With an equal interest the student of evidence will now turn back to the inquiry into the teaching of prophecy. At the outset it sufficed to know the broad fact that the characteristics of the coming Christ were believed by His contemporaries to have been announced in predictions which, whether of divine origin or not, unquestionably moulded their anticipations. He is now able to test their accuracy, to satisfy himself as to their origin, and to study them with a far deeper and more intelligent interest than would be possible without the previous appreciation of our Lord's nature. At first his attention will naturally be caught by separate predictions, by their correspondence with outward occurrences in the Gospel narration; but as he advances in the study his whole spirit will be gradually absorbed in contemplation of their internal coherence, their unbroken continuity, their ever progressing development. Distinct, accurate, and in the strictest sense of the word evidential, those predictions are, taken separately and independently; as such they are recognised by one and all the sacred writers--by none more fully than by the two who stand pre-eminent among the disciples of Jesus--by St Paul, who represents the highest development of the intellectual forces in Christianity, the acute disputant, the subtle reasoner, the spiritualist philosopher, or, as he has been lately called, the metaphysician of Christianity--and by St. John, whose spirit, insphered in the region of love, came into nearest contact with the divine, who represents the very highest of all faculties, that of spiritual intuition. Nay, those predictions are repeatedly and distinctly recognised as conclusive evidences by our Lord Himself. But their full significance is only discerned when we contemplate them as parts of a mighty whole, as a continuous and complete testimony of the Spirit of God. Two lines of light traverse the realm of spiritual manifestation, the one revealing the divine, the other the human characteristics of the future Saviour: the one ever expanding, but from the beginning broad, luminous, equable; the other advancing, so to speak, with varying progress, ever and anon bursting out in sudden flashes, each bringing into vivid light some event in the life, above all each event in the crowning work, of the Saviour. These two lines gradually converge until they meet in the Incarnation. From that point of meeting the Christian goes back; then he learns to combine and to comprehend their intimations. Under Christ's teaching, prophecy becomes to him a guiding light--an evidence so complete that if it stood alone he might dispense with other proofs, and feel it adequate for the support of his faith.