of eternal life," and not endeavour to put into their hands that blessed volume in which they are contained?? Surely, next to a personal adherence to him, this must be your duty : and, if you are his Disciples indeed, I feel no doubt but that you will engage in this blessed work with an affectionate solicitude for the welfare of your fellow-creatures, and an ardent zeal for the honour of your God*1.]
p If this were for a Mission Society, or Bible Society, here would be the place for enlargement on the subject.
i This was written at the distance of many years from that which precedes it, and without the slightest recollection that the text had ever been treated before. But the two are so entirely different from each other, the one being more scientific, (if it may be so called) and the other altogether popular, that they are both inserted as specimens of two very different ways of treating the same text, and as answering in a slight degree the end which is more studiously consulted in the four skeletons at the end of Claude's Essay.
John vi. 70. Jesus ansivered them, Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil?
OUR blessed Lord and Saviour, in the whole of his deportment, was meek and gentle : yet, when occasion called to it, he exercised a holy fidelity even towards his beloved Apostles. They had now all con- fessed him as " the Christ, the Son of the Living God ;" and had declared their determination still to adhere to him, however others of his Disciples might be offended at him, and induced to forsake hima. On this account they might be led to value themselves on their steadfastness, or perhaps feel themselves offended, when they should find, at a future period, that one of their own body was a traitor. Our Lord, therefore, warned them both against self-confidence at the present time, and against that discouragement which they would hereafter feel, when they should behold him delivered up to death through the instru- mentality of one of his own most highly-favoured
a ver. 66—69.