The book's method and form are pervadingly allegorical; its instinct and aim are profoundly mystical. Now from Philo to Origen we have a long Hellenistic, Jewish and Christian applica tion of that all-embracing allegorism, where one thing stands for another and where no factual details resist resolution into a symbol of religious ideas and forces. Thus Philo had, in his life of Moses, allegorized the Pentateuchal narratives so as to repre sent him as mediator, saviour, intercessor of his people, the one great organ of revelation, and the soul's guide from the false lower world into the upper true one. The Fourth Gospel is the noblest instance of this kind of literature, of which the truth depends not on the factual accuracy of the symbolizing appear ances but on the truth of the ideas and experiences thus symbol ized. And Origen is still full of spontaneous sympathy with its pervading allegorism. But this method has lost its attraction; the Synoptists, with their rarer and slighter pragmatic rearrange ments and their greater closeness to our Lord's actual words, deeds, experiences, environment, now come home to us as indefi nitely richer in content and stimulative appeal. Yet mysticism persists, as the intuitive and emotional apprehension of the most specifically religious of all truths, viz., the already full, operative existence of eternal beauty, truth and goodness, of infinite Person ality and Spirit independently of our action, and not, as in ethics. the simple possibility and obligation for ourselves to produce such-like things. And of this elemental mode of apprehension and root-truth, the Johannine Gospel is the greatest literary docu ment and incentive extant : its ultimate aim and deepest content retain all their potency.
The book contains an intellectualist, static, determinist, abstrac tive trend. In Luke x. 25-28, eternal life depends upon loving God and man; here it consists in knowing the one true God and Christ whom He has sent. In the Synoptists, Jesus grows in favour with God and man, passes through true human experiences and trials, prays alone on the mountain-side, and dies with a cry of desolation; here the Logos' watchword is "I am," He has deliber ately to stir up emotion in Himself, never prays for Himself, and in the garden and on the cross shows but power and self-posses sion. Here we find "ye cannot hear, cannot believe, because ye are not from God, not of My sheep" (viii. 47, x. 26) ; "the world cannot receive the spirit of truth" (xiv. 17). Yet the ethical current appears here also strongly: "he who doeth the truth, cometh to the light" (iii. 21), "if you love Me, keep My com mandments" (xiv. 15). Libertarianism is here: "the light came, but men loved the darkness better than the light," "ye will not come to Me" 19, v. 40) ; hence the appeal "abide in the branch can cease to be in Him the Vine (xv. 4, 2). Indeed even those first currents stand here for the deepest religious truths, the prevenience of God and man's affinity to Him. "Not we loved God (first), but He (first) loved us"; "let us love Him, because He first loved us" (r John iv. 1o, 19) : "no man can come to Me, unless the Father draw him" (vi. 44), a drawing which effects a hunger and thirst for Christ and God (iv. 14, vi. 35). Thus man's spirit can respond actively to the historic Jesus, because already touched and made hungry by the all-actual Spirit-God who made that soul akin unto Himself.
The book has an outer protective shell of acutely polemical and exclusive moods and insistences, whilst certain splendid Synoptic breadths and reconciliations are nowhere reached; but this is primarily because it is fighting, more consciously than they, for that inalienable ideal of all deepest religion, unity, even external and corporate, amongst all believers. The "Pneumatic" Gospel comes thus specially to emphasize certain central historical facts; and, the most explicitly institutional and sacramental of the four, to proclaim the most universalistic and developmental of all Biblical sayings. Here indeed Jesus will not pray for the
world (xvii. 9) : "ye shall die in your sins," He insists to His opponents (viii. 44, 24) it is the Jews generally who appear throughout as such; nowhere is there a word as to forgiving our enemies ; and the commandment of love is designated by Jesus as His, as new, and as binding the disciples to "love one another" within the community to which He gives His "example" (xv. 12. xiii. 34, 15). In the Synoptists, the disciples' intolerance is rebuked (Mark ix. 38-41) Jesus' opposition is everywhere restricted to the Pharisees and the worldly Sadducees; He ever longs for the conversion of Jerusalem ; the great double command ment of love is proclaimed as already formulated in the Mosaic law (Mark xii. 28-34) the neighbour to be thus loved and served is simply any and every suffering fellow-man; and the pattern for such perfect love is found in a schismatical Samaritan (Luke x. 25-37). Yet the deepest strain here is more serenely universalist even than St. Paul, for here Jesus says : "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should . . . have everlasting life" (iii. 16). True, the great prologue passage (i. 9) probably reads "He was the true Light coming into the world, that enlighteneth every man," so that the writer would everywhere concentrate his mind upon the grace attendant upon explicit knowledge of the incarnate, historic Christ. Yet Christian orthodoxy, which itself has, all but uni formly, understood this passage of the spiritual radiation through out the world of the Word before His incarnation, has been aided towards such breadth as to the past by the Johannine outlook into the future. For, in contrast to the earliest Synoptic tradition, where the full Christian truth and its first form remain undis tinguished, and where its earthly future appears restricted to that generation, in John the Eternal Life conception largely absorbs the attention away from all successiveness; Jesus' earthly life does not limit the religion's assimilation of further truth and experience : "I have many things to tell you, but you cannot bear them now," "the Father will give you another Helper, the spirit of truth, who will abide with you for ever" (xvi. 12, xiv. 15). This universalism is not simply spiritual; the external element, presupposed in the Synoptists as that of the Jewish church within which Jesus' earthly life was spent, is here that of the now separate Christian community : He has other sheep not of this fold—them also He must bring, there will be one fold, one shep herd; and His seamless tunic, and Peter's net which, holding every kind of fish, is not rent, are symbols of this visible unity. Ministerial gradations exist in this church; Jesus begins the feet washing with Peter, who alone speaks and is spoken to; the beloved disciple outruns Peter to Jesus' monument, yet waits to go in till Peter has done so first ; and in the appendix the treble pastoral commission is to Peter alone : a Petrine pre-eminence which but echoes the Synoptists. And sacramentalism informs the great discourses concerning rebirth by water and the spirit, and feeding on the Living Bread, Jesus' flesh and blood, and the narrative of the issue of blood and water from the dead Jesus' side. Indeed so severe a stress is laid upon the explicitly Christian life and its specific means, that orthodoxy itself interprets the rebirth by water and spirit, and the eating the flesh and drinking the blood to which entrance into the Kingdom and possession of interior life are here exclusively attached, as often represented by a simple sincere desire and will for spiritual purification and a keen hunger and thirst for God's aid, together with such cultural acts as such souls can know or find, even without any knowledge of the Christian rites. Thus there is many "a pedagogue to Christ," and the Christian visible means and expressions are the culmination and measure of what, in various degrees and forms, accompanies every sincerely striving soul throughout all human history.