Even as an ideal, this transcends the philosophy of Epictetus, and outshines the vision of Plato. As one of the charter documents of a society which had come into an actual existence,--as the aim toward which thousands of men and women were struggling, however imperfectly,--it marks the coming of a new life into the world. The Pauline idea of Christ is shown as it worked itself out in the brain and heart of Paul himself. In the Fourth Gospel we have, not the experience of an individual, but an idealized portrait of the Master. The germ may have lain in some genuine tradition of his words, as they were caught and treasured by some disciple more susceptible than the rest to the mystical and contemplative element in Jesus. These words, handed down through congenial spirits, and deeply brooded; these ideas caught by minds schooled in the blending of Hebraic with Platonic thought,--minds accustomed to rely on the contemplative imagination as the discloser of absolute truth; the waning of the hope of Messiah's return in the clouds; the growth in its place of a personal and interior communion with the divine beauty and glory as imaged in Jesus; a temper almost indifferent to outward event, too full of present emotion to strain anxiously toward a future, yet confident of a transcendent future in due season; an assumption that in this belief lay the sole good and hope of humanity, and that the rejection of this was an impulse of the evil principle warring against God; the crystallization of these memories, hopes, and beliefs into a dramatic portraiture of acts and words appropriate to Christ as so conceived; a temper in which a portraiture so inspired was identified with actual and absolute truth--some such genesis we may suppose for the Gospel which bears the name of John. The writer shows no such close contact with the actual struggle of life as vivifies the other biographies of Jesus and the impassioned pleadings of Paul. He is a pure and lofty soul, but he writes as if in seclusion from the world. His favorite words are abstract and general. The parable and precept of the early gospels give place to polemic and metaphysic disquisition. The Christian communities for which he writes have left behind them the sharp antagonisms of the first generation, and have drawn together into a harmonious society, strong in their mutual affection, their inspiring faith, and their rule of life, and facing together the cruelty of the persecutor and the scorn of the philosopher. To this writer, all who are outside of the Christian fold and the Christian belief seem leagued together by the power of evil. The secret of their perversity and the seal of their doom is unbelief. Let them accept the Christ he portrays, and good shall supplant evil in their hearts. The ground of the acceptance is to be simply the self-evident beauty and therefore the self-evident truth of the Christ here set forth.