The result of our inquiry into the evidence for the fourth Gospel is sufficiently decided to render further examination unnecessary. We have seen that, for some century and a half after the events recorded in the work, there is not only no testimony whatever connecting the fourth Gospel with the Apostle John, but no certain trace even of the existence of the Gospel. There has not been the slightest evidence in any of the writings of the Fathers which we have examined even of a tradition that the Apostle John had composed any evangelical work at all, and the claim advanced in favour of the Christian miracles to contemporaneous evidence of extraordinary force and veracity by undoubted eye-witnesses so completely falls to the ground, that we might here well bring this part of our inquiry to a close. There are, however, so many peculiar circumstances connected with the fourth Gospel, both in regard to its authorship and to its relationship with the three Synoptics, which invite further attention, that we propose briefly to review some of them. We must, however, carefully restrict ourselves to the limits of our inquiry, and resist any temptation to enter upon an exhaustive discussion of the problem presented by the fourth Gospel from a more general literary point of view. {386} The endeavour to obtain some positive, or at least negative, information regarding the author of the fourth Gospel is facilitated by the fact that several other works in the New Testament Canon are ascribed to him. These works present such marked and distinct characteristics that, apart from the fact that their number extends the range of evidence, they afford an unusual opportunity of testing the tradition which assigns them all to the Apostle John, by comparing the clear indications which they give of the idiosyncrasies of their author with the independent data which we possess regarding the history and character of the Apostle. It is asserted by the Church that John the son of Zebedee, one of the disciples of Jesus, is the composer of no less than five of our canonical writings, and it would be impossible to select any books of our New Testament presenting more distinct features, or more widely divergent views, than are to be found in the Apocalypse on the one hand, and the Gospel and three Epistles on the other. Whilst a strong family likeness exists between the Epistles and the Gospel, and they exhibit close analogies both in thought and language, the Apocalypse, on the contrary, is so different from them in language, in style, in religious views and terminology, that it is almost impossible to believe that the writer of the one could be the author of the other. The translators of our New Testament have laboured, and not in vain, to eliminate as far as possible all individuality of style and language, and to reduce the various books of which it is composed to one uniform smoothness of diction. It is, therefore, impossible for the mere English reader to