epiritual life of advnnced thinkers. The power of faith to hen!, to invigorate, anrl cloanee; the mighty energies of holy lovo and self-sacrifice; the fact that the stron11est, most energetic, love of man to man eprings from common love to the Holiest and'' the Best; 'the victory of love over death; and the revelation of the spiritual and eternal to love; are among the highest of nil truths. That all trutn emancipates from bondage; tho.t all believing souls will at length be one; and that the Spirit which was in Christ may o.nd doee become in the heart of the believer a well of living water, a source of life to others; are positions to lose which would impoverish human thought beyond remedy. Having been once set forth, these" open secrets" belong to humanity, and cannot be withdrawn. And so with very many other mighty utterances of this spiritual Gospel. These concessions may, therefore, be fairly made without detracting from the floorl of glory which is poured upon them when we find that the ideas themselves are referred by the evangelist to the Jesus whom he knew and loved, to whose heart he drew nearer than any othet had done. 'l'o return to -the suggestions with which this section commenced. We may finn it impossible to state all the reasons which intersect and blend in order to convince us that we have in this wonderful Gospel a veritable revelation of the Son of God. Psychological law will never reduce the conception to a merely ordinary humanity. We need the sense of the Divine as well as the human to prevent the portraiture here given of the Christ from shading or sheering off into the impossible and abnormal. We· need our deepest persuasion that the Divine and hnman are not separated. by an impassable chasm, but in their innermost essence are one; to recognize the portraiture of the Logos made man, fo whom all the humanity at its highest is Divine, and all the· Divinity at its greatest is manifested through the human. A philosophy based on·tbe necessary unknowablenesR of God, on the eternal unlike- ness of God to man, on the -jmpossibility of communication or conversableness between man and his _Maker, must find an insoluble puzzle, an impossibility, in the genuineness of the Fourth Gospel, and endeavours to relegate it to a date when it supposes that the antecedents are all ready for its origination. "The life of Christ" is not itself enough for this philosophy, seeing that all the main ideas to which this Gospel calls special attention are regarded as later accretions on a simpler and less mysterious original. Everything essentially Johannine in the Christ must be excluded from the historical antecedents. The entire synoptic narrative, notwithstanding its striking points of resemblance to the Johannine teaching in some of its most fundamental elements, is insufficient, in the view of many writers, to propound the antecedent or prepare the platform of the Fourth Gospel. The later Tiibingen critics, like Holtzmann and Thoma, go very far in admitting the presence of Paulinism in the Gospel, and, instead of the rational hypothesis that the Johannine elements were widely known and deeply grasped by St. Paul, they suppose that Paul's Epistles, in all the affluence of honour rendered by him to' the rank and work of Christ Jesus, are among the intellectual antecedents of what to such writers is a masterpiece of pious fraud. But neither the synoptists, nor Paul, nor the Acts of the Apostles, nor the Apocalypse itself, al1 1of which furnished materials to the greatfalsarius, are, in the opinion of many, sufficient antecedents for this work. Mo.ny have attempted to show the amount of Ale::rnndrine influence with which the author must have been saturated before he could have proposed the thesis of the pro- logue, and wrought into the texture of his argument what are supposed to be the ideas of Philo. But the pre-existence of the philosophy of Philo, and the wide circulation of the entire New•'festament (minus the Fourth Gospel), are not enough to satisfy those who cannot accept the historic verity of the idea of the Christ. The antecedents here cited would not foroe the Fourth Gospel out of the first century. The production of this Gospel in th~ first century would mean such an accession of evidence for its practical historicity that diligent search has to be made for other indications, literary and 1iolemical, which must have preceded the composition of the Gospel. Consequently, effort has been made to find in Cerinthus, B:i.sileides. and Valentinns such elaborations of the idea of the relation of God to man as to constituto them into veritable antecedents of the lt'ourth Gospel. Even the indications wLich the martyr INTRODUCTION TO
Justin gives of the previous existence of the Gospel have been inverted, 1md great 1inin1 taken to show thRt it is not probable that Justin had read the work of John, but thnt "John" may have made use of Justin; and so, having cleared, not only the first century, but a large portion of the second century, from the presence of the Fourth Gospel, a dat-e hae been aesigned to it just anterior to the time when, by universal confession, the Goepel is known to have been regarded in Antioch and Lyons, in Alex- andria, Ephesus, and Rome, ae one of the four indisputable authorities for the biography of the Lord Jesua.