purpose is most obvious, most solemn, most pressing. II. The books to which St. John particularly refers are books about Christ. He is thinking chiefly of his own Gospel, and of the other three Gospels to which he intended this to be a supplement; these four evangelical records being, in modern phrase, four historical tracts—tracts such as had never been written before, such as have never been written since. It is an inexpressible blessing to have the four together, to have them bound within the same covers. They constitute a perfect unity, a harmonious whole; but the unity must not render us unmindful of the distinct and characteristic impress borne by each. On dwelling upon the whole, we must be careful to assign its proper individual character to every part. Four distinct witnesses supply their respective contributions of knowledge respecting our Divine Lord and Master. Each relates what he knows from his own point of view; each gives his own impression of the manifold life and mission of the world’s Saviour; each leaves in his own monograph the signature of his own habits of thought and of expression; each paints the Divine portrait in his own style. And most precious is it to the intelligent and devout Christian to have a clear and distinct idea of the main peculiarities of the four, looking at them carefully one by one. Harmonies of the Gospels have their use; but they are not used as they ought, they are much abused, if they are suffered to soften down the lines of distinction between Matthew and Mark, between Mark and Luke, between Luke and John. Any attempt made to put together four portraits of one person, painted from different points of view, placed on the canvas in different positions, brought out in different relations of light and shade, so as to destroy what is peculiar to each artist, would be a mischievous process, and would diminish the extent of our knowledge, instead of promoting the correctness of our conceptions. We value four pictures of a great hero painted by four different masters; we do not wish to blend the memories of them in our minds, so as to merge their varied ideals of one reality; we would not, on any account, sacrifice in any of them a single line of drawing, a single tint of colour. We should deprecate the endeavour to destroy a touch here, and a stroke there, under pretence of making the pictures exactly alike. We would infinitely rather have them left unaltered, in all the freshness of their original colouring, than have a single engraving, however carefully and exquisitely executed, which aimed at a harmonious rendering of the four. We prefer these divine productions as they separately stand, each taken by itself, each a beautiful tractate complete in itself, given from God, through the hands of the human writer, to a single volume, made up of the four, cut into fragments, and patched together under a very fallible, although a very skilful editorship.