prising if there had not been any. Daisies growing on the river's brim suggest questious philosophers cannot answer. Jelly fish on the sea-shore, bees on the wing, birds in the air, have mysteries locked up in their being to which the most skilled naturalists have no key. And the higher we ascend in nature, the more mystery confronts us, so that when we get to man we have more in his condition and circumstances than anywhere else, and the higher we go in the examination of man, the more numerous our unsolved problems, so that man, the highest work of God, is the biggest puzzle in creation." "And yet Revelation is to him and about him."

"Yes, and to the highest and noblest and most abiding elements in him-to his spiritual nature. So that Revelation is God, the supreme mystery in the universe, making Himself and His purposes known to man the supreme mystery on this earth. If this book had been without difficulties it would have been an immeasurably greater miracle than it is."

66 'But could such a miracle have been performed ?"

"Rather ask, was there any good reason for such a miracle ?"

"The gospel would have been easier of acceptance, would it not ?"

Perhaps so; and yet candid minds have again and again confessed themselves amazed both at the force and the amount of the evidence in favour of Christianity. But God has not arranged life on the plan of making all things easy, has He? Virtue is not easy of attainment, is it? It is only gained by struggle; and it is in the struggle that strength and patience and all the graces are born. The world is framed on the principle that the difficulties in it will lead men to virtuous deeds and to a virtuous character; and the Bible is framed on the idea that faith will not always be easy of attainment, but will be a victory gained by enquiry, by wrestling with and mastering doubts."

"But if the difficulties are so great as to make faith impossible to some minds, what then ?"

"Then Revelation would be a delusion and a snare. If the suffering and trial of life crushed and annihilated men it could not train them for virtue; so if men 'could not be persuaded' to believe in God and His gospel it would fail to save them. But neither human life, nor the Bible, is arranged with this view. They are meant for salvation and discipline. God would, you know, have sent Dives back to his five brethren if it

"In the presence of Death." NEVER was siege laid to strong city with more skill and determination than George Mostyn laid siege for several months of 1863 to the heart and mind of Joseph Bradley. Painfully realising in dim and shadowy outlines what fearful havoc would have been made amongst all his bright prospects if he had not been rescued from the whirling vortex of scepticism, he set himself with all his might to rescue the man who had been his snare from the danger into which he had fallen.

He saw his difficulties. Bradley was several years his senior, had been in sceptical circles for some time, seemed deeply versed in their literature, and was probably hard and unsusceptible to the tenderness and pathos of the gospel. But he was full of hope and resolution. He read every book he could get hold of that dealt with such difficulties as he expected him to raise. He conversed with his more experienced friends on the best methods of attack. Of course he took his sister Maggie into his confidence, and though George hesitated about telling all to Fred Williamson lest it should shake his faith, Maggie, who knew Fred better, told him all, and engaged his active sympathy in the same cause.

It was no slight joy to Fred and Maggie to be engaged in any good work, but to work together at it, brought a pleasure which single-handed they would not have found. Their hearts seemed closer to one another for the common service; and the undisclosed affection grew stronger and stronger though it dare not speak.

George did not wait long for an opportunity. He had made up his mind which was to be his first shot, and where to plant his first gun. He got ready and he fired. But either he missed his mark or the shot hit and produced no apparent effect. He began with himself and the terrible effect on his own life of three months of contact with scepticism. With unlooked for directness and extra courage he told him the damage he had suffered.

Bradley laughed and jeered.

George looked at him with a pained and anguished look.

Bradley met that look with more laughter and contempt.

66

Why that's the worst old woman's logic I ever heard. Be a man, Mostyn,

66

"Well, scepticism. I have tested scepticism and it has made a worse workman of me, a worse citizen, a worse son, and worse altogether, and on that showing even Mill would say its a bad thing and ought to be given up."

It was no use talking: all he could get in answer was scorn and ridicule. The next day, however, George renewed the attack from a different quarter, and surprised him by "flooring," as Bradley called it, seven of his chief "historical falsehoods," one after another, and from authors avowedly above suspicion. This signal triumph was followed by other victories of the same sort until he who had been compelled to admire his friend's moral worth, manly bearing and deeply fixed love of the true and just and good, was now reluctantly forced to defer to his intellect and confess the clearness and force of his reasoning. In his heart he could not deny, on the first day of George's onslaught, the weight of the argument from the demoralising effect of scepticism; for conscience and experience told him, when he had ears to hear, it had been so with himself, and this conviction secretly and slowly opened his mind with greater readiness to the statements and influence of his young shop-mate. Without confessing any shaking of the pillars of his disbelief, he forced the conversation again and again on to those subjects, borrowed Taylor's Restoration of Belief and other books of similar character, and attended a course of lectures on Christianity given by a converted sceptic of long experience and large ability. The tares were being ploughed up. It might be that on that cumbered ground the good seed planted years ago at Wexborough would yet bear fruit.

At Wexborough there had been bitter

grief for years, and now there was a crushing sorrow. Long and anxiously morning after morning the mother had watched the postman, hoping he carried a letter from her boy. Old Joseph Bradley had written again and again, and could get no answer; nor could a mother's tender appeal touch his hardened heart. He had sold the Bible they gave him, neglected all their advice, and had taken to flinging their letters in the fire. Still they did not cast him off. They prayed for him as before, but with deeper fervour and more tears, for his fall into the snare of the unbelievers made their love stronger, and gave him an overwhelming influence over their hearts.

"My dear boy," wrote his sorrowful mother, "if you want to see your father again in this world you must come soon. Do come, your dear father says he cannot die without seeing you." He had just come from one of the above lectures when he took up this letter, saw the Wexborough post-mark, recognised his mother's hand and was about to destroy it. But he mastered this first impulse and opened the letter. He read it. Again he read it. He was alone, and his thoughts came quick, and now his tears began to flow. He went to bed but could get no sleep. He felt he must go, and yet he shrunk from it with a feeling of inconceivable shame and loathing. Early next morning he left Euston station and travelled by way of Rugby and Leicester to his home.

In that home the old man lay dying. Moaning in his restlessness he said, "O, Absalom my son, Absalom, would God I had died for thee." "O that I had buried him when he was an innocent child with his brother and sister in the chapel yard." Then he rested awhile, but broke out again-" Do save my boy, O God, do save him. Let not my darling be destroyed by the infidels. Save!

save!" And then looking into his wife's eyes, he said with the earnestness of despair, "Polly, Polly, send for the boy. Tell him to come to me, I must see him. God took away John and Jane, and this my only child is lost. O God, I can't let him go to ," and the old man sobbed and shook with his agony-until nature overpowered, he fell asleep again and slept till nearly morning.

By and bye when the sun was up he woke, calm and tranquil, as if his sorrow had been assuaged, and said, "Did you say he was come, Polly, or was it a dream ?"

"I hope he is coming. I wrote for him the day before yesterday; he'll come to-day, I dare say."

The train hardly seemed to go fast enough for Joseph Bradley, so anxious was he to see his father once more and ask his forgiveness. The delay at Rugby was very wearisome. At Leicester one of his old playmates got into the same compartment, and recognising him he asked him many questions about the old place, and the people he had known eight or nine years ago. "Is he dead too? dear me, what changes! The old schoolmaster gone, and my Sunday school teacher, and Farmer Grange and Squire Wilson, all gone," and to himself he added, "really everybody is dying or dead or changed." Life's brevity and eternity's swift approach had never seemed such solemn realities to Joseph Bradley as now.

Well did his mother know the time the train arrived at the nearest station to Wexborough, and how long it would take her son to walk home. But all the morning her hungry heart and loving eyes were at the window looking down the street for his approach. Often, indeed, she had seen him, embraced him, wept

over him in her thoughts. But now she was really to see him again. She would look out of the window. She would go down the garden to meet him. She was restless. In the distance she saw him, with bent head and quick step hasting along. It was her boy, her only boy. He came in. She fell on his neck and they wept sore.

"Is father alive ?" he said in tremulous tones.

Yes, my lad, he is, and he wants to see you much."

"Let's go up then," and mother and son quietly went but with different feelings into the old man's room. The broken-hearted man turned himself towards his son, looked fully into his face, gasped out, "Thank God," and wept, and the son taking his father's hand in his said with sobs, "Do forgive me, forgive me all, dear father, as I hope God has."

It was enough, the old man's heart was glad. He felt his boy was not lost. He could die in peace.

THERE yet remains for notice the fourth gospel, that of the apostle John. A reader of this gospel, who had never heard of the controversies about its origin, would probably think that it contained the clearest indications of its authorship of all the four; yet, strange to say, it is the one whose authorship has been most vehemently assailed of late by critics of what I may, without offence, term the negative school. To me, the assaults upon it seem utterly insufficient to displace it from the high position which it has long held, not only in the judgment but in the affection of the Christian church; and I shall endeavour to show, without attempting to go into the whole question of its genuineness, how it coincides with what we can learn, from other sources, of the character and position of the holy apostle to whom we ascribe it, and how some features of it, which seem to present a difficulty, may be accounted for.

John and his brother James were the sons of Zebedee, a fisherman who pursued his calling on the Lake of Galilee, We do not read of more than one boat that he had; but it appears to have been large enough to give employment to more than his own family, for we read

JOHN CLIFFORD,

of his "hired servants."* It is probable that he died soon after the call of his sons to follow Jesus; for we learn no more of him after that; and his wife Salome seems, as well as her sons, to have followed our Lord in his journeys, to have waited on him in his life, and to have paid the last offices to his body after death; which may be taken as an indication that she was free from all claims of duty at home. From the priority of mention almost always given to James,t it is reasonable to infer that he was the elder, and perhaps the more energetic, of the two brothers;§ so that John readily conceded to him the more forward place, as we find he afterwards did to Peter. Be that as it may, he was one of the three apostles-his brother James and Peter being the others—that were admitted to the closer intimacy of the Saviour; who, we may conclude, found

* Mark i. 20. † Mat. xxvii. 55, 56; Mark xv. 40, 41. It is from a comparison of these two passages that we learn her name.

Luke ix. 28, is the only passage in which John's name occurs first.

§ Possibly his early martyrdom is an indication of this.

Comp. Acts iii. 4, &c.; iv. 8, &c.; viii. 20. They alone were admitted to be present at the raising of Jairus's daughter, at the transfiguration, and at the agony in the garden of Geth

semane.

in them a greater congeniality of disposition with Himself, and a greater readiness to sympathise with His own spiritual affections and purposes, than in His other disciples.

This may be thought, however, hardly consistent with some of the incidents recorded in the gospels, especially with the ambitious request of the brothers to sit on the Saviour's right hand and on his left hand, when he should come in his glory as the anointed King. But when we learn from Matthew (who, contrary to his wont, is in this instance more exact and circumstantial than Mark) that the request was made by their mother on their behalf, it is reasonable to infer that it was prompted by her natural motherly desire for the advancement of her sons, rather than that it arose from any very urgent desire of the young men themselves, or any great effort of theirs to obtain its fulfilment.* Two other recorded incidents, the desire to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans who refused to receive Christ, and the forbidding of the man to cast out demons in Christ's name, because he was not one of his personal followers, are evidences of the apostle's vehemence of temper arising from the strength of his affection for his Divine Master. It was perhaps from some manifestation of this vehemence that the brothers received from Christ the designation of "Boanerges," "the sons of Thunder."§

As my object is to show the accordance ance of the contents of the fourth gospel with what we learn of the apostle from other sources, I have not noticed the incidents which may be learned from the gospel itself. The writer claims to have been the special object of the Saviour's regard, describing himself repeatedly as "the disciple whom Jesus loved," and recording that he leaned on the bosom of Jesus at the last supper;¶ and that he received from his dying lips the solemn charge to do the part of a son in affectionately supporting and consoling the declining years of his bereaved and heart-stricken mother.**

In the Acts of the Apostles, John appears as the companion of Peter, with whom he took part in the miracle of healing the lame man at the beautiful gate of the temple, and in the imprisonment which followed it;†† and again in

* Matt. xx. 20-28; Mark x. 35-45.

+ Luke ix. 52 to 56.

Mark ix. 38 to 40: Luke ix. 49, 50.
Mark iii. 17.

ch. xiii, 23; xix. 26; xx. 2; Tch. xiii. 23 to 25. ** ch. xix. 25-27. tt Acts iii. iv.

xxi. 7, 20. Compare xxi. 24.

the mission to Samaria, to see what had been done there by the deacon Philip." (See above p. 314.) On both these occasions he seems to have yielded the lead to the practical and energetic Peter, as we have noticed that on other occasions, he seems to have done to his own brother James. After this we read no more of him in the Acts of the Apostles; but we learn from Paul's Epistle to the Galatians (ii. 9) that he was still at Jerusalem, and accounted "a pillar" of the church there, when Paul, after his first missionary journey, went up to vindicate the sufficiency of the gospel preached by him and the liberty of his Gentile converts; and that he was one of those who gave to Paul the right hand of fellowship, and sanctioned his mission to the Gentiles. This was probably about A.D. 50 or 52.

Of what we learn from ecclesiastical writers, the best ascertained and most important facts are, that, after leaving Palestine, he settled at Ephesus, apparently not earlier than A.D. 65 if so early, and that he died there at a very advanced age. That he was banished on account of his religion to the island of Patmos will be accepted as fact or denied, according as he is regarded or not as the author of the Apocalypse; a question will be presently considered. His death is fixed by Irenæus (who, as living in the latter part of the second century, and being a native of the Roman proconsular province of Asia, of which Ephesus was the chief city, is entitled to credit in this matter) in the reign of Trajan, and by Jerome, more exactly, in A.D. 100. His age can hardly have been less than ninety, and was perhaps more.

Four other books of the New Testament are ascribed to our Evangelist, three Epistles, and the Apocalypse or Revelation of which the First Epistle was generally received by the early Church; but the Second and Third Epistles, both very short, and the Apocalypse or Revelation are placed by Eusebius among the disputed books. The similarity of thought and style are justly regarded by most critics as clearly showing that the gospel and the First Epistle are by the same hand. The two short epistles perhaps failed to obtain general acknowledgment because, being originally private letters, and, from their brevity, of comparatively little importance and interest, they were published at a later date, and were more slowly diffused than the generally acknowledged writings.

The testimony of the early Christian

*Acts viii. 14 to 25.

writers is conclusive as to the place, Ephesus, where the gospel was written; and it is remarkable that it is only one of the gospels, the place of the composition of which is so clearly stated. Irenæus, whose evidence, for the reasons just given, is entitled to great weight, is the earliest witness to this tradition.

All thoughtful readers of the fourth gospel must be struck with the difference between it and the other three. This fact is in harmony with the statement of the ancients, that John designed his to be supplementary to theirs. Certainly he gives us a record of different discourses and different events from those given by them; and not only so, but the scene of his narrative is to a great extent different. Many of the transactions which he records occurred at Jerusalem or elsewhere in Judæa, or in Samaria; those recorded by the synoptic evangelists, occurred almost entirely in Galilee, except those which immediately preceded the crucifixion. Even with regard to these, where the four are on common ground, John has chiefly given incidents or discourses peculiar to himself. Eusebius accounts for it thus: "The three gospels previously written having been distributed among all, and also handed to him, they say that he admitted them, giving his testimony to their truth; but that there was only wanting in the narrative the account of the things done by Christ among the first of his deeds and at the commencement of the gospel. And this was the truth. For it is evident that the other three evangelists only wrote the deeds of our Lord for one year after the imprisonment of John the Baptist, and intimate this in the very beginning of their history.

For

these reasons the apostle John, it is said, being entreated to undertake it, wrote the account of the time not recorded by the former evangelists, and the deeds done by our Saviour which they have passed by, (for these were the events that occurred before the imprisonment of John,) and this very fact is intimated by him when he says, 'this beginning of miracles Jesus made,' and then proceeds to make mention of the Baptist in the midst of our Lord's deeds, as John was at that time baptizing at Enon, near Salim.' He also plainly shows this in the words, John was not yet cast into prison.' The apostle, therefore, in his gospel gives the deeds of Jesus before the Baptist was cast into prison, but the other three evangelists mention the circumstances after that event."* Jerome,

*Hist. Eccles. iii. 24 (Crusé's translation). Eusebius wrote early in the fourth century.

eighty years later, gives a similar account, adding that the gospel of John had a polemical character, being directed against Cerinthus, and the Ebionites, and other early heretics.†

The substance of Eusebius's statement may be accepted, though the details are open to question. It may be doubted if all the synoptic gospels were concur rently in circulation at so early a period; though Ephesus, from its position and importance, would be as likely a place as any for such concurrence. The differ

ence too between John's and the earlier gospels had reference to doctrine rather than to time; as Clement of Alexandria, a century before Eusebius, had observed. He says, "Last of all, John, observing that in the other gospels those things were related that concerned the body of Christ, and being persuaded by his friends, and also moved by the Spirit of God, wrote a spiritual gospel."

It is not easy for us who are born into a community, pervaded by the Christian traditions of many centuries, and who acquire early and almost unconsciously a knowledge of the great facts and leading precepts and truths of Christianity, and who are continually reminded of them by things around us, to realise the condition of the early believers, who had grown up and were living in the midst, not of a Christian, but of a Jewish or a heathen community, and had to acquire and retain by elaborate instruction the knowledge which we imbibe almost without an effort. To meet their wants, the synoptic evangelists wrote their gospels, which embodied the substance of previous apostolic oral teaching, and recorded the more popular of our Lord's discourses, and those events of his life which constituted the very elements of Christian faith. John's gospel, on the other hand, deals with those more abstruse and recondite truths, which meet the requirements of a riper Christian experience; which had been uttered by our Lord in conflict with his subtler adversaries, or in confidential intercourse with his chosen disciples; and had been elaborated in the mind of our evangelist under the promised guidance of the Spirit and the influence of the varied scenes of a long and eventful life. I suppose that even now the synoptic gospels have the preference in our earlier, and the fourth gospel in our riper years; and thus bear inward witness to the relative time and purpose of their original composition.

† De Viris Illustr. c. 9, cited in Lardner's Credibility, pt. II. ch. cxiv., sec. viii. 4.

Clem. Alex. in Eusebius, Hist. Ecc. vi, 14. I give Lardner's version of the passage.