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etc.). Again and again He speaks of Himself as being 'sent' of God, a commissioned ambassador to whom words and works have alike been 'given,' whose knowl-edge and power are mediated to Him by the Spirit, who seeks the glory of God, and finds His meat and drink in doing a higher will. His human dependence, how-ever, is not a commonplace fact which might have been assumed; it really springs out of the creative ground of His special Sonship, or, in other words, it is the form taken by the Eternal Sonship under the conditions of human life. The lite of the Son is wholly rooted in the Father's. Their reciprocal love and knowledge, it is true, are fre-quently insisted on; yet, although the Son is uniformly dependent on the Father, it would be seriously untrue to St. John to say that the Father is dependent on the Son. The relation leaves a real subordinateness, a human inferiority, on Jesus' side. Again, this dependence is conceived in genuinely ethical terms; it is mediated by motives, feelings, desires, surrenders, not mechanically necessitated by the properties of a Divine substance, or the stiff categories of an a priori metaphysic. All that Jesus says of Himself is perfectly religious in character; It is meant to express personal relations humanly, and so to enable human faith to grasp the only true God through Jesus Christ whom He has sent. For St. John, then, Jesus is truly and perfectly man; what distinguishes Him from other men is His unique relation to the Father. The idea of a new birth from above, a prelude to union with God indispensable for others, is nowhere applied to Him.

4. Just as in the Synoptics, Jesus is depicted in the Fourth Gospel as striving to tree the Twelve from earthly and political ideas of His purpose. And, as a result of His care and teaching, it dawns upon them gradually that the boon He offers is Divine and universal. An early stage of the process is marked by St. Peter's words: 'We have believed and know that thou art the Holy One of God' (B^s); and it is one proof, out of many, of the Evangelist's substantial accuracy, that he does not introduce at this point ideas of the Eternal Sonship of the Logos. But it is as Son that our Lord would have them know Him. He uses the phrase ' my Father' 30 times, on nine occasions so addressing God directly; and at least 17 times He calls Himself 'Son' or 'Son of God.' We can hardly doubt that wherever this term 'Son' occurs in the Johannine literature, its primary reference is to the historical Christ, known in the realm of human fact; and it denotes Him as holding to God a relation of unique intimacy and love. Thus in the great word 1 Jn i'-' 'God . . . sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins,' the writer is thmking of Jesus of Nazareth, the historic Messiah. St. John, however, loves always to go back to ultimate truths; and his Gospel outstrips the others by the assertion that this relation of Sonship is really anterior to time and history. Jesus has lived pre-viously in a state conditioned by personal relationships (n"); in it (so the present writer, with some hesita-tion, judges) the pre-incamate One was already Son, and was by nature possessed of a imique knowledge of God which was somehow capable of reproducing itself in His earthly consciousness (1" 3"- ").

The objection has been made that this reduces Jesus' spiritual escperience as man to a mere show; yet it is surely possible to believe that Jesus' knowledge of God was expen-mental, as beine mediated by the unmeasured gift of the Holy Spirit, without denying that its ultimate sources are to be found in His eternal being. Room must always be left, no doubt, for the possibility that words ascribed to Jesus regarding His own pre-existence, and spoken in wonderful hours of a more than human self-consciousness, have under- gone a certain modification with the lapse of time, in the direction of intensifying the original light and shade. It is scarcely credible that Jesus should haye spoken so plainly of His pre-temporal life with God as that His meaning was transparent to ordinary people; this would make the silence of the Synoptics unintelligiDle. It is altogether more likely that on this subject, as on the subject of His Messiahship,

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He exhibited reticence and delay. On the other hand, we are justified in believing that He did utterwords, mysterious yet significant, which, as pondered lay a mind like St. John's, were clearly seen to involve pre-existence, not of a so-called ideal sort, but real and personal. Even so careful a student as Titius has said, ' I cannot regard it as impossible that the general NT idea of the pre-existence of Christ goes back to sayings of Jesus Himself, and that the Johannine dis-courses especially are based on really historical material.''

5. The last stage of Jesus' claim to and interpreta^ tion of the name ' Son (of God) ' is given in His pre-diction of the glory to which He should rise, and of His future presence in spirit with His followers (especi-ally chapters 13£f.). The primary meaning of Sonship had been a relation to the Father of uniquely close love; it now transpires that, as Son, Jesus is destined to share in the Father's omnipotence and universal sway. In the words (13'), 'Jesus, knowing that the Father had given aU things into his hands,' no con-vincing reason can be offered for limiting 'all things' to the function of revelation and redemption, and barring out omnipotence as such. Besides, the Evan-gelist is quite familiar with the idea that Jesus is origi-nally Lord and Possessor of men, irrespectively of their faith in Him; He came unto His own, and His own received Him not. Hence in his view the Divine power to which Jesus rises is not unsuited to His nature, or gained by usurpation; it is given Him by God, for only so could He receive anything (3^'), and it answers to the glory which He had before the world was. We see this truth breaking fully on the minds of the Twelve after the Resurrection; and the cry of Thomas, 'my Lord and my God' (20^8), marks the great discovery. In the risen One the Apostle discerns the Victor over death, the Lord of glory; and realizing in that moment of inexpressible relief how in Christ he had all that Jehovah Himself could be, he grasps Him as having for faith the value, because the reality, of God. Nowhere in the N'T is the implication more clear that religious faith in Jesus Christ is really equivalent to faith in His Divinity.

6. These general conclusions are strengthened by an examination of the title Son of Man, as used in the Fourth Gospel. Here also the name is put only on Jesus' lips. Perhaps the accent is shitted slightly from His vocation to His Person; the writer employs the name in accord-ance with his higher view of our Lord's nature to express His personal uniqueness. As in the Synoptics, the term is undoubtedly Messianic (12"); and while in this Gospel it is not put in direct relation to the Second Coming, yet it is noticeable that the majority of passages in which Jesus speaks of Himself as Son of Man are references to His exaltation (3" 8^8 12"), or His glorifying (12" 13"), it being implied that Divine glory befits and still awaits Him; and this is a link with one side of the Synoptic representation. The other class of Synoptic passages bearing on the work of the Son of Man has also its parallel in Johannine verses, which describe the Son of Man as giving meat which endureth to everlasting life (6"), or attach the possession of life to eating His fiesii and drinking His blood, or declare that He must be lifted up on the cross. In point of fact, however, no appreciable dis-tinction can be drawn between what, in the Fourth Gospel, is predicated of the Son of God and of the Son of Man. Both are Messianic names, raised, as it were, to their highest power; one expressing the origin of Jesus' Person in God, the other His human affiliation. Yet, for St. John, the title 'Son of Man' always appears to carry something of the suggestion that tor Jesus it is a wonderful thing that He should be man at all. Though in all points perfectly human, heaven is ever open to Him; He is present there perpetually, beholding God with immediate vision (3"), and He will yet ascend up where He was before (.6'^).

7. Other forms of thought in which the higher nature of Jesus is set forth in the Fourth Gospel are

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