The Gospel closes with a scene in which the writer refers in his usual oblique way to himself. I cannot think that there is any real reason for the assumption, which is so often and so confidently made, that the last chapter is an appendix written after the author was dead. On this point, again, I entirely agree with Dr. Drummond, ‘It is surely conceivable that the aged disciple, feeling death stealing upon him, might point out that no words of Jesus justified the expectation which had arisen among some of his devoted friends[36].’ The complete identity of thought and style, and the way in which this last chapter is dovetailed into the preceding (‘This is now the third time that Jesus was manifested to the disciples’; compare at the beginning of the Gospel the counting up of the first Galilean miracles, ii. 11, iv. 54), seem to prove that the last chapter is by the same hand as the rest of the Gospel[37]. But at the very end another hand does take up the pen; and this time the writer speaks in the name of a plurality; ‘This is the disciple which beareth witness of these things, and wrote these things: and we know that his witness is true’ (xxi. 24). The critics who assert that the Gospel is not the work of an eye-witness, and even those who say that the last chapter was not written by the author of the whole, wantonly accuse these last words of untruth. That is another of the methods of modern criticism that seem to me sorely in need of reforming. I hope that a time may come when it will be considered as wrong to libel the dead as it is to libel the living. I accept, then, this last verse as weighty testimony to the autoptic character of the Gospel. It is easy to see that the two concluding verses are added on the occasion of its publication by those who published it. They, as it were, endorse the witness which it had borne to itself. ii. Passages in which the impression conveyed is indirect. We have been through the few salient passages which, in spite of the criticism to which they have been exposed, still proclaim in no uncertain terms the first-hand character of the work to which they belong. I now go on to collect a number of passages which are more indirect in their evidence, and just because of this indirectness have a special value, because the evidence which they afford is unconscious and undesigned. For the present I shall speak only of two groups: first, a series of passages in which the author seems to write as though from the inner circle of the disciples and companions of Jesus; and, secondly, another series in which he refers to the way in which impressions received at the time were corrected or interpreted by subsequent experience and reflection.