ess, never garbling their testimony, not making
all bear the one uniform testimony which he himself bears; nay, showing
with as exact a truthfulness how unbelief grew, as how faith rose from
one degree to another, until the climax is reached in Thomas's explicit
confession, "My Lord and my God!" No doubt some of the confessions which
John records were not acknowledgments of the full and proper divinity
of Christ. The term "Son of God" cannot, wherever used, be supposed to
mean that Christ is God. We, though human, are all of us sons of God--in
one sense by our natural birth, in another by our regeneration. But
there are instances in which the interpreter is compelled to see in the
term a fuller significance, and to accept it as attributing divinity to
Christ. When, for example, John says, "No man hath seen God at any time:
the _only-begotten Son_, which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath
declared Him," it is evident that he thinks of Christ as standing in a
unique relation to God, which separates Him from the ordinary relation
in which men stand to God. And that the disciples themselves passed from
a more superficial use of the term to a use which had a deeper
significance is apparent in the instance of Peter. When Peter in answer
to the inquiry of Jesus replied, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the
living God," Jesus replied, "Flesh and blood hath not revealed this unto
thee"; but this was making far too much of Peter's confession if he only
meant to acknowledge Him to be the Messiah. In point of fact, flesh and
blood did reveal the Messiahship of Jesus to Peter, for it was his own
brother Andrew who told Peter that he had found the Messiah, and brought
him to Jesus. Plainly therefore Jesus meant that Peter had now made a
further step in his knowledge and in his faith, and had learned to
recognise Jesus as not only Messiah, but as Son of God in the proper
sense.

In this Gospel, then, we have various forms of evidence. We have the
testimonies of men who had seen and heard and known Jesus, and who,
though Jews, and therefore intensely prejudiced against such a
conception, enthusiastically owned that Christ was in the proper sense
Divine. We have John's own testimony, who writes his Gospel for the
purpose of winning men to faith in Christ's Sonship, who calls Christ
Lord, applying to Him the title of Jehovah, and who in so many words
declares that "the Word was God"--the Word who became flesh in Jesus
Christ. And wha