The book belongs nearer to the middle than the beginning of the second century, and is the result of an attempt to present the Christ as the incarnate Word of God. The author is not obliged to go far to find his materials; they lie ready shaped to his hand in the writings of Philo and the Gnostics of his century. The thread of Hebrew tradition, has, by this time, become exceedingly thin; vestiges of the popular Jewish conception appear, but faintly, here and there. Nicodemus recognizes the divine character of the Christ by his power to work miracles. The Christ respects the tradition which accorded special privileges to the genuine "children of Abraham;" he declares to the woman of Samaria that "salvation is of the Jews;" he announces that eternal life consists in the knowledge of God, and the acceptance of his Son. Moses is said to have written of the Christ. Father Abraham rejoiced to see his day. Isaiah sang his glory, and spake of him. The brazen serpent is a type of his mission to deliver. For the rest, the conceptions of deity, of providence, of salvation, of the eternal world, are quite different from the recognized Hebrew conceptions--the title given to God sixty times in the gospel, while the word "God," occurs less than twenty, is "Father," and this term is used, not in the sense of Matthew's "Our Father in Heaven," which describes the Old Testament Jehovah under his more amiable aspect, but rather as designating the _abyss of potential being_, as the term is employed in the trinitarian formula, in which the Godhead is broken up into three distinctions; the declaration "God is Spirit," or, as the language equally well permits, "Spirit is God," intimates that the individuality of God has disappeared, that the idea of deity has become intellectual. The one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm expresses perhaps as mystical an apprehension of God as the old Hebrew thought admits of, but that psalm retains the divine individuality; the limits are nowhere transgressed; it is a sympathetic, regardful eye that searches the secret place, and an attentive mind that notes the unarticulated thought. The intelligence loses no point of clearness in becoming penetrative. But in the fourth Gospel, the individuality is gone altogether. The Father "loveth," but with an abstract, impersonal sympathy; the Father "draweth," but with an organic, elemental attraction; the Father "hath life in himself," and hath given the Son to "have life in himself;" but neither the possession nor the communication of this power implies the bestowal of a concrete gift. The Father "judgeth no man, but hath given all judgment to the Son"--a phrase intimating that he had gone into retirement, had withdrawn from active interest in human concerns, had sunk into the depths of the Absolute. The expression "God is Spirit," taken alone, conveys no idea that is not contained in the Hebrew conception of the formless Jehovah; but when