Lazarus had died, that God and the Son of God might be glorified thereby. To Martha He said the same, though now she is interfering with His work. Blessed indeed were the eyes and ears of those persons who stood there that day. The nation was doubtful, hesitant, desiring, and yet afraid to believe. The greater part of the officials had from almost the first been in deadly antagonism. The very disciples could not always believe that the only proper Son of God had come down from heaven to be their Master. I go,' He had said, 'that I may awake him.' And now all stand by the side of the cave. There, behind the stone, lies Lazarus, swathed in many a fold of linen. In sympathy with the sisters and with the world in its woes, He had groaned and wept. And now the sisters are to be made glad, and the Son of God is to be glorified. Lazarus, He called, come hither out; and he that had been dead came forth—an indication, a vindication of the Divine power and Godhead of the Son. Lazarus had been permitted to die that the Divine filiation might be made clearer. The death and resurrection of Lazarus were indisputable. Was it to honour, to magnify the miraculous conception that Lazarus was called back to a second life? Scores of times did Jesus say and imply that He came forth from God, down from heaven, that He was in the Father, that the Father was in Him, that He knew the Father as the Father knew Him, that He and the Father were one. To any other phase of sonship He never referred. He left the common notion, that he was the son of Joseph, uncontradicted. No one needed to be told that He was a man. Every one needed to be told that He was God. Is it not beyond measure absurd to suppose that He marched up the country, raised His friend from the dead, to glorify a mystery which He never published? Only one conclusion is relevant, is indeed possible, that Lazarus was raised from the dead to declare, to honour the inscrutable, ineffable, the high, holy, everlasting descent of the proper Son of God.

The fourteenth chapter of this Gospel is peculiarly impressive. In many a form of words had Jesus told His disciples that His life would end tragically. And now the last evening had come. He washed the feet of His disciples, ate of the paschal lamb, instituted the sacred Supper, plainly telling them that He gave His blood for many for the remission of sins. They could not fail to see and feel that the crisis was at hand. Judas, in pursuance of his fell purpose, had gone out. Jesus and the eleven, saddest of mortals, were left alone. All their hopes of a splendid kingdom, of occupying the first seats therein, were melting away. But now, when the darkest night of their life

and of the world's history had arrived, He turned to them, and in words of heavenly sweetness, He said, 'Let not your heart be troubled, trust in God, and trust in Me. In My Father's house there are many mansions; were it not so, I would have told you! I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to myself, that where I am ye may be also.' He was about to leave them, but He would not forget them. With them, He had taken care of them; away, He would prepare them a place. He had shown them that He was Master of all things here, of winds, of waves, of disease, of death, of unclean spirits, and of spirits clean. And now He intimates that of other worlds He is Master, of the various mansions, dwelling places of the blest, homes of the perfectly purified scattered through infinite space. Of this large, boundless house of His Father's He is the heir and heriter. And though He was about to die by violence, He would not have His disciples believe that He was driven away. 'I go,' He says, 'up into the great house of My Father; I go and I come again.' He, the sole begotten of the Father; He, who owned and made whatever use He pleased of the universe; He, who foresaw all things, to whom nothing was an accident or surprise, might well say to the weak, tremulous disciples, Trust in God and trust in Me.' The difference is infinite between conscious weakness and conscious power, between dependence and omnipotence, between location, limitation, and ubiquity. When Thomas said, 'Lord, we know not whither Thou goest, and how can we know the way?' as before, when Martha said, 'I know that my brother shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day,' Jesus said immediately, 'I am the resurrection and the life, I am the raiser, I am the life giver.' So now He says to Thomas, *I am the way,' the truth of the way, the life of the way. If ye had known Me, He continued, ye should have known my Father also, and from henceforth ye know Him and have seen Him.'

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Who does not sympathise with the men who had to receive such lessons? Who does not admire their slowness, their reluctance, their desire for visible certainty? Jesus spoke of Me and my Father,' and Philip asks to see the Father and avows that then both himself and his fellow Apostles would be satisfied. Have patience with these men ; for if Sir Isaac Newton spent eighteen of the best years of his life in finding out the great law of gravitation, shall we not readily grant to the Apostles a sixth of that time in which to find out an infinitely greater law of gravitation, the secret of secrets, the profound mystery of godliness, the unique truth that the Son of God had condescended to be made flesh? How kind, loving, and gentle is the answer, 'Have

I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not seen me, Philip? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou, then, show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? Believe Me that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me, or else believe Me for the very work's sake.' Sure, such a demand had never before been made on human faith. Let it be remembered that He who made the demand was sitting in their midst, clothed with the frail palpabilities of flesh ; that He had just washed their feet and eaten of the paschal lamb. To us the words of St. Paul come with irresistible force: The brightness of His glory and the express image of His person;' but no such words came to them. To Paul had been granted what could not then have been granted to them. Paul, on the Syrian plain, had seen the Son of God in a cloud of blinding glory-had also been caught up into the third heaven, the Father's great house of many mansionshad seen bright angel forms, and heard their songs of praise-had seen the Son of God sitting on His throne of mercy in glory and' majesty ineffable---and had then been let down to earth to preach the Gospel, to found churches, to write incorruptible truth, and to become the bold, daring, self-denying hero known to history. But Philip had seen no such blazing glory, no such ineffable majesty. Philip was with a Person who wept and walked, who slept and prayed, and whose Divine lineaments were concealed by the dim coatings and surroundings. of flesh. Philip's request is an indication that faith is a plant not easily reared, slowly and with difficulty brought to perfection. But what is clear to us is, that the idea, the assumption of the Divine filiation, the close, eternal, inscrutable relationship existing between the Father and the Son underlies all these sayings, transparent as a sea of gold.

In all literature there is nothing more melodious than this chapter. Though He was going away, He would be still working for them. He would not only prepare mansions for them, but He would hear their prayers and grant their desires. Nay, He declares in words of surpassing kindness and condescension, that both Himself and His Father will make their abode with every one who loves the Son and keeps His word. In all these sayings the assertion is strong and clear of a Divine personality with them; of a Divine personality, in some sense, not with them; a plurality of persons in a oneness of nature; an everlasting Father, and an eternal Son.

VI.-MODERN BRITISH METHODISM.*

THE welcome presence at our late General Conference of the fraternal' delegates from the British Wesleyan Conference, the Rev. William Arthur, A.M., and the Rev. Frederick W. M'Donald, and also of the Rev. Wallace M'Mullen, the fraternal delegate from the Irish Wesleyan. Conference, awakens fresh interest in the relations subsisting between American and British Methodism. Although one in doctrine and in spirit, there is a wide distinction between them in organic form; the British and Colonial Wesleyans having the Presbyterian form of church government, while the chief body of American Methodists is episcopal. A great religious convocation like that recently in session at Cincinnati furnishes a fit occasion for reviewing the processes and events which have resulted in such a wide departure of British Methodism from the oft-repeated views and intentions of Mr. Wesley,. a review which may be of some substantial value to those reformers in the Methodist Episcopal Church whose chief grievance therewith is its episcopacy, and whose apparent mission it is to write and talk our Church into the same anomalous ecclesiastical condition as that which is now occupied by our Wesleyan brethren in Great Britain.

It is often asserted by our Protestant Episcopal friends that Mr. Wesley, from the first to the last, was an ardent, loyal, and even intense Churchman—a fact which his spiritual descendants in England have dutifully and persistently repeated, and in view of which they have refused to be called 'Dissenters,' though departing more and more from the forms and orders of the State Church. The American Methodists, remembering also that their great leader was an Episcopalian, and many of them believing that he was a bishop in his own right by immediate inspiration and providential ordering, have established the order of bishops in their section of the Church of God, whose chief ministers may trace their apostolic succession from the most apostolic man since the apostolic age, and through him may, if they choose, claim connection both with the Greek and the Latin hierarchy, which two grand divisions of Christendom have fostered and enlarged that historic delusion, namely, an unbroken official succession of bishops from St. Peter, the first bishop of Rome.

An opening up of this subject in the light of the facts ought not to be displeasing to our brethren across the ocean; and in view of the

From the American National Repository.

outcome of the recent council for the organisation of an ecumenical Methodism, it may call out such further discussions as will result in a larger degree of unity and a more perfect historic consistency among the various branches of the great Methodist family.

By whom was this cemetery consecrated?' asked Dean Stanley of the old sexton of the burial-ground at the City-road Chapel, London. By the bones of that holy man, that servant of God, John Wesley,' was the reply.

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If the reverend dean were to change the form of his question, and ask the British Conference, By whom was this body of ministers consecrated?' they could not answer after the manner of the old sexton and say, 'By the hands of that holy man, that servant of God, John Wesley, and his successors.' Such an answer to that question could only be given on behalf of the ministry of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

There can be no reasonable doubt that Mr. Wesley intended an episcopal form of government, both for the British and the American conference of Methodists. Why else did he ordain a 'superintendent' for each of them-Alexander Mather for Great Britain and Thomas Coke for the United States? If it be replied, Mr. Wesley ordained superintendents' and not bishops, and that he himself was a 'superintendent' and not a bishop, the burden would be on the respondents to show what actual difference there was between Mr. Wesley and his • superintendents' on the one hand, and the bishops of the English Church on the other. The only differences readily observable are such as grow out of unsupported tradition and State Church politics, thus leaving the great substantial fact undisturbed, that a bishop is a 'superintendent,' and a 'superintendent,' such as Mr. Wesley or Thomas Coke, is a bishop. If it is objected that Mr. Wesley declared that no man by his consent should call him bishop, the answer appears on the surface of the subject. If Mr. Wesley chose to forego, for the sake of peace, the enjoyment of that titular distinction, and advised his dear Frankie' in America to do the same, he showed thereby a degree of sagacity, as well as humility, which renders him all the more honourable, and proves him more fit for the bishopric which for years he actually held. Mr. Wesley never says, I am not a bishop,' a statement which in five words would have changed the whole complexion of his sayings and his doings, and the absence of which, with such abundant testimony in favour of his actual episcopacy, as shown by his ordination of deacons, elders, and 'superintendents,' leaves such a burden of proof on those Presbyterians who call themselves Wesleyans