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The Girl next Door. A Story for Girls, by a Girl
The Great Miraculous Remedy.

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Love.....

Obedience the Secret of Liberty. By the Rev, E. MEDLEY 309

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Being and Doing. A Sermon by the Rev. L. G. CARTER. 326 Willei's Christmas. For the Young

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Lyrics for the Heart., By the Rev. W. P. BALFERN.

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News of the Churches, 55, 84, 112, 189, 167, 195, 224, 252,

280, 307, 342,

THE WORD MADE FLESH.

NOTES ON ST. JOHN'S PROLOGUE TO HIS GOSPEL.

BY THE REV. JAMES CULROSS, A.M., D.D.

No. I.-John i. 1, 2.

As intelligent readers of the New Testament are aware, each of the four Gospels exhibits its special character in its very commencement; each, so to speak, carries a mark on its forehead; and this is pre-eminently the case with the Gospel according to John. They who propose to themselves to study this Gospel must be content to take time, so that they may live into the knowledge of it. It is not possible to write anything like a "Handy Book on it. And after the study of a whole life, there will still remain unfathomable depths into which we can only gaze with wonder and fascination.

The design of the Evangelist in writing this Gospel is told in these words, "That ye might believe that Jesus is Christ, the Son of God, and that believing ye might have life in his name." The best "Introduction" to it is the introduction written by the Evangelist himself. It is comprised in a single paragraph of eighteen verses, and exhibits in a condensed form the whole significance, scope, and intent of the book. Its most obvious peculiarity is its extreme child-like simplicity, combined with amazing riches and depth of thought. It is not, as at first might seem, chronological, sweeping over the period from creation to redemption, or (as has been said) "a history of the several gradually advancing forms of manifestations of the Word." In the outset I reject this view of the structure as untenable; I am satisfied that all attempts to read it as a succession of chronological statements do violence at some point or other to the language. So far as I can make out, we have in it an orderly and profoundly connected series of thoughts, each preparing the mind for that which follows, each making a fresh and farther revelation of Divine truth, and, when all taken together, exhibibiting the gist of the narrative that follows. The order will be apparent when we have studied the whole.

The first thing that strikes one on examining the paragraph is a certain subtle affinity to the first chapter of Genesis, which is an introduction to the story of the first man, as this is an introduction to the story of the second Man, the Lord from heaven. The great words are the same in both cases, though they have evidently deepened in their later use--the Beginning, God, the Word ("God Said"), All Things, Light, Darkness, Life, to Be, to Become. While the Evangelist begins with creation, he goes very far beyond, and consequently uses many words that were not needed in the book of Genesis, but are

VOL. XX. N.S. I.

indispensable to his purpose-such as these-law, grace, truth, faith, sons of God, and so on.

As in the opening of Genesis, "God" is taken for granted. There is no attempt to prove that He is, by argument either a priori or a posteriori. There is no parley or discussion with the atheist. There is no notice taken-not even a side-glance-of any denial that has ever been made of the Divine existence. With a grand daring of disregard, all such denials, together with the speculations on which they are based or by which they profess to be justified, are silently passed by, as if there never had been and never could be any controversy on such a subject; and the paragraph proceeds on the assumption that He is, as something beyond question, like a postulate or axiom.

We are at once placed in thought by the Evangelist in "the Beginning." In every new generation, science is carrying us back into a more remote antiquity, but has done nothing whatever to help us to conceive of a past eternity. The Evangelist does not call us to form any such conception-which indeed the human mind is incapable of doing. But he takes us back till we are behind creation-ere sun or moon or star existed-behind protoplasm or whatever other name may be used; and that timeless Past, "before the world was,' "before the foundation of the world," he calls "the Beginning.

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"In the Beginning was "-God? We are prepared for such a statement; we almost expect it; if it be a truism, it is a glorious one, and underlies all religion. But it is another thing that the Evangelist 'ells us. "In the Beginning," he says, "was the Word." The Word:

, who or what can this Word be? Is it a new name-the Christianphilosophic name for God? Or had God a companion in the bygone eternity? Is Dualism taught here? and is this Word a second God? Or have we here a name for God's first-born creature, called into being before all worlds? Or does the term belong to some system of philosophic speculation, relating to the nature and action of God? Such questions would almost certainly, in some shape or other, spring up in the mind of a heathen reader into whose hands this Gospel might fall. The Evangelist will answer them all, if we have patience, and will give us the true knowledge of the Word, even as the Apostle Paul declared the Unknown God to the Athenians.

Without noticing even in outline any of the learned inquiries and discussions as to where the Evangelist found this name and in what sense he meant it, it is enough to say that it was already in use at the time he wrote, and probably long before. In particular it had been woven into elaborate religious speculations by the Jews living in Alexandria. Just as our modern scientific culture, or the scientific spirit as it is called, is exerting a wide influence in the domain of religious thought to-day, so did Greek philosophy, particularly that of Plato, among these Jews. Taking the writings of the Old Testament as the Divine source of spiritual knowledge, and rejecting mere verbal literalism or interpretation, they endeavoured to give philosophic

expression to the truths they apprehended and to build them into a philosophic system. Under such conditions the doctrine of the Word (the Logos) took shape in the school represented by Philo, and no doubt soon became widely known. There is no ground, however, for supposing that the Evangelist borrowed the name from Philo; it was in far wider and older use, having its origin as far back as the first chapter of Genesis, which I have no doubt was vividly present in his mind as he wrote. "And God Said," "and God Made": so it runs throughout that chapter, preparing for the utterance of the psalmist, "By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth."

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A word is a thought, or emotion, or volition, expressed in sound, and abiding where it is lodged after the sound has passed away. You put yourself into your word, if it is a true word,—your own mind, your own heart, your own will. In telling us that the Word was in the beginning, does the Evangelist, then, simply mean that God spake, and called things into being by the word of His power? and that it was not "holy light" (as Milton sings) but voice or sound, that was the offspring of heaven first-born"? And is the voice of God here personified, as His wisdom is personified in the Book of Proverbs? Shall we say that God's word in the beginning called the heavens and the earth into existence that it afterwards came forth, generation after generation, to the children of man through the prophets-that in the fulness of time it came forth as a living and holy humanity-that God's final word to men is a Man, even the Man Christ Jesus, who is the truth of God, the wisdom of God, and the power of God? We migh the inclined to answer, Yes; it is but a strongly figurative way of telling us this, were it not that the marks of personality are so numerous and decisive, not merely in separate expressions, but in the whole scope of the paragraph. The English version is right in naming the Word He and not It; He, the person-not It, the voice. In the beginning the Word "was with God." At first glance the phraseology seems of the simplest kind. To be with one, we say, is to be his companion, or associate, or fellow. The original makes intimacy even more decisively than does the English translation. We are not to regard the Word as sundered or separated from God; there is distinctness, in some sense, but no apartness or awayness. The phraseology is not singular in the writings of John; we find it in such instances as the following, "That Eternal Life which was with the Father; ""We have confidence toward God;' "We have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous." When it is said, He was "with God," this is antithetic to what is said afterwards, that He was made flesh and "dwelt among us." The manner of the fellowship with God indicated by "with" is in no way explained by the Evangelist, and we must be content to leave it undefined. Taken by itself, apart from the doctrine that God is one, we should find no greater difficulty in the statement, "The Word was with God," than

in the question of the people respecting Jesus, "Are not his brethren with us?"

The Evangelist adds in the same breath, "And the Word was God." It is not that He "was a god," or that He "was of God," or that "God was the Word," but beyond contradiction, as the English version gives it, "The Word was God." The Evangelist may be put out of court as a witness; his testimony may be regarded as worthless; but it is not possible to make anything of it but that "the Word was God." Standing by itself, the statement is quite intelligible. That "makes the Word Divine. Whatever is to be affirmed concerning God is to be affirmed concerning Him.

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No language could be simpler, clearer, more definite, than the language we have been considering. Each separate statement-as a statement is intelligible to a child. But when we put the statements together, and try to harmonise them, our intellects are absolutely baffled. He was with God; He was God; how can both statements hold? Unless the name "God" be used in a double sense, the second statement seems to negative the first. If one is with another, how can he be that other? If the Word was with God, how can He be God? The difficulty does not lie in the obscurity of the statements made to us, but within the Divine nature itself. We shall not clear away by supposing an impartation" of Godhead to Him—as a child inherits the humanity of his parents, or as believers are "made par takers of the Divine nature." He did not "become ; He "was. And then too," The same was in the beginning with God." Nothing that has taken place within the limits of time can explain the mystery. His Past and God's Past, if such expressions be permissible, are one and the same. He was with God and was God, all in the Beginning.

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WHAT BESSIE FOUND TO DO AND HOW SHE DID IT. A CHRISTMAS STORY TOLD ON NEW YEAR'S DAY.

THE Ainslees were wealthy. They wasn't a cheery day; the very lived in a handsome house in a weather seemed as if it had had fashionable part of the city, and too much Christmas, and was dull they were fashionable people. It through sheer reaction. What bewas the day after Christmas, that tween the Christmas-tree and the gala-time of all the year for school- many, many who remember the girls and schoolboys. Bessie Ain-rich, there had been a redundance slee was just turned fifteen, and of gifts in that family; then a sumpwas, like many other young girls tuous dinner and a gay evening of her age, brought up amid the finished the day rather late on into surroundings of wealth and luxury: the night; and now, after a very that is to say, she was fond of plea- late breakfast, the female members sure, impatient of pain or restraint, of the household were sitting in the and considered school-days a most breakfast-room, looking collapsed, intolerable, though necessary, evil. yawning, and mumpish.

While

Well, this 26th of December sitting thus, a servant brought in a

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