A STUDY OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN THE SECOND CENTURY

CHAPTER VI

THE MYSTIC GOSPEL

Christianity had done its best, as we have seen, to purge itself of the virus of Gnosticism. But it was too late. It might cast out its Marcions and Valentines, but it could not undo the work they had wrought. Gnosticism had become bone of its bone. To read the pages of what was soon to be known as the New Testament is to come upon these hated doctrines again and again. They mark especially all the later books, bringing them into vivid contrast with the earlier. How unlike the Jesus of the Galilean Gospels is the “Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men”. What place could be found in Matthew or Mark for this language? “Who is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature : for by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers ... And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. ... In him dwelleth the whole Pleroma of the Godhead bodily”. Or where could this come in? “Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and up­holding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high; being made so much better than the angels, as he hath by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they”. Or this? “His name is called The Word of God ... And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of Kings, and Lord of Lords”. Strange reading this, also, for those who know the death and resurrection of the Master only as narrated by the early Gospels : “Put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: by which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison; ... and is gone into heaven, ... angels and authorities and powers being made subject unto him”.

It must be confessed, however, that these are but fragmentary and most inadequate tokens of a great spiritual movement. Is there nothing more to show? Does nothing remain but these scanty citations, or the recriminations of hostile theologians, to mark an agitation which stirred the young Christian Church so profoundly? Unfortunate, indeed, for the student of religious history, if this is really so.

Happily, if appearances do not deceive us, we are not so badly off. Just as the three earlier Gospels were assuming their final shape, and receiving the sanction of the churches, a fourth, whose unwonted form betrays a wholly dissimilar origin, is added to the number. We can only guess at its exact source. At a time when nearly all Christian writings were virtually anonymous, we cannot complain if this also shows but little trace of its authorship. From what school of thinkers it comes, however, there can be little question. Its opening verses reflect familiar meditations, and carry us at once into a religious atmosphere which we have learned to associate with Alexandria. We cannot be surprised at this. If the Jewish mind had been so influenced by Greek philosophy, how much more the Christian, with new and strange problems on its hands as to the relation of the human and the divine. To the Jew, these speculations threw light upon a grand historic past; to the Christian, they offered a splendid interpretation of incidents and truths still fresh in mind. The eternal Word, the only-begotten Son in the bosom of the Father, whom Philo could depict with the unimpassioned indifference of a philosopher, becomes for the Christian soul a sublime reality. It has taken flesh, and dwelt among men. The drama of ages has reached at last its fulfillment. How inadequate for the portrayal of this celestial scheme must the simple Galilean chronicles have appeared, with which till then the church had been content. Plainly, another Gospel must stand by their side, to reveal the divine significance of what they had treated as purely earthly events.

We must not pretend to more knowledge of this unknown writer or his origin than we really possess. It is only conjecture that connects him directly with Alexandria, or indeed with any special locality or circle; and we must rest content with marking the close affinities of thought and expression between the Fourth

Gospel and the Alexandrian School. As little do we know how far the author was indebted to the older Gospels for any of his historic material. There is certainly no sign of antagonism on his part, nor of any conscious purpose to supplement or correct them. One wonders, indeed, whether he even knew of their existence, so little does he hold to their narrative, or trouble himself to show where he deviates from it. The deviations are profound, and, if reconcilable at all with the primitive accounts, have never yet been reconciled. At the same time, the ingenuous and occasionally realistic character of the new narrative is too marked to allow us to suppose that the writer is inventing his story, or even wholly subordinating the outward events to his spiritual theme. He bases his Gospel upon what he believes to be actual facts; yet he leads us through unfamiliar scenes from beginning to end, and we become aware that he is drawing from some distinct and original historic source. Wherever this Gospel was written, in Alexandria, or in Asia Minor, a tradition of Jesus had survived as unlike the Palestine picture as Phrygia was unlike Galilee. It is no longer a Galilaean ministry that we are witnessing. It is in Judaea that the Messiah begins his earthly work; in Judaea that he chiefly continues it; and in Judaea that he ends it. Instead of lasting but a single year, it goes on from one Pass­over to another, and still another. He has at his side, not the familiar Twelve, but four or five companions hardly known to the other Evangelists. He discourses with his disciples or the multitude, not in familiar conversation or parable, but in stately tones of reverie or monologue.

But it is not so much the historic scenery which distinguishes this Gospel from the others, as the spirit in which the facts are handled. The writer’s interest lies, without concealment, not in the incidents which he is recording, but in their spiritual significance. Though transacted on earth, it is none the less a heavenly history which he presents. Indeed, it has no earthly beginning. There is no birth, not even a miraculous one; still less any Baptism, or Temptation, or Gethsemane. We are taken back at the outset to the very beginning, before time was; into the mysteries of the eternal councils. The actor in these scenes is not the human Jesus that he seems; not really he. It is the very Word, the Logos, which was with God from the beginning and was himself divine. He was the agent through whom all things were created. He was the only son really born of God; the only begotten; and shared the life and light which constitutes the essence of Deity. All this time, while the Son rested in the bosom of the Father, the world was lying in darkness, unaware even of the light which was shining upon every soul which came into the world. In him alone lies the redemption of a world bound in the tragic antithesis of darkness and light, evil and good. Now, at last (we are not told how or when), he has taken the form of flesh; has dwelt among us indeed in an earthly tabernacle, and we have gazed upon his glory, full of grace and truth. We have received what Moses and the Law could not give; what he alone who is in the bosom of the Father can declare. With the coming of the Christ, man enters at last upon his divine inheritance, the sonship of God.

With this Prologue, so impressive in its simplicity, and lending celestial dignity to all that follows, the new Gospel opens. The one connection with the human incidents which elsewhere attend the birth of the Messiah—or his entrance upon his ministry — is offered by the introduction of John the Baptist, “the man sent from God ... to bear witness of the Light”. It is not exactly the Baptist we know so well; the gaunt hermit of the wilderness, whose strange mien and attire, and fiery reproof of Pharisees and Sadducees, publicans and soldiers, make the most vivid sketch by far in the old Gospel picture; not the half-despairing preacher of the kingdom, doubtful to the end whether Jesus of Nazareth were really “he that should come”. This John the Baptist knew the Messiah from the start; had known of him before he came; and appears before us but for a moment, to usher in the incarnate Son of God. The anchorite, the wild reformer, the preacher of righteousness, has become a shadow of himself, a ghostly form which passes for a moment before our eyes, speaks the language of the Alexandrian philosophy, points dramatically to “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”, and disappears speedily from sight.

In a Gospel thus opened we shall hardly expect much individuality in the various actors, or much definiteness of place or time. Phrases like “the next day”, “the day following”, “the third day”, “after these things”, occur here and there, but have nothing behind to give them meaning, and introduce a chronology which is absolutely vague throughout. Men and women appear; but we must be prepared to find that they are as shadowy and intangible as the Baptist himself, and with even less part or concern in what occurs; that their conversation and actions are unreal, and that their presence simply affords occasion for the utterance of abstruse thoughts far beyond their comprehension, where speaker, listener, and narrator are forgotten in mystical and exalted monologue. The Messiah speaks in oracles; sometimes with no audience before him, and into the empty air; always as if looking beyond his hearers to the generations yet to come. We are in a shadow world throughout, where the invisible, the ideal, the spiritual alone is real.

Even the humanities, the tenderest, pass for little here. At Cana of Galilee, where a marriage feast seems for the moment to lend a pleasant personal touch to the opening narrative, when the mother of Jesus ventures to tell her son that there is no wine for the guests, Jesus replies : “Woman, what have I to do with thee? mine hour is not yet come”. Plainly, it is the Logos that speaks here, not the man. The whole scene indeed vanishes as we read. It is no real marriage; it is the entry of the Messiah upon his wonder-working career. It is the “beginning of miracles”, in which he “manifested forth his glory”.

The men and women of the narrative, as has been said, play no essential part in the course of events, but serve for the most part as occasions for philosophic discourse. At Jerusalem a certain Nicodemus, unknown to the other Gospels, comes stealthily into Jesus’ presence at night. He has no real question of his own to propose; the conversation, if such it can be called, is carried on on two distinct planes; he shows no understanding of the Master’s sententious speech; he disappears forthwith from the scene, and is forgotten by the narrator before the chapter is finished. But meantime his brief remark has afforded an opportunity for the Christ, quite regardless of Nicodemus’s presence, to unfold the purely heavenly character of his mission. In the Gospel of Matthew on a similar occasion, as Jesus enters upon his ministry, we have the fine ethical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount; here we listen instead to an unfathomable utterance upon the radical distinction between things of the flesh and things of the spirit. It is to the “spiritual” alone that the kingdom of heaven belongs : “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born from above, he cannot see the kingdom of God ... That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit”. Christ’s coming of itself brought out the vital antagonism between the creatures of darkness and the creatures of light: “This is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, ... but he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest”. In these mystic words, hardly more intelligible to us than to Nicodemus himself, the whole mission of Jesus is lifted once for all from earthly to celestial spheres; but before the discourse is ended, the hearer has passed wholly from our thought, and the result, so far as he is concerned, remains an unimportant matter of conjecture.

Again, as Jesus passes through Samaria, a woman meets him at a well. She is a woman of the people; of the lowest ranks of the people; even more impervious than Nicodemus himself to the higher truth. She can see in the Jewish stranger only a sorcerer, reading the forbidden secrets of her private life; the conversation between them is, as before, on two mutually inaccessible levels; the woman comes and goes as vaguely as Nicodemus; but none the less has elicited from the Christ the finest message of his Gospel, thrown out upon the air with none but a hardened woman to hear, and none to remember or report. “Woman, believe me, the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father ... God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth”. Where else in all literature do the material facts, the well, the water, the thirst, the woman, the husband, melt so completely into thin air, leaving only a spiritual essence behind?

Once for all, we must take these pages on their own ground, and catch from them the breath of that special age, if we would feel their power. If we seek here the charm or variety of historic incident, the nature-touch of parable, or even the burning tones of moral indignation or reproof, we look in vain. This is no chronicle, nor ethical treatise. In themselves these monologues, returning constantly to the same mystic theme, are strangely monotonous. It is only as they lift us with them into spiritual reverie that we discover their true force. This is especially true when familiar scenes from Gospel history pass now and then before us. The Jewish Sabbath is violated, as in the other Gospels. In them, as we remember, it calls forth fine moral precepts, and is made to inculcate lessons of beneficence and right. “The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath”. “Wherefore it is lawful to do well on the sabbath days”. Here it serves instead as a text for a theological disquisition, carrying us once again into the deepest mysteries of the Godhead. The Jews who throng around the Messiah in the streets of Jerusalem listen to a discourse on certain transcendent distinctions between the Father and the Son. Far from resting on the Sabbath, says the Christ, God works continually; and the Son also works. The Son reflects the being of the Father : “What things soever the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise”. He is absolutely dependent on the Father: “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do”. “I can of mine own self do nothing : ... because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me”. Yet the Son claims equal honor with the Father. In his hands, indeed, is the divine judgment; for his voice calls even the dead to life, and separates forever the believer from the unbeliever, assigning the one to eternal life, the other to “the resurrection of damnation”. Had the Jews understood their own Scriptures, they would have found all this concealed there; for beneath the letter was a hidden message. “They testify of me.” All testimony of the past points to the Christ.

The Christ of this Gospel may be of the Jewish race, or he may not; we cannot tell. He is called “Jesus of Nazareth”; he passes as a Jew; he is the son of Joseph, whose father and mother all know; he quotes from Jewish Scriptures; there is a story that he has come out of Galilee. Yet, on the other hand, he speaks of Galilee as if it were not his own country; and throughout the entire Gospel, the Jews are mentioned as if of a foreign race. They are always “the Jews”. Even the Christ himself, in addressing the Jews, speaks of “your law”, and “your father Abraham”. He goes still farther : “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him”. For the Logos, it would seem, the eternal Son of God, all questions of race or fatherhood or nation are of too slight account to be considered.

But other things beside places and individuals melt away under this spiritualizing process. One of the marked peculiarities of our Gospel is its strange silence in regard to the Lord’s Supper. It seems at first glance to know nothing of this incident whatever. The disciples gather at supper, it is true, on the night before the crucifixion; but the evening passes without any allusion to the rite which the Christian Church has ever since associated so closely with those closing hours. Can it be that the tradition, although so widely known among the churches, had not reached the author of this Gospel? Or is it left unmentioned because he would have his readers disregard the outward form of this historic rite, and see in it only its latent sense? If he refers to the Supper at all, this must be the explanation; and one of the early chapters of the Gospel seems to force us to this conclusion. No supper is mentioned there, nor any actual bread or wine. Jesus is in the synagogue at Capernaum. Below are the Jewish multitudes, with minds still intent upon the miraculous loaves on which they had been fed, and clamoring for some new sign, like the falling of the manna in the wilderness; above, the Christ, engaged in lofty speech which even the disciples cannot comprehend. In most narratives it would be bewildering to find allusions to a solemn rite like the Eucharist, before its establishment, and addressed to an assembly for whom the Eucharist could have no meaning; but here it does not surprise us at all. Time and place, flesh and blood, bread and wine, are but symbols at best of a diviner reality. The only true manna is the “bread of God; he which cometh down from heaven, and giveth life unto the world”. “I am that bread of life. Your fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead. ... I am the living bread which came down from heaven : if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world”. “Verily I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you ... For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed”. These forms and words are nothing; it is the spirit alone that tells. “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life”.

Even the miracles of this Gospel, like other outward incidents, lose their verisimilitude, and become themselves but symbols. They are no less vivid or genuine than elsewhere, they are apparently quite as historical, and are often even more realistic in their details; but while in Matthew, Mark, and Luke the tenderness or beneficence of the act itself challenges our attention, here the act always serves some ulterior purpose, for which alone it is introduced. It becomes expository or didactic; it points a moral; it affords a starting-point for a theological discourse, or the discussion of abstract and inscrutable truths. Of what moment is it in such a narrative, the writer seems to say, that the hungry multitudes are fed, or the blind made to see, or even the dead raised to life; it is not the thing itself, but the something symbolized that we are to remember. A man born blind sits by the wayside as Jesus and his disciples pass. The Master stops, makes clay to anoint the eyes of the sufferer, and bids him “go, wash in the pool of Siloam”, and be healed. A beautiful act of helpfulness, which touches our deepest sympathies, and on which we would gladly dwell. But no; it is not the physical blindness that we are to be moved by, but the spiritual. It is “that the works of God may be manifest in him”, that he has been healed. The blind man escapes from a lifetime of darkness to proclaim obscure truths, and enunciate the author’s dogmas. The Christ is shown thereby to be “the light of the world”. “As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world”. “For judgment I am come into this world, that they which see not might see; and that they which see might be made blind”. The passing touch of the human and the real disappears at once in the theological and ideal.

Again, a dear friend of Jesus dies. The Master’s relations with the whole household are peculiarly tender, and as he approaches the bereft home he is deeply moved. For a moment, one single moment, the stately march of the narrative is disturbed, the Logos is forgotten, and a living man stands before us. Jesus weeps. Yet only for a moment. All has been prearranged, we find at once; the bitter trial was known and intended from the beginning. “When Jesus heard that, he said, This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby”. The Master still tarries two days in the same place, though knowing that his friend’s death approaches. Then he says to his disciples: “Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go, that I may awake him out of sleep.... And I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe; nevertheless let us go unto him”. When the grave is opened, and the dead comes forth, it is that the people that stand by might “see the glory of God”," and believe that this was “the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world”. It was a token in advance of his own resurrection, which was to overcome death for all who believe. I am not for a moment criticizing this scene. No interpretation can rob it of its dignity or pathos. I am only calling attention to the character of a Gospel in which, even in moments like this, the historic fact loses itself so completely in its speculative import.

Again, false leaders are troubling the church as this Gospel is written; teachers of strange doctrines; false Messiahs, perhaps, such as were long ago predicted. All these, and indeed all previous teachers, says our Gospel, are but thieves and robbers; they are like hireling shepherds, fleeing from danger, and forgetting the safety of their flocks. “All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them ... I am the good shepherd : the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep ... I am the good shepherd and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep”. These are charming human touches, and bring the Christ very near to earth; but only to lift us at once to the clouds again. The good shepherd is the Logos; clothed with the very power of the Father. If he lays down his life, he has power to take it up again when he will. He can impart to his own eternal life. He shares in the very essence of the Father. “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. And I give unto them eternal life.... My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all ... I and my Father are one”. The Jews, to whom Jesus addressed these words, cry out against such a blasphemous assumption, and take up stones to stone him : “For a good work we stone thee not; but for blasphemy; and because that thou, being a man, makest thyself God”. And a vast assumption it was, if this were the Jewish Messiah of the earlier Gospels. Not so with the Logos; in whose mystic relations with Deity the old messianic notions have been forgotten. Do not his mighty works prove his supernal nature ? Do not their own Scriptures represent God as surrounded by heavenly hosts, and rank even Jewish and heathen rulers as gods? How much more could he whom the Father had sent into the world claim to be the very Son of God.

In these exalted moods, the imagination rarely concerns itself with precise definitions; and we cannot expect our author to show us the exact relations which this celestial being holds to the Infinite. Certainly he does not do so. Perhaps he had not formulated them in his own mind. These thoughts were still new; and the Christian mind had not yet entered upon those subtler distinctions which afterwards became so familiar, and were supposed to reconcile all contradictions, and remove all impossibilities. Meantime, so far as this Gospel is concerned, these contradictions stand, in all simplicity, side by side. The Son once rested in the bosom of the Father, and was with him “before the world was”; he was sent down to the earth and became flesh; like God, he “had life in himself”; he hath all judgment committed to him, and “quickeneth whom he will”; he is of the Father’s essence, and is himself divine; yet at the same time, he “can do nothing of himself”; he can do and speak only as the Father has taught him; and never ceases to declare his dependence upon the Father who sent him, and whose will alone he has come to perform.

By and by this will not be enough; and the Son’s august relations with the Father must be formally catalogued and established. As yet they belong to the sphere, not of logic, but of pure spiritual imagination.

But the story is not yet fully told. Insubstantial as are the scenes of this life in Judaea, it has like all others, if not an earthly beginning, at least an earthly close. Though there is no place in this Gospel for the struggle or agony of Gethsemane, though the cruel end has been foreshadowed from the outset, though the Son of God need not fear death, but has power even to raise himself from the grave, though he has come into the world simply to manifest, in his coming and going, the divine counsels, this cannot prevent a certain solemnity gathering over the closing hours, as of souls charged with momentous secrets. The familiar scenes of the earlier Gospels flit bewilderingly before our eyes; the same, yet strangely different; like the broken, inconsequent apparitions of a dream.

Though the Christ has gone daily in and out of Jerusalem during the two or three years of his ministry, he enters now as a stranger, and with the palm branches of a victor. Though never appearing before as the Jewish Messiah, he suddenly becomes the “king of Israel”, is received with shouts and songs, and seated upon an ass, as in ancient prophecy. Though his death is necessarily but a transient incident, and his burial can be therefore but for a moment, he is none the less anointed for his burial; not, indeed, as in other narratives, by a sinful woman, but by Mary, the loved sister of Lazarus, who wipes his feet with her hair. A vague trouble, as of Gethsemane, passes over his soul; yet brings no heartbroken supplication, — “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” No; but a far more triumphant strain: “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”. His life has already reached its predestined close; and what follows has no terror, because no human reality. “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 me”.

He meets his disciples for a final repast; yet not as in the other Gospels at the Passover, for the real Paschal lamb is to be offered on the morrow; nor yet to establish a covenant or initiate a rite. Beginning with a beautiful symbol of humility, in which the washing of his disciples’ feet is sublimated into the tie which binds the Son to the Father, and the disciples to each other, and to their Master, he fills the hours of the feast with long discourse, in which the mystic speech of the Gospel reaches its height; culminating in a vision of those whom the Father has given him as with him in heavenly places, and beholding the glory which has been his from the beginning.

All this, we feel, is not the work of a falsifier, far though he wanders from the ancient narratives. It is rather the work of one to whom the facts of the Judean ministry, as he has learned them, are divinely significant, and to whom the hidden meaning of such events is alone of real account. It is impressive enough, this fine disdain of the letter which killeth; this absolute absorption in the spirit which giveth life. It points us to many deep truths, and gives a sublime interpretation to the story of the Christ. The process has its perilous side, it must be confessed; and one who commits himself to it must bid farewell once for all to the historic sense, to which the commonest facts are of infinite worth. It removes these divine events from the path of human history. Were this the only record which had survived, we might well deplore its uncompromising mysticism, and long for a touch of the human and the real. But it is not; and we can enjoy its spiritual interpretations without reserve.

Among many points of resemblance to the earlier Gospels which this writing contains, there is one feature wholly peculiar to itself. It comes towards the close. The time approaches when the Son of God must depart. His earthly work is ended, and his disciples will see him no more. “I came forth from the Father”, he says, “and am come into the world : again, I leave the world, and go to the Father”. He speaks of no return upon the clouds, or messianic reign on earth. Yet he promises the disciples that he will not leave them wholly alone. The divine resources are infinite; the angelic hosts numberless. Among them is one whose function it is to take the place of the Logos when he departs. It is the Paraclete; a celestial being unknown to other writers of the New Testament, but evidently familiar to the readers of this Gospel. As in other systems of the period, this divine agent has many names. He is called now the Spirit of truth; now the Holy Ghost; now he seems hardly distinguishable from the Logos himself. Yet his character and functions are clearly marked. He is a direct effluence from the Almighty, sent to the world to fill the place of the Logos, and able to come only after the Logos has left the earth, but then to remain with the believer forever. “I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Helper, that he may abide with you for ever”. “It is expedient for you that I go away : for if I go not away, the Paraclete will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you”. He is to disclose to the disciples the secret meaning of truths which they had been slow to comprehend, and reveal the new teachings which till then they had not been prepared to hear. “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now ... But the Paraclete, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you”. The Paraclete has ceased to be a familiar name to our ears, that of Holy Ghost having early superseded it in Christian theology; but its presence on these pages is an interesting reminiscence of a movement which long agi­tated the church, and gives them an individuality distinctly their own.

This closing discourse, though so profoundly mystical in its spirit, is not without its touches of deep affection, passing at times, as the highest thought so often does, into tones of passionate tenderness. He commends to the Father, in words of great sublimity, those whom he has chosen as his own. His love for them is even as the Father's love for him, who loved him “before the foundation of the world”. His prayer is for them alone, and such as believed in him through their word. The world had not listened to him or heard his voice, therefore could have no place in his remembrance; but all the more are his disciples, sanctified through the truth, and sharing his heavenly glory, to become one in him. He even declares : “The glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one : I in them, and thou in me, that they may be perfect in one”.

It may seem strange to us that the “love” which so pervades these farewell words, and forms as it were their special note, should not embrace the entire world. The writer has freed himself wholly from the Jewish limitations which characterize the earlier Gospels; why does he stop short with the little circle of the elect? We cannot answer this question. We can only accept the fact as one illustration the more that the thoughts of one age are not the thoughts of another, and must not be forced upon another. Many conceptions which eighteen centuries of human activity have made familiar were just suggesting themselves to the second century; and even the mystic, it seems, could not rise wholly above the horizon of his time. In any case, Christendom had still long to wait, as we know, for the thought of God as concerning himself equally for all his creatures.

The closing incidents of the Messiah’s life, while following in general the familiar traditions, and adding some important details, resemble the earlier narratives rather as ghostly forms resemble living figures. The conversation with Pilate, though addressed to Roman ears, is an echo of the theological discourses which have preceded: “My kingdom is not of this world ... To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice”. The guards who accompany Judas, as they heard the voice of the Christ, “went backward, and fell to the ground”. There are no human revulsions before the fatal hour, nor any real sufferings at the end. The ideal death, not the real, was the supreme hour in this tragedy. No cries of anguish come from the cross, no despairing words : “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The celestial visitor announces with a word the end of his mission, and departs. “He said, It is finished : and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost”.

So, by the middle of the second century, a fourth Gospel takes its place beside the other three, destined, in so far as it is accepted at all, to open wide the doors of the young faith to the entrance of mysticism. It would be impossible to overrate its power, or be blind to the splendid assurance and sustained imaginative force with which it lifts the entire earthly scenery of Christianity into visionary spheres. The dividing line between the seen and unseen was less sharply drawn then than now, and many questions which force themselves upon our thought were not even asked. In an age when a human emperor, with more than the foibles of ordinary humanity, could be seriously worshiped after death as a god; when Olympus, a well-known mountain in Greece, had hardly ceased to be regarded as the abode of all the gods, or Jupiter to be revered as the supreme divinity, though sharing the basest human passions, it was quite possible, no doubt, to think of the life in Galilee as real, and yet conceive this sublime dream-world, in which the Logos, the eternal companion of Deity, steps down for the hour, inhabits a human form, allows his enemies to heap upon him indignities which touch him not, then passes back into heavenly realms, leaving a subordinate Aeon in his place. If Paul could imagine the Galilean preacher, who had died but yesterday, and whose daily companions he had known and talked with, to be the very “Lord from heaven”, still more easily, no doubt, could the writer of this Gospel, who had held no such living relations with Master or Apostles, view those sacred hours in their purely celestial aspects.

We cannot quarrel with one who has added so exalted a page to the world’s religious literature, or asserted so sublimely the rights of the spirit to claim all things as its own. Man’s spiritual history, Christianity itself, would hardly be complete had this page not been written, and written by one to whom this was the truth of truths. We must not quarrel, either, with the place he has won for his Gospel in Christian hearts; or the success with which he has effaced the earlier records, and made his interpretation supreme. It could hardly be otherwise, perhaps, so long as the love of the marvelous reigns in the human soul, or the pressure of stern spiritual problems drives humanity into the arms of the ideal. If religious truth is a thing which must never be looked squarely in the face, then indeed these pious endeavors to soften the hard outlines of reality cannot lose their value; and the Fourth Gospel will still hold its place as the consummate flowering of Christian faith. Among certain schools, as we know, this mystic volume is the saving of Christianity, rescuing its facts from their sordid literalness. It is the keynote of Christian philosophy. To them, as to the writer of this Gospel, the unseen alone is real. According to their faith, the pre-existent Logos, eternal effluence from Deity, alone renders possible the communion of the human with the divine. Without the Logos, man and God remain forever apart. The metaphysical necessities of philosophy dominate the spiritual necessities of the soul, and the Fourth Gospel becomes in such hands an imperious occultism, summing up once for all God’s message to the world. Fortunately it is not necessary to contest this point here. In an age when the historic temper and the scientific spirit, unknown in those primeval days, have come at last to their rights, such a question may safely be left for the future to decide. For those of us who cannot for a moment accept any single writing as the last word of Christianity, the beauty and poetry of this Gospel still retain their charm, and it stands as an eloquent chapter of Christian history.

But it is a chapter only, not the whole. If the mystic interpretation of the life of Jesus was beautiful, that life was also beautiful; the more beautiful, the more distinctly its actual features are seen. Its secret lies in its reality. To that earthly life all abstract theories owe whatever significance they possess; and when one speculation after another has had its day and been forgotten, it is the life itself which will remain as the supreme message of Christianity to the race.

Viewed in this light, these four Gospels form a unique record of momentous hours. Neither can take the place of the other. Without the Fourth Gospel, we should never have known the rapturous dreams which the young faith could excite, or the daring ideals it could create; with the Fourth Gospel alone, we should never have guessed that Jesus of Nazareth led a human life, ending in a human tragedy. For this knowledge we must still turn to those homelier chronicles in which facts, too, have their rights, and which claim for themselves no nobler function than to record ingenuously the comings and goings of one sacred year in Galilee.

END