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rich in tlieological implication. He is the Vine in which His followers inhere and grow as living branches (ISM); He is the Resurrection and the Life, to believe in whom is to overcome death (11^); He is the Bread of Life which by faith men eat, and live (6™-). In all such utterances the distinction between Christology and soteriology has vanished. To sustain a relation of vital, inner unity with, and suffusion of, human souls Is manifestly beyond the power of any lower than God Himself; and this is really the basal argument for the Deity of Christ which we can see to be implicit in the NT as a whole.

8. The sum and climax of the matter — and this quite irrespective of the Logos idea, to which we shall come immediately — is that God is personally in Jesus, and Jesus In God (10'*). The simplest and deepest words in the Gospel point to this: 'I and the Father are one' (10™; cf. 17"- 21); 'He that hath seen me hath seen the Father' (14?; cf. 12"). By these sayings the mind is led in the direction of a simple modalism, but no theory of it is furnished. The Father given personally in Jesus is the object of saving faith. Jesus is Life and Light in a sense which is absolute (Jn 1'- ', 1 Jn 6"). In Him there is a real advent and inhabitation of God Himself — this faith is certain of and unconditionally asserts; yet what the ontological presuppositions of it may be is a remote and derivative question, and even the Logos idea, which St. John applies at this point, is not fitted, perhaps is not designed, to take us more than a certain distance towards theoretic insight. No explanation, no combination of categories, even an Apostle's, is able to place us where we see the life of God on its inner side. What as believers we are sure of, is that in Jesus the God of heaven and earth is personally apprehensible, actually present in history — enlightening our eyes in all knowledge because first possessing us as our inward life. This is the keynote of the Johannine Christology; the faith out of which the Gospel is written and which it seeks to wake in other minds, is that Jesus and God are one. Attempts to discredit this unity by describing it as no more than a unity of will are simply wide of the mark. WUl, the living energy of persons, is the most real thing in the universe; it is the ultimate form of being; and the suggestion that behind the will there may lie a still more real Divine 'substance,' a more authentic region from which, after all, Jesus is excluded, is a figment of obsolete metaphysic. If it is possible to express In human language the essential and inherent Godhead of Jesus Christ, the thing has been done in the relevant statements of this Gospel.

9. Nevertheless, in the Fourth Gospel, as in the NT generally, this unity with God is viewed as being com-patible with real subordination. ' My Father is greater than I' (1428). In 10»» Jesus speaks of Himself as One whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world. Yet this is but the relation which belongs to Fatherhood and Sonship as such; for, as LUtgert has expressed it, ' the superordination of God above Jesus does not consist in God's reserving anything to Himself; on the contrary. He conveys Himself wholly to Jesus, making Him monarch of the whole world; what it does consist in is the fact that God is everywhere the Origin, the Giver, the Foundation, while Jesus is the obedient and receptive organ of His purpose.'

10. Turning now to the Prologue, and Its character-istic ideas, let us note first of aU that the study of it comes properly at this point, after we have concluded our more general survey. As' preface, the Prologue stands first, but we may well believe that it was the last to be written. Touching the origin of the term 'Logos,' while we need not assert that St. John took it from Philo, yet it is extremely probable that the influence of Philonic thought went to decide which term out of those supplied by the OT and the Targums (Wisdom, the Spirit, the Word) he should choose. ' The

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Word' had long been familiar to the Hebrew mind as designating the principle of revelation, and it had received from Greek philosophy a certain cosmic width of significance. The Evangelist, it would seem, took it as singularly fitted to express to men of that time the Divine light and life present in Jesus Christ; but, writing in Asia Minor, he took it without prejudice to the full Christian meaning it was to bear. It is, besides, a term which must have been in some sort familiar to the Church; for it is introduced without comment. In St. John's use of it, too, ethical and soteriologioal considerations are supreme; ' Logos ' receives its colour and atmosphere from the term 'Son,' as denoting the historic Jesus. What the Apostle is setting forth, in short, is not a Greek theologoumenon, but the total impression made by Christ's personality. And when we recall how St. Paul had said that all things were created by Christ and for Him (Col 1"), it is easy to see how strong were the interior tendencies of faith conduct-ing to this identification of the Jesus of history with the creative Word of God.

In v.i three weighty affirmations are made as to the Logos: (a) He existed from the beginning, i.e. eternally; (6) His relation to God was living and personal in char-acter; (c) His place is in the sphere of Godhead. Stevens, with a terminology slightly too developed, but with substantial accuracy, says of the content of this verse: 'the author aflirms a distinction, but a community of essence, between the Word and the Father.' It is next asserted that the ' Logos ' is the medium alike of creation and of revelation, that He has a universal relation to men (vv.*- '), that having been in the world from the first, but unrecognized, He is now come personally, and has given to all who receive Him the right to become children of God (vv."- '2). Commentators invite us to note the solemn fashion in which v." attaches itself and corre-sponds to v.i. The Word is indeed the subject of dis-course throughout, but He has not been specifically named in the interval; now, however, in v.", the announcement of the Incarnation is laid, point for point, alongside of the previous declaration of the absolute being of the Word. The simple phrase, 'the Word became flesh,' appears to signify that He passed into a new phase of being — a phase of human mortality, weak-ness, dependence — becoming individualized as a man, yet retaining personal continuity with that which He was before.

These four stages, then, are discernible in the move-ment of thought in the Prologue: (1) The Word in His original, eternal being; (2) the Lord who comes to- His own as Life and Light; (3) the only Son of the Father; (4) the fuU name of the Person before the Evangelist's mind throughout, Jesus Christ. The series is not strictly chronological, but it follows a well-defined gradation of ideas; and from the fashion in which it ends, we can perceive that the term 'Logos' is an ancillary and theoretic one, secondarily interpretative of Jesus as a historic personality, and that, although it stands here as first in the order of thought, it was last in the order of the Evangelist's reflexion. The Prologue, it is clear, has nothing to say as to the mode of Incarnation; but when we connect it, as we ought to do, with the Gospel to which it is prefixed, we can perceive the motive to which Incarnation is due, namely, the Divine purpose of giving eternal life to a perishnig world. Unlike St. Paul, however, St. John conceives the advent of the Son, not as a humiliation, but as a means of revelation.

11. In the First Epistle of John the unity of God and Christ is so strongly felt that the two subjects are used almost interchangeably; so, for example, in S^". Again and again everything is afiirmed to depend on the coming of the Son of God in the flesh, as Saviour of the world. At one or two points we seem to be observing the first movements of a dogmatic Christology (2" 4"; cf. 2 Jn '). The writer is chiefiy concerned to assert the identity of the saving word of life with Jesus Christ, a dooetic