or 'came into being.' The law was _given_; grace and truth _came to
be_.

Now, what do we mean when we talk about a law being given? We simply
mean, I suppose, that it is promulgated, either in oral or in written
words. It is, after all, no more than so many words. It is given when
it is spoken or published. It is a verbal communication at the best.
'But grace and truth came to be.' They are realities; they are not
words. They are not communicated by sentences, they are actual
existences; and they spring into being as far as man's historical
possession and experience of them are concerned--they spring into
being in Jesus Christ, and through Him they belong to us all. Not that
there was no grace, no manifest lore of God, in the world, nor any
true knowledge of Him before the Incarnation, but the earlier portions
of this chapter remind us that all of grace, however restrained and
partial, that all of truth, however imperfect and shadowy it may have
been, which were in the world before Christ came, were owing to the
operation of that Eternal Word 'Who became flesh and dwelt among us,'
and that these, in comparison with the affluence and the fulness and
the nearness of grace and truth after Christ's coming, were so small
and remote that it is not an exaggeration to say that, as far as man's
possession and experience of them are concerned, the giving love of
God and the clear and true knowledge of His deep heart of tenderness
and grace, sprang into being with the historical manifestation of
Jesus Christ the Lord.

He comes to reveal by no words. His gift is not like the gift that
Moses brought down from the mountain, merely a writing upon tables;
His gift is not the letter of an outward commandment, nor the letter
of an outward revelation. It is the thing itself which He reveals by