When the incarnation became a leading feature of Christianity, its whole spirit underwent a change from what it was in the first three Gospels. The miracles which they describe are too tame for the new phase which Christ is made to assume. None of the five, except one, in the Gospel of John, are mentioned in the first three, for the apparent reason that those in the Synoptics all fall short of upholding the claims set up for Christ in the fourth. The subsidence of the sea at Tiberias, at his command, was some proof that he held control of the wind and waves, but a lucky coincidence might account for part, and ocular deception for the rest. But, in that case, the constituents of the water were not changed. Not so with the water at the feast at Cana. The restoration of the widow's son at Nain, and of the daughter of Jairus, might admit of doubt, for the first had not shown signs of decided death, and the latter may have been a case of coma—"For the maid is not dead, but sleepeth." (Matt. ix. 24.) But in the case of Lazarus there could be no mistake. For four days the seal of death sat upon his brow, and flesh and blood were fast returning to their native dust. Christ, in the first three Gospels, heals diseases and cures the blind; but how much was to be referred to his power as a god, and how much to the skill of a Thera-peutÆ, might invite discussion. But in the cases of the man who had an infirmity for eight-and-thirty years, and the one born blind, there could be no ground for dispute. The miracles selected proved all that was claimed for Christ in the first part of the Gospel. He was master of the elements, death heard and obeyed his voice, and he held the avenues which led from fife to the grave. The miracle of the loaves and fishes is the only one in the first three Gospels repeated by John, because it proved his power over nature; for if he did not change the elements, as he did at Cana, he multiplied them. We see in this Gospel a studied effort to avoid anything like a human parentage for Christ, as stated in the first three Gospels. The trip to Bethlehem, the birth in the manger, the journey of the wise men from the East, are all omitted. The name of Mary in this Gospel is studiously kept in the background. She is barely mentioned twice, once at the feast of Cana: "And when they wanted wine, the mother of Jesus saith unto him, They have no wine; Jesus saith unto her, Woman, what have I to do with thee?" The true answer intended by the question was—nothing. Christ could not be entirely oblivious of earthly ties. He had lived under the same roof with Mary. He had received from her many acts of kindness; and if nature was allowed her empire over the heart; he must have felt for her the affection of a son. For him she had all the feelings of a mother. She followed and stood by him at the cross. As she stood and wept in his sight, the only words of consolation and endearment he could give her were as cold and heartless as a Lapland wind: "Woman, behold thy son"! The word "woman" was ever on his lips. When he recommends her, at the last scene, to the care of the disciples, he is studied and guarded in his language: "Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother." The scenes at the cross were too solemn to permit the studied purpose of an artful bigot to muzzle the voice of nature. Truth turns away from the story.

The design of this Gospel to keep out of view the carnal nature of Christ, as it appears in the first three Gospels, is marked with Jesuitical cunning. He who was born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, but of God, must be so constituted as to be above the weaknesses and frailties of those who are born of earth. The temptations in the wilderness, which supply the most remarkable scenes in the life of Christ, and, as given in the first three Gospels, proved the power of the Son of God over the Powers of Darkness, are wholly unnoticed in the Gospel of John. He who was all God, without a link to connect him with humanity, must be so superior to Satan as to be above his arts of seduction. John will not allow Christ to be tempted, because he was above it; but, in sinking his humanity to favor a dogma, he keeps out of sight the most sublime and god-like portion of his character—the power to rise above the allurements of wealth, power, and dominion. It was by such things he proved himself a god. The design of the fourth Gospel is overdone. In making Christ all God, no chord of sympathy is left between him and man. Even in the last supper, dwelt upon with so much tenderness by Matthew, Mark and Luke, we detect, by the silence of John, the spirit of the Jesuit. He makes no mention of it. Who can mistake the reason of this silence? The tender scenes of this last interview between Christ and his disciples are sacrificed to make way for a senseless and heartless dogma. In the last supper, given in the Synoptics, the bread and wine are mere symbols of the death and sufferings of Christ. It was this symbolic character of the sacrament that the writer of John wished to avoid. As the Lord's supper is with John a real sacrifice, each repetition is a fresh atonement, and the bread and wine, by a miraculous conversion, are made flesh and blood. There could be no sacrifice of the body of Christ until death, and, for that reason, the last supper between him and his disciples before the crucifixion is omitted. This miraculous conversion of the elements has been one of the holy mysteries of the Church for ages past. It has been the bigot's wand. Millions have fallen down before the Host. It led the crusades. The fair fields of Europe and Asia have been whitened by the bones of its victims. In fine, it has been the armory in which fanaticism has forged her most fatal and dangerous weapons. With John, the body of Christ is never dead—the grave cannot hold it; but it exists in a mysterious union with the Church, so that every time the devout believer eats of the bread, or touches the sacred cup to his lips, he partakes of the flesh and drinks the blood of the Son of God. Such is the dogma which took its rise in the last half of the second century, the offspring of a bitter, heated controversy which demands that reason be strangled to make room for faith. It is the fate of this dogma, as it is of all like it, to be associated with others equally false and absurd. It can have no fellowship with truth. Speaking of Christ, John says: "The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made." (Chap. i. 2, 3.) Christ says of himself: "For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." (Chap. vi. 38.) He was on earth thirty-three years. In what business was this creator of worlds engaged for thirty years of this time? If anything, so far as we can know, it was the business of a carpenter. Did he do his Heavenly Father's business all this time? This is what he says himself he was sent to do. The first proof he gave of the power of a god, while here, was at Cana. It was here that he first manifested forth his glory, and inspired his disciples with faith. The first three Gospels leave Christ to his humanity to the time the angels took charge of him, and subject him, like other mortals, to human employments. In John, a god with power to create worlds is bound up in the fate of mortals for thirty years, and only escapes thralldom when the spell is broken at the marriage feast. Would he, who was with God in the beginning, whose word was sufficient to create worlds, submit to a fate like this?

The interview between Christ and the woman of Samaria affords abundant evidence of the spurious character of the fourth Gospel, and that the writer was some Greek who was ignorant of the religion of Moses and the Jews.

The temple of Jerusalem being destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, the Samaritans proposed to join the Jews after their captivity in rebuilding it; but the Jews refused the coalition. (Ezra iv. 1-3.) This gave rise to other causes of dispute, until the most inveterate hatred grew up between the two peoples. At length, by permission of Alexander the Great, the Samaritans erected a temple at Mount Gerizim, in opposition to the one at Jerusalem. The same worship was observed in both cities, and both people avoided the idolatry of surrounding nations. All the followers of Moses in Judea shared alike in the calamities which befell the Jewish people; so all shared a common belief that God would at some time, by the hand of a deliverer, restore to them all they had lost. If by the hand of Cyrus the power of the Assyrian empire had been torn down, the Temple rebuilt, and the Jews and Samaritans placed back in their homes in Judea; so, if some like calamity should befall them, the same hand would again restore them to liberty and the land of their inheritance. The Jews and Samaritans, though divided on some things, were alike the chosen people of God, and the promises made to one were made to both. At the time Christ made his appearance in Samaria, the people of that country had settled convictions as to what they might expect from the promises made to them by Jehovah through Moses, their great lawgiver and prophet. These convictions, like the concretion of ages, had solidified, and made up the Jewish and Samaritan character. Whatever might befall them, they had no expectations of a spiritual deliverer of any kind. They recognized no spiritual bondage growing out of the sins of the first parents, like the believers in Christianity, for Moses taught nothing of the kind. A personal sacrifice, like that of Christ, to save men from the condemnation of a broken law, never entered into the mind of either Jew or Samaritan. Neither was cosmopolitan, and with them a deliverer was a deliverer to the Jews and not the Gentiles. After Christ had convinced the woman at the well that he was a prophet, by telling her past life, she is made to say: "I know that Messiah cometh which is called Christ; when he is come he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he." It is said that the woman believed; if so, did she understand him? With Christ, he was the Son of God, equal with the Father; was with him in the beginning, and by him the universe was made—he was the Creator. We ask again, did the woman believe in such a Messiah, and did she believe that he who spoke to her, and told her how many husbands she had had, was that august Being? If there is room in the breast of any people for a hope or expectation of such a person as Christ claimed to be, not a shade of either could be found in the hearts of the followers of Moses. Let a belief in such a Being have made its way into the Jewish mind, and the whole structure, as it was reared by their great leader, would fall like a baseless tower. Strike out the Semitic idea which was thundered from Sinai, and that very thing which cost the Jews ages of persecution would with it be thrown away.

The woman was convinced by the arts of a fortune-teller, some of the Samaritans by what befell the woman, and others, because of what they saw and heard themselves, believed "that Christ was the Saviour of the world!" Here we reach a climax: did the Samaritans, in so short a time, renounce Moses and the institutions of their fathers? Christ claimed before the Jews that he lived before Abraham. This they could not stand, but took up stones and cast them at him, and, because he preached the end of the Mosaic law, they crucified and put him to death.

There are still some of the descendants of the Samaritans at Naplosa (the ancient Shech-em), at Gaza, Damascus and Cairo, who still retain the faith held by their fathers in the time of Christ—a living protest against the truth of the story of the women and men of Samaria. Let him who wishes to be convinced go among the remnant of this persecuted race, witness their poverty, their sad and careworn faces, the work of centuries of injustice and oppression, and ask them if they believe the story of the woman at the well. They will point you to two thousand years of suffering for their Mosaic faith, enough to "bring tears down Pluto's wan cheeks," and ask you, with a look of scorn, if the ancestors of such a people could ever be apostles.

In talking to the Jews, Christ is made to say: "For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words?" (John v. 46,47.) Christ here undertakes to make the Jews believe that he was the one who had been foreseen and spoken of in ages past, and especially by the great prophet of the Hebrew people. Had any Jew in the time of Moses set up the claim that at some future day there would arise one among his people who would be equal with God, but who would suffer death at their hands, as a ransom for the salvation not only of the Jews but of the Gentiles, he would have ordered that such a prophet be stoned to death. By him and \ the Jews no such Saviour was expected or required. Adam and Eve were the first to break the law, but God pronounced judgment upon them before they left the Garden. The earth was cursed with thorns and thistles, for Adam's sake. By the sweat of his brow he was bound to eat of its fruits in sorrow all his days. Upon Eve were imposed the pains and sufferings of childbirth, and the duty of obedience. All this endured, both were to return to the dust from whence they came. This was all the punishment and all the atonement God demanded. He asked no more. With Moses, death was the end of punishment. Those who committed the first sin made their own atonement, and so have all their descendants, in the eyes of Moses and the Jews. "Had ye believed in Moses, ye would have believed in me." Reverse this, and we have the exact truth: If ye believe in Moses, it is impossible to believe in me. How could they? "Moses wrote of me." What did he write? To connect Christ with prophecy, language of the most indefinite character is selected from all parts of the Hebrew scriptures. "The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." Christ of the fourth Gospel is not of the seed of the woman. "The Word was made flesh?" and "was not born of blood, nor the will of the flesh, nor the will of man, but of God." "The scepter shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come." (Gen, xlix. 10). The Jews ceased to be an independent people, and the scepter departed from Judah at the time Pompey invaded the country, seized upon the Temple, deposed Aristobulus, the high priest, and put Hyrcanus in his place. (Josephus, Wars, Book I. chap. vii. sec. 6.) He deprived the Jews of all their conquests, restored the conquered, and placed Syria, together with Judea and the country as far as Egypt and Euphrates, under the command of Scaurus. (Ibid, sec. 7.)

In view of these events, Josephus bitterly laments the results, and says: "We lost our liberty', and became subject to the Romans, and were deprived of that country which we had gained by our arms from the Syrians, and were compelled to restore it to the Syrians. Moreover, the Romans exacted of us, in a little time, above ten thousand talents." (Josephus, Antiquities, Book XIV. ch. iv. sec. v.) When did the Jews, after the conquest of Pompey, shake off the yoke of the Romans? Between his conquest and the birth of Christ at least sixty-seven years had intervened. In the meantime Caesar crossed the Rubicon, was assassinated in the senate; the empire was distracted by civil wars; Mark Antony and Augustus tried the fortune of battle with Brutus and Cassius, on the field at Philippi, and the first of the Roman emperors had nearly completed a long reign of four-and-forty years. When Christ was born, the scepter had departed from Judea, and the Jews were a nation of slaves.

Space will not allow us to pursue this subject farther. Throughout the Gospel of John we discover the most studied and labored effort to connect Christ with the religion of Moses, so that it may appear that in himself he is only the response to the many prophesies contained in the Hebrew scriptures. This Gospel is full of instances where the Jews, upon Christ's bare word—and sometimes not even that—gave up everything, and followed him, even to the cross. The day following the baptism, as John stood by the side of the disciples, Jesus walked by, when the Baptist exclaimed: "Behold the Lamb of God!" This was sufficient to induce two of the disciples to follow Christ, and one of them was so carried away that he hunted up his brother, who was Peter, and told him they had found the Messiah, who was the Christ. On the next day, Christ went to Galilee, and found Philip, whom he directed to follow him; and soon Philip found Nathaniel, and told him, "We have found him of whom Moses, in the law, and the prophets, did write." They had found no such thing. The conversion of Paul formed a new era in religious history. We may well say, that when he left Judaism, he left the twelve disciples behind him, for they could neither climb over or break down the wall of circumcision which separated the Jews from the Gentiles. Paul quarreled with and then left them, but took along with him enough of the Mosaic faith to keep up a connection between the old and new religion, so that we can trace the features of the child in those of the parent. He carried with him Monotheism, but it was qualified in the glare of his vision at Damascus so that, in some sense, Christ was the Son of God. Here was a clear departure from Moses, for which the Jews always despised him. Then followed Paul's tug with the Greeks. In spite of him, they established a dual government in Heaven. The Son was equal with the Father, At this point there should have been an eternal separation between Jewry and Christianity. For nearly two thousand years, the Jews have protested against an alliance, while, on the other side, Christians have striven to maintain it. The two parties, in the meantime, were kept separate by an ocean of blood which flowed between. No bridge could ever span it—no bridge ever can. In conclusion of this branch of the subject, we repeat, that great efforts are made to have it appear in this Gospel that Christ is in harmony with Moses and the prophets, whereas there is scarce a word in it which declares his equality with the Father (and it teaches little else) not met with a denial from Sinai, amid "thunders and lightnings" and "the voice of the trumpet": "Thou shalt have no other gods before me?" Moses is sublime in threats and denunciations against those who depart from the true and only God. The men of the second century knew nothing of the spirit of the Mosaic faith, or they never would have stultified themselves by such a work as the fourth Gospel.