But whatever else may have been peculiar and exceptional in the teaching of Christ, that which chiefly distinguishes Him from all other teachers is this. Moral philosophers like Socrates, ever kept themselves in the background. It was philosophy that was everything, Socrates was but the humble tyro, feebly feeling after truth. Prophets of every religion,--Moses, Zoroaster, Mohammed, all spoke the word which God put into their mouths. He was all; and they were at the best His honoured subjects and servants. But Jesus Christ, the meek, the gentle, the humble, the unselfish, the self-denied, the self-devoted, not only showed Himself as the Pattern of life, but even propounded Himself as the Object of faith, hope, love, obedience, loyalty, devotion, adoration, worship. It is impossible to deny this without rending to pieces every Christian record. It is argued, I know, that this was no part of Christ's original teaching, that it grew up after His death among His devoted followers, who looked back upon Him as a loved and lost friend and teacher, and who by degrees invested Him with Divine attributes and paid Him Divine honours; and especially it is thought that the writings of St. John, or rather writings in the second century falsely ascribed to St. John, and the later epistles attributed to St. Paul, fostered this exaggerated belief. I may well leave the genuineness of these later writings to those who have so ably and so amply dealt with them before me. All I wish to say now is, that if St. John's Gospel and St. Paul's Epistles had never come down to us, we should still be just where we are. This special teaching of Christ by Himself is fully developed in every portion of the three synoptical Gospels. They are interpenetrated by it from end to end. If it never came from Christ, the writers of those Gospels have misconceived Him altogether, and their record is mere fiction and falsehood. And so it is of every document which we possess--history, letters, traditions, anecdotes, apocalypses--they all turn the same way, they all speak the same tongue. Nay; I have often thought that if we had only the three synoptical Gospels left, though we should suffer terribly indeed by losing the deep theology of St. John the Divine, we should still have the clearest possible statements--though of the character sometimes called undesigned, or more properly indirect and incidental--as to the Godhead, Kingship, Priesthood of Christ; and that we should have none, or at most but one or two of those passages which have been thought by many to be inconsistent with the highest belief in our Lord's supreme, co-equal, co-eternal Deity. It is in fact in St. John and in St. Paul that we find the most developed form of the New Testament theology, but on that very account the appearance, for appearance it is only, of inconsistency and difficulty.[144]