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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT.
THE F.PISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS.
THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. 2 Vols.

THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OK GOD
(Hampton Lectures for 1891).

THE BODY OF CHRIST.

DISSERTATIONS ON SUBJECTS CONNECTED
WITH THE INCARNATION.

THE NEW THEOLOGY AND THE OLD
RELIGION.

THE MISSION OF THE CHURCH.
ORDERS AND UNITY.
SPIRITUAL EFFICIENCY.

THE PERMANENT CREED AND THE
CHRISTIAN IDEA OF SIN.

THE QUESTION OF DIVORCE.

Edited by

LUX MUNDI. A Series of Studies in the
Religion of the Incarnation. By Various
Writers.

THE

EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN

BY CHARLES GORE, D.D.

HON. D.D. EDIN. AND DURHAM, HON. D.C.L. OXFORD, HON. LL.D. CAMBRIDGE

AND BIRMINGHAM, HON. FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD,

LATE BISHOP OF OXFORD

LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET, W.

1920

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

103500

2 3 ma

PREFACE

AN exposition of St. John s Epistles by the
present writer was announced, as one of a series
of such expositions, in 1900. This was to have
been a revision of lectures actually delivered in
Westminster Abbey, but it was never accom
plished. And now that I am taking advantage
of some recovered leisure to publish the intended
exposition, I have not gone back upon the
reports of former lectures. The present exposi
tion is entirely new.

Both in the introduction and in the exposition
itself I have had in view especially the ordinary
man and woman who lack the equipment and
knowledge of a scholar, and I have tried to
take no knowledge for granted that an ordinary
education does not supply.

Believing, as I do, that nothing is more im
portant than to get people in our day, whatever
their state of belief, to study the New Testament
books for themselves, I have had it for my own

ix

x Preface

object to make these epistles intelligible and
interesting to them. After the necessary intro
duction on the authorship and character of the
documents, I have used the following method.
Each section of the Epistle is preceded by an
" explanatory analysis/ This is intended to
include all the explanatory matter necessary
for the general understanding of the passage,
though that may have to be found in the Old
Testament or in the Fourth Gospel or elsewhere.
But it concludes in each case with what can
properly be called an analysis of the particular
passage immediately to be studied. It is fol
lowed by the text of the passage from the
Revised Version ; and this again by notes on
particular points in the passage.

It is obvious that the Epistle has a very
direct bearing on present-day controversies
especially on the tendencies commonly called
" Modernist " and on the social application of
Christianity and the function of the Church in
society. I have from time to time indicated
such applications, but I have resisted the temp
tation to write at any length upon them, because
I came to the conclusion that I had better
confine myself pretty strictly to the function of

Preface xi

exposition properly so-called. But I may say
that I believe nothing can be more important
for our modern world than that we should
believe St. John s principles, theological and
ethical, with all our hearts, and set ourselves
to apply them with all our will.

CHARLES GORE.

Ash Wednesday, 1920.

P.S. Since Dr. Sanday s declaration in
Divine Overruling (Clarke, 1920), his name
should no longer be included in the list given
below, p. 17.

CONTENTS

PAGB

INTRODUCTION .... .1

THE FIRST EPISTLE

i. 1- 4 . The word of life . . 52
i. 5 ii. 6. God is light ... 64
ii. 7-17 . The Law of love . . .91
ii. 18-29 . The antichrists . . .107

iii. 1-12 . The children of God and

the children of the devil 133

iii. 13-24 . The Church and the world-
Love and hate . .152

iv. 1- 6 . The testing of spirits . .164
iv. 7-21 . God is love . I . 173

v. 1-12 . The divine witness to Jesus

as the Christ . .190

v. 13-17 . Fellowship in the eternal life

and prayer for others . 201

v. 18-21 . The three solemn final affir
mations . . .213

THE SECOND EPISTLE . . . .221
THE THIRD EPISTLE ... 231

THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN

INTKODUCTION

1

THERE is a striking letter written by Benjamin
Jowett, the Master of Balliol, to Arthur Stanley,
Dean of Westminster, when the latter was in
his sixty-fifth year, exhorting him to devote
the remainder of his life to the production of a
serious theological work. The last ten years
of a man s life are, he insists, the most important.
He has had his full measure of experience. He
has had time to reflect upon it. All the fruit
of his knowledge, his experience, and his reflec
tion should be now mature. He should sternly
refuse to allow any other occupations to distract
him from the task of putting it into shape. 1

1 Dean Stanley s Letters, etc., by R. E. Prothero (John Murray,
1895), p. 443 : " What you have done has been good and valu
able ; but like other theological writings it has been transient,
suited to one generation more than to another. But this work
should be of a deeper kind the last result of many theological
thoughts and experiences, into which your whole soul and life
might be thrown, all the better because the truths of which
you speak had been realized by suffering."

1

St. John s Epistles

This letter expresses an ideal for old age which
is apparently very seldom realized in fact. From
this point of view old age is mostly disappointing.
But I have called attention to it because the
ideal was certainly realized in wonderful per
fection in the case of John the son of Zebedee,
if the traditional account of his life is trust
worthy. On this critical matter I shall have
more to say directly. But I will begin by
reminding my readers of the traditional account
derived from the New Testament and the
second-century writers.

John, then, is described as one of two brothers,
James and John, sons of a master-fisherman of
the lake of Galilee named Zebedee. He was
not only a Galilaean, for, according to the Fourth
Gospel, " the disciple whom Jesus loved/ who
is identified in the tradition with the son of
Zebedee, had some special connection with
Jerusalem as well as Galilee. He had a home
there apparently, 1 and he " was known unto the
high priest/ so far at least as to be admitted
by the servants to the court of the high priest
to witness the examination of Jesus, and to be
allowed to bring in Peter. 2 But he can have

1 John xix. 27. a xviii. 15-16.

Introduction

had but a simple education. In the eyes of the
Jewish leaders he and Peter are reported to be
" unlearned " men, who lacked the training in
the Jewish schools which qualified for the
position of a teacher. In fact, " they had not
been to college." l

What sort of man in disposition John was,
we can judge in part from the fact that our
Lord, who called Simon " Rock-man/ called
him and his brother " Sons of Thunder." The
mild, sentimental young man depicted by the
artists must be as unlike as possible to the
real rugged young fisherman, with his passionate
soul. This man, then, passed through profound
experiences in the school of the great prophet,
John the Baptist, and thereafter in the deeper
school of Jesus of Nazareth. We hear of special
experiences which were his, not shared by all the
apostles -how Peter and James and John con
stituted a sort of inner circle among the Twelve,
how the zeal of the Sons of Thunder in particular
was rebuked and their ambition quenched, 2
how John was singled out (if indeed it be he)

1 Acts iv. 13. The English words " unlearned and ignorant
men " are too strong.

2 Luke ix. 54-5 ; Mark x. 35 ff,

2

St. John s Epistles

as " the disciple whom Jesus loved." Besides
he of course shared the common experiences of
all the apostles culminating in the death of Jesus
on the cross and in His resurrection from the
dead and His ascension and His mission of
the Spirit. Afterwards John is found prominent
among the Twelve in Jerusalem, being mentioned
again and again alone with Peter. 1 At a
comparatively early point of the narrative of
the Acts he passes out of sight ; but St. Paul
in his Epistle to the Galatians reckons him
among " the pillars " of the Church with James,
the Lord s brother, and Peter, at his second
visit to Jerusalem there recorded/ This would
have been about sixteen or twenty years
after our Lord s death and resurrection. By
this time John s brother James had been put to
death by the Jews, and some eighteen to twenty
years later Peter and Paul were martyred at
Eome. Then in A.D. 70 Jerusalem was de
stroyed, and the old Jewish world, as it had
been, centred upon Jerusalem and its temple,
ceased to exist. Whether just before this or
earlier (for the moment is not specified), the
very well supported tradition of the second

1 Acts i. 13, iii. 1 iv. 19, viii. 14. 2 Gal, ii. 9.

Introduction

century assures us that John, with other of the
Apostles, passed to Asia Minor, which became
the last home of the apostolic company, Philip
going ultimately to Hierapolis, but John with
Andrew to Ephesus. Here, in wholly new
surroundings, we hear of him as venerated and
loved. " John, who leaned on the breast of
the Lord, who became a priest wearing the
petalon (the Jewish high-priest s golden plate
this may be either intended as metaphor or
as literal fact), both witness and teacher."
There probably l he suffered persecution for
his faith, apparently under Domitian, who began
to reign in A.D. 81 and died in 96, for he was the
John who from his place of exile at Patmos saw
the visions of the Apocalypse. Moreover, from
Ephesus as a centre he was active in the or
ganization of the Churches of Asia. " Listen,"
says Clement of Alexandria, " to a legend which
is no legend but very history, which has been
handed down and preserved about John the
Apostle. When on the death of the tyrant he
returned from the Isle of Patmos to Ephesus,

1 But Tertullian brings him to Rome to be plunged into a
cauldron of boiling oil before the Porta Latina and then banished
to Patmos.

St. John s Epistles

he used to go away when lie was summoned
to the neighbouring districts as well, in some
places to establish bishops, in others to organize
whole churches, in others to ordain to the clergy
some one of those indicated by the Spirit." And
then he tells the touching and familiar story of
the zeal and love which St. John showed in the
recovery of a lapsed disciple the young man
who had joined a band of robbers and become
their chief. Then we hear how zealous he was
against heresy, so that he would not stay in the
bath-house with Cerinthus, 1 and how zealous
he was to the very end to teach the Church he
was leaving the lesson of mutual love, " Little
children, love one another." 2 Finally, we hear
how he was persuaded, not without a divine
revelation, to commit his Gospel to writing,
partly intending to supplement the other Gospels
already existing and known, and so wrote the
" spiritual Gospel," as Clement calls it ; and
thus, having survived even to the time of
Trajan, i.e. A.D. 97, when he must have been
about ninety years old, he fell asleep at Ephesus.
The chronology of this account of St. John s

1 See below, p. 114.

2 This tradition is not heard of till the fourth century.

Introduction

later activity presents difficulties. It seems
to crowd too much into the very last years.
Tradition, we must remember, is hardly ever
accurate even when it is substantially true.
But, as a whole, it comes on a basis of second-
century consent, along manifold lines, which
would almost seem indisputable.

Am I not right in saying that if this singularly
well-authenticated account of the origin of the
Fourth Gospel is true, it, and the accompanying
First Epistle, do realize wonderfully the ideal
of an old man who devotes himself at the last
to writing what shall summarize in the most
effective form the experience and meditation
of a lifetime ? The Gospel enshrines the aged
disciple s memory of his Master, doubtless often
put into words, but only now at last into writing,
for the express purpose of succouring the faith.
of the Church already distressed by currents
of subversive opinion. The Epistle, which
is a sort of commentary on some of the leading
ideas of the Gospel, brings out into emphasis
the slowly matured fruit of his long experience
and deep and constant reflection about human
life and its fellowship with the divine in the
light of the Incarnation. Truly, so regarded,

8 St. John s Epistles

the Epistle which we are to seek to study
remains among the most priceless of human
testimonies.

2

But the value of the witness of our Epistle
depends greatly, indeed in its distinctive quality
wholly, upon the substantial truth of the
tradition of its origin.

Assuredly the idea of the true life for man
which is here unfolded the life lived in the
light, utterly unworldly, of unselfish fellowship
and pure self-control does, if we set ourselves
to study it, set our heart aglow quite without
reference to the author of it. It is so human
and simple, yet so rich and satisfying. If men
in general would adopt it and live by it, there
is no question that it would remedy the diseases
of society. Short of this there is no doubt that
if there were everywhere in evidence a Christian
church, really organized to live the life, even
though it were everywhere a small minority,
it would have, as the early Christian church had
in the heathen world, an infinite force and
attractiveness. In the midst of a world per-

Introduction 9

meated by obscuring and corrupting influences,
it would stand as " a city set on a hill " and as
" salt " which had not lost its savour. Again,
short of this, there can be no doubt that every
individual who makes this idea of what a man s
life can be his own and faithfully lives by it,
becomes among his fellows a sort of rock amidst
shifting sands. But St. John is not merely
promulgating an idea, like a philosopher, he is
asserting a fact. And there is the rub.

This ideal of human life contradicts the selfish
and sensual assumptions on which human life
is generally based. St. John certainly does
not conceal this. But then is it natural ? and
Low is it to be made possible ? Here comes
in the point of his witness.

St. John s fundamental assurance is that the
life which he would have men live is in the
deepest sense natural and true that is in
accordance with fundamental reality because
it is fellowship with the eternal and only enduring
life and being, which is the basis of our own,
the life and being of God. And he and his
fellows have, he claims, through their special
experience, been allowed to receive indisputable
assurance of this. For they had experience in

10 St. John s Epistles

Jesus of Nazareth of the perfect human life,
and on indisputable evidence, as it seemed to
them, were led almost forced to believe that
what was exhibited before their eyes in a man s
life was nothing else than the eternal life of
God manifested to men that Jesus Christ was
the only-begotten Son of God, Himself incarnate
God. Thus what has been proved to be in
accordance with the will and being of God
must be both possible and natural.

There have been in other generations and
there are in our own agnostics and even atheists
who have summoned men to live the true and
noble life, though they see in vast nature no
signs of moral sympathy and no good evidence
of a God of love and righteousness, but only
of a world-force which, if not brutal, is un
conscious and therefore indifferent. And we
must be thankful that they are so noble and so
defiant of nature. It is magnificent, but it is,
after all, an irrational nobility, a splendid fana
ticism. For of what use can it be for a tiny
portion of the universe to raise the standard of
rebellion against a vast whole which must
infallibly swallow up and absorb our puny race
with its strangely-kindled aspirations ?

Introduction 11

If the highest life is to have rational ground
or hope or goal, there must be behind it something
eternal, something which belongs to the whole
of which we form a part an " Eternal not
ourselves making for righteousness " and love
with which we can co-operate. Man can live
the good life with good hope only if God is good,
and, because God is God, good must be the
final goal of all. That is St. John s conviction,
and he can base it on nothing but revelation
God s own self-disclosure.

We need not exaggerate the gloom of nature.
The European philosophers who apart from
any question of revelation have set their whole
mind and devoted their whole life to investigate
reality, from Plato and Aristotle and Plotinus
down to our own time, have in great measure,
and by a great majority, and in the greatest
instances, found themselves either authorized
or constrained to declare that goodness the
idea or force of good is at the heart of the
universe. And the plain man cannot give up
the hope. Nevertheless, the doctrine of the
philosophers has been full of hesitations and
qualifications and contradictions, and has never
succeeded in convincing the plain man, who

12 St. John s Epistles

for his part remains bewildered. After all,
Nature is a sphinx. A confession of ignorance
or doubt about the character of the world-force
seems to be the most justifiable attitude. Nor
in our day can we flee for refuge to a conclusion
which in earlier ages has sometimes seemed to
men satisfactory the conclusion that there
are two principles in the universe, a good and a
bad, in perpetual conflict, and that nature and
human nature have fellowship with both. For
now we know this at least, that nature is a
closely-knit unity, and the force which operates
there is one only one God, if God it can be
called. Then the question recurs of what sort
is this force or God ? What is its mind and
purpose for man and the world, if mind or purpose
it have at all ?

Surely if there be, or may be, a God, and if the
rational mind and conscience of man is capable
of fellowship with Him from whom it came,
it is natural that He should disclose Himself,
not, of course, in contradiction of nature which
is His creation, nor of what the brooding mind
of man has, on the whole, been able to discover
from nature, for our reason is His, but by way
of increase of light and confirmation of assur-

Introduction 13

ance. Surely in man s moral conscience, where
he feels that he gets nearest to God, God does
everywhere in varying degrees of clearness
reveal Himself, not by way of argument, but as
a voice from above or from the beyond, guiding,
threatening, and cheering. Why should not this
self -disclosure of God have gone further ?
. At this point we must recognize that the
essence of the Jewish witness was that this
self-disclosure of God is a fact. Over hundreds
of years prophets had appeared amongst them
who, not in virtue of any conclusions which
they had reached by reasoning, but because
they had actually heard, in whatever way, the
voice of God, proclaimed as "the word of Je
hovah " His righteous will for His people, His
tremendous justice, and His unalterable goodness.
Jehovah called " The LORD " in our Bible
was Israel s God, but more and more clearly
had it been proclaimed that He was the one
and only God, the creator and sustainer and
ruler of all that is. Thus it was that the
prophets of Israel became, what in a memorable
phrase Athanasius calls them, " the sacred
school of the knowledge of God and the spiritual
life for all mankind/

14 St. John s Epistles

Now we must recognize that almost every
good thing which has diffused itself upon this
planet has arisen or been discovered in one
spot and has thence spread in a widening area.
Why then, we ask, should not the Jews have
been in the matter of religion what the Romans
were in the matter of government or law, and
the Greeks in art and intellect not indeed its
sole source, but the source of it in its highest
quality, greatest authority, and freest adapt
ability ? And I think any one who reads the
sequence of Jewish prophets ruthlessly leaving
out what he finds too obscure to understand,
which is generally of secondary importance
will receive a profound impression : will be
deeply disposed to believe that they really spoke,
as they believed themselves to speak, the word
of the Lord.

" St. John," as we perceive in his Gospel, is
full of the Jewish faith in the prophetic scriptures.
He knows that salvation was of the Jews. And
there is no doubt that He of whom St. John
wrote assumed the teaching of the Jewish
prophets as the background and basis of all
He taught about God. It is of great importance
to recognize this. But in his Epistle John

Introduction 15

makes almost no reference to the Old Testament.
His mind is concentrated on Him in whom the
old prophetic succession is fulfilled in whom
His disciples recognized One greater than the
prophets in whom they came to believe as
the eternal Son of God incarnate. The meaning
of this conviction in its bearings on human life
is expounded in our Epistle, but its grounds
are recorded in the Gospel, in both books by
one who claims to be an eye-witness. Was he
an eye-witness of what he relates ? Did these
things really happen ? And was the " beloved
disciple " of the Fourth Gospel really John the
son of Zebedee ? The value of our author s
teaching about human life and its possibilities
he makes to depend, and it does really depend,
upon the trustworthiness of his claim to report
truly about Jesus of Nazareth.

This, then, is the question : Can we rely upon
it that when the writer of our Epistle speaks of
what he and his associates have " heard," " seen
with their eyes," :( beheld," and " handled with
their hands," when he asserts that what he

16 St. John s Epistles

declares to us is what they in common have
" seen and heard/ 1 he is referring to a real
objective experience and that he is speaking the
truth ? Or, again, when he speaks of the
mission of the Son of God as something which
" we have seen " and of which consequently
we can " bear witness " ? 2 And, granted that
the Epistle proceeds from the same author as
the Fourth Gospel, can we assume not only
that the experience on which he bases his teaching
is the experience related in that Gospel, but
that he really relates things as they occurred ?
And, finally, can we suppose that " the beloved
disciple " who records or professes to record
his experience so particularly 5 was John the
disciple and apostle of Jesus Christ, the son
of Zebedee, as the Church has always supposed ?
Now, with regard to all these questions there
has been infinite discussion of late years and
infinite confusion in the world of criticism.
Books advocating almost every conceivable
view have poured and are pouring from the
press. In literary Germany the traditional
view of St. John s authorship has almost passed

1 1 John i. 1-3. 2 iv. 14.

3 John xix. 35, xx. 30-1, xxi. 24.

Introduction 17

out of sight, except for the one name of Theodor
Zahn. And though that is not at all the case
in England for Sanday, Armitage Robinson,
Salmond, Strong, Chase, Richmond, Ramsay,
Drummond, Holland, and others among our best
living or quite recent scholars, assure us that
the traditional view is tenable and indeed the
most reasonable view yet the critical world
is greatly divided and the problem is often
regarded as, if not insoluble, yet far from so
lution. Plainly then, though I am not writing
for scholars, I must say something about it,
and this is not an easy task on a subject so
blackened with controversy, and when those
for whom I am writing cannot, in most cases,
go thoroughly into it.

I would say, then, by way of preliminary,
that you must not attribute any final authority
to the critical fashions of the day. During the
last fifty years a student has seen many " ac
cepted results " of criticism pass out of vogue.
Modern historical criticism is a real science,
to which we owe the greatest additions to our
knowledge of what the past history of mankind
has really been. It is not too much to say that
it has opened to us a new world, or many new

18 St. John s Epistles

worlds. But you reach a point, and sometimes
it is soon reached, where what can be strictly
called historical science passes into conjecture
and into the region where presuppositions and
prejudices have free play for lack of positive
evidence. Indeed, there is no history without
presuppositions. But the main stream of Ger
man criticism, which has been the basis of
English criticism, has been " rationalistic " ;
and this means broadly that, for whatever
reasons, it refuses to admit as credible the real
incarnation of the Son of God in the sole person
of Jesus Christ, or the reality of such " nature
miracles " as our Lord s birth of a virgin
mother, or the resurrection of His body from
the tomb, or such miracles as are ascribed in
the Fourth Gospel with so much precise detail
to our Lord the turning of the water into
wine, the feeding of the five thousand, and the
raising of Lazarus. Obviously, if it is from the
start taken as incredible that these things can
have happened, something, even though it be
something violent, must be done to dispose of
the Fourth Gospel as authentic history. I do
not say that there would have been no critical
problem, apart from these prejudices, con-

Introduction 19

cerning the Fourth Gospel very far from it.
But that the criticism of the last fifty years has,
on the whole, had these prejudices among their
main motives cannot be denied. Let me quote
one of the sanest and wisest of the critics, to
whom I am going to refer you again, the Uni
tarian scholar Dr. Drummond, who is main
taining the (to me) impossible thesis that the
author of the Fourth Gospel did not really
mean or pretend to be writing literal history,
and among his grounds sets this " I must
frankly add that, on general grounds affecting
the whole question of the miraculous, I am
unable to believe that such miracles as the
turning of water into wine and the raising of
Lazarus were really performed." Now, I am
writing in the main for those who are without
such an invincible prejudice. I hope the bulk
of my readers are those who find it credible
that, in a world such as ours is known in
experience to be, God, if really there be a good
and just God, should have taken action for the
redemption of the world, and that this redemp
tion, after long preparation, should have been

1 Dr. James Drummond, Character and Authorship of the
Fourth Gospel (Williams & Ncrgate, 1903), p. 426.

3

20 St. John s Epistles

finally effected by God Himself entering into our
human life by an incarnation in the person of
Jesus Christ, and that such a person, embodying
as He did the life-giving will of the Creator
for the purposes of recreation, should have
been the occasion for divine " powers " to work
upon Him and through Him as much above
the normal as must have been God s original
acts of creation. If we find this credible, still
we should not be credulous. We should not
rush into believing anything that is told us ; but
we should be ready to accept evidence, the whole
body of evidence, moral and material. It is
this real openness of mind that is asked of us,
and it is this openness of mind that those for
whom rationalistic criticism is the last word
of wisdom do not possess.

At the same time I am most anxious that we
should not disparage or ignore historical criticism,
as applied to the Bible ; and that we should not
take refuge in a supposed infallibility in the
authority or judgment of the Church in matters
of authorship. Historical criticism, where it
really remains open-minded, is capable of
correcting many mistakes in tradition. Many
of the greatest leaders in this new science have

Introduction 21

been men totally free from rationalism and full
of real reason. They have, in my judgment,
fairly disproved many traditional authorships
in the Old Testament, not only without loss to
the faith, but with the result that we have a
far more spiritually useful view of the Old
Testament literature. And for my own part,
seeing no ground for believing that the Church
was gifted with infallibility in its critical judg
ments, I am disposed to admit that a letter
" the second Epistle of Peter " professing to be
by an apostolic eye-witness, 1 was probably in
fact written under his name by a much later
author. Here the case is very different from
the case of the Gospel of St. John. Of the
latter " there was never any doubt in the
Church." It was one of the agreed-upon Gospels,
which the second-century Church regarded as
the indisputable pillars of its spiritual world.
Its authority as the authentic work of St. John
rests upon the strongest grounds of external
and internal evidence, as I shall go on to help
you to discover for yourselves. The second
Epistle of Peter, by contrast, can claim only
the weakest external evidence, and the internal

1 2 Peter i. 16, 18,

22 St. John s Epistles

evidence is most ambiguous. After its appear
ance to sight, late in the second century, it was
rejected in part of the Church and seriously
doubted by some of the most influential writers
who had to do with the formation of the Canon
of the New Testament, by Origen and Eusebius,
and such serious doubts are recorded by Jerome.
It finally only got into the Canon " by the skin
of its teeth/ if I may so express it. Neverthe
less, it did get in, and, if our suspicions are
justified, the Church made a mistake in the
matter of authorship. For it would never have
got into the Canon except as believed to be by
St. Peter. 1 Thus, in approaching the question
of the Fourth Gospel, we should approach it
with a really open mind, remembering also the
debt under which really open-minded criticism
has recently laid us in the vindication of our
New Testament documents. Has it not recently
given us overwhelming assurance that our
second and third Gospels and the Acts of the
Apostles were really written by the men, John

1 It is important to recognize that admission to the Canon was
a judgment on authenticity or apostolic authorship, not a
judgment on spiritual value. Thus Eusebius assumes that if
the Apocalypse was not by John the Apostle but by another
John, it would fall out of the Canon, as a matter of course.

Introduction 23

Mark and Luke the physician, who had the
best possible opportunities for collecting the
most authentic information ? Has it not vin
dicated the simple claims of St. Luke s preface ?
If " St. John s Gospel " were proved false to
history and no work of St. John, still the true
figure of Jesus would remain, as it were, photo
graphed in the other Gospels ; still we should
know how He spoke and much of what He
spoke ; and still the conclusion, based in the
minds of the Twelve upon the experience there
recorded, would remain as it stands in the
Epistles of St. Paul and St. Peter. And still,
to take one step further, the Catholic Creeds
would stand justified by these Gospels and
Epistles. I do not say that the loss of St. John s
special testimony would not be a portentous
loss ; but it would not be destructive of the
whole fabric. Nevertheless, I am persuaded
that no such sacrifice will be required of us by
the evidence.

Plainly I cannot attempt to argue the question
here. That would require a whole volume,
and belongs more properly to a commentary
on the Gospel. All that I can do is (1) to seek
to advise my readers how to proceed, if they

24 St. John s Epistles

want to instruct themselves in the evidence ;
(2) to state the conclusions to which I have
been led myself.

(1) As to authors to be consulted, I would
advise a would-be student, who has only a
moderate amount of leisure to give to such
matters, to read Dr. Drummond s book already
referred to. 1 Dr. Drummond cannot believe
that the Fourth Gospel can be historical in many
of its main features, and he cannot believe the
full doctrine of Christ s person, which that Gospel
not only asserts but asserts on the authority of
Christ Himself. Thus, so far as he has natural
prejudices, they would be obviously against
attributing the Gospel to St. John. Neverthe
less he is a profoundly honest and candid as
well as learned man, and after a careful review
of all the evidence, and a careful examination
of all rival theories, he concludes his book thus :
" I give my own judgment in favour of the
Johannine authorship/ And it is worth noting
that in the course of his argument he says of
" those who see in the Gospel nothing but pure
history " (I think he should have said " those

1 CJiaracter and Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (Williams &
Norgate, 1903).

Introduction 25

who are prepared to accept the Gospel, including
its miracles, as historical "), " I do not wonder
that they look upon the Johannine authorship
as irrefragably established." l I think, in fact,
that Dr. Drummond underrates the evidence
in part, and I do not think he overrates it any
where ; and I have recommended the study
of his book because the bias of partiality in
favour of tradition cannot be ascribed to him.
Next I would recommend the study of Mr.
Wilfrid Richmond s Gospel of the Rejection. 1
The most real obstacle to the acceptance of the
traditional account of the Fourth Gospel lies, no
doubt, in the differences both in respect of the
story of our Lord s ministry and of the tone of
our Lord s discourses between the Fourth Gospel
and the Synoptics. This difficulty has presented
itself to me again and again as very grave,
though examination in detail always reduces
the difficulty to very much smaller proportions.
It is dealt with very ably and in part satisfac
torily by Dr. Drummond. But I do not think
that there is any book which is more illuminating
on the relation of the Fourth Gospel to the other
three than Mr. Richmond s, which has not, I

1 p. 426. a John Murray, 1900.

26 St. John s Epistles

think, received nearly enough attention ; and
it is written so as to need no student s apparatus
in order to be able to read it intelligently.

Then, for an example of thorough-going
scepticism as to the traditional accounts of the
Gospel, I would say, read Dr. Latimer Jackson s
Problem of the Fourth Gospel, 1 It is no doubt
an able specimen of the kind of destructive
criticism which will accept nothing unless it is
demonstrated, and can suggest possible doubts
as to the strongest pieces of evidence. My own
feeling after a careful reading of the book was
that it represents an even grotesque exaggeration
of the merely critical spirit the capacity for
pulling anything to pieces and that it is desti
tute of the gift of constructive imagination so
necessary for an historian. It ranks, to my
mind, with the writings of some, on the other
extreme flank of the army of historians, who
defend ecclesiastical tradition at all costs. That
is to say, it is among the books which produce
on the mind of any one who believes that
good historical evidence ought to be accepted,
though it can never be strictly demonstrative,
the opposite impression to that intended.

1 Cambridge Univ. Press, 1918.

Introduction 27

(2) Now I am going to give the conclusions
about the authorship and character of the
Fourth Gospel and the Epistle to which I have
been led myself.

(a) I cannot entertain any doubt that the
Epistle is by the same author as the Gospel.
The late Professor James Hope Moulton (and
there is no better authority) says of all three
Epistles, " No one with the faintest instinct
of style would detach them from the Gospel." l
I think the most reasonable view is that the first
Epistle was written immediately after the Gospel
or a sort of commentary on it. About the
second and third Epistles I will speak when
we come to them.

(b) Equally I cannot doubt that the Gospel
is of one piece. (Of course I except the narrative
of the woman taken in adultery, which does
not seem to belong to this Gospel, though, from
internal evidence, I think it may be regarded
as certainly historical.) I hold with Dr.
Gardner that " The whole book is of uniform
character and is the literary creation of a single
author, including the last chapter, which is of

1 Peake s Commentary on the Bible (Jacks, 1919) : " The
Language of the N.T.," p. 592.

28 St. John s Epistles

the nature of a supplement." l The unity of
this Gospel seems to me to be as self-evident
as the unity shall I say ? of the Epistle to
the Galatians. It is not the work of an editor
working upon sources, but the original work of
a man inspired by one declared purpose to
confirm faith in Jesus as the Son of God * who
believed himself (or represented himself as so
believing) that he had within his own memory
the materials for his narrative and needed
nothing else.

When he issued the completed book he was
surrounded by a circle of friends (xxi. 24). So
also he is represented to us in the traditions.
And we need not exclude the idea that if one of
them was a better Greek scholar than the author
he may have corrected the Greek. Dictation

1 Dr. Percy Gardner, Ephesian Gospel, p. 53.

2 John xx. 31.

3 This hypothesis has been suggested in view of the strong
evidence that John the Apostle was the author of the Apocalypse.
How then, it is said, can he have written both works ? In the
Apocalypse the author writes at times a strangely ungrammatical
Greek. " He writes Greek, as the Duke of Wellington spoke
French, with a great deal of courage " and force but with great
inaccuracy. On the other hand, the Gospel and Epistle are in
quite accurate Greek. At the same time the Greek of the
Gospel and Epistle is totally lacking in the Greek spirit. And
if the Apocalypse had been merely revised and corrected without

Introduction 29

to shorthand writers and mere verbal repro
duction of what was dictated was a common
practice of the Empire. But there is reason to
believe that the scribes often did a good deal
more than mere transcription.

(c) The author intends, with the utmost
human intensity, to convey the impression that
the Gospel is true history. He begins his
Epistle by stressing the evidence of eye and ear
and hand on which his message is based. It
is from what he beheld in the human person,
Jesus of Nazareth, that he reached the belief
that He was more than human. And it seems
to me that there is no possibility of mistaking
the intense consciousness of the Evangelist that
he is recording what he himself saw and heard.
This impression is conveyed by particular state
ments : " We beheld his glory " 1 ; He " mani
fested " it at Cana " and his disciples believed
on him." 2 After His resurrection the disciples
" remembered " 3 something that Jesus had
actually said. At the death upon the cross,
the author was an eye-witness : " He that hath

substantial alteration by some one better instructed in Greek
grammar, it would present a style not different from that of
the Gospel and Epistle.

1 John i. 14. 2 ii. 11. 3 ii. 22.

30 St. John s Epistles

seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true." 1
And the circle of his friends at the end of the
appendix the cap. xxi. add their testimony :
This is the disciple which beareth witness of
these things, and wrote these things : and we
know that his witness is true." 2

Moreover, the writer s mind is to represent
other men as well as himself as coming to their
belief in Jesus by what they themselves saw and
heard. So John the Baptist (i. 34) ; so Philip
would have it be with Nathanael (i. 46) ; so
was it with the multitude in Jerusalem (ii. 23)
and with the people of Sychar (iv. 42). So
Jesus is represented as restoring in His disciples
an impression long ago received, not by any
words but by going Himself back to the scene
of their original experience, that they might
come to find Him there and that the place
might by its associations revive the impression
(x.40-1).

Some of these expressions could easily be
attributed to the skilful literary artist who was
representing himself as an eye-witness, without
having really been so. And writers in many
ages have, for literary purposes, assumed such

1 John xix. 35. 2 xxi. 24.

Introduction 31

a character without any intention to deceive.
Moreover, the early Christian centuries produced
many " pseudonymous " books books, that
is, written in the name of some well-known
man, as a literary device, and perhaps some of
them (but not all) without any intention to
deceive. But just as we can more or less
certainly distinguish among paintings pro
fessing to be portraits of real persons those
which are mere efforts of imagination and those
which (though we do not know the features of
the person represented) are obviously, as we say,
" the real living man," so I think it is, again
more or less, in literature. True, there have
been certain supreme geniuses in imaginative
biography or history. But certainly such a
genius is not likely to have arisen in the first
two centuries. The disguise in the existing
efforts of this kind belonging to this period is
confessedly very thin. 1 On the other hand, the
Fourth Gospel conveys, as intensely as any

1 " Pseudo-epigraphical composition," says Dr. Burkitt,
" among Jews and Christians had its own rules. Not, of course,
that the authors tried to make the hero of old times prophesy or
write in accordance with real historical verisimilitude : that would
indeed be a literary anachronism." J. T. S. vol. xiii. No. 51,
p, 374, (The italics are mine.)

32 St. John s Epistles

record of experience can convey it, the impression
of a man whose senses were extraordinarily
keen ; who was moulded by what he saw ; who
drew his conclusions from his experiences ; who
gives an astonishingly vivid impression both of
what he saw and heard and of what observations
were made upon it by others. All the way
through the narrative I at least receive an
irresistible impression that this is the record
of an eye-witness. Thus when Dr. Drummond,
who cannot on general grounds believe that
Jesus really raised Lazarus from the dead,
suggests that the author did not seriously
intend to represent it as an actual historical
occurrence, but only to embody a spiritual
impression in such a guise, 1 I believe he is as
wrong as it is possible to be. The author of the
Fourth Gospel meant, with all the intensity of
his nature, to convey an impression of what
had actually occurred. This is certain, it seems
to me, on literary grounds. But for myself I
confess, as I have said, that I cannot resist

1 " If it be designed to set forth in a vivid and picturesque form
the truth that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, and by His
commanding spiritual authority raised the dead from the grave
of moral corruption and released them from the stifling grasp of
Pharisaic teaching, then history returns in a new guise." p. 64.

Introduction 33

the impression that he not only meant this, but
was justified in meaning it that he had actually
seen what he describes.

I must make a distinction, however, as truth
compels me to do, between the incidents and the
speeches. I believe St. John gives us wonderfully
vivid memorials of what he had seen ; and,
substantially, in the discourses of the Fourth
Gospel, a truthful account of the claim and
teaching of Jesus in Jerusalem and in conflict
with the Jewish leaders. In each discourse we
seem to discern actual phrases of Jesus so that it
is essential that we should add the testimony of
these discourses to that of the Synoptic Gospels,
if we are to get a fairly full conception of His
teaching. Thus I cannot doubt that assertions
by our Lord of His own pre-existence, such as
are contained in the discourses of the Fourth
Gospel, were really made. Indeed, pre-existence
is inseparable from the claim of divine sonship
as represented in the Synoptics. 1 Also I cannot

1 Matt. xi. 27, xxi. 36-7, xxiv. 36 (R.V.), xxvi. 63, and xxviii.
18, with parallel passages in St. Mark and St. Luke. Those
passages imply a superhuman personality which can hardly be
thought of as coming into existence by a human birth. They
suggest something which belongs of right to the being of God
and has come or been sent into this world.

34 St. John s Epistles

doubt that our Lord did really speak of Himself
as the Bread of Life and of our eating His flesh
and drinking His blood, and did really announce
the mission of the Holy Spirit and speak of His
future function, as is recorded in different parts
of the Fourth Gospel. I do not think that the
unhesitating beliefs of the apostolic Church could
have been what they were without such teach
ing on the part of the Master Himself. Thus I
believe the promise of xiv. 26 that the Holy
Spirit would quicken the memory of the Twelve
and make it faithful to have been really given
and really fulfilled.

But this concerns the substance of the dis
courses. As regards their form I cannot resist
the impression that the manner and method of
Jesus in teaching is more accurately represented
in the Synoptics ; and that it is in the discourses
of the Fourth Gospel constantly difficult to
distinguish between the original speech of Jesus
and the form which that utterance had gradually
taken in the apostle s mind. Memory and
meditation, we feel, have both combined to
produce the result. Psychologically we should
judge the apostle to have been a man upon
whom visual and tactile experience made an

Introduction 35

impression which survived distinct and un
modified ; but the impressions made through
the ear by what he heard from the great Teacher
were fused with his later meditations, so that
though you can be sure the germ or main sub
stance of the discourse is truly to be ascribed
to Jesus, you cannot say the same of its form.
But as to the relation of the Fourth Gospel to
the other three, both in respect of incident and
discourse, I must be content to refer my readers,
if they will pursue the subject, to Mr. Kichmond s
book and to Dr. Drummond s.

(d) Now I want to pass for a moment from
the mind of the author of the Fourth Gospel to
that of the Church which received it. The
second century and the third produced a crop
of legendary Gospels and Acts of Apostles which
had considerable vogue. And the intention of
the Church, which resulted in the establishment
of the unique authority of the four Gospels
before the middle of the second century, was
to distinguish from all spurious productions the
genuine writings of the apostles and their com
panions. They would not have intentionally
accepted a pseudonymous work, however edify
ing. There is an apocryphal book called the
4

36 St. John s Epistles

Acts of Paul and Thecla, which Sir William
Ramsay and other scholars believe to contain
some important element of true history ; and
this writing, or some writing on which it is
based, was in vogue at the end of the second
century. Thus it is instructive to notice that
Tertullian discusses and refuses to accept a
certain writing " falsely ascribed to Paul "
which made mention of this Thecla, for he would
have those who quote this authority know
" that a presbyter in Asia who composed that
writing, adding it out of his own to the list of
Paul s, was convicted of his act, and, having
confessed that he did it for love of Paul, was
deposed from his office." l This, which is quite
incidentally mentioned, shows the attitude which
the Church took towards :c pseudonymous "
compositions. 2

Again, it is really monstrous to suggest, as is
frequently done, by critics who surely ought to
know better, that when the Alexandrian Clement
calls St. John s Gospel the distinctively spiritual "
one (by contrast to the others, which were held

1 De baptismo, 17.

2 It is fair to admit that this particular composition was not
only pseudonymous but also contrary to the discipline of the
Church,

Introduction 37

to give the "bodily" things 1 ) he means that
St. John s Gospel is only intended as allegory
and not history. I say this is monstrous
because, on the one hand, Clement s words
admit of another perfectly natural interpreta
tion, viz. that the Synoptics are simply concerned
to record things as they were seen and heard,
and St. John is constantly occupied in supplying
an interpretation the spiritual meaning of the
things ; and, on the other hand, if Clement
does not explain himself, his greater and more
famous successor at Alexandria, Origen, does
so, with great elaboration. He, as is well
known, thinks that though the bulk of what is
written in the Bible as history is real history,
and the bulk of its precepts intended to be
literally obeyed, yet this is not the case with all
that is to be found there. There are things
there related as history or prescribed as duties
which cannot have really occurred or be intended
to be practised literally, both in the Old Testa
ment and in the New including the Gospels.
These are inserted in order that their falsity,
according to the letter, being manifest, may
stimulate our minds to rise to the spiritual or

1 Clem. ap. Euseb. E. H. vi. 14.

38 St. John s Epistles

allegorical meaning of the Scriptures, of which
the Alexandrians made so much. He thus
believes that there are in the Bible historical-
sounding narratives which are not historically
true, but are allegorical. But he expressly
would have us exclude from this category of
" pure spirituals " (as he calls them) " the things
written concerning the Saviour/ That no
one." he writes, " may suppose us to make the
general assertion that there is no true history
because some of it is not so ; or no legislation
which is to be literally observed because there
is some which literally is absurd or impossible ;
or that the things written concerning the Saviour
are not true in respect of the outward facts ;
or that his legislation is in no part to be literally
observed (to avoid such a misconception) be it
said that it is clearly present to our minds that
there is (in the Bible) true history ; . . . for
there are, in fact, many more things which are
historically true than those purely spiritual
which are interwoven." l Then he goes on to
quote the precepts of the ten commandments,
etc., as intended to be literally observed. And

1 From De Principiis, iv., quoted at length in the Philocalia.
See Robinson s edit. (Camb, Press, 1893), p. 27.

Introduction 39

in another place lie says that certain things in
the Gospels " have a spiritual meaning, though
the historical truth of them must be first assumed
to remain "-as, for example, our Lord s healings,
which actually happened and have a spiritual
meaning, or His raisings of the dead to life. He
both did at a certain time miracles of this kind,
as in raising Lazarus and others, and he also
continually does it spiritually. 1 On the whole,
I believe the truth to be that though spiritual
romances were popular (and Clement was fond
of quoting them), yet the Church generally
sedulously sought to distinguish genuine from
spurious, and attached the greatest importance
to questions of apostolic authorship ; and would
not not even the Alexandrians who carried
allegorical interpretation to such an excess
have tolerated the idea of Gospels which were
not true in fact.

(e) I find the evidence supplied by the Gospel
itself such as ought to convince us that it must
have been written (and, therefore, the Epistle

1 See fragment of Origen on the Epistle to the Galatians in
Rufinus s version (Lommatzsch), vol. vi. p. 269. On these passages
and the current misunderstanding of the mind of the Alexandrians
I have written an appended note : see at the end of this volume,
p. 236.

40 St. John s Epistles

also) by a Palestinian Jew, thoroughly ac
quainted with the whole district and with
Jerusalem, thoroughly at home, moreover, in
the situation which was utterly and irrecoverably
overthrown by the destruction of Jerusalem
and its temple in A.D. 70 ; further, that it must
have been really written by one of the most
intimate circle of the disciples, and that John
the son of Zebedee is, without being named,
clearly indicated as the " disciple whom Jesus
loved." I think the old argument of Godet
and Westcott to this effect remains untouched
in substance.

(/) I find the external evidence, however
often I review it, pointing to John the Apostle
as the author of the Gospel, almost overwhelm
ing. I do not think the fabric of Lightfoot s
argument has been the least overthrown. 1 I
feel myself, therefore, constrained none the
less really because gladly to accept the con
clusion that the tradition is true.

But there is one qualification which I wish to
make. A few scholars who believe that the Gospel

1 On the silence of Ignatius I should wish to call attention to
Mr. Bardsley s argument in J. T. 8. vol. xiv. No. 54, p. 207,
and No. 56, p. 489.

Introduction 41

records a real experience of "the beloved disciple "
who wrote it, are attracted by the tradition of
there having been two Johns, one the apostle
the son of Zebedee, and another called John the
Presbyter. This latter John is a most shadowy
figure. I am tempted to doubt his having
really existed. 1 But these scholars are disposed
to identify with him the disciple who wrote
the Fourth Gospel. They think he may have
been originally (what the author of this Gospel,
in their judgement, must have been) a Jew of
good position in Jerusalem possibly the rich
young ruler who was offended by the stern
counsel of Jesus, but whom Jesus is said
to have " loved " (Mark x. 21) ; they suppose
him to have been among the early disciples,
and to have returned to allegiance after his
temporary alienation. They think he may
have been the host at the last supper, and
so have occupied the position there ascribed to
him in the Gospel, and have passed into the
innermost circle of the disciples, so that he
could write the Fourth Gospel as a true record
of the experience in which he had shared.

1 See Dom Chapman s John the Presbyter (Clarendon Press,
1911).

42 St. John s Epistles

Then they accept a late statement made on
early authority l (but as it seems to me certainly
under a misunderstanding) that John the son
of Zebedee was, like his brother, slain by the
Jews. And they think that the other John,
the beloved disciple, passed into his place in
tradition, and did and suffered all that is re
corded of the apostle at Ephesus, and wrote the
Johannine books. 2

This opinion seems to me highly improbable
from more than one point of view. I find it
difficult even to treat it seriously. But it gives
us for our Gospel an author who had the experi
ence and knowledge and intimacy which the
Gospel implies, and for our Epistle an author who
could truly speak, as John the son of Zebedee
could have spoken, of what he had seen and
heard and gazed upon and touched, as the basis
for the great conclusion which he there, in a
measure, develops. Thus I wish to make men
tion of this theory of the authorship and to
recognize that for our purposes it would suffice :

1 On the ascription of this statement to Papias see Arm.
Robinson, Historical Character of St. John s Gospel (Longmans),
pp. 64 ff., who deals with the matter admirably.

2 Dr. Swete suggested before his death such a view as the
above. See J. T. 8. xvii. pp. 371 ff.

Introduction 43

it would make the Gospel a true record of a
real experience and justify the claim of our
Epistle.

Nevertheless I affirm the authorship of St.
John the Apostle ; and I should like to add
that, after all these years of discussion from
every point of view, I think the subject is ripe
for decision.

4

There are only two further points which have
to be touched upon in this introduction the
first is the character of St. John s mysticism,
and the second is his claim to be called a philo
sopher. And first as to his mysticism.

(1) By the term "mystics" we describe a
class of thinkers who have three special char
acteristics first, that they are not content
with a surface view of the world or with its
external aspect, but (in Wordsworth s phrase)
" see into the life of things " ; secondly, that
they have an intensely vivid perception of the
unity of all things in God they see God in all
things and all things in God, and find in com
munion with God, aimed at and in part realized
here and now, the chief occupation of their

44 St. John s Epistles

lives ; thirdly, that their method of arriving at
truth is not the method of argument or discursive
reasoning, but the method of intuition : they
do not arrive at truth by critical inquiry or an
tagonism to error, but by a sort of positive vision
or feeling. Now St. John has all those charac
teristics to an intense degree. He is thus in
tensely mystical. But the experiences on which
many mystics have depended have been private
experiences of their own inward consciousness,
or visions which have been shown only to their
inward spiritual eye. It is this which has
made their affirmations so often unconvincing
to other men not endowed with like gifts, and
even fantastic or unmeaning. But St. John s
method is exactly the opposite. He had de
pended upon external historical experiences to
quicken and nourish his soul. He had lived
by facts, been taught by facts, moulded by
facts. His idealism is the fruit of his external
experiences. If this is not the case, then he
must be pronounced wholly ignorant of himself,
and that, as it seems to me, no one who can
study and appreciate the Gospel or the Epistle
ought to be able to believe.
Thus the " mysticism " of St, John would be

Introduction 45

rightly set in opposition to any method of
presenting religion which is mainly logical or
argumentative, or to any presentation of it
which is mainly concerned with visible institu
tions or rites and ceremonies to what we may
call " externalism." But it is in no way opposed
to the emphasis on historical facts. Nay, no
one could emphasize them more than St. John
does ; nor, I may add, is it anyway opposed to
sacramentalism, that is to say, the system
which sees the principle of the Incarnation
the communication of the divine through what
is visible and tangible perpetuated in the
visible Church, with its visible and symbolical
rites as instruments of the divine action. St.
John s mysticism is the sort of mysticism which
requires the historical creeds and which coheres
naturally with the idea and authority of the
Church and the sacraments.

Our " Epistle " which, as I have said, has
few of the characteristics of an epistle, but is
rather a commentary on the ideas of the Gospel,
embodying in infinitely solemn utterances what
St. John believed to be the final outcome of all
his experiences impresses us, like the writings
of all the greatest mystics, alike by its simplicity

46 St. John s Epistles

and its profundity. If these utterances about
God and about human life as momentous as
they are simple are indeed trustworthy and
true, it makes the whole difference to us. They
are to-day just what we want. It is just about
these momentous simplicities that the souls of
men have been startled and harassed with even
agonizing doubts during the horrifying experi
ences of the past years. Nothing could do us
more good to-day than to reflect again on what
such a man as wrote this Epistle found, after
long years of brooding meditation, to be the
final outcome of all his vividly remembered
experiences of the life, teaching, death, and
resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

(2) The other question on which I want to say
a word is the question whether we must rank
the author of the Fourth Gospel and the Epistle
which accompanied it as a philosopher. Eor
it has been a frequent objection to St. John s
authorship of the Fourth Gospel that a man
such as he was, with such slender education,
could never have become such a philosopher
as the author of the Fourth Gospel undoubtedly
was.

Now if by a philosopher we mean simply a man

Introduction 47

who loved truth above all things, who thought
profoundly and who had by his experiences
been provided with adequate matter to think
about, of course he was a philosopher. But if
it is meant that our author must have been
among the academic students of his day, and
must have been acquainted with philosophical
literature, for example, with Philo or with the
unknown contemporary of St. Paul who wrote
at Ephesus under the name of the ancient
philosopher Heraclitus, 1 I would say there is
not the slightest reason to imagine it and every
reason to doubt it. It has become more and
more evident that all the materials for the
prologue to the Fourth Gospel can be found in
the Old Testament language about the word of
God, coupled with the conception of the divine
wisdom in Proverbs and the later Sapiential
books." No doubt there were learned men of

1 On the Letters of Heraclitus see my Exposition of the
Epistle to the Ephesians, p. 253, I name him here simply as an
Ephesian philosopher.

2 " We are moving still further away from the old belief that
the origins of the Fourth Gospel are to be sought in Alexandria
and that every presentation of the doctrine of the Logos must
have passed through the moulding hands of Philo." Reudel
Harris, Odes and Psalms of Solomon (Camb. Press, ed. 2, p.
xiv).

48 St. John s Epistles

the academic type in Judaea in St. John s youth,
and in Ephesus in St. John s old age, but he had
little or no connection with them. The learned
men, first in Judsea and then in the larger
Greek world, showed themselves either violently
opposed to Jesus of Nazareth and His teaching,
or for the most part totally indifferent to
it. And our Lord had shown Himself strangely
indifferent to the alienation of the learned
class in Judaea, and even thankful for it. " In
that same time," writes St. Luke, " He rejoiced
in the Holy Spirit, and said, I thank thee,
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou
didst hide these things from the wise and under
standing, and didst reveal them unto babes ;
yea, Father, for so it was well pleasing in thy
sight." If we begin to think, we can well
understand this thankfulness on our Lord s
part, which at first hearing sounds so strange
and repugnant. For undoubtedly " the wise
and understanding " of the Jewish synagogue
would only have been persuaded to welcome
a religion so conceived and so expressed as to
be profoundly alien both to the mass of mankind
and to the learned Greeks of their own time.
And a religion so conceived and so expressed

Introduction 49

say by St. Paul as to be welcome to the philo
sophic Greeks would never have been homely
enough to be intelligible to the common people.
It would have been, like Stoicism or Platonism,
the religion of a select class. But a catholic
faith must be first of all a faith intelligible to the
common man, directed to common needs and
expressed in common human language. This
is what our Lord intended His religion to be.

But it is most untrue that our Lord was in
different to intellect or thought. No teacher
ever set himself so deliberately to make the
ordinary man think for himself. He was not
willing merely to instruct. He would force
men to think for themselves. This was His
purpose in teaching by parables. Men were to
find in their observations of common things,
by deep thinking about them, the laws and
principles of the kingdom of God. And we may
say that no teacher ever succeeded as our Lord
succeeded in making common men think. The
apostles were scoffed at as unlearned men,
without the training which qualifies men to be
teachers. But out of this original apostolic
circle in which we are not including St. Paul,
who was a more " highly educated " man

50 St. John s Epistles

proceeded some wonderful documents the first
Epistle of St. Peter, the Epistle of St. James,
the Epistles of St. John. These, indeed, are the
writings of men who have asked themselves
the great questions who have been forced up
against the great enigmas and have attained
the great convictions. They had passed through
no learned academy, and had nothing more than
the ordinary man s acquaintance with learned
phraseology. But assuredly they had learned
to think. In particular there is not, in all
history, I venture to say, a greater instance
than St. John s Epistle of a long-continued and
momentous experience moulding a simple and
observant mind, therein stirring great questions
and generating great principles, which, long
revolved and brooded upon, are at last produced,
for the enrichment of mankind, with a simplicity
proportioned to their depth.

Thus there is nothing of the academic philo
sopher in the author of the first Gospel nothing
that is not drawn from the Old Testament
wisdom and the teaching of Jesus Christ and
the experience of common human life. It was
on this basis only that the principles of a catholic
religion must be laid. The wisdom of the

Introduction 51

schools, whether Rabbinic or Greek, was not to be
in the foundations. But when once the founda
tions had been laid and the Church established
on a creed suited to the plain man, a creed of
facts and simply religious ideas, it was to
show its capacity to develop a philosophy and a
theology a task for which all the learning
accessible to the age would be needed. Only
this was not the task of the first generation of
witnesses. Their task was with the everlasting
foundations, with the witness to the facts, and
the message about God and man which can
never be revised, for it only reads out into
common human words what lies plain to ob
servation, when once it is shown us, in the
teaching and life, the death and resurrection
of Jesus Christ.

THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN
i. 1 JOHN i. 1-4

THE WORD OF LIFE

EXPLANATORY ANALYSIS

ST. JOHN strikes the key-note of his Epistle by
declaring his intention of communicating to us
an experience of his own and of his fellow-
disciples which concerns what he calls " the
word of life." What is the meaning of this
expression ? It is something of this kind.
Mankind finds itself living and struggling to live
doing things and suffering things in order to
live. As soon as it gains leisure and capacity
to think, it finds itself asking the question
What is the meaning of life ? Is there any
purpose in all this striving and struggling ? Has
it any adequate end "? What kind of life is a
good life ? We are asking these questions
to-day as vigorously as ever. To the good Jew,
however, there was no doubt about the answer
to these questions. 1 The Jew was intensely

1 The only book of the Old Testament which in its original
form expressed a profound scepticism as to the worth of life

52

The word of life 53

practical. He had none of the artistic or
intellectual gifts of the Greek. But he under
stood, or was capable of being made to under
stand, the meaning of life and of religion as a
way of life. The most impressive utterances
of the Old Testament are about religion as a
way of life. Whence then cometh wisdom ?
And where is the place of understanding ?
Seeing it is hid from the eyes of all living. . . .
God understandeth the way thereof, and he
knoweth the place thereof. . . . When he made
a decree for the rain, and a way for the lightning
of the thunder : then did he see it, and declare
it ; he established it, yea, and searched it out.
And unto man he said, Behold, the fear of the
Lord, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil
is understanding." 1 "He that would love life,
and see good days, let him refrain his tongue
from evil, and his lips that they speak no guile :
and let him turn away from evil, and do good ;
let him seek peace, and pursue it. For the
eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and
his ears unto their supplication/ 2

is the Book of Ecclesiastes, which, we may say, in its main bulk
stands in the Bible only to be contradicted.

1 Job xxviii. 20-26.

2 Ps. xxxiv. 12-16 ; as cited in 1 Pet. iii. 10-12.

54 St. John s Epistles

Here is indeed a clear doctrine of the good
of life, and of morality and religion as alone
showing the way. Now, the Jew s conviction
of the good of life and of the way to blessedness
was based upon what seemed to him to be the
surest ground upon the divine word. Through
countless prophets and commissioned teachers
God had assured man of His good purpose and
taught him how to co-operate. Thus " the
word of God " in the Old Testament is emphatic
ally a " word of life." And St. John was a
devout Jew. In his Gospel he shows us, even
in minutest details, his sense that Christ came
not to destroy or even to originate, but to fulfil
what was written in the old Scriptures. But
in his Epistle he never quotes or refers to the
Old Testament. His mind is wholly fixed on the
disclosure of God s purpose for man in Jesus
Christ, which had fulfilled and superseded all that
went before it. This, to him, had given " the word
of life " a quite new meaning and distinction.

The teaching of Jesus Christ had indeed been,
like that of the Old Testament prophets, a
" word of life." " A man s life consisteth not
in the abundance of the things that he possess-
eth " ; " The life is more than the food " ; " Seek

The word of life 55

first the kingdom of God and his righteousness " ;
I came that they may have life, and may
have it abundantly." St. John s Gospel in
particular is full of teaching about the true life.
But it was much more than a message about
life delivered by word of mouth. It was more
even than a perfect example of human life.
The disciples had been led to believe that under
the conditions of a true human nature, in the
intelligible lineaments of a human character,
Jesus of Nazareth, there had been disclosed to
them the life which is eternal and indestructible,
the very life of God. This is the note which is
struck at once in our Epistle. They had heard
Him with their ears, they had seen Him with
their eyes, through all the phases of His strug
gling mortal life. They had been witnesses of
His death. Under the shock of this seemingly
disastrous failure their faith in Him had failed.
But under the experience of His resurrection it
had been restored and more than restored.
They had gazed upon Him and handled Him
with their hands after He was risen. And the
summary result of all this great experience is
what had given its meaning to St. John s phrase
" the word of life." In the man Christ Jesus

56 St. John s Epistles

slowly but surely John and his fellows had been
led to see the manifestation of the eternal life
of God. Men had always been disposed to
believe that, behind the transitory veil of nature
and the manifold types of evanescent life, there
was something eternal. But of what sort who
could say ? " No man had seen God at any time."
But now " the only begotten Son/ or " God
only begotten, 1 which is in the bosom of the
Father, he hath declared him." He with whom
in familiar intercourse they had had converse,
and of whom they were commissioned to bear
witness, was eternally with the Father, His own
very life. This is St. John s " message of life " :
and because it is of such incomparable import
ance to every man, so he and his fellows who
had enjoyed this original experience could find
satisfaction in nothing except in imparting it.
For the fellowship with God in Christ into
which they had been admitted was not to pass
away. The Church, indeed, of which they were
the first members, existed for no other purpose
than to perpetuate both their witness and their

1 This is the alternative reading of John i. 18. The prologue
to the Gospel and the prologue to the Epistle should be read
together.

The word of life 57

experience. It was to invite men through its
open doors into a human fellowship which they
would find to be not human only but divine
the fellowship of very God the fellowship of
the Father and the Son.

That which was from the beginning, that which we have
heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which
we beheld, and our hands handled, concerning the word
of life (and the life was manifested, and we have seen,
and bear witness, and declare unto you the life, the eternal
life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto
us) ; that which we have seen and heard declare we unto
you also, that ye also may have fellowship with us : yea,
and our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son
Jesus Christ : and these things we write, that our joy
may be fulfilled.

NOTES

1. " The word l of life." In the prologue to
his Gospel St. John used " the Word that is,
the utterance or self-expression of God 2 as a

1 So printed in the margin of the Revised Version, and rightly,
I think. In the text and in the old version it is printed " Word "
with the capital letter, as if it meant not the message but the
person, the Eternal Word.

2 Dr. Rendel Harris, in his Prologue to St. John s Gospel (Camb.
1917), has done a great service in making it more evident than
ever before how the prologue to St. John s Gospel is moulded
upon the language of the Old Testament about the Divine
Wisdom. But St. John chose the expression Word and not
Wisdom as the name of the Son ; and I think we can no longer

58 St. John s Epistles

personal name for the eternal Son, who was
incarnate in Jesus Christ. But elsewhere in the
Gospel " the word " is used in its more ordinary
sense of the message (ii. 22, iv. 41, etc.), and it
is, I think, so used here in the Epistle, in spite
of the fact that the prologue of the Epistle is
so full of reminiscences of the prologue to the
Gospel. I think it is so because " the word or
message of life " (cf. Acts v. 20, " the words of
this life ") is a much more natural expression
than " the Word of Life," meaning the divine
person who is the Life. I have already ex
plained the significance of the expression as a
description of the divine message which con
stitutes the substance of the Bible which " in
divers portions and divers manners " had been
in old times spoken by God through prophets
and now in the end had been fulfilled through
one who was more than a prophet, even the
only-begotten Son.

2. The experience of St. John and his fellow-
disciples is described as " that we have heard,
that which we have seen with our eyes, that
which we beheld [or gazed upon], and our hands

doubt that he used it in the Old Testament sense of divine
utterance rather than in the Greek sense of the divine reason.

The word of life 59

handled." This is what constitutes the record
of the Gospels in general, and of the Fourth
Gospel in particular. In view of the fact re
corded by St. Luke that our Lord gave Himself
to be " handled " by the disciples on the evening
of the resurrection (" handle me and see " >),
and eight days afterwards similarly, as St. John
records, offered Himself to St. Thomas, who
had been absent on the first occasion, that he
might feel His hands and thrust his hand into
His side 2 ; in view also of the stress laid upon
the repeated sights of the risen Lord vouchsafed
to the disciples, 3 it is probable that the last two
phrases which are coupled together, " that
which we beheld [or gazed upon], and our
hands handled," refer specially to the appearances
of the risen Christ. And the conclusion reached
as a result of all these experiences is that in
Jesus of Nazareth they had to do not with any
transitory or partial phase of life not merely
with an exceptionally good man but with
something eternal and universal, " the eternal

1 St. John certainly knew St. Luke s Gospel, and assumed
the knowledge of it in those for whom he wrote ; see especially
how he speaks of Martha and Mary (xi. 1) as known persons.
See Luke x. 38-9.

2 John xx. 27-8. 3 xx. 20, 25, 29-30, xxi. 14.

60 St. John s Epistles

life which was with the Father, and was mani
fested unto us/

3. He does not say the " eternal life of the
Father/* but the " eternal life which was with
the Father/ as he says in the prologue of the
Gospel "the Word was with God/ The life
which they had beheld in Jesus was the life of
a " person " distinguishable from the Father,
but in eternal fellowship with Him, one in whom
the Father, before ever the world was, found
His joy and satisfaction who was and is the
Father s very life. The doctrine of distinctions
of persons in the unity of the Godhead was
based upon the experience of the disciples.

4. This momentous conclusion about God s
self-disclosure in Christ is, so to speak, articu
lated into its various meanings and aspects in
the Epistle, and its grounds are recorded in the
Gospel. The grounds consist in a temporary
experience of a few men extending over a few
years ; but the experience of divine fellowship,
into which the original witnesses were thus
admitted, is to be permanent, and it is the
function of the Church, or of the Holy Spirit
in the Church, both to declare it and to per
petuate it. This is what St. John means when,

The word of life 61

some sixty years after the Resurrection, he ex
presses his desire to admit to the full apostolic
fellowship those for whom he is now writing.
The world in which St. John was now living
was utterly different from the Jewish world of
his youth. He was at Ephesus, not at Jerusalem
or in Galilee. And Ephesus, Greek and Asiatic,
was as different as could be from the towns of
Galilee or from Jerusalem. None the less, the
old apostolic fellowship is as fully meant for
his present associates as for those of old times.
The Church of Jesus Christ is to bear its old
witness in new surroundings ; it is to exhibit a
human fellowship into which all men are to be
made welcome (" that ye may have fellowship
with us ") ; and therein to make the glorious
discovery that the human fellowship into which
they have been admitted is also divine yea,
and our fellowship is with the Father, and with
his Son Jesus Christ."

The distinctive note of St. John s mysticism,
as has been already remarked, is that it is an
internal intuition of spiritual truth based upon
and moulded by external experiences or facts.
It can, therefore, be a corporate and not merely
individual conviction, because the facts were

62 St. John s Epistles

common to all. It can be the conviction of a
whole society ; and it is only through fellowship
in the society that the witness to the facts can
be realized in its true meaning. Thus the
comment of the Venerable Bede cited by
Westcott is noticeable : " Blessed John shows
plainly that all who desire to have fellowship with
God should first be united to the fellowship of
the Church." St. John or St. Paul would hardly
have understood our latter-day fear of " putting
the Church in place of Christ." We must indeed
recognize with all sadness how the sins and
shortcomings of the Church in a word, its
worldliness have led to this fear and in great
measure justified it. But, as I say, St. John
and St. Paul would hardly have understood it.
For what is the Church but the human fellowship
in which, by the Spirit, Christ is found what
is it but His body ? And how can you put the
body in place of the person ? or how can the
fellowship of God be realized except in the
brotherhood of men the particular brotherhood
which He has appointed as its instrument ?

5. I cannot doubt that some of those whom
I should most wish to help to feel the force of
St. John s witness will say, on studying the

The word of life 63

opening words of his Epistle, that they are not
ready for it that its assumptions are too many
or too great for them. I would remind such
hesitating believers that St. John s witness is
the result of a prolonged experience, of which
he is here contributing to us the conclusion.
The grounds of this conclusion are to be found
in the Gospels taken together. It is a question
for examination whether those Gospels do
really give an authentic account of the
apostolic testimony, and whether, if so, that
testimony can be accepted as true. But the study
of this Epistle can do much for us, even before
we have reached the solid ground of Christian
conviction. It can make us feel how truly the
Christian conviction is a message of life, and
how deep and enduring its answer is to the
profoundest needs and questionings of men.
And it is in this spirit that I would invite still
sceptical minds to the thoughtful and, if it may
be, prayerful consideration of its contents.

2. 1 JOHN i. 5-ii. 6
GOD IS LIGHT

ST. JOHN S gospel of life consists first of all in
a message about the nature of God. This is
because what men will become and do depends
in the long run upon what they believe about
God. And St. John s solemn message is given,
not in terms of a logical definition of God, but
in a brilliant metaphor such as can fire our
imaginations and warm our hearts. This is
the message which we have heard from Christ,
and announce unto you, that God is light, and
in him is no darkness at all."

What is this metaphor meant to convey ?
Light is recognized by all as the source and

c? <u /

condition of vitality, joy, beauty, security.
And the Bible is full of the love of light in every
sense. Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant
thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." l " If
a man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because
he seeth the light of this world." * " In thy
light shall we see light." 3 Thus to say that

1 Eccl. xi. 7. 2 John xi. 9. 3 Ps. xxxvi. 9.

64

God is light 65

God is pure unqualified light is to convey to
us the idea that He is ungrudging goodness, and
glorious beauty, and pure truth, infinitely dif
fusive, rejoicing in the vigorous life and security
and joy of His creatures. Certainly darkness is
a very large element of our present human
experience, deepening into the darkness of
death. But it makes the whole difference if
behind the darkness is light, and light which
the darkness cannot overcome. It makes the
whole difference if God, the source and ground
of all being, is pure light. Then, as St. James
puts it, " every divine giving is good, and every
divine gift is perfect in its origin, coming down
as it does from the Father of lights, with whom
can be no variation, or shadow due to change." l
But, inasmuch as St. John attributes this
message specially to Christ, we must look closely
at His teaching about " light/ especially as it
is given in the Fourth Gospel. And this requires
us to interpret the statement that " God is
light" with reference, in the first place, and
indeed almost exclusively, to moral righteousness ;
and St. John, in fact, follows it up immediately
with a statement of the incompatibility of any

1 James i. 17, following Hort.

66 St. John s Epistles

acquiescence in moral evil with the fellowship
of God, which is religion. We are so accustomed,
at least in theory, to the intimate and necessary
association of morality with religion that we
are apt to forget how much we owe it to the
Bible. What may most properly be called
"natural religion" all the world over is mainly
non-moral. It is nature-worship in some form ;
and, as nature is non-moral, so is its worship.
And where it is the worship of the productive
and reproductive powers of nature it is often
immoral. Thus Ephesus, where St. John wrote,
was a famous religious centre. Its business was
largely religious. But the worship of the Ephe-
sian Artemis as the Greeks called the " great
mother was wholly non-moral and largely
immoral. Natural religion then consists gener
ally in religious observances, rites and taboos,
which are wholly divorced from any considera
tion of character. But in marked contrast to
all this, the central doctrine of the Old Testament
is the essential holiness of character in God,
and the uselessness of all rites or ceremonies
apart from character. This is the constant
theme of the prophets. It is needless to
quote. And the meaning of the moral claim

God is light 67

of God is infinitely deepened and intensified by
our Lord.

True religion, then, is utterly incompatible
with " the works of darkness/ What is the
meaning of this phrase and all the phrases which
identify darkness and moral evil, such as recur
in this Epistle ? We may express it, perhaps,
in this way. All decent human society involves
some public standard of required goodness.
This constitutes the moral light of the society.
The rebels against this are the men who love the
darkness, first of all because it enables them to
escape detection. They are of those that rebel
against the light ; they know not the ways thereof,
nor abide in the paths thereof. The murderer
rising when there is no light killeth the poor
and needy ; and in the night is as a thief. The
eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight,
saying, No eye shall see me : and disguiseth his
face. In the dark they dig through houses,
which they had marked for themselves in the
daytime : they know not the light. For the
morning is to them even as the shadow of death ;
if one know them, they are in the terrors of the
shadow of death/ l This gives one the primary

1 Job xxiv. 13-17.

68 St. John s Epistks

physical meaning of " the works of darkness/
They are done in the dark to escape detection.
They are disreputable actions. But a man
may be living a perfectly respectable life and
still be living in " the darkness " and doing
" the works of darkness/ This is partly because
" God seeth the heart/ and requires purity of
heart as well as outward conformity of conduct ;
partly because the standard of respectability
the traditional moral requirement made by
society may be itself defective. Like the
Pharisees, men may " make the commandment
of God of none effect by their traditions." Thus
Christ came to penetrate all hypocrisy, conscious
or unconscious, and all conventional morality
with the searchlight of perfect goodness. He
is " the light of the world/ And the light
condemns the darkness of conventional respect
ability as much as the darkness of disreputable
sins. No one can study our Lord s moral teach
ing without acknowledging, what so-called Chris
tian society constantly ignores, that such vulgar
sins as fornication or drunkenness or violence
are in no way worse in His sight than avarice
or pride or uncharitableness. The latter belong
to " the darkness " as fully as the former

God is light 69

Thus it is quite generally in view of sin of all
kinds that St. John says " This is the judgement,
that the light is come into the world, and men
loved the darkness rather than the light ; for their
works were evil. For every one that doeth ill
hateth the light, and cometh not to the light,
lest his works should be reproved. But he
that doeth the truth cometh to the light, that
his works may be made manifest, that they
have been wrought in God." l

This, then, is St. John s primary announce
ment. God is absolute moral goodness without
qualification. " God is light and in him is no
darkness at all." Fellowship with Him, which
is religion, requires in us unqualified agreement
in heart and conscience, as well as in outward
conduct, with His character. To profess re
ligion while living in sin whether sin of outward
conduct or of the heart is to practise a lie and
not to be living the truth. On the other hand,
if we bring our whole life into the light of God,
inwardly and outwardly, as Christ is in the
light, not only do we have fellowship with God,
but with one another also. For the obstacle

1 John iii. 19-21. This passage appears to belong not to
our Lord s own words, but to the evangelist s comment.

70 St. John s Epistles

to human fellowship is that men s secret lives,
their real ambitions and desires and thoughts of
one another, are selfish and evil that is, they
are antisocial. And, on the other hand, to be
really right with God is also to be a good comrade
man-wards. Then the obstacles to real fellow
ship are gone. And if we are not sinless, yet
we have the secret of redemption from sin. For
wherever such real fellowship is established
in Christ, there His blood that is, His human
life offered in sacrifice for man and by His Spirit
communicated to men for their inward renewal
cleanses them from all sin.

Here, then, there confronts us the need fully
to recognize the fact of sin in ourselves. For
we cannot come into the light of God without
becoming immediately conscious of sin.

" I thought I could not breathe in that tine air,
That pure severity of perfect light."

This had been Isaiah s message as he contem
plated the coming of God to Zion. " Sinners
in Sion are afraid ; trembling hath surprised
the godless ones. Who among us shall dwell
with the devouring fire ? who among us shall

God is light 71

dwell with everlasting burnings ? " * This de
vouring fire, these everlasting burnings, are
nothing else than God s holiness and goodness
as it presents itself to the " godless ones." And
it is not only the godless ones, as Isaiah had
found in his own case, who feel this. " Woe is
me ! >: he had been constrained to cry in the
awful presence of God, " for I am undone ;
because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell
in the midst of a people of unclean lips : for
mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of
hosts." * The better a man is the more he feels
the awfulness of God. Thus St. John goes on
to tell us that if any man does not confess to
personal sinfulness, he is self-deceived and a
liar. Confession of sin inevitably follows upon
any sincere attempt to bring ourselves and our
deeds into the light of truth. But the confession
must be real. No vague confession is enough.
It must be confession of our sins in detail and
particular, without any manner of palliation
or self-excusing. And so great is the value of
frank confession, because it is a willing coming
into the light, that God shows His truth to His
own promises and His real righteousness in no

1 Is. xxxiii. 14. 2 vi. 5

72 St. John s Epistles

way more than this, that He meets our mere
confession with forgiveness waiting for nothing
else and cleanses us from all unrighteousness.
We stand free to serve Him without the guilt
or disability of the past. But he has declared
us to be sinners, and confession that is, practical
assent to this divine charge against us is abso
lutely necessary. To deny that we have sinned
to attribute our shortcomings to any other
cause, such as our nature or our circumstances
is, in effect, to make God a liar and show that
His word has no place in us.

The object of this stern reminder which
St. John presses upon us is twofold. It is both
that we should cease to sin, and also that, when
we fail and commit sin, he should know where
the remedy lies. For we cannot redeem our
selves from sin. But we are not alone as mere
individuals guilty before God. We have one
at hand to speak to the Father for us Jesus
Christ, who, man like us, is perfectly righteous,
free from all taint of sin ; and it is to Him we
belong. He, then, is the propitiation for our
sins. In Him by His mediation we are set
free from our sins to begin again. And He is
the propitiation not for us only, not merely for

God is light 73

any class among men, but for the whole world.
In Him all alike can find the same forgiveness
and the same freedom.

But to be thus dealt with for Christ s sake
to be able thus to feel the assurance of His
advocacy we must belong to Him. We must
know Him. It is no mechanical process. How,
then, are we to " know that we know him " ?
There is only one ground of assurance it is
the way of obedience to His commandments.
To profess to belong to Him or to know Him
without a life of actual obedience is to show
ourselves liars who are alien to the truth. But
in the obedience to His word or teaching is the
fulfilment in us of the love of God. This is
actually to abide in Christ to share His life
and to know that we share it. And no one can
claim to share His life who does not actually
live among men as He lived.

And this is the message which we have heard from him,
and announce unto you, that God is light, and in him is no
darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with
him, and walk in the darkness, we lie, and do not the truth 1 :
but if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have
fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus his
Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no

1 cf. St. John i. 4-9, Hi. 19-21, viii. 12, xii. 35-6.

74 St. John s Epistles

sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If
we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive
us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar,
and his word is not in us.

My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye
may not sin. And if any man sin, we have an Advocate
with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous : and he is the
propitiation for our sins ; and not for ours only, but also
for the whole world. And hereby know we that we know
him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know
him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the
truth is not in him : but whoso keepeth his word, in him
verily hath the love of God been perfected. Hereby know
we that we are in him : he that saith he abideth in him
ought himself also to walk even as he walked.

1. There are very few passages in the whole
of literature which are at once so simple and so
profound as the passage which we have just
read. It will be seen to traverse and correct
with profound conviction and solemn authority
a number of assumptions which are current in
our world to-day. Thus, first, by beginning his
account of the Gospel of life with a declaration
about the nature of God, St. John would remind
us that the only root of a really Christian life
in an individual or a really Christian organization
of society is to think rightly about God. Our
Lord spent His pains as a teacher on nothing

God is light 75

so much as in giving men, or helping them to
gain, right ideas about God. This is "to love
the Lord our God with all our mind." This is
to avoid idolatry, which is, at the root, enter
taining false ideas of God. And is there any
thing more lacking in present-day religion than
a clear and living conception of God ?

Secondly, St. John takes it for granted that
there will be no such assurance as we need about
the nature of God except by God s own definite
self -disclosure. Such a message from God about
His own nature and character was delivered
by the old prophets of Israel. But St. John s
attention is concentrated upon the last and
fullest form of the message that delivered by
Jesus Christ. This, as it is given in parables
and plain sayings, and as it is expressed in His
own character, is vivid and plain enough. It
wins us by its manifold expression of self-
sacrificing love, by its assurance of the infinite
value which God sets on every single human
soul, by its free offer of forgiveness and welcome.
None the less the Gospels are severe books. The
moral claim of God upon the soul of man and
not less upon society, His inexorable right
eousness, His tremendous judgements these

76 St. John s Epistles

make it impossible for any real disciple in the
school of Jesus Christ to lapse into the free-and-
easy conception of a " good-natured " God who
must somehow make it all right for every one
at last, with which we are to-day obsessed. This,
then, is surely the question of questions for us.
Do we really believe that what was and is in
accessible by human philosophy has been really
given by divine self-disclosure and in full and
final form through the lips and in the person
of Jesus Christ ? Certainly He claimed to tell
us about His Father with infallible authority.
" No man knoweth the Father save the Son,
and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal
him." This is no isolated text, but the spirit
of His whole teaching about God. Can we
stand face to face with Him and repudiate His
claim ? But if not, is there not a formidable
reconstruction of our whole way of living and
thinking required in most of those who call
themselves Christians and in our whole social
life ? What we need truly is not to argue about
Christianity, but honestly to try it.

Thirdly, St. John perceives that the disclosure
of God was given, as it was needed, in forms
intelligible to the common man. So it is in the

God is light 77

parables and in the plain teaching of Jesus.
So it is in the human character of Jesus in whom
we are to see the Father. So it is in the three
solemn expressions of the essence of God which
we owe to St. John the first (which he ascribes
to Jesus Himself) " God is a spirit " in such
sense as not to admit of the thought of His
being worshipped in one place rather than in
another, or of His being satisfied with any
external forms of worship ; and the two others
which he gives in this Epistle, " God is love "
and " God is light." These are not intellectual
definitions, but great thoughts of God which
appeal to our heart and imagination and which
stimulate our affections and our conscience. It
is quite right that the theologians and philo
sophers should have used all the powers of the
human intellect upon the idea of God. But
if it be the case that the most trustworthy and
complete material upon which they have to work
is the revelation of the Father given by His
prophets and His Son Jesus Christ, it can hardly
be denied that in translating the picture into
intellectual forms they have too often obscured
it. But the account of God given in the prophets
and of " the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ "

78 St. John s Epistles

in the Gospels is as lucid and attractive as it
is tremendous.

2. " God is light, and darkness in Him there
is not any at all." We naturally give to the
metaphor of light and enlightenment an in
tellectual meaning. This is quite legitimate.
We must thankfully acknowledge that we cannot
find in the Bible the least trace of obscurantism ;
and we can discern in the idea of wisdom, divine
and human, in our Lord s broad outlook on man
and nature, as it appears in the parables, and
in St. Paul s conception of the divine order and
system of the world, an encouragement to philo
sophy and science. But, on the whole, the
New Testament conception of the divine light
and of human enlightenment both in our
Lord s teaching and in St. Paul, St. Peter,
St. James, and St. John 1 is markedly ethical.
This has been already pointed out. Here
St. John s bold assertion of the unqualified
goodness of God under the figure of light is
such as to attract and delight. But he insists
upon it not as delightful, but as serious in its
moral consequences. We must be fit to live
in the unqualified light. And this brings him

1 See esp. Eph. v. 8-14 ; 1 Pet. ii. 9 ; James i. 17-18.

God is light 79

at once to the fact of sin. He condemns three
attitudes towards sin the sort of moral in
difference which amounts to the denial that there
is such a thing as sin or that it excludes from
the fellowship of God (ver. 6) ; the denial of
sin as a fact in ourselves which is simply self-
deception (ver. 8) ; and the denial of particular
sins by which we make God a liar, because in
all His dealings with man, and all men individu
ally, He has treated them as sinners needing
redemption.

3. And this leads him to emphasize the
value of confession. There can indeed be no
doubt about the value assigned to it both in
the Old and in the New Testaments. " I said,
I will confess my sins unto the Lord, and so
thou forgavest the wickedness of my sin/
" And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned
against the Lord. And Nathan said unto
David, The Lord also hath put away thy sin/
At first sight it might be supposed that con
fession mere frank acknowledgement was a
very easy thing and only a short step towards
reformation. But, in fact, our knowledge of
human nature, including our own, teaches us
better. Many men live in a state of moral

80 St. John s Epistles

indifference. Many deplore their sins, but at
tribute them to circumstances or nature or
heredity, or are content with being " not worse
than other people." Many, again, " deceive
themselves " as to their motives and actions.
It is, in fact, quite rare to find a person who
wholeheartedly desires to know the naked truth
about himself. But this is the essence of a good
confession. It is to bring ourselves without
reserve into the light. It is to put away all
self-excusing and all comparison of ourselves
with others. It is to face the terrible truth
naked before God. And as St. John implies,
while self-deception leads to a general denial
of sin, a good confession must be a confession
of sins that is, of the particular acts of sin in
thought and word and deed. It is to say, " I have
sinned by my fault, by my own fault, by my
own grievous fault, and in such and such ways/*
This is why a good confession is so great a thing
and brings so rich a blessing.

4. Does St. John contemplate confession to
God only ? Dr. Westcott denies this. " Confess
our sins," he writes in his commentary on this
place, " not only acknowledge them, but
acknowledge them openly in the face of men."

God is light 81

There is no doubt that the Greek word, and its
compound, wherever used in the New Testament,
means open acknowledgement before men ; but
the Hebrew word for " confess " does not
always bear this meaning not in " I said, I will
confess my transgressions unto the Lord " l
(Ps. xxxii. 5), nor in " Confessing my sin and the
sin of my people " (Dan. ix. 4 and 20) ; and I
do not feel satisfied that the word used by
St. John need mean more than confession to
God. Nevertheless, the probability is, if we
consider the ordinary meaning of the word he
uses, that he was thinking of confession to man
also, as in the cases of Achan, of those who
came to John s baptism, and of those who
confessed to sorcery at Ephesus. 2

Confession to " the brethren " as well as to
God was the practice of the first Christians.
Thus from the first notorious and scandalous
sinners who were put to open penance, as in
St. Paul s Epistles to the Corinthians, must
acknowledge their sin openly before they could
be readmitted to the fellowship. And apart
from such scandalous sins, St. James exhorts

1 Where, however, a different word is used in the Greek Bible.

2 See Josh. vii. 19-20 ; Matt. iii. 6 ; Acts xix. 18.

82 St. Johns Epistles

all Christians to " confess their sins one to
another " their sins of all kinds, and not merely
their " faults " against one another. And in
an early document, the Didache, we learn that
mutual confession of sins before the Eucharist
was the practice of the Church, " Having first
confessed your sins, that your sacrifice may be
pure." Moreover, it must be acknowledged
that the divine commission given to the apostles,
and so to the Church, to absolve and retain
sins only admits of special application to the
individual Christian where the sins to be judged
are known to the Church or its ministers. It
is on this primitive practice of requiring the
confession of scandalous sins in the congrega
tion, and encouraging the confession of sins
generally, and on the divine grant of absolving
and retaining authority to the Church, that the
penitential discipline of the Church, which has
varied greatly in different times and places, was
built up.

With us, in our part of the Church, there is
no ecclesiastical requirement under ordinary
circumstances of that confession to a priest
which took the place in the Church of public
confession to the congregation. But it must

God is light 83

be acknowledged that, quite apart from the
question of any ecclesiastical requirement, we
Englishmen forget the sense in which no con
fession to God can be real unless it at least
includes a willingness that our sins should be
known to men. Many a person, including many
who frequent the confessional, would be furious
if one of their fellow-men were to impute to
them the very sins they had confessed to God.
But this is hypocrisy. All honest confessions
to God must exclude any desire to bear a re
putation among men which is better than we
deserve. We must want to be known just for
what we are, as we shall be known at the Great
Day of disclosure. And if social considerations
make it undesirable to make public confession
of our sins, yet where we have wronged an
individual we should frankly confess it to him.
If I have told some one a lie of any importance,
by far the best remedy against repeating such
an offence is frankly to confess it to him ; and
there are innumerable alienations (for instance)
between husband and wife which would be
healed if the first offence were frankly acknow
ledged. " I am very sorry. I hope I shall not
do it again." And beyond this, I am sure
7

84 St. John s Epistles

that we greatly need to remember St. James s
general admonition " Confess your sins one
to another."

5. The divine gifts of forgiveness and cleansing
wait on our confession (ver. 9), and herein the
divine righteousness, no less than God s faithful
ness to His promise, is shown. Forgiveness has
been greatly misunderstood. It is not the
remission of punishment the natural conse
quences of our offences. It is the greatest
mistake to identify forgiveness with being " let
off." One who knows his guilt and has been
forgiven will always be ready to be punished.
And in the 99th psalm the record of God s deal
ings with His saints is " Heard forgiven
punished." l But to be forgiven is to be set
free from bondage to our past. It is to be
granted (and that over and over again) a fresh
start. " I will run the way of thy command
ments, when thou hast set my heart at
liberty." And the condition of all forgiveness
is the steady will of obedience in the future.
This is what St. John proceeds to emphasize in
the latter part of the paragraph that we are
studying. It is most noticeable that in the

1 Ps. xcix. 8.

God is light 85

parable of the unthankful servant, the remission
of debt which is granted by the king uncon
ditionally is found to be utterly reversed as soon
as it is plain that the servant was showing no
disposition to imitate his lord. 1 Absolution is
nothing but the being set free to go forward in
the service of the Lord. It cleanses our con
sciences only in order that we may " serve the
living God." 2

6. We should be profoundly grateful to St.
John for telling us so clearly that if we are
really right with God, if we " walk in the light/
we shall be also right with men. All social
alienation, all class divisions, all personal
quarrels, are due to men " walking in darkness,"
living a life either of pride or selfishness or lust.
Real fellowship with God will remove all these
causes of social alienation. And conversely
the causes of social alienation will never be
removed by even the best economic changes
unless there is also the change of heart towards
God.

7. The removal of sin is the work of Christ
for us and in us. St. John would emphasize
as much as St. Paul our absolute dependence

1 Matt, xviii. 22 ff. Heb. ix. 14.

86 St. John s Epistles

for our redemption upon Another ; and though,
in his Gospel, St. John only indicates without
emphasizing the function of atonement or pro
pitiation, yet in his Epistle he makes it evident
that, like St. Paul, he would emphasize equally
both aspects of Christ s work, propitiation
and renewal His work for us and His work
in us.

When St. John speaks of " the blood of Jesus "
as " cleansing us from all sin/ we are bound
to think of his Gospel of the blood wherein we
drink eternal life, and which is " spirit and life "
(vi. 52-63). The root idea of sacrificial blood
is that the life of the victim is in it 2 : thus it
is the sacrificed life of Christ, as communicated
to us by His Spirit, which is to renew us inwardly,
in the fellowship of His manhood, into eternal
life. This is the teaching of the 6th chapter
of his Gospel, taken with the figure of the vine
(c. xv.) and the accompanying teaching about the
Holy Spirit. And it is St. Paul s doctrine as well
as St. John s. Herein, moreover, is the meaning
of the Holy Communion. But there is some
thing to precede this communication of life.

1 See John i, 29, iii. 14, xi. 49-51.

2 Levit. xvii. 11.

God is light 87

That is the restoration of our standing-ground
before God it is propitiation. Of the moral
necessity for propitiation St. Paul gives us some
explanation. 1 St. John simply assumes it.
We cannot appear before God in our bare selves.
Our sinfulness precludes this. But Another
has acted for us. He is our brother man, but
sinless. He has offered the perfect sacrifice of
a humanity in which God is perfectly well pleased.
He is our propitiation ; we ask God to look at
Him, not at us. He is our advocate ; we ask
God to listen to Him, not to us. But we can
only ask God to do this because we belong to Him.
In a sense all men belong to Him. He stands
for humanity everywhere, " the whole world/
But our power to claim His advocacy and plead
His propitiation depends on our belonging to
Him. This is the privilege conveyed in our
baptism, which is the instrument of our new
birth. 2 But St. John is not here thinking of this.
Baptism is quite ineffective morally without
moral identification, without the will to obey,
and that is what he emphasizes. Wholly
without any merit of ours, and that again and
again, we can accept of God s free gift of for-

1 Rom. Hi. 25-6. 2 John iii. 5.

88 St. Johns Epistles

giveness in the name and by the merit of Christ,
but this only if we belong to Him or " know
Him," and to know Him means that we are
of His company and keep His commandments
and walk even as He walked if not faultlessly,
at least in will and intention.

Truly I believe there would have been no
difficulty about the Christian doctrine of Christ s
propitiation for us, appealing as it does to all
the deepest needs of men, but for three most
unfortunate mistakes : (1) that absolution has
been confused with being let off punishment,
whereas it means our being set free to serve :
and there is, in fact, no absolution for those whose
will is not set to serve ; (2) that Christ s work
for us (propitiation) has been separated from
His work in us (spiritual renewal), to which,
in fact, it is only the prelude, as is represented
by St. Paul and St. John; (3) that, contrary
to all the teachings of the New Testament,
the mind of Christ has been distinguished
from the mind of the Father as mercy from
justice.

In the Gospel we notice that only the Holy
Spirit is called the Paraclete or Advocate, yet
in calling Him " another Advocate " our Lord

God is light 89

implies that that office is also His, 1 and speaks
of the exercise of it. 2

8. The antithesis of light and darkness, as
symbolical of evil and good, which is found in
the New Testament, is not by any means peculiar
to Christianity. In its Persian form it was
already recognized and known in the empire
at any rate some twenty years after St. John
wrote ; for the Gnostic leader Basileides speaks
of those who declared that there were two
original self -existent principles of all things,
light and darkness. And in the form of such
dualism it has played a great part in the thoughts
of men. But when St. John proclaims God as
pure light, he means that there is no rival God
no original or self-existent darkness and that
all the darkness in which the world lies is due
to nothing else than either to the rebel wills
of created spirits, or, we should add, to the law,
which is God s law for His world, that progress
is only to be obtained gradually and through
effort and struggle. A certain " darkness "
belongs to undeveloped nature as well as to
violated nature. It is profoundly character
istic of Christianity to deny either that there is

1 John xiv. 16. xiv. 13-15.

90 St. John s Epistles

any original evil principle in the world or any
fundamentally evil substance. Evil lies only
in the misuse of good things. And however
evil a thing may be in its misuse, let it once be
brought out into the light and revealed as it is
and it becomes light-giving as St. Paul says,
Whatsoever is made manifest is light."

3. 1 JOHN ii. 7-17

THE LAW OF LOVE

WE have been given clearly to understand that
" to keep the word " or " the commandments "
of Jesus and to walk as He walked is the only
test of really " knowing " Him ; Jesus is " the
way/ and we are to examine His manner of
" walking/ and so ourselves to find it.

But there is one pre-eminent commandment
of Jesus and one supremely memorable word
commended in the fullest sense by His example
" A new commandment I give unto you, that
ye love one another ; as I have loved you, that
ye also love one another. By this shall all
men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have
love one to another " (John xiii. 34-5). " If ye
keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my
love ; even as I have kept My Father s command
ments, and abide in His love. . . . This is my
commandment, that ye love one another, even
as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man
than this, that a man lay down his life for his
friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do the things

91

92 St. John s Epistles

which I command you " (John xv. 10-15). This
commandment of mutual love was no longer,
when St. John wrote his Epistle, a new com
mandment. It was already old something
heard and received and held from the very
beginning. And it is more than a commandment
given in words and received by the ear. It has
been an experienced reality in Christ who gave
His life for them and also among themselves.
This is what St. John means by saying it is
" true in him and in you." Nevertheless, John
can repeat Christ s word and call it " again a
new commandment/ because they are standing
at the dawn of a new day. The old dark
night, alike of Jewish exclusiveness and heathen
depravity, is passing away, and in the new
catholic fellowship of the Church the genuine
light of the world has begun to shine. In this
new world of light the old commandment of
mutual love becomes a new commandment,
demanding a new application. And it is per
emptory. To claim to belong to the new world
of light is an idle boast if a man hate one who is
his brother in Christ that is, if he do not
actively love him. For St. John knows no middle
state between loving and hating. Whatever he

The law of love 93

may say, one who hates his brother belongs to
the old dark world and stumbles as he walks
(John xi. 9-10), having his stumbling-block
in himself because he has not light in his heart,
and he misses his way, like a blind man (John
xii. 35). But he who loves his brother lives
in the light. He knows his goal and sees his
way, and has no occasion to stumble. And
St. John writes to his Christian people as those
who have the glad, free hearts of children,
because in coming to belong to Christ they have
received the forgiveness of their sins and been
set free from all the entanglements of the old
dark world, and again because they have thus
learned to rejoice in the knowledge of the Father.
He writes to them also as fathers who have the
secret of wisdom and experience, because they
have known Him who has been from the be
ginning the way and the truth and the life.
He writes to them once again as youths who
have perennially the strength of youth, because
they have won the victory over the evil one in
the power of the divine word which abides in
them. Let them separate themselves utterly,
then, from the old dark world. The love of
the Father is totally incompatible with the love

94 St. John s Epistles

of the old world. That old world has for its
contents the desire for selfish satisfaction and
external show and personal aggrandizement.
These things do not come from the Father, but
from the world which ignores Him. And this
world and all its desires are passing away. It
is only by doing the will of God that we can
attain to the life which abides.

Beloved, no new commandment write I unto you, but
an old commandment which ye had from the beginning :
the old commandment is the word which ye heard. Again,
a new commandment write I unto you, which thing is true
in him and in you ; because the darkness is passing away,
and the true light already shineth. He that saith he is
in the light, and hateth his brother, is in the darkness even
until now. He that loveth his brother abideth in the
light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him. But
he that hateth his brother is in the darkness, and walketh
in the darkness, and knoweth not whither he goeth, because
the darkness hath blinded his eyes.

I write unto you, my little children, because your sins
are forgiven you for his name s sake. I write unto you,
fathers, because ye know him which is from the beginning.
I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome
the evil one. I have written unto you, little children,
because ye know the Father. I have written unto you,
fathers, because ye know him which is from the beginning.
I have written unto you, young men, because ye are
strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have
overcome the evil one. Love not the world, neither the
things that are in the world. If any man love the world,

The law of love 95

the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in
the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes,
and the vainglory of life, is not of the Father, but is of
the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust
thereof : but he that doeth the will of God abideth for
ever.

1. "The beginning" which St. John refers
to must be the beginning of the Christian
tradition when they first received the word of
Christ and heard the new commandment. This
new commandment is already old ; and has
behind it experienced reality in the love of Christ
and of Christians. Christ is " the Way/ and
in walking as He walked they too have found
the way. This must be the meaning of " which
thing is true in Him and in you " truth meaning
reality to St. John (as he spoke above, i. 6, of
" lying and not doing the truth," i.e. not making
it real in action) ; but, none the less, it is still
a new commandment involving new applications.
It is easy to understand (if this interpretation is
right) what St. John s meaning was. The
new commandment " had been given to Jews
at Jerusalem, and the first disciples in Jerusalem
showed themselves zealous in following it. But
they were all Jews brought up under the same
sacred but narrow tradition. And when it

96 St. John s Epistles

appeared that Gentiles also were to be
" brethren " and were to be admitted to a
perfect equality of fellowship with Jews that
is, men whose traditions pious Jews had learned
to execrate and who were accustomed to eat
unclean meats in unclean ways it was from the
Church of Jerusalem, which had been foremost in
the race of love, that the fiercest opposition arose.
It was indeed a new commandment that they
had to obey. Or, again, when St. John passed
from Jerusalem to Ephesus when the sacred
city fell and was trodden underfoot it was
indeed a new world, wholly alien to his old
traditions, into which he passed. It was a world
in which all the various races which bordered
upon the Mediterranean Sea and others from
the further east were mixed indiscriminately
together, in which religion had borne a meaning
as different as possible from what religion had
meant in Jerusalem, and wholly new ideas
possessed the minds of men. The old world
was gone, and the new world in which the light
was to triumph through the fellowship of the
Church was appearing. The veil that was
spread over all nations was passing away.
Again then the old commandment became a

The law of love 97

new commandment. Because it still held true
that_Christianity _could only triumph through
the exhibition among men of a human fellow
ship of love utterly transcending all racial
differences and prejudices.

It was, in fact, in great measure because it
did exhibit such a fellowship, because, in spite
of all the prejudices and suspicions felt against
the Christians, the heathen world could not
restrain its astonishment at seeing how they
loved one^another, that it won the heart of the
world. Alienated from the world of the Roman
empire, often debarred from their old trades
and occupations, partly because the occupations
themselves were tainted with idolatry, partly
because the suspicions and prejudices of their
fellows drove them out, the Christians were
forced to develop a social and economic system
of their own, on the basis of their religious
principles, for mutual support and encourage
ment. And it was a fine expression of the law
of brotherhood, really believed in and applied.

If we leap over the intervening centuries,
with their glory and their shame, and come to
our own time, we can very well understand how
the old commandment becomes a new com-

98 St. John s Epistles

mandment. Thus, when the Englishman, proud
of his superior race, finds himself in Africa or
India required really to welcome and love as
brethren in Christ men of a totally different
tradition and civilization (or absence of civili
zation) from his own, truly for him the old com
mandment has become a new commandment of
amazing difficulty. Or when the breakdown of
our old social system, with all its naive in
equalities of privilege and conditions, brings us
face to face with a new and turbulent demand
for justice, as meaning not less than equality of
opportunity for all men, and the abandonment
of an old status of privilege for the few, a status
which in lapse of time has come to be a second
nature, truly with deep searchings of heart we
find out that the old commandment has become
a new commandment, and that we must obey it
or be convicted of " lying and doing not the
truth." Or to put the same problem from
another point of view. The old idea of the duty
of almsgiving seemed simple. We were to give
of our superfluity to help the poor and miserable.
We were not concerned with the causes of misery
and poverty. Our business was to supply
relief in this case and that, as they were pre-

The law of love 99

sented to our notice. But now it appears that
something much more is wanted " not charity
but justice," as it is phrased, though the idea
of charity is thereby degraded. All this relief
work is unavailing. We have to attend to the
grounds and sources of the dominant evil of
ignoble poverty. We see that except in com
paratively small proportions and in far more
remediable forms it need not exist. A juster
social order an order more worthy of being
called " charitable " that is, inspired by love
and brotherhood has to be created. Again
the old commandment has become a new com
mandment, and we are staggered at the greatness
of its demand.

It would be out of place to enlarge here on
these new demands. It is enough to suggest
how again and again the old commandment
becomes a new commandment. We know
Jerome s familiar story of St. John, when a very
old man, being carried down into the Christian
assembly Sunday after Sunday, and saying
always the same thing, " Little children, love
one another." Did they complain " We have
heard this so often before " ? Yes, St. John
would say, but even every week and to every
8

100 St. John s Epistles

man the old commandment becomes a new
commandment and demands a new effort. We
have no sooner settled down in our theology or

Ov

our practice into a routine than we have begun
to " make the commandment of God " (or His
truth) " of none effect by our tradition/ and the
prophetic spirit is needed to awaken us to some
fresh beginning.

2. St. John, we observe, sees things in ex
tremes. We shall have to notice this charac
teristic later on. But here we see that he
acknowledges no middle ground between " lov
ing " your brother and " hating " him. As our
Lord said, " He that is not with me is against
me," so St. John would reckon selfish indiffer
ence or the weak sort of pity which does not
exert itself practically to remedy the evils which
it perceives (iii. 17) as hatred. Hatred is
everything which is not active love ; as again
our Lord says, " Inasmuch as ye did it not
depart from me." It is only the full force of
active love which can really illuminate the heart
of man and free him from internal stumbling-
blocks and show him both the goal and the
way. But we are always tempted to narrow
down the commandment to suit our own lethargy.

The law of love 101

So with brilliant irony Clough parodies our
treatment of the sixth commandment

" Thou slialt not kill, but need st not strive
Officiously to keep alive."

St. John would have us believe that unless we
really " strive to keep alive " we do in fact
" kill."

3. " Because the darkness hath blinded his
eyes." He has become as blind as a mole.
Having refused to see, at last he cannot see.
Bring him .out into the sunshine, and it will
make no difference. That is fundamentally
the meaning of hell that a man has so long
refused the truth and the right that at last he
has no faculty to recognize it or welcome it.

4. " The children " and " the fathers " and
the " young men " to whom St. John writes
are not to be interpreted as distinct classes of
the community, as when St. Paul writes to
parents and children, husbands and wives,
masters and slaves. They are different names
for the whole body in different aspects. All
have, or should have, the heart and freshness
of childhood, the wisdom and experience of age,
and the strength of youth. We may compare

102 St. Johns Epistles

(1) " Except ye ... become as little children, ye
shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of
heaven " (Matt, xviii. 3) ; and (2) "I am wiser
than the aged, because I keep thy command
ments " (Ps. cxix. 100) ; or " For honourable
old age is not that which standeth in length
of time, nor is its measure given by number of
years : but understanding is grey hairs unto
men, and an unspotted life is ripe old age"
(Wisdom iii. 8) ; and (3) " Even the youths shall
faint and be weary, and the young men shall
utterly fall : but they that wait upon the Lord
shall renew their strength " (Is. xl. 30-1).

In each of its three aspects, as children, as
fathers, as youths, St. John gives a double
message to the Church, saying first " I write,"
then " I wrote." It is very difficult to see
any significance in the use of the two tenses,
unless we take the simplest explanation, and
suppose that St. John was interrupted in writing
the Epistle after the threefold " I write," and
began again by almost repeating what he had
said already.

The two messages show most difference in
the first case, the message to " children."
It runs first " because your sins have been

The law of love 103

forgiven you for his name s sake." The " name "
of Christ carries with it the thought of all that
is revealed in His person and office. It is because
of what He is and has done that our sins have
been forgiven. In the second instance it runs,
" Because ye have known the Father." But as
in ii. 3 to have our sins forgiven through Christ
our propitiation is shown to involve " knowing "
Him, so here to have our sins forgiven on account
of Christ s name is treated as identical with
having known the Father who bestows the
forgiveness, for it is to enter into the intimate
relationship of children to their Father. The
message to " fathers " is the same in both
cases : !c because ye have known Him who is
from the beginning" i.e. the eternal Word or
Son of the Father, in the knowledge of whom
we are admitted to the true wisdom, the fellow
ship in the eternal counsels. The message to
the young men is slightly expanded in the
second delivery " because ye have overcome
the wicked one " being preceded by the words
because ye are strong and the word of God
abideth in you." Thus the ground of their
victory is shown. (St. John has, as we shall
see later, no hesitation in witnessing to a

104 St. John s Epistles

personal adversary whom they have overcome
the devil. ) This threefold message to Christians
as " children/ as " fathers/" and as " young
men " is full of inspiration, and suggests a
community at once full of childlike confidence
and freshness, wise with the wisdom of God
and triumphant over all forces of evil.

5. "The world" in a bad sense means here
as elsewhere human society as it or