However, in our two preceding chapters we have been describing something much more than the exhibition of this order of truth; that is, we have set forth the union of it with a Person, who both exhibits it in Himself, and is the source of it to others. And the difference between these two things is very great. Many at different times have said, “I teach the truth.” One only has said, “I am the Truth:” and to say it is the most emphatic indirect assumption of Godhead which can be conceived. And with it that One also joined a similar expression, containing the same assumption of Godhead, and which equally was never approached by any other teacher, “I am the Life.” The union of the Truth at once and of the Life with His Person, which is thus become the root of both to human nature, was the subject of the last two chapters. Now, as we have said, that there was an order of truth sacred and inviolable above all things, was borne witness to by the Hebrew martyrs, and therefore was not new to the chosen race of Israel, though it was new to heathendom, at the time at which our Lord appeared. But the union of the Truth and of the Life with the Person of One appearing visibly in the world as man, was as new to the Hebrews as to the heathen, was an absolute novelty to human nature. And so the Christian Faith also, as a system of belief and action, that is, as embracing the mind and the will of man, as giving both Truth and Life, is entirely new in this respect; that in this double action it is in its origin and in its whole course and maintenance bound up with a Person. Thus all which it teaches is not naked truth, unlocalised as it were, and impersonal, but is the development of relations in which the disciples of Christ stand to Him; for instance, as King, as God, as Head, as Bridegroom, as Father. As these, He is at once The Truth and the Life. Thus it is that the Christian Faith flows out of the Person of Christ the God-man; and, as its Truth is centered in that Person, so also its continuous Life depends on Him. And further, as the connection of doctrine, or truth, and of life, that is, action, with a Person is the point from which all this movement springs, in which respect we have said it was absolutely new, so the term to which it reaches is the creation of something in both these things correlative to that Person, the creation of a Kingdom, a Temple, a Body, a Mother, a Race, in which respect also the term is as new as that from which it springs. That He is the Truth and the Life is shown in this creation, which has a distinctive character, as He has, an unique existence, and an organic unity with Him.