appropriation) "this is the temper of a man who will not enter the public baths along with the heretic who has dishonoured his Lord." * "For a good work we stone thee not, but for blasphemy; and because that thou being a man makest thyself God." Jesus answered them, "Is it not written in your law, I said, ye are gods? If he called them gods unto whom the word of God came (and the scripture cannot be broken), say ye of him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest, because I said I am the son of God?" This is the spirit of the writer of the gospel, not of Jesus: the egotism of the writer is reflected in the words put into the mouth of his master; and thus the preacher of the Father's love is degraded into the seeker of his own glory, and bearing witness of himself, his witness becomes untrue. I must also draw attention to one or two cases of unreality attributed to Jesus by this gospel. He prays, on one occasion, "because of the people who stand by:" he cries on his cross, "I thirst," not because of the burning agony of crucifixion, but in order "that the Scriptures might be fulfilled:" a voice answers "his prayer," "not because of me, but for your sakes." This calculation of effect is very foreign to the sincere and open spirit of Jesus. Akin to this is the prevarication attributed to him, when he declines to accompany his brethren to Judaea, but "when his brethren were gone up then went he also up to the feast, not openly but as it were in secret." All this strikes us strangely as part of that simple, fearless life. We reject this gospel, sixthly, for the cruel spirit, the arrogance, the self-assertion, the bigotry, the unreality, attributed by it to Jesus, and we denounce it as a slander on his memory and an insult to his noble life. We may, perhaps, note, as another peculiarity of this gospel--although I do not enter here into the argument of the divinity of Jesus,--that when Dr. Liddon, in his celebrated Bampton Lectures, is anxious to prove the Deity of Jesus _from his own mouth_, he is compelled to quote exclusively from this gospel. Such a fact as this cannot be overlooked, when we remember that "St. John's gospel is a polemical treatise" written to prove this special point. We cannot avoid noting the coincidence.