£ Thomas answered and said to him. Before, so far as we know, any gesture or effort was made on his part to accept the tests which had been so rashly demanded, but so graciously offered. He already found evidence which was far more efficacious than that which he in gross and sensuous fashion had thought indispensable for his peculiarly constituted mind.
Before doing more than fill his hungry eyes with these identifying signs of the Lord's actual objective presence, he did in reality touch his Lord by other powers than finger or hand. He bounded from the depths of despondency to the very top of faith, and he "answered"—he responded to the proof he had already received of the Lord's triumph over death, and to the seal that had now been set upon the Lord's own supreme and majestic claims, by an adoring cry.
Thomas "said to him." Observe it is not hinted that he uttered a vague and ejaculatory cry to the eternal Father (as Theodore of Mopsuestia, modern rationalists and Unitarians have repeatedly urged—a speculation which is wrecked on the εἶπεν αὐτῷ).
Thomas said to him, My Lord and my God. This is the first time that any of the disciples had ever drawn this lofty conclusion of love and reason. They had called him "the Son of God," "the Lord," as a Being of quite immeasurable claims; and John, in the prologue, after years of meditation, declared that "the Loges which was God" and "with God," and the Creator of all things, and "the Light and Life," had "become flesh," and flashed forth" the glory of the only begotten Son," even in his earthly life; but it was reserved for the most depressed and skeptical mind of them all, the honest doubter, the man who needed immediate and irresistible evidence, infallible proofs, triumphant, invincible demonstrations—it was reserved for Thomas to say TO HIM, and to say unrebuked, uncondemned, by the risen Lord," MY LORD AND MY GOD!"
Herein is condensed into one burning utterance from the worried heart of humanity the slowly gathering conclusion which had been steadily inwrought in the mind of his disciples by all the teachings of the Savior.
It was at last spontaneous and exultant. These words are the climax of the entire Gospel. Every narrative points on to this unchallenged utterance. From the wedding at Cana to the raising of Lazarus, from the testimony of the Baptist to the awful tones of intercessory prayer, every discourse, every miracle, points on to this superlative conclusion, not breathed in loving accents by the enthusiastic Mary, not sounded forth by the rock-like apostle, not whispered in awestruck affection by the beloved disciple, but wrung from the broken heart of the man who had said, "Let us go, that we may die with him;" of him who cried, "We know not whither thou goest: how can we know the way?"
of him who had said, "Unless I see the print of the nails, I will not believe." It is not long before it is notorious that St. Paul spoke of him as "God blessed forever," called him the" Image of the invisible God," as endowed with "the Name that is above every name," as "set down on the right hand of the majesty on high;" that the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews called him the "express Image of the Father's substance," and "the Effulgence of the Father's glory."
The earliest testimonies of heathendom confess that Christians sang hymns to Christ as to God (Pliny, 'Letter to Trajan')! but this was the hour of the great confession; this was the birth-cry of Christendom; this was the epoch-making scene, which guided the pen of John from the prologue to the close of the Gospel Thus Thomas doubted that the Church might believe.
Thomas did indeed die with his Master, that he might lead a multitude of the dead from their hopelessness and unrest to the resurrection-life. He received a full and all-sufficing evidence of the supernatural and Divine life, and eighteen hundred years of faith have blessed God for the victory which Thomas gained over his despondency, and for the climacteric force with which St.
John tells us of it.