countenance. How wonderful that even "the beloved disciple," who was
permitted to lean on the bosom of the Son of man, and who had seen him
in the most trying circumstances of His earthly history, never speaks of
the tones of His voice, or of the expression of His eye, or of any
striking peculiarity pertaining to His personal appearance! The silence
of all the evangelists respecting matters of which at least some of them
must have retained a very vivid remembrance, and of which ordinary
biographers would not have failed to preserve a record, supplies an
indirect and yet a most powerful proof of the Divine origin of the
Gospels.

But whilst the sacred writers enter so sparingly into personal details,
they leave no doubt as to the perfect integrity which marked every part
of our Lord's proceedings. He was born in a degenerate age, and brought
up in a city of Galilee which had a character so infamous that no good
thing was expected to proceed from it; [21:1] and yet, like a ray of
purest light shining into some den of uncleanness, He contracted no
defilement from the scenes of pollution which He was obliged to witness.
Even in boyhood, He must have uniformly acted with supreme discretion;
for though His enemies from time to time gave vent to their malignity in
various accusations, we do not read that they ever sought to cast so
much as a solitary stain upon His youthful reputation. The most
malicious of the Jews failed to fasten upon Him in after life any charge
of immorality. Among those constantly admitted to His familiar
intercourse, a traitor was to be found; and had Judas been able to
detect anything in His private deportment inconsistent with His public
profession, he would doubtless have proclaimed it as an apology for his
perfidy; but the keen eye of that close observer could not discover a
single blemish in the character of his Master; and, when prompted by
covetousness, he betrayed Him to the chief priests, the thought of