ddle like Peter. To show astonishment or
entire incredulity or misunderstanding if a course in life quite
different from ours is found to be quite as useful to Christ's people
and to the world as ours; to show that we have not yet apprehended how
many men, how many minds, how many methods, it takes to make a world, is
to incur the rebuke of Peter. Christ alone is broad as humanity and has
sympathy for all. He alone can find a place in His Church for every
variety of man.

Coming to the close of this Gospel, we cannot but most seriously ask
ourselves whether in our case it has accomplished its object. We have
admired its wonderful compactness and literary symmetry. It is a
pleasure to study a writing so perfectly planned and wrought out with
such unfailing beauty and finish. No one can read this Gospel without
being the better for it, for the mind cannot pass through so many
significant scenes without being instructed, nor be present at so many
pathetic passages without being softened and purified. But after all the
admiration we have spent upon the form and the sympathy we have felt
with the substance of this most wonderful of literary productions, there
remains the question: Has it accomplished its object? John has none of
the artifice of the modern teacher who veils his didactic purpose from
the reader. He plainly avows his object in writing: "These signs are
written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God,
and that believing ye might have life through His name." After half a
century's experience and consideration, he selects from the abundant
material afforded him in the life of Jesus those incidents and
conversations which had most powerfully impressed himself and which
seemed most significant to others, and these he presents as sufficient
evidence of the divinity of his Lord. The mere fact that he does so is
itself very strong evidence of his truth. Here is a Jew, trained to
believe that no sin is so heinous as blasphemy, as the worshipping more
gods than one or making any equal with God--a man to whom the most
attractive of God's attributes was His truth, who felt that the highest
human joy was to be in fellowship with Him in whom is no darkness at
all, who knows the truth, who is the truth, who leads and enables men to
walk in the light as He is in the light. What has this hater of idolatry
and of lying found as the result of a holy, truth-seeking life? He has
found that Jesus, with whom he