xviii. 31-33), but condescended individually to the blind importunate

mendicant who sat by the wayside begging (vers. 35-43).

[246] The word here is βιος not ζωη. "Βιος period of life; hence the means by which it is sustained, means of life." (Archbp. Trench.) It is to be wished that the R. V. had either kept "the good" of the A. V., or adopted the word "living"--the translation of βιος in Mark xii. 44; Luke xxi. 4.

[247] 2 John 3.

[248] 1 John i. 4, ii. 28, iii. 21, iv. 17, v. 14, iii. 19.

[249] 1 John i. 4.

[250] τα σπλαγχνα (ver. 17). This however is the only occurrence of the word in St. John's writings. The substantive σπλαγχνα = _emotions_, is found in classical poets. But the verb σπλαγχνιζομαι occurs only in LXX. and New Testament--and thus, like αγαπη, is almost born within the circle of revealed truth. The new dispensation so rich in the mercy of God (Luke i. 78), so fruitful in mercy from man to man, may well claim a new vocabulary in the department of tenderness and pity.

[251] 1 John v. 6, conf. John xix. 34.

[252] θεωρη, ver. 17.

[253] "The love of which God is at once the object, and the author, and the pattern." (Prof. Westcott.)

[254] 1 John iv. 19.

[255] Lord Meath.

SECTION VII.

GREEK. LATIN.

Αγαπητοι, μη παντι Carissimi, nolite omni πνευματι πιστευετε, spiritui credere, sed αλλα δοκιμαζετε τα probate spiritus si ex πνευματα, ει εκ του Deo sint, quoniam multi Θεου εστιν· ὁτι πολλοι pseudoprophetæ exierunt ψευδοπροφηται εξεληλυθασιν in mundum. In εις τον κοσμον. hoc cognoscitur spiritus εν τουτω γινωσκετε το Dei. Omnis spiritus Πνευμα του Θεου· παν qui confitetur Iesum πνευμα ὁ ὁμολογει Christum in carne Ιησουν Χριστον εν venisse, ex Deo est: σαρκι εληλυθοτα, εκ et omnis spiritus qui του Θεου εστι. και solvit Iesum Christum παν πνευμα ὁ μη ὁμολογειτον ex Deo non est; et his Ιησουν Χριστον est Antichristus quod εν σαρκι εληλυθοτα, εκ audistis quoniam venit του Θεου ουκ εστι· και et nunc iam in mundo τουτο εστι το του est. Vos ex Deo estis, αντιχριστου, ὁ ακηκοατε filioli, et vicistis eum, ὁτι ερχεται, και νυν εν quoniam maior est qui τω κοσμω εστιν ηδη. in vobis est quam qui Ὑμεις εκ του Θεου εστε, in mundo. Ipsi de τεκνια, και νενικηκατε mundo sunt: ideo de αυτους· ὁτι μειζων εστιν mundo locuntur, et ὁ εν ὑμιν ἡ ὁ εν τω mundus eos audit. Nos κοσμω. Αυτοι εκ του ex Deo sumus: qui κοσμου εισι· δια τουτο novit Deum audit nos; εκ του κοσμου λαλουσι, qui non est ex Deo, και ὁ κοσμος αυτων non audit nos. In hoc ακουει. ἡμεις εκ του cognoscimus spiritum Θεου εσμεν· ὁ γινωσκων veritatis et spiritum τον Θεον, ακουει ἡμων· erroris. ὁς ουκ εστιν εκ του Θεου, ουκ ακουει ἡμων. Εκ τουτου γινωσκομεν το πνευμα της αληθειας και το πνευμα της πλανης.

AUTHORISED VERSION. REVISED VERSION.

Beloved, believe not Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the every spirit, but prove spirits whether they the spirits whether are of God: because they are of God; because many false prophets many false prophets are gone out into the are gone out into world. Hereby know the world. Hereby ye the Spirit of God: know ye the Spirit Every spirit that confesseth of God: every spirit that Jesus which confesseth that Christ is come in the Jesus Christ is come flesh is of God: and in the flesh is of God: every spirit that confesseth and every spirit which not that Jesus confesseth not Jesus is Christ is come in the not of God: and this flesh is not of God: and is the _spirit_ of the this is that _spirit_ of antichrist, whereof ye have antichrist, whereof ye heard that it cometh; have heard that it and now it is in the should come; and even world already. Ye are now already is it in the of God, _my_ little world. Ye are of God, children, and have overcome little children, and have them: because overcome them: because greater is He that is greater is He that in you, than he that is is in you, than he that in the world. They is in the world. They are of the world, therefore are of the world: therefore speak they _as_ of speak they of the the world, and the world, and the world world heareth them. heareth them. We are We are of God: he that of God: he that knoweth knoweth God heareth God heareth us: us: he who is not of he that is not of God God heareth us not. heareth not us. Hereby By this we know the know we the spirit spirit of truth and the of truth, and the spirit spirit of error. of error.

ANOTHER VERSION.

Beloved, believe not any spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth Jesus Christ come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit which confesseth not Jesus is not of God: and this is that _power_ of the antichrist whereof ye have heard that it cometh, and even now it is in the world already. Ye are of God, children, and have conquered them: because greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world. They are of the world, therefore of the world is their manner of speech, and the world heareth them. We are of God; he that knoweth God heareth us, he who is not of God heareth not us. From this we know the spirit of The Truth, and the spirit of the error.

NOTES.

Ch. iv. 1, 7.

Ver. 1. _Believe not any spirit_] μη παντι πνευματι πιστευετε. The different constructions of πιστευειν in St. John must be carefully noted. (_a_) With _dative_ as here--"believe not such an one;" take him not upon trust, at his own word; credit him not with veracity. So in the Gospel, our Lord continually complains that the Jews did not even believe Him on His word--strong and clear as that word was with all the freshness of Heaven, and all the transparency of truth. John v. 38, 46, viii. 45, 46, x. 37.

(_b_) πιστευειν εις = to make an act of faith in, to repose in as divine. John iii. 36, iv. 39, vi. 35, xi. 25; 1 John v. 10.

(_c_) With an _accusative_ = to be persuaded of the thing--to believe it with an implied conviction of permanence in the persuasion--as in the beautiful verse (iv. 16)--"we are fully persuaded of the love of God," we make it the creed of our heart. πεπιστευκαμεν την αγαπην.

SECTION VIII.

GREEK. LATIN.

Αγαπητοι, αγαπωμεν Carissimi, diligamus αλ ληλους, ὁτι ἡ αγαπη invicem, quoniam caritas εκ του Θεου εστι, και ex Deo est, et πας ὁ αγαπων εκ του omnis qui diligit ex Θεου γεγεννηται και Deo natus est et cognoscit γινωσκει τον Θεον· ὁ Deum. Qui non μη αγαπων ουκ εγνω diligit non novit Deum, τον Θεον· ὁτι ὁ Θεος quoniam Deus caritas αγαπη εστιν. Εν τουτω est. In hoc apparuit εφανερωθη ἡ αγαπη του caritas Dei in nobis, Θεου εν ἡμιν, ὁτι τον quoniam Filium Suum υιον αυτου τον μονογενη unigenitum misit Deus απεσταλκεν ὁ Θεος εις in mundum, ut vivamus τον κοσμον, ἱνα ζησωμεν per Eum. In hoc δι αυτου. εν τουτω est caritas, non quasi εστιν ἡ αγαπη, ουχ ὁτι nos dilexerimus Deum, ἡμεις ηγαπησαμεν τον sed quoniam ipse dilexit Θεον, αλλ' ὁτι αυτος nos et misit Filium ηγαπησεν ἡμας και suum propitionem pro απεστειλε τον υιον peccatis nostris. Carissimi, αυτου ιλασμον περι si sic Deus των ἁμαρτιων ἡμων. dilexit nos, et nos debemus αγαπητοι, ει ουτως ὁ alterutrum diligere. Θεος ηγαπησεν ἡμας, Deum nemo και ἡμεις ὁφειλομεν vidit unquam: si diligamus αλληλους αγαπαν. Θεον invicem, Deus ουδεις πωποτε τεθεαται· in nobis manet, et εαν αγαπωμεν αλληλους, caritas eius in nobis ὁ Θεος εν ἡμιν μενει, perfecta est. In hos και ἡ αγαπη αυτου intellegimus quoniam τετελειωμενη εστιν εν in eum manemus et ἡμιν. εν τουτω γινωσκομεν ipse in nobis, quoniam ὁτι εν αυτω de Spiritu Suo dedit μενομεν και αυτος εν nobis. Et nos vidimus ἡμιν, ὁτι εκ του Πνευματος et testificamur quoniam αυτου δεδωκεν ἡμιν. Pater misit Filium Και ἡμεις τεθεαμεθα salvatorem mundi. και μαρτυρουμεν ὁτι ὁ Quicunque confessus πατηρ απεσταλκε τον fuerit quoniam Iesus υιου σωτηρα του κοσμου. est Filius Dei, Deus in ὁς αν ὁμολογηση ὁτι eo manet, et ipse in Ιησους εστιν ὁ υιος του Deo. Et nos cognovimus Θεου, ὁ Θεος εν αυτω et credimus, caritati μενει και αυτος εν τω Dei quam habet Θεω. Και ἡμεις εγνωκαμεν Deus in nobis. Deus και πεπιστευκαμεν caritas est, et qui manet την αγαπην ἡν εχει ὁ in caritate in Deo manet, Θεος εν ἡμιν. ὁ Θεος et Deus in eo. In αγαπη εστι, και ὁ μενων hoc perfecta est nobiscum εν τη αγαπη εν τω Θεω caritas ut fiduciam μενει, και ὁ Θεος εν habeamus in die iudicii αυτω. Εν τουτω τετελειωται quia sicut ille est et ἡ αγαπη μεθ' nos sumus in hoc ἡμων, ἱνα παρρησιαν mundo. Timor non εχωμεν εν τη ἡμερα της est in caritate, sed κρισεως· ὁτι καθως perfecta caritas foras εκεινος εστι και ἡμεις mittit timorem; quoniam εσμεν εν τω κοσμω timor pœnam τουτω. φοβος ουκ εστιν habet, qui autem timet εν τη αγαπη, αλλ' ἡ non est perfectus in τελεια αγαπη εξω βαλλει caritate. Nos ergo τον φοβον, ὁτι ὁ φοβος diligamus invicem quoniam κολασιν εχει, ὁ δε Deus prior dilexit φοβουμενος ου τετελειωται nos. Si quis dixerit εν τη αγαπη. ἡμεις quoniam diligo Deum, αγαπωμεν αυτον, ὁτι et fratrem suum oderit, αυτος πρωτος ηγαπησεν mendax est: qui enim ημας. Εαν τις ειπη. non diligit fratrem Ὁτι αγαπω τον Θεον, suum quem videt, και τον αδελφον αυτου Deum quem non videt μιση, ψευστης εστιν· ὁ quomodo potest diligere? γαρ μη αγαπων τον Et hoc mandatum αδελφον αυτου ὁν ἑωρακε habemus a Deo, τον Θεον ὁν ουχ ἑωρακε ut qui diligat Deum πως δυναται αγαπαν; diligat et fratrem suum. και ταυτην την εντολην εχομεν απ' αυτου, ἱνα Omnis qui credit ὁ αγαπων τον Θεον quoniam Iesus est αγαπα και τον αδελφον Christus, ex Deo natus αυτου. est; et omnis qui diligit eum qui genuit, diligit Πας ὁ πιστευων ὁτι eum qui natus est Ιησους εστιν ὁ Χριστος ex eo. In hoc cognoscimus εκ του Θεου γεγεννηται· quoniam diligimus και πας ὁ αγαπων τον natos Dei, cum γεννησαντα αγαπα και Deum diligamus et τον γεγεννημενον εξ mandata eius faciamus. αυτου. εν τουτω γινωσκομεν Hæc est enim caritas ὁτι αγαπωμεν Dei, ut mandata eius τα τεκνα του Θεου, ὁταν custodiamus. τον Θεον αγαπωμεν και τας εντολας αυτου τηρωμεν. αυτη γαρ εστιν ἡ αγαπη του Θεου, ἱνα τας εντολας αυτου τηρωμεν.

AUTHORISED VERSION. REVISED VERSION.

Beloved, let us love Beloved, let us love one another: for love one another: for love is of God; and every is of God; and every one that loveth is born one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth of God, and God. He that loveth knoweth God. He not knoweth not God; that loveth not knoweth for God is love. In not God; for God this was manifested is love. Herein was the love of God toward the love of God manifested us, because that in us, that God God sent His only begotten hath sent His only begotten Son into the Son into the world, that we might world, that we might live through Him. live through Him. Herein is love, not Herein is love, not that we loved God, that we loved God, but that He loved us, but that He loved us, and sent His Son _to be_ and sent His Son _to be_ the propitiation for our the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought so loved us, we also also to love one another. ought to love one another. No man hath No man hath seen God at any time. beheld God at any If we love one another, time: if we love one God dwelleth in us, another, God abideth and His love is perfected in us, and His love is in us. Hereby perfected in us: hereby know we that we dwell know we that we in Him, and He in us, abide in Him, and He because He hath given in us, because He hath us of His Spirit. And given us of His Spirit. we have seen and do And we have beheld testify that the Father and bear witness that sent the Son _to be_ the the Father hath sent Saviour of the world. the Son _to be_ the Whosoever shall confess Saviour of the world. that Jesus is the Whosoever shall confess Son of God, God dwelleth that Jesus is the in him, and he in Son of God, God abideth God. And we have in him, and he in known and believed God. And we know the love that God hath and have believed the to us. God is love: love which God hath and he that dwelleth in us. God is love; in love dwelleth in and he that abideth in God, and God in him. love abideth in God, Herein is our love and God abideth in made perfect, that we him. Herein is love may have boldness in made perfect with us, the day of judgment: that we may have boldness because as He is, so in the day of are we in this world. judgment; because as There is no fear in He is, even so are we love; but perfect love in this world. There casteth out fear: because is no fear in love: but fear hath torment. perfect love casteth out He that feareth fear, because fear hath is not made perfect punishment; and he in love. We love that feareth is not Him, because He made perfect in love. first loved us. If a We love, because He man say, I love God, first loved us. If a and hateth his brother, man say, I love God, he is a liar: for he and hateth his brother, that loveth not his he is a liar: for he brother whom he hath that loveth not his seen, how can he love brother whom he hath God whom he hath not seen, cannot love God seen? And this commandment whom he hath not seen. have we And this commandment from Him, That he have we from who loveth God love Him, that he who his brother also. loveth God love his brother also. Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ Whosoever believeth is born of God: and that Jesus is the Christ every one that loveth is begotten of God: Him that begat loveth and whosoever loveth Him also that is begotten Him that begat loveth of Him. By this we Him also that is begotten know that we love the of Him. Hereby children of God, when we know that we we love God, and keep love the children of His commandments. God, when we love For this is the love of God, and do His commandments. God, that we keep For this His commandments. is the love of God, that we keep His commandments.

ANOTHER VERSION.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God in us, because that God hath sent His Son His only begotten Son into the world that we might live through Him. In this is The Love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son _as_ propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also are bounden to love one another. God no one hath ever yet beholden: if we love one another God abideth in us and His love is perfected in us. Herein know we that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He hath given us out of the _fulness_ of His Spirit. And we have beheld and are bearing witness that the Father hath sent the Son _as_ the Saviour of the world. Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God abideth in him and he in God. And we know and have believed the love which God hath in us. God is love; and he that abideth in love, abideth in God, and God in him. Herein hath The Love been perfected with us that we may have boldness in the Day of the Judgment: because as He is so are we in this world. Fear is not in love: but the perfect love casteth out fear, because fear bringeth punishment with it. He that is fearing is not made perfect in his love. We love Him because He first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, God whom he hath not seen how can he love? And this commandment have we from Him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.

Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and every one who loveth Him that begat loveth also Him that is begotten of Him. Herein we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and do His commandments: for this is the love of God, that we observe His commandments.

DISCOURSE X.

_BOLDNESS IN THE DAY OF JUDGMENT._

"Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the Day of Judgment: because as He is, so are we in this world."--1 JOHN iv. 17.

It has been so often repeated that St. John's eschatology is idealized and spiritual, that people now seldom pause to ask what is meant by the words. Those who repeat them most frequently seem to think that the idealized means that which will never come into the region of historical fact, and that the spiritual is best defined as the unreal. Yet, without postulating the Johannic authorship of the Apocalypse--where the Judgment is described with the most awful accompaniments of outward solemnity[256]--there are two places in this Epistle which are allowed to drop out of view, but which bring us face to face with the visible manifestations of an external Advent. It is a peculiarity of St. John's style (as we have frequently seen) to strike some chord of thought, so to speak, before its time; to allow the prelusive note to float away, until suddenly, after a time, it surprises us by coming back again with a fuller and bolder resonance. "And now, my sons,"[257] (had the Apostle said) "abide in Him, that if He shall be manifested, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed shrinking from Him[258] at His coming."[259] In our text the same thought is resumed, and the reality of the Coming and Judgment in its external manifestation as emphatically given as in any other part of the New Testament.[260]

We may here speak of the conception of the Day of the Judgment: of the fear with which that conception is encompassed; and of the sole means of the removal of that fear which St. John recognises.

I.

We examine the general conception of "the Day of the Judgment," as given in the New Testament.

As there is that which with terrible emphasis is marked off as "_the_ Judgment,"[261] "_the_ Parousia," so there are other judgments or advents of a preparatory character. As there are phenomena known as mock suns, or haloes round the moon, so there are fainter reflections ringed round the Advent, the Judgment.[262] Thus, in the development of history, there are successive cycles of continuing judgment; preparatory advents; less completed _crises_, as even the world calls them.

But against one somewhat widely-spread way of blotting the Day of the Judgment from the calendar of the future--so far as believers are concerned--we should be on our guard. Some good men think themselves entitled to reason thus--"I am a Christian. I shall be an assessor in the judgment. For me there is, therefore, no judgment day." And it is even held out as an inducement to others to close with this conclusion, that they "shall be delivered from the bugbear of judgment."

The origin of this notion seems to be in certain universal tendencies of modern religious thought.

The idolatry of the immediate--the prompt creation of effect--is the perpetual snare of _revivalism_. _Revivalism_ is thence fatally bound at once to follow the tide of emotion, and to increase the volume of the waters by which it is swept along. But the religious emotion of this generation has one characteristic by which it is distinguished from that of previous centuries. The revivalism of the past in all Churches rode upon the dark waves of fear. It worked upon human nature by exaggerated material descriptions of hell, by solemn appeals to the throne of Judgment. Certain schools of biblical criticism have enabled men to steel themselves against this form of preaching. An age of soft humanitarian sentiment--superficial, and inclined to forget that perfect Goodness may be a very real cause of fear--must be stirred by emotions of a different kind. The infinite sweetness of our Father's heart--the conclusions, illogically but effectively drawn from this, of an Infinite good-nature, with its easy-going pardon, reconciliation all round, and exemption from all that is unpleasant--these, and such as these, are the only available materials for creating a great volume of emotion. An invertebrate creed; punishment either annihilated or mitigated; judgment, changed from a solemn and universal assize, a bar at which every soul must stand, to a splendid, and--for all who can say I _am saved_--a triumphant pageant in which they have no anxious concern; these are the readiest instruments, the most powerful leverage, with which to work extensively upon masses of men at the present time. And the seventh article of the Apostles' Creed must pass into the limbo of exploded superstition.

The only appeal to Scripture which such persons make, with any show of plausibility, is contained in an exposition of our Lord's teaching in a part of the fifth chapter of the fourth Gospel.[263] But clearly there are three Resurrection scenes which may be discriminated in those words. The first is spiritual, a present awakening of dead souls,[264] in those with whom the Son of Man is brought into contact in His earthly ministry. The second is a department of the same spiritual resurrection. The Son of God, with that mysterious gift of Life in Himself,[265] has within Him a perpetual spring of rejuvenescence for a faded and dying world. A renewal of hearts is in process during all the days of time, a passage for soul after soul out of death into life.[266] The third scene is the general Resurrection and general Judgment.[267] The first was the resurrection of comparatively few; the second is the resurrection of many; the third will be the resurrection of all. If it is said that the believer "cometh not into _judgment_," the word in that place plainly signifies _condemnation_.[268]

Clear and plain above all such subtleties ring out the awe-inspiring words: "it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the Judgment;" "we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ."[269]

Reason supplies us with two great arguments for the General Judgment. One from the conscience of history, so to speak; the other from the individual conscience.

1. General history points to a general judgment. If there is no such judgment to come, then there is no one definite moral purpose in human society. Progress would be a melancholy word, a deceptive appearance, a stream that has no issue, a road that leads nowhere. No one who believes that there is a Personal God, Who guides the course of human affairs, can come to the conclusion that the generations of man are to go on for ever without a winding-up, which shall decide upon the doings of all who take part in human life. In the philosophy of nature, the affirmation or denial of purpose is the affirmation or denial of God. So in the philosophy of history. Society without the General Judgment would be a chaos of random facts, a thing without rational retrospect or definite end--_i.e._, without God. If man is under the government of God, human history is a drama, long-drawn, and of infinite variety, with inconceivably numerous actors. But a drama must have a last act. The last act of the drama of history is "The Day of the Judgment."

2. The other argument is derived from the individual conscience.

Conscience, as a matter of fact, has two voices. One is _imperative_; it tells us what we are to do. One is _prophetic_, and warns us of something which we are to receive. If there is to be no Day of the General Judgment, then the million prophecies of conscience will be belied, and our nature prove to be mendacious to its very roots.

There is no essential article of the Christian creed like this which can be isolated from the rest, and treated as if it stood alone. There is a _solidarity_ of each with all the rest. Any which is isolated is in danger itself, and leaves the others exposed. For they have an internal harmony and congruity. They do not form a hotchpot of credenda. They are not so many _beliefs_ but one _belief_. Thus the isolation of articles is perilous. For, when we try to grasp and to defend one of them, we have no means left of measuring it but by terms of comparison which are drawn from ourselves, which must therefore be finite, and by the inadequacy of the scale which they present, appear to render the article of faith thus detached incredible. Moreover, each article of our creed is a revelation of the Divine attributes, which meet together in unity. To divide the attributes by dividing the form in which they are revealed to us is to belie and falsify the attribute; to give a monstrous development to one by not taking into account some other which is its balance and compensation. Thus, many men deny the truth of a punishment which involves final separation from God. They glory in the legal judgment which "dismisses hell with costs." But they do so by fixing their attention exclusively upon the one dogma which reveals one attribute of God. They isolate it from the Fall, from the Redemption by Christ, from the gravity of sin, from the truth that all whom the message of the Gospel reaches may avoid the penal consequences of sin. It is impossible to face the dogma of eternal separation from God without facing the dogma of Redemption. For Redemption involves in its very idea the intensity of sin, which needed the sacrifice of the Son of God; and further, the fact that the offer of salvation is so free and wide that it cannot be put away without a terrible wilfulness.

In dealing with many of the articles of the creed, there are opposite extremes. Exaggeration leads to a revenge upon them which is, perhaps, more perilous than neglect. Thus, as regards eternal punishment, in one country ghastly exaggerations were prevalent. It was assumed that the vast majority of mankind "are destined to everlasting punishment"; that "the floor of hell is crawled over by hosts of babies a span long." The inconsistency of such views with the love of God, and with the best instincts of man, was victoriously and passionately demonstrated. Then unbelief turned upon the dogma itself, and argued, with wide acceptance, that "with the overthrow of this conception goes the whole redemption-plan, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, and the grand climax of the Church-scheme, the General Judgment." But the alleged article of faith was simply an exaggeration of that faith, and the objections lay altogether against the exaggeration of it.

II.

We have now to speak of the removal of that terror which accompanies the conception of the Day of the Judgment, and of the sole means of that emancipation which St. John recognises. For terror there is in every point of the repeated descriptions of Scripture--in the surroundings, in the summons, in the tribunal, in the trial, in one of the two sentences.

"God is love," writes St. John, "and he that abideth in love abideth in God: and God abideth in him. In this [abiding], love stands perfected _with us_,[270] and the object is nothing less than this," not that we may be exempted from judgment, but that "we may have boldness in the Day of the Judgment." Boldness! It is the splendid word which denotes the citizen's right of free speech, the masculine privilege of courageous liberty.[271] It is the tender word which expresses the child's unhesitating confidence, in "saying all out" to the parent. The ground of the boldness is conformity to Christ. Because "as He _is_," with that vivid idealizing sense, frequent in St. John when he uses it of our Lord--"as He is," delineated in the fourth Gospel, seen by "the eye of the heart"[272] with constant reverence in the soul, with adoring wonder in heaven, perfectly true, pure, and righteous--"even so" (not, of course, with any equality in degree to that consummate ideal, but with a likeness ever growing, an aspiration ever advancing[273])--"so are we in this world," purifying ourselves as He is pure.

Let us draw to a definite point our considerations upon the Judgment, and the Apostle's sweet encouragement for the "day of wrath, that dreadful day."

It is of the essence of the Christian faith to believe that the Son of God, in the Human Nature which He assumed, and which He has borne into heaven, shall come again, and gather all before Him, and pass sentence of condemnation or of peace according to their works. To hold this is necessary to prevent terrible doubts of the very existence of God; to guard us against sin, in view of that solemn account; to comfort us under affliction.

What a thought for us, if we would but meditate upon it! Often we complain of a commonplace life, of mean and petty employment. How can it be so, when at the end we, and those with whom we live, must look upon that great, overwhelming sight! Not an eye that shall not see Him, not a knee that shall not bow, not an ear that shall not hear the sentence. The heart might sink and the imagination quail under the burden of the supernatural existence which we cannot escape. One of two looks we must turn upon the Crucified--one willing as that which we cast on some glorious picture, or on the enchantment of the sky; the other unwilling and abject. We should weep first with Zechariah's mourners, with tears at once bitter because they are for sin, and sweet because they are for Christ.

But, above all things, let us hear how St. John sings us the sweet low hymn that breathes consolation through the terrible fall of the triple hammer-stroke of the rhyme in the _Dies iræ_. We must seek to lead upon earth a life laid on the lines of Christ's. Then, when the Day of the Judgment comes; when the cross of fire (so, at least, the early Christians thought) shall stand in the black vault; when the sacred wounds of Him who was pierced shall stream over with a light beyond dawn or sunset; we shall find that the discipline of life is complete, that God's love after all its long working with us stands perfected, so that we shall be able, as citizens of the kingdom, as children of the Father, to say out all. A Christlike character in an un-Christlike world--this is the cure of the disease of terror. Any other is but the medicine of a quack. "There is no fear in love; but the perfect love casteth out fear, because fear brings punishment; and he that feareth is not made perfect in love."[274]

We may well close with that pregnant commentary on this verse which tells us of the four possible conditions of a human soul--"without either fear or love; with fear, without love; with fear and love; with love, without fear."[275]

NOTES.

Ch. iv. 7, v. 3.

Ver. 3. This verse should divide about the middle.

FOOTNOTES:

[256] Apoc. xx. 12, 13.

[257] 1 John ii. 28.

[258] αισχυνθωμεν απ' αυτου, see Jerem. xii. 13 (for מִן בּושׁ). Prof. Westcott happily quotes, "as a guilty thing surprised."

[259] _Coming_, εν τη παρουσια αυτου. The word is not found elsewhere in the Johannic group of writings. But by his use of it here, St. John falls into line with the whole array of apostolic witnesses--with St. Matthew (xxiv. 3-27, 37, 39); with St. Paul (_passim_); with St. James (v. 7, 8); with St. Peter (2 Peter i. 16, iii. 4-12). This fact may well warn critics of the precarious character of theories founded upon "the negative phenomena of the books of the New Testament." (See Professor Westcott's excellent note, _The Epistles of St. John_, 80.)

[260] (εν τη ἡμερα της κρισεως)--"in the Day of the Judgment"--cf. Apoc. xiv. 7. We have "in THE Judgment" (Matt. xii. 41, 42; Luke x. 14, xi. 31, 32)--the indefinite "day of judgment" (Matt. x. 15, xi. 22, 24; Mark vi. 11).

[261] 2 Pet. ii. 9, iii. 7--but "_The_ Day of _The_ Judgment," here only.

[262] Cf. our Lord's words--"_henceforth_ (απ' αρτι) ye shall see the Son of Man _coming_." (Matt. xxvi. 64.)

[263] John v. 21, 29.

[264] Ver. 21.

[265] Ver. 26.

[266] Ver. 24.

[267] Ver. 28, 29.

[268] The writer ventures to lament the substitution of "judgment" for "condemnation," ver. 24. R.V. It is a verbal consistency, or minute accuracy, purchased at the heavy price of a false thought, suggested to many readers who are not scholars. "In John's language κρισις is, (_a_) that _judgment_ which came in pain and misery to those who rejected the salvation offered to mankind by Christ, iii. 19, κ.τ.λ., ερχεσθαι εις κρισιν, to _fall into the state of one thus condemned_, v. 24. (_b_) Judgment of condemnation to the wicked, with ensuing rejection, v. 29." Grimm. Lex. N.T. 247. Between this passage of the fourth Gospel and Apoc. xx., there is a marvellous inner harmony of thought. "The first resurrection" (ver. 6) = John v. 21, 26; then vv. 11, 12, 13 = John v. 28, 29.

[269] Heb. ix. 27; 2 Cor. v. 10, cf. Rom. xiv. 10; Apoc. xx. 11, 12, 13.

[270] μεθ' ἡμων--God's love in itself is perfected. It might be made as perfect as man's nature will admit by an instantaneous act; but God works jointly, in companionship with us. The grace of God "preventing us that we may will, _works with us_ when we will." The essential idea of μετα is _companionship_ or _connexion_. (See Donaldson, _Gr. Gr., 50, 52 a._)

[271] ελευθεριας ἡ πολις μεστη και παρρησιας γιγνεται. (Plat., _Rep._, 557 B). The word is derived from παν and ῥησις.

[272] Ephes. i. 18.

[273] Cf. Matt. v. 48.

[274] Ver. 18.

[275] Bengel. The writer must acknowledge his obligation to Professor Westcott, whose exposition gives us a peculiar conception of the depth of St. John's teaching here. (_The Epistles of St. John_, 149-153).

SECTION IX.

GREEK. LATIN.

Και αι εντολαι αυτου Et mandata eius gravia βαρειαι ουκ εισιν· ὁτι non sunt. Quoniam παν το γεγεννημενον εκ omne quod natum est του Θεου νικα τον ex Deo vincit mundum: κοσμον· και αυτη εστιν et hæc est victoria ἡ νικη ἡ νικησασα τον quæ vincit mundum, κοσμον, ἡ πιστις ἡμων. fides nostra. Quis est τις εστιν ὁ νικων τον qui vincit mundum nisi κοσμον, ει μη ὁ πιστευων qui credit quoniam ὁτι Ιησους εστιν ὁ υιος Iesus est Filius Dei? του Θεου; Ουτος εστιν Hic est qui venit per ὁ ελθων δι ὑδατος και aquam et sanguinem, αιματος, Ιησους ὁ Χριστος· Iesus Christus: non in ουκ εν τω ὑδατι aqua solum, sed in μονον, αλλ' εν τω ὑδατι aqua et sanguine. Et και εν τω αιματι· και το Spiritus est qui testificatur πνευμα εστι το μαρτυρουν, quoniam Christus ὁτι το πνευμα est veritas. Quia εστιν ἡ αληθεια. ὁτι tres sunt qui testimonium τρεις εισιν οι μαρτυρουντες, dant, Spiritus το πνευμα, και et aqua et sanguis, et το ὑδωρ, και το αιμα· tres unum sunt. Si και οι τρεις εις το ἑν testimonium hominum εισιν. Ει την μαρτυριαν accipimus, testimonium των ανθρωπων λαμβανομεν, Dei maius est: quoniam ἡ μαρτυρια του hoc est testimonium Θεου μειζων εστιν· ὁτι Dei quod αυτη εστιν ἡ μαρτυρια maius est, quia testificatus του Θεου, ὁτι μεμαρτυρηκεν est de Filio suo. περι του υιου Qui credit in Filio Dei, αυτου. ὁ πιστευων εις habet testimonium Dei τον υιον του Θεου, εχει in se: qui non credit την μαρτυριαν εν αυτω. mendacem facit eum: ὁ μη πιστευων τω quoniam non credidit Θεω, ψευστην πεποιηκεν in testimonio quod αυτον, ὁτι ου πεπιστευκεν testificatus est Deus εις την μαρτυριαν, ἡν de Filio suo. Et hoc μεμαρτυρηκεν ὁ Θεος est testimonium, quoniam περι του υιου αυτου. vitam eternam Και αυτη εστιν ἡ μαρτυρια dedit nobis Deus, et ὁτι ζωην αιωνιον hæc vita in Filio eius. εδωκεν ἡμιν ὁ Θεος· και Qui habet Filium habet αυτη ἡ ζωη εν τω υιω vitam: qui non habet αυτου εστιν. ὁ εχων filium vitam non habet. τον υιον, εχει την ζωην· Hæc scripsi vobis ut ὁ μη εχων τον υιον του sciatis quoniam vitam Θεου, την ζωην ουκ εχει. habetis æternam, qui Ταυτα εγραψα ὑμιν ἱνα creditis in nomine ειδητε ὁτι ζωην εχετε Filii Dei. Et hæc est αιωνιον, οι πιστευοντες fiducia quam habemus εις το ὁνομα του υιου ad eum quia quodcumque του Θεου. Και αυτη petierimus secundum εστιν ἡ παρρησια ἡν voluntatem εχομεν προς αυτον, ὁτι eius audit nos. Et εαν τι αιτωμεθα κατα scimus quoniam audit το θελημα αυτου, ακουει nos quicquid petierimus, ἡμων· και εαν οιδαμεν scimus quoniam ὁτι ακουει ἡμων ὁ αν habemus petitiones αιτωμεθα, οιδαμεν ὁτι quas postulamus ab eo. εχομεν τα αιτηματα α Qui scit fratrem suum ητηκαμεν παρ' αυτου. peccare peccatum non Εαν τις ιδη τον αδελφον ad mortem, petit, et αυτου αμαρτανοντα dabit ei vitam, peccantibus αμαρτιαν μη προς θανατον, non ad mortem. αιτησει, και δωσει Est peccatum ad mortem: αυτω ζωην τοις ἁμαρτανουσι non pro illo dico μη προς θανατον. ut roget quis. Omnis εστιν αμαρτια προς iniquitas peccatum est: θανατον· ου περι εκεινης et est peccatum ad λεγω ἱνα ερωτηση· πασα mortem. αδικια αμαρτια εστιν, και εστιν αμαρτια ου προς θανατον.

AUTHORISED VERSION. REVISED VERSION.

And His commandments And His commandments are not grievous. are not grievous. For whatsoever is born For whatsoever is begotten of God overcometh the of God overcometh world: and this is the the world: and victory that overcometh this is the victory that the world, _even_ our hath overcome the faith. Who is he that world, _even_ our faith. overcometh the world, And who is he that but he that believeth overcometh the world, that Jesus is the Son but he that believeth of God? This is He that Jesus is the Son that came by water of God? This is He and blood, _even_ Jesus that came by water Christ; not by water and blood, _even_ Jesus only, but by water and Christ; not with the blood. And it is the water only, but with Spirit that beareth witness, the water and with the because the Spirit blood. And it is the is truth. For there Spirit that beareth are three that bear witness, because the record in heaven, the Spirit is the truth. Father, the Word, and For there are three the Holy Ghost: and who bear witness, the these three are one. Spirit, and the water, And there are three and the blood: and the that bear witness in three agree in one. If earth, the spirit, and we receive the witness the water, and the of men, the witness of blood: and these three God is greater: for the agree in one. If we witness of God is this, receive the witness of that He hath borne men, the witness of witness concerning His God is greater: for Son. He that believeth this is the witness of on the Son of God hath God which He hath the witness in him: he testified of His Son. that believeth not God He that believeth on hath made Him a liar: the Son of God hath because he hath not the witness in himself: believed in the witness he that believeth not that God hath borne God hath made Him a concerning His Son. liar; because he believeth And the witness is not the record this, that God gave that God gave of His unto us eternal life, Son. And this is the and this life is in His record, that God hath Son. He that hath the given to us eternal life, Son hath the life; he and this life is in His that hath not the Son Son. He that hath the of God hath not the life. Son hath life; _and_ he These things have I that hath not the Son written unto you, that of God hath not life. ye may know that ye These things have I have eternal life, _even_ written unto you that unto you that believe believe on the name of on the name of the Son the Son of God; that of God. And this is ye may know that ye the boldness which we have eternal life, and have toward Him, that, that ye may believe on if we ask any thing the name of the Son of according to His will, God. And this is the He heareth us: and if confidence that we we know that He heareth have in Him, that, if us whatsoever we ask any thing according ask, we know that to His will, He we have the petitions heareth us: and if we which we have asked know that He hear us, of Him. If any man whatsoever we ask, see his brother sinning we know that we have a sin not unto death, the petitions that we he shall ask, and _God_ desired of Him. If will give him life for any man see his brother them that sin not unto sin a sin _which is_ death. (There is a sin not unto death, he shall unto death). There ask, and He shall give is sin unto death; not him life for them that concerning this _sin_ am sin not unto death. I saying that he should There is a sin unto make request. All death: I do not say unrighteousness is sin, that he shall pray for and there is sin not it. All unrighteousness unto death. is sin: and there is a sin not unto death.

ANOTHER VERSION.

And His commandments are not heavy, for whatsoever is born of God conquereth the world: and this is the conquest that hath conquered the world--the Faith of us. Who is he that is conquering the world, but he that is believing that Jesus is the Son of God? This is He that came by water and blood--Jesus Christ: not with the water only, but with the water and with the blood. And the Spirit is that which is ever witnessing that the Spirit is the truth. For three are they who are ever witnessing, the Spirit and the water and the blood: and the three agree in one.

If we receive the witness of men the witness of God is greater; because the witness of God is this, because (_I say_) He hath witnessed concerning His Son. He that is believing on the Son of God hath the witness in him, he that is not believing God hath made Him a liar: because he is not a believer in the witness that God witnessed concerning His Son. And this is the witness, that God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He that hath the Son hath the life, he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life. These things have I written unto you that ye may know that ye have eternal life--ye that are believing in the name of the Son of God! And this is the boldness which we have to Himward, that if we ask any thing according to His will, He is hearing us: and if we know that He is hearing us, we know that we have the desires that we have desired from Him. If any man see his brother sinning sin not unto death, he shall ask, and _God_ shall give him life--(I _mean_ for those who are not sinning unto death). Not concerning this _sin_ am I saying that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin, and there is sin not unto death.

DISCOURSE XI.

_BIRTH AND VICTORY._

"And His commandments are not grievous. For whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?"--1 JOHN v. 3, 4, 5.

St. John here connects the Christian birth with victory. He tells us that of the supernatural life the destined and (so to speak) natural end is conquest.

Now in this there is a _contrast_ between the law of nature and the law of grace. No doubt the first is marvellous. It may even, if we will, in one sense be termed a victory; for it is the proof of a successful contest with the blind fatalities of natural environment. It is in itself the conquest of a something which has conquered a world below it. The first faint cry of the baby is a wail no doubt; but in its very utterance there is a half triumphant undertone. Boyhood, youth, opening manhood--at least in those who are physically and intellectually gifted--generally possess some share of "the rapture of the strife" with nature and with their contemporaries.

"Youth hath triumphal mornings; its days bound From night as from a victory."

But sooner or later that which pessimists style "the martyrdom of life" sets in. However brightly the drama opens, the last scene is always tragic. Our natural birth inevitably ends in defeat.

A birth and a defeat is thus the epitome of each life which is naturally brought into the field of our present human existence. The defeat is sighed over, sometimes consummated, in every cradle; it is attested by every grave.

But if birth and defeat is the motto of the natural life, birth and victory is the motto of every one born into the city of God.

This victory is spoken of in our verses as a victory along the whole line. It is the conquest of the collective Church, of the whole mass of regenerate humanity, so far as it has been true to the principle of its birth[276]--the conquest of the Faith which is "The Faith of _us_,"[277] who are knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of the Son of God, Christ our Lord. But it is something more than that. The general victory is also a victory in detail. Every true individual believer shares in it.[278] The battle is a battle of soldiers. The abstract ideal victory is realised and made concrete in each life of struggle which is a life of enduring faith. The triumph is not merely one of a school, or of a party. The question rings with a triumphant challenge down the ranks--"who is the ever-conqueror of the world, but the ever-believer that Jesus is the Son of God?"

We are thus brought to two of St. John's great master-conceptions, both of which came to him from _hearing_ the Lord who is the Life--both of which are to be read in connection with the fourth Gospel--the Christian's _Birth_ and his _victory_.

I.

The Apostle introduces the idea of the birth which has its origin from God precisely by the same process to which attention has already been more than once directed.

St. John frequently mentions some great subject; at first like a musician who with perfect command of his instrument, touches what seems to be an almost random key, faintly, as if incidentally and half wandering from his theme. But just as the sound appears to be absorbed by the purpose of the composition, or all but lost in the distance, the same chord is struck again more decidedly; and then, after more or less interval, is brought out with a music so full and sonorous, that we perceive that it has been one of the master's leading ideas from the very first. So, when the subject is first spoken of, we hear--"every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him."[279] The subject is suspended for a while; then comes a somewhat more marked reference. "Whosoever is born of God is not a doer of sin; and he cannot continue sinning, because of God he is born." There is yet one more tender recurrence to the favourite theme--"every one that loveth is born of God."[280] Then, finally here at last the chord, so often struck, grown bolder since the prelude, gathers all the music round it. It interweaves with itself another strain which has similarly been gaining amplitude of volume in its course, until we have a great _Te Deum_, dominated by two chords of Birth and Victory. "This _is_ the conquest that has _conquered_ the world--the Faith which is of us."

We shall never come to any adequate notion of St. John's conception of the Birth of God, without tracing the place in his Gospel to which his asterisk in this place refers. To one passage only can we turn--our Lord's conversation with Nicodemus. "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God--except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."[281] The germ of the idea of entrance into the city, the kingdom of God, by means of a new birth, is in that storehouse of theological conceptions, the psalter. There is one psalm of a Korahite seer, enigmatical it may be, shadowed with the darkness of a divine compression,[282] obscure from the glory that rings it round, and from the gush of joy in its few and broken words. The 87th Psalm is the psalm of the font, the hymn of regeneration. The nations once of the world are mentioned among them that know the Lord. They are counted when He writeth up the peoples. Glorious things are spoken of the City of God. Three times over the burden of the song is the new birth by which the aliens were made free of Sion.

This one was born there, This one and that one was born in her, This one was born there.[283]

All joyous life is thus brought into the city of the new-born. "The singers, the solemn dances, the fresh and glancing springs, are in thee."[284] Hence, from the notification of men being born again in order to see and enter into the kingdom, our Lord, as if in surprise, meets the Pharisee's question--"how can these things be?"--with another--"art thou that teacher in Israel,[285] and understandest not these things?" Jesus tells His Church for ever that every one of His disciples must be brought into contact with two worlds, with two influences--one outward, the other inward; one material, the other spiritual; one earthly, the other heavenly; one visible and sacramental, the other invisible and divine. Out of these he must come forth new-born.

Of course it may be said that "the water" here coupled with the Spirit is _figurative_. But let it be observed first, that from the very constitution of St. John's intellectual and moral being things outward and visible were not annihilated by the spiritual transparency which he imparted to them. Water, literal water, is everywhere in his writings. In his Gospel more especially he seems to be ever seeing, ever hearing it. He loved it from the associations of his own early life, and from the mention made of it by his Master. And as in the Gospel water is, so to speak, one of the three great factors and centres of the book;[286] so now in the Epistle, it still seems to glance and murmur before him. "The water" is one of the three abiding witnesses in the Epistle also. Surely, then, our Apostle would be eminently unlikely to express "the Spirit of God" _without_ the outward water by "water _and_ the Spirit." But above all, Christians should beware of a "licentious and deluding alchemy of interpretation which maketh of anything whatsoever it listeth." In immortal words--"when the letter of the law hath two things plainly and expressly specified, water and the Spirit; water, as a duty required on our part, the Spirit, as a gift which God bestoweth; there is danger in so presuming to interpret it, as if the clause which concerneth ourselves were more than needed. We may by such rare expositions attain perhaps in the end to be thought witty, but with ill advice."[287]

But, it will further be asked, whether we bring the Saviour's saying--"except any one be born again of water and the Spirit"--into direct connection with the baptism of infants? Above all, whether we are not encouraging every baptised person to hold that somehow or other he will have a part in the victory of the regenerate?

We need no other answer than that which is implied in the very force of the word here used by St. John--"all that is born of God conquereth the world." "That is born" is the participle perfect.[288] The force of the perfect is not simply past action, but such action lasting on in its effects. Our text, then, speaks only of those who having been born again into the kingdom continue in a corresponding condition, and unfold the life which they have received. The Saviour spoke first and chiefly of the initial act. The Apostle's circumstances, now in his old age, naturally led him to look on from that. St. John is no "idolater of the immediate." Has the gift received by his spiritual children worn long and lasted well? What of the new life which should have issued from the New Birth? Regenerate in the past, are they renewed in the present?

This simple piece of exegesis lets us at once perceive that another verse in this Epistle, often considered of almost hopeless perplexity, is in truth only the perfection of sanctified (nay, it may be said, of moral) common-sense; an intuition of moral and spiritual instinct. "Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin: for his seed remaineth in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God." We have just seen the real significance of the words "he that is born of God"--he for whom his past birth lasts on in its effects. "He _doeth_ not sin," is not a sin-doer, makes it not his "trade," as an old commentator says. Nay, "he is not able to be" (to keep on) "sinning." "He cannot sin." He cannot! There is no physical impossibility. Angels will not sweep him away upon their resistless pinions. The Spirit will not hold him by the hand as if with a mailed grasp, until the blood spirts from his finger-tips, that he may not take the wine-cup, or walk out to the guilty assignation. The compulsion of God is like that which is exercised upon us by some pathetic wounded-looking face that gazes after us with a sweet reproach. Tell the honest poor man with a large family of some safe and expeditious way of transferring his neighbour's money to his own pocket. He will answer, "I cannot steal:" that is, "I cannot steal, however much it may physically be within my capacity, without a burning shame, an agony to my nature worse than death." On some day of fierce heat, hold a draught of iced wine to a total abstainer, and invite him to drink. "I cannot," will be his reply. Cannot! He can, so far as his hand goes; he cannot, without doing violence to a conviction, to a promise, to his own sense of truth. And he who continues in the fulness of his God-given Birth "does not _do_ sin," "cannot be sinning." Not that he is sinless, not that he never fails, or does not sometimes fall; not that sin ceases to be sin to him, because he thinks that he has a standing in Christ. But he cannot go on in sin without being untrue to his birth; without a stain upon that finer, whiter, more sensitive conscience, which is called "spirit" in a son of God; without a convulsion in his whole being which is the precursor of death, or an insensibility which is death actually begun.

How many such texts as these are practically useless to most of us! The armoury of God is full of keen swords which we refrain from handling, because they have been misused by others. None is more neglected than this. The fanatic has shrieked out--"sin in my case! I _cannot_ sin. _I_ may hold a sin in my bosom; and God may hold me in His arms for all that. At least, I may hold that which would be a sin in you and most others; but to _me_ it is _not_ sin." On the other hand, stupid goodness maunders out some unintelligible paraphrase, until pew and reader yawn from very weariness. Divine truth in its purity and plainness is thus discredited by the exaggeration of the one, or buried in the leaden winding-sheet of the stupidity of the other.

In leaving this portion of our subject we may compare the view latent in the very idea of infant baptism with that of the leader of a well-known sect upon the beginnings of the spiritual life in children.

"May not children grow up into salvation, without knowing the exact moment of their conversion?" asks "General" Booth. His answer is--"yes, it may be so; and we trust that in the future this will be the usual way in which children may be brought to Christ." The writer goes on to tell us how the New Birth will take place in future. "When the conditions named in the first pages of this volume are complied with--when the parents are godly, and the children are surrounded by holy influences and examples from their birth, and trained up in the spirit of their early dedication--they will _doubtless come to know and love and trust their Saviour in the ordinary course of things_. The Holy Ghost will take possession of them from the first. Mothers and fathers will, as it were, put them into the Saviour's arms in their swaddling clothes, and He will take them, and bless them, and sanctify them from the very womb, and make them His own, without their knowing the hour or the place when they pass from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. In fact, with such little ones it shall never be very dark, for their natural birth shall be, as it were, in the spiritual twilight, which begins with the dim dawn, and increases gradually until the noonday brightness is reached; so answering to the prophetic description, 'The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.'"[289]

No one will deny that this is tenderly and beautifully written. But objections to its teaching will crowd upon the mind of thoughtful Christians. It seems to defer to a period in the future, to a new era incalculably distant, when Christendom shall be absorbed in Salvationism, that which St. John in his day contemplated as the normal condition of believers, which the Church has always held to be capable of realization, which has been actually realized in no few whom most of us must have known. Further; the fountain-heads of thought, like those of the Nile, are wrapped in obscurity. By what process grace may work with the very young is an insoluble problem in psychology, which Christianity has not revealed. We know nothing further than that Christ blessed little children. That blessing was _impartial_, for it was communicated to all who were brought to Him; it was _real_, otherwise He would not have blessed them at all. That He conveys to them such grace as they are capable of receiving is all that we can know. And yet again; the Salvationist theory exalts parents and surroundings into the place of Christ. It deposes His sacrament, which lies at the root of St. John's language, and boasts that it will secure Christ's end, apparently without any recognition of Christ's _means_.

II.

The second great idea in the verses at the head of this discourse is _Victory_. The intended issue of the new birth is conquest--"all that is born of God conquers the world."

The idea of victory is almost[290] exclusively confined to St. John's writings. The idea is first expressed by Jesus--"be of good cheer: I have conquered the world."[291] The first prelusive touch in the Epistle, hints at the fulfilment of the Saviour's comfortable word in one class of the Apostle's spiritual children. "I write unto you, young men, because ye have conquered the wicked one. I have written unto you, young men, because ye have conquered the wicked one."[292] Next, a bolder and ampler strain--"ye are of God, little children, and have conquered them: because greater is He that is in you, than he that is in the world."[293] Then with a magnificent persistence, the trumpet of Christ wakens echoes to its music all down and round the defile through which the host is passing--"all that is born of God conquereth the world: and this is the conquest that has conquered the world--the Faith which is ours."[294] When, in St. John's other great book, we pass with the seer into Patmos, the air is, indeed, "full of noises and sweet sounds." But dominant over all is a storm of triumph, a passionate exultation of victory. Thus each epistle to each of the seven Churches closes with a promise "to him that _conquereth_."

The text promises _two_ forms of victory.

1. A victory is promised to the Church universal. "_All that_ is born of God conquereth the world." This conquest is concentrated in, almost identified with "the Faith." Primarily, in this place, the term (here alone found in our Epistle) is not the faith by _which we believe_, but the Faith _which is_ believed--as in some other places;[295] not faith subjective, but The Faith objectively.[296] Here is the dogmatic principle. The Faith involves definite knowledge of definite principles. The religious knowledge, which is not capable of being put into definite propositions, we need not trouble ourselves greatly about. But we are guarded from over-dogmatism. The word "of us" which follows "the Faith" is a mediating link between the objective and the subjective. First, we possess this Faith as a common heritage. Then, as in the Apostle's creed we begin to individualise this common possession by prefixing "I believe" to every article of it. Then the victory contained in the creed, the victory which the creed _is_ (for more truly again than of Duty may it be said of Faith, "thou who _art victory_"[297]), is made over to each who believes. Each, and each alone, who in soul is ever believing, in practice is ever victorious.

This declaration is full of promise for missionary work. There is no system of error, however ancient, subtle, or highly organised, which must not go down before the strong collective life of the regenerate. No less encouraging is it at home. No form of sin is incapable of being overthrown. No school of anti-Christian thought is invulnerable or invincible. There are other apostates besides Julian who will cry--"Galilæe, vicisti!"

2. The second victory promised is individual, for each of us. Not only where cathedral-spires lift high the triumphant cross; on battle-fields which have added kingdoms to Christendom; by the martyr's stake, or in the arena of the Coliseum, have these words proved true. The victory comes down to us. In hospitals, in shops, in courts, in ships, in sick-rooms, they are fulfilled for us. We see their truth in the patience, sweetness, resignation, of little children, of old men, of weak women. They give a high consecration and a glorious meaning to much of the suffering that we see. What, we are sometimes tempted to cry--is _this_ Christ's Army? are these His soldiers, who can go anywhere and do anything? Poor weary ones! with white lips, and the beads of death-sweat on their faces, and the thorns of pain ringed like a crown round their foreheads; so wan, so worn, so tired, so suffering, that even our love dares not pray for them to live a little longer yet. Are these the elect of the elect, the vanguard of the regenerate, who carry the flag of the cross where its folds are waved by the storm of battle; whom St. John sees advancing up the slope with such a burst of cheers and such a swell of music that the words--"this is the conquest"--spring spontaneously from his lips? Perhaps the angels answer with a voice which we cannot hear--"whatsoever is born of God conquereth the world." May we fight so manfully that each may render if not his "pure" yet his purified

"soul unto his captain Christ, Under whose colours he hath fought so long:"

--that we may know something of the great text in the Epistle to the Romans, with its matchless translation--"we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us"[298]--that arrogance of victory which is at once so splendid and so saintly.

FOOTNOTES:

[276] This is expressed, after St. John's fashion, by the neuter, παν το γεγεννημενον εκ του Θεου. ver. 4.

[277] ἡ πιστις ἡμων, ver. 4.

[278] ὁ νικων τον κοσμον, ὁ πιστευων, ver. 5.

[279] 1 John ii. 29.

[280] 1 John iv. 7.

[281] John iii. 5.

[282] σφοδρα αινιγματωδης και σκοτεινως ειρημενος. Euseb.

[283]

יֻלָּר־שָׁמ וֶה. Ver. 4. יֻלַּר־בָּהּ וְאִישׁ אִישׁ. Ver. 5. יֻלָּר־שָׁמ וֶה. Ver. 6. Psalm lxxxvii.

[284]

"Both they who sing and they who dance, With sacred song are there; In thee fresh brooks and soft streams glance, And all my fountains clear." MILTON, Paraphrase Ps. lxxxvii. 7.

This, on the whole, seems to be considered the most tenable interpretation.

[285] Συ ει ὁ διδασκαλος του Ισραηλ; John iii. 10.

[286] John i. 26, ii. 6, 9, iii. 5-22, iv. 6-16, v. 3, vii. 37, 39, ix. 7, xiii. 1-5, xix. 34.

[287] Hooker, _E. P._, V. lix. (4).

[288] So the perfect is used throughout. γεγεννηται. ii. 29, iii. 9, iv. 7. παν το γεγεννημενον. v. 4. Very remarkably below, πας ὁ γεγεννημενος--αλλα ὁ γεννηθεις εκ του Θεου; the first of the regenerate man who continues in that condition of grace, the second of the Begotten Son of God who keeps His servant. 1 John v. 18.

[289] _Training of children; or How to Make the Children into Saints and Soldiers of Jesus Christ._ By the General of the Salvation Army. London: Salvation Army Book Stores, pp. 162, 163.

[290] Not quite, cf. Rom. viii. 37, xii, 21; 1 Cor. xv. 55, 57. The substantive νικη occurs only 1 John v. 4. A slightly different form (νικος) is in Matt. xii. 20; 1 Cor. xv. 54, 55, 57.

[291] John xvi. 33.

[292] John ii. 13, 14.

[293] 1 John iv. 4.

[294] It does not seem possible to convey to the English reader the fourfold harping upon the word (1 John v. 4, 5) by any other rendering. "The _victory_ that hath _overcome_ the world" (R.V.) fails in this. The noble translation of ὑπερνικωμεν (Rom. viii. 37), happily retained by the Revisers, is rendered consistent by the translation here proposed.

[295] Apoc. ii. 13, xiv. 12.

[296] Fides _quæ creditur_, not _quâ creditur_.

[297]

"Thou who art victory!" WORDSWORTH, _Ode to Duty_.

[298] ὑπερνικωμεν. Rom. viii. 37.

DISCOURSE XII.

_THE GOSPEL AS A GOSPEL OF WITNESS; THE THREE WITNESSES._

"It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth. For there are three that bear witness, the Spirit, and the water, and the blood; and these three agree in one. If we receive the witness of men, the witness of God is greater, for this is the witness of God which He hath testified of His Son. He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself."--1 JOHN v. 6-10.

It has been said that Apostles and apostolic men were as far as possible removed from common-sense, and have no conception of evidence in our acceptation of the word. About this statement there is scarcely even superficial plausibility. Common-sense is the measure of ordinary human tact among palpable realities. In relation to human existence it is the balance of the estimative faculties; the instinctive summary of inductions which makes us rightly credulous and rightly incredulous, which teaches us the supreme lesson of life, when to say "yes," and when to say "no." Uncommon sense is superhuman tact among no less real but at present impalpable realities; the spiritual faculty of forming spiritual inductions aright. So St. John among the three great canons of primary truth with which he closes his Epistle writes--"we know that the Son of God hath come and is present, and hath given us understanding, that we know Him who is true."[299] So with _evidences_. Apostles did not draw them out with the same logical precision, or rather not in the same logical form, which the modern spirit demands. Yet they rested their conclusions upon the same abiding principle of evidence, the primary axiom of our entire social life--that there is a degree of human evidence which practically cannot deceive. "If we receive the witness of men." The form of expression implies that we certainly do.[300]

Peculiar difficulty has been felt in understanding the paragraph. And one portion of it remains difficult after any explanation. But we shall succeed in apprehending it as a whole only upon condition of taking one guiding principle of interpretation with us.

The word _witness_ is St. John's central thought here. He is determined to beat it into the minds of his readers by the most unsparing iteration. He repeats it ten times over, as substantive or verb, in six verses.[301] His object is to turn our attention to his Gospel, and to this distinguishing feature of it--its being from beginning to end a Gospel of _witness_. This witness he declares to be fivefold. (1) The witness of the Spirit, of which the fourth Gospel is pre-eminently full. (2) The witness of the Divine Humanity, of the God-Man who is not man deified, but God humanified. This verse is no doubt partly polemical, against heretics of the day, who would clip the great picture of the Gospel, and force it into the petty frame of their theory. This is He (the Apostle urges) who came on the stage of the world's and the Church's history[302] as the Messiah, under the condition, so to speak, of water and blood;[303] bringing with Him, accompanied by, not the water only, but the water and the blood.[304] Cerinthus separated the Christ, the divine Æon, from Jesus the holy but mortal man. The two, the divine potency and the human existence, met at the waters of Jordan, on the day of the Baptism, when the Christ united Himself to Jesus. But the union was brief and unessential. Before the crucifixion, the divine ideal Christ withdrew. The man suffered. The impassible immortal potency was far away in heaven. St. John denies the fortuitous juxta-position of two accidentally-united existences. We worship one Lord Jesus Christ, attested not only by Baptism in Jordan, the witness of water, but by the death on Calvary, the witness of blood. He came by water and blood, as the means by which His office was manifested; but with the water and with the blood, as the sphere in which He exercises that office. When we turn to the Gospel, and look at the pierced side, we read of blood and water, the order of actual history and physiological fact. But here St. John takes the ideal, mystical, sacramental order, water and blood--cleansing and redemption--and the sacraments which perpetually symbolise and convey them. Thus we have Spirit, water, blood. Three are they who are ever witnessing.[305] These are three great centres round which St. John's Gospel turns.[306] These are the three genuine witnesses, the trinity of witness, the shadow of the Trinity in heaven. (3) Again the fourth Gospel is a Gospel of human witness, a tissue woven out of many lines of human attestation. It records the cries of human souls overheard and noted down at the supreme crisis-moment of life, from the Baptist, Philip, and Nathanael, to the everlasting spontaneous creed of Christendom on its knees before Jesus, the cry of Thomas ever rushing molten from a heart of fire--"my Lord and my God." (4) But if we receive, as we assuredly must and do receive, the overpowering and soul-subduing mass of attesting human evidence, how much more must we receive the Divine witness, the witness of God so conspicuously exhibited in the Gospel of St. John! "The witness of God is greater, because _this_" (even the history in the pages to which he adverts) "is the witness; because" (I say with triumphant reiteration) "He hath witnessed concerning His Son."[307] This witness of God in the last Gospel is given in four forms--by Scripture,[308] by the Father,[309] by the Son Himself,[310] by His works.[311] (5) This great volume of witness is consummated and brought home by another. He who not merely coldly assents to the word of Christ, but lifts the whole burden of his belief on to the Son of God,[312] hath the witness in him. That which was logical and external becomes internal and experimental.

In this ever-memorable passage, all scholars know that an interpolation has taken place. The words--"in heaven the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one. And there are three that bear witness in earth"--are a gloss. A great sentence of one of the first of critics may well reassure any weak believers who dread the candour of Christian criticism, or suppose that it has impaired the evidence for the great dogma of the Trinity. "If the fourth century knew that text, let it come in, in God's name; but if that age did not know it, then Arianism in its height was beaten down without the help of that verse; and, let the _fact_ prove as it will, the _doctrine_ is unshaken."[313] The human material with which they have been clamped should not blind us to the value of the heavenly jewels which seemed to be marred by their earthly setting.

* * * * *

It is constantly said--as we think with considerable misapprehension--that in his Epistle St. John may imply, but does not refer directly to any particular incident in, his Gospel. It is our conviction that St. John very specially includes the Resurrection--the central point of the evidences of Christianity--among the things attested by the witness of men. We propose in another discourse to examine the Resurrection from St. John's point of view.

FOOTNOTES:

[299] δεδωκεν ἡμιν διανοιαν ἱνα γινωσκομεν κ.τ.λ. 1 John v. 20. N. T. lexicographers give as its meaning _intelligentia_ (_einsicht_). See Grimm. _Bretschn._, s.v. Prof. Westcott remarks that "generally nouns which express intellectual powers are rare in St. John's writings." But διανοια is the word by which the LXX. translate the Hebrew לֵב, and has thus a moral and emotional tinge imparted to it. We may compare the sense in which Aristotle uses it in his Poetics for the cast of thought, or general sentiment. (_Poet._, vi.)

[300] ει την μαρτυριαν των ανθρωπων λαμβανομεν. 1 John v. 9.

[301] The A. V. (very unhappily) tried to minimise this reiteration by the introduction of synonyms in four places--"bear record," "record" (vv. 7, 10, 11), "hath testified" (ver. 9).

[302] ὁ ελθων.

[303] δι ὑδατος και αιματος.

[304] ουκ εν τω ὑδατι μονον, αλλ' εν τω ὑδατι και εν τω αιματι.

[305] τρεις εισιν οι μαρτυρουντες, ver. 7.

[306] The _Water_, John iii. 5, cf. i. 26-33, ii. 9, iii. 23, iv. 13, v. 4, ix. 7. The _Blood_, vi. 53, 54, 56, xix. 34. The _Spirit_, vii. 39, xiv., xv., xvi., xx. 22. The water centres in _Baptism_ (iii. 5); the blood is symbolised, exhibited, in Holy _Communion_ (vi.); the Spirit is perpetually making them effective, and especially by the appointed ministry (xx. 22).

[307] ὁτι αυτη εστιν ἡ μαρτυρια του Θεου, ὁτι μεμαρτυρηκεν περι του υιου αυτου, ver. 9.

[308] v. 39, 46, etc.

[309] viii. 18.

[310] viii. 17, 18.

[311] ver. 36, x. 25.

[312] ὁ πιστευων εις τον υιον του Θεου, ver. 10. (See Bihs Ellicott on the force of various prepositions with πιστευω. _Comment, on Pastoral Epistles_.)

[313] Bentley. Letter of January 1st, 1717.

DISCOURSE XIII.

_THE WITNESS OF MEN_ (_APPLIED TO THE RESURRECTION_).

"If we receive the witness of men."--1 JOHN v. 9.

At an early period in the Christian Church the passage in which these words occur, was selected as a fitting Epistle for the First Sunday after Easter, when believers may be supposed to review the whole body of witness to the risen Lord and to triumph in the victory of faith. A consideration of the unity of essential principles in the narratives of the Resurrection will afford the best illustration of the comprehensive canon--"if we receive the witness of men."--if we consider the unity of essential principles in the narratives of the Resurrection, and draw the natural conclusions from them.

I.

Let us note the unity of essential principles in the narratives of the Resurrection.

St. Matthew hastens on from Jerusalem to the appearance in Galilee. "Behold! He goeth before you _into Galilee_," is, in some sense, the key of the 28th chapter. St. Luke, on the other hand, speaks only of manifestations in Jerusalem or its neighbourhood.

Now St. John's Resurrection history falls in the 20th chapter into four pieces, with three manifestations in Jerusalem. The 21st chapter (the appendix-chapter) also falls into four pieces, with one manifestation to the seven disciples in Galilee.

St. John makes no profession of telling us all the appearances which were known to the Church, or even all of which he was personally cognisant. In the treasures of the old man's memory there were many more which, for whatever reason, he did not write. But these distinct continuous specimens of a permitted communing with the eternal glorified life (supplemented on subsequent thought by another in the last chapter) are as good as three or four hundred for the great purpose of the Apostle. "These are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God."[314]

Throughout St. John's narrative every impartial reader will find delicacy of thought, abundance of matter, minuteness of detail. He will find something more. While he feels that he is not in cloudland or dreamland, he will yet recognise that he walks in a land which is wonderful, because the central figure in it is One whose name is Wonderful. The fact is fact, and yet it is something more. For a short time poetry and history are absolutely coincident. Here, if anywhere, is Herder's saying true, that the fourth Gospel seems to be written with a feather which has dropped from an angel's wing.

The unity in essential principles which has been claimed for these narratives taken together is not a lifeless identity in details. It is scarcely to be worked out by the dissecting-maps of elaborate harmonies. It is not the imaginative unity which is poetry; nor the mechanical unity, which is fabrication; nor the passionless unity, which is commended in a police-report. It is not the thin unity of plain-song; it is the rich, unity of dissimilar tones blended into a fugue.

This unity may be considered in two essential agreements of the four Resurrection histories.

1. All the Evangelists agree in reticence on one point--in abstinence from one claim.

If any of us were framing for himself a body of such evidence for the Resurrection as should almost extort acquiescence, he would assuredly insist that the Lord should have been seen and recognised after the Resurrection by miscellaneous crowds--or, at the very least, by hostile individuals. Not only by a tender Mary Magdalene, an impulsive Peter, a rapt John, a Thomas through all his unbelief nervously anxious to be convinced. Let Him be seen by Pilate, by Caiaphas, by some of the Roman soldiers, of the priests, of the Jewish populace. Certainly, if the Evangelists had simply aimed at effective presentation of evidence, they would have put forward statements of this kind.

But the apostolic principle--the apostolic canon of Resurrection evidence--was very different. St. Luke has preserved it for us, as it is given by St. Peter. "Him God raised up the third day, and gave Him to be made manifest after He rose again from the dead, not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us."[315] He shall, indeed, appear again to all the people, to every eye; but that shall be at the great Advent. St. John, with his ideal tenderness, has preserved a word of Jesus, which gives us St. Peter's canon of Resurrection evidence, in a lovelier and more spiritual form. Christ as He rose at Easter should be visible, but only to the eye of love, only to the eye which life fills with tears and heaven with light--"yet a little while, and the world seeth Me no more; but ye see Me ... He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will manifest Myself to Him."[316] Round that ideal canon St. John's Resurrection-history is twined with undying tendrils. Those words may be written by us with our softest pencils over the 20th and 21st chapters of the fourth Gospel. There is--very possibly there can be--under our present human conditions, no manifestation of Him who was dead and now liveth, except to belief, or to that kind of doubt which springs from love.

That which is true of St. John is true of all the Evangelists.

They take that Gospel, which is the life of their life. They bare its bosom to the stab of Celsus,[317] to the bitter sneer plagiarised by Renan--"why did He not appear to all, to His judges and enemies? Why only to one excitable woman, and a circle of His initiated?" "The hallucination of a hysterical woman endowed Christendom with a risen God."[318] An apocryphal Gospel unconsciously violates this apostolic, or rather divine canon, by stating that Jesus gave His grave-clothes to one of the High Priest's servants.[319] There was every reason but one why St. John and the other Evangelists _should have_ narrated such stories. There was only one reason why they _should not_, but that was all-sufficient. Their Master was the Truth as well as the Life. They dared not lie.

Here, then, is one essential accordance in the narratives of the Resurrection. They record no appearances of Jesus to enemies or to unbelievers.

2. A second unity of essential principle will be found in the impression produced upon the witnesses.

There was, indeed, a moment of terror at the sepulchre, when they had seen the angel clothed in the long white garment. "They trembled, and were amazed; neither said they anything to any man; for they were afraid." So writes St. Mark.[320] And no such word ever formed the close of a Gospel! On the Easter Sunday evening there was another moment when they were "terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit."[321] But this passes away like a shadow. For man, the Risen Jesus turns doubt into faith, faith into joy. For woman, He turns sorrow into joy. From the sacred wounds joy rains over into their souls. "He showed them His hands and His feet ... while they yet believed not for joy and wondered." "He showed unto them His hands and His side. Then were the disciples glad when they saw the Lord."[322] Each face of those who beheld Him wore after that a smile through all tears and forms of death. "Come," cried the great Swedish singer, gazing upon the dead face of a holy friend, "come and see this great sight. Here is a woman who has seen Christ." Many of us know what she meant, for we too have looked upon those dear to us who have seen Christ. Over all the awful stillness--under all the cold whiteness as of snow or marble--that strange soft light, that subdued radiance, what shall we call it? wonder, love, sweetness, pardon, purity, rest, worship, discovery. The poor face often dimmed with tears, tears of penitence, of pain, of sorrow, some perhaps which we caused to flow, is looking upon a great sight. Of such the beautiful text is true, written by a sacred poet in a language of which so many verbs are pictures. "They looked unto Him, and _were lightened_."[323] That meeting of lights without a name it is which makes up what angels call joy. There remained some of that light on all who had seen the Risen Lord. Each might say--"have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?"

This effect, like every effect, had a cause.

Scripture implies in the Risen Jesus a form with all heaviness and suffering lifted off it--with the glory, freshness, elasticity, of the new life, overflowing with beauty and power. He had a voice with some of the pathos of affection, making its sweet concession to human sensibility: saying, "Mary," "Thomas," "Simon, son of Jonas." He had a presence at once so majestic that they durst not question Him, yet so full of magnetic attraction that Magdalene clings to His feet, and Peter flings himself into the waters when he is sure that it is the Lord.[324]

Now let it be remarked that this consideration entirely disposes of that afterthought of critical ingenuity which has taken the place of the base old Jewish theory--"His disciples came by night, and stole Him away."[325] That theory, indeed, has been blown into space by Christian apologetics. And now not a few are turning to the solution that He did not really die upon the cross, but was taken down alive.

There are other, and more than sufficient refutations. One from the character of the august Sufferer, who would not have deigned to receive adoration upon false pretences. One from the minute observation by St. John of the physiological effect of the thrust of the soldier's lance, to which he also reverts in the context.

But here, we only ask what effect the appearance of the Saviour among His disciples, supposing that He had not died, must unquestionably have had.

He would only have been taken down from the cross something more than thirty hours. His brow punctured with the crown of thorns; the wounds in hands, feet, and side, yet unhealed; the back raw and torn with scourges; the frame cramped by the frightful tension of six long hours--a lacerated and shattered man, awakened to agony by the coolness of the sepulchre and by the pungency of the spices; a spectral, trembling, fevered, lamed, skulking thing--could that have seemed the Prince of Life, the Lord of Glory, the Bright and Morning Star? Those who had seen Him in Gethsemane and on the cross, and then on Easter, and during the forty days, can scarcely speak of His Resurrection without using language which attains to more than lyrical elevation. Think of St. Peter's anthemlike burst. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath begotten us again to a lively hope, by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Think of the words which St. John heard Him utter. "I am the First and the Living, and behold! I became dead, and I am, living unto the ages of ages."[326]

Let us, then, fix our attention upon the unity of all the Resurrection narratives in these two essential principles. (1) The appearances of the Risen Lord to belief and love only. (2) The impression common to all the narrators of glory on His part, of joy on theirs.

We shall be ready to believe that this was part of the great body of proof which was in the Apostle's mind, when pointing to the Gospel with which this Epistle was associated, he wrote of this human but most convincing testimony--"if we receive," as assuredly we do, "the witness of men"--of evangelists among the number.

II.

Too often such discussions as these end unpractically enough. Too often

"When the critic has done his best, The pearl of price at reason's test On the Professor's lecture table Lies, dust and ashes levigable."

But, after all, we may well ask: can we afford to dispense with this well-balanced probability? Is it well for us to face life and death without taking it, in some form, into the account?

Now at the present moment, it may safely be said that, for the best and noblest intellects imbued with the modern philosophy, as for the best and noblest of old who were imbued with the ancient philosophy, external to Christian revelation, immortality is still, as before, a fair chance, a beautiful "perhaps," a splendid possibility. Evolutionism is growing and maturing somewhere another Butler, who will write in another, and possibly more satisfying chapter, than that least convincing of any in the _Analogy_--"of a Future State."

What has Darwinism to say on the matter?

Much. Natural selection seems to be a pitiless worker; its instrument is _death_. But, when we broaden our survey, the sum-total of the result is everywhere advance--what is mainly worthy of notice, in man the advance of goodness and virtue. For of goodness, as of freedom,

"The battle once begun Though baffled oft, is always won."

Humanity has had to travel thousands of miles, inch by inch, towards the light. We have made such progress that we can see that in time, relatively short, we shall be in noonday. After long ages of strife, of victory for hard hearts and strong sinews, goodness begins to wipe away the sweat of agony from her brow; and will stand, sweet, smiling, triumphant in the world. A gracious life is free for man; generation after generation a softer ideal stands before us, and we can conceive a day when "the meek shall inherit the earth." Do not say that evolution, if proved _à outrance_, brutalises man. Far from it. It lifts him from below out of the brute creation. What theology calls original sin, modern philosophy the brute inheritance--the ape, and the goat, and the tiger--is dying out of man. The perfecting of human nature and of human society stands out as the goal of creation. In a sense, all creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God. Nor need the true Darwinian necessarily fear materialism. "Livers secrete bile--brains secrete thought," is smart and plausible, but it is shallow. Brain and thought are, no doubt, connected--but the connection is of simultaneousness, of two things in concordance indeed, but not related as cause and effect. If cerebral physiology speaks of annihilation when the brain is destroyed, she speaks ignorantly and without a brief.

The greatest thinkers in the Natural Religion department of the new philosophy seem then to be very much in the same position as those in the same department of the old. For immortality there is a sublime probability. With man, and man's advance in goodness and virtue as the goal of creation, who shall say that the thing so long provided for, the goal of creation, is likely to perish? Annihilation is a hypothesis; immortality is a hypothesis. But immortality is the more likely as well as the more beautiful of the two. We may believe in it, not as a thing demonstrated, but as an act of faith that "God will not put us to permanent intellectual confusion."[327]

But we may well ask whether it is wise and well to refuse to intrench this probability behind another. Is it likely that He who has so much care for us as to make us the goal of a drama a million times more complex than our fathers dreamed of; who lets us see that He has not removed us out of his sight; will leave Himself, and with Himself our hopes, without witness in history? History is especially human; human evidence the branch of moral science of which man is master--for man is the best interpreter of man. The primary axiom of family, of social, of legal, of moral life, is, that there is a kind and degree of human evidence which we ought not to refuse; that if credulity is voracious in belief, incredulity is no less voracious in negation; that if there is a credulity which is simple, there is an incredulity which is unreasonable and perilous. Is it then safe to grope for the keys of death in darkness, and turn from the hand that holds them out; to face the ugly realities of the pit with less consolation than is the portion of our inheritance in the faith of Christ?

"The disciples," John tells us, "went away again unto their own home. But Mary was standing without at the sepulchre weeping."[328] Weeping! What else is possible while we are _outside_, while we _stand_--what else until we _stoop_ down from our proud grief to the sepulchre, humble our speculative pride, and condescend to gaze at the death of Jesus face to face? When we do so, we forget the hundred voices that tell us that the Resurrection is partly invented, partly imagined, partly ideally true. We may not see angels in white, nor hear their "why weepest thou?" But assuredly we shall hear a sweeter voice, and a stronger than theirs; and our name will be on it, and His name will rush to our lips in the language most expressive to us--as Mary said unto Him in _Hebrew_,[329] Rabboni. Then we shall find that the grey of morning is passing; that the thin thread of scarlet upon the distant hills is deepening into dawn; that in that world where Christ is the dominant law the ruling principle is not natural selection which works through death, but supernatural selection which works through life; that "because He lives, we shall live also."[330]

With the reception of the witness of men then, and among them of such men as the writer of the fourth Gospel, all follows. For Christ,

"Earth breaks up--time drops away;-- In flows Heaven with its new day Of endless life, when He who trod, Very Man and very God, This earth in weakness, shame, and pain, Dying the death whose signs remain Up yonder on the accursëd tree; Shall come again, no more to be Of captivity the thrall-- But the true God all in all, King of kings, and Lord of lords, As His servant John received the words-- 'I died, and live for evermore.'"

For us there comes the hope in Paradise--the connection with the living dead--the pulsation through the isthmus of the Church, from sea to sea, from us to them--the tears not without smiles as we think of the long summer-day when Christ who is our life shall appear--the manifestation of the sons of God, when "them that sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him." Our resurrection shall be a fact of history, because His is a fact of history; and we receive it as such--partly from the reasonable motive of reasonable human belief on sufficient evidence for practical conviction.

All the long chain of manifold witness to Christ is consummated and crowned when it passes into the inner world of the individual life. "He that believeth on the Son of God, hath the witness in him," _i.e._, in himself![331] Correlative to this, stands a terrible truth. He of whom we must conceive that he believes not God,[332] has made Him a liar--nothing less, because his time for receiving Christ came and went, and with this crisis his unbelief stands a completed present act as the result of his past;[333] unbelief stretching over to the completed witness of God concerning His Son;[334]--human unbelief co-extensive with divine witness.

But that sweet witness in a man's self is not merely in books or syllogisms. It is the creed of a living soul. It lies folded within a man's heart, and never dies--part of the great principle of victory[335] fought and won over again in each true life[336]--until the man dies, and ceasing then only because he sees that which is the object of its witness.

FOOTNOTES:

[314] The writer is entirely persuaded that St. John in chap. xx. 30, 31, refers to the _Resurrection_ "signs," and not to miracles generally.

[315] Acts x. 41, 42. It is to be regretted that the R. V. has not boldly given us such an arrangement of the words in this important passage as would at once connect "made manifest" with "after He rose again from the dead," and avoid making the Apostle state that the chosen witnesses ate and drank with Christ after the Resurrection. St. Peter mentions that particular characteristic of the Apostles which made them judges not to be gainsayed of the identity of the Risen One with Him with whom they used to eat and drink.

[316] John xiv. 19-21.

[317] Τις τουτο ειδεν; γυνη παροιστρος, και ει τις αλλος των εκ της αυτης γοητειας. Ὁτε μεν ηπιστειτο εν σωματι πασιν ανιδην (freely, without restraint) εκηρυττεν, ὁτε δε πιστιν αν ισχυραν παρειχεν εκ νεκρων αναστας ἑνι μονω γυναιω και τοις ἑαυτου θεασιωταις (adepts, initiated) κρυβδην παρεφαινετω ... εχρην ειπερ οντως θειαν δυναμιν εκφηναι ηθελεν ὁ Ιησους αυτοις τοις επηρεασι και τω καταδικασαντι και ὁλως πασιν οφθηναι. [Celsus, _ap. Orig._, 2, 55, 59, 70, 63.] The passage is given in Rudolph Anger's invaluable _Synopsis Evang. cum locis qui supersunt parallelis litterarum et traditionum Evang. Irenæo. antiquiorum._ p. 254.

[318] γυνη παροιστρος, Celsus. "Moments sacrés ou la passion d'une hallucinée donne au monde un Dieu ressuscité." Renan, _Vie de Jesus_, 434.

[319] "Post Resurrectionem ... Dominus quum dedisset sindonem servo sacerdotis"--Evang. ad Heb.--Matt. xxvii. 59.--R. Anger, _Synopsis Evang._, 288.

[320] Mark xvi. 8.

[321] Luke xxiv. 37.

[322] Luke xxiv. 41; John xx. 20.

[323] Ps. xxxiv. 15.

[324] John xxi. 12, cf. 7.

[325] Matt. xxviii. 13.

[326] 1 Peter i. 3, 4; Apoc. i. 17, 18.

[327] See _The Destiny of Man, viewed in the light of his origin_, by John Fiske, especially the three remarkable chapters pp. 96-119.

[328] John xx. 10, 11.

[329] The word Ἑβραιστι had unfortunately dropped out of the T. R. John xx. 16.

[330] John xiv. 19.

[331] εν ἑαυτω, ver. 10.

[332] ὁ μη πιστευων τω Θεω, _Ibid._

[333] ου πεπιστευκεν, _Ibid._

[334] εις την μαρτυριαν ἡν μεμαρτυρηκεν ὁ Θεος περι του υιου αυτου. _Ibid._

[335] παν το γεγεννημενον εκ του Θεου νικα τον κοσμον. ver. 4.

[336] With the neuter in ver. 4, contrast the individualising masculine in ver. 5, τις εστιν ὁ νικων.

DISCOURSE XIV.

_SIN UNTO DEATH._

"There is a sin unto death."--1 JOHN v. 17.

The Church has ever spoken of seven deadly sins. Here is the ugly catalogue. Pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, hatred, sloth. Many of us pray often "from fornication and all other deadly sin, Good Lord deliver us." This language rightly understood is sound and true; yet, without careful thought, the term may lead us into two errors.

1. On hearing of _deadly_ sin we are apt instinctively to oppose it to _venial_. But we cannot define by any _quantitative_ test what venial sin may be for any given soul. To do that we must know the complete history of each soul; and the complete genealogy, conception, birth, and autobiography of each sin. Men catch at the term _venial_ because they love to minimise a thing so tremendous as sin. The world sides with the casuists whom it satirises; and speaks of a "white lie," of a foible, of an inaccuracy, when "the 'white lie' may be that of St. Peter, the foible that of David, and the inaccuracy that of Ananias!"

2. There is a second mistake into which we often fall in speaking of deadly sin. Our imagination nearly always assumes some one definite outward act; some single individual sin. This may partly be due to a seemingly slight mistranslation in the text. It should not run "there is _a_ sin," but "there is sin unto" (_i.e._, in the direction of, towards) "death."

The text means something deeper and further-reaching than any single sin, deadly though it may be justly called.

The author of the fourth Gospel learned a whole mystic language from the life of Jesus. Death, in the great Master's vocabulary, was more than a single action. It was again wholly different from bodily death by the visitation of God. There are two realms for man's soul co-extensive with the universe and with itself. One which leads towards God is called _Life_; one which leads from Him is called _Death_. There is a radiant passage by which the soul is translated from the death which is death indeed, to the life which is life indeed. There is another passage by which we pass from life to death; _i.e._, fall back towards _spiritual_ (which is not necessarily eternal) death.

There is then a general condition and contexture; there is an atmosphere and position of soul in which the true life flickers, and is on the way to death. One who visited an island on the coast of Scotland has told how he found in a valley open to the spray of the north-west ocean a clump of fir trees. For a time they grew well, until they became high enough to catch the prevalent blast. They were still standing, but had taken a fixed set, and were reddened as if singed by the breath of fire. The island glen might be "swept on starry nights by balms of spring;" the summer sun as it sank might touch the poor stems with a momentary radiance. The trees were still _living,_ but only with that cortical vitality which is the tree's death in life. Their doom was evident; they could have but a few more seasons. If the traveller cared some years hence to visit that islet set in stormy waters, he would find the firs blanched like a skeleton's bones. Nothing remained for them but the sure fall, and the fated rottenness.

The analogy indeed is not complete. The tree in such surroundings _must_ die; it can make for itself no new condition of existence; it can hear no sweet question on the breeze that washes through the grove, "why will ye die?" It cannot look upward--as it is scourged by the driving spray, and tormented by the fierce wind--and cry, "O God of my life, give me life." It has no will; it cannot transplant itself. But the human tree can root itself in a happier place. Some divine spring may clothe it with green again. As it was passing from life toward death, so by the grace of God in prayers and sacraments, through penitence and faith, it may pass from death to life.

The Church then is not wrong when she speaks of "deadly sin." The number _seven_ is not merely a mystic fancy. But the _seven_ "deadly sins" are seven attributes of the whole character; seven master-ideas; seven general conditions of a human soul alienated from God; seven forms of aversion from true life, and of reversion to true death. The style of St. John has often been called "senile;" it certainly has the oracular and sententious quietude of old age in its almost lapidary repose. Yet a terrible light sometimes leaps from its simple and stately lines. Are there not a hundred hearts among us who know that as years pass they are drifting further and further from Him who is the Life? Will they not allow that St. John was right when, looking round the range of the Church, he asserted that there is such a thing as "sin unto death?"

It may be useful to take that one of the seven deadly sins which people are the most surprised to find in the list.

How and why is sloth deadly sin?

There is a distinction between sloth as _vice_ and sloth as _sin_. The deadly _sin_ of _sloth_ often exists where the _vice_ has no place. The sleepy music of Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" does not describe the slumber of the spiritual sluggard. Spiritual sloth is want of care and of love for all things in the spiritual order. Its conceptions are shallow and hasty. For it the Church is a department of the civil service; her worship and rites are submitted to, as one submits to a minor surgical operation. Prayer is the waste of a few minutes daily in concession to a sentiment which it might require trouble to eradicate. For the slothful Christian, saints are incorrigibly stupid; martyrs incorrigibly obstinate; clergymen incorrigibly professional; missionaries incorrigibly restless; sisterhoods incorrigibly tender; white lips that can just whisper Jesus incorrigibly awful. For the slothful, God, Christ, death, judgment have no real significance. The Atonement is a plank far away to be clutched by dying fingers in the article of death, that we may gurgle out "yes," when asked "are you happy"? Hell is an ugly word, Heaven a beautiful one which means a sky or an Utopia. Apathy in all spiritual thought, languor in every work of God, fear of injudicious and expensive zeal; secret dislike of those whose fervour puts us to shame, and a miserable adroitness in keeping out of their way; such are the signs of the spirit of sloth. And with this a long series of sins of omission--"slumbering and sleeping while the Bridegroom tarries"--"unprofitable servants."

We have said that the _vice_ of sloth is generally distinct from the _sin_. There is, however, one day of the week on which the sin is apt to wear the drowsy features of the _vice--Sunday_. If there is any day on which we might be supposed to do something towards the spiritual world it must be Sunday. Yet what have any of us done for God on any Sunday? Probably we can scarcely tell. We slept late, we lingered over our dressing, we never thought of Holy Communion; after Church (if we went there) we loitered with friends; we lounged in the Park; we whiled away an hour at lunch; we turned over a novel, with secret dislike of the benevolent arrangements which give the postman some rest. Such have been in the main our past Sundays. Such will be those which remain, more or fewer, till the arrival of a date written in a calendar which eye hath not seen. The last evening of the closing year is called by an old poet, "the twilight of two years, nor past, nor next." What shall we call the last Sunday of our year of life?

Turn to the first chapter of St. Mark. Think of that day of our Lord's ministry which is recorded more fully than any other. What a day! First that teaching in the Synagogue, when men "were astonished," not at His volubility, but at His "doctrine," drawn from depths of thought. Then the awful meeting with the powers of the world unseen. Next the utterance of the words in the sick room which renovated the fevered frame. Afterwards an interval for the simple festival of home. And then we see the sin, the sorrow, the sufferings crowded at the door. A few hours more, while yet there is but the pale dawn before the meteor sunrise of Syria, He rises from sleep to plunge His wearied brow in the dews of prayer. And finally the intrusion of others upon that sacred solitude, and the work of preaching, helping, pitying, healing closes in upon Him again with a circle which is of steel, because it is duty--of delight, because it is love. O the divine monotony of one of those golden days of God upon earth! And yet we are offended because He who is the same for ever, sends from heaven that message with its terrible plainness--"because thou art lukewarm, I will spue thee out of my mouth." We are angry that the Church classes sloth as deadly sin, when the Church's Master has said--"thou wicked and _slothful_ servant."

DISCOURSE XV.

_THE TERRIBLE TRUISM WHICH HAS NO EXCEPTION._

"All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death."-- 1 JOHN v. 17.

Let us begin by detaching awhile from its context this oracular utterance: "all unrighteousness is sin." Is this true universally, or is it not?

A clear consistent answer is necessary, because a strange form of the doctrine of indulgences (long whispered in the ears) has lately been proclaimed from the housetops, with a considerable measure of apparent acceptance.

Here is the singular dispensation from St. John's rigorous canon to which we refer.

Three such indulgences have been accorded at various times to certain favoured classes or persons. (1) "The moral law does not exist for the elect." This was the doctrine of certain Gnostics in St. John's day; of certain fanatics in every age. (2) "Things absolutely forbidden to the mass of mankind, are allowable for people of commanding rank." Accommodating Prelates, and accommodating Reformers have left the burden of defending these ignoble concessions to future generations. (3) A yet baser dispensation has been freely given by very vulgar casuists. "The chosen of Fortune"--the men at whose magic touch every stock seems to rise--may be allowed unusual forms of enjoying the unusual success which has crowned their career.

Such are, or such _were_, the dispensations from St. John's canon permitted to themselves, or to others, by the elect of _Heaven_, by the elect of _station_, and by the elect of _fortune_.

Another election hath obtained the perilous exception now--the election of _genius_. Those who endow the world with music, with art, with romance, with poetry, are entitled to the reversion. "All unrighteousness is sin"--except for _them_. (1) The indulgence is no longer valid for those who affect intimacy with heaven (partly perhaps because it is suspected that there is no heaven to be intimate with). (2) The indulgence is not extended to the men who apparently rule over nations, since it has been discovered that nations rule over them. (3) It is not accorded to the constructors of fortunes; they are too many, and too uninteresting, though possibly figures could be conceived almost capable of buying it. But (generally speaking) men of these three classes must pace along the dust of the narrow road by the signpost of the law, if they would escape the censure of society.

For genius alone there is no such inconvenient restriction. Many men, of course, deliberately prefer the "primrose path," but they can no more avoid indignant hisses by the way than they can extinguish the "everlasting bonfire" at the awful close of their journey. With the man of genius it seems that it is otherwise. He shall "walk in the ways of his heart, and in the sight of his eyes;" but, "for all these things" the tribunals of certain schools of a delicate criticism (delicate criticism can be so indelicate!) will never allow him "to be brought into judgment." Some literary oracles, biographers, or reviewers, are not content to keep a reverential silence, and to murmur a secret prayer. They will drag into light the saddest, the meanest, the most selfish doings of genius. Not the least service to his generation, and to English literature, of the true poet and critic lately taken from us,[337] was the superb scorn, the exquisite wit, with which his indignant purity transfixed such doctrines. A strange winged thing, no doubt, genius sometimes is; alternately beating the abyss with splendid pinions, and eating dust which is the "serpent's meat." But for all that, we cannot see with the critic when he tries to prove that the reptile's crawling is part of the angel's flight; and the dust on which he grovels one with the infinite purity of the azure distances.

The arguments of the apologists for moral eccentricity of genius may be thus summed up:--The man of genius bestows upon humanity gifts which are on a different line from any other. He enriches it on the side where it is poorest; the side of the Ideal. But the very temperament in virtue of which a man is capable of such transcendent work makes him passionate and capricious. To be _imaginative_ is to be _exceptional_; and these exceptional beings live for mankind rather than for themselves. When their conduct comes to be discussed, the only question is whether that conduct was adapted to forward the superb self-development which is of such inestimable value to the world. If the gratification of any desire was necessary for that self-development, genius itself being the judge, the cause is ended. In winning that gratification hearts may be broken, souls defiled, lives wrecked. The daintiest songs of the man of genius may rise to the accompaniment of domestic sobs, and the music which he seems to warble at the gates of heaven may be trilled over the white upturned face of one who has died in misery. What matter! Morality is so icy, and so intolerant; its doctrines have the ungentlemanlike rigour of the Athanasian Creed. Genius breaks hearts with such supreme gracefulness, such perfect wit, that they are arrant Philistines who refuse to smile.

We who have the text full in our mind answer all this in the words of the old man of Ephesus. For all that angel-softness which he learned from the heart of Christ, his voice is as strong as it is sweet and calm. Over all the storm of passion, over all the babble of successive sophistries, clear and eternal it rings out--"_all_ unrighteousness is sin." To which the apologist, little abashed, replies--"of course we all know _that_--quite true as a general rule, but then men of genius have bought a splendid dispensation by paying a splendid price, and so _their_ inconsistencies are not sin."

There are two assumptions at the root of this apology for the aberrations of genius which should be examined. (1) The temperament of men of genius is held to constitute an excuse from which there is no appeal. Such men indeed are sometimes not slow to put forward this plea for themselves. No doubt there are trials peculiar to every temperament. Those of men of genius are probably very great. They are children of the sunshine and of the storm; the grey monotony of ordinary life is distasteful to them. Things which others find it easy to accept convulse their sensitive organisation. Many can produce their finest works only on condition of being sheltered where no bills shall find their way by the post; where no sound, not even the crowing of cocks, shall break the haunted silence. If the letter comes in one case, and if the cock crows in the other, the first may possibly never be remembered, but the second is never forgotten.

For this, as for every other form of human temperament--that of the dunce, as well as of the genius--allowance must in truth be made. In that one of the lives of the English Poets, where the great moralist has gone nearest to making concessions to this fallacy of temperament, he utters this just warning. "No wise man will easily presume to say, had I been in Savage's condition I should have lived better than Savage." But we must not bring in the temperament of the man of genius as the standard of his conduct unless we are prepared to admit the same standard in every other case. God is no respecter of persons. For each, conscience is of the same texture, law of the same material. As all have the same cross of infinite mercy, the same judgment of perfect impartiality, so have they the same law of inexorable _duty_.

(2) The necessary _disorder_ and _feverishness_ of high literary and artistic inspiration is a _second_ postulate of the pleas to which I refer. But, is it true that disorder _creates inspiration_; or is a condition of it?

All great work is ordered work; and in producing it the faculties must be exercised harmoniously and with order. True inspiration, therefore, should not be caricatured into a flushed and dishevelled thing. Labour always precedes it. It has been prepared for by education. And that education would have been painful but for the glorious efflorescence of materials collected and assimilated, which is the compensation for any toil. The very dissatisfaction with its own performances, the result of the lofty ideal which is inseparable from genius, is at once a stimulus and a balm. The man of genius apparently writes, or paints, as the birds sing, or as the spring colours the flowers; but his subject has long possessed his mind, and the inspiration is the child of thought and of ordered labour. Destroying the peace of one's own family or of another's, being flushed with the preoccupation of guilty passion, will not accelerate, but retard the advent of those happy moments which are not without reason called creative. Thus, the inspiration of genius is akin to the inspiration of prophecy. The prophet tutored himself by a fitting education. He became assimilated to the noble things in the future which he foresaw. Isaiah's heart grew royal; his style wore the majesty of a king, before he sang the King of sorrow with His infinite pathos, and the King of righteousness with His infinite glory. Many prophets attuned their spirits by listening to such music as lulls, not inflames passion. Others walked where "beauty born of murmuring sound" might pass into their strain. Think of Ezekiel by the river of Chebar, with the soft sweep of waters in his ear, and their cool breath upon his cheek. Think of St. John with the shaft of light from heaven's opened door upon his upturned brow, and the boom of the Ægean upon the rocks of Patmos around him. "The note of the heathen seer" (said the greatest preacher of the Greek Church) "is to be contorted, constrained, excited, like a maniac; the note of a prophet is to be wakeful, self-possessed, nobly self-conscious."[338] We may apply this test to the distinction between genius, and the dissipated affectation of genius.

Let us then refuse our assent to a doctrine of indulgences applied to genius on the ground of _temperament_ or of literary and artistic _inspiration_. "Why," we are often asked, "why force your narrow judgment upon an angry or a laughing world?" What have you to do with the conduct of gifted men? Genius means exuberance. Why "blame the Niagara River" because it will not assume the pace and manner of "a Dutch canal"? Never indeed should we force that judgment upon any, unless they force it upon us. Let us avoid as far as we may posthumous gossip over the grave of genius. It is an unwholesome curiosity which rewards the blackbird for that bubbling song of ecstasy in the thicket, by gloating upon the ugly worm which he swallows greedily after the shower. The pen or pencil has dropped from the cold fingers. After all its thought and sin, after all its toil and agony, the soul is with its Judge. Let the painter of the lovely picture, the writer of the deathless words, be for us like the priest. The washing of regeneration is no less wrought through the unworthy minister; the precious gift is no less conveyed when a polluted hand has broken the bread and blessed the cup. But if we are forced to speak, let us refuse to accept an _ex post facto_ morality invented to excuse a worthless absolution. Especially so when the most sacred of all rights is concerned. It is not enough to say that a man of genius dissents from the received standard of conduct. He cannot make fugitive inclination the only principle of a connection which he promised to recognise as paramount. A passage in the Psalms,[339] has been called "The catechism of Heaven." "The catechism of Fame" differs from "the catechism of Heaven." "Who shall ascend unto the hill of Fame?" "He that possesses genius." "Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord?" "He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; He that hath sworn to his neighbour and disappointeth him not" (or disappointeth _her_ not) "though it were to his own hindrance"--aye, to the hindrance of his self-development. Strange that the rough Hebrew should still have to teach us chivalry as well as religion! In St. John's Epistle we find the two great axioms about sin, in its two essential aspects. "Sin is the transgression of the law:" there is its aspect chiefly _Godward_. "All unrighteousness" (mainly injustice, denial of the rights of others) "is sin:" there is its aspect chiefly _manward_.

Yes, the principle of the text is rigid, inexorable, eternal. Nothing can make its way out of those terrible meshes. It is without favour, without exception. It gives no dispensation, and proclaims no indulgences, to the man of genius, or to any other. If it were otherwise, the righteous God, the Author of creation and redemption, would be dethroned. And _that_ is a graver thing than to dethrone even the author of "Queen Mab," and of "The Epipsychidion." Here is the jurisprudence of the "great white Throne" summed up in four words: "_all unrighteousness is sin_."

So far, in the last discourse, and in this, we have ventured to isolate these two great principles from their context. But this process is always attended with peculiar loss in St. John's writings. And as some may think perhaps that the promise[340] just succeeding is falsified we must here run the risk of bringing in another thread of thought. Yet indeed the whole paragraph[341] has its source in an intense faith in the _efficacy of prayer_, specially as exercised in _intercessory prayer_.

(1) The efficacy of prayer.[342] This is the very sign of contrast with, of opposition to, the modern spirit, which is the negation of _prayer_.

What is the real value of prayer?

Very little, says the modern spirit. Prayer is the stimulant, the Dutch courage of the moral world. Prayer is a power, not because it _is_ efficacious, but because it is _believed_ to be so.

A modern Rabbi, with nothing of his Judaism left but a rabid antipathy to the Founder of the Church, guided by Spinoza and Kant, has turned fiercely upon the Lord's prayer.[343] He takes those petitions which stand alone among the liturgies of earth in being capable of being translated into every language. He cuts off one pearl after another from the string. Let us look at two specimens. "Our Father which art in Heaven." Heaven! the very name has a breath of magic, a suggestion of beauty, of grandeur, of purity in it. It moves us as nothing else can. We instinctively lift our heads; the brow grows proud of that splendid home, and the eye is wetted with a tear and lighted with a ray, as it looks into those depths of golden sunset which are full for the young of the radiant mystery of life, for the old of the pathetic mystery of death.[344] Yes, but for modern science Heaven means air, or atmosphere, and the address itself is contradictory. "Forgive us." But surely the guilt cannot be forgiven, except by the person against whom it is committed. There is no other forgiveness. A mother (whose daughter went out upon the cruel London streets) carried into execution a thought bestowed upon her by the inexhaustible ingenuity of love. The poor woman got her own photograph taken, and a friend managed to have copies of it hung in several halls and haunts of infamy with these words clearly written below--"come home, I forgive you." The tender subtlety of love was successful at last; and the poor haggard outcast's face was touched by her mother's lips. "But the heart of God," says this enemy of prayer, "is not as a woman's heart." (Pardon the words, O loving Father! Thou who hast said "Yea, she may forget, yet will I not forget thee." Pardon, O pierced Human Love! who hast graven the name of every soul on the palms of Thy hands with the nails of the crucifixion.) Repentance subjectively seems a reality when mother and child meet with a burst of passionate tears, and the polluted brow feels purified by their molten downfall; but repentance _objectively_ is seen to be an absurdity by every one who grasps the conception of law. The penitential Psalms may be the _lyrics_ of repentance, the Gospel for the third Sunday after Trinity its _idyll_, the cross its _symbol_, the wounds of Christ its _theology_ and _inspiration_. But the course of Nature, the hard logic of life is its refutation--the flames that burn, the waves that drown, the machine that crushes, the society that condemns, and that neither can, nor will forgive.

Enough, and more than enough of this. The monster of ignorance who has never learnt a prayer, has hitherto been looked upon as one of the saddest of sights. But there is something sadder--the monster of over-cultivation, the wreck of schools, the priggish fanatic of godlessness. Alas! for the nature which has become like a plant artificially trained and twisted to turn away from the light. Alas! for the heart which has hardened itself into stone until it cannot beat faster, or soar higher, even when men are saying with happy enthusiasm, or when the organ is lifting upward to the heaven of heavens the cry which is at once the creed of an everlasting dogma and the hymn of a triumphant hope--"with Thee is the well of Life, and in Thy light shall we see light." Now having heard the answer of the modern spirit to the question "what is the real value of prayer?" think of the answer of the spirit of the Church as given by St. John in this paragraph. That answer is not drawn out in a syllogism. St. John appeals to our consciousness of a divine life. "That ye may know that ye have eternal life." This _knowledge_ issues in _confidence, i.e._, literally the sweet possibility of saying out all to God. And this confidence is never disappointed for any believing child of God. "If we know that He hear us, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him."[345]

On the 16th verse we need only say, that the greatness of our brother's spiritual need does not cease to be a title to our sympathy. St. John is not speaking of all requests, but of the fulness of brotherly intercession.

* * * * *

One question and one warning in conclusion; and that question is this. Do we take part in this great ministry of love? Is our voice heard in the full music of the prayers of intercession that are ever going up to the Throne, and bringing down the gift of life? Do _we_ pray for others?

In one sense all who know true affection and the sweetness of _true_ prayer do pray for others. We have never loved with supreme affection any for whom we have not interceded, whose names we have not baptized in the fountain of prayer. Prayer takes up a tablet from the hand of love written over with names; that tablet death itself can only break when the heart has turned Sadducee.

Jesus (we sometimes think) gives one strange proof of the love which yet passeth knowledge. "Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus;" "when He had heard therefore" [O that strange therefore!] "that Lazarus was sick, He abode _two days_ still in the same place where He was." Ah! sometimes not two days, but two years, and sometimes evermore, He seems to remain. When the income dwindles with the dwindling span of life; when the best beloved must leave us for many years, and carries away our sunshine with him; when the life of a husband is in danger--then we pray; "O Father, for Jesu's sake spare that precious life; enable me to provide for these helpless ones; bless these children in their going out and coming in, and let me see them once again before the night cometh, and my hands are folded for the long rest." Yes, but have we prayed at our Communion "because of that Holy Sacrament in it, and with it," that He would give them the grace which they need--the life which shall save them from sin unto death? Round us, close to us in our homes, there are cold hands, hearts that beat feebly. Let us fulfil St. John's teaching, by praying to Him who is the life that He would chafe those cold hands with His hand of love, and quicken those dying hearts by contact with that wounded heart which is a heart of fire.

NOTES

Ch. v. 3-17.

Ver. 3. This section should begin with the words "And His commandments are not heavy"--and should not be separated from what follows, because they give one reason of the victory whereof he proceeds to speak. "His commandments are not heavy, for all that is born of God conquereth the world." What a picture of the sweetness of a life of service! What a gentle smile must have been on the old man's face as he said, "His commandments are not grievous!"

Vers. 7, 8. This passage with its apparent obscurity, and famous interpolation, demands some additional notice. As to _criticism_ and _interpretation_.

(1) _Critically._ Since the publication of J. J. Griesbach's celebrated work (_Diatribe in locum_ 1 John v. 7, 8, Tom. ii., N.T. Halle: 1806), first German, and latterly English, opinion has become absolutely unanimous in agreeing with Griesbach that "the words included between brackets are spurious, and should therefore be eliminated from the Sacred Text." Even the famous Roman Catholic scholar, Scholts, in his great critical edition of the New Testament, in two volumes (Bonn: 1836), boldly dropped the disputed passage from the text. The interpolated passage has certainly no support in any uncial manuscript, or ancient version, or Greek Father of the four first centuries. (2) As to _interpretation_, the faith has lost nothing by the honesty of her wisest defenders. The whole of the genuine passage is intensely Trinitarian. The interpolation is nothing but an exposition written into the text. The three genuine witnesses do really point to the Three Witnesses in Heaven. Bengel's saying expresses the permanent feeling of Christendom, which no criticism can do away with: "This trine array of witnesses on earth is supported by, and has above and beneath it the Trinity, which is Heavenly, archetypal, fundamental, everlasting." The whole context recognizes three special works of the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. "This is the witness of God," _i.e._ of the Father (ver. 9); "this is He that came by water and blood," _i.e._ the Son (ver. 6); "it is the Spirit that witnesseth," _i.e._ the Holy Ghost (_ibid._).

A fuller examination of this passage, from a polemical point of view, will be found in the third of the introductory discourses. It will be well, however, to indicate here the immediate controversial reference in the Spirit, the water, and the blood. There is abundant proof that the popular heretical philosophy of Asia Minor struck Christianity precisely in three vital places. It denied--

(1) The Incarnation--consequently

(2) The Redemption--consequently

(3) The Sacraments.

But the mention of the water and the blood in connection with the Person of the Son Incarnate and Crucified established exactly these three points. Narrated as it was by an eye-witness, it established:--

(1) The reality of the Incarnation--consequently

(2) The reality of Redemption--for the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin (1 John i. 7)--consequently

(3) The reality of Sacraments.

We have articulate evidence of the denial of the two sacraments by the Docetic idealists of Asia Minor. The _Philosophumena_ tells us of the view of baptism held by one of their principal sects. "According to them the promise of the laver of regeneration is nothing more than the introduction into the 'unfading pleasure' of him that is washed (as they say) with living water, and anointed with 'chrism that speaketh not.'"[346] The testimony of Ignatius is express as to the other sacrament. "From Eucharist and prayer they abstain on account of not confessing that the Eucharist is flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ which suffered for our sins." ["Water and blood" should be noted in Heb. ix. 19. Water is not mentioned in Exod. xxiv. 6.]--(_Ep. ad Smyrn._ vii.)

FOOTNOTES:

[337] Mr. Matthew Arnold.

[338] This is true as a general rule; but there were exceptions.

[339] See Ps. xv. Cf. Ps. xxiv. 3-7.

[340] 1 John v. 15.

[341] 1 John v. 14, 18.

[342] Vv. 14, 15.

[343] _Historical and Critical Commentary on Leviticus._ By M. M. Kalisch. Part 1. Theology of the Past and Future, 431, 438.

[344] This is denied by De Wette (_Ueber die Religion_, Vorlesungen, 106).

[345] The form of expression indicates _not_ necessarily the very things asked, but the spiritual essence and substance.

[346] Ἡ γαρ επαγγελια του λουτρου ουκ αλλη τις εστι κατ' αυτους, ἡ το εισαγαγειν εις την αμαραντον ἡδονην τον λουομενον κατ' αυτους ζωντ ὑδατι και χριομενον αλαλω χρισματι.--(_Philosoph._, p. 140, de Naassenis.)

SECTION X.

GREEK. LATIN.

Οιδαμεν ὁτι πας ὁ Scimus quoniam omnis γεγεννημενος εκ του qui natus est ex Θεου ουχ ἁμαρτανει, Deo non peccat, sed αλλ' ὁ γεννηθεις εκ του generatio Dei conservat Θεου τηρει αυτον, και eum et malignus non ὁ πονηρος ουχ ἁπτεται tangit eum. Scimus αυτου. οιδαμεν ὁτι εκ quoniam ex Deo sumus του Θεου εσμεν, και et mundus totus in ὁ κοσμος ὁλος εν τω maligno positus est. πονηρω κειται. οιδαμεν Et scimus quoniam δε ὁτι ὁ υιος του Θεου Filius Dei venit, et ἡκει, και δεδωκεν ἡμιν dedit nobis sensum ut διανοιαν, ἱνα γινωσκωμεν cognoscamus verum τον αληθινον· και εσμεν Deum et simus in vero, εν τω αληθινω, εν τω Filio eius; hic est υιω αυτου Ιησου Χριστω. verus et vita æterna. ουτος εστιν ὁ αληθινος Filioli custodite vos a Θεος και ἡ ζωη αιωνιος. simulachris. Τεκνια, φυλαξατε ἑαυτους απο των ειδωλων. αμην.

AUTHORISED VERSION. REVISED VERSION.

We know that whosoever We know that whosoever is born of God is begotten of sinneth not; but he God sinneth not; but that is begotten of God He that was begotten keepeth himself, and of God keepeth him, that wicked one toucheth and the evil one toucheth him not. _And_ we him not. We know know that we are of that we are of God, God, and the whole and the whole world world lieth in wickedness. lieth in the evil one. And we know And we know that the that the Son of God is Son of God is come, come, and hath given and hath given us an us an understanding, understanding that we that we may know Him know Him that is true, that is true, and we and we are in Him that are in Him that is true, is true, _even_ in His _even_ in His Son Jesus Son Jesus Christ. This Christ. This is the is the true God, and true God, and eternal eternal life. _My_ little life. Little children, children, guard yourselves keep yourselves from from idols. idols. Amen.

ANOTHER VERSION.

We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not: but the Begotten of God keepeth him, and the evil one toucheth him not.

We know that we are from God and the world lieth wholly in the evil one.

We know moreover that the Son of God hath _come and_ is here, and hath given us understanding that we know Him that is the Very God: and in His Son Jesus Christ (this is the Very God and eternal life), we are in the Very (_God_). Children, guard yourselves from the idols.

NOTES.

Ch. v. 18-21.

Ver. 18, 19, 20. Three seals are affixed to the close of this Epistle--three postulates of the spiritual reason; three primary canons of spiritual perception and knowledge. Each is marked by the emphatic "we know," which is stamped at the opening its first line. The first "we know," is of a sense of purity made possible to the Christian through the keeping by Him Who is the one Begotten of God. The evil one cannot touch him with the contaminating touch which implies connection. The second "we know" involves a sense of _privilege_; the true conviction that by God's power, and love, we are brought into a sphere of light, out of the darkness in which a sinful world has become as if cradled on the lap of the evil one. The third "we know" is the deep consciousness of the very Presence of the Son of God in and with His Church. And with this comes all the inner life--supremely a new way of looking at things, a new possibility of thought, a new cast of thought and sentiment, "understanding" (διανοια). Words denoting intellectual faculties and processes are rare in St. John. This word is used in the sense just given in Plat., _Rep._, 511, and Arist., _Poet._, vi. (in the last, however, rather of the _sentiment_ of the piece than of the author), "He hath given us understanding that we know continuously the very [God]." And in "His Son Jesus Christ [this is the very God and eternal life] we are in the very God." This interpretation of the passage is supported by the position of the pronoun which cannot be referred naturally to any subject but Jesus Christ. Waterland quotes Irenæus. "No man can know God unless God has taught him; that is to say, that without God, God cannot be known."[347]

Ver. 21. The Epistle closes with a short, sternly affectionate exhortation. "Children, guard yourselves" (the aorist imperative of immediate final decision) "from the idols." These words are natural in the atmosphere of Ephesus (Acts xix. 26, 27). The Author of the Apocalypse has a like hatred of idols. (Apoc. ii. 14, 15, ix. 20, xx. 1-8, xxii. 15.)

It would appear that the Gnostics allowed people to eat freely things sacrificed to idols. Modern, like ancient unbelief, has sometimes attributed to St. John a determination to exalt the Master whom he knew to be a man to an equality with God. But this is morally inconsistent with the Apostle's unaffected shrinking from idolatry in every form. (See _Speaker's Commentary, N. T._, iv., 347).

FOOTNOTE:

[347] Moyer Lecture, vi.

_THE SECOND EPISTLE OF ST. JOHN._

II. EPISTLE.

GREEK. LATIN.

Ο πρεσβυτερος εκλεκτη Senior electæ dominæ κυρια και τοις τεκνοις et natis eius, quos ego αυτης, ους εγω αγαπω diligo in veritate, et εν αληθεια, και ουκ εγω non ego solus sed et μονος αλλα και παντες omnes qui cognoverunt οι εγνωκοτες την αληθειαν, veritatem, propter veritatem δια την αληθειαν quæ permanet την μενουσαν εν ἡμιν, in nobis et nobis cum και μεθ' ἡμων εσται εις erit in æternum. Sit τον αιωνα. εσται μεθ' nobiscum gratia misericordia ἡμων χαρις, ελεος, ειρηνη, pax a Deo Patre παρα Θεου πατρος και et Christo Iesu Filio παρα Κυριου Ιησου Patris in veritate et Χριστου του υιου του caritate. Gavisus sum πατρος, εν αληθεια και valde quoniam inveni αγαπη. Εχαρην λιαν de filii tuis ambulantes ὁτι ευρηκα εκ των τεκνων in veritate sicut mandatum σου περιπατουντας εν accepimus a αληθεια, καθως εντολην Patre. Et nunc rogo te, ελαβομεν παρα του domina, non tamquam πατρος. και νυν ερωτω mandatum novum scribens σε, κυρια, ουχ ὡς εντολην tibi, sed quod γραφων σοι καινην, αλλα habuimus ab initio, ut ἡν ειχομεν απ' αρχης, diligamus alterutrum. ἱνα αγαπωμεν αλληλους. Et hæc est caritas, ut και αυτη εστιν ἡ αγαπη, ambulemus secundum ἱνα περιπατωμεν κατα mandata eius. Hoc τας εντολας αυτου. αυτη mandatum est ut quemadmodum εστιν ἡ εντολη, καθως audistis ab ηκουσατε απ' αρχης, ἱνα initio in eo ambuletis. εν αυτη περιπατητε· ὁτι Quoniam multi seductores πολλοι πλανοι εισηλθον exierunt in mundum εις τον κοσμον, οι μη qui non confitentur ὁμολογουντες Ιησουν Iesum Christum venientem Χριστον ερχομενον εν in carne. Hic σαρκι· ουτος εστιν ὁ est seductor et antichristus. πλανος και ὁ αντιχριστος· Videte vosmet βλεπετε ἑαυτους, ἱνα μη ipsos, ne perdatis απολεσωμεν α ειργασαμεθα, quæ operati estis, sed αλλα μισθον ut mercedam plenum πληρη απολαβωμεν. πας accipiatis. Omnis qui ὁ παραβαινων και μη præcedit et non manet μενων εν τη διδαχη του in doctrina Christi, Χριστου Θεον ουκ εχει· Deum non habet: qui ὁ μενων εν τη διδαχη permanet in doctrina, ουτος και τον πατερα και hic et Filium et Patrem τον υιον εχει. ει τις habet. Si quis venit ad ερχεται προς ὑμας και vos, et hanc doctrinam ταυτην την διδαχην ου non adfert, nolite recipere φερει, μη λαμβανετε eum in domumnec αυτον εις οικιαν, και ave ei dixeritis: qui χαιρειν αυτω μη λεγετε· enim dicit illi ave, communicat ὁ γαρ λεγων αυτω operibus illius χαιρειν κοινωνει τοις malignis. Plura habens εργοις αυτου τοις πονηροις. vobis scribere, nolui Πολλα εχων ὑμιν per cartam et atramentum: γραφειν ουκ ηβουληθην spero enim me δια χαρτου και μελανος· futurum apud vos et αλλα ελπιζω ελθειν προς os ad os loqui, ut ὑμας και στομα προς gaudium vestrum sit στομα λαλησαι, ἱνα ἡ plenum. Salutant te χαρα ἡμων η πεπληρωμενη. filii sororis tuæ electæ. Ασπαζεται σε τα τεκνα της αδελφης σου της εκλεκτης. αμην.

AUTHORISED VERSION. REVISED VERSION.

The elder unto the The elder unto the elect lady and her children, elect lady and her children, whom I love in whom I love in the truth; and not I truth; and not I only, only, but also all they but also all they that that have known the know the truth; for truth; for the truth's the truth's sake which sake, which dwelleth abideth in us, and it in us, and shall be with shall be with us for us for ever. Grace be ever: Grace, mercy, with you, mercy, _and_ peace shall be with us, peace, from God the from God the Father, Father, and from the and from Jesus Christ, Lord Jesus Christ, the the Son of the Father, Son of the Father, in in truth and love. I truth and love. I rejoiced rejoice greatly that I greatly that I have found certain of found of thy children thy children walking walking in truth, as we in truth, even as we have received a commandment received commandment from the from the Father. Father. And now I And now I beseech beseech thee, lady, not thee, lady, not as as though I wrote a though I wrote to thee new commandment a new commandment, unto thee, but that but that which we had which we had from the from the beginning, beginning, that we love that we love one one another. And this another. And this is is love, that we walk love, that we should after His commandments. walk after His commandments. This is the This is commandment, That, the commandment, as ye have heard from even as ye heard from the beginning, ye the beginning, that ye should walk in it. For should walk in it. For many deceivers are many deceivers are entered into the world, gone forth into the who confess not that world, even they that Jesus Christ is come in confess not that Jesus the flesh. This is a Christ cometh in the deceiver and an antichrist. flesh. This is the Look to yourselves, deceiver and the antichrist. that we lose Look to yourselves, not those things which that ye lose not we have wrought, but the things which we that we receive a have wrought, but that full reward. Whosoever ye receive a full reward. transgresseth, and Whosoever abideth not in the doctrine goeth onward and of Christ, hath abideth not in the not God. He that teaching of Christ, hath abideth in the doctrine not God: he that of Christ, he hath both abideth in the teaching, the Father and the Son. the same hath both the If there come any unto Father and the Son. you, and bring not this If any one cometh unto doctrine, receive him you, and bringeth not not into _your_ house, this teaching, receive neither bid him God him not into _your_ house, speed: For he that and give him no greeting: biddeth him God speed for he that giveth is partaker of his evil him greeting partaketh deeds. Having many in his evil works. things to write unto Having many things you, I would not _write_ to write unto you, I with paper and ink: would not _write them_ but I trust to come with paper and ink: unto you, and speak but I hope to come face to face, that our unto you, and to speak joy may be full. The face to face, that your children of thy elect joy may be fulfilled. sister greet thee. The children of thine Amen. elect sister salute thee.

ANOTHER VERSION.

The Elder unto the excellent Kyria and her children whom I love in truth, (and not I only, but also all they that know the truth) for the truth's sake which abideth in us--yea, and with us it shall be for ever. There shall be with you grace, mercy, peace from God the Father, and from Jesus Christ the Son of the Father, in truth and love. I was exceeding glad that I found of thy children walking in truth even as we received commandment from the Father. And now I beseech thee Kyria, not as though writing a fresh commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another. And this is the love, that we should walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment as ye heard from the beginning that ye should walk in it. For many deceivers are gone out into the world, _even_ they who are not confessing Jesus Christ coming in the flesh. This the deceiver, and the antichrist. Look to yourselves that ye lose not the things which ye have worked, but that ye receive reward in full. Every one leading forward and not abiding in the doctrine which is Christ's hath not God: he that abideth in the doctrine, the same hath both the Son and the Father. If there come unto you any and bringeth not the doctrine, receive him not into your house, and no good speed wish him. For he that wisheth him good speed partaketh in his works which are evil. Having many things to write unto you I would not write with paper and ink, but I hope to be with you and to speak face to face, that our joy may be fulfilled. The children of thine elect sister greet thee.

DISCOURSE XVI.

_THEOLOGY AND LIFE IN KYRIA'S LETTER._

"The elder unto the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth ... Grace be with you, mercy and peace, from God the Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love."--2 JOHN, 3.

Of old God addressed men in tones that, were so to speak, distant. Sometimes He spoke with the stern precision of law or ritual; sometimes in the dark and lofty utterances of prophets; sometimes through the subtle voices of history, which lend themselves to different interpretations. But in the New Testament He whom no man hath seen at any time, "interpreted,"[348] Himself with a sweet familiarity. It is of a piece with the dispensation of condescension, that the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven should come to us in such large measure through epistles. For a letter is just the result of taking up one's pen to converse with one who is absent, a familiar talk with a friend.

Of the epistles in our New Testament, a few are addressed to _individuals_. The effect of three of these letters upon the Church, and even upon the world, has been great. The Epistles to Timothy and Titus, according to the most prevalent interpretation of them, have been felt in the outward organization of the Church. The Epistle to Philemon, with its eager tenderness, its softness as of a woman's heart, its chivalrous courtesy, has told in another direction. With all its freedom from the rashness of social revolution; its almost painful abstinence (as abolitionists have sometimes confessed to feeling) from actual invective against slavery in the abstract; that letter is yet pervaded by thoughts whose issue can only be worked out by the liberty of the slave. The word emancipation may not be pronounced, but it hovers upon the Apostle's lips.

The second Epistle is, in our judgment, a letter to an individual. Certainly we are unable to find in its whole contents any probable allusion to a Church personified as a lady.[349] It is, as we read it, addressed to Kyria, an Ephesian lady, or one who lived in the circle of Ephesian influence. It was sent by the Apostle during an absence from Ephesus. That absence might have been for the purpose of one of the visitations of the Churches of Asia Minor, which (as we are told by ancient Church writers) the Apostle was in the habit of holding. Possibly, however, in the case of a writer so brief and so reserved in the expression of personal sentiment as St. John, the gush and sunshine of anticipated joy at the close of this note might tempt us to think of a rift in some sky that had been long darkened; of the close of some protracted separation, soon to be forgotten in a happy meeting. "Having many things to write unto you, I would not do so by means of paper and ink; but I hope to come unto you, and to speak face to face that our joy may be fulfilled."[350] The expression might not seem unsuitable for a return from exile. Several touches of language and feeling in the latter point to the conclusion that Kyria was a widow. There is no mention of her husband, the father of her children. In the case of a writer who uses the names of God with such subtle and tender suitability, the association of Kyria's "children walking in truth" with "even as we received commandment _from the Father_," may well point to Him who was for them the Father of the fatherless. We need not with some expositors draw the sad conclusion that St. John affectionately hints that there were others of the family who could not be included in this joyful message. But it would seem highly probable from the language used that there were several sons, and also that Kyria had no daughters. Over these sons who had lost one earthly parent, the Apostle rejoices with the heart of a father in God. He bursts out with his _eureka_, the _eureka_ not of a philosopher, but of a saint. "I rejoiced exceedingly that I found[351] certain of the number of thy children walking in truth."

While we may not trace in this little Epistle the same fountain of wide-spreading influence as in others to which we have referred; while we feel that, like its author, its work is deep and silent rather than commanding, reflection will also lead us to the conclusion that it is worthy of the Apostle who was looked upon as one of the "pillars" of the faith.[352]

1. Let us reflect that this letter is addressed by the aged Apostle to a widow, and concerns her family.

It is significant that Kyria was, in all probability, a widow of Ephesus.

Too many of us have more or less acquaintance with one department of French literature. A Parisian widow is too often the questionable heroine of some shameful romance, to have read which is enough to taint the virginity of the young imagination. Ephesus was the Paris of Ionia. Petronius was the Daudet or Zola of his day. An Ephesian widow is the heroine of one of the most cynically corrupt of his stories.

But "where sin abounded, grace did more than abound." Strange that first in an epistle to a Bishop of the Church of Ephesus, St. Paul should have presented us with that picture of a Christian widow--"she that is a widow, indeed, and desolate, who hath her hope set on God, and continueth in prayer night and day"--yet who, if she has the devotion, the almost entire absorption in God, of Anna, the daughter of Phanuel,[353] leaves upon the track of her daily road to heaven the trophies of Dorcas--"having brought up children well, used hospitality to strangers, washed the saints' feet, relieved the afflicted, diligently followed every good work."[354] Such widows are the leaders of the long procession of women, veiled or unveiled, with vows or without them, who have ministered to Jesus through the ages. Christ has a beautiful art of turning the affliction of His daughters into the consolation of suffering. When life's fairest hopes are disappointed by falsehood, by cruel circumstances, by death; the broken heart is soothed by the love of Christ, the only love which is proof against death and change. The consolation thus received is the most unselfish of gifts. It overflows, and is lavishly poured out upon the sick and weary. With St. Paul's picture of a widow of this kind, contrast another by the same hand which hangs close beside it. The younger Ephesian widow, such as Petronius described, was known by St. Paul also. If any count the Apostle as a fanatic, destitute of all knowledge of the world because he lived above it, let them look at those lines, which are full of such caustic power, as they hit on the characteristics of certain idle and wanton affecters of a sorrow which they never felt.[355] What a distance between such widows and Kyria, "beloved for the truth's sake which abideth in us!"[356]

But the short letter of St. John is addressed to Kyria's _family_ as well as to herself. "The elder to the excellent Kyria and her children."[357]

There is one question which we naturally ask about every school and form of religion. It is the question which a great English Professor of Divinity used to ask his pupils to put in a homely form about every religious scheme and mode of utterance--"will it _wash_ well?" Is it an influence which seems to be productive and lasting? Does it abide through time and trials? Is it capable of being passed on to another generation? Are plans, services, organizations, preachings, classes, vital or showy? Are they fads to meet fancies, or works to supply wants? Is that which we hold such sober, solid truth, that wise piety can say of it, half in benediction, half in prophecy[358]--"the truth which abideth in us; yea, and with us it shall be for ever?"

2. We turn to the _contents_ of the Epistle.

We shall be better able to appreciate the value of these, if we consider the state of Christian literature at that time.

What had Christians to read and carry about with them? The excellent work of the Bible Society was physically impossible for long centuries to come. No doubt the LXX. version of the Old Testament was widely spread. In every great city of the Roman Empire there was a vast population of Jews. Many of these were baptized into the Church, and carried into it with them their passionate belief in the Old Testament. The Christians of the time and place to which we refer could, probably, with little trouble, if not read, yet hear the Old Covenant and able expositions of it. But they had not copies of the entire New Testament. Indeed, if all the New Testament was then written, it certainly was not collected into one volume, nor constituted one supreme authority. "Many barbarous nations," says a very ancient Father, "believe in Christ without written record, having salvation impressed through the Spirit in their hearts, and diligently preserving the old tradition."[359] Possibly a Church or single believer had one synoptical Gospel. At Ephesus Christians had doubtless been catechised in, and were deeply imbued with, St. John's view of the Person, work, and teaching of our Lord. This had now been moulded into shape, and definitely committed to writing in that glorious Gospel, the Church's Holy of Holies, St. John's Gospel. For them and for their contemporaries there was a living realization of the Gospel. They had heard it from eye-witnesses. They had passed into the wonderland of God. The earth on which Jesus trod had blossomed into miracle. The air was haunted by the echoes of His voice. They had, probably, also a certain number of the Epistles of St. Paul. The Christians of Ephesus would have a special interest in their own Epistle to the Ephesians, and in the two which were written to their first Bishop, Timothy. They had also (whether written or not) impressed upon their memories by their weekly Eucharist, the liturgical Canon of consecration according to the _Ephesian usage_--from which, and not from the Roman, the Spanish and Gallican seem to be derived. The Ephesian Christians had also the first Epistle of St. John, which in some form accompanied the Gospel, and is, indeed, a picture of spiritual life drawn from it. But let us remember that the Epistle is not of a character to be very quickly or readily learned by heart. Its subtle, latent links of connection do not present many grappling hooks for the memory to fasten itself to. Copies also must have been comparatively few.

Now let us see how the second Epistle may well have been related to the first.

Supremely, and above all else, the first Epistle contained _three_ warnings, very necessary for those times. (1) There was a danger of _losing the true Christ_, the Word made Flesh, Who for the forgiveness of our sins did shed out of His most precious side both water and blood--in a false, because shadowy and ideal Christ. (2) There was danger of _losing true love_, and therefore spiritual life, with truth. (3) With the true Christ and true love there was a danger of losing _the true commandment_--love of God and of the brethren. Now in the second Epistle these very three warnings were written on a leaflet in a form more calculated for circulation and for remembrance. (1) Against the peril of faith, of _losing the true Christ_. "Many deceivers are gone out into the world--they who confess not Jesus Christ coming in flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist."[360] With the true Christ, the true doctrine of Christ would also vanish, and with it all living hold upon _God_. _Progress_ was the watchword; but it was in reality _regress_. "Every one who abideth not in the doctrine of Christ hath not God."[361] (2) Against the peril of _losing love_. "I beseech thee, Kyria ... that we love one another."[362] (3) Against the peril of losing _the true commandment_ (the great spiritual principle of charity), or the true commandments[363] (that principle in the details of life). "And this is love, that we walk after His _commandments_. This is the _commandment_, that even as ye heard from the beginning ye should walk in it."[364]

Here then were the chief practical elements of the first Epistle contracted into a brief and easily remembered shape.

Easily remembered, too, was the stern, practical prohibition of the intimacies of hospitality with those who came to the home of the Christian, in the capacity of emissaries of the antichrist above indicated. "Receive him not into your house, and good speed salute him not with."[365]

Many are offended with this. No doubt Christianity is the religion of love--"the epiphany of the sweet-naturedness and philanthropy of God."[366] We very often look upon heresy or unbelief with the tolerance of curiosity rather than of love. At all events, the Gospel has its intolerance as well as tolerance. St. John certainly had this. It is not a true conception in art which invests him with the mawkish sweetness of perpetual youth. There is a sense in which he was a son of Thunder to the last. He who believes and knows must formulate a dogma. A dogma frozen by formality, or soured by hate, or narrowed by stupidity, makes a bigot. In reading the Church History of the first four centuries we are often tempted to ask, why all this subtlety, this theology-spinning, this dogma-hammering? The answer stands out clear above the mists of controversy. Without all this the Church would have lost the conception of Christ, and thus finally Christ Himself. St. John's denunciations have had a function in Christendom as well as his love.

3. There are two most precious indications of the highest Christian truth with which we may conclude.

We have prefixed to this Epistle that beautiful Apostolic salutation which is found in two only among the Epistles of St. Paul.[367] After that simple, but exquisite expression of blessing merged in prophecy--"the truth which abideth in us--yes! and with us it shall be for ever"[368]--there comes another verse set in the same key. "There shall be with us grace, mercy, peace, from God the Father, and from Jesus Christ the Son of the Father, in truth" of thought, "and love" of life.[369]

This rush and reduplication of words is not very like the usual reserve and absence of emotional excitement in St. John's style. Can it be that something (possibly the glorious death of martyrdom by which Timothy died) led St. John to use words which were probably familiar to Ephesian Christians?

However this may be, let us live by and learn from those lovely words. Our poverty wants _grace_, our guilt wants _mercy_, our misery wants _peace_. Let us ever keep the Apostle's order. Do not let us put _peace_, our feeling of peace, first. The emotionalists' is a topsy-turvy theology. Apostles do not say "peace and grace," but "grace and peace."

One more--in an age which substitutes an ideal something called the spirit of Christianity for Christ, let us hold fast to that which is the essence of the Gospel and the kernel of our three creeds. "To confess Jesus Christ coming in flesh."[370] Couple with this a canon of the First Epistle--"confesseth Jesus Christ _come_ in flesh."[371] The second is the Incarnation _fact_ with its abiding consequences; the first, the Incarnation _principle_ ever living in a Person, Who will also be personally manifested. This is the substance of the Gospels; this the life of prayers and sacraments; this the expectation of the saints.

NOTES.

Ver. 1. _The Elder._] This word has played a great part in an important controversy. It is argued that the Elder of this and of the Third Epistle is the author indeed of the first Epistle and of the Gospel, but cannot be the Apostle St. John, who would not, (it is alleged,) call himself ὁ πρεσβυτερος. And Eusebius (_H.E._ lib. iii., cap. ult.) preserves a fragment from Papias, which he misunderstands to indicate that there were two Johns (see Riggenbach, _Leben Jesu_, 59, 60). But even if the word be Presbyter, and points to an ecclesiastical title, it might stand precisely on the same footing as St. Peter's language--"the elders among you I exhort, who am a _fellow elder_" (1 Pet. v. 1). The Elder at the opening of the Second and Third Epistles of St. John, may well signify the aged Apostle, the oldest of the company of Jesus, the one living representative of the traditions of Galilee and Jerusalem.

Ver. 7. _The seducer._] ὁ πλανος. The almost technical force of this word would be adequately appreciated only by readers more or less imbued with Jewish ideas. It was indeed the really strong motive in the terrible game which the Jewish priests played in bringing about the death of our Lord. The process against the _Mesith_, "seducer," is drawn out in the Talmud with an effrontery at once puerile and revolting. The man accused of _seduction_ was to be drawn into conversation, while two witnesses were hidden in the next room,--and candles were to be lighted, as if accidentally, close by him, that the witnesses might be sure that they had seen, as well as heard the heretic. He was to be called upon to retract his heretical pravity. If he refused, he was to be brought before the Council, and stoned if the verdict was against him. The Talmudists add that this was the legal process carried out against Jesus: that He was condemned upon the testimony of two witnesses; and that the crime of "misleading" was the only one which was thus formally dealt with. (See references to the Talmud of Jerusalem, and that of Babylon, _Vie de Jesus_, Renan, 394, N. 1). The Gospels tell us that the accusation against our Lord was "misleading:" and the terrible word in the verse which we are examining was actually applied to Him (εκεινος ὁ πλανος, Matt. xxvii. 63; πλανα τον οχλον John vii. 12; μη και ὑμεις πεπλανησθε John vii. 47).

"Excepting some minutiæ which were the product of the Rabbinical imagination, the narrative of the Evangelists answers, point by point, to the process actually laid down by the Talmud" (Renan, ut sup.).

Ver. 9. _Every one who leadeth forward._] πας ὁ προαγων is certainly the true reading here; the commander himself pushing boldly onward, and also carrying others with him. The allusion is polemical to the vaunted _progress_ of the Gnostic teachers.

"_The doctrine which is Christ's._"] What is that? John vii. 16, 17. The doctrine which Christ emphatically called "_My doctrine_," "_the doctrine_." No doubt the word (διδαχη) sometimes means the _act_, sometimes the _mode, of teaching_ (Mark xii. 38; 1 Cor. xiv. 6); but "it underwent a transformation which converted it into a term synonymous with dogmatic teaching," with the body of faithful doctrine which was the ultimate type and norm to which all statements must be conformed. (Acts vi. 42; Tit. i. 9; Rom. vi. 17, xvi. 17; see also Matt. xvi. 12; Acts v. 28, xvii. 19; Heb. xiii. 9.) It is much to be regretted that in the R.V. the word "doctrine" has disappeared from all these passages, Romans xvi. 17 alone excepted. St. John's language in this verse seems quite decisive.

FOOTNOTES:

[348] John i. 18.

[349] There is no doubt a large amount of authority for this view that St. John addresses a Church personified. It has the support of sacred critics so different as Bishop Wordsworth and Bishop Lightfoot. (_Ep. to Colossians and Philemon_, 305), and Professor Westcott seems (with some hesitation) to lean to it. But there is also a great body of support, ancient and modern, for the literal view. (Clem. Alex., _Adunbr. ad ii. Joan., Op._, iii. 1011.) So Athanasius, or the author of "Synopsis S.S." in Athanasius, _Opp._, iv. 410. See also the heading of the A. V. ("He exhorteth a certain honourable matron, with her children.") For reasons for accepting Kyria rather than Electa as the name, see _Speaker's Commentary_, iv. 335.

[350] Ver. 12.

[351] ευρηκα, ver. 4.

[352] "James, Cephas, and JOHN, who seemed to be _pillars_." Gal. ii. 9.

[353] Luke ii. 36.

[354] 1 Tim. v. 3, 5, 10.

[355] 1 Tim, v. 6-11, 12, 13.

[356] 2 John 2.

[357] Ver. 1.

[358] δια την αληθειαν την μενουσαν εν ἡμιν, και μεθ' ἡμων εσται εις τον αιωνα. 2 John ver. 2.

[359] Irenæus, _Hær._, iii. 4.

[360] Ver. 7.

[361] Ver. 9.

[362] Ver. 5.

[363] "_Commandments_ and _commandment_--Love strives to realise in detail every separate expression of the will of God." (Prof. Westcott, _Epistles of St. John_, 217).

[364] Ver. 6.

[365] It is, probably, the existence of these verses (vv. 10, 11) which acts as a stimulus to many liberal Christian commentators in favour of the ultra-mystical view, that the lady addressed in this Epistle is a Church personified. It should be carefully noted that St. John speaks of a _formal_ summons, so to speak, from an emissary of antichrist as such. (ει τις ερχεται προς ὑμας, ver. 10). St. John, also, must have detected a danger in the very gentleness of Kyria's character, or in the disposition of some of her children. So much, indeed, might seem implied in the sudden, solemn, and rather startling warning, which entreated constant continuous care (βλεπετε ἑαυτους), so that they should not in some momentary impulse, under the charm of some deceiver, lose what they had wrought, and with it reward in fulness (ἱνα μη απολεσητε, ver. 10).

[366] Titus iii. 4.

[367] 1 Tim. i. 1; 2 Tim. i. 2.

[368] The construction altered to bring out the meaning more strikingly than a uniform structure could have done.--Winer, _Gr. Gr._, Part III., § 3.

[369] Εσται μεθ' ὑμων χαρις, ελεος, ειρηνη, κ.τ.λ. 2 John ver. 3.

[370] Ιησουν Χριστον ερχομενον εν σαρκι. 2 John ver. 7.

[371] Ιησουν Χριστον εν σαρκι εληλυθοτα. 1 John iv. 2.

_THE THIRD EPISTLE OF ST. JOHN._

III. EPISTLE.

GREEK. LATIN.

Ὁ πρεσβυτερος Γαιω Senior Gaio carissimo, τω αγαπητω, ὁν εγω quem ego diligo αγαπω εν αληθεια. in veritate. Carissime, Αγαπητε, περι παντων de omnibus orationem ευχομαι σε ευοδουσθαι facio prosper te ingredi και ὑγιαινειν, καθως et valere, sicut prospere ευοδουται σου ἡ ψυχη. agit anima tua. εχαρην γαρ λιαν ερχομενων Gavisus sum valde venientibus αδελφων και fratribus et μαρτυρουντων σου τη testimonium perhibentibus αληθεια, καθως συ veritati tuæ, sicut εν αληθεια περιπατεις. tu in veritate ambulas. μειζοτεραν τουτων ουκ Maiorem horum non εχω χαραν, ἱνα ακουω habeo gratiam quam ut τα εμα τεκνα εν αληθεια audiam filios meos in περιπατουντα. Αγαμητε, veritate ambulantes. πιστον ποιεις Carissime, fideliter ὁ εαν εργαση εις τους facias quidquid operaris αδελφους και εις τους in fratres, et hoc ξενους, οι εμαρτυρησαν in peregrinos; qui testimonium σου τη αγαπη ενωπιον reddiderunt εκκλησιας, ους καλως caritati tuæ in conspectu ποιησεις προπεμψας ecclesiæ; quos αξιως του Θεου. ὑπερ bene facies ducens γαρ του ονοματος digna Deo. Pro nomine εξηλθον μηδεν λαμβανοντες enim profecti sunt nihil απο των εθνων. accipientes a gentibus. ἡμεις ουν οφειλομεν Nos ergo debemus suscipere απολαμβανειν τους τοιουτους, huiusmodi ut ἱνα συνεργοι cooperatores simus γινωμεθα τη αληθεια. veritatis. Scripsissem Ἑγραψα τη εκκλησια· sitan ecclesiæ: sedis αλλ' ὁ φιλοπρωτευων qui amat primatum αυτων Διοτρεφης ουκ gerere in eis Diotripes επιδεχεται ἡμας. δια non recipit nos. Propter τουτο, εαν ελθω, ὑπομνησω hoc, si venero, αυτου τα εργα commoneam eius opera ἁ ποιει λογοις πονηροις quæ facit verbis malignis φλυαρων ἡμας, και μη garriens in nos, et αρκουμενος επι τουτοις quasi non ei ista sufficiant, ουτε αυτος επιδεχεται nec ipse suscipit τους αδελφους, και τους fratres, et eos quo cupiunt βουλομενους κωλυει και prohibet et de εκ της εκκλησιας εκβαλλει. ecclesia eicit. Carissime, Αγαπητε, μη noli imitari malum, μιμου το κακον, αλλα sed quod bonum το αγαθον. ὁ αγαθοποιων est. Qui bene facit, εκ του Θεου ex Deo est: qui male εστιν· ὁ δε κακοποιων facit, non videt Deum. ουχ ἑωρακεν τον Θεον. Demetrio testimonium Δημητριω μεμαρτυρηται redditur ab omnibus et ὑπο παντων και ὑπ' ab ipsa veritate: et nos αυτης της αληθειας· testimonium perhibemus, και ἡμεις δε μαρτυρουμεν, et nosti quoniam και οιδατε ὁτι ἡ μαρτυρια testimonium nostrum ἡμων αληθης εστι. verum est. Multa habui Πολλα ειχον γραφειν, scribere tibi, sed nolui αλλ' ου θελω δια μελανος per atramentum et και καλαμου σοι calamum scribere tibi: γραψαι· ελπιζω δε spero autem protinus ευθεως ιδειν σε, και te videre, et os ad os στομα προς στομα loquimur. Pax tibi. λαλησομεν. Ειρηνη σοι. Salutant te amici. Saluta Ασπαζονται σε οι φιλοι· amicos per nomen. ασπαζου τους φιλους κατ' ονομα.

AUTHORISED VERSION. REVISED VERSION.

The elder unto the The elder unto Gaius well beloved Gaius, the beloved, whom I whom I love in the love in truth. Beloved, truth. Beloved, I wish I pray that in all things above all things that thou mayest prosper thou mayest prosper and be in health, even and be in health, as thy soul prospereth. even as thy soul For I rejoiced greatly, prospereth. For I rejoiced when brethren came greatly, when and bare witness unto the brethren came and thy truth, even as thou testified of the truth walkest in truth. that is in thee, even Greater joy have I as thou walkest in none than this, to hear the truth. I have no of my children walking greater joy than to hear in the truth. Beloved, that my children walk thou doest a faithful in truth. Beloved, thou work in whatsoever doest faithfully whatsoever thou doest toward them thou doest to that are brethren and the brethren, and to strangers withal; who strangers; which have bare witness to thy borne witness of thy love before the church: charity before the whom thou wilt do church: whom if thou well to set forward on bring forward on their their journey worthily journey after a godly of God: because that sort, thou shalt do well: for the sake of the because that for His Name they went forth, name's sake they went taking nothing of the forth, taking nothing Gentiles. We therefore of the Gentiles. We ought to welcome therefore ought to receive such, that we may be such, that we fellow-workers with might be fellowhelpers the truth. I wrote to the truth. I wrote somewhat unto the unto the Church: but church: but Diotrephes, Diotrephes, who loveth who loveth to have the to have the pre-eminence pre-eminence among among them, them, receiveth us not. receiveth us not. Therefore, if I come, Wherefore, if I come, I will bring to remembrance I will remember his his works which deeds which he doeth, he doeth, prating against prating against us with us with wicked malicious words: and words: and not content not content therewith, therewith, neither doth neither doth he himself he himself receive the receive the brethren, brethren, and them and forbiddeth them that would he forbiddeth, that would, and casteth and casteth _them_ _them_ out of the church. out of the church. Beloved, Beloved, follow not that imitate not that which is evil, but that which is evil, but that which is good. He which is good. He that doeth good is of that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth God: he that doeth evil hath not seen God. evil hath not seen God. Demetrius hath good Demetrius hath the report of all _men_, and witness of all _men_, and of the truth itself: yea, of the truth itself: yea, and we _also_ bear we also bear witness; record; and ye know and thou knowest that that our record is true. our witness is true. I I had many things to had many things to write, but I will not write unto thee, but I with ink and pen write am unwilling to write unto thee: but I trust _them_ to thee with ink I shall shortly see thee, and pen: but I hope and we shall speak shortly to see thee, and face to face. Peace _be_ we shall speak face to to thee. _Our_ friends face. Peace _be_ unto salute thee. Greet the thee. The friends salute friends by name. thee. Salute the friends by name.

ANOTHER VERSION.

The Elder unto Gaius the beloved, whom I love in truth. Beloved, in all things I pray that thou mayest prosper, and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth. For I was exceeding glad of brethren coming and witnessing to thy truth, even as thou truly walkest. Greater joy than these _joys_ I have not, that I should hear of my own children walking truly. Beloved, thou doest in faithful wise whatsoever thou art working towards the brethren who are moreover strangers; which witness to thy charity before the Church; whom thou wilt do well to speed forward on their journey worthily of God: because that for the sake of the Name they went out taking nothing of the Gentiles. We therefore are bound to take up such that we may become fellow-workers with the truth. I wrote somewhat unto the Church: but Diotrephes who loveth to have primacy over them receiveth us not. Wherefore if I come I will bring to remembrance his works which he is doing, prating against us with wicked words: and not contented hereupon neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and them that would he hindereth, and casteth them out of the Church. Beloved, imitate not that which is evil, but that which is good. He who is doing good is from God; he that is doing evil hath not seen God. To Demetrius witness stands given of all men and of the truth itself: yea, and we also are witnessing, and ye know that our witness is true. Many things I had to have written, but I am not willing to be writing unto thee with ink and pen: but I am hoping straightway to see thee, and we shall speak face to face. Peace unto thee. The friends greet thee. Greet the friends by name.

DISCOURSE XVII.

_THE QUIETNESS OF TRUE RELIGION._

"The elder unto the well beloved Gaius.... He that doeth good is of God; but he that doeth evil hath not seen God."--3 JOHN 1, 11.

The mere analysis of this note must necessarily present a meagre outline. There is a brief expression of pleasure at the tidings of the sweet and gracious hospitality of Gaius which was brought by certain missionary brethren to Ephesus, coupled with the assurance of the truth and consistency of his whole walk. The haughty rejection of Apostolic letters of communion by Diotrephes is mentioned with a burst of indignation. A contrast to Diotrephes is found in Demetrius, with the threefold witness to a life so worthy of imitation. A brief greeting--and we have done with the last written words of St. John which the Church possesses.

I.

Let us _first_ see whether, without passing over the bounds of historical probability, we can fill up this bare outline with some colouring of circumstance.

To two of the three individuals named in this Epistle we seem to have some clue.

The _Gaius_ addressed is, of course, _Caius_ in Latin, a very common prænomen, no doubt.

Three persons of the name appear in the New Testament[372]--unless we suppose St. John's Caius to be a fourth. But the generous and beautiful hospitality adverted to in this note is entirely of a piece with the character of him of whom St. Paul had written, "Gaius, mine host, and of the whole Church."[373] We know further, from one of the most ancient and authentic documents of Christian literature, that the Church of Corinth (to which this Caius belonged) was, just at the period when St. John wrote, in a lamentable state of schismatic confusion. Diotrephes may, at such a period, have been aspiring to put forward his claim at Corinth; and may, in his ambitious proceedings, have rejected from communion the brethren whom St. John had sent to Caius.[374] A yet more interesting reflection is suggested by a writing of considerable authority. The writer of the "Synopsis of Holy Scripture," which stands amongst the Works of Athanasius, says--"the Gospel according to John was both dictated by John the Apostle and beloved when in exile at Patmos, and by him was published in Ephesus, through Caius the beloved and friend of the Apostles, of whom Paul also writing to the Romans saith, _Caius mine host, and of the whole Church_."[375] This would give a very marked significance to one touch in this Third Epistle of St. John. The phrase here "and we bear witness also, _and ye know that our witness is true_"--clearly points back to the closing attestation of the Gospel--"_and we know that his witness is true_."[376] He counts upon a quick recognition of a common memory.[377]

Demetrius is, of course, a name redolent of the worship of Demeter the Earth-Mother, and of Ephesian surroundings. No reader of the New Testament needs to be reminded of the riot at Ephesus, which is told at such length in the history of St. Paul's voyages by St. Luke. The conjecture that the agitator of the turbulent guild of silversmiths who made silver shrines of Diana may have become the Demetrius, the object of St. John's lofty commendation, is by no means improbable. There is a peculiar fulness in the narrative of the Acts, and an amplitude and exactness in the reports of the speeches of Demetrius and of the town-clerk which betray both unusually detailed information, and a feeling on the part of the writer that the subject was one of much interest for many readers.[378] The very words of Demetrius about Paul evince that uneasy sense of the powers of fascination possessed by the Apostle which is often the first timid witness of reluctant conviction.[379] The whole story would be of thrilling interest to those who, knowing well what Demetrius had become, were here told what he once had been. In a very ancient document (the so-called "Apostolic Constitutions")[380] we read that "Demetrius was appointed Bishop of Philadelphia by me," _i.e._, by the Apostle John. To the Bishop of a city so often shaken by the earthquakes of that volcanic soil came the commendation--"I know thy works that thou didst keep My word;" and the assuring promise that he should, when the victory was won, have the solidity and permanence of "a pillar" in a "temple"[381] that no convulsion could shake down. The witness then, which stands on record for the Bishop of Philadelphia, is threefold; the threefold witness of the First Epistle on a reduced scale--the witness of the world;[382] the witness of the Truth itself, even of Jesus;[383] the witness of the Church--including John.[384]

II.

We may now advert to the _contents_ and _general style_ of this letter.

1. As to its _contents_.

1. It supplies us with a valuable test of Christian life, in what may be called the Christian instinct of _missionary affection_, possessed in such full measure by Caius.[385]

This, indeed, is an ingredient of Christian character. Do we admire and feel attracted by missionaries? They are knight-errants of the Faith; leaders of the "forlorn hope" of Christ's cause; bearers of the flag of the cross through the storms of battle. Do we wish to honour and to help them, and feel ennobled by doing so? He who has no almost enthusiastic regard for missionaries has not the spirit of primitive Christianity within his breast.

2. The Church is beset with different dangers from very different quarters. The second Epistle of St. John has its bold unmistakable warning of danger from the philosophical atmosphere which is not only round the Church, but necessarily finds its way within. Those who assume to be leaders of intellectual and even of spiritual progress sometimes lead away from Christ. The test of scientific truth is accordance with the proposition which embodies the last discovery; the test of religious truth is accordance with the proposition which embodies the first discovery, _i.e._, "the doctrine of Christ." Progress outside this is regress; it is desertion first of Christ, ultimately of God.[386] As the second Epistle warns the Church of peril from _speculative ambition_, so the third Epistle marks a danger from _personal ambition_,[387] arrogating to itself undue authority within the Church. Diotrephes in all probability was a bishop.[388] At Rome there has been a permanent Diotrephes in the office of the Papacy; how much this has had to say to the dislocation of Christendom, God knows. But there are other smaller and more vulgar continuators of Diotrephes, who occupy no Vatican. Priests! But there are priests in different senses. The priest who stands to minister in holy things, the true _Leitourgos_ is rightly so-called. But there is an arrogant priestship which would do violence to conscience, and interpose rudely between God and the soul. Priests in this sense are called by different names. They are clad in different dresses--some in chasubles, some in frock-coats, some in petticoats. "Down with priestcraft," is even the cry of many of them. The priest who stands to offer sacrifice may or may not be a priest in the evil sense; the priest (who abjures the name) who is a master of religious small-talk of the popular kind, and winds people to his own ends round his little finger by using them deftly, is often the modern edition of Diotrephes.

3. This brief Epistle contains one of those apparently mere spiritual _truisms_, which make St. John the most powerful and comprehensive of all spiritual teachers. He had suggested a warning to Caius, which serves as the link to connect the example of Diotrephes which he has denounced, with that of Demetrius which he is about to commend. "Beloved!" he cries, "imitate not that which is evil, but that which is good." A glorious little "Imitation of Christ," a compression of his own Gospel, the record of the Great Example in three words![389] Then follows this absolutely exhaustive division, which covers the whole moral and spiritual world. "He that doeth good," (the whole principle of whose moral life is this,) "is of," has his origin from, "God;" "he that doeth evil hath not seen God," sees Him not as a consequence of having spiritually looked upon Him. Here, at last, we have the flight of the eagle's wing, the glance of the eagle's eye. Especially valuable are these words, almost at the close of the Apostolic age and of the New Testament Scripture. They help us to keep the delicate balance of truth; they guard us against all abuse of the precious doctrines of grace. Several texts are _mutilated_; more are conveniently _dropped out_. How seldom does one see the whole context quoted, in tracts and sheets, of that most blessed passage--"if we walk in the light, as He is in the light, _the blood of Jesus, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin_?" How often do we see these words at all--"he that doeth good is of God, but he that doeth evil hath not seen God?" Perhaps it may be a lingering suspicion that a text which comes out of a very short Epistle is worth very little. Perhaps doctrinalism _à outrance_ considers that the sentiment "savours of works." But, at all events, there is terrible decisiveness about these antithetic propositions. For each life is described in section and in plan by one or other of the two. The whole complicated series of thought, actions, habits, purposes, summed up in the words _life_ and _character_, is a continuous stream issuing from the man who necessarily is _doing_ every moment of his existence. The stream is either pure, bright, cleansing, gladdening, capable of being tracked by a thread of emerald wherever it flows; or it carries with it on its course blackness, bitterness, and barrenness. Men must be plainly dealt with. They may hold any creed, or follow any round of religious practices. There are creeds which are nobly true, others which are false and feeble--practices which are beautiful and elevating, others which are petty and unprofitable. They may repeat the shibboleth ever so accurately; and follow the observances ever so closely. They may sing hymns until their throats are hoarse, and beat drums until their wrists are sore. But St. John's propositions ring out, loud and clear, and syllable themselves in questions, which one day or other the conscience will put to us with terrible distinctness. Are you one who is ever doing good; or one who is not doing good? "God be merciful to me a sinner!" may well rush to our lips. But _that_, when opportunity is given, must be followed by another prayer. Not only--"wash away my sins." Something more. "Fill and purify me with Thy Spirit, that, pardoned and renewed, I may become good, and be doing good." It is sometimes said that the Church is full of souls "dying of their morality." Is it not at least equally true to say that the Church is full of souls dying of their spirituality? That is--souls dying in one case of unreal morality; in the other of unreal spirituality, which juggles with spiritual words, making a sham out of them. Morality which is not spiritual, is imperfect; spirituality which is not moralized through and through is of the spirit of evil.

It is a great thing that in these last sentences, written with a trembling hand, which shrank from the labour of pen and ink,[390] the Apostle should have lifted a word (probably current in the atmosphere of Ephesus among spiritualists and astrologers[391]), from the low applications with which it was undeservedly associated; and should have rung out high and clear the Gospel's everlasting justification, the final harmony of the teaching of grace--"he that doeth good is of God."

III.

The style of the third Epistle of St. John is certainly that of an old man. It is reserved in language and in doctrine. God is thrice and thrice only mentioned.[392] Jesus is not once expressly uttered. But

"... They are not empty-hearted whose low sound Reverbs no hollowness."

In religion, as in everything else, we are earnest, not by aiming at earnestness, but by aiming at an object. Religious language should be deep and real, rather than demonstrative. It is not safe to play with sacred names. To pronounce them at random for the purpose of being effective and impressive is to take them in vain. What a wealth of reverential love there is in that--"for the sake of the Name!"[393] Old copyists sometimes thought to improve upon the impressiveness of Apostles by cramming in sacred names. They only maimed what they touched with clumsy hand. A deeper sense of the Sacramental Presence is in the hushed, awful, reverence of "not discerning the Body," than in the interpolated "not discerning of the Lord's Body." Even so "The Name," perhaps, speaks more to the heart, and implies more than "His Name." It is, indeed, the "beautiful Name," by the which we are called. And sometimes in sermons, or in Eucharistic "Gloria in Excelsis," or in hymns that have come from such as St. Bernard, or in sick rooms, it shall go up with our sweetest music, and waken our tenderest thoughts, and be "as ointment poured forth." But what an underlying Gospel, what an intense suppressed flame there is behind these quiet words! This letter says nothing of rapture, of prophecy, of miracle. It lies in the atmosphere of the Church, as we find it even now. It has a word for _friendship_. It seeks to _individualise_ its benediction.[394] A hush of evening rests upon the note. May such an evening close upon our old age!

NOTES.

Ver. 2 ... _thy soul._] Strange difficulty seems to be felt in some quarters about the word ψυχη, as used by our Lord and the Apostles. The difficulty arises from a singular argument advanced by M. Renan. He maintains that Christ and His first followers knew nothing of "the soul" as the immortal principle in man--that in him which is capable of being saved or lost. It was simply, according to him, _either_ the animal natural life[395] (Matt. ii. 20; John xii. 25); _or_ at most the vague Greek immortality of the shadows, as opposed to the later Hebrew Resurrection-life. But there are very numerous passages in the New Testament where "soul" _can_ only be used for "life as created by God;" for the thinking substance, different from the body and indestructible by death, created with possibilities of eternal happiness or misery. (The following passages are decisive--Matt. x. 28, xi. 29; Acts ii. 27; 2 Cor. xii. 13; Heb. xiii. 17; 1 Pet. i. 9, 22, ii. 11, 25; Jas. i. 21, v. 20; 3 John 2; Apoc. vi. 9, xx. 4).

Printed by Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ltd., London and Aylesbury

FOOTNOTES:

[372] Caius, a Macedonian (Acts xix. 29); Caius of Derbe (Acts xx. 4); Caius of Corinth (Rom. xvi. 23; 1 Cor. i. 14).

[373] Rom. xvi. 23.

[374] No doubt ver. 10 presents some difficulty. Voyages between Corinth were regularly and easily performed. Still it is scarcely probable that the aged Apostle should have contemplated such a voyage. But the form (εαν ελθω) purposely expresses possibility rather than probability--the smallest amount of presumption--if I shall come, which is not quite impossible. (Donaldson, _Gr. Gr._, "Conditional Propositions." 501.) The hope of seeing Caius "face to face" (ver. 14) contains no objection, as it may refer to a visit of Caius to Ephesus.

[375] "Synopsis S.S." '76. (S. Athanas., _Opp_., iv. 433. Edit. Migne.)

[376] Read together 3 John 12, and John xxi. 24.

[377] The writer had worked out his conclusions about Caius independently before he happened to read Bengel's note. "Caius _Corinthi_ de quo Rom. xvi. 23, vel huic Caio, Johannis amico, fuit _simillimus_ in hospitalite--vel _idem_;--si idem, ex Achaia in Asiam migravit, vel Corinthum Johannes hanc epistolam misit."

[378] Acts xix. 23-41.

[379] "Almost throughout all Asia this Paul hath persuaded and turned away much people, saying, that they be no gods, which are made with hands."--Acts xix. 26.

[380] vii. 46.

[381] Apoc. iii. 7, 8, 12.

[382] "All men."

[383] Και ὑπ' αυτης της αληθειας _i.e._, Jesus (Apoc. iii. 7, 12). This type of expression marks the "Asiatic school." So Papias; απ' αυτης της αληθειας (Ap. Euseb. _H. E._, iii. 39). Cf. John xiv. 6.

[384] "And we also bear witness." 3 John 12.

[385] 3 John 5, 6, 7.

[386] 2 John 9.

[387] 3 John 9, 10.

[388] See authorities quoted by Archdeacon Lee (_Speaker's Commentary_, Tom. ii., N.T., p. 512).

[389] μιμου ... το αγαθον, 3 John 11.

[390] 3 John 13.

[391] The verb αγαθοποιειν is found in a few places in the LXX and New Testament. "Amongst profane writers, astrologers only used this verb. They signified by it, _I offer a good omen_. So in Proclus and others." See Bretsch. and Grimm, s. v. αγαθοποιεω.

[392] "Worthily of God" ver. 6; "is of God--hath not seen God" ver. 11.

[393] Ver. 7.

[394] "The friends salute thee: salute the friends by name," ver. 14 The mention of friendship is not common in the New Testament. Beautiful exceptions will be found in Luke xii. 4; John xi. 11, xv. 14, 15; cf. Acts xxvii. 3.

[395] As indicated by breathing--from ψυχω

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=LONDON IDYLLS.= By W. J. DAWSON. Second Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth, 5_s._

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_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

=1. THE REDEMPTION OF EDWARD STRAHAN=: A Social Story. Third Edition. Paper covers, 1_s._

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=CHARACTERISTICS AND CHARACTERS OF WILLIAM LAW.= Selected and arranged with an Introduction by ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D. Crown 8vo, cloth, 9_s._

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=CHARLES G. FINNEY=. An Autobiography. With Steel Portrait. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._

=LETTERS AND SKETCHES FROM THE NEW HEBRIDES.= By MAGGIE WHITECROSS PATON (Mrs. John G. Paton of Aniwa). Edited by her Brother-in-Law, Rev. JAMES PATON, B.A. With Portrait, Map, and 23 Illustrations. Third Edition. Sixth Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._

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=LIFE OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI=. By PAUL SABATIER. Translated from the French. Gilt top. New Edition. Price 9_s._ net.

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"We may cordially commend this translation. It is thoroughly well done, fluent and accurate, and nowhere betraying by idiomatic faultiness or even stiffness, that insufficient mastery of one or the other language which mars too many versions."--_Glasgow Herald_.

=THE PEOPLE'S BIBLE.= Discourses upon Holy Scripture, forming a Pastoral Commentary. By JOSEPH PARKER, D.D. Demy 8vo, each; 8_s._

=THE OLD TESTAMENT.=

Vol. I. GENESIS. Vol. II. EXODUS. Vol. III. LEVITICUS--NUMBERS XXVI. Vol. IV. NUMBERS XXVI.--DEUTERONOMY. Vol. V. JOSHUA--JUDGES V. Vol. VI. JUDGES VI.--1 SAMUEL XVIII. Vol. VII. 1 SAMUEL XVIII.--1 KINGS XIII. Vol. VIII. 1 KINGS XV.--1 CHRONICLES IX. Vol. IX. 1 CHRONICLES X.--2 CHRONICLES XX. Vol. X. 2 CHRONICLES XXI.--ESTHER. Vol. XI. THE BOOK OF JOB. Vol. XII. THE BOOK OF PSALMS. Vol. XIII. THE BOOK OF PROVERBS. Vol. XIV. ECCLESIASTES--ISAIAH XXVI. Vol. XV. ISAIAH XXVII.--JEREMIAH XIX. Vol. XVI. JEREMIAH XX.--DANIEL. Vol. XVII. HOSEA--MALACHI.

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=THE UNKNOWN GOD=; Or, Inspiration Among Pre-Christian Races. By C. LORING BRACE. In 8vo, cloth, 12_s._

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=THE PARABLES OF OUR SAVIOUR EXPOUNDED AND ILLUSTRATED.= Third Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, 7_s._ 6_d._

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_WORKS BY DR. THAIN DAVIDSON._

=1. A GOOD START.= Sixth Thousand. Crown 8vo, cloth, 3_s._ 6_d._

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=THE CATACOMBS OF ROME=, and their Testimony Relative to Primitive Christianity. By the Rev. W. H. WITHROW, M.A. Sixth Edition. 134 Illustrations. Crown 8vo; cloth, 6_s._

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_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._

=THE GROUNDS OF THEISTIC AND CHRISTIAN BELIEF.= 8vo, cloth, 10_s._ 6_d._

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=IRELAND AND THE ANGLO-NORMAN CHURCH=: A History of Ireland and Irish Christianity from the Anglo-Norman Conquest to the Dawn of the Reformation. By Rev. Preb. G. T. STOKES, D.D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Dublin. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._

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=IRELAND AND THE CELTIC CHURCH:= A History of Ireland from St. Patrick to the English Conquest in 1172. Third Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, 6_s._

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=2. THE EVERY-DAY OF LIFE.= Fifth Edition.

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=3. SECRETS OF A BEAUTIFUL LIFE.= Third Edition.

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=4. SILENT TIMES.= Fifth Edition.

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=STUDIES ON THE NEW TESTAMENT.= Edited by the Hon. and Rev. W. H. LYTTELTON, M.A., Canon of Gloucester. Tenth Edition. Crown 8vo, cloth, 7_s._ 6_d._

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The Expositor's Bible.

EDITED BY THE REV. W. Robertson Nicoll, M.A., LL.D.

_Separate Volumes, 7/6. Price to subscribers for any single series, 24/- net, except the Eighth (7 volumes), the subscription price of which is 28/- net._

FIRST SERIES.

Colossians and Philemon. By ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D.

The Gospel according to St. Mark. By the Very Rev. G. A. CHADWICK, D.D., Dean of Armagh.

The Book of Genesis. By the Rev. Professor MARCUS DODS, D.D.

The First Book of Samuel. By Professor W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D., LL.D.

The Second Book of Samuel. By the same Author.

The Epistle to the Hebrews. By Principal T. C. EDWARDS, D.D.

SECOND SERIES.

The Epistle to the Galatians. By Professor G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.

The Pastoral Epistles. By the Rev. A. PLUMMER, D.D.

The Book of Isaiah i.-xxxix. Vol. I. By Professor GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D.

The Book of Revelation. By Professor W. MILLIGAN, D.D.

The First Epistle to the Corinthians. By Professor MARCUS DODS, D.D.

The Epistles of St. John. By the Right Rev. W. ALEXANDER, D.D., D.C.L., Lord Bishop of Derry and Raphoe.

THIRD SERIES.

Judges and Ruth. By the Rev. R. A. WATSON, D.D.

The Prophecies of Jeremiah. By the Rev. C. J. BALL, M.A.

The Book of Isaiah. Chaps. xl. to lxvi. Vol. II. By Professor GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D.

The Gospel of St. Matthew. By J. MONRO GIBSON, D.D.

The Book of Exodus. By the Very Rev. G. A. CHADWICK, D.D., Dean of Armagh.

The Gospel of St. Luke. By the Rev. H. BURTON, M.A.

FOURTH SERIES.

Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher. By SAMUEL COX, D.D.

The Epistles of St. James and St. Jude. By the Rev. ALFRED PLUMMER, D.D.

The Book of Leviticus. By the Rev. S. H. KELLOGG, D.D.

The Book of Proverbs. By the Rev. R. F. HORTON, D.D.

The Acts of the Apostles. Vol. I. By the Rev. Professor G. T. STOKES, D.D.

The Gospel of St. John. Vol. I. By the Rev. Professor MARCUS DODS, D.D.

The Expositor's Bible--_continued_.

_Separate Volumes, 7/6. Price to subscribers for any single series, 24/- net, except the Eighth (7 volumes), the subscription price of which is 28/- net._

FIFTH SERIES.

The Epistles to the Thessalonians. By the Rev. JAMES DENNEY, D.D.

The Gospel of St. John. Vol. II. By the Rev. Professor MARCUS DODS, D.D.

The Book of Psalms. Vol. I. By the Rev. ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D.

The Acts of the Apostles. Vol. II. By the Rev. Professor G. T. STOKES, D.D.

The Book of Job. By the Rev. R. A. WATSON, D.D.

The Epistle to the Ephesians. By the Rev. Professor G. G. FINDLAY, B.A.

SIXTH SERIES.

The Epistle to the Philippians. By the Rev. Principal RAINY, D.D.

The First Book of Kings. By the Very Rev. F. W. FARRAR, F.R.S., Dean of Canterbury.

The Book of Joshua. By the Rev. Professor W. G. BLAIKIE, D.D., LL.D.

Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. By the Rev. Prof. W. F. ADENEY, M.A.

The Book of Psalms. Vol. II. By the Rev. ALEXANDER MACLAREN, D.D.

The Epistles of St. Peter. By the Rev. Prof. J. RAWSON LUMBY, D.D.

SEVENTH SERIES.

The Epistle to the Romans. By Handley C. G. MOULE, M.A., D.D.

The Second Book of Kings. By the Very Rev. F. W. FARRAR, F.R.S., Dean of Canterbury.

The Second Epistle to the Corinthians. By the Rev. JAMES DENNEY, D.D.

The Books of Chronicles. By the Rev. Prof. W. H. BENNETT, M.A.

The Book of Numbers. By the Rev. R. A. WATSON, D.D.

The Book of Psalms. Vol. III. By ALEX. MACLAREN, D.D.

EIGHTH AND FINAL SERIES.

The Book of Daniel. By the Very Rev. F. W. FARRAR, F.R.S., Dean of Canterbury.

The Book of Jeremiah. Chaps, xxi.-lii. By the Rev. W. H. BENNETT, M.A.

The Book of Deuteronomy. By the Rev. Professor ANDREW HARPER, B.D.

The Song of Solomon and the Lamentations of Jeremiah. By the Rev. W. F. ADENEY, M.A.

The Book of Ezekiel. By the Rev. JOHN SKINNER, M.A.

The Minor Prophets. By the Rev. Professor GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D.D. In two vols.

The Devotional Library.

_Handsomely printed and bound, price 3s. 6d. each, cloth._

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=2. MEMORANDA SACRA.= By Professor J. RENDEL HARRIS, M.A., Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. Second Edition.

"Two gifts, both of the very highest, are marvellously united in Professor Rendel Harris, and here we have the ripe fruits of one, in most delicious flavour and most wholesome nourishment. It is not possible to review such a book as this. Words about it do not tell us what it is. Nor will a selection of words from it half convey its incommunicable fragrance."--_Expository Times_.

_THE GENERAL GORDON EDITION._

=3. CHRIST MYSTICAL.= By JOSEPH HALL, D.D., Bishop of Norwich. Reprinted, with General Gordon's marks, from the Original Copy used by him, and with an Introduction on his Theology by the Rev. H. Carruthers Wilson, M.A.

"Hall's treatise is in itself an excellent example of the best kind of devotional literature, and it will contribute to its appreciation by the modern reader that its sacred teachings and appeals formed part of the spiritual nourishment of the English 19th century hero and saint."--_Christian World_.

=4. RUYSBROECK AND THE MYSTICS.= With selections from Ruysbroeck. By MAURICE MAETERLINCK. Authorised Translation by Jane T. Stoddart.

"It does much to make intelligible and attractive a powerful religious thinker, from whom most readers would turn aside on account of the perplexities and vagueness of his manner."--_Scotsman_.

* * * * *

LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON, 27, PATERNOSTER ROW.

Transcriber's Notes:

Obvious punctuation and spelling errors have been fixed throughout.

Inconsistent hyphenation is as in the original.

The comparisons located on Pages 79, 100-101, 117, 133-135, 164-165, 179-180, 185-187, 204-205, 207-209, 220-222, 274, 279-281 and 297-299, have been reformatted to make them more readable.

Footnote 116: Has no anchor, left as in the orginal text.

Footnote 124: Has no opening parenthesis, left as in the original. [... Tisch., 275).]

Page 241: Paragraph was modified to match better scan. Ending of the paragraph was removed and replaced with a dash. [... witness of men"--if we consider ...].