try,
we are again met by difficulties in the chronology, which are not only
various, but to the certain solution of which there appears to be no
clue. If we follow exclusively the order given by one Evangelist we
appear to run counter to the scattered indications which may be found
in another. That it should be so will cause no difficulty to the
candid mind. The Evangelists do not profess to be guided by
chronological sequences." So writes Dean Farrar in despair. Is it
likely that such confusion would be found in a Divine revelation?
Would not the narratives have been as well arranged and clear as, by
the admission of orthodoxy, they are the reverse? Would the names of
the authors of the Gospels, their warrants and the sources of their
information, have been withheld? Providence surely was not there.

If there was a miraculous revelation on which salvation depended, why
was it not universal? Why has it all this time been withheld from
nations even more in need of it than those to whom it was given? Are
we to suppose that the salvation of these myriads was a matter of
indifference to their Creator, or that Heaven preferred the slow and
precarious working of the missionary to the instantaneous action of its
own fiat? This is the question which scepticism asks, and which the
great author of the "Analogy of Religion" fails to answer.

What did Jesus think of himself and his mission, and of his relation to
Deity? This it seems impossible without more authentic records clearly
to decide. The Gospel of St. John, which is the most theological,
would appear to be the least trustworthy of the four. Its author,
apparently, sees its subject through a theosophic medium of his own.
The idea of the teacher in the mind of the disciples would naturally
rise with his ascendancy; so, perhaps, would his own idea. If Jesus is
rightly reported he believed himself to be the Son of God, exalted to
union and participation in spiritual dominion with the Father, and
destined together with the Father to judge the world. But, in his
mortal hour of anguish in Gethsemane, he prays to the Father to let the
cup pass from him; an act hardly consistent with the doctrines of the
Athanasian Creed. In the immortality of the soul and judgment after
death he plainly believes. But he does not substantiate the belief by
any explanation of the mode of survival; nor, in separating the two
flocks of sheep and goats, does he say how mixed characte