Selected Short Works of John Stoughton
9781465669643
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The chapter before us is plainly a supplement to the main history. St. John concluded that history under a deep conviction that it was far from a full account of his Master’s wonderful ministry. “Many other signs,” said he, “truly did Jesus, in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.” But in this supplementary chapter, added to the Gospel, perhaps, after a lapse of several years, the inspired Evangelist returns to his subject, and relates with singular minuteness of detail the miracle of the draught of fishes. He then appends to the whole narrative an asseveration of its truth; and still feeling, as he had done before, that there remained an inexhaustible fulness of facts and lessons in the life of his adorable Lord which defied every attempt at recording them, he at last finishes his Gospel—inclusive of the appendix—in the same spirit in which he had concluded what he wrote before. Persuaded of the impossibility of doing perfect justice to such a life as that of the Word made flesh, he employed a strong Oriental hyperbole to express the impossibility, whilst his heart overflowed with adoring love and wonder—“And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.” It is not unusual for an author to return to the perusal and examination of a work composed by him in bygone years with a deepened belief of the truth of its contents, accompanied by an overwhelming conviction of its want of completeness. Another chapter may be added to what was written before, and then, when all is done, the pen may be laid down, with the feeling that not one-half of all the beautiful truth to which the book relates has yet been told. A circumstance so common in connection with efforts of genius finds something of a parallel here, in connection with the higher and nobler exercises of inspiration. It is to the last degree affecting to behold the aged Evangelist reading over his own Gospel, dwelling with delight upon sacred memories of the Divine Friend who so graciously loved him, and whom he so gratefully loved in return, thinking of one act of his after another, one word of his after another, never written, and realizing the impossibility of producing a perfect portrait of the Divine original, yet folding up his own MS. with the devout assurance that in giving it to the Church he was an instrument, in the hands of the Spirit, of bestowing upon mankind one of the richest treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
