The Gospel in all its parts and all its forms makes provision for the infinite future by giving answer to finite questions already asked. The same character is stamped on the written records in which it is conveyed. There too human search precedes Divine revelation. The words of our Lord belong more to dialogue than to discourse; and it is seldom possible to arrive at their principal meaning while they are treated as solitary aphorisms, without a history, and therefore without a purpose. The definite fitness with which they were first spoken is the measure of their lasting power, and even of their universality.

On the other hand few if any of the questions addressed to our Lord received an answer in the shape that was desired. It is not enough to say that His merciful wisdom withheld such replies as might have proved injurious to the moral state of the questioners. The replies which He gave were not merely more profitable but more true, and more apposite in their truth, than any others could have been. It is an idle fancy that to what seems a clear and positive question there must needs be somewhere a clear and positive answer of pure truth. The necessity exists only for the most abstract or the most concrete things. All questions in which the spiritual realm has any part contain within them assumptions in thought and in word; and these assumptions cannot but be more or less affected by human infirmity.