Alexandrian teachers whom some suppose him to have imitated. It is not only that his style is simple and childlike. Throughout he speaks of the light as making men aware of the _darkness_ that is in them. Throughout he speaks of the light as lightening _all_ men. Are these reports of the Baptist inconsistent with those which we derive from the other Evangelists? Are we not told that he came to level the hills, and exalt the valleys? Are we not told that he bade his countrymen not say within themselves that they had Abraham to their father, because God was able of the stones to raise up children to Abraham? What finer commentary can we find on these announcements than the words, '_He testified of the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world_'? Still the reader of St. John's Gospel will continue to ask himself, 'Is not the lesson which I am taught here, in some sense or other, a more advanced lesson than that which was imparted even by the first Evangelists,--_à fortiori_, than that which was imparted before the day of Pentecost, before the resurrection, the death, even the preaching, of Jesus Christ?' I think, my brethren, that there is a confusion latent in this word '_advanced_'--a confusion which besets other studies as well as theological. We speak of Bacon's discovery of the true method of physical investigation, as the greatest step in advance which it was possible for the man of science to take. But in another sense that discovery involved a retrogression. The schoolman, who had proceeded with the greatest satisfaction to himself in building a tower of speculations respecting nature, is stopped in his work and bidden to look back to his foundations. Classifications and generalizations, which had appeared convenient and indispensable, are disallowed, because they hinder direct intercourse with the facts. And the laborious collector of facts, though he is commended for his diligence, is told that every one of them must be submitted to tests before we can know what it is worth. Is it not true, in this and in all similar instances, that the greatest progress consists in the assertion and elucidation of first principles; that when they are asserted and elucidated, all faithful effort is seen to have been directed to the search for them,--all unfaithful, self-seeking efforts, to the construction of systems on hypothetical sand?