_different places_--the market-place, the
home at Bethany, the hillside, the Temple cloister; to many _different
audiences_--now in thronging crowds, and again to the secret disciple
whose footfall startled the night, or the lone woman drawing water from
the well; on many _different themes_--to mention all of which would be
impossible, though He never spoke on any subject, common as a wayside
flower, without associating with it thoughts that can never die. We
have but a small portion of His words recorded in the Gospels, it is
therefore the more remarkable that He left anything unsaid, and that at
the close of His ministry He should have to say, _I have yet many
things to say unto you_. Many parables, fair as His tenderest, woven
in the productive loom of His imagination, remained unuttered; many
discourses, inimitable as the Sermon on the Mount, or as this in the
upper room, unspoken; many revelations of heavenly mystery not made.

A comparison between the Gospels and the Epistles will indicate how
much our Lord had left unsaid. The relation of the law of Moses to His
finished work was left to the Epistle to the Romans: the relation
between His Church and the usages of the heathen world, for the Epistle
to Corinth: the effect of His resurrection on the sleeping saints for
the Epistle to the Thessalonians. He said nothing about the union of
Jew and Gentile on terms of equality in His Church; this mystery,
hidden from ages and from generations, was only fully unveiled in the
Epistle to the Ephesians. It was left for the Epistle to the Hebrews
to disclose the superseding of the Temple and its ritual by the
realities of the Christian dispensation. The practical precepts for
the right ordering of the Churches were left for the pastoral Epistles;
and the course of the Church through the ages of the world's history,
for the Apocalypse of the beloved Apostle. When we perceive the many
things, taught in the Epistles, which were not unfolded by the Lord, we
discern a fresh meaning in His assurance that He left much unsaid.

We are perpetually assailed by the cry, "Back to Christ," which is
significant of men's weariness of theological system, and organized
ecclesiasticism, and of a desire to get away from the accretions of the
Middle Ages and the dead hand of Church Tradition, into the pure,
serene, and holy presence of Jesus of Nazareth. It always seems to us
as if the cry should be _Up to_ Christ, rather than _Back_ t