What are the contents of the Gospel? (1) A lofty and dogmatic _proœmium_, which tells us of "the Word who was in the beginning with God--in Whom was life." (2) _Discourses_ and utterances, sometimes running on through pages, sometimes brief and broken. (3) _Works_, sometimes miraculous, sometimes wrought into the common contexture of human life--looks, influences, seen by the very eyes of St. John and others, gazed upon with ever deepening joy and wonder. (4) _Incidents_ which proved that all this issued from One who was intensely human; that it was as real as life and humanity--historical not visionary; the doing and the effluence of a Manhood which could be, and which was, grasped by human hands. Such is a synopsis of the Gospel precisely as it is given in the beginning of the First Epistle. (1) The Epistle mentions _first_, "that which was from the beginning." There is the compendium of the proœmium of the Gospel. (2) One of the most important constituent parts of the Gospel is to be found in its ample preservation of dialogues, in which the Saviour is one interlocutor; of monologues spoken to the hushed hearts of the disciples, or to the listening Heart of the Father, yet not in tones so low that their love did not find it audible. This element of the narrative is summed up by the writer of the Epistle in two words--"That which we heard."[37] (3) The _works_ of benevolence or power, the doings and sufferings; the pathos or joy which spring up from them in the souls of the disciples, occupy a large portion of the Gospel. All these come under the heading, "that which we have seen with our eyes,[38] that which we gazed upon,"[39] with one unbroken gaze of wonder as so beautiful, and of awe as so divine.[40] (4) The assertion of the _reality of the Manhood_[41] of Him who was yet the Life manifested--a reality through all His words, works, sufferings--finds its strong, bold summary in this compendium of the contents of the Gospel, "and our hands have handled." Nay, a still shorter compendium follows: (1) The Life with the Father. (2) The Life manifested.[42] 2. But we have more than a synopsis which embraces the contents of the Gospel at the beginning of the Epistle. We have towards its close a _second_ synopsis of the whole framework of the Gospel; not now the theory of the Person of Christ, which in such a life was necessarily placed at its beginning, but of the human conception which pervaded the Evangelist's composition.