These apparitions and occultations are frequent in the gospel, the Christ's outward form being only a façade, removable at pleasure. The numerous comings and goings, hidings, disclosures, presences, absences, are accounted for on this supposition, better than on any other. He goes up to the feast at Jerusalem, not openly, but "as it were in secret," veiled, disguised. He comes before the crowd many of whom must have been familiar with his person, but is unrecognized; he discloses himself for a moment, speaks exciting words that raise a tumult, and then, at the height of the turmoil, becomes invisible. "They sought to take him; but no man laid hands on him, _for his hour was not yet come_." On a subsequent occasion his hearers, intensely aroused by his language, took up stones to cast at him; but he "_hid himself_, and went out of the temple, _going through the midst of them_, and so passed by." His enemies sought to take him, but "he escaped out of their hands." Having spoken, he departs, and hides himself; but again, without apparently changing his locality or absenting himself for any period, he is again heard proclaiming his mission. There is no history in this book. The incarnate Word can have no history. His career being theological, the events in it cannot be other than spectral. He is not in the world of cause and effect. His actions are phenomenal; the passages of his life do not open into one another, do not lead anywhere; nothing follows anything else, nothing moves; there is no progress towards development. The biography is a succession of scenes, a diorama. There are no sequences or consequences. Stones are taken up, but never thrown; hands are uplifted to strike, but no blow is delivered. The movement to arrest is never carried out. The miracles are not deeds of power or mercy, they are signs, thrown out to attract popular attention, demonstrations of the divine presence; sometimes merely symbolical foreshadowings or interpretations of speculative ideas, as in the case of the turning of water into wine at the "marriage feast;" the opening of the blind man's eyes, signifying that he was come a light into the world; the resurrection of Lazarus, a scenic commentary on the text, "I am the resurrection and the life." These are pictures not performances. None of them are mentioned in the earlier traditions, for the probable reason that they never occurred, never were rumored to have occurred. They were designed by the artist of the fourth Gospel, for his private gallery of illustrations. The artist was a Greek Jew who took Hebrew ideals for his models, but he was sometimes obliged to go far to find them. The hint for the conversion of the water into wine, may have come from the legends of Israelite sojourn in Egypt, where Moses, the first deliverer, turned water into blood, the mystical synonym of wine; Elisha may have furnished a study for the elaborate picture of the blind man's cure, and Isaiah may have supplied the motive