myself in millions of hearts. I will draw all men unto
Me, if I am lifted up". The Christ without a cross must be forever alone. The
Christ on the cross exhibits the law of the cross as that of the harvest. There will
be duplication and reduplication. Christ the seed. Christians the harvest. The
cross and missions are here forever married in holy union by Jesus Himself under
the holy law of reproduction. "What God has joined together, let no man put
asunder". So the Teacher Himself seals this thought. How real and rich the
Johannine conception of the extension of the kingdom ! From this author the
"Great Commission" is indeed absent, but from the Jordan to the cross in His
Gospel there is the profound truth constantly asserted : Every real disciple brings
another. The church itself is the harvest from the Christ-sown seed on Calvary.
Missionary enthusiasm is thus the revelation of the vitality of the new life in
Christ. Regeneration issues in spiritual reproduction as normally as generation
produces generation in the physical life. Far be it from any one to abate one jot

466 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
or tittle of absolute imperativeness of the King's order to go into all the world and
preach the good news to every creature. Without treason to His authority no one
dares dilute the power of the sacredness of that command. Yet from the Fourth
Cbspel we see how true it is that men filled with the Christ life would have made
the effort to win others to such a glorious Lord. The great mandate rests upon
fhe life that is within our souls. The followers of the Saviour who gives such a life
should carry the message that brings that life to the ends of the earth because of
that life itself. Worldwide evangelization is the ideal of spiritual life. Questions
of geography are impertinent. What then is missionary work?
Merely Andrew and John seeking their kin, and saying : " We have found the
Christ ! " Philip in all lands answering to the prejudiced Nathanaels, " Come and
see'' ; the woman preaching out of a full experience, " Come, see a man who told
me all things that ever I did. Can this be the Christ ? "; those who proclaim in the
strength of their unanswerable experiences, "One thing I know, that, whereas I
was blind" — incontestable preamble — "now I see" — inalienable assurance — "Do
you also wish to become His disciples ?" — glorious invitation ! Missionary activity
is only the law of the cross in our daily lives, sowing ourselves and reaping a
harvest, scattering all that we are in all spheres and receiving back multiplied the
power we scattered. Missionary biography ? What is it but the story of men and
women who felt some of the celestial passion that brought Jesus to this world, and
buried themselves, as we say, in all lands, and among all races, that from their
germinal consecration there may be reaped a garner full of saved lives out of the
very soil in which they sowed themselves.
(i) It is true of the divine life itself. God had not finished His work when
He made the material universe. The cosmos is simply the materialization of the
divine thoughts. The revelation of the divine personality was yet to come. In
that great resolution, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness". He
•would duplicate Himself, so far as it was possible, in terms of human life. Man
was intended to be God's shadow cast on earth. "We are His offspring". He is
a Father and we are to be His sons. The incarnation reveals creation's ideal-
Jesus was the divine artist proof of God. Immanuel discloses the meaning of
image and likeness. Redemption is the process of making us in the image of
Christ, who is the image of God. Regeneration is that act of the Holy Spirit
which makes us spiritual. The church is spiritual because it is composed of those
who have been born of the Spirit. The ideal church is a paraphrase of Christ.
(2) This must also be true of the Christian life precisely because it is true of
God's life. All grades of existence are both limited and stimulated by this law of
reproduction. Grass of the field produces grass of the field, fish of the sea pro
duce fish, fowl of the air perpetuate fowl of the air. There is both conformity to
type and perpetuation of species. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, that
which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Thoughts produce thoughts, emotions pro
duce emotions, volitions produce volitions. Sinners produce sinners, therefore
avoid them. Christians produce Christians as their spiritual progeny. Mission
ary activity is the working out in , practical Christian life of this universal law of
reproduction, the religious analogue of this Edenic method. It explains the zeal
of prophet and apostle, it interprets the glorious helplessness of those who said,
'' We cannot but speak the things we have both seen and heard " (Acts 4: 20). As
the church is the divine life in men organizing itself ; as sanctification is the divine
life more and more fully enlarging itself and growing within us ; as sepai-ation
from the world, that peculiarity of the people of God which is a mark of the holy
nation, is only the treating of worldliness as waste, so missionary effort in all

THE PRINCIPLE OF MISSIONS. 467
forms is only that divine life multiplying itself in others. The whole mass is
leavened by multiplication of the yeast germ. Contagion is the method of the
Kingdom of God. Infinite germination is the process, and that is infinite repro
duction. Therefore, how can they believe in Him of whom they have not heard,
and how shall they hear without a preacher ? Life infusing life is the law for God
and nature and man. Mere machinery is like the dead stick which Gehazi laid on
the face of the lifeless boy. Therefore no printing press can ever render the pulpit
obsolete. Individual Christian life sustained by organization, growth, and waste,
but the species called Christian preserved through this reproduction. The divine
cause the life of God, the human instrumentality is the personal energy of the
redeemed man.
Missions and spiritual vitality are synonymous. We have organization highly
developed. We are rich in some rare characters that grow up to bless the world.
Never as now were religious specialists abounding who say, "This one thing I
do " and count all else as waste. What we need is a vitality that shall reproduce
ourselves. The decline of interest in missions is not due to the wearing away of
the romantic sentimental veneer with which missionary- life has been overlaid ; nor
to the evaporation of motive; nor to the inroads of " new theology" which is said
to " cut the nerve of missions" ; nor to any of the many like causes which a shal
low observation assigns. It is due to low vitality within ourselves, to an auEemic
spiritual life in individual men and women. The great question which should
agitate us is not that concerning the state of the heathen after death, but the condi
tion of the Christian before death. Our anxieties should center not so much on
the relation of God's mercj' to those who never heard of Christ as upon the selfish
indolence of those who profess to know and love the Christ in this life. Within
myself, into the depths of my own heart, the keen searching probe must be run.
Am I dead while I have a name to live ? Just here will be found the true explana
tion of most of that indifference which we are, in the evil spirit of self-excuse, too
prone to attribute to other causes. Missionary success is only the extension,
through the areas of concentric circles, of that first joyous impulse which we
fovind in ourselves when we first believed, the enthusiasm for others and the efforts
to have them share our rapture. This reawakened reproductive energy means joy
to our own hearts, a revival in our own churches, and the triumph of Christ on
earth. Let us bring to the quickening Christ all our'feebleness and failure, and
let us count as very little all our ponderous machinery of organization, our attain
ments in personal growth, and regard as purely Pharisaic our censure of worldli
ness as waste, unless with these functions of life we shall also have in enthusiastic
abundance that propagating energy which belongs as essentially to genuine life as
the others. Let every living thing bring forth " after its kind "

SANCTIFICATION THROUGH THE TRUTH.
(St. John i7|: 17.)
b-x- rev. horace ^v^^. tiuden, d. d.,
Pastor of the Livermore Baptist Church, Livermore Falls, Me.
This is one of the shining gems of John. Its light reaches through to the very
end of an accomplished salvation. The prayer of Jesus is the same as the purpose
of God. Hence we here learn that it is the plan of the Father to make personally
holy Christian believers by means of His revealed word. The Holy Spirit is our
sanctifier, but He employs the Scriptures of truth as an instrumentality in the work.
Now while this is a divine work and utterly beyond the reach of human power.
it cannot be that Christians are wholly passive while it is being accomplished.
Our sympathetic co-operation is required and along the line of the Spirit's working.
We must make ourselves familiar with the oracles of truth if we would be sanctified
through them. Not even the Spirit of God can cleanse us by something that is
foreign to ovir thought or life. The water of truth can do nothing for the heart
unless it can get into familiar contact with it. We must seek the water of the word
if we would have our iniquities sponged out and our virtues developed.
We then dare to risk this proposition. The influence of the Holy Spirit upon
the believer, is proportional to that believer's sympathetic knowledge of the word
of truth. The more men saturate their minds with the thoughts of God's word, the
freer course will the Spirit have to run through their lives and be glorified. The
paths of His going are thus many and easily traveled.
We are aware that certain Christians claim direct communication with the
Lord apart from the word, and hence put less than full value upon it. But their
interior voices are not infallible except they abide the test of the inspired standard
which is the criterion of all spirits. Hence good as the lives of these people gene
rally are, they err upon a fundamental point, and as a result their eccentricities are
often as noticeable as their excellencies.
But these are not alone among those who slight the word as a means of sancti
fication. There are found Christians in almost every community who value highly
emotional experiences such as are induced by the excitements of large meetings and
the exhortations of the religiously fervent, and reckon the state of mind so reached
to be that of complete sanctification. Such emotional experiences inust not be
lightly spoken of, but when they are produced by a mere human excitation of our
religious natures they soon burn out and leave us poorer than before.
If you burn the shavings up without setting the wood on fire, you have not
wherewith to kindle another blaze. It is a mistake to suppose, as these do, that the
Holy Spirit is the emotional person of the Trinity-. He frequently has nothing
whatever to do with the religious excitements met with, but moves men always by
solid considerations through the medium of substantial truth. The outw-ard dis
play of Pentecost will never be repeated. The kingdom comes without observation.
Sanctification of character is a sturdj' work. It is not effected mainly by an origi
nation of sweet emotions, but by a radical renovation of the whole life. It is the
republication of God's moral image in every thought and act of the man, and is
468

SANCTIFICATION THROUGH THE TRUTH. 469
often wrought out in storm and winter struggle, as other great achievements are.
But coming to more direct and positive ground, we find a multitude of Chris
tians, so large that it includes almost all, confessing, even lamenting, the lack of
the Spirit's power in the churches, and yet who do not see that it is they themselves
that are compelling the lack. They have clogged the only channel through which
the Spirit can come to the churches. Preachers and laymen alike are declaring that
the great crying need ot the Christians is the influence of the Holy Spirit upon
them, and yet they say almost nothing about the divinely prescribed way of enjoy
ing that influence without measure.
The sermon that is preached from the depths of Biblical truth cafnnot get to
men without being charged with divine influence. Let the members of a church
flU theii minds with the gems of inspiration, and their hearts would soon be full of
the Spirit. But we pray for the presence and power of God upon us and then so
violate the conditions made that we can feel neither. We ask for God's blessing and
then make impossible the blessing we seek. No one doubts the need of the Spirit
— nor His willingness to bless — and yet we are all the time dwelling on these, and
meanwhile neglecting the means by which the blessings can come.
What is the use to come to men in a dark cave, and then tell them their need
of sunlight ; or to accompany hungry men to tell them that they need food ? The
thing to be done is to tell them how to get sunlight and food. God cannot bless
any man according to His fulness, but according to the man's receptivity. When
we know where the blessing comes, we should straightway put ourselves into that
place. If we seek the sanctification of the Spirit, get divine truth into the heart,
through which the Spirit works.
Zachaeus climbed the tree to find out which way Jesus was going and he gained
a guest and a Saviour in one. Get up into the branches of scripture truth and you
will find the way the Spirit is going and gain His impulse.
Our hearts must be turned Zion-ward if we want to reach Zion. A man must
do the best he can to understand God, with his natural powers, if he would enjoy
the divine aid. This is the established order, first the natural, then the spiritual.
The water was, then the wine came to be. Master the truth of the Bible by the use
of your mental powers as you would master anj' other truth and then the Spirit
gives an edge to it, vitalizes it, turns it into veritable food, makes it a flame to melt
the carnality of the nature, and brings it on towards the current of unselfish living.
Not only light and heat come from the sunshine, but a third, achei-nical quality
Called actinic. The effect is beyond that of light and heat. But this actinic ray
does not act apart from light and heat, but always in their track, though it is above
both. So the Spirit's power is always directed along the line of inspired truth ;
and in proportion as we get fully inline of this truth shall we feel the actinic power
of our divine Sanctifier. We must prepare the plate if we would have the sun take
a picture for us. So of our work and the Spirit's ; if we prepare a plate the picture
will not fail. There is no electricity generated by the electric wire, but when w^
put up the wire as a definite channel it will do the work we ask. So the Ploly Spirit
is evermore filling the moral spaces all about us and as ready to act for our good as
electricity to act through the wire we stretch for it. But He cannot act for our
sanctification the best way until we put up the wire. If you want water from the
reservoir you must not expect it to come unless you lay pipes for its flow. The
fulness of the fountain will not lay the pipes. All powers of good have their appro
priate channel through which to flow, and every reasonable man will look for good
only in these particular channels.
A plain duty is thus made manifest. God has not promised to give the Holy

47° THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Spirit to them who ask, when the asking means no more than the utterance of
words. It needs to be said again and again that the Holy Spirit does not wield the
truth in such a way as to relieve man from the study of it. We may complain that
we lack time for the study of the Bible. We may say that other things absorb all
our attention, but nothing of the sort can atone tor a lack of acquaintance with the
scriptures of truth, and nothing can supply the loss of the Spirit's blessing thereby.
God is not pleased with our compliments to His word, so long as we neglect any
attention to it. Our hope for a more rapid advancement towards Christ-like char-
<acter lies in better studied Bibles. The trouble with the church is not that it is
wicked, but that it is weak. The Christian goes about his work with languid step.
The spirit is willing, but feeble. The churches need a new feast of heavenly bread,
to give more vigor of holy choice and action. When the hosts of God shall turn
with greater eagerness to this word of life, then they will go forth to the renewed
conflict "terrible as an army with banners" Christian effort can be sustained
only by Christian provender. The overflowing life of Jesus coming into believing
hearts through the Spirit will make the church invincible.

THE DRAMATIC MOVEMENT IN ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL.
BY REV. "WII.,3:iA.RD BRQ-WN- THiORP,
Pastor of the South Congregational Church, Chicago, III.
Do you remember when flrst you stumbled upon this "Gospel according to
St. John" in the old Bible at home in your childhood, and read those strangel3'
impressive and mysterious words of the Prologue ?
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning
WITH God. All things were made by Him; and without Him
WAS not anything made that was made. In Him was life ; and
THE life was the LIGHT OF MEN. AnD THE LIGHT SHINETH IN
DARKNESS ; AND THE DARKNESS COMPREHENDED IT NOT.
It is like the opening movement of a great oratorio. And that, perhaps, more
truly than any other word expresses the quality of this Book of John.
Then from out that background of primal mystery emerges a human figure,
the prophet of the wilderness.
There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.
The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the light.
We find ourselves on the banks of the Jordan where John is baptizing ; and in
another moment the central figure comes quietly upon the scene.
Behold the Lame of God, which taketh away the sin of
THE world.
Not a word of description is given. The Christ is simply presented as moving
about among the crowds ; and one and another of John's disciples go to Him, and
are convinced that this is indeed He that is to come.
Two striking acts of Jesus are now introduced, — one at Cana of Galilee, the
making of water into wine, which gives us a glimpse of the social surroundings in
which He had lived ; the other in Jerusalem, the driving of the money-changers
from the temple, with the accompanying outburst of comment and criticism -
Thus far it has been almost entirely a record of deeds, the words being confined to
a few laconic utterances. Now action gives place to speech, and we have the night
incident with Nicodemus, yielding such great sayings as "Ye must be born again",
and "God so loved the world". A day scene follows, by the well at noon in
Samaria, the conversation with the Samaritan woman leading up to the great
words : God is a spirit : and they that worship Him must worship
Him in spirit and in truth.
The action now shifts to Jerusalem ; and the healing of a lame man waiting
his turn at the pool of Bethesda is chosen as the incident about which gathers a
discourse in reply to the charge that He " not only brake the Sabbath but called
God His own Father " i
471

472 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
And now we come to what may be called the great Third Act in this dramatic
development. It is the crisis in Galilee; and we have the feeding of the multitude
by the lake, the attempt to make Him king, the withdrawal into the mountain to
pray, the storm on the lake, and on the morrow the great discourse centering
about the words,
I AM THE LIVING BREAD WHICH CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN.
And as the result of it all we see Him abandoned by all but the Twelve, to whom
He says, " Will ye also go away?" and Peter makes answer, " Lord, to whom shall
we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life "-
The Fourth Act brings us to Jerusalem and the porches of the temple. We
see Jesus in the midst of controversy, parrying the thrusts of the scribes and occa
sionally uttering great words that ring immortal through the ages.
I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.
If any man WILLETH TO DO HiS WILL, HE SHALL KiiOW OF
THE TEACHING.
Before Abraham was, I am.
Ye shall KNOW the truth, and the truth shall make you
FREE. I AND THE Father are one.
I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD : THE GOOD SHEPHERD L.\YETH DOWN
HIS LIFE FOR THE SHEEP.
Chapters seven to ten are filled with these things, all leading up to the great
event of the raising of Lazarus, enshrining the immortal words,
I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE.
The last act begins in the quiet of Bethany, opens out into the swelling
strains of the triumphal entry, pauses a moment for discourses which j'ield such
sayings as. Except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, — and —
I, IF I be lifted up will draw all men unto Myself, —
then enters the peaceful atmosphere of the upper room for those last discourses
with the disciples, — and finally breaks into the rude and jarring discords of the
trial, and the silent and majestic solitude of the cross. The treatment of each of
these scenes, with all the minor episodes, is a consummate work of art.
And then, after all seems to be over, comes the epilogue of the resurrection,
which is treated bj' John with a delicacy of feeling surpassing all the other evan
gelists. It is centered about three scenes, that with Mary Magdalene in the
garden, that with doubting Thomas, and that with Simon Peter by the lake of
Galilee, with the words,
Lovest thou Me? « * « Feed My sheep.
And the Book, which opened with the sonorous notes of the Prologue, " In the
beginning was the Word", comes down to the level of everj'-day life in the simple
words with which the writer lays down his pen.
And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which
if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world
itself would not contain the books that should be written.

DRAMATIC MO VEMENT IN ST. JOHN'S GOSPEL. 473
Such in merest outline is the presentation which this Book makes of the life of
Christ. We see at once that it is no mere chronicle. It is a work of art, a literary
composition of the highest order, with a dramatic unity and progress which would
make it an admirable basis for a great oratorio. As soon as we grasp ^his fact, we
have the explanation of many of those striking differences that exist between it
and the other three Gospels, which are comparatively artless records of such recol
lections of Jesus' words and works as survived in the early church.

* ST. JOHN'S TEACHING OF FATHERHOOD AND SONSHIP.
BY RT. REV. FREDERIC DAN H-UNTINGKrON, S. T. D.,
D. C. L., LL. D..,
Late Bishop of Central New York.
Whatever view Christian believers may take of the person, or the char
acter, or the doctrine, of the Fourth Evangelist, or in whatever aspect he
may be presented to the mind of the Christian Church, his chief claim upon
our reverence, our confidence, and our obedient attention must rest on what
he affirms of God. Manifold and luminous as are the subjects of study
belonging to him, as Apostle, Evangelist, Instructor, Author and Beloved
Disciple, yet superior to every other element in his greatness, is his authority
as an inspired witness to the ministry and mediation of the second Person in
the Trinity, God the Son. No Biblical writer creates an impression of living
and speaking so habitually and completely encompassed in an atmosphere dis
tinctly supernatural, or, to use the word more strictly accurate and descriptive,
superhuman. Without the slightest qualification of a full and entire humanity,
or manhood, he adds to every intellectual and temperamental quality that of
dwelling in the serenity, purity and radiance of a world other than this. The
voice speaking out of that loftier sphere is never so penetrating or commanding
as when it assures us of the mind and will and love of Him to whom both worlds
belong. By virtue of this divine eminence he is distinctively the apostolic theo
logian, to a higher degree than St. Peter or even than St. Paul.
Verifying this statement we need to look not much beyond the indefinable
but yet definite style and tone of everything preserved to us that John wrote.
That it should not have suppressed or forbidden a large part of the strained and
narrow criticism, beyond any necessity of truth or scholarship, which has at
tempted to invalidate the evidence for the genuineness of his Gospel is discredit
able to literary candor. This Gospel, without systematic or scientific intention,
on its face, with a form and method singularly original, is a demonstration from
end to end, of our Lord's divinity. No such object, on the part of the writer, is
expressly apparent on its pages. As a biography, or an abridgement or fragment
of one,. without pretention or formality, it opens the eternal mystery of revelation
with the utmost simplicity of narrative and with unadorned reports of dialogue, of
divinely exalted meditation, and of marvellous discourse, which all after-ages were
to read, study and ponder. But the special wonder is this. While, in no one
expression, and no specific affirmation, is Christ represented as declaring Himself
to be God, and in no language that a serious Gnostic could reject, yet the evangel
as a whole offers a demonstration of his superhuman nature and relations such as

* This article is especially valued as it was written only a few months (September, 1903) before
Bishop Huntington's death. He wrote that he felt at first he could not accede to the request to contribute
for the series in the press, but " since coming to that decision I have been particularly struck with the
repeated repetition of the name 'Father' by our Lord in relation to the First and Second Persons in the
Trinity. This impression was so strong that 1 put my thoughts about it at once in writing ". To all who
knew Bishop Huntington, this article will prove peculiarly reminiscent of the early period of a long and
distinguished career. 474

TEACHING OF FATHERHOOD AND SONSHIP. 475
no Unitarian ventures to question, and at which even the Arian stands in awe.
After the Oriental proem the book is one uniform, consistent, unvarying represen
tation of the relation of oneness between two Persons, God and Jesus Christ,
under the personal names and natures of Father and Son. Read the whole through,
with this in mind, and this peculiarity of Fatherhood and Sonship becomes i-nore
and more signal and remarkable. As a proof of the absolute unity or oneness of
the two in their nature, and so of the Saviour's proper divinity, nothing could be
more conclusive. Parent and child, two personalities with one and the same
nature, need neither analogy nor illustration.
Yet there can be no denying the fact that an unorthodox and uncatholic
theology has extensively used this fact of parental and filial relationship to sup
port the heretical theory of Christ's inferiority or subordination to the Creator,
the Jehovah of the Old Testament and the monotheist's only Deity.
How is that error to be met ?
I. In the human generation, the inferiority of the Son to the Father is
temporary, not permanent.
2. It does not necessarily or uniformly imply superiority in the parent,
intellectual, moral, physical, or any kind of power.
3. The Catholic doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son sets a final
limit to the force of the analogy and its doctrinal use in the Creed.
4. In every possible form of teaching short of an explicit and literal dec
laration, St. John's Gospel provides scriptural authority for the Nicene
formula.
Assuming the genuineness and authenticity of the First Epistle of St. John,
that Epistle sustains the Trinitarian dogmatic teaching of the Gospel.

A HIDDEN REVELATION.
(St. John 21 : 15-17.)
BY REV. .JA.AIES OHUROH ALVORD,
Pastor of the Globe Congregational Church, Woonsocket, R. I.
It is one of the misfortunes of English readers of the Bible that certain very
delicate and subtle shades of thought lurk, untranslatable, or at least untranslated,
in the original languages. This is particularly true of the Greek of the New Tes
tament. This paper takes for its whole subject one such illusive turn of thought
in the last chapter of John.
This chapter was added after the rest of the book had been written. The
closing verse of the twentieth chapter is evidently intended to finish the Gospel as
well. That the "beloved disciple" felt the story of the twenty-first chapter too
personal, too intimate, that he shrank from revealing this w-ondrous prophecy of
Jesus concerning himself is certain. By what means, or by whose urging he was
induced to add this heavenly tale, we know not. All we know is that w-e have it, a
treasure beyond purchase. Let that suffice.
We are not, however, dwelling on this whole great treasure, but on one special
pearl in the garland, somewhat dimmed and clouded by its English setting. This
pearl you will find in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth verses of the chapter.
Here is recorded a conversation between Jesus and Peter. There is a question,
" Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me?" and an answer, " Yea, Lord ; Thou know--
est that I love Thee", followed by a command, " Feed My sheep". It is true that
this last phrase is better rendered " Shepherd — or tend — My sheep" ; that there is
an added touch of the infinite tenderness of Christ in the fact that He first entreats,
" Shepherd My lambs", even before He thinks of the wandering sheep, but it is
not of this that we are speaking. Suggestively tempting as these two thoughts
are, we pass them by.
The main, the primal thing lies in the meaning of that word translated love.
It is two words. In the English there is but one, "Lovest thou Me?" " I love
Thee"; as if the Master and the disciple caught at the same term. This is just
what they did not do. For there are two kinds of loving, and two Greek words for
loving. The English has but one. So we are fain to bungle at the subtle, the
evasive, the profound revelation here recorded.
Now, the first kind of loving is the love we bear for men at large, for the world
or for the church universal, for the truth, for a neighbor, for an enemy. This the
Greeks called by a word yet remaining for us in English in the noun, " Agapa?",
by which we designate the love feasts of the early Christians — a word sometimes
found among the Methodists and the Salvationists of our own generation. There
is no equivalent for this idea in our vocabular}'. " Esteem " is too chilly ; " adore "
too high fiown ; "love" too personal. Let us translate it in this talk, bitterly as
we shall wrong it, by the verb " esteem "-
But there is another style of love, and another Greek word for it, too. This is
the love a man has for his father, his mother, his brother, most of all for the
maiden he would wed. This also is preserved for us — rather say mummified — in
476

A HIDDEN REVELATION. 477
the English "philter". Love-philter, we call it, but that is tautology, for philter
is itself a love charm — a charm that will awaken in a woman the changeless affec
tion of a wife. This second Greek verb, this philter verb, I translate " love "-
Now, do you not see the immense significance of the fact that the first time
Jesus speaks He uses the word for the agapae — love? "Simon, son of Jonas,
esteemest thou Me?" That is, lovest thou Me in the large, general way, as thou
oughtest to love the church, the brethren, the world for whose sake thou shalt be
crucified? That is a large demand, but Peter, timid, faltering, tumultuous Peter,
overleaps its boundaries. Peter will have naught to do with such diluted phrases.
He turns to the sweet and solemn thoughts of household affection and cries, "I
love Thee" Thou art to me father, brother, child and wife ; "I love Thee". The
quick change of term, the proffer of this warm and clinging fondness, touches the
Master. But He asks again, "Simon, son of Jonas, esteemest thou Me?" Again
the passionate soul of Peter changes the verb. Again the confession, " I love Thee ".
Then comes the splendor of it, the glory of it. At the third asking Jesus uses
Peter's word, and questions, "Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou Me?" It is an
incident, a chance play on words, — aye, it is more. It is a revelation. By a mas
terly insistance Peter has drawn from the Saviour the statement that the love bind
ing us to Him flows from the scarlet rush of human blood. It goes way down into
the depths, and tugs at familiar heart strings. We love Jesus as we love the little
circle around the breakfast table in the home, — and He responds like love for like.
There is no face dearer than the face of the Master — nay, not even a mother's.
There is no hand more clinging than the hand of the Master — nay, not even a son's.
There is no heart nearer than the heart of the Master — nay, not even a wife's. One
of the family He is. He sits at our daily board. He bends beside our heavy task.
He watches our troubled slumber, He sticketh closer than a brother though all the
world desert us. That heart-cry out from the midst of the Old Testament is ours
today. We, too, can say, " Very pleasant art Thou unto me, my brother Jesus ;
Thy love to me is wonderful, surpassing the love of women "
Verj' many other things is this Redeemer of ours, — Lord of peoples. Light of
nations. Saviour of the whole world, Hope of the human race ; but to you and me
-iorever and forever is He still "elder Brother, tender Friend". Long before
Charles Wesley saw the light of day, Peter, the son of Jonas, hid in the Greek of
this Gospel, that last and greatest title of the Lord Christ, "Jesus, lover of my
Soul".

THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH.
BY REV. O. A.. L. RICHARDS, D. D.,
Rector Emeritus of St. John's Episcopal Church, Providence, R- I-
However w-e regard the Gospel of John, as the work of an apostle directly cog
nizant of the teaching and life of Jesus, or as the work of a later disciple of the
Master who died and rose again, and whose power of self-revelation therefore was
not limited to three years beneath the Syrian blue, of one thing we are sure, that
he who wrote it cared more for the spirit than for the letter of his Lord's teaching,
and that the spirit of Jesus was to him especially a spirit of love. Though it w-as
Paul, not John, who wrote the thirteenth chapter of i Corinthians and drew love's
portrait in such glowing colors, yet it is John who is known through the churches
as the apostle of love. The glory that Paul saw and portrayed John lived in. Its
atmosphere was his daily breath. He felt that it was the Master's habitual
atmosphere, and it is as love incarnate, love for a season tabernacled in our flesh,
that John most clearly revealed Him.
He who wore our flesh still wears it. The church is His body. In the church
then love eternal, ever living love, is to-day entabernacled. How far is the
casket worthy of the Jewel ? How far is the shrine fit for Him who looks out
from it on the world ? How far is the body the facile instrument of the Spirit
of Jesus who condescends to inhabit it ?
John tells us that Jesus prayed that His disciples might be one even as He and
Plis Father were one, I in them and Thou in Me, that they may be perfected into
one. Nineteen centuries have gone by. Is that prayer yet fully answered ? Is the
unity of Christendom the most visible fact as men to-day behold it?
I open my Saturday's paper and find the advertised services for the Lord's
Day that is to follow. They are multitudinous. They represent not one broad
Holy Catholic Church, which is the communion of all who are or would be saints,
but endless divisions and sub-divisions of it. If we think of them as the voices of
Christian worship, they must be heard, not in one great vaulted temple, but in
endless side chapels thereof. The central nave is empty, the common worship
silent ; but all round the circuit of the walls go up various conflicting prayers and
praises. Yet as incense from a hundred altars may rise distinct and several
columns towards heaven, while, as it ascends, those columns draw together and
become one common cloud, — so from the countless jarring and discordant voices
may rise at last a common chord of praise, a harmony richer and fuller than any
unison. Our Lord's prayer lays no emphasis upon any numerical or visible unity.
It is a prayer that His disciples may be one as He and His Father are one, a unity
which the Athanasian creed expresses by the scholastic phrase "neither con
founding the persons nor dividing the substance". If, then, the several bodies of
believers, while separate in organization and activity, were of one heart, so that
the spiritual union was real and substantial while the ecclesiastical severance was
but formal and accidental, it might well be argued that there still remained the
unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace and that the church was one.
It is very possible to exaggerate the significance of divided Christendom, to
478

THE UNITY OF THE CHURCH. 471)
overestimate the necessity of structural unity. Certainly catholicity is of the spirit,
not of the letter. Great churches may display the petty mood of the schismatic
and sectarian, while in the minutest subdivision of Christian people may yet be
nurtured a love of the whole rather than the part, a joy in the common heritage of
believers. Yet who can fail to perceive that the fragmentary condition of Chris
tendom is highly symbolical? It expresses and suggests the actual ravages of
the spirit of sect, of party, the spirit that magnifies differences. The cities may
scarcely feel this, but the villages bitterly recognize the truth. In little hamlets
whose worshippers could easily be sheltered in a single modest church and be
served by a single minister, three, four, half a dozen, perhaps, of Christian so
cieties strive for preeminence. Each zealously seeks to extend its jurisdiction, to
multiply its adherents, to crowd out its neighbors, to survive in the struggle.
They emphasize their oppositions. Each down in his inmost depths believes in
one Lord, one faith, one brotherhood, one God over all, one Saviour for all, and
desires first of all the glory of the one kingdom. Yet each seems mainly con
cerned, practically occupied in rearing fences and nursing hedges and constructing
earth-works, and the world scornfully looks on to see the landmarks so visible and
the tillage of the field so poor.
There are those who would not defend who yet excuse the present divisions of
Christendom as not without use, as stimulating a healthy rivalry, as spurring to
competitive enterprise, as on the whole furthering the general growth. They
argue that there is more room for individuality, that the divisions of Christendom
may be held to be a useful and providential ordering, and that organic church
unity is but a mystic dream. As long as a narrow and false conception of the
church prevails, as long as men insist upon agreement in opinion, on rigidity of
structure, on uniformity in ritual, so long sects and parties may be the inevitable
recoil and reaction, may afford the only opportunity in -ivhich differing natures
find room to breathe and space to move. So long as a man may be a saint of
God ripe for His presence, yet without home or welcome in any particular body
of believers ; so long as the Anglican Church can find no room for Baxter or
Wesley, and the Lutheran Church no room for Zwingle, and New England Con
gregationalism no room for Channing, and Unitarianism no room for Parker, and
Northern and Southern orthodoxy alike no room for Garrison, divisions are the
natural consequence, the providential remedy. If the church general be built too
small to shelter on earth the destined denizens of heaven, all sorts of out-build
ings, rude sheds, dwarfed temples, rickety chapels, make-shift conventicles will
spring up, a mushroom growth, on every side about it. Its bigotry palliates their
schism. Yet schism and bigotry are evils both. Woe unto them who offend, but
woe unto them who cause offense. Both may be forgiven, but neither can be
justified, and who of us dare say that he is without sin in this regard ?
Certainly the Christian ideal is of one body with one spirit. Ceitainly
spiritual unity is more effectively symbolized and expressed by one organic struct
ure than by a hundred independent and unrelated growths. If we were one in
heart how naturally would we approximate in life. What an impressive and con
vincing spectacle it would be to a jarring and wrangling world. See how these
Christians love one another, see how closely they are knit together, how they
harmonize their discords, forget their differences, magnify their points of agree
ment, how every sort of sage and saint, of lowly penitent, of anxious believer, of
eager worker finds room and verge enough, large liberty and full opportunity in
this body of redeemed humanity, this glad family, this imperial community.
Could we but show the darkened realm of heathendom this splendid vision ! But,

48o THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
oh — the difference! What moral weight is lost by our fragmentary condition,
what force is scattered and wasted !
It is idle to look for corporate union until spiritual harmony has preceded it.
The one church must come, not by surrender of this part to that, or absorption of
this part in that, but in a common submission to one Lord who shall be Prince of
Peace. As we bow beneath His Spirit we shall perceive how few things in religion
are essential, that love is indeed the one thing needful, the sure cement of souls.
Already men care less for opinion and more for character ; less for theory, more
for practice; less for intellectual adhesion, more for moral conformity; less for
mint, anise and cummin, more for weightier matters of gospel and law. In all
quarters are found those who watch for the moAiing, who are asking not what
must we demand as the price of reconciliation, bfit what can we yield and sacrifice
that has been familiar and dear. With that mood God's people are drawn together,
and the time hastens when the church shall indeed be one. Why in the twentieth
century may not the miracle be wrought ?

ST. JOHN IN ALL AGES.

" That little book is a still deeper sea, in which the sun and stars are mirrored,
and if there are eternal truths (and such there are) for the human race, they are
found in the Gospel of John ". — Herder.
"This Gospel is the consummation of the Gospels, as the Gospels are of all
the Scriptures ". — Origen.
" This is the unique, tender, genuine, chief Gospel. « ? ? Should a tyrant
succeed in destroying the Holy Scriptures and only a single copy of the Epistle to
the Romans and the Gospel according to John escape him, Christianity would be
saved ". — Luther.
"The first three evangelists give us diverse aspects of one glorious landscape.
St. John pours over that landscape a flood of heavenly sunshine, which seems to
transfigure its very character, though every feature of the landscape remains the
same ". — Farrar.
" The Gospel of John is the most original, the most important, the most influ
ential book in all literature. * * * It is simple as a child and sublime as a
seraph, gentle as a lamb and bold as an eagle, deep as the sea and high as the
heavens ". — Schaff.
"The Fourth Gospel is the heart of Christ". — Ernesti.
" The Gospel of the world, resolving reason into intuition and faith into sight".
— Westcott. "The diamond among the Gospels". — Lange.
" The most wonderful of all religious books ". — Biedermann.
" Written by the hand of an angel". — Herder.
"It is a Gospel for the height and likewise for the depth". — Da Costa.
"The Plato of the inspired circle". — Kaufman.
"John does not argue, he sees, he soars ; the eagle is his symbol". — Scliajf.
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe is said to have remarked in reference to a certain
magazine of great literary merit, but at one time somewhat imbued with sceptical
thought : " I like to read it, but when I have laid it down, I always read a chapter
in the Gospel of John ". —
"If the heart studies the Christ as portrayed in this writing, it will need no
other proof of His divinity ". — Ellicott.
" This Gospel speaks a language to which no parallel whatever is to be found
in the whole compass of literature ; such childlike simplicity, with such contempla
tive profundity ; such life and such deep rest ; such sadness and such severity ; and
above all, such a breath of love".- — Tholuck.
"These brief sentences * * * as inexhaustible in thought as they are
inartificial in language". — Dr. Alexander Maclaren.
"Above all do I like to read the Gospel of John". — Claudius {German poet).
" Bird of God 1 with boundless flight
Soaring far beyond the height
Of the bard or prophet old;
Truth fulfilled and truth to be-
Never purer mystery
Did a purer tongue unfold "- — Poet of the Middle Ages,
481

482 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
"The doctrine of the Word made flesh shows us God uniting Himself most
intimately with our nature, manifesting Himself in a human form, for the very end
of making us partners of His own perfection". — Channing.
"John's Gospel shows us how deep a sense Jesus had of being a stranger on
the earth". — Beyschlag.
"In the Four Gospels, or rather in the four books of the one Gospel, the
Apostle St. John has lifted higher and far more sublimely than the other three his
proclamation, and in lifting it up he has wished our hearts also to be lifted". —
Augustine. " It was he who bequeathed to the world in his three works the three-fold
picture of the life in God ; in the person of Christ (the Gospel) ; in the Christian
(the Epistles) ; and in the church (the Apocalypse). He anticipated more perfectly
than any other the festival of the eternal life". — Godet.
" For, verily, beneath the tranquil surface of this Gospel, which is filled to so
great an extent with what the Lord Himself said, are deep and fervid ocean-currents
of holy life and love, which no one can undertake to explore and describe without
being made to feel the dimness of his vision and the feebleness of his speech". —
Hovey. " Since Irenaeus it has remained for the sons of the apostolic spirit the crown
of the apostolic Gospels ". — Lange.
"The last proposition, — the Word was God, — is against Arius ; the other, — the
Word was with God, — is against Sabellius ". — Luther.
" St. John expresses the Divine voice with absolute authority of spiritual life
and death in the present and the future. * * * Through the study of the
Apocalypse, we are able in a vague and dim way to understand how that long drawn
out living death in Patmos was the necessary training through which he must pass
who should write the Fourth Gospel. In no other way could man rise to that
superhuman level in which the Fourth Gospel is pitched and be able to gaze with
steady, unwavering eyes on the eternal and the Divine, and to remain so uncon
scious of the ephemeral world". — Professor W. M. Ramsay.
" If 1 live yet, it is for good, more love
Through me to men : be nought but ashes here
That keep awhile my semblance, who was John, —
Still, when they scatter, there is left on earth
No one alive who knew (consider this I)
— Saw with his eyes and handled with his hands
That which was from the first, the Word of,Life-
How will it be when none more saith, ' I saw'?"

"To me, that story — ay, that Life and Death
Of which I wrote ' it was ' — to me, it is ;
— Is, here and now : I apprehend nought else ".

" What do I hear say, or conceive men say,
' Was John at all, and did he say he saw?
Assure us, ere we ask what he might see 1 ' '
*- > .It * T »
" Such is the burden of the latest time-
I have survived to hear it with my ears.
Answer it with my lips : does this sufiice?

ST. JOHN IN ALL AGES. 483
For if there be a further woe than such.
Wherein my brothers struggling need a hand.
So long as any pulse is left in mine.
May I be absent even longer yet.
Plucking the blind ones back from the abyss.
Though I should tarry a new hundred years I "
Browning : " A Death in the Desert ".
" Whether we regard the sublimity of its thought, the width and spirituality of
its conception of religion, the depth of its moral insight, or the tragic pathos of its
story, we cannot but feel that we have before us the work of a master mind- And
when we remember how it has moulded the faith and touched the heart and calmed
the sorrows of generations of men, we must approach it with no ordinary reverence,
and with a desire to penetrate its inmost meaning and become more thoroughly
imbued with its kindling power". — Dr. James Drummond.
"We would not willingly give up for any other form of narrative a Gospel
which reveals to us what the Christ grew to be in the mind of one who leaned on
His bosom in youth, had cherished a perpetual recollection of Him throughout
long years of toil and suffering for His name, and at the close wrote as in his
Master's very presence his testimony to what his Master had been and forever
should be — the Light and the Life of men". — Dr. Armitage Robinson, Canon of
Westminster.

PROGRAMS
OF THE CONFERENCES

INDICES
TO AUTHORS AND TEXTS

PROGRAMS OF THE CONFERENCES.

FIRST CONFERENCE. (Chapter I.)
* Held Wednesday, October 21, 1903, at the First Baptist Church, Rev. Henry M. King, D. D.,
presiding. MORNING.
10.00. The Prologue to the Gospel of St. John. St. John i . 1-18.
Professor Clark S. Beardslee, D. D., Hartford Theological Seminary,
Hartford, Conn.
Discussion.
11.00. Men and Events in the Time of Jesus.
Professor Charles F. Sitterly, Ph.D., S.T.D., Drew Theological
Seminary, Madison, N. J.
Discussion.
11.45. John the Baptist and His Testimony to Jesus. St. John i: 19-37.
Professor William Arnold Stevens, D.D., LL.D., Rochester Theological
Seminary, Rochester, N. Y.
Discussion.
afternoon.
2.30. The Study of the Gospel of St. John.
Professor Wilbert W. White, Ph.D., President Bible Teachers Train
ing School, New York.
3.15. " Full of Grace and Truth "- St. John i : 14.
Professor Henry S. Nash, D. D., Episcopal Theological School,
Cambridge, Mass.
Discussion.
4.00 The Calling of the First Disciples. St. John i : 3S-51.
Rev. A. C. Dixon, D. D., Pastor of the Ruggles Street Baptist Church,
Boston, Mass.
evening.
7.30. The First Chapter of St. John.
President Wilbert W. White, Ph.D., New York.
8.30. Power to Become the Sons of God. St. John i : 12.
Rev. Floyd W. Tomkins, S. T. D., Rector of Holy Trinity Episcopal
Church, Philadelphia, Penn.

SECOND CONFERENCE. (Chapters II, III, IV.)
t Held Wednesday, November 11, 1903, at the Mathewson Street Methodist Episcopal Church, Rev.
Charles M. Melden, Ph-D., D-D., presiding. MORNING.
10.00. The Miracle at Cana and a Philosophical Discussion of Miracles.
St. John 2:1-11.
President Augustus H. Strong, D.D., LL.D.,
Rochester Theological Seminary, Rochester, N. Y.
Discussion.
* At each Conference the presiding officer was the pastor or rector of th« church at which the Confer
ence was held. Each session was begun with a brief devotional service.
fRev. Carter E- Cate, D.D., Pastor of the Roger Williams Free Baptist Church, and Chairman of
the Conference Committee, presided at the evening session. 487

488 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
ii.oo. The Optimism of Jesus. St. John 4 : 1-42.
Rev. Frank J. Goodwin, Pastor of the Pawtucket Congregational Church,
Pawtucket, R. I.
Discussion.
11.45. Jesus and Nicodemus — The New Birth. St. John 3 : 1-15.
Rev. Edward Abbott, D. D., Rector of St. James's Episcopal Church,
Cambridge, Mass.
Discussion.
AFTERNOON.
2.30. Eternal Life through Belief. St. John 3 : 14-21.
Rev. Albeit H. Plumb, D.D.,
Pastor of the Walnut Avenue Congregational Church, Boston, Mass.
Discussion.
3.15. The Gospel of John in the Spiritual Life of the Churches.
Rev. Henry M. King, D.D., Pastor of the First Baptist Church,
Providence, R. I.
Discussion.
4.15. The Source or Condition of Jesus' Strength. St. John 4 :34.
Rev. Willis P. Odell, D.D., Pastor of Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church,
New York.
EVENING.
7.30. Some Characteristics of the Gospel according to St. John.
Rev. Alexander McKenzie, D. D., Pastor of the First Church,
Congregational, Cambridge, Mass.

THIRD CONFERENCE. (Chapters V, VI.)
* Held Wednesday, December 9, 1903, at the Beneficent Congregational Church, Rev. Asbury E.
Krom, presiding. MORNING.
10.00. The Works of Jesus. I. Resurrection. St. John 5 : 17-30.
Rev. George P. Eckman, Ph.D., D. D., Pastor of St. Paul's Methodist
Episcopal Church, New York.
Discussion.
10.45. t The Secret of Jesus' Life. St. John 5:30.
Rev. John Balcom Shaw, D. D., Pastor of the West End Presbyterian
Church, New York.
Discussion.
11.30. Jesus the Bread of Life. St. John 6 : 30-59.
Rev. Cornelius Woelfkin, Pastor of the Greene Avenue Baptist Church,
Brooklyn, N. Y.
Discussion.
^ Rev. James G. Vose, D.D., Pastor Emeritus of the Beneficent Church, presided at the afternoon
session, and Rev. Arthur M. Aucock, Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, at the evening session.*
t Owing to Dr. Shaw's unavoidable detention in New York, this address was postponed to the February
Conference-

PROGRAMS OF THE CONFERENCES, 489
AFTERNOON.
2.30. Symposium by Rhode Island Pastors and Laymen on the Gospel of St.
John in the Churches.
3.30. Belief the Spring of Religious Action. St. John 6:29.
President N. E. Wood, D. D., Newton Theological Institution,
Newton Centre, Mass.
Discussion.

7.30. The Confession of Peter — Christ, the World's only Hope and Life. St.
John 6 : 68, 69.
Professor Henry S. Nash, D. D., Episcopal Theological School,
Cambridge, Mass.

FOURTH CONFERENCE. (Chapters VII, VIII, IX, X.)
*Held Wednesday, January 13, 1904, at Grace Episcopal Church, Rev- Edmund S- Rousmaniere,
presiding. MORNING.
10.00. Unbelief the Fundamental Sin.
Rev. B. L. Whitman, D. D., LL. D., Pastor of the Fifth Baptist Church,
Philadelphia, Penn.
10.45. The Personal Equation in the Gospel of St. John.
Rev. Frederic Palmer, A.M., Rector of Christ Church, Andover, Mass.
11.30. Spirit and Life. St. John 7 : 37-39.
Rev. Amory H. Bradford, D.D., Pastor of the B^irst Congregational Church,
Montclair, N. J.
AFTERNOON.
2.30. The Controversies of Jesus with the Jews.
Professor Melancthon W. Jacobus, D. D., Hartford Theological Semi
nary, Hartford, Conn.
3.15. The Evidential Value of Miracles.
Professor Charles W. Rishell, Ph.D., Boston University School of
Theology, Boston, Mass.
4.00. The Sinlessness of Jesus.
Rev. William R. Huntington, D. D., Rector of Grace Episcopal Church,
New York.
EVENING.
7.30. Knowledge of the Teaching of Jesus through the Doing of the Will of God.
St. John 7 : 17.
Rev. Francis J. McConnell, Ph.D., Pastor of the New York Avenue Meth
odist Episcopal Church, Brooklyn, N. Y.
8.15. Freedom Through the Truth. St. John 8 : 31-36.
Rev. Everett D. Burr, D. D., Pastor of the First Baptist Church in Newton,
Newton Centre, Mass.
* Rev. Arthur M. Aucock, Rector of All Saints Episcopal Church, presided at the afternoon session.

490 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
FIFTH CONFERENCE. (Chapters XI, XII, XIII.)
*Held Wednesday, February lo, 1904, at the Central Baptist Church, Rev. John R. Brown, presiding
MORNING-
10.00. Mysticism in the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Chapters of the
Fourth Gospel.
Professor Alfred Williams Anthony, D. D., Cobb Divinity School,
Lewiston, Maine.
10.45. The Works of Jesus. II. Judgment. St. John 5 : 17-30.
Rev. Charles M. Melden, Ph.D., D.D., Pastor of the Mathewson Street
Methodist Episcopal Church, Providence, R. I.
11.30. The Secret of Jesus' Life. St. John 5:30.
Rev. John Balcom Shaw, D.D., Pastor of the West End Presbyterian
Church, New York.
AFTERNOON.
2.30- The Light of the World. St- John 12 : 46- (Compare St. John 8 : 12.)
Rev. Willard Scott, D.D., Pastor of the Piedmont Congregational Church,
Worcester, Mass.
3. 11;. The Attracting Power of the Cross. St. John 12 :32.
Rev. Avery A. Shaw, M.A., Pastor of the Baptist Church in Brookline,
Brookline, Mass.
EVENING.
7.30. How the Gospel was made.
Professor Frederick L. Anderson, D.D., Newton Theological Insti
tution, Newton Centre, Mass.
8.15. The Washing of the Disciples' Feet and the Law of Service. St. John 13 : 1-17.
Rev. Edwin Alonzo Blake, Ph.D., D.D., Pastor of the Tremont Street
Methodist Episcopal Church, Boston, Mass.

SIXTH CONFERENCE. (Chapters XIV, XV, XVI.)
t Held Wednesday, March g, 1904, at the Trinity Union Methodist Episcopal Church, Rev. J. Francis
Cooper, presiding. MORNING.
10.00. The Presence of the Father, Son and Spirit through Obedience to the
Commands of Christ. St. John 14 : 21-23.
Rev. Robert A. Ashworth, M.A., Pastor First Baptist Church, Meriden,
Conn.
Discussion.
11.00. fThe Method of Jesus with Individuals. St. John 3 : 1-16 and 4 :5-26.
President William Douglas Mackenzie, D. D., Hartford Theological
Seminary, Hartford, Conn.
Discussion.

*Rev. Edward C. Bass, D-D-, Pastor of the Tabernacle Methodist Episcopal Church, presided at
the evening session.
t Rt. Rev. William N. McVickar, S.T.D-, Bishop of Rhode Island, presided at the evening session.
} As President Mackenzie could not be present at this hour, his was the opening address of the afternoon

PROGRAMS OF THE CONFERENCES. 491
afternoon.
2.30. The Vine and the Branches. St. John 15 : 1-16.
Rev. John T. Beckley, D-D-, Pastor of the Central Baptist Church, New
port, R. I.
3.15. The Seventeenth Chapter of St. John.
Professor Henry T. Fowler, Ph.D., Brown University, Providence, R. I.
4.00. The Glorification of the Son of Man. St. John 13 : 31, 32.
Professor Samuel Hart, D.D., D. C.L., Berkeley Divinity School,
Middletown, Conn.
EVENING.
7.30. Obedience to the New Commandment the Proof of Discipleship. St. John
13:, 34' 35-
Rev. Rockwell H. Potter, Pastor of the First Congregational Church,
Hartford, Conn.
8.15. The Coming of the Greeks and the Law of Sacrifice. St. John 12 : 20-32.
Rev. Henry C. Mabie, D.D., Home Secretary of the American Baptist
Missionary Union, Boston, Mass.

SEVENTH CONFERENCE. (Chapters XVII, XVIII, XIX.)
* Held Wednesday, April 13, 1904, at the Central Congregational Church, Rev. Edward F- Sanderson,
presiding- MORNING.
10.00. The Teaching Function of the Church.
Professor Frank K. Sanders, Ph.D., D.D.,Yale Divinity School, New
Haven, Conn.
10-45. Jesus the Revelation of the Father. St. John 14 : 6-11.
Professor Henry C. Sheldon, S.T.D., Boston University School of Theology,
Boston, Mass.
11.30. The Twenty- First Chapter of St. John.
President Henry G. Weston, D.D., LL. D., Crozer Theological Seminary,
Chester, Penn.
AFTERNOON.
2.30. The Self-Surrender of Jesus Christ. St. John 18 : 11.
Rev. George M. Stone, D.D., Pastor of the Asylum Avenue Baptist Church,
Hartford, Conn.
3.15. The Crucifixion — " It is Finished". St. John 19 : 30.
Rt. Rev. Thomas A. Jaggar, D.D., Bishop of Southern Ohio, Cincinnati,
Ohio.
EVENING.
7.30. The Home at Bethany and the Friendships of Jesus.
Rev. Donald Sage Mackay, D. D., Pastor of the Fifth Avenue Collegiate
Church, New York.
8.15. The Unity of Christianity as Revealed in the Prayer of Christ. St. John 17.
Professor Henry S. Nash, D. D., Episcopal Theological School, Cam
bridge, Mass.
* Rev. Fred B. Hill, Assistant Pastor of the Central Church, presided at the afternoon session, and
Rev. Andrew J. Coultas, Presiding Elder of the Providence District of the Methodist Episcopal Church,
presided at the evening session.

492 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
EIGHTH CONFERENCE. (Chapters XX, XXI.)
Held Wednesday, May ir, 1904, at All Saints Memorial Church, Rev. Arthur M. Aucock, presiding-
MORNING.
10.30. The Resurrection the Crowning Fact of Christianity. St. John 20.
Rev. Herbert Welch, D.D., Pastor of the Chester Hill Methodist Episco
pal Church, Mount Vernon, N. Y.
II. 15. Sanctification in the Truth. St. John 17 : 17-19.
Rev. D. W. Faunce, D.D., Providence, R. I.
afternoon.
2.30. Friendship with Jesus Through Obedience to His Commands. St. John
IS : 14. i.?-
Rev. John D. Pickles, Ph.D., Pastor of St. John's Methodist Episcopal
Church, Boston, Mass.
3.15. The Author of the Fourth Gospel.
Professor Clark S. Beardslee, D.D., Hartford Theological Seminary,
Hartford, Conn.
EVENING.
7.30. Jesus and Simon Peter at the Sea of Tiberias. — " Feed my Sheep.'' St.
John 21.
Rev. Galusha Anderson, S.T.D., LL.D., Newton Centre, Mass.
8.15. The Commandment of God and Life Everlasting. St. John 12 : 49, 50.
Rev. Stewart Means, D. D., Rector of St. John's Episcopal Church, New
Haven, Conn.

INDEX TO AUTHORS.

(The A. B. degree is indicated by the date after name of college : the B. D. degree by date after name
of seminary. Dates in brackets after names of college or seminary indicate period of study without degree.
Dates after names of cities, towns and counties indicate pastorates or rectorates.)
Edward Abbott, D. D., b. Farmington,. Me. ; Univ. of City of New York,
iS6o; Andover Theol. Sem. (1860-2); Agent of the U. S. Sanitary Commission,
Washington, D. C, and with the Army of the Potomac, 1862, 1863 ; Founder and
first Pastor of Stearns Chapel (now Pilgrim) Cong. Church, Cambridge, Mass.,
1865-9; Associate Editor of "The Congregationalist," 1869-78; Editor and Joint
Proprietor of "The Literary World", 1877-88, and Editor of same, 1 895-1 903 ; Min
ister of St. James's Episcopal Church, Cambridge, since 1878, and Rector since Dec,
1879; Chaplain of the Mass. Senate, 1872-3. Author: A Paragraph History of
the U. S., 1875 ; A Paragraph History of the American Revolution, 1876 ; Revolu
tionary Times, 1876; History of Cambridge (in Drake's Hist, of Middlesex Co.,
Vol. i), i88o; The Long Look Books (Juvenile, 3 vols.), 1877-80; Memoir of
Jacob Abbott (Memorial Edition of The Young Christian, 1882); Phillips Brooks,
1900; numerous monographs, sermons, &c.
James Church Ai.vord, b. Greenfield, Mass. ; Williams, 1885; Andover, 1888;
Hamilton, Mass., 1888-93; Woonsocket, R. I., 1893 — . Contributed articles in the
" Congregationalist"; stories in the "Wellspring", &c.
Frederick Lincoln Anderson, A. M., D. D., b. St. Louis, Mo.; old Univ.
of Chicago, 1882, and A. M. (in course), 1885; Baptist Union Theol. Sem., 1888;
Asst. Prof, of Latin, old Univ. of Chicago, 1882-5 ; Second Baptist Church, Roch
ester, N. Y., 1888-1900 ; Prof, of N. T. Interpretation, Newton Theol. Inst'n, 1900 — ;
studied in the University of Berlin, 1904-5. Contributed articles for Reviews ;
occasional addresses.
Galusha Anderson, A. M., S. T. D., LL. D., b. Clarendon, N. Y. ; Univ. of
Rochester, 1854, and A. M. (in course), 1857; Rochester Theol. Sem., (1854-6);
Janesville, Wis., 1856-8 ; St. Louis, Mo., 1858-66 ; Prof, of Sacred Rhetoric, Church
Polity and Pastoral Duties, Newton Theol. Inst'n, 1866-73; Brooklyn, N. Y.,
1873-6 ; Chicago, 111., 1876-8 ; Pres. of old Univ. of Chicago, 1878-85 ; Salem, Mass.,
1885; Pres. of Denison Univ., 1887-90; Prof, of Homiletics, Church Polity and
Pastoral Duties, Baptist Union Theol. Sem., 1890-2; Prof, and Head of the Dept.
of Homiletics, the Univ. of Chicago, 1892-1904. Retired from the active duties of
his chair in January, 1904. Author: Notes on Church Polity, 1867; Notes on
Homiletics, 1869 ; Ancient Sermons for Modern Times (translated from the Greek),
1904; various Articles for Reviews.
Alfred Williams Anthony, D. D., b. Providence, R. I.; Brown, 1883;
Cobb Div. Sch., 1885; studied at Univ. of Berlin, 1888-90; Bangor, Me., 1885-8;
Prof, of N. T. Exegesis and Criticism, Cobb Div. Sch. (elected, 1887), 1890 — .
Author: An Introduction to the Life of Jesus, 1896; The Method of Jesus, 1899.
Editor: Preachers and Preaching, 1900; New Wine Skins : Present Day Problems,
1901, &c. 493

494 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Robert Archibald Ashworth, M. A., b. Glasgow, Scotland; Columbia,
1892, and M. A. (in course), 1S93 ; Union Theol. Sem., 1896; Minerva, N. Y.,
1896-8; Bridgeton, N. J., 1898-igoo; Meriden, Conn., 1900 — . Contributed articles
for various literary and religious periodicals.
Clark Smi-th Beardslee, D. D., b. Coventry, N. Y. ; Amherst, 1876; Hart
ford, 1879; Teacher of Hebrew, Hartford Theol. Sem., 1879-81 ; s^udied at Univ. of
Berlin, 1881 ; Le Mars, Iowa, 1882-5; Prescott, Ariz., 1885-6; West Springfield,
Mass., 1886-8 ; Prof, of Biblical Dogmatics and Ethics, Hartford, 1888 — . Author:
Christ's Estimate of Himself (a pamphlet), 1899; Teacher -Training with the
Master Teacher, 1903 ; Jesus the King of Truth, 1904.
William Coleman Bitting, M. A., D. D., b. Hanover County, Va. ; Rich
mond, 1877, and M. A.; Crozer, 1880; Luray, Va., 1S81-3; New York, Jan. 1,
1884 — . Author : Earthly Blooms from Heavenly Stems, 1900 ; Foundation
Truths — Bible Study Union Lessons, 1902 ; numerous articles for magazines, &c-
Edwin Alonzo Blake, Ph. D., D. D., ^. Pittsfield, N. H. ; Wesleyan, 1872;
Univ. of City of N. Y., 1896, 1S97 ; Ph. D., 1897; Guilford, Conn., 1872; Ken
sington, Conn., 1873, 1874; Bridgeport, Conn., 1875; Babylon, N. Y., 1876-8; New
York, 1879-81; Port Chester, N- Y-, 18S2-4; Bridgeport, Conn., 1885-7; Brook
lyn, N. Y., 1888-91 ; Patchogue, N. Y., 1892-3 ; Brooklyn, N. Y., 1894-7 ; Hartford,-
Conn., 1898-1901 ; Christ Church, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1902 ; Boston, 1903 — .
Amory Howe Bradford, D. D., b, Granby, N. Y. ; Hamilton, 1867; Andover,
1870; studied at Oxford Univ., 1884; first Pastor of First Cong. Church, Mont
clair, N. J., 1870 — ; Moderator of National Congregational Council, 1901-4;
Pres. Am. Miss. Asso., 1904. Author: Spirit and Life, 1888; Old Wine: New
Bottles, 1892 ; The Pilgrim in Old England, 1893 ; Heredity and Christian Prob
lems, 1895 ; The Sistine Madonna : A Meditation, 1897 ; The Growing Revelation,
1S97 ; The Art of Living Alone, 1899; The Spiritual Teaching of the Brownings,
1900; The Return to Christ, 1900; The Age of Faith, 1902; Messages from the
Masters, 1903 ; The_ Ascent of the Soul, 1903, &c.
Everett Doughty Burr, D. D., b, Nyack on the Hudson, N. Y. ; Brown,
1884; Crozer, 1887; Chicago, 1887-91; Ruggles St., Boston, 1891-1900; Newton
Centre, Mass., 1900 — . Author: (Pamphlets) The Church : Its Present Problems,
1889; Social Salvation, 1899; also various articles.
Amzi Clarence Dixon, D. D., b. Shelby, N. C. ; Wake Forest, N. C, 1S75 ;
Southern Bapt. Theol. Sem. (1876); Mt. Olive and Bear Marsh Churches, N. C,
1876-8; Chapel Hill, N. C-, 1878-81; Asheville, N. C, 1S81-4; Baltimore. Md.,
1884-91; Brooklyn, N. Y., 1891-1901 ; Boston, Mass., 1901 — . Author: Heaven
on Earth ; Milk and Meat ; Lights and Shadows of American Life ; The Holy Spirit
in Life and Service ; Present Day Life and Religion ; The Christian Science
Delusion ; besides about 300 published sermons and tracts.
George Peck Eckman, A. M., Ph. D., D. D., b. Stoddardsville, Penn. ; Wes
leyan, 1884, and A. M., 1893; Drew, 1SS6; Univ. of City of N. Y., A. M. (in
course), 1894; Ph. D., 1S97 ; Metuchen, N.J., 1886-7; South Orange, N. J., 1888-90;
Orange, N. J., 1891-3 ; Morristown, N. J., 1894-6 ; New York, 1897 — . Contributed
various articles for periodicals.
Daniel Worcester Faunce, D. D., b. Plymouth, Mass.; Amherst, iS^o;
Newton, 1853; Worcester, 1S54-60; Maiden, iS6o-6; Concord, N. H., 1866-75;
Lynn, Mass., 1875-81 ; Washington, D. C, 1881-9; West Newton, Mass., 1S89-94 ;
Pawtucket, R. I., 1894-9. Author: The Christian in the World (Fletcher Prize,

INDEX TO A UTHORS. 495
Dartmouth College), 1875, ; A Young Man's Difficulties with his Bible, 1877 ; The
Christian Experience, 1880 ; Resurrection in Nature and in Revelation, 1884 ; Prayer
as a Theory and a Fact (Fletcher Prize), 1885 ; Hours with a Sceptic, 1893 ; Inspir
ation Considered as a Trend, 1897; Shall We Believe in a Divine Providence?,
1899; Advent and Ascension, 1902.
Henry Thatcher Fowler, Ph.D., b. Fishkill, N. Y. ; Yale, 1890; Ph.D.,
1896; Yale, 1 890-1 ; teacher in Norwich Free Academy, 1891-2 ; General Secre
tary Yale Univ. Y. M. C. A., and student Yale Div. Sch., 1892-4; Yale, 1894-5;
Assistant in Biblical Literature, Yale, 1895-6 ; Prof, of Philosophy in Knox College,
1896-1901 ; Prof, of Biblical Literature and History, Brown, 1901 — . Author:
The Books of the Bible with Relation to their Place in History, 1904 ; The Prophets
as Statesmen and Preachers, 1905.
Frank Judson Goodwin, b. Rye, N. Y. ; Amherst, 1884; Union, 1S88; Glen
Ridge, N. J., 1888-99; Pawtucket, R. I., 1899 — . AutJior : A Harmony of the
Life of St- Paul, 1895. Articles: The Influence of St. Paul's Rabbinical Education
on his Spiritual Life (S. S. Times, Aug. i, 1896); The Rabbinical Cast in St.
Paul's Theology (S. S. Times, Aug. 22, 1896); The Place of Miracle in the Modern
Christian's Faith (Homiletic Review, Oct., 1898) ; The Biblical Doctrine of Divine
Justice (Homiletic Review, Jan., 1904).
Samuel Hart, A.M., D. D., D. C. L., b. Saybrook, Conn.; Trinity, 1866,
and A.M. (in course), 1869; Tutor in Greek, Trinity, 1S68-70; Asst. Prof. (1870-3),
and Prof. (1873-83) of Mathematics, Trinity ; Prof, of Latin, Trinity, 1883-99 ; Prof.
of Doctrinal Theology and of the Prayer Book, and Vice-Dean, Berkeley Div. Sch.,
1899 — ; Registrar of the Diocese of Conn., 1874 — ; Custodian of the Standard Book
of Common Pi'ayer, 1886 — ; Secretary of the House of Bishops of the Episcopal
Church, 1892 — . Editor: Satires of Juvenal, 1873; Satires of Persius, 1875;
Scipio's Dream, with Notes ; Bishop Seabury's Communion-Office, with Notes,
1874; Manuals for Confirmation (1895), and Communion (1895), and Family
Prayers (1902). Author : Monographs, Discourses, and Addresses on Connecticut
History and American Church History.
Doremus Almy Hayes, Ph. D., S. T. D., LL. D., b. Russelville, Ohio ; Ohio
Wesleyan, 1884; Boston Univ. Sch of Theol., 1887, and S. T. D. (in course) 1901 ;
Boston Univ. , 1885-7 ; Ph. D., 1887; San Leandro, Cal., and San Lorenzo, 1887-8;
Prof, of Greek Lang, and Lit., Univ. of the Pacific, 1888-91 ; studied in Berlin and
Leipzig as Fellow of Boston Univ., 1891-2 ; Napa, Cal., 1892-5; Prof, of Bibl.
Theol., Iliff Sch. of Theol., Denver, Col., 1895-6 ; Prof, of the English Bible, Garrett
Bibl. Inst., 1896-1901 ; Prof, of N. T. Exegesis, 1901 — . Author: Monograph on
The Book of Acts (in Iliff School Studies) ; article on The Revival : Its Power and
Its Perils (in Church Congress Series) ; articles in Biblical World and Denomi
national Papers.
Frederic Dan Huntington, S. T. D., D. C. L., LL. D., b. Hadley, Mass.,
May 28, 1819 ; son of Rev. Dan Huntington of Hadley, who was first a Cong., then
a Unit, minister; d. at Hadley, July 11, 1904. Prepared for college at Hopkins
Academy, Hadley; Amherst, 1839; Harvard Div. Sch., 1842 ; South Cong. Church
(Unit.), Boston, 1842-55 ; Chaplain of the Mass. Legislature, 1843 ; First Plummer
Professor of Christian Morals, Harvard College, 1855-60. Confirmed in the Epis
copal Church, March 25, i860; ordained Deacon, September 12, i860, and Priest,
March 19, 1861 ; First Rector of Emmanuel Church, Boston, 1861-9; First Bishop of
Central New York, (Consecrated, April 8, 1869), 1869-1904. Editor in turn of The

496 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Christian Register; The Monthly Religious Magazine; The Church Monthly;
The Gospel Messenger. Author : Sermons for the People ; Christian Believing
and Living; Divine Aspects of Human Society; Helps to a Holy Lent; New Helps
to a Holy Lent; The Fitness of Christianity to Man (Bohlen Lectures) ; Lectures
on Preaching; A Pastoral Supplication; An Old Man's Old Testament Petitions;
Personal Christian Life in the Ministry ; The High Calling ; The Gospel and the
People; Christ in the Christian Year (two vols.); Gospel and Judgment; Good
Talking a Fine Art ; The Golden Rule Applied to Social Life ; Christ and the
World; Forty Days with the Master; Separate Poems, &c.; Editor of two Collec
tions of Poems : — " Lyra Domestica", and " Elim "-
William Reed Huntington, D. D., D. C. L., L. H. D., *. Lowell, Mass.;
Harvard, 1859; studied Divinity under Rev. F. D. Huntington, Rector of Em
manuel Church; Curate of Emmanuel Church, Boston, 1861-2 ; All Saints,
Worcester, 1862-83; Grace, New York, 1883 — . Author: The Church Idea, 1870;
Conditional Immortality, 1878; The Peace of the Church, 1891 ; The Causes of the
Soul, 1891 ; A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer, 1893 ; The Spiritual
House, 1895 ; A National Church, 1897 ; Psyche, A Study of the Soul, 1899 ; Sonnets
and a Dream, 1899, &c. ; various pamphlets and sermons.
Melancthon Williams Jacobus, D. D., b. Allegheny City, Penn.; Prince
ton, 1877; Princeton Theol. Sem., i88i; student at Gottingen and Berlin, 1881-4;
Pastor of Presbyterian Church, Oxford, Penn., 1884-91; Prof, of N. T. Exegesis
and Criticism, Hartford Theol. Sem., 1891 — ; Dean of the Faculty, 1903 — ; Acting
Pastor First Cong. Church, 1899-1900. Author: A Problem in New Testament
Criticism (Lectures at Princeton Theol. Sem. on the Stone Foundation, 1897-8);
various articles for Reviews, &c. Contributing Editor in charge of the N. T. Dept.
of the New International Encyclopaedia ; Editor in Chief of the forthcoming Stand
ard Bible Dictionary.
Thomas Augustus Jaggar, D. D., b. New York, N. Y.; educated in New
York; prepared for ministry by private tutors and course at General Theol. Sem.
Rectorates: Trinity, Bergen Point, N. J., 1862-4; Anthon Memorial, New York,
1S64-9 ; St. John's, Yonkers, 1869-70 ; Holy Trinity, Philadelphia (in succession to
Phillips Brooks), 1870-5. Consecrated First Bishop of Southern Ohio, 1875 ; Retired
from jurisdiction, Oct., 1904; preacher at St. Paul's, Boston, 1904 — . Author:
The Man of the Ages (a volume of Sermons), 1898; The Personality of Truth
(Bohlen Lectures for 1900) ; Papers on The Pulpit and Modern Scepticism, The
Ministry of Phillips Brooks, &c.; various addresses.
Henry Melville King, A. M., D. D., b. Oxford, Me.; Bowdoin, 1859, and
A. M. (in course , 1862; Newton, 1862; Instructor in Hebrew at Newton Theol.
Inst'n, 1862-3; Dudley Street, Boston, 1863-82; Emmanuel, Albany, N. Y., 1882-
91; First, Providence, 1891 — . Author: Early Baptists Defended, 1880; Mary's
Alabaster Box, 1883; Our Gospels, 1895; A Summer Visit of Three Rhode Islanders
to the Mass. Bay, in 1651, (1896); The Mother Church, 1896; The Baptism of
Roger Williams, 1897; The Messiah in the Psalms, 1899; Why We Believe the
Bible, 1902; Religious Liberty, 1903, &c.
Henry Clay Mabie, D. D., b. Belvidere, 111.; old Univ. of Chicago, i868;
Bapt. Union Theol. Sem., 1875; Rockford, 111., 1869-73; Oak Park, 111., 1873-5;
Brookline, Mass., 1876-9; Indianapolis, Ind., 1879-83; Belvidere, 111., 1883-5;
St. Paul, Minn., 1885-8; Minneapolis, Minn., 1888-90; tour of Asiatic Missions
of the Am. Bapt. Miss. Union, 1890; Cor. Sec. of the Am. Bapt. Miss. Union,

INDEX TO A UTHORS. 497
1890 — . Has devoted the last fourteen years to a wide touring of the Northern
States of America, holding numerous conferences on foreign missions. Author-
Romanism in Four Chapters, 1890 ; In Brightest Asia, 1893.
Francis John McConnell, Ph. D., b. Dresden, Ohio; Ohio Wesleyan, 1894;
Boston Univ. Sch. of Theol., 1897; Boston Univ., Ph. D., 1899; West Chelms
ford, Mass., 1894-6; Newton Upper Falls, 1897-9; Ipswich, 1 899-1 902 ; Harvard
Street, Cambridge, 1902-3; Brooklyn, N. Y., 1903—.
Donald Sage Mackay, D. D., b. Glasgow, Scotland; Univ. of Glasgow,
1885; Seminary of the New College, Edinburgh, 1889; St. Albans, Vt. (Cong.),
1890-4; Newark, N.J. (Reformed), 1894-9; Collegiate, New York, 1899 — .
Alexander McKenzie, A. M., D. D., b. New Bedford, Mass. ; Harvard, 1859,
and A. M. (in course), 1862 ; Andover, 1S61 ; Augusta, Me., 1861-7; First, Cong.,
Cambridge, Mass., 1867 — . Author: The History of the First Church in Cam
bridge, 1873; Cambridge Sermons, 1884; Some Things Abroad, 1887; Christ Him
self, 1891 ; A Door Opened, 1898; The Divine Force in the Life of the World
(Lowell Institute Lectures), 1898 ; Now, 1899; Getting One's Bearings, 1903, &c.
William Douglas Mackenzie, D. D., b. Fauresmith, Orange River Colony,
South Africa ; Univ. of Edinburgh, 1881 ; Scottish Congregational College,
Edinburgh, 1882; studied at Gottingen, 1886, and Marburg, 1895; Pastor at
Montrose, Scotland, 1882-9; Edinburgh, 1889-95; Prof, of Syst. Theol., Chicago
Theol. Sem., 1895-1903; Preaching Pastor of New England Cong. Church, Chi
cago, 1898-1903; Prof, of Syst. Theol. and Pres., Hartford Theol. Sem., 1904 — .
Aut/ior : The Ethics of Gambling, 1895; The Revelation of the Christ, 1896;
Christianity and the Progress of Man, 1897; South Africa, Its History, Heroes
and Wars, 1900; John Mackenzie, South African Missionary and Statesman,
1902. Stewart Means, A. M., D. D., *. Steubenville, Ohio; Kenyon (1869-72);
A.M., 1881 ; Union, 1875; Episcopal Theol. Sch., 1876; Bayonne, N. J., 1876-9;
Middletown, Ohio, 1879-81; Assistant, St. Ann's, Brooklyn, N. Y., 1882-3; New-
Haven, Conn., 1883 — . Author: St. Paul and the Ante-Nicene Church, 1904;
Essays, Sermons, Translations, &c.
Charles Manly Melden, Ph. D., D. D., b. Salem, Mass.; Boston Univ.,
1880; Boston Univ. Sch. of Theol., 1883; Boston Univ., Ph. D., 1892; Byfield,
Mass., 1882-3; Lawrence, 1884-6; Northampton, 1887-9; Somerville, 1890-3; Brock
ton, 1894-7; Pres. of Clark Univ., Atlanta, Ga., 1897-1902 ; Providence, 1903 — .
James Lee Mitchell, Ph. D., b. Limerick, Me. ; Harvard, 1S84; Union, 1887;
Yale, Ph. D., 1896; Cadillac, Mich., 1887-90; New Haven, Conn., 1890-1901;
Attleboro, Mass., 1901 — .
Henry Sylvester Nash, D. D., b. Newark, O.; Harvard, 1878; Epis. Theol.
Sch., 1881; Prof, of N. T. Interpretation, Epis. Theol. Sch., 1S82— ; Rector,
Chestnut Hill, Newton, Mass., 1887-1902. Author: The Genesis of the Social
Conscience, 1896; Ethics and Revelation, 1898; History of the Higher Criticism of
the New Testament, 1900.
Willis Patterson Odell, Ph. D., D. D., b. Laconia, N. H.; Boston Univ.,
1880; A. M. (in course), 1890; Ph. D., 1896; Cliftondale, Mass., 1880-3; Salem,
1883-6; Maiden, 1886-90; Delaware Ave., Buffalo, N. Y., 1890-5; Richmond Ave.,
Buffalo, 1895-8; Calvary, New York. 1898-190^ ; Germantown, Philadelphia, 1904 — .
Author : Ministries of Hope, 1904 ; numerous pamphlets.

498 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Frederic Palmer, A. M., b. Boston, Mass.; Harvard, 1869, and A. M- (in
course), 1872 ; Andover, 1872 ; Private Tutor, 1872-4; Pastor, Revere, Mass. (Cong.),
1874-8; Ordained Deacon in Episcopal Church, 1878; Assistant, Emmanuel Church,
Boston, 1878-9; ordained Priest, 1879 ; Acting Rector, Lonsdale, R.I. , 1879; Rector,
Jenkintown, Penn., 1880-8; Andover, Mass., 1888 — ; Associate Editor of "The
Church", 1896-9. Autlior: Studies in Theologic Definition, 1894; The Drama
of the Apocalypse, 1903.
John Davis Pickles, Ph. D., b. St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Can.; Boston
Univ., 1877 ; Boston Univ. Sch. of Theol., 1873 ; Boston Univ., Ph. D., 1885 ; Win-
throp, Mass., 1877-80 ; Lawrence, 1880-3 ! Melrose, 1883-6 ; Lynn, 1886-91 ; Worcester,
1891-5 ; Tremont Street, Boston, 1895-1900 ; Westfield, 1900-03 ; St. John's, Boston,
1903 — . Author: Pamphlet on Methodism: — Historical, Educational, Doctrinal,
Missionary, 1902 ; Sermons to Grand Army Republic on Memorial Sundays, 1904.
Albert Hale Plumb, D. D., *. Gowanda, N. Y.; Brown, 1855; Andover,
1858; Chelsea, Mass., 1858-72; Roxbury, Boston, 1872 — ; Member of Prudential
Committee of A. B. C. F. M., 1882-1903. Author : Numerous articles, addresses, &c.
Edwin McNeil Poteat, D. D.,*. Caswell Co.,N. C. ; Wake Forest, N. C,
1881; Southern Bapt. Theol. Sem., 1885; Chapel Hill, N. C, Aug.-Dec,
1885 ; Instructor in Latin and Greek, Wake Forest, Jan.-June, 1886 ; Johns Hopkins
Univ., 1886-8; Lee St., Baltimore, Md. (supply), 1886-8; Calvary, New Haven,
Conn., 1888-98; Memorial, Philadelphia, Penn., 1898-1903; Pres. of Furman Univ.,
Greenville, S. C, 1903 — .
Rockwell Harmon Potter, b. Glenville, N. Y. ; Union College, 1895;
(Yale, 1895-6; Union, 1896-7), Chicago, 1898; Flushing, L. I. (Reformed), 1898-
1900; First (Cong.), Hartford, Conn., 1900 — .
Charles Augustus Lewis Richards, D. D., b. Cincinnati, Ohio; Yale,
1849; Jefferson Medical School, Philadelphia, M. D., 1852; Practised as phy
sician, 1852-4; Theol. Sem. of Virginia, 1858; Great Barrington, Mass., 1858-61;
Church of the Saviour, Philadelphia, 1861-5 ; Trinity, Columbus, Ohio, 1865-9;
St. John's, Providence, 1869-1901 ; Rector Emeritus, 1901 — . Author; Several
papers before the Church Congress ; article on Christian Unity in the Andover
Review, &c.
Charles Wesley Rishell, A. M., Ph. D., b. Williamsport, Penn.; Witten
berg, 1876, and A. M. (in course), 1879; Drew (1874-5); studied at Univ. of Berlin,
1889-91; Cincinnati, Ohio, 1876-8; Winton Place, 1878-80; Delhi, 1880-3; Avon-
dale, 1883-6 ; Urbana, 1886-9 i Cincinnati, 1891-4 ; Springfield, 1894-5 ; Prof, of His
torical Theol., Boston Univ. Sch. of Theol., 1895 — ; Asst. Dean Boston Univ. Sch.
of Theol., 1904 — . Author: History of the Christian Church, 1891 ; The Higher
Criticism, 1893 ; The Official Recognition of Woman in the Church, 1S92 ; The
Foundations of the Christian Faith, 1899 ; The Child as God's Child, 1904 ; various
articles in religious and theological journals.
Frank Knight Sanders, Ph. D., D. D., *. Batticotta, Jaffna, Ceylon ; Ripon
(Wis.), 1882; Instructor, Jaffna College, Ceylon, 1882-6; Yale, 1886-9; Ph. D.,
1889; Asst. (1889-91) and Instructor in Semitic Languages, Yale, 1891-2 ; Asst.
Prof. (1892-4) and Woolsey Prof, of Bib. Lit., Yale, 1894-1901 ; Prof, of Bib. Hist.
and Archaeology, and Dean, Yale Div. Sch., 1901-5; First Pres. of Religious Edu
cation Association, 1903-4, and Director for Life, 1904 — . Author: The Messages
of the Earlier Prophets, 1898 (with Prof. C. F. Kent) ; The Messages of the Later
Prophets, 1899 (with Prof. Kent) ; Co-Editor (with Prof. Kent) of The Historical

INDEX TO A UTHORS. 499
Series for Bible Students (10 vols.). The Messages of the Bible (12 vols.), and of
The Library of Ancient Inscriptions (10 vols.); Regular Weekly Contributor of
Senior Bible Class Department to Sunday School Times since 1895.
Avery Albert Shaw, M. A., b. Berwick, Nova Scotia, Can. ; Acadia College,
1892, and M. A. (in course), 1895; Rochester Theol. Sem., 1896; Windsor, Nova
Scotia, 1896-1900; Brookline, Mass., 1900 — . Contributed — Christ a Creation or
the Creator of Christianity.' (article in Bibliotheca Sacra, July, 1903).
John Balcom Shaw, A. M., D. D., b. Bellport, N. Y. ; Lafayette, 1885, and
A.M., 1888; Union, 1888; New York, 1888-1904; Chicago, 1904—. Author:
Four Great Questions, 1897 ; Soul-Winning, 1902 ; The Difficult Life, 1903 ; The
Work that Wins, 1905 ; numerous articles in the Independent, Observer, Interior,
Homiletic Review, &c.
Henry Clay Sheldon, A. M., S. T. D., *. Martinsburg, N. Y. ; Yale, 1867,
and A.M., 1870; Instructor, Delaware Literary Institute, 1867-8; Boston Univ.
Sch. of Theol., 1871 ; studied at Leipzig Univ., 1874-5 ; St. Johnsbury, Vt. (supply),
1871-2; Brunswick, Me., 1872-4; Prof, of Church Hist., Boston Univ. Sch. of
Theol., 1875-95 ; Prof, of Syst. Theol., 1895—; has also taught Bib. Theol. of the N.
T. for a series of years. Author: History of Christian Doctrine (2 vols.), 1886;
History of the Christian Church (5 vols.), 1894; System of Christian Doctrine,
1903 ; numerous articles, &c.
Charles Fremont Sitterly, Ph. D., S. T. D., b. Liverpool, N. Y. ; Syra
cuse, 1883, and Ph.D., 1886; Drew, 1886; student at Oxford, Bonn, Heidelberg,
Leipzig, Berlin, 1890-2; Chester, N. J., 1886-8; Cranford, 1888-9; Madison, 1889-
90; Prof, of Bib. Lit. and English Exegesis, Drew, 1892 — . Author: Manu
scripts of the Greek Testament, 1898; History of the English Bible, 1899; also
contributions to church Reviews and to American Journal of Theology.
William Arnold Stevens, D. D., LL. D., b. Granville, Ohio; Denison,
1862, and A. M., 1865 ; Rochester Theol. Sem. (1862-3) ! Classical Tutor, Denison,
1863-5; student of Philology and Theology, Harvard, Leipzig, Berlin, 1865-8;
Prof, of Greek Lang, and Lit., Denison, 1868-77; Prof, of Bib. Lit. and N. T.
Exegesis, Rochester, 1877 — ; Biblical study abroad, chiefly in Egypt and Syria,
1882-3. Author: Select Orations of Lysias, 1876; Commentary on the Epistles
to the Thessalonians, 1887 ; Outline Handbook of the Life of Christ (with Prof.
Ernest DeWitt Burton), 1892 ; Harmony of the Gospels for Historical Study (with
Prof. Burton), 1894; articles in Bibliotheca Sacra, Homiletic Review, &c.
George Marvin Stone, D. D., b. Strongsville, Ohio; Madison Univ. (now
Colgate), 1858; Hamilton Theol. Sem. (now Colgate), (1859); Danbury, Conn.,
1860-7; Winona, Minn., 1867-70; Milwaukee, Wis., 1870-3; Tarrytown, N. Y.,
1873-9; Hartford, Conn., 1879 — . Author: Public Uses of the Bible, 1891 ;
numerous articles in periodicals.
Augustus Hopkins Strong, D. D., LL. D., b. Rochester, N. Y.; Yale,
1857; Rochester, 1859; travelled in Europe and the East and studied at Univ. of
Berlin, 1859-60; Haverhill, Mass., 1861-5 ; Cleveland, Ohio, 1865-72; Prof, of Bib.
Theol. and Pres., Rochester Theol. Sem., 1872 — . Author: Systematic Theology
[7th Edition, 1903], 1886; Philosophy and Religion, 1888; The Great Poets and
their Theology, 1897 ; Christ in Creation and Ethical Monism, 1899.
Willard Brown Thorp, b. Oxford, N. Y. ; Amherst, 1887 ; in business in
New York, 1887-8; Yale, 1891 ; Binghamton, N. Y., 1891-9; Chicago, 1899—.

Soo THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Horace Wayland Tilden, A. M., D. D., b. Chesterville, Me.; served in Union
Army, 1863-6; Colby, 1872, and A. M. (in course), 1875 ; Newton, 1875 ; Augusta,
Me., 1875-84; Hyde Park, Mass., 1884-9; Des Moines, Iowa, 1889-98; Livermore
Falls, Me., 1899-1903 ; Pierre, S. D., 1904 — . Author : Sundry sermons and essays.
Floyd Williams Tomkins, S. T. D., b. New York, N. Y. ; Harvard, 1872;
General Theol. Sem., 1875; Missionary, Pueblo, Col., 1875-7, and Cheyenne,
Wyoming, 1877-8; Rector, Kenosha, Wis., 1878-80; Minneapolis, Minn., 1880-2;
Keene, N. H., 1882-4; Asst. in charge Calvary Chapel, New York, N. Y.,
1884-8; Christ Church, Hartford, Conn., 1888-92; St. James, Chicago, 111.,
1892-5; Grace, Providence, R. I., 1895-9; Holy Trinity, Philadelphia, Penn.,
1899 — . Author: The Christian Life, 1897; Following Christ, 1900; My Bes*
Friend, 1902 ; Beacons on Life's Voyage, 1904.
James Gardiner Vose, D. D., b. Boston, Mass. ; Yale, 1851 ; Andover, 1854;
Greenfield, Mass., 1854-5; travelled in Europe and studied in Berlin, 1855-6; Prof.
of Rhetoric, Amherst, 1856-65; Dorchester, Mass. (supply), 1865; Beneficent,
Providence, 1866-1901 ; Pastor Emeritus, 1901 — . Author: Congregationalism in
Rhode Island, 1894; Children's Day, 1897; articles in Bibliotheca Sacra, and New
Englander; occasional sermons and addresses.
Herbert Welch, D. D., b. New York, N. Y. ; Wesleyan, 1887; Drew, 1890;
studied at Oxford, 1902-3; Bedford Station, N. Y., 1890-2; St. Luke's, New York,
1892-3; Summerfield, Brooklyn, 1893-8; Middletown, Conn., 1 898-1 902 ; Mount
Vernon, N. Y., 1903-5; Pres. Ohio Wesleyan Univ., 1905 — . Editor: Selections
from the Writings of John Wesley, 1901.
Henry Griggs Weston, D.D., LL.D., b. Lynn, Mass.; Brown, 1840;
Newton, (1840-2): Tazewell and Woodford Counties, 111., 1843-6; Peoria, 111.,
1846-59; Oliver St. and Madison Ave., New York, 1859-68; Prof, of Practical
Theology and Pres., Crozer Theol. Sem., 1868 — . Author: Matthew, the Gen
esis of the New Testament, 1900; besides several brochures-
WiLBERT Webster White, Ph- D., b. Ashland, Ohio ; Wooster, 1881 ; Xenia,
1885; Instructor in Prep. Dept. Univ. of Wooster, 1S81-3; Pastor, Peotone, 111.
(U. P.), 1885-7; Yale, 1887-90; Ph. D., 1890; Prof, of Hebrew and O. T. Lit.,
Xenia, 1890-5 ; Instructor in Moody Bible Institute, Chicago, 1895-6 ; Special
Bible Work in India and Great Britain under Y. M. C. A. and College auspices,
1896-1900; Pres. Bible Teachers Training School, New York, 1900 — ; Editor of
"The Bible Record", 1904—. AutJior: Thirty Studies in the Gospel by John,
1895; Thirty Studies in the Revelation, 1897; Inductive Studies in the Minor
Prophets, 1894; Thirty Studies in Jeremiah, 1S95 ; Studies in Old Testament Char
acters, 1900; Availing Prayer, 1900; Thirty Studies in the Gospel bj' Matthew,
1903; various pamphlets, charts, &c., on Bible Study.
William Calvin Whitford, A. M., b. Brookfield, N. Y. ; Colgate, 1886, and
A. M. (in course), 1890; in business in Brookfield, N. Y., 1886-9; Union, 1892;
Berlin, N. Y. (Seventh Day Baptist), 1892-3; Prof, of Bib. Languages and Lit. in
Alfred Univ., 1893 — ; in Alfred Theol. Sem. (organized, 1901), 1901 — ; Contribut
ing Editor of Peculiar People, 1894-6; Editor of Plelping Hand (S. S. Quarterly,
Plainfield, N. J.), 1898—.
Benaiah Longley Whitman, D. D., LL. D., b. Wilmot, Nova Scotia, Can. ;
Brown, 1887; Newton, 1890; Portland, Me., 1890-2; Pres. Colby Univ., 1892-5;
Pres. Columbian Univ., 1895-1900; Philadelphia, 1900 — . Author: Elements

INDEX TO AUTHORS. 501
of Ethics, 1893; Elements of Political Science, 1899; Outlines of Political History,
1900; numerous articles on Educational and Religious Topics.
Cornelius Woelfkin, D. D., b. New York, N. Y. ; educated in New York,
and at Christian Bibl. Inst., Stanford, N. Y. ; Stanford, N. Y., 1885-7; Hacken-
sack, N. J., 1887-92; Jersey City, 1892-4; Brooklyn, N. Y., 1894 — . Author:
Chambers of the Soul, 1901.
Nathan Eusebius Wood, D. D., b. Forrestville, N. Y. ; old Univ. of Chicago,
1872 ; Bapt. Union Theol. Sem., 1875 ; Chicago, 111., 1875-7 ; Principal of Wayland
Academy, Wis., 1877-83; Chicago, 111., 1883-6; Brooklyn, N. Y., 1886-92; Brook
line, Mass., 1892-4; First, Boston, 1894-9; Prof, of Theology and Pres., Newton
Theol. Inst'n, 1899 — . Author: History of the First Baptist Church, Boston,
1899; Editor of Boise's Notes on the Epistles of Paul, 1896; various articles for
Reviews, &c.

INDEX TO TEXTS.

(References are given by author and page to principal texts in order of chapter and verse. In each
chapter, if necessary to clearness, sections of more than two verses are indexed first in order of first verse
of section). I. 1-5 (F. L. Anderson, 417; Thorp, 471) ; 1-18 (Beardslee, 26-9, 398; Nash,
59; F. L. Anderson, 417-8) ; 1-51 (White, 22-5) ; 6-13 (F. L. Anderson, 417) ; 10-13
(Jaggar, 339) ; 14-18 (F. L. Anderson, 417) ; 19-37 (Stevens, 30-41); 29-51 (Dixon,
42-9; Poteat, 453); 35-51 (Bitting, 463-4) ;—i (White, 22-3; Beardslee, 26-9;
Strong, 63,70; King, 100; McKenzie, iii; Sheldon, 289, 293 ; Fowler, 306; Jag
gar, 339; F. L. Anderson, 415, 435; Mitchell, 450-2); 3 (McKenzie, 112; Sheldon,
289-90; Beardslee, 399); 4 (King, 104-5; Eckman, 118; Burr, 206; Beardslee, 399;
F. L. Anderson, 415) ; 5 (Nash, 59) ; 6 (Stevens, 30-2, 38-41) ; 6, 7 (Thorp, 471) ;
7 (White, 10-15; Burr, 206-7; F. L. Anderson, 415) ; 9 (Sheldon, 287, 290; Beards
lee, 399); II (Mabie, 224); 12 (Tomkins, 50-8; Plumb, 77; Sheldon, 292; Pickles,
304; F. L. Anderson, 415); 13 (Tomkins, 58; Nash, 60; King, 104); 14 (White,
22-3; Beardslee, 26-9; Nash, 59-62; Strong, 63-4; Abbott, 74; King, 105; McKen
zie, no; Mabie, 233; Sheldon, 288, 290, 292; Jaggar, 337, 343; F. L. Anderson,
414); 15 (Stevens, 35); 17 (Sheldon, 287) ; 18 (White, 22-3 ; Sheldon, 287-8); 26
(Stevens, 38); 29 (Stevens, 35-6; Dixon, 42, 46; Abbott, 74; Plumb, 86; McKen
zie, III ; A. A. Shaw, 239; Sheldon, 287 ; Faunce, 321 ; Thorp, 471) ; 30 (Sheldon,
290); 31 (Stevens, 32-4); 33 (Stevens, 36-7) ; 34 (Stevens, 34-5 ; Dixon, 42); 37
(Dixon, 42-4) ; 39 (Dixon, 46); 41 (Dixon, 44-7) ; 42 (Dixon, 47-8); 43 (White,
20-1, 24-5; Dixon, 45); 45 (White, 23-4; Dixon, 45); 46 (White, 23-5; Dixon, 45);
47 (Dixon, 48) ; 48 (White, 24) ; 49 (White, 17, 24; Dixon, 48; Pickles, 305) ; 51
(Dixon, 48-9).
2. i-ii (Strong, 63-70; McKenzie, 112, 113; G.Anderson, 367; Beardslee,
399) ; — 4 (Strong, 65 ; Weston, 364) ; 5 (White, 20) ; 6 (McKenzie, 108) ; 7 (Strong,
65) ; II (Strong, 63-70; Abbott, 72; Rishell, 201 ; F. L. Anderson, 414); 19 (A. A.
Shaw, 239) ; 19-21 (Welch, 349) ; 23 (Rishell, 201 ; Mackenzie, 383).
3. 1-15 (Abbott, 71-5 ; McKenzie, 113 ; F. L. Anderson, 419 20) ; 1-16 (Mac
kenzie, 382-9; Whitford, 455-7); 14-21 (Plumb, 76-86; Mackenzie, 384); 18-20
(Plumb, 80); — I (Beardslee, 437) ; 2 (Rishell, 201; Welch, 351); 3 (Nash, 60;
Abbott, 72-3; McKenzie, in, 113-4; Whitford, 455-6); 4 (Abbott, 73); 5 (Abbott,
73-5; King, 104; F. L. Anderson, 419-20; Whitford, 456); 13 (Sheldon, 290); 14
(King, 105; A. A. Shaw, 236,239; Bitting, 465) ; 15 (Abbott, 71 ; Plumb, 76-7);
16 (Tomkins, 50; Abbott, 71; Plumb, 79; McKenzie, in; A. A. Shaw, 240;
Sheldon, 290, 294; Ashworth, 296; Pickles, 305; Jaggar, 343; Whitford, 457) ;
19 (White, i<9; Melden, 126-7); 31. 3^ (Sheldon, 290-1); 35 (Sheldon, 292); 36
(Plumb, 77,86).
4. 1-42 (Goodwin, 87-92 ; McKenzie, 114-5; Vose, 45S-62 ; Bitting, 464-5);
5-26 (Mackenzie, 382-3,386-9); 7-15 (F. L. Anderson, 421); 16-42 (F. L. Anderson,
421) ; 43-54 (F. L. Anderson, 421); — 6 (McKenzie, 109-10) ; 7 (White, 18; Beards
lee, 438) ; 14 (McKenzie, no; Sheldon, 290); 19 (Rishell, 201); 23 (Goodwin,
90); 24 (King, 105; Burr, 215; Thorp, 471); 26 (White, 17); 32 (Means, 252);
34 (Odell, 93-8; J. B. Shaw, 130-1 ; Jaggar, 342 ; Preface, ix) ; 35 (Goodwin, S8-9) ;
41 (Rishell, 200); 42 (W. R. Huntington, 191); 46 (White, 18).
502

INDEX TO TEXTS. 503
5. 1-16 (Jacobus, 164); 1-30 (Eckman, 118-23; Melden, 124-9); 1-47 (Beards
lee, 401) ; 21-23 (Sheldon, 292) ; — 4 (Eckman, 119); 6 (Eckman, 121-2; Melden,
126, 128); 16 (McKenzie, 115); 17 (Eckman, 120; Melden, 125; Jaggar, 338); 18
(Eckman, 120-1 ; Melden, 124-5 ; A. A. Shaw, 240) ; 19, 20 (Beardslee, 400) ; 20
(Rishell, 202 ; Sheldon, 290, 292) ; 21 (Eckman, 121 ; Melden, 126) ; 22 (Eckman,
122; Melden, 126); 23 (Melden, 126); 24 (Melden, 126); 26 (Eckman, 118;
Sheldon, 292); 26, 27 (Jaggar, 339); 27 (Sheldon, 288); 28, 29 (Eckman, 122-3;
Melden, 127); 30 (J. B. Shaw, 130-5) ; 31 (Melden, 128); 36 (White, 15-17; Mel
den, 128; Rishell, 200; Burr, 207); 37 (Melden, 128; Burr, 207); 39 (White, n;
Melden, 128; Burr, 207-8); 40 (White, 19; Burr, 207); 42 (White, 19) ; 46 (Mel
den, 128).
6. 1-14 (Beardslee, 399); 1-71 (Nash, 155-6); 30-59 (Woelfkin, 145-52);—
9 (McKenzie, 115-6); 26 (Rishell, 202); 27 (Woelfkin, 149; Sheldon, 287-8);
29 (Plumb, 77; Wood, 136-44; Woelfkin, 149); 33 (Sheldon, 290; Beardslee, 400) ;
35 (Woelfkin, 145, 149); 38 (J. B. Shaw, 130; Woelfkin, 151); 40 (Jaggar, 338);
46 (Sheldon, 290); 47 (Wood, 142-3); 48 (Sheldon, 292); 51 (Woelfkin, 150;
Jaggar, 340; Beardslee, 438) ; 52 (Jaggar, 337) ; 53 (A. A. Shaw, 239) ; 56 (Jaggar,
337)1 56, 57 (Woelfkin, 151); 57 (Sheldon, 292); 60 (Nash, 156); 62 (Sheldon,
288, 290); 63 (McKenzie, 117; Woelfkin, 150; Burr, 215; Sheldon, 287); 66
(Rishell, 201) ; 67 (Nash, 156) ; 68 (Sheldon, 287) ; 68-69 (Nash, 153-60).
Chapters 7-10 (Jacobus, 161-6).
7. 37-39 (Bradford, 187-8) ;— 17 (Wood, 136; Whitman, 173; McConnell, 177-
86 ; Mackay, 222) ; 18 (Sheldon, 288) ; 31 (Rishell, 202) ; 37 (Jacobus, 165 ; Jaggar,
338; Beardslee, 439); 37.38 (Beardslee, 399); 46 (Rishell, 201) ; 50-52 (Pickles,
305)- 8. 31-36 (Burr, 205-17) ; — 12 (White, 21 ; Sheldon, 287 ; Faunce, 325 ; Jaggar,
337; Beardslee, 399; Poteat, 454) ; 28 (A. A. Shaw, 236, 239) ; 29 (Odell, 95 ; J. B.
Shaw, 130-1 ; W. R. Huntington, 189-96; Sheldon, 288-9, 292) ; 30 (Rishell, 201) ;
31, 32 (Beardslee, 439); 32 (Jaggar, 338); 36 (Burr, 208); 38 (Whitman, 173;
Sheldon, 292) ; 42 (Whitman, 173; Jaggar, 333); 44 (Whitman, 173); 46 (Tom
kins, 57 ; W. R. Huntington, 189-96); 47 (Whitman, 173); 56 (Jaggar, 343) ; 58
(Sheldon, 290-1 ; Jaggar, 338).
9. 1-41 (Bitting, 465);— 3 (Rishell, 202); 4 (Rishell, 200; Jaggar, 343) ; 7 (Mc
Kenzie, 116); II (White, 19); 25-33 (Beardslee, 440); 34 (F. L. Anderson, 427);
35-38 (Wood, 142); 39 (Mabie, 226).
10. 8, 9 (Pickles, 301-2); 10 (Burr, 205); n (McKenzie, n6; A. A. Shaw,
239, 242 ; Beardslee, 440) ; 14 (Sheldon, 294) ; 14, 15 (Sheldon, 292); 16 (Fowler,
306); 17, 18 (Stone, 327); 18 (A. A. Shaw, 240; Means, 252); 27 (Weston, 361);
28 (Plumb, 76-7 ; Sheldon, 294); 30 (Sheldon, 292-3; Fowler, 306); 32 (Rishell,
200) ; 36 (Faunce, 319) ; 37, 38 (Rishell, 199-201 ; Sheldon, 292) ; 38 (Fowler, 308-9).
II. 1-46 (Mackay, 218-23) ,—3 (Mackay, 220) ; 4 (Rishell, 202) ; 25 (Eckman,
118, 123; Melden, 127; Jaggar, 338; Beardslee, 440) ; 35 (Mackay, 220) ; 36 (Mackay,
221) ; 43 (Mackay, 220-1) ; 52 (Fowler, 307) ; 57 (Means, 252).
12. 1-9 (Mackay, 218-23); 20-32 (Mabie, 224-35) ;— 7 (Mackay, 220); 12-19
(Beardslee, 441); 23 (Mabie, 224; A. A. Shaw, 237); 24 (Jacobus, 165; Mabie,
224 ; A. A. Shaw, 237 ; Blake, 261 ; Jaggar, 340) ; 24, 25 (Bitting, 465) ; 25 (Blake,
261) ; 25, 26 (Mabie, 231) ; 27 (Mabie, 233 ; A. A. Shaw, 237) ; 27, 28 (Jaggar, 341) ;
28 (Mabie, 225, 233; F. L- Anderson, 434); 30 (Mabie, 233); 31 (Mabie, 225-35;
A. A. Shaw, 243); 31, 32 (Jacobus, 165); 32 (McKenzie, 116; Mabie, 225; A. A.

504 THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN.
Shaw, 236-48; Hart, 268-9; J^gg^r, 341; F. L. Anderson, 434; Bitting, 465);
36 (White, 20); 37 (White, 15; Rishell, 201); 37-40 (Rishell, 203); 45 (Sheldon,
288) ; 46 (Jaggar, 338); 49, 50 (Means, 249-56).
13. 1-17 (Blake, 257-67); 31-38 (Beardslee, 441); 33-35 (Fowler, 309); — i
(Blake, 257, 260; Sheldon, 294; F. L. Anderson, 415) ; 3 (Blake, 259) ; 5 (McKenzie,
116); 10 (Tomkins, 58); 15 (Blake, 258, 265) ; 16 (Blake, 265) ; 17 (Mackay, 222) ;
21 (Anthony, 281) ; 23 (McKenzie, 107) ; 31-32 (Hart, 268-74) i 33 (Anthony, 281) ;
34 (Mackay, 219 ; Means, 252 ; Blake, 265-6) ; 34-35 (Potter, 275-9 ! Preface, viii-ix) ;
36 (Potter, 275; Stone, 326); 38 (Anthony, 281).
14. 1-3 (Welch, 351); 6-11 ("Sheldon, 287-94); 7-i° (Anthony, 282); 9-11
(Anthony, 283-4) ; 16-18 (Anthony, 282-3); ^9-23 (Anthony, 283); 21-26 (Ash
worth, 295-300); — I (Anthony, 282); 2 (King, 106; Anthony, 282-3); 3 (Anthony,
282) ; 5 (Anthony, 284) ; 6 (Burr, 206, 208 ; Faunce, 320 ; Jaggar, 338) ; 8 (Anthony,
284) ; 9 (Stone, 329); 10 (Sheldon, 292); 10, n (Fowler, 306, 309); 11 (Whitman,
175; Rishell, 200; Welch, 351); 12 (Anthony, 283) ; 15 (King, 106; Means, 252);
16, 17 (Beardslee, 441-2); 20 (Anthony, 284; Sheldon, 292); 21 (Means, 252;
Pickles, 302-3); 23 (Pickles, 302; G. Anderson, 378); 26 (Anthony, 284); 30
(W. R. Huntington, 194; Mabie, 229); 31 (Means, 253).
15. I (Mackay, 221-2); 3 (Sheldon, 287); 4 (Anthony, 283); 5 (King, 105-6;
Burr, 214; Fowler, 306); 9 (Sheldon, 288); 10 (Means, 253; Pickles, 303; Fowler,
3e)6, 308); 12 (Means, 253); 14 (White, 20; Mackay, 222); 14, 15 (Pickles, 301-5);
15 (Mackay, 218, 222-3); ^6 (Beardslee, 400); 22-24 (Plumb, 77-8, 81); 24 (Rishell,
201) ; 26 (Anthony, 284).
16. 7-15 (Sheldon, 287); 8-11 (Anthony, 284); 12-14 (Jaggar, 337); — 7
(Anthony, 282 ; Jaggar, 339) ; 9 (Jaggar, 339) ; 1 1 (Mabie, 229) ; 13 (Anthony, 284) ;
15 (Sheldon, 292) ; 21 (Jaggar, 340) ; 33 (Nash, 312 ; Welch, 352).
17. 1-5 (Faunce, 318); 1-26 (Fowler, 306-10; Nash, 311-16); 4-8 (Nash, 313);
6-19 (Faunce, 318) ; 12-18 (Nash, 314) ; 17-19 (Faunce, 317-25) ; 20-26 (Faunce, 318) ;
21-23 (Richards, 478-80); — i (A. A. Shaw, 237; Nash, 312); i, 2 (Jaggar, 339); 2
(Sheldon, 288) ; 3 (Plumb, 76; McKenzie, 117 ; Whitman, 176; Means, 256 : Sheldon,
287; Nash, 312; Jaggar, 339); 4 (Sheldon, 288: Faunce, 318); 5 (Hart, 273; Shel
don, 290-1; Fowler, 307 ;6 (Faunce, 319) ; 9-11 (Nash, 314); n (Fowler, 307-8;
Faunce, 318; Jaggar, 338) ; 12 (Rishell, 203; Fowler, 307-8); 17 (Plumb, 85; Til
den, 468-70) ; 18 (Jaggar, 342) ; 19 (Nash, 314-5) ; 20 (Jaggar, 342) ; 20, 21 (Fowler,
308); 21 (King, 106; Jaggar, 338); 22 (Fowler, 308-9); 22, 23, (Nash, 315); 23
(Fowler, 309; Jaggar, 342); 24 (Fowler, 309); 25, 26 (Jaggar, 338); 26 (Nash,
31S-6)- 18. 28-40 (Beardslee, 443) ; — n (Stone, 326-31) ; 37 (Jacobus, 165-6 ; Sheldon,
287). 19. 27 (Abbott, 72; McKenzie, 108-9 ; 28 (Jaggar, 342); 30 (A. A. Shaw,
239; Jaggar, 332-43) ; 39 (Pickles, 305).
20. 1-31 (Welch, 344-55) ; — 21 (Beardslee, 400 ; Preface, ix) ; 22 (Beardslee,
399) ; 28 (White, 17, 23, 25 ; Strong, 64 ; King, 104 ; Wood, 144 ; Pickles, 302 ; Welch,
352; G. Anderson, 369; F. L. Anderson, 435); 31 (White, 10-12, 15, 17, 20, 22-3;
Plumb, 86; King, 99-104; Rishell, 199; Welch, 345; G. Anderson, 366, 368-9;
Palmer, 390-6; Beardslee, 397-8; F. L. Anderson, 414; Bitting, 463; Preface,
vii-ix). 21. 1-14 (G. Anderson, 368-71); 1-25 (Weston, 356-65; F. L. Anderson,
435); — I (G.Anderson, 366) ; 6 (Weston, 356) ; 8 (McKenzie, 108) ; ii(McKenzie,
108); 15 (McKenzie, 117); 15-17 (Weston, 357-64; G.Anderson, 366-79; Beards
lee, 443; Alvord, 476-7) ; 1S-19 (G. Anderson, 378) ; 20 (G. Anderson, 369); 21

INDEX TO TEXTS. 505
(Weston, 364; G. Anderson, 379); 22 (Weston, 364; G. Anderson, 379); 23
(Strong, 64; G. Anderson, 367); 24 (McKenzie, 109; G. Anderson, 369); 25
(Weston, 365; G. Anderson, 366).
Authorship. White, 10-13, ^7 i Stevens, 36; Tomkins, 52; Strong, 64; King,
100-3; McKenzie, 107-ni, 115, 117; Eckman, iiS; Nash, 153-4, ^64; G. Anderson,
368-9; Palmer, 390-6; Beardslee, 397-402; Richards, 478; Riggs, (Preface) viii-x.
Characteristics. White, 10-3, 17-8,20-3; Beardslee, 26-9, 397-402 ; Tomkins,
50; Nash, 59, 153-4, 311; Strong, 63-5; King, 99-106, (Preface) iv ; McKenzie,
107-17; Wood, 136; Jacobus, 163-4; Ashworth, 295; Jaggar, 336-8; Weston, 356,
444-6; G. Anderson, 367-9; Mackenzie, 3S2, 384; Palmer, 390-6; F. L. Anderson,
414; Hayes, 447-9; Poteat, 453-4; Vose, 458; Bitting, 463; Thorp, 471-3; F. D.
Huntington, 474-5; Richards, 478; Riggs, (Preface) viii-x; Preface, v, vii, viii.
Analysis of the Gospel. (F. L. Anderson).

Preface,

4H-S-

General Analysis,

415-6.

1:1-18,

416-8.

1:19—4:54,

418-21.

5:1—12: 50,

422-9.
13: 1—20:31,
429-35-
21:1-25,
435-6-
Suggestive Studies and References.
(Beardslee). Chapters 1-21, 437-43.
St. John in All Ages. King, 99-103 ;
Hay.
5S, 447-8; also 481-3.
I ,' ll ;'iii|SpijF,'" I'W
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