. They had seen such sights, and heard such words, that they
were inclined to be silent, and think over it all, and only wrote
because they must write. They felt that our Lord, as I say, was
utterly beyond them, too unlike any one whom they had ever met
before; too perfect, too noble, for them to talk about him. So they
simply set down his words as he spoke them, and his works as he did
them, as far as they could recollect, and left them to tell their
own story. Even St. John, who was our Lord's beloved friend, who
seems to have caught and copied exactly his way of speaking, seems
to feel that there was infinitely more in our Lord than he could put
into words, and ends with confessing,--'And there are also many more
things which Jesus did, the which if they should be written every
one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the
books that should be written.'

The first reason then, I suppose, for the evangelists' modesty, was
their awe and astonishment at our Lord. The next, I think, may have
been that they wished to copy him, and so to please him. It surely
must have been so, if, as all good Christians believe, they were
inspired to write our Lord's life. The Lord would inspire them to
write as he would like his life to be written, as he would have
written it (if it be reverent to speak of such a thing) himself.
They were inspired by Christ's Spirit; and, therefore, they wrote
according to the Spirit of Christ, soberly, humbly, modestly,
copying the character of Christ.

Think upon that word _modestly_. I am not sure that it is the best;
I only know that it is the best which I can find, to express one
excellence which we see in our Lord, which is like what we call
modesty in common human beings.

We all know how beautiful and noble modesty is; how we all admire
it; how it raises a man in our eyes to see him afraid of boasting;
never showing off; never requiring people to admire him; never
pushing himself forward; or, if his business forces him to go into
public, not going for the sake of display, but simply because the
thing has to be done; and then quietly withdrawing himself when the
thing is done, content that none should be staring at him or
thinking of him. This is modesty; and we admire it not only in
young people, or those who have little cause to be proud: we admire
it much more in the greatest, the wisest, and the best; in those who
have, humanly speaking, most cause to be proud.