In answer to this we have, on the one hand, Christ’s promise reported by John: “The Comforter ... shall bring all things to your remembrance whatsoever I have said unto you” (ch. 14:26); on the other, we have reason to believe that the reports are not verbatim. (_a_) This would require a supernatural exercise of memory nowhere claimed by the Evangelists, and therefore not to be claimed by the church for them. (_b_) In some instances, _e. g._, the case of the conversation with Nicodemus and the woman at the well, it is certain that John could not have been present, and must have derived his information either from Jesus or from the other party to the conference. (_c_) The language in which the discourse is reported is analogous not only in words, but also in the forms of expression to that of the narrator; the likeness is so marked that in several instances the critics are not fully agreed how much is to be regarded as the discourse of Jesus, and how much as the accompanying comment of John. (_d_) The thought is sometimes, and the language is often, obscure. And though this obscurity is increased by mistranslations, and by the division into verses, which hides from the reader the true unity of the discourse, nevertheless it exists in the Greek original. Such obscurity does not exist in the reports of Christ’s discourses in the other Gospels. (_e_) The largest public discourse as reported would not have required over eight minutes in delivery. I believe then that in the Fourth Gospel we have the substantial thoughts of Christ, reproduced generally in the words and with the phraseology of John, whose mind, under the divine inspiration, preserves the essential truth unimpaired, but represents it, not as a mechanical repeater of words, but as a disciple who freely reproduces the ideas of his Master, but largely in language of his own. =Object and character.= We are not left to surmise the object of the author of the Fourth Gospel. He himself tells us what it was: “These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing, ye might have life through his name.”[22]