When matter has come down by oral tradition, men can hardly worship the letter of it. We possess only brief memoirs collected by men, the dates and history of the composition of which are far from certain, so that room is left for criticism and judgment. The revelation of God is, therefore, not so direct that men will be awestricken and shut their minds at the sight of it; but human intelligence can be brought to bear on the records, whereby their meaning is brought out, and men’s intellects are braced by the exploration of lofty regions. Men may without irreverence raise the question, whether the narrator had rightly understood Christ’s sayings, and properly connected them with the circumstances out of which they arose. Our Lord, in Galilee at any rate, spoke Aramaic, and we have merely the Greek; we have only fragments of His teaching; we possess different versions, agreeing indeed in essentials, but with such differences, that we are forced to admit in the writers a human possibility of error. We have our Lord’s words it is true, but not in the order, or in the connection, in which they were spoken. There is not only room for human judgment but a necessity for it. Hence the form in which our Lord’s utterances have come down to us is suited to the plan which seems to run through all our Lord’s teaching; it calls for the free play of the human mind, and leaves room for the admission of a certain choice as to what we accept as revealed truth. It is true that some Divines have endeavoured to do what our Lord was careful not to do—they have, by theories of verbal inspiration, endeavoured to put our Gospels in the position that actual writings of our Lord would have held; and, so far as they have succeeded, they have brought about the evils which attended the notions of the scribes. But the form in which we have the Gospels does not lend itself to such a theory. If men go wrong in this way they have only themselves to blame. There is another way in which this form of the Gospels answers to the plan of Christ’s teaching. He impressed men, above all, by His Personality, and the record of His life is preserved to us in that form which is best adapted to preserve personality and store it up for the future, viz. the form of memoirs put together by contemporaries, or by those who were familiar with contemporaries. History and literature furnish many instances of men who have made their mark in virtue of a striking _personality_; whose reputation rests, not on any visible tokens,—not on kingdoms conquered, institutions founded, books written, or inventions perfected or anything else that they _did_,—but mainly on what they _were_. Their merely having passed along a course on earth, and lived and talked and acted with others, has left lasting effects on mankind.