So it was, I suppose, with the writers of the gospels. They had
been in too grand company for them to speak freely of what they felt
there. They had seen such sights, and heard such words, that they
were inclined to be silent, and think over it all, and only wrote
because they must write. They felt that our Lord, as I say, was
utterly beyond them, too unlike any one whom they had ever met
before; too perfect, too noble, for them to talk about him. So they
simply set down his words as he spoke them, and his works as he did
them, as far as they could recollect, and left them to tell their
own story. Even St. John, who was our Lord's beloved friend, who
seems to have caught and copied exactly his way of speaking, seems
to feel that there was infinitely more in our Lord than he could put
into words, and ends with confessing,--'And there are also many more
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.'
The first reason then, I suppose, for the evangelists' modesty, was
their awe and astonishment at our Lord. The next, I think, may have
been that they wished to copy him, and so to please him. It surely
must have been so, if, as all good Christians believe, they were
inspired to write our Lord's life.
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