ioner, before I answer it.'
And when Pilate brushes aside Christ's question, with a sort of
impatient contempt, and returns to the charge, 'What hast Thou done?'
our Lord, whilst He makes the claim of sovereignty, takes care to make
it in such a way as to show that Rome need fear nothing from Him, and
that His dominion rested not upon force. 'My Kingdom is not of this
world.' And then, when Pilate, like a practical Roman, bewildered with
all these fine-spun distinctions, sweeps them impatiently out of the
field, and comes back to 'Yes, or No; are you a King?' our Lord gives a
distinct affirmative answer, but at once soars up into the region where
Pilate had declined to follow Him: 'To this end was I born, and for this
cause came I into the world, that I might bear witness to the truth.'
'Before Pontius Pilate he witnessed the good confession.' And His
confession was His royalty, His relation to the truth, and His
pre-existence. 'To this end was I born,' and the next clause is no mere
tautology, nor a non-significant parallelism, 'and for this cause came I
into the world.' Then He was before He came, and birth to Him was not
the beginning of being, but the beginning of a new relation.

So, then, out of this great word of our text, which falls into line with
a great many other words of the New Testament, we may gather important
and significant truths with regard to two things, the matter and the
manner of Christ's witnessing. You remember how the same Apostle
John--for whom that word 'witness' has a fascination in all its manifold
applications--in that great vision of the Apocalypse, when to his
blessed sight the vision of the Master was once given, extols Him as
'the faithful witness, and the First-begotten from the dead, and the
Prince of the kings of the earth.' And you may remember how our Lord
Himself, after His conversation with Nicodemus, says, 'We speak that we
do know, and bear witness to that we have seen,' and how again, in
answer to the taunts of the Jews, He takes the taunt as the most
intimate designation of the peculiarity of His person and of His work,
when He says, 'I am one that bear witness of Myself.' So, then, we have
to interpret his declaration before Pilate in the light of all these
other sayings, and to remember that He who said that He came to bear
witness to the truth, said also, 'I am the truth,' and therefore that
his great declaration that He was the witness-bearer to the truth is
absolutely