following manner:- -"But John, last of all, perceiving that what had reference to the body in the Gospel of our Saviour was sufficiently detailed, and being encouraged by his familiar friends, and urged by the Spirit, he wrote a Spiritual Gospel" (Extracted by Eusebius from Hypotyposes, Eccles. Hist. v. 14.). The following are a few references out of very many:—

John i. 1. "In the beginning was the Word," &c.

Clement, Exhortation to Heathen, chap i. "Do not suppose the song of salvation to be new, as a vessel or a house is new, for .... "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.""

John i. 17. "The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came," &c.

Clement, Instructor, i. 7. "Wherefore it [the law] was only temporary; but eternal grace and truth were by Jesus Christ."

John i. 2, x. 11. Clement, Instructor, i. 11. "With authority of utterance, for He is God and Creator, for all things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made;' and with benevolence, for He alone gave Himself a sacrifice for us, 'for the Good Shepherd giveth His Life for the sheep.""

John i. 18. "No man hath seen God at any time," &c.

Clement, Miscellanies, v. 12. "And John the Apostle says: 'No man hath seen God at any time. The only begotten God [very old reading], who is in the bosom of the Father,'

&c.

John iii. "He that believeth not, is condemned already," &c. Clement, Miscell., iv. 16. "He that believeth not is, according to the utterance of the Saviour, condemned already."

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Also, Miscell. vi. 11. "I must decrease,' saith the prophet John." Miscell. i. 6. As the Lord taught to worship in spirit. "Instructor, i. 6. "I," says the Lord, "have meat to eat that ye know not of." Instructor, i. 6, "Further, the Word declares Himself to be the bread of heaven. 'For Moses,' He says, 'gave you not that bread from heaven, but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven,""&c.

Such are the testimonies of Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement to the fact of there having been, within their memory, only four Gospels, and that one of these is that of St. John, exactly as we now possess it. These men were all men of letters, of extensive reading, and deep thought. They lived in the most opposite parts of the world-Tertullian in Africa, Irenæus in Gaul, Clement in Alexandria. They were all writing, or had written, about 190. They all witness dis

tinctly to the fact that St. John's Gospel had been accepted by the Church, not only at the time they wrote, but always-from the first. Now let us consider, for what period could they speak on such a subject with certainty? Most assuredly for above a century. One of them, Irenæus, remembered well the teaching of Polycarp, who himself remembered, and spoke of having seen, St. John. If, at the end of the century, they were between sixty and seventy, or even younger, they could have conversed with Christians-aged men, of course who were contemporary with St. John, or who were born within a few years after his death. Such men could, and do, vouch with absolute certainty for the fact that, during their whole life-time, and as far back as the memory of their immediate fathers extended, no Gospel purporting to be written by the Apostle St. John, and not written by him, could have been palmed upon the Church as his: and not only palmed upon the Church, but appealed to as the standard of the Church on the matter of a doctrine of such supreme importance as the Divine Nature of her Head, and also read in her assemblies gathered together for the celebration of her highest worship.

Let the reader remember that the fourth Gospel was professedly received by the Church, not for its intrinsic merits, but for its presumed authenticity as the genuine work of an Apostle to whom was given the Spirit of God, to guide him into all the truth. Its statements of doctrine were received as being as much above mere human approval as above criticism, simply because they were Apostolic.

Let the reader try to imagine any book of such authority received everywhere as authentic in the year 1883, purporting to be written between 1780 and 1790, by the foremost man of his day in the society or sect to which he belonged, but, in fact, not seeing the light till 1840 or so, and being, in reality, a forgery by some absolutely obscure and unknown man, using the name of the said celebrated man, who died before the end of the last century; the book so forged establishing itself, without a word of surprise, or opposition, or inquiry; and without a word of explanation as to why it had lain so long in the dark!

Surely, absurdity could scarcely go further; but no, we have it in our power to imagine it going much further. Let us suppose a book, actually written in 1780, received by the Church or society to which the author belonged, and of which he was then the virtual head, as a standard of appeal, commented on and read in public as one out of four most important books, and reckoned amongst these

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four because of its presumed authorship, but, by some revolutionary catastrophe, the vast mass of the literature available for tracing its use for the first one hundred years of its existence perishing, except a few scraps; and critics 1,800 years hence (in A.D. 3600), thrusting aside as worthless the testimony of learned and credible witnesses in 1883, taking no account of their reiterated appeals to it as a genuine work, always accepted by the Church as her standard, making nothing of the fact that, to all appearance, it had attained to the highest position, unchallenged and unquestioned, calmly laying down that the Church had not only been imposed upon by an unknown author, but that she was under the impression that, since the time of its publication, she had received the book, and read it in public as authoritative, whilst, in point of fact, she had done no such thing; but the whole body of the Church were blindly, and we must say wilfully, deceived on a matter which touched the very existence of their society, as a society founded for holding and disseminating the truth of God.

If anyone asserts this to be a caricature, I deny it; and I ask such a person to consider what is implied in the ignoring of such a witness as Irenæus. It assumes that Irenæus had himself lost all memory of what had occurred in his own lifetime, and that he took not the slightest interest in the truth of the history of the events of the society of which he was an office-bearer, so as to inquire of his older brethren or fathers of what had occurred within their memory. For the addition of another Gospel to the three, the completion of the Quaternion, was a thing of portentous importance, and could not have occurred unnoticed in a society which long hesitated about the admission of Epistles, such as that of St. James and that to the Hebrews, into the number of their sacred books.

There is yet remaining to be examined another writer, Justin Martyr, living in the middle of the second century. It is, as is well known, the peculiarity of this author that, though quoting the four Gospels as the Memoirs of the Apostles, he never cites them by name. It is most certain that he knows and refers to the four, for he clearly distinguishes between the books as being written, not only by the Apostles, but "by those that followed them." And he writes thus, making this distinction, when he is speaking of our Lord's Bloody Sweat, of which we have the account, not in a Gospel written by an Apostle, but by the follower of an Apostle, i.e. by St. Luke (Dial. ciii.).

The following are references more or less distinct to the fourth Gospel, in the order in which they appear in Justin :

(1.) Apology, I. xxii. "In that we say that he made whole the paralytic and those born blind, we seem to say," &c. St. John, alone of the Evangelists, mentions the restoring of sight to one born blind (John ix. 32).

(2.) Apol. I. xxxii. "And the first Power, after God the Father and Lord of all, is the Word, who is also the Son; and of Him we will, in what follows, relate how He took flesh, and became Man." This is a free reproduction for the use of the heathen of John i. 1 and 14.

(3.) Apol. I. xxxiii. "For things which were incredible and impossible with men, these God predicted as about to come to pass, in order that, when they came to pass, there might be no unbelief, but faith," &c.-a clear reminiscence of John xiii. 19.

(4.) Apol. I. lxi. He thus describes baptism to the heathen: "Then they are brought by us where there is water, and are regenerated in the same manner in which we ourselves were regenerated. .... For Christ also said, 'Except ye be born again, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.' Now, that it is impossible for those who have once been born to enter into their mothers' wombs, is manifest to all." A clearer reference to John iii. 3-5 cannot be conceived.

(5.) Apol. I. lxvi. Speaking of the Eucharist, he writes: "In like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, hath both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His Word. . . . is the flesh and blood of that Jesus Who was made flesh." The three Synoptics, in speaking of the first Eucharistic element, report that the Lord said, "This is my body." Our Lord alone, in John vi., speaks of it as flesh; so that Justin here plainly has John vi. before him.

(6.) Apol. II. x. "For no one trusted in Socrates, so as to die for his doctrine, but in Christ, Who was partially known even by Socrates (for He was and is the Word Who is in every man). ...not only philosophers and scholars believed," &c. Justin would not have written this if he had not had in his mind John i. 9: "That was the true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." (7.) Apol. II. xiii. "The word Who is from the Unbegotten and Ineffable, since also He became man for our sakes"-a reminiscence of John i. 14.

(8.) Dialogue xvii. "Accordingly, you displayed great zeal in

publishing throughout all the land bitter, and dark, and unjust things against the only blameless and righteous Light sent by God." In St. John only is our Lord called the “Light."

(9.) Dial. xxvii. "For, tell me, did God wish the priests to sin when they offer the sacrifices on the Sabbath? or those to sin who are circumcised, or do sacrifice on the Sabbaths, since He commands that on the eighth day, even though it happen on a Sabbath, those who are born shall always be circumcised?"—a clear reminis cence of John vii. 22, 23.

(10.) Dial. xxviii. "But though a man be a Scythian or a Persian, if he has the knowledge of God and of His Christ," &c. The knowledge of God and of Christ are only thus associated in John xvii. 3, "Know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ."

(11.) Dial. xxxiv. "For Christ is King and Priest and God and Lord." The two Divine titles, God and Lord, are in the New Testament never together applied to Christ, except in John xx. 28; see also Dial. cxxviii. and cxxix., "The cause of His power, and of His being Lord and God."

(12.) Dial. lvi. “For I affirm that He has never at any time done anything which He Who made the world, above Whom there is no other God, has not wished Him both to do and to engage Himself with ". -a clear reminiscence of that unity of will and action between the Father and the Son which pervades St. John; see, particularly, John vi. 38, iv. 34, xii. 49, xiv. 31.

Also Dial. lvi. "He announces to men, whatsoever the Maker of all things, above Whom there is no God, wishes to announce to them" ("I have declared unto them Thy word ").

(13.) Dial. Ixi. "Who is called by the Holy Spirit, now the glory of the Lord, now the Son, again Wisdom, again an Angel, then God, and then Lord and Logos." Our Lord is called by the Holy Spirit by the three last names only in St. John: God and Lord, John xxi.; Logos, John i.

(14.) Dial. Ixi. "This God, begotten of the Father of all things, and Word, and Wisdom, and Power, and the Glory of the Begetter," &c. "God begotten " seems a clear reminiscence of the very old, if not original, reading, "God only begotten, Who is in the bosom of the Father," of John i. 18.

(15.) Dial. lxii. “But this Offspring, which was truly brought forth from the Father, was with the Father before all the creatures, and the Father communed with Him." So John i. 1, 2, and John xvii., throughout.