and the testimony of Jesus to Himself. Though the writers of these gospels would not have drawn such a distinction themselves, and did their work, so far as we can see, quite unconscious of it, it is necessary that we should draw it, and it is not in their case too difficult to apply it. The difficulty is very much increased and amounts at various points to an impossibility when we come to the fourth gospel. There is only one style in the gospel from beginning to end, and every one speaks in it-John the Baptist, Jesus, the evangelist himself. There is only one mode of thought represented in it from beginning to end, and every one shares it-John the Baptist, Jesus, the evangelist himself. What it enables us to see with indubitable clearness is the place which Jesus holds in the faith and life of the writer; what we cannot so easily recover from it is the exact relation of this place to that which Jesus Himself claimed. It is true that to a large extent the writer's testimony to Jesus is given through Jesus' life; it is represented as the very word of the Lord Himself. But the critical study of the gospel, and especially the comparison of it with the synoptics, makes it doubtful how far we can take this literally. It is the preponderating opinion of all who have investigated the subject that the fourth gospel is in substance the fulfilment of the words of Jesus which we read in c. 16 2: 'I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. But when He is come, the Spirit of truth, He shall lead you into all the truth . . . He shall glorify Me, for He shall take of Mine and shall declare it unto you.' The Jesus who speaks in its pages, though it is in form a gospel, and follows the course of His life on earth, is not only the Jesus who taught in the synagogues and fields of Galilee, or in the temple courts and streets of Jerusalem, but also the exalted Lord whose spirit vivifies and interprets the memories of Jesus in

the heart of an intimate, devoted, and experienced disciple. The words of Jesus are connected, of course, with times and places, for they are given as part of a historical career, but they do not belong to time or place; they are the expression of the eternal truth which was revealed in Jesus, and which for the writer is identical with Him. They are the word, rather than the words, of the Lord. They are the authentic revelation of what He is and was, as His Spirit has interpreted Him to the evangelist, rather than the ipsissima verba of Jesus of Nazareth. But while this makes it more difficult to use the fourth gospel without reflection in answering the second of the two questions with which we are concerned, it gives us ampler material to answer the first. The way in which Jesus presents Himself in the gospel can generally be taken as embodying the evangelist's own sense of his place and significance for faith.

Although the procedure is open to criticism, we vegin with the prologue. The immense influence which these few verses have had in determining the doctrine of the Catholic Church, and the tendency of a once dominant critical school to interpret them in a purely philosophical and speculative interest, should not blind us to their essentially practical, historical, and, it may even be added, experimental character. The main propositions they contain are those of vv. 14 and 16: 'The word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. . . . Of His fulness we all received, and grace upon grace.' This is entirely in keeping with what we have found in the first epistle; and in spite of the attempts that have been made to find divergent modes of thought in the two documents and to assign them to different hands, the view of Lightfoot still seems to me to have everything in its favour-viz., that the epistle is a sort

of covering letter accompanying and recommending the gospel.' The gospel exhibits Jesus in His life in the flesh in precisely that significance for faith which He has in the epistle. There is the same insistence on the flesh, on the historical reality, to which immediate testimony is borne; there is the same emphasis on the conception of Christ as 'Only-begotten,' one who gives others the right to become children of God (112), but has an incomparable sonship of His own; there is the same sense of owing everything to Him (116). There is not in the prologue a single word which betrays a purely speculative interest, such as we find, for example, in Philo. There is not a single technical term. The writer has no philosophical problems or conundrums for the solving of which he makes use of the category of the Logos. The one immeasurable reality which fills and holds his mind is Jesus. Jesus has been to him the. Interpreter of God (118): in knowing Him he has known God as he never did before; in seeing Him he has seen the Father: in associating with Him he has been flooded as it were, wave upon wave, with the fulness of grace and truth which dwelt in Him. This is fundamental in the prologue as it stands, and is the key to everything else it contains. Possibly we understand it best by comparing it with the other gospels. To all the evangelists Jesus is a great person, and it lies on them somehow to exhibit and explain His greatness. Mark, who is the earliest, does least. He connects Jesus with John the Baptist, and by a single allusion to the prophecies of Isaiah and Malachi, which were fulfilled in the forerunner, leaves us to infer that in Jesus God's ancient purposes are being achieved. Matthew goes further. He introduces Jesus as the Christ, son of David, son of Abraham. He is the key to the whole Jewish history: 'Biblical Essays, 63, 198.

the one true religion, beginning with the father of the faithful, has its consummation in Him. Luke goes further still. He traces the genealogy of Jesus not to Abraham but to Adam. He is sensible that His significance is not national but universal, and that to appreciate His greatness we must understand His essential relation not only to Israel but to the whole human race. But for John none of these ways of representing the greatness and significance of Jesus is adequate. To exhibit the truth about Him, or rather to exhibit Him in the truth of His being, we must relate Him not to the Baptist merely, or to Abraham, or to the father of mankind, but to the eternal being of God. This is what the writer does by means of the Logos idea, and it is for this purpose alone that he makes use of the idea. He does not arbitrarily assign to Jesus all or any of the functions assigned to the Logos in Heraclitus and the Stoics, or in the Alexandrian philosophy of Philo; in such things he has less than no interest. His heart is where his treasure is, with Jesus. In coming into contact with Jesus he has come into contact with the eternal truth and love of God; the final and all-sufficient revelation of Him whom no man has seen has been made in the Only-begotten. There is nothing in the universe-nothing in nature, in history, in all that has ever been known as religion or revelation-that can truly be understood except in this light (vv. 1-12). The world, as it has been put before, is a Christian world, and we do not understand it finally till everything in it has been set into relation to Christ. To set everything into relation to Christ, under this profound sense of His universal significance, is the purpose of the writer in the opening verses of his gospel. He does so in bold outlines, in a few brief sentences; and he borrows the conception of the Logos for a moment, because in the environment for which he wrote it facilitated

the execution of his purpose. But though he borrows the conception, he does not borrow from it. He does not invest Jesus with an unreal greatness which belongs to this philosophical conception and not to the Person. Jesus is too great for this, and too real; the writer knows Him too well, and his d.votion to Him is too absolute; as the gospel itself will show, he can say everything he has to say about Jesus without so much as using the term; and the interest of the prologue for our present purpose is that it puts at the very outset, though in a form that has created some misapprehension, his sense of the divine, eternal, and universal significance of Jesus. At the risk of being tiresome, it may be said once more that he did not borrow this from the Logos; he borrowed the Logos, because it lent itself to the convenient and intelligible expression of this independent Christian conviction. The value of the Logos doctrine for a Christian is that it can be used in this way, and if it ceased to be as convenient or as intelligible to modern readers as it was to Christians of Asia Minor when the gospel was published, its value would be gone.

When we pass from the prologue to the body of the gospel, we are practically in the same world of thought and experience which we know already from the first epistle. The writer himself tells us formally the purpose of his work. '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' (ch. 20 31). The ultimate aim of the evangelist here is the same with that which we find on the lips of Jesus Himself in c. 10 10: 'I am come that they might have life'; and in more solemn and formal terms in ch. 172f.: "Thou hast given Him power over all flesh, that all which Thou hast given Him He may give unto them eternal life. And this is life eternal, that they should know Thee, the only true God, and