s to say about the great truths and
principles which we call the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This is my simple
design, and I gather the phenomena into three or four divisions for the
sake of accuracy and order.

I. First of all, then, let us hear its witness to the divine Christ.

Look how the letter begins. 'Paul, and Silvanus, and Timotheus, unto the
church of the Thessalonians, which is in God the Father, and in the Lord
Jesus Christ.' What is the meaning of that collocation, putting these
two names side by side, unless it means that the Lord Jesus Christ sits
on the Father's throne, and is divine?

Then there is another fact that I would have you notice, and that is
that more than twenty times in this short letter that great name is
applied to Jesus, 'the Lord.' Now mark that that is something more than
a mere title of human authority. It is in reality the New Testament
equivalent of the Old Testament Jehovah, and is the transference to Him
of that incommunicable name.

And then there is another fact which I would have you weigh, viz., that
in this letter direct prayer is offered to our Lord Himself. In one
place we read the petition, 'May our God and Father Himself and our Lord
Jesus direct our way unto you,' where the petition is presented to both,
and where both are supposed to be operative in the answer. And more than
that, the word 'direct,' following upon this _plural_ subject, is itself
a _singular_ verb. Could language more completely express than that
grammatical solecism does, the deep truth of the true and proper
divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ? There is nothing in any
part of Scripture more emphatic and more lofty in its unfaltering
proclamation of that fundamental truth of the Gospel than this
altogether undoctrinal Epistle.

The Apostle does not conceive himself to be telling these men, though
they were such raw and recent Christians, anything new when he
presupposes the truth that to Him desires and prayers may go. Thus the
very loftiest apex of revealed religion had been imparted to that
handful of heathens in the few weeks of the Apostle's stay amongst them.
And nowhere upon the inspired pages of the fourth Evangelist, nor in
that great Epistle to the Colossians, which is the very citadel and
central fort of that doctrine in Scripture, is there more emphatically
stated this truth than here, in these incidental allusions.

This witness, at any rate, declares, apart altogether from any