Now arises the question, How far did our Lord Himself determine which among His doings and sayings should be recorded and which not? If He had Himself left a record, every word would have been regarded as inspired, and the Christian church would have been ruled, not by an indwelling Spirit, but by a book written once for all. It could not have been ruled by both,—for men cannot walk after the letter and after Faith at the same time—and that wooden fixity which characterised Rabbinical Judaism, would have affected Christianity as well. It pleased God that it should be left to men to tell the tale, and so other men may venture to use their judgment about it. But as Christ passed on His course, He must Himself have felt that this or that incident or discourse ought to be handed down. How could He effect this without miracle of any kind? It seems to me that He may have selected, as it were, matters for preservation thus. When He desired an incident to be known, “Wheresoever the Gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world,”(302) He emphasizes it, by some action or declaration, as above, viz. by letting drop some vivid expression which takes hold of the minds of men. Thus the story of the denials of Peter is rendered indelible by the words, “before the cock crow twice.” The hard saying or striking expression, sometimes because it touched the quick of men’s understandings, and sometimes because it puzzled them to make it out, was thought of again and again, and remained by them as part of themselves. The incident which called the saying forth, or the colloquy in which it occurred would have to be recorded to explain the saying itself: a mass of the matrix would go along with the precious metal embedded in it. What it was not thought needful to preserve, was not enriched with these pregnant sayings and has not survived. Hence I believe that the withdrawal from us of those “many other things that Jesus did” was not without design. The consequences of this may be of service to us in many ways, but the only one of which I shall speak is this. If every detail of our Lord’s acts had been set down, many more of those matters of daily life, on which judgment is now left open, would have been determined for us by the recorded example of our Lord. Many Christians would have felt bound to act as Christ had done, even in those concerns of ordinary life which might well be left to the individual; and many inexorable necessities—many rigid lines for which there was no occasion—would have traversed the field of Christian action. That our Lord should have thus placed a limit on the particulars that should be recorded about Him falls in with the views taken in this book, viz. that He was anxious to preserve individual freedom of action, and that He looked forward with a general prescience to the course of events.