of the Son of Man by participation in the sacrament of His love, with the grace and strength that it gives day by day to innumerable souls; the Gospel concentrated into that great sacrifice; the Church's gifts of benediction summarised in the unspeakable Gift; this is the unceasing witness of the _Blood_. (4) Men are ever witnessing. "The witness of men" fills the Gospel from beginning to end. The glorious series of confessions wrung from willing and unwilling hearts form the points of division round which the whole narrative may be grouped. Let us think of all those attestations which lie between the Baptist's precious testimony with the sweet yet fainter utterances of Andrew, Philip, Nathanael, and the perfect creed of Christendom condensed into the burning words of Thomas--"my Lord and my God."[52] What a range of feeling and faith; what a variety of attestation coming from human souls, sometimes wrung from them half unwillingly, sometimes uttered at crisis-moments with an impulse that could not be resisted! The witness of men in the Gospel, and the assurance of one testimony that was to be given by the Apostles individually and collectively,[53] besides the evidences already named includes the following--the witness of Nicodemus, of the Samaritan woman, of the Samaritans, of the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda, of Simon Peter, of the officers of the Jewish authorities, of the blind man, of Pilate.[54] (5) The witness of God occupies also a great position in the fourth Gospel. That witness may be said to be given in five forms: the witness of the Father,[55] of Christ Himself,[56] of the Holy Spirit,[57] of Scripture,[58] of miracles.[59] This great cloud of witnesses, human and divine, finds its appropriate completion in another subjective witness.[60] The whole body of evidence passes from the region of the intellectual to that of the moral and spiritual life. The _evidence_ acquires that _evidentness_ which is to all our knowledge what the sap is to the tree. The faithful carries it in his heart; it goes about with him, rests with him day and night, is close to him in life and death. He, the principle of whose being is belief ever going out of itself and resting its acts of faith on the Son of God, has all that manifold witness in him.[61]