, with a
perpetual discoursing about the Father and the Son; of which there is
barely the germ in Matthew:--and herewith a new doctrine concerning
the heaven-descended personality of Jesus. That the divinity of Christ
cannot be proved from the three first gospels, was confessed by the
early Church, and is proved by the labouring arguments of the modern
Trinitarians. What then can be dearer, than that John has put into the
mouth of Jesus the doctrines of half a century later, which he desired
to recommend?

When this conclusion pressed itself first on my mind, the name of
Strauss was only beginning to be known in England, and I did not read
his great work until years after I had come to a final opinion on this
whole subject. The contemptuous reprobation of Strauss in which it is
fashionable for English writers to indulge, makes it a duty to express
my high sense of the lucid force with which he unanswerably shows that
the fourth gospel (whoever the author was) is no faithful exhibition
of the discourses of Jesus. Before I had discerned this so vividly
in all its parts, it had become quite certain to me that the secret
colloquy with Nicodemus, and the splendid testimony of the Baptist
to the Father and the Son, were wholly modelled out of John's own
imagination. And no sooner had I felt how severe was the shock to
John's general veracity, than a new and even graver difficulty rose
upon me.

The stupendous and public event of Lazarus's resurrection,--the
circumstantial cross-examination of the man born blind and healed
by Jesus,--made those two miracles, in Dr. Arnold's view, grand and
unassailable bulwarks of Christianity. The more I considered them, the
mightier their superiority seemed to those of the other gospels. They
were wrought at Jerusalem, under the eyes of the rulers, who did their
utmost to detect them, and could not; but in frenzied despair, plotted
to kill Lazarus. How different from the frequently vague and wholesale
statements of the other gospels concerning events which happened where
no enemy was watching to expose delusion! many of them in distant and
uncertain localities.

But it became the more needful to ask; How was it that the other
writers omitted to tell of such decisive exhibitions? Were they so
dull in logic, as not to discern the superiority of these? Can they
possibly have known of such miracles, wrought under the eyes of
the Pharisees, and defying all their malice, and yet have told in