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I. OUR LORD'S OWN ORAL TEACHING DID NOT EMBRACE ALL NECESSARY CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE.

1. This is a point of great importance. It is not unusual to hear people say: "I accept only the very words of Christ. St. Paul taught some doctrines which Christ Himself did not teach: I do not wish to be bound by these. The Church has in her creeds and elsewhere used language which I do not find in the words of Christ: I may reject that language. The Sermon on the Mount and Christ's other discourses are enough for me. The rest is superfluous." This language recommends itself because it sounds at first so loyal to our Lord, just as politeness towards a single individual is more remarkable when the person who shows it is habitually uncivil to the rest of the world. By a confession of faith such as this, men flatter themselves that they can cut down the Christian creed to very narrow dimensions, and at the same time be all the better Christians. And yet here we find Christ saying that He did not undertake to teach in Person all that it was necessary for Christians to know. What the apostles taught would be still His teaching, even although it should go beyond the measure of truth which He had taught Himself (Luke 10:16; Matthew 10:40).

2. John 15:15 would seem at first sight to be at variance with the text. But there is no contradiction. So far as confidence went our Lord trusted His disciples unreservedly. But there was a want of spiritual comprehension on their side. Many a man has a wife or a sister with whom he has literally no secrets whatever, although she is not on that account able to share all his intellectual interests; he does not trust the less because he does not communicate unintelligible secrets; the time will come, perhaps, when whatever is now unintelligible will be understood.

3. Our Lord's teaching, then, was completed by that of the Holy Spirit. To see how this was done we need not go beyond the limits of the New Testament.

(1) Our Lord had spoken, for instance, of the necessity that the Messiah should die; of His blood as the blood of the New Testament which was shed for His disciples. In the apostolic writings this is expanded into the doctrine of the Atonement.

(2) Our Lord had hinted at a new ground of acceptance with God in His parable of the labourers in the vineyard, in His eulogy upon the publican, and in His precept (Luke 17:10). But in St. Paul's writings we find a fully elaborated doctrine of salvation through the grace of Christ as contrasted with that of obedience to the Jewish law. In the visit of the Eastern sages to the manger of Bethlehem, in the acceptance of the Syro-Phoenician woman, in the interview with the Greeks at the passover, in the statement that the Good Shepherd had other sheep who were not of the fold of Israel, we have hints that the Pagan nations were in some way to have their part in the Divine Saviour. In St. Paul we find the express assertion that a special revelation had been made to him to the effect (Ephesians 3:6).

4. Our Lord spoke about Himself, His sinlessness, His claims upon human thought and human affection, His power of enlightening and saving human beings, His future coming to judge all human beings, in a way which we should now-a-days think very extraordinary in any good man, and indeed fatal to his claim to goodness because inconsistent with sober fact. The Holy Spirit took of the words of Christ and showed the truth unto the apostles that the Speaker was Divine (1 Corinthians 12:3). The disciples could not have borne the full splendour of these truths before (chap. John 12:16).

II. WHY WAS OUR LORD'S OWN TEACHING THUS INCOMPLETE?

1. The answer is, that the same motive which led Him to teach men at all led Him to impose these limits. He taught men in their ignorance because He loved men too well to leave them in darkness. He taught men gradually, and as they were able to bear the strong light of His doctrine, because He loved men too well to shock or blind them by a sudden blaze of truth, for which they were as yet unprepared. He knew what was in man. He knew what the prejudices of education, the power of mental habits, the associations of youth, the traditions of a great history, could do to destroy the receptive powers, the moral flexibility of the soul. He was too wise and considerate to expect too much. The full understanding of who He was, and what He came to do, was preceded by a twilight; itself His own work, which brightened more and more towards the day.

2. In this He was true to God's providential action in human history. All along God has taught men gradually. The heathen nations have been taught what little truth, amid their errors, they know by a succession of minds. The old Jewish Scriptures are a long series of revelations: the Patriarchal, the Mosaic, the prophetical. Each is an advance upon its predecessors, and all lead up to the final and complete revelation of God in Christ.

III. TWO PRACTICAL LESSONS.

1. The true principle of —

(1) A religious education. To be solid it should be gradual; it should be given only as the learner's mind becomes acclimatized to the atmosphere of religious truth. We find in the Epistles the distinction between "babes in Christ" and "strong" men or adults. To the first was given that elementary instruction which, from its easiness of reception, the apostle terms "milk." To the second a much more comprehensive instruction in the mysteries of the Christian creed and in the range of Christian duty was imparted, and this the Apostle terms "strong meat." This double order of teaching passed into the primitive Church. The catechumens, who were in the earlier stage of instruction, were treated quite differently from the faithful.

(2) The principle holds good of secular education, and is too much lost sight of in some modern methods. The old and deeper idea of education as a means of training the faculties of the mind to deal with any subject has been abandoned only too largely for the idea of an education which overloads the mind with huge packages of unmastered and unmanageable knowledge, and not seldom leads to frightful cases of intellectual indigestion. Boys are expected to know something about everything; they too often know nothing about anything thoroughly. The consequence is, that while they can talk with striking but unnatural facility on a great many more subjects than boys did forty or fifty years ago, their mental faculties are really less braced and sharpened, and their actual capacity for meeting the requirements of life is less considerable than that of their predecessors.

(3) And in teaching religious truth parents are sometimes apt to fall into the same mistake. They want to teach everything at once, and they end by really teaching nothing. They forget that most necessary duty of every teacher of placing himself, by an effort of sympathy and imagination, as nearly as possible in the mental position of his pupil or child. They think chiefly or only of what interests themselves in religion; not of what might be interesting or intelligible to minds just opening upon life, and catching with difficulty the horizons of truth and duty which meet the gaze. What is the consequence? Either the children are alienated from all religion in later life, or they learn that most fatal of all lessons in religion, to talk about it easily without thinking of what they say.

2. Remember that until our last day God is teaching us, through the action of other minds, through the events of life. Each stage of life up to the very last leaves some truth untaught. We are daily adding to our expectance. We never complete it. What can the soul do but breathe the prayer — "Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, lead Thou me on," &c.?

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now.

WEB: "I have yet many things to tell you, but you can't bear them now.