he understood the answer as a direct affirmative; nor could he well understand it otherwise, as it was the common form of affirmation among the Jews. They who can see a vagueness in these answers would, we suppose, see it equally in the words which our Lord addressed to St. Peter on his declaring, "I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God," "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father, which is in heaven;" and such persons would, no doubt, equally deny the explicitness of the various other declarations in which our Saviour affirms his Deity. For instance, on the occasion of the blind man receiving his sight, "Dost thou believe in the Son of God?" he answered and said, "Who is he, Lord, that I might believe in Him?" Jesus said unto him, thou hast both seen Him, and it is He that talketh with thee: and he said, Lord, I believe; and he worshipped;"1 or when He says, "The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live;" or when He declares, "I am the resurrection and the life."

' John ix.

But

this all-important article of our faith, without which, indeed, the whole system of Christianity is but a baseless fabric, was established independently of the testimony of our Saviour, or of the testimony of man: "There is another that beareth witness" of Him, even He who spoke thrice from heaven, and whose awful voice twice proclaimed, "This is my beloved Son." It is true that "The Son of Man" is the favourite designation which our Lord chose to apply to himself while sojourning among men, whom He called his brethren; it was as the Son of man that He bore their sorrows, and became acquainted with their grief that He was touched with a sense of their weakness and infirmities-that He was bruised for their transgressions, and crucified for their sins; but the peculiar and frequent use of the expression, The Son of Man, as applied to himself by our Saviour, seems naturally to imply that He was something more; for it would strike us as very strange if used in the same way by Moses, or Samuel, or any other of the Prophets, whose mere humanity was never a subject of doubt. It is possible, also, that our Lord, in insisting so constantly on this peculiar title, might have had a pro

phetic eye to one of the most formidable heresies that distracted the early christian church -the heresy of the Gnostics, who rejected the humanity of Christ, and denied the reality of his sufferings. We may likewise remark, that our Lord, when alluding to his omnipresence (an attribute belonging exclusively to Deity), still calls himself the Son of Man, "and no man hath ascended up to heaven, but He that came down from heaven, the Son of Man, which is in heaven."1

NOTE Q. Page 85.

There is one text in Scripture which is sometimes brought forward to overthrow the equality and unity with God, which our Saviour so constantly asserts; it is that verse in which the Redeemer says, My Father is greater than I." This verse, taken singly, wears indeed such a formidable appearance, that, like the ploughshare of the Roman soldiery, it seems an engine powerful enough to

1 John iii.

root up and subvert the very foundations of our Temple of Faith. Unfortunately, however, for those who would use it as an implement of destruction, and happily for those whose faith is of so wavering a nature as to be more easily shaken by one doubtful passage than confirmed by twenty of an opposite. tendency, this verse is found in that very chapter which, beyond all other chapters in the Gospel, most unequivocally and decidedly asserts the union, and in fact the oneness, of Christ with God. It is in the fourteenth chapter of St. John, which opens with the beautiful and consolatory exhortation of our Lord to his afflicted disciples, "Let not your heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me." In the eighth verse Philip, perplexed and distracted with the mystery of the unity of Christ with God, and anxious as man always has been, and ever will be, to obtain that demonstrative evidence of the external

senses which the case can never admit of, exclaims, "Shew us the Father and it sufficeth us;" the Saviour then gives him this remarkable answer, "Have I been so long with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip! He that hath seen me hath seen the

Father; and how sayest thou, then, shew us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? The words that I speak unto you, I speak not of myself; but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works. Believe me, that I am in the Father, and the Father in me; or else believe me for the very works' sake. If ye ask any thing in my name, I will do it." In the twenty-eighth verse He then says, "If ye loved me ye would rejoice, because I said I go unto the Father, for the Father is greater than I." To take this declaration, then, in the sense that some have attempted to affix to it, we must read it thus, I have just been consoling you with assurances of my unlimited. power; I have just been exhorting you, as you believe in God, so likewise to believe in me; I have just positively affirmed to you that my words were God's words-my works were God's works; that God was in me, and I in him;1 and that in seeing me ye had likewise

Though the Christian, regenerated by the influence of God's Holy Spirit, might (in a certain sense) say with our Lord, that God was in him, no man, we presume, would venture to affirm that he was in God in that intimate state of union which would enable him to add, without blas