represented as the dreadful thing; and Love, another abstraction, is raised to honor as a spiritual grace, equally unconnected with the human will. "Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is Love." The words have a deep and tender sound. But the consideration that "the beloved" are those only who confess that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, that all others are the reverse of "beloved," causes that neither the depth nor the sweetness remains. The love does not mean compassion, or pity, or good-will, or helpfulness; it has no reference to the poor, the needy, the sick, sorrowful, wicked; it has no downward look, is destitute of humility, is as far as can well be from the love described by Paul in his perfect lyric. It is, we may say, the opposite of that, being a quality that distinguishes the elect from the non-elect, and makes their special election the more sure. The literary character of the fourth gospel must be remarked on as a peculiar indication of the mental exhaustion that accompanies the last stages of an intellectual movement. The literature of the century preceding Jesus fairly throbs with personal vitality. It is scarcely more than an expression of individual energies. The earliest writings of the New Testament, the genuine letters of Paul, are animated in every line by his own vehement personality; the speculative portions of them stir the blood, so real are the issues presented, so vital are the interests at stake. Shapeless, and sometimes incoherent, the thoughts tumble out of the writer's overcharged heart. The Christ is an ideal personage, but his mission is tremendously real; we are moved by a battle cry as the apostle's ideas burst upon us. The literature of the succeeding period, though more elaborate and self-conscious, bearing traces of reflection, and even artifice in composition, is yet warm with the presence of a real purpose. But the fourth gospel is a purely literary work; a composition, the production of an artist in language. Its author, perhaps because he was simply an artist in language, is unknown. Trace of an historical Jesus in it there is none. No breath from the world of living men blows through it; no stir of social existence, no movement of human affairs ruffles its calm surface. The people are not real people, the issues are not real issues, the conflict is not a real conflict. We have a book, not a gospel.