Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/331

 began to rebuke him," anxious to avert the omen. Had he believed that it was God himself with whom he was conversing, he could hardly have ventured to question his perfect knowledge of the future.

The doctrine of the divinity of Christ is not, in fact, to be found in the New Testament. Even the writer of the fourth Gospel, who holds the highest and most mystical view of his nature, does not teach that. Often indeed in that Gospel does Jesus speak of himself as one with the Father. But the dogmatic force of all these expressions is measured by the fact that precisely in the same sense he speaks of the disciples as one with himself. As the Father and he are in one another, so he prays that the disciples may be one in them (Jo. xvii. 21). Moreover, when the Jews charged him with making himself God, he met them by inquiring whether it was not written in their law, "I said, Ye are gods." If, then, those to whom the word of God came were called gods, was it blasphemy in him, whom the Father had sanctified and sent, to say, "I am the Son of God?" (Jo. x. 33-37). Here, then, the term which Jesus appropriates is "Son of God," and this he considers admissible because the Hebrew people generally had been called gods. Evidently, then, he does not admit the charge of making himself God.

The authority of the fourth Gospel is, of course of no value in enabling us to determine what Jesus said or did, but it is of great value as evidence of the view taken about him by those of his disciples who, at this early period, had advanced the furthest in the direction of placing him on a level with God himself. It is either the latest, or one of the latest, compositions in the New Testament, and it proves that, at the period when its author lived, even the boldest spirits had not ventured on the dogma which afterwards became the corner-stone of the Christian creed.

Throughout the rest of the canonical books, Jesus is simply the Messiah, the Son of God; in whom, in that sense, it is a duty to believe. Whoever believes this much is, according to the first epistle of John, born of God (1 John v. 1).

Clearer still is the evidence that, in the opinion of those most competent to judge, Jesus had no intention of abolishing