We will now proceed to the last assertion:—­

    “One [system of teaching] clothed in the great language of humanity,
    the other concealed in obscure philosophic terminology.”

What can this writer mean by the “philosophic terminology” of our Lord’s sayings as reported in the Fourth Gospel?  If the use of the term “Logos” be “philosophic terminology,” it is confined to four sentences; and these not the words of Jesus Himself, but of the Evangelist.  I do not remember throughout the rest of the Gospel a single sentence which can be properly called “philosophical.”

The author must confound “philosophical” with “mysterious.”  Each and every discourse in the fourth Gospel is upon, or leads to, some deep mystery; but that mystery is in no case set forth in philosophical, but in what the author of “Supernatural Religion” calls the “great language of humanity.”  Take the most mysterious by far of all the enunciations in St. John’s Gospel, “Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His Blood, ye have no life in you.”  What are the words of which this sentence is composed?  “Eat,” “flesh,” “blood,” “Son of man,” “life.”  Are not these the commonest words of daily life? but, then, their use and association here is the very thing which constitutes the mystery.

Again, take the salient words of each discourse—­“Except a man be born again”—­“be born of water and of the Spirit.”  “Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst.”  “As the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself.”  “All that are in the graves shall hear His voice and shall come forth.”  “The bread that I will give is My flesh.”  “If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.”  “As the Father knoweth Me, even so know I the Father.”  “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”  “Whatsoever ye shall ask in My name, that will I do.”  “If I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you but:  if I depart, I will send Him unto you.”

It is the deepest of all mysteries that one in flesh and blood can say such things of Himself; but it is a perversion of language to speak of these sayings as “philosophical terminology.”  They are in a different sphere from all more human philosophy, and, indeed, are opposed to every form of it.  Philosophy herself requires a new birth before she can so much as see them.

I must recur, however, to the author’s first remark, in which he characterizes the discourses of the Synoptics as “purely moral,” and those of St. John as “wholly dogmatic.”  This is by no means true.  The discourses in the Synoptics are on moral subjects, but they continually make dogmatic assertions or implications as pronounced as those in the Fourth Gospel.  In the Sermon on the Mount, for instance, the preacher authoritatively adds to and modifies the teaching of the very Decalogue itself.  “Ye have heard that it was said TO them of old time” (for so [Greek:  errhethe