St. Paul was not a historian, or we may be sure that he would have furnished abundant parallels for the sort of procedure that we find in St. John. He is not a historian, but he does for once lapse into history, and he does then furnish a parallel which has always seemed to me very exact and very illuminating. You will remember in Gal. ii. 11 ff. the account of the dispute with St. Peter at Antioch. The first few verses are strictly historical; but suddenly and without a word of warning the Apostle glides into one of his own abstruse doctrinal arguments as to justification by works of law and by faith. While therefore I quite allow that in any given instance there is need for close scrutiny to determine what belongs to the Master and what to the disciple, I entirely repudiate the inference that St. John cannot have written the Gospel. Psychologically, the Gospel is more intelligible if one like St. John wrote it, one who drew upon his own memories and was conscious of speaking with authority. It is a mechanical and, I believe, really untenable view to suppose that the author has simply taken over certain Synoptic sayings and adapted them to his own ideas. We form for ourselves a far truer and more adequate conception if we think of these discourses as the product of a single living experience. They are from first to last a part of the author’s self. The recollections on which they are based are his own, and it is his own mind that has insensibly played upon them, and shaped them, and worked up in them the fruits of his own experience. It is this that really constitutes the value of the Gospel. It is not a mere invention, but it is the result of a strong first-hand impression of a wonderful Personality. It is a blending of fact and interpretation; but the interpretation comes from one who had an unique position and unique advantages for getting at the heart and truth of that which he sought to interpret. It is the mind of Christ, seen through the medium of one of the first and closest of His companions. IV. The Presentation of the Supernatural. i. The treatment of Miracle in the Fourth Gospel. I cannot regard anything that we have hitherto had to deal with as constituting a substantial set-off against the arguments previously urged for the authentic and autoptic character of the Gospel. It is otherwise when we come to its manner of presenting the Supernatural. It must be confessed that the miracles in the Fourth Gospel, while in the main they run parallel to those in the Synoptic Gospels, yet do appear to involve a certain heightening of the effect. The courtier’s servant is healed from a distance; the impotent man had been thirty-and-eight years in his infirmity; the blind man who was sent to wash in the pool of Siloam had been blind from his birth; Lazarus had lain four days in the tomb.