can perceive also why each should inevitably at times. adopt forms of speech which appear more characteristic of another.

(5) Many having written, 'it seemed good to me also,' says Luke, to write. It seemed good to him!' Some may cry, 'Was he not then taught to write by the Spirit of God?' I imagine, my friends, that he who described the day of Pentecost, and referred the whole existence and work of the Church to the Spirit of God, had quite as awful a feeling of His government over himself as any of us can have. The freedom of his language shews me how strong his feeling was; our sensitiveness and unwillingness to connect the Spirit with the operations of the human intellect, indicate the weakness of ours. The habitual conviction that he could not have undertaken such a task as he was now entering upon, if he had not been moved to it by the Holy Spirit -that he could not pursue it faithfully, laboriously, effectually, unless the Spirit were at every moment leading his mind out of its own fantasies to the apprehension of that which is-preserved the Evangelist from a number of subtleties into which we fall, because we have lost that conviction, and rather suppose that we are to protect the lessons of the Spirit, than that He is to protect us. We ask for distinctions about the degrees and measures in which the Spirit has been, or will be, vouchsafed. The Evangelists make no such distinctions. I think they dared not. Could they doubt, that if the Spirit called them to the greatest of all works-to that which would most concern the name of God, and the good of their fellowmen for generations-they should have the help and light which they required, that which the Source of all light and help knew what they required? Would

they have wished us to doubt that, in all our works, even the humblest, He will grant us what we require?

(6) The next clause teaches us much on this subject, and would teach us more, if it had not been unhappily perverted in our version. We represent St. Luke as saying, that he had perfect understanding of all things from the very first. I do not know exactly what meaning our translators wish us to attach to that statement; but if any readers have attached this meaning to it, that St. Luke arrived at once, without effort-without any process of sifting or inquiry-at an understanding of the facts which he records, they have directly inverted his words. What he says is, that it seemed good to him to write, having followed out all things with careful diligence from their source, just as a man traces the source of a river from its mountain bed through all its windings. Instead of being absolved from this diligence by the presence of the divine Spirit, he felt himself obliged by that Spirit to spare no labour, not to omit the most earnest and solicitous examination of what he heard from those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word; not to give himself credit for understanding it at the first, but to wait for that clear penetrating light which could distinguish between his own impressions and the truth of things. And I apprehend, that the difference between those reports which many had undertaken to write, and those which have really stamped themselves on the heart and conscience and faith of mankind, may be traced mainly to this cause-that the first were the fruits of immature thoughts and feelings which had a strong hold on the writers' minds, but which had never been submitted to any severe process whereby the gold might be severed from the dross; that the others

came from men who remembered the promise, 'He shall baptise with the Spirit and with fire, and who believed that whatever passed through their intellects must undergo this divine fire, if it was to last through the ages, and to testify, in them all, of Him who does not change.

(7) There is one word more in this preface which I cannot pass by. St. Luke professes to write to Theophilus in order. The narrative is to be an orderly or continuous one. If it does not fulfil this condition,

it will not answer its purpose; it will not tell Theophilus the certainty of those things wherein he has been instructed. Can we then discover the order which St. Luke has followed? Clearly, it is very different from that of common biographers, especially different from that which a biographer of Jesus would have adopted, if we may judge from the experience of eighteen centuries. Think how the fancy of painters and of writers of legends has expatiated over the infancy and boyhood of Christ, and then remember how many incidents are recorded by our Evangelistwho yet records more than any other-of all the period before He began to be about thirty years of age. Evidently, his conception of the life must be entirely different from theirs. What with them is most substantial is for him a mere introduction,

a most valuable introduction, as I think,-but one which must become false to us if we lose the Evangelist's perspective, and contemplate it according to some theory of our own. What then is this perspective? What rule does it follow? The answer to this question will come out, I trust, in the course of our readings. I will only anticipate it thus far. I think you will find that what the Evangelist traces are the steps by which a

King claimed dominion over His subjects; how they were prepared for Him; how He was prepared for going forth among them; how He manifested the powers of His Kingdom; how He illustrated the nature of it; what kinds of opposition He encountered; what battles He fought; who stood by Him, who deserted Him; how He seemed to be vanquished; how He prevailed at last. The more steadily we keep before ourselves the thought of a Kingdom of Heaven-a kingdom actual in the highest sense, explaining the nature and forces of every kingdom that has existed on the earth, showing what in those kingdoms must abide, what must pass away-the more shall we adhere to the letter of the Gospels, the more shall we enter into their spirit. This characteristic is common to them all. And it is in the light of that common object we can best examine their specific differences. In general, the hint of a purpose is given very early in the narratives. The title of St. Matthew's Gospel-The book of the generations of Jesus Christ the Son of David, the Son of Abraham-with the genealogy which follows, marks out his design to associate Jesus with the foregone history of his land. Much as St. Mark resembles him, it is evidently his main object to set forth a Gospel of the Son of God. He exhibits royalty more in act, less as the fulfilment of past anticipations. In this first chapter of St. Luke we have certain signs of his intention, which criticism has often sought to obliterate. The stories of the vision to Zacharias and of the birth of John the Baptist, and of the annunciation to the Virgin, belong exclusively to him. Those who suppose that he was writing the life of a Teacher whom he had preferred to other teachers, to whom he attributed great supernatural powers, of course assume these to be

embellishments, introduced for the purpose of magnifying the hero, and of showing that, like other heroes, he had a celestial parentage. On that hypothesis we must at once concede the extravagance and falsity of that which St. Luke sets down as true. Were the hypothesis established, we must abandon the stories of this chapter, and along with them, I conceive, all the rest of the narrative.

If Jesus was not the Son of David or the Son of God, the notion that a preacher of repentance was appointed as the witness of His birth, as well as the notion that a Virgin was chosen to be the instrument of it, fall naturally and without an effort. If He was the Son of God and the King of men, we may feel, we ought to feel, that these records are not those which prove Him to possess His divine royalty-that He must have had it, apart from all circumstances of His birth. The evidence for it may be quite independent of any such circumstances. We may be very thankful 10 St. John for setting forth His higher generation, to St. Mark for fixing our minds on that evidence of His works on earth which was wholly unconnected with the Virgin. But we shall not feel that such a narrative as we read here is a startling or inconsistent one. Theophilus must have asked, 'If such a Person as you speak of did come into the world, How did He come? Was His birth like another birth? Was there no preparation for it, no announcement of it?' An Evangelist who undertook to tell him the certainty of those things wherein he had been instructed, could not evade such inquiries. The answer, it seems to me, which is given is the simplest that we can imagine. What it is, in what manner the two gifts to men, of a Prophet and of a