he essential predicate of the inward unity of the divine life; and Christ (in John's Gospel) calls himself the truth and the life. Hence, the ideas of love and holiness are the two divine attributes which (as far as it is possible to reduce John's pregnant words to precise intellectual notions) will most nearly express what he represents as the characteristic of the glory of God revealed in the life of Christ, and agree with his using love and holiness in his first epistle as designations of the divine being.'

God has been glorified in Christ (John xiii. 32), in him as the Son of Man, by whom the archetype of humanity is realized; that is, he has exhibited in human nature the glory of God, the perfect image of God as holy love. As man was created in the image of God, and was destined to glorify God, that is, to manifest him in his glory with selfconsciousness-this is now fulfilled by the Son of God in human form. The practical revelation of the heavenly Father in the obscure subjective consciousness of man, and his perfect revelation in the appearance of the Son, are mutually related; the former was a preparation for the latter; and the latter reflects fresh illumination on the former. As whoever understands that revelation of God which pierces through the thick darkness of the soul, must be attracted by the perfect revelation of the same God in his Son, it follows, that whoever knows the Father must necessarily recognise the Father in the Son,-while the not recognising, or the denying of the Son, is a proof that a man knows not the Father, and is estranged from him. The image of the Father is perfectly exhibited in the Son, in his holy love to man, and in him also was first revealed in a comprehensible manner what a being that God is, whose holy personality man was created to represent. Through him God closes up the chasm that separated him from the human race, and im

1 John does not make use of the second term precisely, but it is implied in what he says; for when he affirms in 1 John i. 5, "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all," as darkness is a designation of sin,-light, by contrast, is expressive of holiness.

After Christ had said (John vi. 45) that all must be leu to him by the voice of his Father speaking in their hearts, he guards against a misapprehension, as if this was in itself a complete knowledge of the Father. This only the Son possesses, and he alone can reveal it. former must be therefore something preparative, a way-mark to more perfect knowledge.

The

parts himself to them in the communion of a divine life; and by that life it is taught that all living knowledge of God can only proceed from life; and thus the apostle was justified in saying, "Whoever hath not the Son, hath not the Father also."

The Son is a perfect personality in humanity, in which the eternal personality of God is imaged. Thus by the drawing of the Father man is brought to the Son, and through the manifestation of the Son he is led to the Father. Along with the Son man loves the Father, and with the Father he loves the Son. This is a position which appears with increasing luminousness in the historical development of mankind, and to it history is constantly giving a clearer commentary.

John contemplates the whole life of Christ from the beginning as a revelation of the glory of the divine Logos, as in short a connected revelation of God; and hence the divine in reference to Christ must never be viewed as something isolated and extraneous. His miracles also, as marks of a divine power controlling nature, as witnesses to the presence of such a power, are not explicable from natural causes in the phenomenal world; they cannot be regarded as isolated or superadded from without, as a new order of facts differing in their essential qualities from the other works of Christ. Only as far as the glory of God which originally dwelt within him, which at the beginning of his public ministry as the Messiah was entirely veiled under the ordinary forms of human life-from that epoch came forth on particular occasions from its concealment, and manifested itself in such results in the world of the senses by which even carnal men might be roused to perceive the presence of the divine-only in reference to this beginning of a new epoch in his ministry for the revelation of the glory of God among mankind, John distinguishes the beginning of the miracles of Christ (ii. 11) as the beginning of the revelation of his glory. When he tells us, that the Baptist saw the Spirit of God descending on the Redeemer, by which he was distinguished as the personage who would baptize with the Holy Spirit, he certainly did not mean to intimate that Christ, according to the common Jewish and Judaizing-Christian view, was then first furnished with the fulness of divine power for his Messianic calling ;— for John's mode of contemplating his character is most

decidedly opposed to such a representation. According to his own conceptions, since Christ was no other than the incarnate Logos, all that was divine in former revelations became concentrated in him; hence, single transitory impulses and revelations of the Divine Spirit could not be attributed to him; but the Holy Spirit, which illuminated and inspired former prophets partially and occasionally, dwelt in him from the beginning in its totality, and operated by him from this time in those extraordinary signs which were perceptible to common men. It was precisely for this reason, that the Son possessed his divine life, not as something communicated from without, but dwelling in his very being, and essential to it, that the divine fountain of life itself was manifested in him, that he alone could communicate divine life to others, John v. 26; and the baptism of the Holy Spirit which he administers, is no other than the immersion of human nature in the divine life communicated by him, so that it becomes completely imbued with it; John vii. 39.

But as the miracles of Christ appear sometimes in relation to the inward essence of his appearance, to the dóla which proceeded from the indwelling of the Logos as simply belonging to his nature; so, on the other hand, they are the marks or signs of the revelation of this indwelling glory for carnal men, in order to lead them from his appearance in the sensible world to the divine, to excite their susceptibility for the total impression and display of the divine dóka revealed in the Son of Man. In this sense, Christ said to Nathaniel, whose faith was founded on these outward signs, "Thou shalt see greater things than these; from this time thou shalt see the heavens opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man." Greater than all the signs and wonders which attended or followed it was his advent itself; for by it the chasm between heaven and earth was closed, it became the bond of communion between both, the medium by which the fulness of the divine power was poured forth on mankind, and in comparison with which the total assemblage of divine communications to the human race, all earlier Angelophanies and Theophanies were only as so many single rays of the Deity.

We thus ascertain the gradations in the use of the term faith by John; he understands by it, either the acknowledgment higher power proceeding from impressions made on

the senses, from the impression of extraordinary facts in the sensible world, as in ii. 23; or the possession of the heart by an immediate spiritual impression of the divine in the life and words of Christ, as was exhibited in Peter's confession; vi. 68.

Though John presents, with peculiar earnestness, the selfrevelation and self-impartation of Christ as the incarnate Logos through the whole of his earthly life for an object of believing appropriation, yet it is evident from various intimations, that he attributes the same importance as Paul to the sufferings of Christ in the work of redemption. As far as Christ in his sufferings manifested the love of God to the fallen race of man, and carried the moral ideal of his life through a series of conflicts to its triumphant conclusionand with self-denying labour completed the work which his heavenly Father had commissioned him to fulfil—the Saviour affirms in reference to these his impending sufferings, that he had, in determination of will, already fulfilled them, xiii. 31; that now was the Son of Man glorified, and God was glorified in him. He speaks of his sufferings as the completion of his life devoted to God as a sacrifice, xvii. 19; that he thus devoted himself to God, or presented himself as a sacrifice, for his disciples, that they might be devoted or consecrated in the truth. The realization of the ideal of holiness in Christ's life and sufferings, is here represented as the ground of the sanctification of the human race. Had he not himself realized this ideal, he could not have furnished this principle of sanctification for all mankind, which they as individuals receive only by entering into communion with him, and by appropriating the truth which he announced. In John's writings, as in Paul's, we find the idea of Christ's bearing the punishment of sin for mankind, and the reconciliation of mankind with God through him, though this idea is not so expressly developed, and though greater prominence is given to the idea of Christ as the dispenser of divine life, and the founder of a communion in that life. Thus John the Baptist compares him, as innocent and full of heavenly mildness and patience under sufferings, to a Lamb, on whom the punishment of sin and the guilt of mankind are (as it were) laid and thus carried away; and the apostle himself designates him in his first 1 We have not entered into the controversy respecting the sense in which the Baptist originally used these words, since it is here only

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epistle, the sin-offering, the Xaopos for sin. And when Christ had been declaring that divine life would be attained only in communion with him, that as the bread of heaven he was the same for the spiritual life of man which material bread is for the bodily life, he added (vi. 51), that the bread' was his body,' which he would give for the life of the world; he then repeats the same idea though under a different form, and describes how he must be received in his whole nature, divine and human. We are therefore led to believe, that between these two views, of which one relates in general to the whole being of Christ, and the other to his offering up himself for the salvation of men, an internal connexion must exist. The communication of divine life by the Redeemer,all that his divine life could effect for mankind, depended on this, that as he himself had glorified the Father on earth, he would be exalted in that human nature in which he had so glorified him, above the limits of earthly existence to the fellowship of his Father's glory; that he might from that time, by an invisible spiritual agency, complete among men the work of which he had laid the foundation during his earthly sojourn, that he might now glorify him through the development of the divine life, and the victorious progress of the kingdom of God on earth. Christ himself points out this necessary connexion in that passage of John's Gospel, where he compares his life on earth to a grain of corn which must first be dissolved, and lose its peculiar form, in order that it may not abide alone, but bring forth much fruit. The divine life remained hidden in himself as his own exclusive possession during his sensible presence on earth. There was indeed a natural reason for this, that the apostles, as long as they saw Christ sensibly present among them, and enjoyed on all occasions his personal guidance, were dependent on his outward superintendence; they could not raise themselves above his human personality to the higher point of view of him as the Son of God, to an independent spiritual communion with him

of importance to determine the ideas of the apostle John on the subject.

This is not exactly the same as his calling himself, in his whole being and appearance, the Bread of Life.

To justify this interpretation. I refer to Lücke's commentary on

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