Significance of St. John's intimacy with our Lord. 273

the moral of this cynical proverb is altogether at fault. Jesus. Christ chooses one disciple to be the privileged sharer of a nearer intimacy than any other. The son of Zebedee lies upon His bosom at supper; he is 'the disciple whom Jesus loved.' Along with St. Peter and St. James, this disciple is taken to the holy mount, that he may witness the glory of his Transfigured Lord. He enters the empty tomb on the morning of the Resurrection. He is in the upper chamber when the risen Jesus blessed the ten and the eleven. He is on the mount of the Ascension when the Conqueror moves up visibly into heaven. But he also is summoned to the garden where Jesus kneels in agony beneath the olive-trees; and alone of the twelve he faces the fierce multitude on the road to Calvary, and stands with Mary beneath the cross, and sees Jesus die. He sees more of the Divine Master than any other, more of His glory, more too of His humiliation. His witness is proportioned to his nearer and closer observation. Whether he is writing Epistles of encouragement and warning, or narrating heavenly visions touching the future of the Church, or recording the experiences of those years when he enjoyed that intimate, unmatched companionship, St. John, beyond any other of the sacred writers, is the persistent herald and teacher of our Lord's Divinity.

How and by what successive steps it was that the full truth embodied in his Gospel respecting the Person of his Lord made its way into and mastered the soul of the beloved disciple, who indeed shall presume to say? Who of us can determine the exact and varied observations whereby we learn to measure and to revere the component elements even of a great human character? The absorbing interest of such a process is generally fatal to an accurate analysis of its stages. We penetrate deeper and deeper, we mount higher and higher, as we follow the complex system of motives, capacities, dispositions, which, one after another, open upon us. We cannot, on looking back, say when this or that feature became distinctly clear to us. We know not now by what additions and developments the general impression which we have received took its shape and outline. St. John would doubtless have learnt portions of the mighty truth from definite statements and at specified times. The real sense of prophecy f, the explicit confessions of disciples, the

f St. John xii. 4Ι: ταῦτα εἶπεν Ησαΐας, ὅτε εἶδε τὴν δόξαν αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐλάλησε περὶ αὐτοῦ. Isa. vi. 9.

8 St. John i. 49. After our Lord's words implying His omnipresence, Nathanael says, 'Paßßì, où eÎ ¿ Yids toû Oeoû.

274 The most intimate companionship with Jesus

assertions by which our Lord replied to the malice or to the ignorance of His opponents h, were doubtless distinct elements of the Apostle's training in the school of truth. St. John must have learned something of Christ's Divine power when, at His word, the putrid corpse of Lazarus, bound with its grave-clothes, moved forward into air and life. St. John must have learned yet more of his Master's condescension when, girded with a towel, Jesus bent Himself to the earth, that He might wash the feet of the traitor Judas. Each miracle, each discourse supplied a distinct ray of light; but the total impression must have been formed, strengthened, deepened, by the incidents of daily intercourse, by the effects of hourly, momentary observation. For every human soul, encased in its earthly prison-house, seeks and finds publicity through countless outlets. The immaterial spirit traces its history with an almost invisible delicacy upon the coarse hard matter which is its servant and its organ. The unconscious, involuntary movements of manner and countenance, the unstudied phrases of daily or of casual conversation, the emphasis of silence not less than the emphasis of speech, help in various ways to complete that self-revelation which every individual character makes to all around, and which is studied by all in each. Not otherwise did the Incarnate Word reveal Himself to the purest and keenest love which He found and chose from among the sons of men. One flaw or fault of temper, one symptom of moral impotence, or of moral perversion, one hasty word, one ill-considered act, would have shattered the ideal for ever. But, in fact, to St. John the Life of Jesus was as the light of heaven; it was as one constant unfailing outflow of beauty, ever varying its illuminating powers as it falls upon the leaves of the forest oak or upon the countless ripples of the ocean. In the eyes of St. John the Eternal Person of Jesus shone forth through His Humanity with translucent splendour, and wove and folded around itself, as the days and weeks passed on, a moral history of faultless grandeur. It was not the disciple who idealized the Master; it was the Master Who revealed Himself in His majestic glory to the illumined eye and to the entranced touch of the disciple. No treachery of memory, no ardour of temperament, no sustained reflectiveness of soul, could have compassed the transformation of a human friend into the Almighty and Everlasting Being. Nor was there room for serious error of judgment after a companionship so intimate, so heart-searching, so

h St. John viii. 58, &c.

issues in the strongest assertions of His Divinity. 275

true, as had been that of Jesus with St. John. And thus to the beloved disciple the Divinity of his Lord was not a scholastic formula, nor a pious conjecture, nor a controversial thesis, nor the adaptation of a popular superstition to meet the demands of a strong enthusiasm, nor a mystic reverie. It was nothing less than a fact of personal experience. 'That Which was from the beginning, Which we have heard, Which we have seen with our eyes, Which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life; (for the Life was manifested, and we have seen It, and bear witness, and shew unto you that Eternal Life, Which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us ;) That Which we have seen and heard declare we unto you.'

LECTURE VI.

OUR LORD'S DIVINITY AS TAUGHT BY ST. JAMES,`

ST. PETER, AND ST. PAUL.

And when James, Cephas, and John, who seemed to be pillars, perceived the grace that was given unto me, they gave to me and Barnabas the right hands of fellowship; that we should go unto the heathen, and they unto the circumcision.-GAL. ii. 9.

THE meditative temper of thought and phrase, which is so observable in St. John, may be thought to bear in two different manners upon the question before us in these lectures. On the one hand, such a temper, regarded from a point of view entirely naturalistic, must be admitted to be a guarantee against the presumption that St. John, in his enthusiastic devotion to Jesus, committed himself to hasty beliefs and assertions respecting the Person of his Friend and Master. An over-eager and undiscriminating admiration would not naturally express itself in metaphysical terminology of a reflective and mystical character. But on the other hand, it may be asked whether too much stress has not been laid by the argument of the last lecture upon the witness of St. John? Can the conclusions of a mind of highstrung and contemplative temper be accepted as little less, if at all less, than a sufficient basis for a cardinal point of belief in the religion of mankind? May not such a belief be inextricably linked to the moral and intellectual idiosyncrasies of the single soul? The belief may indeed be the honest and adequate result of that particular measure and kind of observation and reflection which a single mind has achieved. As such the belief may be a worthy object of philosophical interest and respect; but is not this respect and interest due to it on the precise ground that it is the true native product of a group of conditions, which coexist nowhere else save in the particular mind which generated it? Will the belief, in short, bear transplantation into the moral and mental soil around? Can it be nourished and handed on

St. John's Christology, shared by the other apostles. 277

by minds of a different calibre, by characters of a distinct cast from that in which it originally grew? Dr. Samuel Johnson, for instance, had private beliefs which were obviously due to the tone and genius of his particular character. These beliefs go far to constitute the charm of the picture with which we are familiar in the pages of Boswell. But our respect for Dr. Johnson does not force us to accept each and all of his quaint beliefs. They are peculiar to himself, being such as he was. We admire them as belonging to the attractive and eccentric individuality of the man. We do not suppose that they are capable of being domesticated in the general and diversified mind of England.

Now, if it be hinted that some similar estimate should be formed respecting St. John's doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, the present, for obvious reasons, is not the moment to insist upon a consideration which for us Christians must have paramount weight, namely, that St. John was taught by an infallible Teacher, by none other than God the Holy Ghost. But let us remark, first of all, the fact that St. John did convey to a large circle of minds his own deep conviction that his Friend and Master was a Divine Person; paradoxical as that conviction must at first have seemed to them. If we could have travelled through Asia Minor at the end of the first century of our era, we should have fallen in with a number of persons, in various ranks of society, who so entirely believed in St. John's doctrine, as to be willing to die for it without any kind of hesitationa. But it would have been a mistake to suppose that the prevalence of the doctrine was due only to the activity of St. John. While St. John was teaching this doctrine under the form which he had been guided to adopt, a parallel communication of the substance of the doctrine was taking place in several other quarters. St. John was supported, if I may be allowed to use such an expression, by men whose minds were of a totally distinct natural cast, and who expressed their thoughts in a religious phraseology which had little enough in common with that which was current in the school of Ephesus. Nevertheless it will be our duty this

a The Apocalypse was probably written immediately after Domitian's persecution of the Church. Antipas had been martyred at Pergamos. (Rev. ii. 13.) St. John saw the souls of martyrs who had been beheaded with the axe ; εἶδον τὰς ψυχὰς τῶν πεπελεκισμένων διὰ τὴν μαρτυρίαν Ἰησοῦ. (Rev. xx. 4.) This was the Roman custom at executions. In the persecution under Nero other and more cruel kinds of death had been inflicted. The Bishops of Pergamos (Ibid. ii. 13) and Philadelphia (Ibid. iii. 8) had confessed Christ. St. Clement of Rome alludes to the violence of this persecution. (Ep. ad Cor. 6.) The Apostle himself was banished to Patmos.