they not be collected? could not the chaff be separated from the wheat, the fancies of men from the Divine discovery? The answer to this demand is in the written Gospel. How a Gospel should be written, who should write it, those who longed for one could not tell. But they believed the longing to be given them from above; they could not doubt that He who inspired it would in some way gratify it.

As I read the Gospels, I find how this need has been supplied. From the place which they now occupy in our Bibles, it has been supposed that they contain 'lives of Jesus,' originally simple, probably derived from a common source, increased and interpolated by degrees as notions of His character and office, which had not been previously entertained, were developed in the Church. Such a notion, it seems to me, is dispelled, if we take any one of them and consider it carefully and regularly. I propose to do this with St. Luke's, not from any preference for it, but specially on account of its connection with that other treatise of which I have spoken to you already. When we have gone through it, you may reconsider that treatise in what appears its natural order.

(1) The introduction to this Gospel is the highest authority for that account of the purpose of its composition which I have given you. Theophilus, whoever he was, was already a disciple. He had been instructed in the things which were most surely believed in the Church. He desired to know the certainty of those things. St. Luke believed that it was his vocation to give him what he wanted. If Theophilus was an individual, he represented the need of the Church generally. That which was good for him, might, if God pleased, be good for ages to come.

(2) Many, St. Luke says, had attempted this task before him. They had taken in hand, our translators say, to set forth a DECLARATION of the things which are most surely believed in the Churches. The declaration, I conceive, had been made already. That had been contained in the preaching of the Apostles and their helpers. What was wanted was a continuous Narrative of the things which made the substance of the declaration; for it was a declaration of things, not of opinions; of events that had happened, of acts that had been done. The preaching concerned a person, the narrative must exhibit a person.

Who had taken this great enterprise in hand St. Luke does not say. He may or may not have read the narrative of St. Matthew or St. Mark. Those narratives may or may not have been written. At all events, his phrase 'many' will not be satisfied by these two. Nor does St. Luke pronounce on the merits or demerits of his predecessors. That was not his calling. There was a better judge than he of the genuine and the spurious. We may safely affirm that he was not afraid if the experiments to produce a record of our Lord's acts were ever so numerous; if some of them were ever so confused and erroneous. He could not believe the word which he preached unless he had confidence that what was true would live, that what was false would be, sooner or later, divided from it. If God had conferred the highest blessing on the human race, He would take care that the human race should not miss the blessing through any want of means to be acquainted with it.

(3) The next clause of this introduction has perplexed many, perhaps has given pain to some. As they delivered these things to us, which from the beginning were

eyewitnesses. What then, are we not about to read the story of an eyewitness? St. Luke does not claim that character; he does not desire that we should invest him with it. He has received these records from those

who were. He has examined their reports carefully. He does not say that he ever saw Christ whilst he was walking in Galilee or Judæa. He seems to imply the contrary. Now here is a difference between him and some of the other Evangelists, perhaps between him and all the other three. Is it a difference which puts him below them, which makes his testimony inferior to theirs? According to their own judgment and confession, assuredly it is not. They tell us that they did not understand the words and acts of Jesus whilst they were walking with Him, whilst they were eyewitnesses of what He did. They misapprehended the particular words and acts. They misapprehended They misapprehended

their relation to each other.

the Person who was the speaker of the words and the doer of the acts. They tell us this again and again, in various forms of expression, all natural, all simple. Their eyes were holden,' Their hearts were hardened.'

No doubt they would, sometimes, have ventured to reproduce His parables, or His explanation of the parables, to those about them. They must have been conscious that their lips were stammering, that they misrepresented Him when they most wished to be faithful in their reports; that they degraded Him whom they most wished that others should exalt. By degrees, they will have learnt the wisdom of obeying Him simply, by only preaching 'Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand,' as He bade them, and using the powers of that kingdom as He imparted

them. What they all say what no one says so frequently as the beloved disciple-is, that the things which they could not understand at first came to them with full power and revelation when they saw Him no more; that His Spirit brought back to them acts which had been hidden in the cells of their memory, quickened words that had been mere dead sounds, harmonised precepts which had seemed fragmentary or contradictory, discovered to them the divine source from which they had issued. No doubt to be eyewitnesses of a fact or a person is an honourable distinction but an eyewitness may glorify himself on that distinction, and attribute a worth to it which no careful student of evidence will concede. There are qualities necessary in an eyewitness besides his eyes, if he would teach us anything, if he would impart truth to us; one who possesses these qualities, and who faithfully sifts the testimonies of eyewitnesses, may tell us what they do not tell, may open to us the very sense and purpose of what they do tell. It is so in all cases if we believe the Evangelists-those of them who were eyewitnesses-it is pre-eminently so in this case.

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(4) In connection with this subject, I would direct your attention to an expression of St. Luke which is sometimes overlooked. He speaks of those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word. What does he mean by the Word? He does not surely mean that a man could be an eyewitness of sounds, or a minister of sounds. If the expression occurred in St. John's Gospel, it would cause no perplexity. We should assume at once that he was speaking of the Word which was in the beginning; whose life was the light of men; who was made flesh and dwelt among men.

But it has been customary to assume that no other of the Evangelists ever fell into this kind of language. I cannot doubt that the Apostle who survived to the end of the age, was specially appointed to remove confusions which had haunted the readers of the earlier Gospels and which were giving occasion to various partial theories, by declaring broadly that He who healed the sick and cast out demons whilst He walked below, was the eternal Source of all good and deliverance to the sons of men, one with the Father before the worlds were. But every Jew could read, as well as St. John, that the Word of God had come to Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel. Every Jew who read their prophecies as they were written, believed they had conversed with this Word as with a living person. The thought, 'He with whom we have conversed is that same Person-He has in human flesh revealed Himself to us,' was not a strange speculation, the refinement of a later age. It was the simplest way of connecting the old world with their day. It was the great escape from the rabbinical traditions which buried the divine Person under the mere letter of the books. That this thought should express itself naturally-unconsciously, as it were—at the outset of a Gospel concerning a Person, who was an impostor if He were not the messenger of God, the utterer of His mind, cannot, I think, cause us any surprise. Formally to assert the force of the prophetical phrase-to make it prominent before all others-was not St. Luke's calling. The King, the Christ, is his subject. If we admit any direction of the minds of those who wrote these books-indeed, any special callings of men in this world at all-we can perceive why the tasks of the different Evangelists should be different. We