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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 organizes itself
apart from God or in rebellion against Him.
In this world mankind has lost its true centre
and object, and seeks its gratification in selfish
desires and its objects of worship in idols. It
is rooted and grounded in a lie the idea of
human independence of God, and it will pass
away " even as a dream when one awaketh."
The only abiding life is rooted in the truth,
which is the will of God.
And the contents of this godless world, the
characteristics of " worldliness," are: (1) "the
desire of the flesh," which includes all the selfish
appetites, every form of passion for appropriating
things we desire without regard to the intention
of God, whether the passion be sexual lust,
gluttony, vanity, the love of money or revenge ;
(2) " the desire of the eyes," i.e. the desire to
The law of love 105
make for ourselves a world pleasing to con
template, again without regard to the purpose
of God ; as when men seek selfishly to fashion a
beautiful world for themselves within a narrow
circle, surrounding themselves with beautiful
and pleasing objects and persons without regard
to others who are left outside in ignorance and
hunger " hiding themselves from their own
flesh " ; (3) " the vain-glory of life," i.e. the
exultation in all the visible show of life, as a
sign of what man can accomplish, without any
thought of God, the creator of all that is. " Is
not this great Babylon which I have builded ? "
This account of " the world " and of its contents
goes home to our consciences to-day, as we
contemplate the civilization at the foundations
of which the Great War has struck its blow,
and causes us to read with trembling St. John s
warning.
6. We must notice that " brother " in the
New Testament means a fellow-Christian. It
is in the " love of the brethren " that we are to
learn " love " for all men (2 Pet. i. 7). Perhaps
in the parable of the Last Judgement our Lord
calls all suffering men His "brethren," 1 but else-
1 Matt. xxvi. 40,
106 St. John s Epistles
where the word means always fellow-Jews or, as
in the vast majority of cases, fellow-Christians.
This limitation embodies a great principle.
All men are meant for brotherhood, as the Church
is meant for all men. But brotherhood is hard
to realize. It means, as the New Testament
understands it, so much. And the Christians
knew that their entrance into brotherhood began
with their redemption through Christ from the
world of sin and selfishness into the family
of God.
1 As in Matt. v. 23 ; Luke vi. 41.
4. 1 JOHN ii. 18-29
THE ANTICHRISTS
IT is obvious throughout the Epistle that
Christianity is a life a corporate life in
St. John s estimation, and not a philosophy.
None the less, it now appears that it is a life
based upon or involving a revelation of truth
such as the human mind must apprehend, accept,
and insist upon in the form of intellectual
propositions, or what we call a dogmatic creed.
And resistance to intellectual error is as clear
a duty as resistance to wickedness. Thus in
the Revelation, side by side with the ten-horned
and seven-headed beast " who represents
the world-power which violently persecutes the
Church, is " another beast " who uses the
faculties of intellect to " deceive " the world,
in the interests of the world-power, and who is
elsewhere called " the false prophet." 1 And
so similarly here we hear both of " the world "
which " hates " the Church on account of its
moral claim and principles, and which " lieth
1 Rev. xiii., xvi. 13, xix. 20, xx. 10,
107
108 St. Johns Epistles
in the evil one," 1 and also, in the passage
we are just going to consider, of the " anti
christs " who are seceders or apostates from the
Church, who preach a lie, who are deceivers
and false prophets, and who belong to the
world and are welcomed by the world. 2 The
point is that St. John feels himself compelled
to emphasize the necessity of orthodoxy in the
same imperative terms as the necessity for love,
and to demand as uncompromising opposition
to intellectual as to moral error. 3 This will
appear repeatedly as we continue our study.
But we must pause at this point to collect from
the Epistle the indications of the particular
form of false teaching which St. John is thinking
of and to endeavour to interpret them.
The false teaching, it appears, is the denial
that " Jesus is the Christ," or (what seems to
be regarded as the same thing) that " Jesus is
the Son of God/ or that " Jesus Christ is come
in the flesh," or that He " cometh [i.e. is still
to be expected at His "appearing"] in the
flesh."
1 1 John iii. 13, v. 19.
2 1 John ii. 18-19, 21-3, iv. 1-6, and 2 John 7.
3 2 John 10-11.
* 1 John ii. 22-3, iv, 2-3, 15, v. 1, 5; 2 John 7.
The antichrists 109
It appears to be out of place to interpret
the denial that " Jesus is the Christ " simply
of the already old-fashioned denial by the
Jews that Jesus was the Messiah or was the
Son of God. With this original denial we
are face to face in the Fourth Gospel. But
the orthodox Jews are not in evidence here.
The indications taken together point to a new
type of hostile thought, such as had arisen not
from the Jewish people, but from apostate
Christian leaders. It is " Gnostics/ not Jews,
who are now the enemy. Their Christ (con
ceived more or less on the lines of the late
Jewish apocalypse, the Book of Enoch) is a
heavenly, semi-divine being, who is also perhaps
called the Son of God, and the point of
opposition is to the idea of an incarnation to
the idea that the heavenly or divine being can
actually have become man in the person of
Jesus, or can actually and permanently have
taken flesh. The heavenly being, they would
have contended, must have remained a separate
person with a separate destiny, not to be
identified with the human person, Jesus of
Nazareth.
Jn this connection a very early reading of
110 St. John s Epistles
iv. 3 is also to be noted. Instead of " Every
spirit which confesseth not Jesus," the reading
runs, " Every spirit which dissolveth Jesus." 1
I have, in the course of this exposition, given
my reasons for thinking that this reading is
probably original, and that (in accordance with
the plainer indications in the Epistle) it would
naturally be interpreted of any doctrine which
" dissolves " Christ s person, and instead of
acknowledging one person, the Son of God made
flesh, postulates two persons or beings a higher
divine being called the Son or the Christ, and
an ordinary human being called Jesus. Such
teaching would accordingly involve the denial
that the man Jesus was or is, in His own
person, either the Son or the divine Christ,
or, to put it otherwise, would deny the verity
of the incarnation that truly and really the
eternal Son was " made flesh." Then, finally,
in v. 6 it is implied that the false teaching ac
knowledges that the Christ (or the Son) " came
by water," i.e. presumably at the baptism of
Jesus, but denies that He came " by blood,"
i.e. denies to Him any participation in the
passion. This much I think we could gather
1 Rather than " annulleth," as R.V. margin translates.
The antichrists 111
by way of probable conjecture from the Epistle
itself, in the light of what we know of the
early forms of Gnosticism. But all these
hints or indications as to the doctrine which
St. John was so strenuously opposing are
precisely in accordance with the account
which Irenaeus gives us of the false teaching
of Cerinthus, the traditional opponent of St.
John.
This Saint Irenaeus is found as an influential
presbyter in the Church of Lyons in A.D. 177,
and was there made bishop in succession to
St. Pothinus, the martyr in the persecution
under Marcus Aurelius, and continued as bishop
till about the end of the century. There was
no one in the whole Christian world held in
higher esteem than he. And his early home
had been in Asia Minor. There, in his early
youth, he had been a disciple of the famous
Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, later the martyr ;
and he tells us (in a letter to a certain Florinus,
who had been with him there at the same period,
probably in the imperial service) how vividly
he remembers all about Polycarp, his look, his
character, his habit, and his teaching how he
used to narrate his intercourse with John and
112 St. John s Epistles
with the others who had seen the Lord : for
Polycarp had been appointed bishop in Smyrna
by the surviving apostles. 1 Irenseus s life, in
Asia, in Rome (for he was more than once in
Rome), and in Gaul, coincided with the activity
of the " Gnostics," and it is mainly against
them that he wrote his great work in defence
of orthodox Christianity (The Conviction and
Overturning of the Knowledge [Gnosis] falsely
so-called). The Gnostics, who were so named
because, like modern theosophists, they laid
stress upon their superior knowledge (gnosis)
and enlightenment, and despised the simple
faith of the Church, belonged to various schools
and followed various leaders who combined in
different amalgamations Jewish and Christian
ideas and terms with ideas and terms derived
from Oriental and Greek speculation. But the
central motive of all these movements or schools
of thought was the refusal to bring the supreme
God, the highest and the holiest, into any
immediate contact with matter. This con
tempt for matter or the material world was
common in different degrees to Greek philosophy
and to Oriental speculation, and it was, as I
1 See Iron. iii. 3, 4, and fragm. ii.
The antichrists 113
have said, the soul of all the movements grouped
together as Gnostic, which have remarkable
affinities with modern theosophy and indeed
with other kinds of modern idealism. In ac
cordance with this fundamental characteristic
they all had to find some creator for this lower,
material world other than the Supreme God,
who could not be made responsible for it, and
also some way of deliverance for the souls of men,
or the fragments of the spiritual principle
suffering bondage in material bodies, other
than the incarnation of any properly divine
being. The very idea of the incarnation of
God in a material body was intolerable to
them. Their way of bridging over the gulf
between the Supreme God and the lower world
was by postulating " emanations " from God
in a gradually descending scale. And some of
these schools of Gnostics took up the idea or name
of the Christ, represented as a heavenly being,
almost divine in character, and they gave the
name of " Christ " to one of their semi-divine
" emanations " who belonged to the spiritual
and not the material world. With this much
by way of explanation we shall be able to under
stand Irenaeus s quite careful and credible account
114 St. John s Epistles
of Cerinthus, first of all taking note that
Irenseus tells us, on the authority of a statement
made by Polycarp to persons at Rome, that
St. John had such a horror of Cerinthus that,
perceiving him in a bathing establishment
whither he had gone to take a bath, he withdrew
in all haste with the exclamation, " Let us
escape, lest the roof fall in, because Cerinthus
is there, the enemy of the truth." 1 We can
imagine St. John, half playfully, but with a
very great seriousness under the playfulness, so
behaving. At any rate, it fairly represents
his profound horror of any teaching which
seemed to him fundamentally anti-Christian.
What, then, was Cerinthus s doctrine, according
to Irenaeus ? It had the two fundamental
Gnostic characteristics : (1) that the creator
of the world had been a " power very far separate
from the Supreme God and ignorant of Him " ;
and (2) that Jesus was a man born in normal
human fashion of Joseph and Mary simply a
pre-eminently good and wise man upon whom,
after his baptism, a divine being, the Christ,
descended from " the Supreme Authority " in
the figure of a dove, announced to Him the
Iren. iii. 3, 4.
The antichrists 115
unknown Father, and worked miracles ; but
that at the last the Christ " flew back again "
from Jesus, and Jesus alone suffered and rose
again while the Christ remained impassible,
being a spiritual being. 1 If we suppose that
Cerinthus, like other Gnostics, spoke also of a
Son of God, whether as identified with the
Christ or as another divine or semi-divine being
from the spiritual world, the account of Cerin-
thus s teaching satisfies all the requirements
which our Epistle suggests for St. John s op
ponents. Irenseus, we must add, would have
us believe that St. John had Cerinthus specially
in mind in writing his Gospel, but he makes
no allusion to the motive of the Epistles,
where opposition to Cerinthus is much more
apparent.
Thus it is that St. John has reason to denounce
those who " dissolve " Jesus ; who make of
Jesus and Christ, or Jesus and the Son of God,
two separate beings ; who deny that the Son of
God has Himself come in our flesh and is still
so to come again ; and who, while they ac
knowledge the participation of the divine being
in the baptism (the water), refuse to acknow-
1 Iron. i. 26, 1 ; iii. 11, 1.
116 St. John s Epistles
ledge His participation in the passion (the
blood). 1
With this amount of explanation we can go
on to consider the next section of the Epistle.
Explanatory Analysis. We are living in a last
hour of the world s day. That is to say, the Day
of the Lord the day of the coming of Christ in
His glory is at hand. But a last hour is an
hour of strenuous conflict, in which the forces
that resist Christ gather for their last effort,
You have heard about the coming of Antichrist.
But if you look around you see that many anti
christs have arisen. That is the sign of a last
hour. These antichrists did not spring up in
the heathen world. They are apostate Chris
tians. But though they formally belonged to
our company, they did not really belong to us
or they would have remained with us. To show
their true character to warn us that all Chris
tians are not real Christians they left us. Now
they are striving to lead you astray with an
1 It appears that Hippolytus gave a rather different account
of Cerinthus s teaching. But Irenseus s account certainly
coincides remarkably with the teaching which St. John appears
to have in view. It should be noticed that Cerinthus was not
a Docetist, and there is no real suggestion of Docetism in the
doctrine which St. John is opposing.
The antichrists 117
alien doctrine a lie incompatible with the
truth. And you, because you have received
the anointing of the Spirit of truth, have all of
you the power to know the truth and to dis
tinguish between the truth and the falsehood.
What is the falsehood ? It is the denial of the
Incarnation the denial that Jesus, who lived
and died in human flesh, is the very Christ and
Son of God. And to deny that Jesus is the Son
is to deny the Father. There is no belief in the
Father possible except by belief in Jesus Christ
as the Son. That is the original message which
you received when you became Christians and
to which you must abide faithful. The eternal
life, the life of fellowship with the Son and the
Father, is promised to those only who so believe
in Jesus.
I have written this to warn you against those
who would lead you astray. But it is no ex
ternal warnings that you need. You have
received as a permanent endowment of your
nature the unction of the Spirit of truth. He
is an infallible guide and teacher, and you have
nothing to do but cling closely to His original
teaching. Holding to the Spirit, you will be
ready for Christ, whenever He is manifested in
118 St. John s Epistles
His glory. That day of His coming is what
we have to expect, and our effort must be to
be so loyal to Him as that His coming may
bring us no failure of heart and no danger of
being shamed away from Him. And the mark
of true sonship, as derived from Him, is this
only it is likeness of character, a righteousness
like His.
Little children, it is the last hour : and as ye heard that
antichrist cometh, even now have there arisen many
antichrists ; whereby we know that it is the last hour.
They went out from us, but they were not of us ; for if
they had been of us, they would have continued with us :
but they went out, that they might be made manifest how
that they all are not of us. And ye have an anointing
from the Holy One, and ye all know. I have not written
unto you because ye know not the truth, but because
ye know it, and because no lie is of the truth. Who is the
liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ ? This
is the antichrist, even he that denieth the Father and the
Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the
Father : he that confesseth the Son hath the Father also.
As for you, let that abide in you which ye heard from the
beginning. If that which ye heard from the beginning
abide in you, ye also shall abide in the Son, and in the
Father. And this is the promise which he promised us,
even the life eternal. These things have I written unto
you concerning them that would lead you astray. And
as for you, the anointing which ye received of him abideth
in you, and ye need not that any one teach you ; but as
The antichrists 119
his anointing teacheth you concerning all things, and is
true, and is no lie, and even as it taught you, ye abide in
him. And now, my little children, abide in him ; that,
if he shall be manifested, we may have boldness, and not
be ashamed before him at his coming. If ye know that
he is righteous, ye know that every one also that doeth
righteousness is begotten of him.
The " last day," that is, the " manifestation "
of Christ, His final " coming " in glory (ver. 28),
is the background of this whole paragraph. If
St. John is the author of the Apocalypse which
closes our Bible, no doubt his mind was full of
this subject. But in his Gospel and Epistles
he only alludes to it or assumes it (see in the
Gospel, v. 28, vi. 39, 40, etc., xi. 24, xii. 48, xxi. 22,
and in the Epistle ii. 28 and iii. 2). Probably
he thought that in the existing Gospels and in
the current traditions of the Church stress
enough was laid on the future coming, and that
his task was to supply what was lacking to
strengthen the tradition of the Church in the
matter of Christ s own witness to Himself, as
He had borne it in the world by word and sign,
and of His "coming" by the Spirit in the Church
to perpetuate His life here and now among men,
that is " the eternal life," which is St. John s
name for the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless,
120 St. John s Epistles
none can doubt that St. John also looked
forward eagerly to the coming of Christ in glory
His final manifestation. And as there is a
good deal of perplexity upon the subject,
something must be said about it.
1. The prophets of Israel constantly pro
claimed " the day of the Lord " the day of
judgement upon all rebellious persons and in
stitutions the day when God shall come into
His own in the world that He has made. And
must we not say that such a belief is hardly
separable from belief in God ? If God exists
and is Lord, He must at last vindicate His
sovereignty. But this final, acknowledged reign
of God might come about by a gradual evolution,
a gradual and progressive advance of good
over evil. Not so, however, did the prophets,
and especially not so did the later apocalyptic
teachers of Israel, expect God to vindicate
Himself at last, but by an abrupt catastrophe.
The powers of evil, the powers which ignore and
resist God, would go on in their pride and in
solence, and continually seem too strong for
the people of God. Then suddenly and finally
God would act, to overthrow the adversaries
and establish His reign and the triumph of His
The antichrists 121
faithful ones. And the instrument of this final
judgement and triumph was to be the promised
Christ : so, at least, the belief of the Jews had
tended to fix itself when our Lord came into the
world, though no doubt with much variation
and uncertainty in detail. Now, in several
ways our Lord profoundly corrected in the
minds of His disciples this current belief, as by
His teaching of the suffering Messiah, and of
the judgement on Israel itself, and of the kingdom
v C-J CJ
of God as a thing now present and secretly
working among men, and of the Mission of the
Spirit, and His own return by the Spirit to
establish the kingdom of God in the Church.
In all these ways He turned men s minds in
another direction and towards ideals quite
different from those of Jewish Apocalypse.
Nevertheless, it is quite certain that He main
tained the belief in the minds of His disciples
that this age of the world would have an end,
and that the end w r ould be His coming to judge
the world and to establish the divine kingdom
in all its fulness of glory. This is what our
Lord in St. John s Gospel frequently calls
" the last day." This is, therefore, the faith
of the Church as it is recited in the Creeds. And
122 St. John s Epistles
I ask again, is faith in God really separable
from belief in His final triumph, or faith in
Christ, as manifested God, separable from the
belief that His coming in glory will close the
vista of history ? Every Christian heart should
cry out " Even so come, Lord Jesus " ; and it
is because we do not heartily and all together
so cry out that we are not allowed to see even
" one of the days of the Son of Man."
2. The Antichrist. But granted this belief
in " the last day," how is it to be expected ?
By a gradual and progressive improvement of
the world till the lordship of Christ is everywhere
recognized ? That progress is the intention of
God, and that the Church, which represents His
mind, is intended to expand, and thereby also
the whole force of good in the world to be
manifested to its utmost limits, is certain and
has been matter of experience. It is irreligious
to doubt the divine purpose of progressive good
and idle to deny its reality. Nevertheless, it is
always progress by conflict. The embodiments
of evil change their shape, but evil shows no
signs of disappearing or even weakening. Thus,
prophets and our Lord lend no countenance to
the idea of a gradual disappearance of evil.
The antichrists 123
Bather they lead us to anticipate the fiercest
conflict at the end. This is the implication of
our Lord s question, "When the Son of Man
cometh, shall He find the faith on the earth ? "
The strain on faith, it seems, is to be intensest
at the end. So the early Church, perhaps
learning it from the Jews, anticipated at the
end a sort of incarnation of the forces of evil
and lawlessness in an Antichrist. St. John does
not appear to encourage such a belief ; but he
points to the " many antichrists " who were
plain to see in the experience of the Church ;
and amongst them he signalizes as antichrists
and deceivers one particular class of teachers
who opposed the belief in the incarnation, and
he would stimulate the Christian Church to a
firm and deliberate resistance to their doctrine.
Certainly we cannot to-day look around us
and doubt that for us also there are many
antichrists. Those, for instance, who are most
keenly democratic to-day, who believe that
democracy represents the divine purpose, are
rendered thereby the more conscious that de
mocracy has many perils that it needs Christ
if it is not to fail and disappoint us ; and that
it is the anti-Christian forces which are the real
124 St. John s Epistles
enemies of democracy. Certainly there are
many antichrists. But it is false doctrine that
St. John has specially in view. He most de
liberately and solemnly warns us that Chris
tianity is a religion which involves a specific
intellectual position the belief, in particular,
that the eternal "Word or Son of God, Himself
God, was made flesh ; that is, was personally
incarnate in Jesus Christ : and that the denial
of this is antichrist. We are so loath to-day
positively to reject any doctrine we are so
anxious " to hear what can be said on both
sides " that any real intellectual decision is
very difficult for us. We need, then, seriously
to consider the deliberate but decisive judgements
of St. John, as indeed of St. Paul and of the
Church, on fundamental questions. There are
certain questions on which the Church cannot
be neutral, for its life is at stake. It must
pronounce sentence. It must say deliberately,
" This is antichrist."
3. But what is the meaning of " a last hour " ?
The presence of these antichrists, St. John
says, is the sign of a " last hour." (He does
not write " the last hour," but " a last hour."
This can hardly be unintentional.) This ex-
The antichrists 125
presses the belief already alluded to that " the
day of the Lord " that is, the day of the victory
of good and of God, would be preceded by a
period of specially hot conflict. This would be
" the last hour " of the world preceding the
dawning of the new " day." And every day
of judgement on a corrupt civilization, every
" day of the Son of Man," would in like manner
be preceded by a " last hour " of intense conflict.
Thus there may be many " days of the Son of
Man " and many " last hours," and it is quite
possible that this is definitely in St. John s
mind, and that he does not mean to insist that
the end of the world is close at hand; though
he, probably with the rest of the apostolic
Church, had so believed in earlier days, through
a misunderstanding (as I think) of our Lord s
meaning. It is very difficult to deal with a
subject of much controversy in a few words.
But I think the truth is this.
Our Lord quite deliberately and solemnly
pronounced judgement on Jerusalem, and he
did this in the manner of the ancient prophets,
who threw their prophecies of judgement against
the world-powers upon the background of
physical convulsions. So our Lord threw the
126 St. John s Epistles
judgement over Jerusalem on the background
of physical convulsions. All His words in the
apocalyptic discourse about darkened lumin
aries, and falling stars, and quaking nature
(St. Mark xiii. 24-6) are quotations from the
ancient prophets. Now I believe that all our
Lord s assertions of the end, as coming within
the generation which heard His words, had a
definite reference to the judgement on Jerusalem,
though they were partly misunderstood. I
believe also that our Lord did truly (as repre
sented in other utterances in the Gospels) warn
the disciples against imagining that they could
know the times and the seasons of the divine
judgements, and used language about the uni
versal preaching of the Gospel and the gradual
diffusion of His teaching and of God s kingdom
which was inconsistent with any rapid end of
the world : and that He solemnly confessed
that He, though He was the Son, did not (in
His mortal state) know the day or the hour
i.e. did not have the map of the future spread
before His human mind. Thus I believe that
He neither deceived His disciples nor spread
the future before them ; but (1) definitely
foretold one " day of the Son of Man," one
The antichrists 127
" day of judgement " within their own genera
tionthat is, the judgement on Jerusalem, and
threw this on the background of final physical
catastrophe, a background which is no doubt
symbolical and traditional but represents a
reality ; (2) led them to expect a similar day
of judgement " one of the days of the Son of
Man " wherever they should see an evil in
stitution or corrupt civilization showing its
signs of rottenness : Wherever the carcase is,
there will the eagles be gathered together " ;
(3) maintained in their minds the belief in a last
great day, which shall be the end of this present
world and the coming of the new heaven and
the new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.
It appears to be of the essence of the teaching
about the end which we can ascribe to divine
inspiration to be both symbolical and vague
in outline. We are not meant to learn the
future beforehand, except in its moral principles.
Thus the disciples mistook our Lord s meaning,
and thought themselves justified in anticipating
His almost immediate return and the end of
the world. But this was never more than an
expectation. It was never part of their faith.
Thus when Jerusalem fell and the end did not
128 St. Johns Epistles
come, they suffered, apparently, no great shock.
When John saw the vision of the Apocalypse,
the day of judgement on the new adversary, the
persecuting empire of Rome, was shown him
as being both certain and speedy, and again
this act of divine judgement was thrown upon
the tremendous background of the end of the
world. Yet if St. John had lived long enough
to see the judgement on Rome, but to find a
new age dawning and the end of the world still
seemingly as far off as ever, I believe he would
have suffered no shock, but would still have
bidden us expect and call for the judgements of
God on every form of organized wickedness,
and still prepare for bitter conflict (" a last
hour ") before the end comes, and still be
prepared for a new lifetime of the present
world. Certainly we live to-day in the midst
of the signs of judgement on a false industrial
civilization and a false nationalism. Certainly
it is a " last hour " of conflict. But it need
not be the end of the world. It may be the
dawning of a new and better age.
4. The purpose of schisms or heresies is declared
by St. Paul (1 Cor. xi. 19) to be the sifting out
in the face of day of the true from the false
The antichrists 129
Christians. So here St. John sees the signi
ficance of the Gnostic schisms in the proof it
affords that all who are Christians formally are
not Christians really (ver. 19). What St. Au
gustine calls " the true body of Christ " consists
of those who belong both to the body of the
Church and to its spirit. And it is only by a
sifting probation that it becomes evident who
they are.
5. The Unction from the Holy One is the Holy
Spirit. So St. Paul had already called the
gift of the Spirit as given in the Church (2 Cor.
i. 21). It means that we share with " Christ,"
the Anointed One, in the same gift. At the
same time, St. John tells us, Christ is for us the
source of the gift. He is " the Holy One " by
whom the gift is bestowed (cf. John vi. 69,
Apoc. iii. 7, and John xvi. 7). And just as in
the Gospel the Paraclete is especially viewed
as " the Spirit of truth," who guides into all the
truth and reveals Christ as He truly is and
recalls His words, so it is here in the Epistle.
The result of His coming into their hearts is
that they " all know " (rather than " they
know all things "), and all can and must test
and discriminate by an inward criterion true
130 St. John s Epistles
teaching from false, and hold fast with a personal
conviction to the original Gospel, as being the
truth. This is very strongly affirmed in this
passage.
Certainly St. John would not tolerate the
Romanist division of the Church into "the teach
ing Church " i.e. the priesthood and " the
Church which learns " i.e. the laity which simply
receives from its teachers what it is to believe.
Ye need not/ he says, " that any one teach
you." Ye have within yourselves a better
teacher. We must acknowledge at the same
time that St. John, while he says this, is at the
V
very moment giving very markedly dogmatic in
struction. If we are to interpret him reasonably
we shall recognize the teaching function of the
Church and its officers, but recognize also that
the truth is committed to the whole body and
to every member of it who receives the Spirit
of truth; and the power of testing what is
currently taught belongs, or should belong,
to every adult Christian. This freedom of
inquiry, which is the spirit of the claim for an
" open Bible," makes the " teaching office " of
the Church or the official priesthood a very
different thing from what it becomes if it is
The antichrists 131
unregulated by the free inquiry and criticism
of the whole body of the faithful.
The " anointing " of Christians is described
by St. John as something which " they re
ceived " on a certain occasion. The reference
is, I think there is no doubt, to what we call
Confirmation or " the laying on of hands/
St. John, we remember, was in the earliest days
of the Church " sent down " with St. Peter
by the Church at Jerusalem to " confirm-" the
newly converted and baptized Samaritans ; and,
as far as we know, the gift of the Spirit which
gives to each member of the body his full
franchise both his full spiritual endowment
and his share in the kingship and priesthood
of God which belongs to the Church has been
from the first sacramentally conceived ; that
is to say, it has been regarded as normally con
veyed through the outward ceremony of the
laying on of hands. Early in the Church s life,
partly in consequence of St. John s words,
anointing with oil was added to the laying on
of hands and became part of the ceremony of
Christian initiation. But it is not probable
that it was in use in St. John s day. I may
quote Tertullian s words about the ceremony
10
132 St. John s Epistles
as it was in his day, A.D. 200 : When we come
out of the font we are anointed with the blessed
unction which comes from the discipline of the
old covenant under which they used to be
anointed with oil to the priesthood. . . . After
wards the hand is laid upon us by benediction
invoking and inviting the Holy Spirit."
6. " // he shall be manifested." Both here
and in iii. 2 St. John uses this rather curious
expression, which cannot be understood to
express any doubt about the second coming,
but only an uncertainty as to the time of its
occurrence " if (at any moment) " ; cf. John
xiv. 3, " If I go away and prepare a place
for you." The "if" in these cases is hardly
distinguishable from "whenever."
5. 1 JOHN iii. 1-12
THE CHILDREN OF GOD AND OF THE DEVIL
ST. JOHN has been speaking of the conflict which
the Church, holding the faith of the Incarnation,
is bound to maintain with the antichrists who
seek to undermine the right faith. But at the
end of the paragraph there is a sharp tran
sition. It had appeared that the mark of the
true Church was right belief. Now suddenly
it is declared that righteousness a character
like Christ s is the infallible mark of the new
birth. These rapid transitions from insistence
on orthodoxy to insistence on character as the
one essential are characteristic of St. John.
Of this something more will be said later. Now
he pursues the last thought of righteousness
as the mark of the children of God. It is no
longer the conflict between truth and falsehood
which is in his mind, but the conflict of two
kinds of society based respectively on righteous
ness and sin.
The wonderful love of the Father has admitted
us, by a new birth from Christ (ii. 29), into
133
134 St. John s Epistles
the position of children of God. So we are
called and so we have found ourselves to be.
It follows that the world which refused to
recognize Jesus Christ will refuse to recognize
us, because in our sonship to God we are like
Him in character. We are like Him in this
world as being children of God. And if there
lies before us a more splendid future when Christ
shall have come in glory, and if our future con
dition has not yet been revealed to us, yet this
at least we know about it, that it will still be
a condition of likeness to Him. We shall see
Him as He is ; and none can so see Him without
being like Him. Every one, therefore, who is
inspired with the hope of eternal fellowship
with Christ, must have one main motive in life
to become like Him, to purify himself even
as Christ is pure. But this involves a per
manent antagonism to sin. For what is sin ?
It is lawlessness. God made the world to
express a certain order and law in all its parts.
Upon every creature is impressed the law of its
being. Only to created spirits, including man,
was given the fateful gift of freedom, involving
the opportunity for rebellion and lawlessness.
This is sin. All sin is violation of law, and
The children of God 135
there is no violation of law except through the
rebellion of free spirits. Sin and lawlessness
are co-extensive terms. In antagonism to this
principle of sin Christ was manifested. Himself
sinless, He was to expiate and take away sins.
And between Him and sin there can be no kind
of fellowship. To abide in Him means not to
sin : to sin means that we have had no vision
of Him nor knowledge of Him.
There is this root antagonism : and it is
with regard to this that St. John feels that
there are so many who would deceive his " little
children " his immature and easily misled
disciples. There are, in fact, two sonships
between which we must choose the sonship to
God in Christ, of which the essential principle
is righteousness like Christ s righteousness, and
the sonship to the devil, of which the essential
character is sin and lawlessness. Sin has been
from the beginning, before ever man was, the
characteristic of the devil, and every one who
sins belongs to him. To destroy all that the
devil has done to bring his seeming kingdom
to dissolution is the very object for which
Christ was manifested.
We must recognize, then, the fundamental
136 St. John s Epistles
antagonism. In being regenerated and made
children of God we have received the seed of
a new life which makes sin impossible. Sin is
the outward and visible mark of the children
of the devil, as righteousness of the children of
God. And this righteousness is no mere ab
stinence from evil but a positive thing, in par
ticular a positive love of each one who belongs
to the brotherhood. So we were taught from
the beginning ; just as, on the other hand, the
children of the devil, since the days of Cain, as
they have been themselves sinful, so also have
been inspired by a jealousy of good in others
which has made them hate their brethren, as Cain
hated his brother Abel and became his murderer.
Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed
upon us, that we should be called children of God : and
such we are. For this cause the world knoweth us not,
because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we children
of God, and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be.
We know that, if he shall be manifested, we shall be like
him ; for we shall see him even as he is. And every one
that hath this hope set on him purifieth himself, even as
he is pure. Every one that doeth sin doeth also lawless
ness : and sin is lawlessness. And ye know that he was
manifested to take away sins ; and in him is no sin. Who
soever abideth in him sinneth not : whosoever sinneth
hath not seen him, neither knoweth him. My little
children, let no man lead you astray : he that doeth
and the children of the devil 137
righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous : he that
doeth sin is of the devil ; for the devil sinneth from the
beginning. To this end was the Son of God manifested,
that he might destroy the works of the devil. Whosoever
is begotten of God doeth no sin, because his seed abideth
in him : and he cannot sin, because he is begotten of God.
In this the children of God are manifest, and the children
of the devil : whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of
God, neither he that loveth not his brother. For this is
the message which ye heard from the beginning, that we
should love one another : not as Cain was of the evil one,
and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him ? Be
cause his works were evil, and his brother s righteous.
1. Sonship and heaven. The love of the
Father is a self-communicating love. He is
not content with showing it. He has also
" given " it as a gift to us, by the Spirit. The
true mark of the sonship into which we are
called is to live in the possession and exercise
of the divine love. " As many as are led by
the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God/
St. John, however, never uses St. Paul s word
" sons." He always calls us " children " of
God, a word suggestive of our being only at the
beginning of our spiritual life still quite un
developed, as he goes on to intimate : for " never
yet was it made manifest " not even in the
appearances of our Lord after His resurrection
of what sort we shall be in the perfected life of
138 St. John s Epistles
heaven. This only we can be sure of, that as
likeness to Christ is the mark of the children of
God even now, so much more will it be in heaven.
There we shall be like Him " because we shall
see Him as He is " which phrase probably
covers both possible meanings, viz. that only
those who are like Him can see Him as He is,
and also that the vision of Him will transform
us more and more into His likeness. This is
the essence of heavenly perfection, to see Christ
as He is in His glory.
Beyond this fundamental thought the silence
of the New Testament about the world beyond
is most remarkable. In all those respects in
which it has a direct bearing on present conduct
in all those respects in which faith needs to be
made vigorous, and hope sure, and love active,
and repentance thorough we are informed
about the eternal issues of life. But with regard
to the multitude of questions which curiosity
suggests to us about heaven and hell and about
the state of waiting whether, for example,
there is purgatory for the imperfect there is
singularly little, we may almost say nothing, to
be gathered from the pages of the New Testament.
And this silence is so marked that we are forced
The children of God 139
to conclude that it is intentional. We are not
meant to know what the after-life is to be
like, and it is probably inexpressible in terms
of our present intellectual faculties. We must
be content with childish figures and metaphors.
Our present business is to show what the life
of sonship can be on earth.
2. Regeneration. The principle of regenera
tion is stated by St. John in the prologue to his
Gospel thus : In a world of sin and darkness
there were yet those who received the true
light, which is Jesus Christ. " And as many
as received him, to them gave he the right to
become children of God, even to them that
believe on his name ; which were born not of
blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the
will of a man, but of God/ * And again, he
1 John i. 12. There is, however, a very early reading of this
passage which is found in some of the Fathers, and is accepted
as original by some scholars, including Dr. Inge : see his Plotinus
(Longmans), vol. ii. p. 207. According to this reading, the
words after " believe on his name " would run : " who was born
not of bloods, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of a man,
but of God." The words would then describe the manner of
our Lord s birth, not of the mixture of human seeds (for the
word translated " blood " is plural in the Greek), nor of human
appetite, nor of the will of a man (a husband), but of God.
According to the text as it stands in almost all the MSS. and in
our versions, it describes the supernatural regeneration of the
140 St. John s Epistles
reports our Lord as saying to Nicodemus,
Verity, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man
be born anew [or " from above "], he cannot
see the kingdom of God. . . . Except a man be
born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter
into the kingdom of God/ * These passages
mean that so perverted is the whole world by
sin that, though sonship to God is the purpose
of our creation, it must be imparted as a new
gift of God to each man in Christ by His Spirit ;
and the latter implies, what the whole New
Testament suggests, that baptism, the ceremony
of incorporation into Christ and into His Church,
is the instrument of our regeneration. In the
truest and deepest sense all the baptized into
Christ have in themselves the principle of the
new birth and " their seed abideth in them/
We may feel sure St. John would not have
denied this doctrine of baptismal regeneration.
children of God, but in terms suggestive of the New Birth on
which our regeneration is based, i.e. our Lord s birth of a virgin:
see Dr. Chase, Belief and Creed (Macmillan), pp. 67 ff. ; also
Zahn, Einleilung, ii. p. 504 f., as cited by Latimer Jackson,
describes St. John in this passage as so portraying the origin of
the children of God, after the pattern picture of the only " Son
of God " who is such in the fullest sense, that the reader will
be at once reminded of a begetting and birth without carnal
impulse or the will of a man. J John iii, 3, 5.
and the children of the devil 141
Nevertheless, it is most necessary for those
who believe it to notice the insistence with
which St. John speaks of regeneration as neces
sarily involving holiness. Of the baptized who
have no knowledge of the meaning of their
baptism or show no respect to it, he could not
bear to speak as, in the real sense, " begotten
of God/ To be sons of God, he would tell us,
involves co-operation on our part with the act
of God in us. Thus, St. John would be as far
as possible from allowing us to treat baptism
as a charm. He would not, I think, sanction
our struggling to " get people baptized " with
little or no regard to their dispositions ; nor
surely would he sanction the baptism of infants
except with a very real guarantee for their
being brought up to understand the meaning
of what had been bestowed upon them.
3. Sin is lawlessness. There have been many
attempts to explain sin as that it is an inevit
able accompaniment of material life, matter in
itself degrading the spirit which is imprisoned
in it ; or that it is the result of imperfection, a
relic of barbarism or a former purely animal
condition ; or that it is due to ignorance. Now,
it is quite true that our material bodies, especially
142 St. John s Epistles
as they have come to be under the long pre
valence of sin, may and do press us to sin and
minister to sin ; it is quite true that sin may
be due to animal impulses ; it is quite true,
once more, that ignorance promotes sin. But
Christianity has it for one of its central and
essential doctrines that sin, strictly speaking,
is none of these things and does not consist in
any external condition. It is rebellion the
rebellion of created wills against their creator.
God made the world for law and order, and
impressed on each element or type of creation
its own proper law of being. But He gave to
created spirits the fateful gift of freedom, which
carries with it the possibility of rebellion.
And through the whole expanse of nature there
is no lawlessness except where rebel wills have
used their freedom to refuse the will of God.
That lawlessness is sin ; and sin, strictly speak
ing, begins and ends with lawlessness or
rebellion. 1 There is no lawlessness but sin and
no sin that is not lawlessness.
1 It would be out of place to consider what is meant by original
or racial sin, i.e. an inherited tendency to evil. Suffice it to say
here that only in so far as the will accepts the tendency and
makes it its own, does it become strictly sin.
The children of God 143
Thus it is a delusion to speak of sin as if it were
a survival of animal instinct, or as if civilization
tended to outgrow it. Sin is a spiritual thing
a rebellion of will which appears in refined and
intellectual as well as in sensual and animal
forms. Developed civilizations are no less sinful
than barbarisms. Our Lord will not allow us
to believe that sensual sins fornication or
violence are more sinful than pride or avarice
or uncharitableness. Wherever, then, is the
refusal of God, of His truth, of His righteousness,
of His love, there is sin, and as sin is always
lawlessness, so it is always the source of disorder
and weakness in the world.
Again, it is misleading to say (though great
men have said it) that sin is purely negative.
It is no doubt true in the sense that there is
not in the world any evil substance, and that
sin is only the misuse of things or faculties in
themselves good. But if the essence of sin is
rebellion or the assertion of self-will, then surely
it is in itself a very positive thing.
4. He was manifested to take away sins. Just
because sin is not any essential quality of
nature but only a rebellion of wills, so it is
remediable by the conversion of wills into
144 St. John s Epistles
harmony with the purpose of God. Let but
the will be right and the whole nature will be
in time subdued to order. Sin is remediable.
Thus our Lord was manifested to take away
sins. He was " the Lamb of God, which taketh
away the sin of the world/ * That means that
He both expiates it and removes it. Sinless
Himself, He bore all the burden that was laid
upon Him by human sin, into the heart of which
He came in becoming man. As the victim of
pure love He converted all that burden into the
material of His perfect sacrifice. So He ex
piated sin and inaugurated a new manhood
free from all taint and flaw of sin. And this
new manhood, by the power of His Spirit,
becomes the source and ground of moral victory
to all who believe on Him and become united
to Him. So was He manifested in fullest power
to deal effectively both with the guilt and
the power of sin in general and of all sins in
particular. There is no sin for which He can
not and will not supply the remedy.
5. " The devil sinneth from the beginning "
" The works of the devil," " The children of the
devil." Like the rest of the writers of the
1 John i. 29.
and the children of the devil 145
New Testament St. John has no doubt that
behind the rebel wills of men there is a master-
rebel, who sinned before they were in being
("from the beginning"), and who, as the
enemy of all good, is called the devil, the slan
derer, or Satan, the adversary. It seems to
me that our Lord s own language in the same
sense is so deliberate and intense that it is
impossible to accept Him as a perfect spiritual
teacher without accepting this element in His
teaching. And it seems to me also to make a
great practical difference in our spiritual outlook
on life if we accept this as a fact ; and, moreover,
to be in accordance with the deepest spiritual
experience. But instead of using words of my
own, I will quote the words of one of our greatest
recent prophets, Frederick Denison Maurice, 1
who was brought up among Unitarians and in
disbelief of the existence of the devil.
I know that I did not learn this doctrine [about the
devil] by the precepts of men. I was not taught it in
my childhood. Those I reverenced, and still reverence,
considered it a fable. As I grew up I felt the same motives
to retain that opinion which act upon many of my con
temporaries. The notion of a devil was associated in my
mind with many superstitions which science had confuted.
1 Lectures on the Epistles of St. John, xii.
146 St. John s Epistles
It was held by vulgar people, among whom I did not wish
to be reckoned. It was quite possible, if I cared for that,
to pass muster with the orthodox and respectable though
I was sceptical on this point. But there are some things
which are more terrible than being confounded with vulgar
people. It is more terrible not to be honest with one s
self. It is more terrible to think that one is given over
hopelessly to work iniquity. It is more terrible to be cut
off from all fellowship with human beings, if they are
vulgar.
Then he describes the various efforts he made
to explain evil otherwise :
These evil thoughts did they originate with me 1 I
could not say so to please any theorist, or to get credit
for ever so much liberality and wisdom. I might have
rejected the thoughts, but they were presented to me. I
may bewilder myself all men have bewildered themselves
at some time or other by saying, " I shuffled the cards ;
I played both hands " ; but it will not do. It is not a fair
representation of the facts. To a man in earnest it is a
quite maddening explanation of them. Did they, then,
originate with some other mortal ? It is the same story
again. If a man is making his confession on his deathbed,
he, too, will speak of the thought having been in some way
offered to him. He knows then that this does not make
the case better for him, but he uses the language because
it is the only natural language.
Then he speaks of the importance of this feeling :
It is no fancy. You know that it is what we are all
tempted to do continually [that is, to make excuses for
ourselves on the ground of our nature]. But if we heartily
The children of God 147
believed that we had a common enemy plotting against
us all, making use of every man s peculiar gift or charac
teristic which is meant for his blessing, to work his ruin,
accusing our Father in heaven to us all, accusing every
brother to another, persuading each of us that he is not a
child of God, that he does not belong to a family of brothers,
should we indulge this miserable tenderness of that which
is preying upon our own vitals ; should we indulge our
cruelty by mocking the diseases and derangements of our
brothers ? Should we not feel that we have a common
battle to fight ; that each man who stood his own ground
firmly was doing something for all against the common
enemy, that each might aid some other, even by his wounds
and his falls ?
Granted this, we understand quite well what
St. John means by " the works of the devil."
It is the devil who by his age-long activity
gives a certain kingdom-like consistency to evil
and builds an evil " world " over against the
kingdom of God. And those who allow them
selves to be the servants of sin become " his
children." But the whole of this false fabric
is to pass away. Christ was manifested to
destroy, or, more strictly, to " dissolve " it.
He has already in principle dissolved, and is
in fact to dissolve, the " works of the devil."
6. (f Whosoever abideth in him sinneth not; . . .
he that doeth sin is of the devil." This section will
11
148 St. John s Epistles
make us familiar with St. John s idealism. He
sees things in their fundamental principles and
traces out the working of these principles, free
from all hindrances, to their ultimate results.
So he exposes to light each tendency as it is in
principle and in its extreme issue. So he deals
with the good and evil which he sees around
him. So he paints things white and black
not grey. Thus the principle of goodness is
sonship to God. It is totally incompatible with
any sin. It is the purity of Christ. It wages
with sin an incessant conflict with an absolute
mastery. Sin, on the other hand, is pure law
lessness. It is the principle of the devil. All
who share in sin are the children of the devil.
In particular, the characteristic of the children
of God is pure love of the brethren. The
characteristic of the children of the devil is
jealousy, hatred, and murder. So the children
of God and the children of this " world " which
" lieth in the evil one " are absolutely distinct.
Thus, again, in the preceding paragraph, he
has put into the same sharp opposition the
faith of the Church and the lies of Antichrist.
But we to-day resent this method of St. John s
and distrust it and especially our " intelligent
and the children of the devil 14.9
people." The world is a very mixed place, we
say. In every man and in every current opinion
good and evil, truth and falsehood are mixed.
There is a soul of good in things evil and of
evil in things good. We will neither give an
exclusive approval nor an exclusive condemna
tion to anything ; or, rather, with a benevolent
optimism, we will make the best of every
tendency and entertain the hope that nothing
is really bad or utterly false, but is part of the
great mixed movement which has God for its
goal. This is called charity, or appreciative
sympathy, or tolerance, or broad-mindedness.
But we know enough of ourselves to know the
fatal result of such tolerance or broad-minded
ness. It eats at the roots of decision. It makes
us acquiesce in things as they are. It paralyses
moral action. It does this, St. John would tell
us, because it is false. Tendencies are not all
fundamentally good. They are not all moving
to the same good end. We are not all going to
the same place. There are two tendencies ;
two standards ; two kingdoms between which
we have to choose ; and our wisdom is to see
each in its essential nature, in its ultimate issue,
and under its real leader Christ or the devil ;
150 St. John s Epistles
Christ or Antichrist. Of course St. John is
no dualist. He of all men knows that there is
only one God that the devil is only a rebel
spirit, and that the kingdom of evil is destined
only for final overthrow. Nevertheless, in our
existing world evil is alive and active, and
stands to be overcome. Again, St. John knows
that the children of God are not absolutely
true to their divine Father and do, in fact,
commit sins. So he reiterates in this Epistle.
He gives no real support to the arrogant claims
of sinless perfection. But Christians who sin
" forget themselves." And if their real will is
right they can recover themselves. Also, there
is no reason to doubt that he would recognize a
movement for good in the heart of those who are,
on the whole, abandoned to sin. But at the
bottom there is an inevitable choice. Ye
cannot serve God and mammon." Each man
at bottom adheres to the kingdom of God or
the kingdom of the devil ; and our wisdom is
to unveil the true principles of each kingdom
the real meaning of truth and righteousness,
and the real meaning of sin and falsehood, that
we may cleave to the one and hate the other.
Finally, the special characteristic of the
The children of God 151
righteousness of Christ and His kingdom is
active love, and the special characteristic of
Satan s kingdom is selfishness and the conse
quent hatred and jealousy of what threatens
selfishness that is, love. So we get our point
of transition to the next paragraph.
6. 1 JOHN iii. 13-24
THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD LOVE AND HATE
ST. JOHN S thought is still running on the hatred
of the Church on the part of the world which
the brethren are to expect. They cannot wonder
that it should be so, because they have passed
right out of that old world that world of death
into a new world the world of life. And the
evidence to ourselves of having passed from the
one world to the other is that we find ourselves
loving all our brethren in the new fellowship
actively loving all sorts of men and women
whom naturally we should have disliked and
avoided. Now, inasmuch as love is the only
evidence of our really belonging to the Church,
it is of the greatest importance that we should
not be deceived as to our possessing it. Nega
tively, it can be known by its being utterly
incompatible with hatred of any one of our
brethren. Hatred in principle is the same thing
as murder : it is murder in the heart ; and the
152
The church and the world 153
spirit of murder utterly excludes from the true
or eternal life, of which it is the essence of the
Church to be possessed. Positively, the love
of the brethren must be unlimited in degree
and extent. As shown to us in Christ it meant
the surrender of His life for us, and in us, too,
it must be nothing less we ought to lay down
our lives for the brethren. But also and here
it can be more frequently tested it must
extend to all the common needs of life. It is
idle for any one to profess to have the love of
God in him if, when he sees his brother in want
of anything, he does not supply his necessities
out of his store of this world s goods, but closes
to him the avenues of his heart in selfishness.
For love is not a matter of words, nor is the
tongue its proper instrument, but it is practical
and real. But when the genuine motive of our
life is this sort of love, then we know that we
belong to the truth that is the real world, the
world of God and though we are very far from
perfect, yet in whatever re spect we feel our
conscience condemn us, we shall reassure our
selves that we are right with God, because
God, who is greater than our hearts and who
knows everything, assures us of our standing-
154 St. John s Epistles
ground before Him by the genuine utter love
which is our motive. And if we are not self-
condemned, if we can thus rightly reassure our
conscience, we can stand boldly before God to
speak freely to Him ; and we can depend upon
it that He will grant all our requests, because
we keep His commandments and do what pleases
Him. And His commandment is twofold. It
is a commandment of belief that we should
believe the revelation of Himself that He has
given in Him whom we must own as Son of
God, Jesus the Christ. It is also a command
ment of practice that we should love one
another in will and act, just as He bade us.
And there is no mistake about it he who thus
observes God s commandments shares in God s
life. God abides in him and he abides in
God. The evidence to ourselves of this divine
indwelling is that we are conscious that He has
given us His Spirit.
Marvel not, brethren, if the world hateth you. We
know that we have passed out of death into life, because
we love the brethren. He that loveth not abideth in
death. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer : and
ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.
Hereby know we love, because he laid down his life for
us : and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.
The church and the ivorld 155
But whoso hath the world s goods, and beholdeth his
brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him,
how doth the love of God abide in him ? My little children,
let us not love in word, neither with the tongue ; but in
deed and truth. Hereby shall we know that we are of the
truth, and shall assure our heart before him, whereinsoever
our heart condemn us ; because God is greater than our
heart, and knoweth all things. Beloved, if our heart
condemn us not, we have boldness toward God ; and
whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep
his commandments, and do the things that are pleasing
in his sight. And this is his commandment, that we should
believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ, and love one
another, even as he gave us commandment. And he that
keepeth his commandments abideth in him, and he in him-
And hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the Spirit
which he gave us.
1. The two worlds. If we consider such a
passage as this attentively, the experience which
it represents cannot but astonish us. As we
have seen, St. John paints experience very black
and very white in the sharpest contrast. On
the one hand, there is the experience of "the
world " a world made up of " the lust of the
flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of
life" : a lawless world a world of death the
world which the devil rules. He fearlessly
paints it in these black colours, as also St. Paul
does, as if there were no doubt that his readers
156 St. John s Epistles
would acknowledge that they had so found it.
On the other hand, sharply distinguished from
it, is the new world into which they have passed
by an unmistakable act of transition the
world for which Christ both sets the example
of true living and provides by His sacrifice the
all-sufficient redemption from the old tyranny
of sin and inbreathes by His Spirit the power
of the new life. And of this new life the supreme
and summary test is the " love of the brethren."
About the true quality of their love St. John
would have them examine themselves narrowly.
But granted that it is genuine and unmistakable,
he would have them in spite of all suggested
scruples of conscience suggested by their failures
and sins trust it utterly as the sufficient
evidence of their fellowship with God ; for where
genuine love is, God is. And though his lan
guage suggests the need of admonition and the
possibility of a hypocritical profession of Christ,
yet there is no mistaking his fearless appeal to
experience. The thing was, as He says, " true
[or real] in Christ and in them/ It is a realized
experience. There is a sentence from George
Meredith s preface to The Tragic Comedians in
which he speaks as if this sort of pure love did
The church and the world 157
not exist among men. " Love may be celestial
fire before it enters into the system of mortals.
It will then take the character of its place of
abode, and we have to look not so much for the
pure thing, as for the passion/ St. John s
experience asserts the contrary. He would
have us utterly repudiate this slander on the
capacity of humanity for the highest and best.
He and in this he claims to speak for the
Church as a whole has found men capable of
the fellowship of real love.
The love which St. John describes is no doubt
potentially universal. No doubt St. John would
assent to the universal extension of love which
St. Peter s second Epistle suggests 1 from " love
of the brethren " to " love " universal. But
St. John is only speaking of love within the
limited circle of believers. " The brethren "
means certainly those only who have confessed
Christ and been baptized into His fellowship.
This has been already made plain. Now, to
become a Christian when St. John wrote was to
enter a society viewed with intense suspicion
and hatred in contemporary society though
it provoked also an unwilling admiration. It
1 2 Peter i, 7.
158 St. John s Epistles
was to run the risk of calumny and persecution.
The reality of the sacrifice involved in entering
it kept the Church relatively pure. Not that
Christians were perfect ; but that they .re
sponded to moral discipline and to the appeal
of sacrifice as to what was obviously expected
of them. Within the sacred circle temporal
provision could fearlessly be made for all men,
because, speaking generally, the brethren could
be trusted. " Charity," in the sense of alms
giving, did no harm, but good. It was the
practical and voluntary expression of a real
community of goods. It is, therefore, desper
ately hard to apply the principles of St. John
to a state of society in which the world and the
Church have become wholly fused ; in which
it costs nothing to profess Christianity indeed,
it rather costs something to withhold the pro
fession in which accordingly there are vast
masses of nominal " brethren " whose member
ship counts for nothing in their lives and who
respond not at all to the appeals of membership.
In other words, we have a world to deal with
of which St. John had no experience a world
which cannot be dealt with either as if it were
really Christian or as if it were not more or less
The church and the world 159
deeply leavened by the Christian tradition.
Here I will do no more than point out the
difference of the situation. If I were to at
tempt to indicate how the difference has arisen
and what is the way of return, I should be going
too far beyond the function of the expositor.
Meanwhile, within the personal relationships
into which life every day introduces us we have
abundant opportunities of testing ourselves
whether we do really set our wills to " love the
people we do not like "-whether our love is
practical and effective and unlimited whether
we are ready to respond to every legitimate
human claim.
2. Love without faith. We must ask the
question, what would St. John say to genuine
love divorced from right belief or from member
ship in " the brotherhood " ? He does not
write as if he knew of its existence. He does
not suggest the existence of pure, disinterested,
self-sacrificing love in the non-Christian world,
or among the heretical sect who had broken
away from the Church and the faith of the
Incarnation. He speaks as if the true love
were always the accompaniment of the right
faith ; and he speaks of each by turns as in
160 St. John s Epistles
the highest degree essential. He does indeed
contemplate a right faith (so far as mere
intellectual confession goes) which does not
show itself in love, and we know what he
thinks of it (see ii. 4, 9, etc.). But what
would he say to a genuine love divorced from
its normal spring and motive in a right
faith ? We really cannot say. We should
most eagerly desire to be able to ask him
and to know his answer. For us the problem
is so common to find the genuinely Christian
character where intellectually there is nothing
but doubt and even denial. We can but
think that St. John would hold to the prin
ciple which underlies all his thought that,
inasmuch as God is love, so where love is God
is ; and that He who inspires it will crown
its exercise with the vision of Him whence it
came, if not in this world then beyond it. As
our Lord says, " He that doeth his will shall
know of the doctrine, whether it be of God."
Nevertheless, we must acknowledge that St. John
gives us no clear indication of his mind in this
matter. He certainly states absolutely that
" if ye know that he is righteous, ye know that
every one also that doeth righteousness is
The church and the world 161
begotten of him " (ii. 29). He certainly would
have every one who lives by love, reassure
himself that he is " of the truth " and has
God on his side and is possessed by His Spirit
(iii. 19-20). He says without qualification, " If
we love one another, God abideth in us, and
His love is perfected in us " (iv. 12). On the
other hand, he is assured that " he that knoweth
God heareth us [i.e. listens to the faith of the
Incarnation]. He who is not of God heareth
us not " (iv. 6), and " He that confesseth the Son
[i.e. the Son of God as come in the flesh in the
person of Jesus] hath the Father also, and
whosoever denieth the Son the same hath not
the Father/ nor, it is implied, " the eternal
life " (ii. 23-5). St. John, in fact, is convinced
that the true life and the intellectual acknow
ledgement of Jesus as Christ and as Son or
Word of God go together, and that where
the intellectual acknowledgement is absent or
denial is made, there the roots of the true life
are cut.
3. It is worth noting the names under
which St. John the aged addresses his disciples
to whom he writes. In ii. 1 he calls them " my
little children/ which expresses at once his
162 St. John s Epistles
fatherly relation to them and their immaturity,
needing guidance and teaching and strength ;
again and again (first in ii. 7) he calls them
" beloved/ which needs no comment ; in
ii. 12-14 he addresses them from different points
of view as at once " little children/ " fathers "
because of the wisdom, and " young men "
because of the spiritual strength given them
in Christ ; again and again (in. 18, etc.) he
calls them " little children " ; and in iii. 13
" brothers/ expressing their spiritual equality
with himself. There is a wealth of meaning in
these various names.
4. On the general assurance, " whatsoever w r e
ask, we receive," see below on v. 14, where it
is repeated with the explanatory addition " ac
cording to His will."
5. To " believe on the name of His Son Jesus
Christ " is a significant phrase. The name
means all that is revealed in His person, and
the three names, "Son," "Jesus," "Christ,"
express His divine and human natures and His
mission.
We note that here the commandment of
God is declared to be twofold right faith
in Christ s person, coupled with love of the
The church and the world 163
brethren. Obedience to God s commandments
ensures the mutual indwelling of God in the
disciple and the disciple in God, and the evidence
of this is found in the gift of the Spirit. So
the essence of true religion is viewed in manifold
aspects.
12
7. 1 JOHN iv. 1-6
THE TESTING OF SPIRITS
THE world in which St. John was living was,
like our own, full of " movements/ To-day
we are constantly attending and hearing of
meetings which represent this or that movement
that is, this or that group of persons inspired
by a common aim, holding some idea in common
or following some leader, and accordingly con
ferring and acting together. Something of the
same kind was occurring in St. John s day.
Most important of all in our eyes, though not
so in the eyes of St. John s contemporaries,
was the Catholic Church, which was spreading
throughout the Greek and Roman world and
was soon to gain such a position that, though
the philosophers endeavoured to ignore it, the
imperial authorities could not. Then there was
the group of movements called Gnostic, partly
Christian but much more substantially Oriental
in origin. Their nomenclature sounds to us
164
The testing of spirits 165
barbaric and weird, but they have remarkable
affinities with modern theosophy and other
kinds of idealism. Those known to St. John
had all been founded by men who had belonged
to, and had left, the Christian faith and Church,
and the same was the case with some of the
later Gnostic sects. And they proved very
attractive. A hundred years later than St. John
Tertullian speaks of " this man or that, the
most faithful, the wisest, the most experienced
in the Church, going over to the wrong side "
that is, the Gnostics. Then in the purely Pagan
world there were almost innumerable cults of
different divinities, each with its own society
of votaries ; and the followers of different
philosophies and modes of life formed their own
circles ; and there were guilds innumerable
trade guilds, burial guilds, guilds of all kinds ;
while the loyalty to the city and empire of Rome,
which gave the world peace and order, expressed
itself in the deification of Rome and of the
emperors, and a vast organization attached
itself to this worship. Thus it was an age of
movements and associations. Now St. John
knew that the inspirer and maintainer of the
Church was the Spirit of God; but, believing
166 St. John s Epistles
as lie did in created spirits also, evil as well as
good, he saw perhaps, 1 in each of these con
temporary movements, such at least as he
judged false, the action of a personal evil spirit
inspiring and controlling it. Thus, where we
should bid people not commit themselves to any
movement which demanded their adhesion with
out careful examination, St. John bids them
not to believe every spirit, but to " prove " or
test the spirits. 2 This is the point of the next
paragraph.
They are to test the spirits, because as St. John
looks out over the world he sees a widespread
activity of false prophets. He knows that they
are false and that the spirit which animates
them is not of God. What is the test that he
applies and would have all his brethren apply ?
We should have expected him, perhaps, to apply
the practical test of their lives, their works,
their character, but here it is the test of doctrine
which he makes absolute and all-sufficient.
Every spirit which acknowledges the truth of
the Incarnation which sees in Jesus the Christ,
1 See, however, below, pp. 168 f .
2 cf. 1 Thess. v. 21 ; 1 Cor. xii, 10, xiv. 29, " discerning of
spirits " ; Rev. ii. 2.
The testing of spirits 167
the very Son of God made flesh is of God.
And, on the other hand, every spirit which
refuseth this faith in Jesus is not of God and is
a spirit of antichrist, such as they have heard
of and can see active among them. The
Christians have no cause to fear these false
spirits. The power that is in them is greater
than anything that is in the world. They are
children of God and they have the experience
of victory already. Nor have they any reason
to be surprised at the popularity of anti- Christian
movements. They belong to the world. It is
so they speak and so they are listened to : they
demand, that is, of people, no change of
heart. They take them as they find them, on
their own level. On the other hand, the Church
comes from God, and those whose hearts God
has touched those who know God listen to
His messengers : those and those only. This
acknowledgement of the truth of the Incarna
tion, this readiness to listen to the message of
the Church, is all-sufficient to distinguish the
spirit of truth from the spirit of error.
Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits,
whether they are of God : because many false prophets
are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit
168 St. John s Epistles
of God : every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ
is come in the flesh is of God : and every spirit which
confesaeth not Jesus is not of God : and this is the spirit
of the antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it cometh ;
and now it is in the world already. Ye are of God, my
little children, and have overcome them : because greater
is he that is in you than he that is in the world. They are
of the world : therefore speak they as of the world, and the
world heareth them. We are of God : he that knoweth
God heareth us ; he who is not of God heareth us not.
By this we know the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error.
1. Spirits good and* evil, St. John no doubt
believed, not only in the Holy Spirit, the Spirit
of God, as personal, but in a whole world of
created personal spirits good and evil in the
devil and in other evil spirits. If he had only
spoken of " the Spirit of truth " inspiring the
Church, and " the spirit of error/ " he that is
in the world/ inspiring the false prophets and
their followers, or of manifold spirits of error,
we should have had no doubt that he was re
ferring to personal spirits. But when he talks
of a multiplicity of spirits (" every spirit ")
which acknowledge Christ with a true faith
(ver. 2) we are in doubt. He can hardly con
ceive of groups of Christians or individual
Christians as inspired by a number of minor
personal spirits, true and good. At least that
The testing of spirits 169
would be a new doctrine, unheard-of elsewhere.
Only the one Holy Spirit is spoken of as inspiring
Christians. So we are driven to wonder whether
St. John does not use " spirit " (without the
definite article) almost in the sense in which
we use it when we speak of the " corporate
spirit " in a movement, or " the group spirit/
That is to use the word " spirit " not to describe
a distinct personal being, but a display of
spiritual influence. Of course, this again is a
mysterious thing, something plainly not in
dividual, which yet can hardly be thought of
as wholly impersonal. But St. John would not
be analysing it ; he would simply be using the
word spirit in this place vaguely, as we use it,
to describe the unseen but compelling force of
any movement, good or bad, among men.
2. The doctrinal tests that " Jesus Christ
is come in the flesh/ or that " Jesus is the
Christ who has come in the flesh." There were
in early days " Docetics " (so called) who be
lieved that Jesus Christ was a mere apparition
with no real and bodily humanity. But St.
John s opponents do not appear to have held
any such belief. 1 They had no doubt that the
1 See above, p. 116 note.
170 St. John s Epistles
man Jesus was real, " in the flesh/ 3 What they
doubted was whether the divine being the
Son or the Christ, as they called him was
really identical with Jesus in person, or was
only temporarily associated with Him, visiting
Him at His baptism and withdrawing from
Him before His death. When St. John then
makes the point of faith to be the confession
that " Jesus is the Christ, come in the flesh/
he must mean, as he elsewhere expresses it,
the belief that the man Jesus of Nazareth was
nothing less than the manifestation in the
flesh of the eternal Word and Son of God
Himself God made flesh and Himself the glorified
Christ.
The contrary judgement is expressed in our text
as " every spirit which confesseth not Jesus,"
i.e. which does not so acknowledge Him as the
Christ and the divine Son. This is the read
ing of all the Greek MSS. But the Latin
MSS. and Fathers attest another reading (see
R.V. margin) which goes back to quite primitive
times, which is translated " every spirit which
annulleth," or much better, " which dissolveth
Jesus, is not of God." This is so difficult and
at the same time so significant a reading that
The testing of spirits 171
I am disposed to believe that it is original. It
would (as explained on p. 114) express exactly
what Cerinthus and his followers did. They
resolved the single person, Jesus Christ, incarnate
Son of God, into two persons one celestial,
called Son and Christ ; and the other of earth,
Jesus of Nazareth. And St. John repudiates
this theory of theirs as fundamentally de
structive of Christianity. For he has con
centrated his mind through a long life on this
point, and he is profoundly convinced that the
only sufficient basis of Christian practice is the
Christian theory or faith in the real incarnation
of the Son of God that Jesus was and is the
Christ and Son of God, and not only a human
person in some close connection with him. Thus
it is that he speaks so dogmatically and decisively.
Only, be it observed, he would not be content
with his disciples accepting his word for it.
They must judge for themselves. For them
selves they must " test the spirits." Because
the same Spirit which has guided their teacher s
judgement and inspired their teacher s con
viction will in like manner guide and inspire
them.
3. St. John s decisiveness. We to-day, who
172 St. Johns Epistles
would be intelligent persons/ do not find intel
lectual decisions easy. We like to see good on
all sides and in all opinions. But St, John is
intensely persuaded that there is a mortal
struggle going on between good and evil, between
truth and falsehood, between Christ and the
devil. Thus, he seeks to go to the root principle
of every claim and determine whether it is, at
the root and so in its ultimate issues, for Christ
or against Him. It cannot be both. And he
sees the root principle of Christian truth, as
has just been said, in the real incarnation of
God in Jesus. And with an unfaltering decision
he proclaims and applies this test. And here,
in this paragraph, he proclaims this doctrinal
test as if it stood alone and there were no other.
But then immediately the note changes. He
shows the reason of this zeal for the theological
truth. It is because it is the ground, the only
adequate ground, of the conviction that God
is love and love is the only true life for man.
8. 1 JOHN iv. 7-21
GOD IS LOVE
AT this point in the Epistle we pass from the
thought of the conflict of the Church and the
world, or of Christ and the antichrists, and
henceforward are occupied with the consideration
of what Christianity, the true religion, essentially
is. And the point of this section is that Inas
much as religion is fellowship with God, and in
Christ God has revealed His essential character
as love, so love a love life Christ s is the
essence and test of the true religion. Where love
is, God is ; and where love is not, God is not.
So he begins, " Beloved, let us love one
another/ Inasmuch as love can proceed from
no other source than God, every one who really
loves has his birth from God and knows God.
On the other hand, as God s very being is love,
a loveless or selfish person shows conclusively
that he does not know Him. If the question
be asked, How do we know God s real character,
the. answer is that He has made it evident in
173
174 St. John s Epistles
our case by sending His only Son into the
world the one and only perfect expression of
Himself that through Him we might share the
true life, the life of God. Love is not something
which belongs to human nature or starts from
our side toward God. It is all the other way.
God sent His Son to redeem us from our sins
and reconcile us to Himself by the sacrifice of
His life. Here, in this sacrifice of self for man,
we see the character of God. And hence follows
the duty of so loving our brother-man. The
vision of God as He is has never yet been within
the capacity of man ; but in Christ we know
of what sort He is, and can therefore imitate
Him in the love of our brethren, and herein
find assurance that God, whose being love is,
dwells in us and His love has found its accom
plishment in us. It is only to say this in other
words, to say that the presence of love is proof
of the presence of the Spirit of God, and the
presence of His Spirit is the guarantee of the
mutual indwelling of God and us. Or, again,
inasmuch as our love is based upon the recog
nition of the love of God, as manifested in Christ
for the world s salvation, so we must say that the
confession of this manifestation, the confession
God is love 175
of Jesus as Son of God, is the guarantee of this
mutual indwelling of God and us. So only has
the Son of God been recognized and believed.
This, then, is our sure ground. As God is
love, so where love is, God is, and the permanence
of love in us means that we are permanently
dwelling in God and God in us. And inasmuch
as the perfection of love is in mutual confidence,
so the perfection of divine love is to be shown
in our case by our confidence in the final day of
disclosure the day of judgement. We are living
the life of love as He is, so are we in the world.
We have accordingly nothing to fear. There
is a complete understanding between us. Love
in its perfection must, in fact, expel fear : for
fear is fear of punishment and means that
love is not perfect. And again be it said, this
love in man is no invention of man no enter
prise of his own. It is purely and simply the
following of God, who showed us His love to
us. And, in our case, love can only be proved
manward. For a man to profess love to God
while he hates his brother is to prove himself
a liar. For the testing of love is in experience.
You have seen your brother. He has come
into your experience. Do you love him ? If
176 St. John s Epistles
not, you have not love, and it is an idle boast to
say, in that case, that you love God whom you
have not seen that is to say, that love exists
in you where it has not been put to the test of
experience, when it has been shown not to exist
where it has been put to the test. Besides,
it is not merely a matter of inference. It is a
matter of a positive commandment of God that
he who loveth God love his brother also.
Beloved, let us love one another : for love is of God ;
and every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth
God. He that loveth not knoweth not God ; for God is
love. Herein was the love of God manifested in us, that
God hath sent his only begotten Son into the world, that
we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we
loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be
the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved
us, we also ought to love one another. No man hath beheld
God at any time : if we love one another, God abideth in
us, and his love is perfected in us : hereby know we that
we abide in him, and he in us, because he hath given us
of his Spirit. And we have beheld and bear witness that
the Father hath sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world.
Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God
abideth in him, and he in God. And we know and have
believed the love which God hath in us. God is love ; and
he that abideth in love abideth in God, and God abideth
in him. Herein is love made perfect with us, that we may
have boldness in the day of judgement ; because as he is,
even so are we in this world. There is no fear in love : but
God is love 177
perfect love casteth out fear, because fear hath punishment ;
and he that feareth is not made perfect in love. We love,
because he first loved us. If a man say, I love God, and
hateth his brother, he is a liar : for he that loveth not his
brother whom he hath seen, cannot love God whom he
hath not seen. And this commandment have we from
him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.
1. God is love. St. John s whole argument
implies that in Jesus Christ we see revealed
the true character of God. It is true that the
phrase so often repeated, " God sent His Son/
need not of itself mean so much. The character
of the Messenger might be different from the
character of Him that sent Him. And, in fact,
theologians have sometimes been at such pains
to guard the " impassibility " of the Father-
that is, His incapacity for suffering that the
whole of that spirit of self-sacrifice which appears
as the very central characteristic of our Lord
has been represented as alien to the being of the
Father. But St. John conceives of the Son as
in His incarnation revealing nothing else than
the mind and character of the Father. " He
that hath seen me hath seen the Father." His
love is God s love, and as the very essence of
His love is self-sacrifice, such, St. John would
have us believe, is the love of the Father. The
178 St. Johns Epistles
Patripassians, i.e. those who ascribed the suffer
ings of Christ to the Father, were no doubt
rightly condemned, for they were denned by
Origen, their contemporary, as " those who
identify the Father and the Son, and represent
them as one and the same person under two
different names." 1 Herein, no doubt, they
fell into most serious error. No one could
reasonably argue that St. John does not re
present Father and Son as different " persons/
It was clearly, in his view, the Son and not the
Father who lived among men and prayed to
the Father and suffered on the Cross. But
the opponents of Patripassianism, though they
have the truth on their side so far, often use
arguments which are certainly not derived from
the Bible, but from Greek philosophy, arguments
implying that the divine being is in itself so
wholly " impassible," so emotionless and passion
less, that the ascription to it of the name of
love would seem unreal. Nothing can be less
1 Origen on the Epistle to Titua. We have only Rufinua s
translation. " Patripassians " were, in fact, the same as those
called Sabellians by the Greeks, and Origen probably used the
latter name ; but the consequence of their teaching, which is
emphasized in the name " Patripasaians," was what Origen had
particularly in view.
God is love 179
true of the God revealed in the Old Testament
and of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ. It is the innermost and divine being
of the Son which St. John would have us believe
is revealed under human conditions " in the
flesh " of Jesus Christ. And in this His divine
being He is " of one substance with the Father/
He differs from the Father in no respect except
in being His Son, derived, therefore, from Him
and dependent upon Him, but identical in
quality and character. It is only because this
is absolutely the case that St. John can argue
back from Christ s love to God s love, and assure
us that God is love in His very essence, and where
love is, love of which the characteristic act is
self-sacrifice, God is. Indeed, if it were not so
if the Father were not implicated (so to speak)
in the sufferings of Jesus the " sending " of
Him to suffer and die might be an argument
rather for indifference on His part than for
love.
Truly the Church always needs to remember
that the speculations of theologians about the
mysteries of God s being need constantly to be
brought to trial at the bar of God s word
His true expression of Himself through His
13
180 St. John s Epistles
prophets and in His Son. And the ideas of G od s
almightiness, unchangeableness, omniscience,
impassibility, etc., which the Bible conveys to
oar minds, differ considerably from the abstract
ideas derived from Greek philosophy. 1 The
ancient philosophers, in fact, were so obsessed
with the desire to deny to God not merely
everything carnal, but everything that belongs
to the emotional nature of man, that the religion
of the Bible the religion of the Incarnation
can never in this respect find itself at home
with them. There is nothing about God in the
philosophers which will compare with Isaiah s
" In all their afflictions he was afflicted, . . .
in his love and in his pity he redeemed them ;
and he bare them, and carried them all the days
of old."
2. " Love is of God." Some modern thinkers
Huxley, Bertrand Russell, Wells have told
us just the opposite of this. Love is a splendid
human growth, which rebel man has to make
a desperate attempt to impose upon or ac-
1 Thomas Treherne our recently discovered seventeenth-
century Anglican mystic in his Century of Meditations (Dobell)
has a magnificent protest against the unemotional idea of God
derived from Greek philosophy. See Cent. i. 40, pp. 27 ff.
God is love 181
climatize in a reluctant universe. The great
bulk of nature knows nothing of it. Now, we
must rejoice that such men should hold fast
by what they know in their consciences to be
the best, even if the universal life were all
against them. Nevertheless, for man to war
with natiire is at bottom an irrational and futile
kind of rebellion. Nature is too vast for puny
man to impose its will upon it. The wise man
has always seen that man s true destiny must
be in harmony with nature. And St. John s
magnificent assurance of the supremacy of love
depends, as he so deeply perceives, on the belief
that the origin and fount of love is in God and
not in us. " Love is of God." " God is love."
And again, this assurance can be grounded on
no other secure basis than the belief that Christ,
who certainly is love, comes, as He Himself
declares, from God, and discloses, in the in
telligible lineaments of human self-sacrifice,
the very heart of the eternal and omnipresent
God, the maker and sustainer of all that is.
3. The purpose for which the Father sent His
only-begotten Son into the world is described
by St. John in this passage in three phrases :
(1) that we might live through Him ; (2) to
182 St. John s Epistles
be the propitiation for our sins ; (3) to be the
saviour of the world. Each phrase is character
istic. The first represents the constant theme
of the Fourth Gospel. " In him was life and
the life was the light of men " (i. 4). " As the
Father hath life in himself, so hath he given
to the Son to have life in himself " (v. 26).
" God so loved the world, that he gave his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on
him should . . . have eternal life " (iii. 16).
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat
the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood,
ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth
my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal
life. ... As the living Father sent me, and I
live because of the Father ; so he that eateth
me, he also shall live because of me " (vi. 53-7).
" I came that they may have life, and may have
it abundantly" (x. 10). "I am the ... life"
(xiv. 6). " Because I live, ye shall live also "
(xiv. 19). Here we have the whole doctrine of
what St. Paul also calls " the life that is life
indeed" (1 Tim. vi. 19). The Son is, by com
munication from the Father, the eternal seat of
life. He has illuminated man since his creation
as a rational being, but in His incarnation He
God is love 183
manifested the true life under human conditions
to human observation. Men become receptive
of it by faith, but it is only by the actual com
munication of Christ s manhood to them that
they can have it in themselves. That they may
so have it is the purpose of His coming. And
(it must be added) the instrument of its com
munication to them is the Holy Spirit. This
is implied in our Lord s words about the " living
water " (John vii. 37) and in His last discourses
(xiv.-xvi.), and is expressed more directly by
St. Paul. This, then, is the object of His
coming, " that we might live through Him."
Then in the second phrase St. John repeats
in part what he has said earlier in his Epistle
(ii. 2), and declares Clirist to have come into
the world " to be the propitiation for our sins "
that is, to remove the preliminary obstacle to
fellowship with God which men s sin had inter
posed, and by the sacrifice of Himself to reconcile
us to God and restore the free current of His
love. St. John plainly accepts this idea of
propitiation and its necessity without scruple,
but he does not go even so far as St. Paul in
suggesting an explanation. He simply asserts
it twice here in his Epistle, as in his Gospel
184 St. John s Epistles
he relates St. John Baptist s suggestion of it
(i. 29), and alludes to it under the figure of the
brazen serpent (iii. 14) and in explanation of
Caiaphas s "prophecy" (xi. 51-2).
Thirdly, he expresses the purpose and universal
scope of Christ s work in the incarnation by the
phrase to be " the saviour of the world " (c/.
earlier, ii. 2, " and not for our sins only, but for
the whole world"). It is characteristic of
St. John that he does not seek to supply us
with any help in correlating these different
statements, any more than his statements about
love and right belief and the possession of the
Spirit, as, each in itself, the all-sufficient mark
of divine sonship. But it is safe to affirm that
St. John would have us see in Christ s work in
us, actually renewing and imparting the true
life to us, and abiding in us that we may abide
in Him and so in the Father by the Spirit, the
ultimate purpose of Christ s coming, without
which all else would have been in vain. At the
same time he would have us recognize a pre
liminary necessity for the removal of the existing
obstacle of sin. This is Christ s work for us,
which He calls " propitiation." Hereby, without
any assistance or co-operation on our part, simply
God is love 185
by the power of His perfect sacrifice, Christ gave
mankind a new standing-ground before the
Father, and enabled the Father to look upon
man, in Christ, with new eyes, and pour out
upon him freely the fulness of His love. And
if we seek for the phrase to express, in accordance
with man s universal sense of need, what the love
of God intends, and for whom He intends it,
we can find it only in St. John s third phrase-
salvation as wide as the world. The world in
various ways, ignorantly but earnestly, was
asking for " salvation " and deliverance from
the manifold evils of life. And St. John affirms
that it is the purpose of God to correspond with
this world- wide desire without stint or limitation,
and that there is one only name given under
heaven wherein this universal salvation is really
to be found.
4. There are two chief tests given by St. John
of our abiding in God and God in us the one
is love and the other is the confession that Jesus
is the Son of God. As already remarked, no
guidance is given us how to think of cases where
the two tests do not coincide none at least in
the case where there is the genuine love but
not the true confession. But we need to notice
186 St. John s Epistles
the fact that St. John does insist on the in
tellectual as well as the moral test. There is
a very widespread tendency to-day to disparage
the value of intellectual propositions or
dogmas in religion. St. John would have none
of this. For him the practical belief that love
is the supreme expression of God is only rational
if it is also believed that God has really revealed
Himself in Jesus, and that Jesus is personally
His only-begotten Son incarnate. He cannot
separate, or allow us to separate, the practical
belief from its intellectual expression. He is
sure they are interdependent, and that no other
opinion about Jesus will justify us in maintaining
that God is love. Therefore he insists on his
two tests the one practical, the other in
tellectual with an equal and unconditional
emphasis.
5. Perfect love casteth out fear. The reason
which St. John gives why perfect love is in
compatible with fear is that fear " hath " or
" involves " (the word is vague) punishment.
This may mean that fear is fear of divine punish
ment. The man fears to sin because God will
punish him for his sin hereafter. It may also
mean that fear torments the soul and is itself
God is love 187
a punishment. I am inclined to believe that
the former meaning is the right one. Cf. Isaiah,
" Sinners in Zion are afraid " at the tidings of
the approach of God. Who among us/
they cry, " shall dwell with the devouring fire ?
who among us shall dwell with the everlasting
burnings ? >: It is the divine visitation that is
described thus under the figure of fire. It
represents itself to them as terrible punishment.
But " he that walketh uprightly " need have
no such terror. He " shall behold the King
in his beauty/ * So St. John says " perfected
love " has no place for servile fear of the punish
ment which the day of the Lord will bring with
it. But he does not say that perfect love is
not based upon and cannot grow out of a very
imperfect sort of love, which must consist with
a large element of fear. Our generation is
extraordinarily without the fear of God. But
its fearlessness seems like the fearlessness of
Jehoiachim and his courtiers, a foolish fear
lessness, due only to a failure to consider the
awfulness of the divine presence and judgement.
Our Lord Himself bids us fear " fear him who
is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."
1 Is, xxxiii. 14-17.
188 St. John s Epistles
And it is only too possible to be premature in
claiming the fearlessness widen belongs to love
only when it is perfected.
6. He that loveth not his brother whom he hath
seen, etc. In the authorized version this sen
tence concluded with a question, " How can he
love God whom he hath not seen ? which
seemed to imply that it was much easier to love
what you had seen than what you had not.
This may be true. But I remember a brilliant
young man young, that is, more than forty
years ago exclaiming against St. John s argu
ment, because he himself found no difficulty in
loving people till he had seen them. It was
the sight which caused the difficulty. I think
this is really St. John s point. It is " sight/
that is, experience, which brings our love to
the test. The practical probation is that we
have " to love the people whom we don t like."
If we fail when this practical test is applied,
we prove that we have not genuine love only
natural liking with its correlative disliking.
And our profession of loving God, where our
love has been put to no such test, is disproved.
" If he loveth not his brother whom he hath seen,
he cannot love God whom he hath not seen."
God is love 189
And we may venture to extend the argument.
Sometimes we have, if not sight, yet at least
experience of God, and He seems hard, remorse
less, inexorable. If we fail under this trial,
if all our love to God quite vanishes under His
seemingly heavy hand, is it not a proof that we
never had any real love of God ? But this is
not suggested by St. John. Experience, or
what St. John calls " sight/ is the testing of
the reality of love, and this testing he is content
to find in the relations of men to one another.
7. " In us/ in ver. 9 and perhaps in ver. 16,
should be, I think, " among us " or " in our
case" (see R.V. margin), in spite of the rather
frequent recurrence of "in us " in the context.
The Greek preposition can carry this meaning,
and what is in view appears to be the disclosure
of the divine love among men in the person of
Jesus Christ.
8. In the word " only-begotten " here applied
to our Lord (ver. 9), the emphasis is on the
first part of the compound word. It is used of
anything that is unique in kind.
9. 1 JOHN v. 1-12
THE DIVINE WITNESS TO JESUS AS THE
CHRIST
[If readers will turn back to the account
already given of the teaching of Cerinthus
(p. 114), whom St. John appears to have in
mind in this Epistle as the typical adversary,
they will find the latter part of the section easier
to understand.]
St. John begins by affirming that the belief
that Jesus is the Christ is the mark of divine
sonship. And the character of true sonship
to God shows itself with an equal necessity
both in the love of our brethren and in the
love of the Father. On the one hand, you
cannot really love the Father (" that begat ")
unless you love each of His children. On the
other hand, you cannot know that you love the
children of God, as being such, unless you love
God, the Father of this new family, and do
His commandments. The love of God means
nothing at all except this diligent keeping of
190
The divine witness to Jesus 191
His commandments. And we are not to think
of His commandments as a burden hard to be
borne. They are indeed a heavy burden to
those who belong to the worldly world and
have their real interest in the things which
make it up, " the lust of the flesh and the lust
of the eyes and the vainglory of life " ; but
our new birth as children of God admits us,
every one, to victory over all the powers of
this old world. And the instrument of this
victory is our faith. The Christian faith has
triumphed over the world once for all, because
it is faith in Jesus as the Son of God. We
should explain this by reference to the Gospel.
There we see Him in the world. We see the
world apparently victorious over Him, rejecting
Him and crucifying Him. But we see Him
also triumphant through death over all the
powers of the world, and made manifest in His
Resurrection as the Son of God our Lord and
our God. And through faith in Him, St. John
now tells us, His victory is ours. And there is
no other instrument of victory except that
faith.
Now we are to consider closely the divine
witness borne to Christ. We are to note two
192 St. John s Epistles
symbolic tokens of His manifestation when He
who was to come did come Jesus the Christ.
First, He came by water, when at the opening
of His ministry He was baptized by John the
Baptist in the river Jordan, and on that occasion,
as we are told in the Gospel, John (as well as
Jesus) " beheld the Spirit descending as a dove
out of heaven ; and it abode upon him/*
" And I knew him not/ he said ; " but he
that sent me to baptize with water, he said
unto me, Upon whomsoever thou shalt see the
Spirit descending, and abiding upon him, the
same is he that baptizeth with the Holy Spirit.
And I have seen and have borne witness that
this is the Son of God" (John i. 32-4). Thus
He was marked out at His baptism in water as
a divine being, the Son of God and the Christ.
And, secondly, He came by blood the blood
of the Cross, which is the symbol of true human
flesh, sacrificed and suffering. Not as our ad
versaries say, who recognize the divine Christ
only in the water and refuse to acknowledge
Him in the blood. Nay, in Him both were
joined, even as St. John has seen and borne
witness in his Gospel that out of His pierced
side upon the cross flowed together water and
The divine witness to Jesus 193
blood. Both together mark Him as He that
should come, divine and from heaven, but in
the true flesh of man. And it is the Spirit
whom Jesus has poured forth upon us the
Spirit of God, which is the Spirit of truth,
promised to guide us into all the truth and now
given to us who bears witness that Jesus is
no other than the Christ. For He who gives
the Spirit is the Christ. But indeed there is
a threefold witness the witness of the Spirit
which cannot lie ; and the witness of the water
of baptism, Christ s baptism, and now% too,
ours the witness of His divine sonship and
the instrument of ours ; and the witness of the
blood in the assurance of Christ s true and abiding
manhood, which we verily and indeed drink
in the Cup ; and these three witnesses combine
upon the one point that Jesus very man is
the very Son of God and the Christ who was
to come. It is a matter of human witness.
But it is something much more than human
witness. God Himself has borne witness to
His Son. This is the substance of His witness,
and you cannot pass it by. Believe on the
Son of God and the divine witness passes into
your qwn being. Refuse to believe, and truly
194 St. John s Epistles
it is God you refuse to believe it is God whom
you make a liar. So manifest is it that He has
borne His witness to His Christ. And the
meaning of the witness is this that God has
given us eternal life, fellowship in His own life,
in His Son. If you have Him you have the
life ; and without Him you have it not.
Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is begotten
of God : and whosoever loveth him that begat loveth him
also that is begotten of him. Hereby we know that we
love the children of God, when we love God, and do his
commandments. For this is the love of God, that we
keep his commandments : and his commandments are
not grievous. For whatsoever is begotten of God over-
cometh the world : and this is the victory that hath
overcome the world, even our faith. And who is he that
overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus
is the Son of God ? This is he that came by water and
blood, even Jesus Christ ; not with the water only, but
with the water and with the blood. And it is the Spirit
that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth. For
there are three who bear witness, the Spirit, and the water,
and the blood : and the three agree in one. If we receive
the witness of men, the witness of God is greater : for the
witness of God is this, that he hath borne witness concerning
his Son. He that believeth on the Son of God hath the
witness in him : he that believeth not God hath made him
a liar ; because he hath not believed in the witness that
God hath borne concerning his Son. And the witness is
this, that God gave unto us eternal life, and this life is in
The divine witness to Jesus 195
his Son. He that hath the Son hath the life ; he that
hath not the Son of God hath not the life.
1. It is a comfort to many people to note that
St. John interprets the love of God so absolutely
as having no other meaning than the diligent
keeping of His commandments, and doubtless
also the " love of the brethren " as the willing
and whole-hearted service of them. Such
devotion to the service of God and man is
normally followed by feelings of affection. But
it is not a matter of feeling : nor is feeling the
test.
2. His commandments are not " grievous/
or, rather, " heavy/ There would seem to be
an obvious reference to our Lord s own words,
" Come unto me, all ye that labour and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take
my yoke upon you, and learn of me ; for I am
meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find rest
unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my
burden is light " (Matt. xi. 28-30).
3. " The victory which overcame the world "
is represented as " our faith." But the context
shows that the faith St. John is thinking of is
an assurance resting upon facts of experience
the facts of Christ s human life, which justified
14
196 St. Johns Epistles
or compelled the belief in the divine sonship
of the man. The victory of our faith depends
upon the victory of Him in whom we have
believed. It is His victory appropriated by us.
4. The dependence of the Epistle on the
Gospel is nowhere more evident than in this
passage. The meaning of " the water " is to
be found by reference to John the Baptist s
testimony as given in the Gospel (already
quoted) to the significance of the baptism of
Jesus (i. 32-4). The witness of the blood is to
be interpreted in the light of John vi. 52-5,
where " flesh " expresses our Lord s human
nature given for the life of the world; and when
the word "flesh" causes scandal (ver. 52),
" blood " is added to it to emphasize the reality
of sacrificed manhood the " blood which is
the life " thereof. Again, the combination of
water and blood in the drops that flowed from
our Lord s pierced side is emphasized without
explanation in the Gospel (xix. 35), and here
interpreted of the union in Jesus of the divine
and human elements. Again, the " witness of
the Spirit " must be thought of in the light
(1) of John vii. 38-9, " This spake he of the
Spirit, which they that believed on him were
The divine witness to Jesus 197
to receive : for the Spirit was not yet ; because
Jesus was not yet glorified " ; and (2) of the last
discourses about the Spirit (xiv. 25-6, xv. 26-7,
xvi. 7-15), where, to a degree not commonly
recognized, the Spirit is spoken of as " the
Spirit of truth/ Again, the idea of a divine
witness to Christ overshadowing the human
witness, which is to be appropriated as divine
by the individual, requires interpreting by John
iii. 31-4 and v. 31-47, and other passages.
It is fundamental to the understanding of St.
John s attitude towards either intellectual re
jection of Christ or perversion of the teaching
about Him, that to his mind the Father and
the Divine Spirit had borne such manifest
witness to Jesus as Christ and Son of God that
to reject the witness was to impugn the divine
truthfulness to make God a liar, who had
wilfully deceived His unhappy creatures. Only,
St. John would say, the external testimony
loyally accepted receives such inward confirma
tion in the man s own heart that it becomes
his own testimony.
Again, the idea of the reception of life,
divine and eternal, as the result of believing in
Christ and as the object of His coming, is a
198 St. Johns Epistles
foundation thought of the Gospel (see above,
p. 182). And, finally, the unique and exclusive
claim of the Christ, " He that hath not the
Son hath not life," refers back to John iii. 36.
5. The threefold witness. We may feel fairly
confident about the interpretation of the Spirit
and the water and the blood given above. It
is characteristic of St. John s mystical method
that it should rest on outward facts, the bap
tism of Christ, the shedding of His blood, the
drops of blood and water which trickled from
His pierced side a detail remembered and
treasured with precision ; and that his brooding
soul should grow to see the inward meaning in
the outward facts with an absolute certainty of
intuition ; and that he should pass from the
record of past facts, the baptism and cross of
Jesus and the mission of the Spirit, to the present
living witnesses, the Spirit still possessing the
Church, the baptism of regeneration into the
divine life, and the eucharist in which we eat
the flesh of Christ and drink His blood. It is
not possible to prove, but it is hardly possible
to doubt, these last references.
6. Finally, a word must be said about the
great interpolation. In the familiar authorized
The divine witness to Jesus 199
version the text of the above section (ver. 7)
runs : There are three that bear record [or
" witness "] in heaven, the Father, the Word,
and the Holy Ghost : and these three are one.
And there are three that bear witness in earth,
the Spirit, and the water, and the blood/ The
words in italics are an undoubted interpolation.
They do not exist in the Greek manuscripts,
except in two very late and worthless ones,
apparently translated from the Latin. They
were not in the old Latin nor in Jerome s trans
lation, nor in any of the old versions. What
happened was that the " three witnesses agreeing
in one " suggested the idea of the Trinity. This
suggestion, probably first written on the margin,
found its way into the text at the hands of a
pious copyist, probably innocent of any in
tention to deceive. Its first occurrence, as a
text of St. John, is in the writings of the Spaniard
Priscillian, 1 who was put to death in A.D. 385.
The words are : " As John says, There are three
which bear witness on earth, the water, the flesh,
and the blood ; and these three agree in one :
and there are three which bear witness in heaven,
the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these
1 Tract, i, p, 6, in the Corpus Script, Eccl, Lat. vol. xviii.
200 St. Johns Epistles
three are one in Christ Jesus." These or the
like words passed from copy to copy of the Latin
Bible, and came to be accepted as part of the
authoritative text. But they interrupt the
context and plainly were not original.
Nevertheless, though these particular words
are not St. John s, there can be no question
that St. John believed in the Trinity in Unity.
The statement of the Quicunque that " The
Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy
Ghost is God. And yet they are not three
Gods, but one God " can be quite fairly concluded
from his Gospel and Epistles. Later writers
have loved the argument that love involves
fellowship ; and that a God who eternally is
Love must be a God whose essential nature is
a fellowship, and I do not think St. John would
have demurred.
10. 1 JOHN v. 13-17
ST. JOHN defined the motive of his choice of
incidents for his Gospel in the words (xx. 31) :
These things have been written that ye may
believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God ; and that believing ye may have life in
his name." So now he says of this Epistle
that he has written it that they who believe in
the name of the Son of God may know that
they are in actual enjoyment of eternal life,
the life which no earthly blows can shake or
empair. And this eternal life is a life of fellow
ship with God, and carries with it such freedom
of speech and freedom of approach towards
God that whatever we ask according to His
will He hears us. Thus we know that His
receiving and giving effect to such petitions of
ours is so certain that we can rely upon what
we have asked for as already in our possession.
201
202 St. John s Epistles
St. John then applies this to intercessory prayer
to prayer in particular to which we are
moved by the sight of sins committed by one
of our brethren in Christ. In this regard St. John
draws a distinction. As under the Old Covenant
grave and deliberate sins had death for
their penalty, while lighter sins of carelessness,
ignorance, or sudden passion could be dealt
with by the sacrificial system of the community,
so is it now, only with a change in the nature
of the death involved. There are mortal sins
possible among Christians that is, sins so
deliberate and defiant as to cut off those who
commit them from all fellowship in the eternal
life and plunge their souls into death. (This
awful passage from life to death would lie
in the nature of the sin ; but, where open
and known, the sin would be marked outwardly
and visibly by excommunication cutting off
the guilty person from the fellowship of the
Church. ) Now, prayer for others seeks for them
a divine gift, such as, according to God s will,
postulates human response. The dead soul gives
no such response. St. John then, though he
does not actually forbid us to pray for souls
thus dead in sin, does say that when he speaks
Fellowship in eternal life 203
of intercession for sinners he is only thinking
of those who are still alive spiritually, i.e. still
responsive to the movements of the Spirit.
When such people sin as we may say, when
they are overtaken by sin or betrayed into
sin against the real bent of their will we may
be confident of obtaining life for them from
God ; a renewal of the life which sin has more
or less interrupted.
These things have I written unto you, that ye may
know that ye have eternal life, even unto you that believe
on the name of the Son of God. And this is the boldness
which we have toward him, that, if we ask anything ac
cording to his will, he heareth us : and if we know that
he heareth us whatsoever we ask, we know that we have
the petitions which we have asked of him. If any man see
his brother sinning a sin not unto death, he shall ask, and
God will give him life for them that sin not unto death.
There is a sin unto death : not concerning this do I say
that he should make request. All unrighteousness is sin :
and there is a sin not unto death.
1. "Ye have eternal life." This thought is
deep in the mind of St. John. No doubt, as
he says in the next verse that we already
" have " the things we faithfully ask for ac
cording to God s will, though we have them not
yet in experience or enjoyment, so about eternal
204 St. John s Epistles
life he would recognize that there is a sense
in which eternal life is still future and is to be asso
ciated with the resurrection (see John v. 24-9).
But the main thought on which he insists is
that it consists not in any external satisfaction
or rewards, but in the fellowship of the soul
with God, and that this fellowship in the life of
God is to be actually realized now. " Eternal
life " in St. John is practically the equivalent
of " the kingdom of God/ which is a phrase
he seldom uses.
2. Prayer. The end of our being is to have
fellowship with God. " The life of man is the
vision of God." Doubtless it is in order to
train us for such fellowship and not in order to
inform God of our needs for " your Father
knoweth what things ye have need of before
ye ask Him " that God, according to the
testimony of our Lord, has made so much to
depend on prayer. Our Lord affirms the need
of prayer " Ask, and it shall be given unto
you " and constantly instructs His disciples
that it must be urgent and importunate ; just
as He assumes the necessity of work and of the
thought and courage which is required for good
work : for only " the workman is worthy of his
Prayer for others 205
hire " ; only " He that reapeth receiveth wages
and gathereth fruit " ; " The night cometh when
no man can work." There are, in fact, multi
tudes of good things intended for us, and through
us for others, in the providence of God, which
will never be ours unless we work for them.
Equally certainly there is an abundant store of
good things intended for us, and through us for
others, which will never be ours unless we
faithfully and importunately pray for them.
So our Lord taught His disciples by word and
example.
But He also taught His disciples another
lesson that the efficacy of prayer depends on
its being in accordance with what we know to
be the will of God as St. John here says,
" according to his will." And it was the will
of God which our Lord came to make men
understand. This lesson He taught in various
phrases : " If ye abide in me and my word
abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will and it
shall be done unto you " ; " Whatsoever ye shall
ask the Father in my name [i.e. as representing
me and my intention, and not as expressing
your own selfish desires] it shall be done unto
you. Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my
206 St. Johns Epistles
name/* The object of prayer, we learn, is not
to persuade God to do something different from
what He had intended, but to free His hand
to do His will that will which can only be done
for free men by their co-operation. This re
cognition of an immutable will of God, expressed
in the laws of nature and in the whole spiritual
world, is not meant to enslave us but to free us.
Nature, we have learnt, can be controlled, but
only by being obeyed. So long as we approach
nature in the light of our own whims and ideas,
we can get nothing from her. She remains
stubborn and irresponsive. When we reverently
and submissively study her laws and correspond
with them, we can use them for our purposes.
So it is in the spiritual world. This lesson is
taught most plainly in the petitions of the
Lord s Prayer and in the order of those petitions.
The beginning of effective prayer is to abandon
our selfish and short-sighted schemes and desires,
and concentrate our whole will and desire upon
the kingdom of God and the fulfilment of the
Father s will. Thus there is given to faith so
great a certainty of ultimate fulfilment even
as the prayer of Christ Himself is at last to be
heard and His kingdom to come that it can
Prayer for others 207
be said to have already what it asks for ; but
that crowning mercy nevertheless it never can
receive without the persistent asking, for the
law of God s action upon us is to demand such
correspondence.
3. Intercessory prayer. In accordance with
what has just been said, the spirit of the truest
intercessory prayer is denned by St. Paul
speaking of the intercession of the Spirit in the
body of Christ as "in accordance with God
on behalf of saints " 1 that is, on behalf of
consecrated persons who are moving in corre
spondence with the Spirit. Thus if we take
the intercessory prayers of the New Testament
our Lord s great prayer and St. Paul s prayers
for his converts we see that they are prayers
for the perfecting of those already in correspond
ence with God. The principle which our Lord
enunciates " I pray not for the world, but for
them whom thou hast given me " ! appears
generally in the other examples. The normal
action of intercessory prayer, then, is within the
responsive body. From it there flows within
the body so rich and united a life that those
outside are impressed and won. So here St. John
1 Rom. viii. 27. 2 John xvii. 9.
208 St. John s Epistles
speaks about intercessory prayer as prayer for
the cleansing and recovery from incidental sins
of those who are still responsive to God and living
the true life. As for those who, by deliberate
apostasy, hand themselves back to the world
of darkness and death we cannot help thinking
of those leaders in error whom St. John describes
as antichrists he does not say that we should
pray for them. He does not forbid it. It is,
for instance, very hard to suppose that St. John
did not pray for the young man in the story
Clement tells of him, 1 who had been guilty of
the most flagrant apostasy from Christ and
become a leader in outrageous crimes, whom
the bishop to whom he had been entrusted
described as " dead dead to God/ It is
very difficult, I say, to believe that St. John did
not pray for him as soon as ever he heard of his
sad case, before he so lovingly and bravely
sought and won him. But he does tell us that
this is not the normal action of intercessory
prayer.
I am quite sure we need to-day to learn the
lesson afresh. We are apt to pray somewhat
tepidly and perfunctorily for the perfecting of
1 Clement ap. Euseb. Eccl. Hist, iii, 23 ; see above, p. 5.
Prayer for others 209
the faithful. We take their customary sins
for granted. And it is just those of whom
St. John says, " I do not say that ye should
pray for them " for whom we pray most
urgently. We seem to regard this even as the
normal kind of intercessory prayer practically
reversing the order of the New Testament. I
am sure this subject will bear much thinking of.
The normal action of intercessory prayer is,
according to the teaching of the New Testament,
within the circle of those who are living in
actual response to the movement of the Divine
Spirit.
4. Sins unto death and sins not unto death.
This distinction is, no doubt, based upon the
Old Testament. I will explain what I mean
by setting before my readers a passage from the
late Dr. A. B. Davidson, Theology of the Old
Testament, 1 partly for the pleasure of quoting
from so admirable a book.
A distinction is drawn in the Old Testament, as has
been seen, between sins of ignorance and inadvertence
and sins done with a high hand or of purpose. . . . The
former class embraced more than mere involuntary or
inadvertent sins. The class comprehended all sins done
not in a spirit of rebellion against the law and ordinance
1 (Clarke, Edin. 1904), pp. 315-17.
210 St. John s Epistles
of Jehovah sins committed through human imperfection,
or human ignorance, or human passion ; sins done when
the mind was directed to some end connected with human
weakness or frailty, but not formally opposed to the
authority of the lawgiver. The distinction was thus
primarily a distinction in regard to the state of mind of the
transgressor. In point of fact, however, it was convenient
to specify in general the offences which belonged to the
class of sins done with a high hand, and upon the whole
they were the sins forbidden by the moral law. 1 No doubt
in certain circumstances even these sins, if committed
involuntarily, were treated as sins of error, and the penalty
due to them was averted by certain extraordinary arrange
ments ; as, for example, when a murder was committed
by misadventure, the manslayer was allowed to flee to a
city of refuge. Otherwise, the consequence of his deed
would overtake him in the ordinary penalty attached to
such an offence, which was death.
Corresponding to this distinction among offences was
another. Only sins of ignorance were capable of being
atoned for by sacrifice. The class of offences said to have
been done with a high hand were capital, and followed by
exclusion from the community. The sins of error or
ignorance could be removed by sacrifice and offering. In
other words, the Old Testament sacrificial system was a
system of atonement only for the so-called sins of inad
vertency. . . . [It] belonged to the worship of the people
of God concerned as truly His people, believing in Him
and in fellowship with Him. And it was a means of
1 Not, however, all sins against the Ten Commandments by
any means, e.g. not theft. It is probable that the words " that
soul shall be cut off from Israel," which recur so often in the
priestly code, refer to excommunication and not death. Cf.
Ezra x. 8. C. G.
Prayer for others 211
maintaining this fellowship, of equating or removing the
disturbances which human frailty occasioned to the
communion." On the other hand, " high-handed " sins
" threw the offender outside the space within which God
was continuously gracious. There was no sacrifice for
such sins. The offender was left face to face with the
anger of God. 1
We need not consider how far this theory of
the Jewish law was realized in fact. At any
rate, the distinction of high-handed sins which
are " unto deatb" (or its equivalent excom
munication) and sins of error and weakness lies
very deep in the Old Testament, and St. John
reaffirms it. Doubtless with him the distinction
is viewed mainly as it is in the heart of the
sinner and in the moral nature of things. But
we see already in St. Paul s Epistles to the
Corinthians, that, as under the Old Covenant,
so under the New, certain kinds of sin were to be
regarded as " high-handed " and flagrant acts
of apostasy, and visited with excommunication.
The Christian Church thereby, like the Jewish,
handed over the offender to the judgement of
God among " those without," though it had
the advantage of the older Church in having
1 The reader should refer to Lev. iv. 11 ; Num. xv, ; and
Heb. v. 2, ix. 7, x. 26.
15
212 St. John s Epistles
an assurance of reconciliation for the penitent.
And, doubtless, St. John had in his mind, when
he reaffirmed the distinction between mortal
sins and those not mortal, the primitive system
of Church discipline. His is one of the profoundly
sacramental minds by which the co-ordination
of the inward and the outward, the moral and
the ecclesiastical, can never be forgotten, and
he would tolerate no disparagement of w r hat is
external as such. Nevertheless, if we bring to
mind the history of the terms " mortal " and
" venial " in connection with the confessional,
and recall certain famous Provincial Letters
which once written can never be forgotten I
think we shall feel how much the Church needs
a St. John in almost every age to keep recalling
its outward dealing with sins as they appear
to the inward tribunal of spiritual truth.
11. 1 JOHN v. 18-21
THE THREE SOLEMN FINAL AFFIRMATIONS
ST. JOHN ends his Epistle with three great final
affirmations, for which he appeals confidently
to the consciousness of those to whom he writes
and associates them with himself (" we know ").
These in a way sum up not his message, for his
message is lamely concerned with the ethical
o /
contents of the Christian religion, but the
grounds of his message. First, and in spite of
what he has just said about the experience of
sins of infirmity and also of mortal sins among
Christians, he makes a solemn affirmation that
sin is inconsistent with the condition of divine
regeneration ; that the condition of each re
generate person is a condition of security against
sin because he is guarded by the Only-begotten
Son and the wicked one cannot touch him.
Secondly, he affirms the great contrast between
the Church and the world that the Church is
the family of God, and that the whole world
213
214 St. John s Epistles
society, that is, as it organizes itself for its own
ends apart from God lies in the grasp of the
evil one. Finally, he affirms the truthfulness
and finality of God s disclosure of Himself in
His Son Jesus Christ. He who was to come
in Him has come. There is no more to be
expected. He has come and has given us what
mankind of themselves never could arrive at
an intellectual understanding of God as He
genuinely is : and more than understanding a
life lived in Him ; that is to say, a life lived in
His Son Jesus Christ, which is the same thing ;
for the Father and the Son are one, and dwelling
in the Son is dwelling in the Father. This is
the genuine God and the life we thus live is
eternal life. There are many false gods, the
product of men s imagination, which have no
genuine reality ; there are many false aims
towards which are directed lives that are worth
less and transitory. These are idols. " Little
children, guard yourselves from the idols."
We know that whosoever is begotten of God sinneth
not ; but he that was begotten of God keepeth him, and
the evil one toucheth him not. We know that we are of
God, and the whole world lieth in the evil one. And we
know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an
Three solemn affirmations 215
understanding, that we know him that is true, and we are
in him that is true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is
the true God, and eternal life. My little children, guard
yourselves from idols.
1. He that was begotten of God, who is thus
distinguished from the many who " are [or more
strictly, " who have been "] begotten," must be
" the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom
of the Father" (John i. 18). As He Himself
is inaccessible to the devil, because the devil
found in Him nothing that he can lay hold of
(John xiv. 30), so also He renders secure against
attack those whom He guards within the shelter
of His own sonship.
2. The Church and the world. What a tre
mendous contrast St. John draws between the
two societies : the Church in its supremacy
over the evil one and all his works, and the
godless society which lies in his grasp ! To give
the contrast any point it must have been felt
to be true true, that is, on the whole, in spite
of the unworthy lapses of individual members
of the Church, such as St. John implies, and in
spite of respectable and noble lives among those
who were not Christians. In spite of these
things, so long as becoming a Christian was a
216 St. John s Epistles
perilous venture which no one would make who
was not in earnest, the moral level of the
Church was very high and the contrast between
the Church and the world continued sharp.
And St. John, who, as we have seen, loves to
represent things as they are in their ultimate
principles and ultimate issues, states the con
trast at its sharpest. At a later date ".the
conquest of the world " (so called) took place.
It cost nothing henceforth to be a Christian :
rather, it cost much to be in name anything
else. The Church then entered into the world as
still a leaven possibly, but certainly no longer
as "the salt," or "the light," or " the city set on
the hill " all which metaphors involve the
sharp contrast. The Church entered into the
world, or, much more truly, it suffered the
world to enter into the Church unchanged,
unregenerated in character, and unashamed ;
and though it is still obvious that the worldly
world lieth in the grip of the evil one, though
our industrial organization and international re
lations are enough to convince one of this, yet
there is no contrasted society visible and co
herent, living over against the world, militant but
attractive. We have compromised with the world.
Three solemn affirmations 217
We have not been much in love with sanctity
nor anxious to tear the veils of! corruption.
We have preferred to discern a soul of good in
things evil, and with good-humoured satisfaction
to point out that " these saints are not much
better than the rest of us." We have made for
ourselves a drab world, neither very black (as
we think) nor very white. Now, perhaps, there
is an awakening. Perhaps, at least, we are
more conscious than formerly that "the world
lieth in the evil one/ 5 But certainly the Church
has still a long way to travel before men can
recognize in it the society of the redeemed.
3. Understanding to know the real God. Here,
again, we observe St. John s insistence upon the
importance of right thinking about God. We
are to love the Lord our God with all our under
standing, as well as with all our heart and soul
and strength. It is really shallowness, or what
Butler calls shortness of thought, which causes
so many to-day to talk as if " what exactly
people believe " is not of much importance so
long as their hearts are right. The fact is that,
however much inconsistency there may be be
tween intellectual belief and practice at any
particular moment or in any particular in-
218 St. John s Epistles
dividual, in the long run how men behave the
character of their whole civilization, indeed
depends upon what exactly they really believe
about God. Thus St. John has a very clear
idea of the fellowship of mutual love which is
to constitute Christian society ; but he is clearly
convinced that this sort of society can come
into being and maintain itself only if men believe
that the very being of God Himself is love,
which must, therefore, be the law of the world.
And, again, he is convinced that this assurance
about God s nature has come to men, and can
be maintained, in no other way than through
the belief that the hidden Father has shown
Himself, His real mind and being, in the historical
person, Jesus, the Christ and the Son of God
so truly one with the Father that in knowing
Him we know the Father, and in being joined
to Him we are joined to the Father. This is
the real God, he says, in contrast to all the idols
of men s ungoverned imagination.
Right religion is then, according to St. John,
not a mere matter of our personal feeling or what
we call our " experience," but depends upon
facts outside ourselves, what Jesus was, w r hat
He taught about God, how He suffered and
Three solemn affirmations 219
rose again. And those facts can be apprehended
by the understanding and (within limits) can
be expressed in propositions which, if they are
justified by the facts, can, like the propositions
which St. John uses, constitute a standard of
orthodoxy or right thinking in religion. It
is not my business now to argue what the
orthodox creed is or ought to be, only to insist
that a religion such as Christianity claims to be
a religion of objective facts must have a
standard of orthodoxy appealing to the under
standing.
4. Keep yourselves from the idols. So the Old
Testament prophets thundered often in deaf
ears. And they meant by idolatry the worship
of idols of wood and stone. But it was even then
apparent that this idolatry is so sternly pro
hibited because it is a worship of false gods, or,
if not that, because it misrepresents the true
God. During the Captivity a great change
came over Israel. They ceased, in the old
sense, to be inclined to idolatry. The prophets
after the Captivity have little need to denounce
it. It has become the national characteristic
of Israel to abhor idols. Nevertheless, the old
prophets would have been disappointed in Israel,
220 St. John s Epistles
as was John the Baptist and as was our Lord.
Though in name they worshipped the true God
and worshipped Him only by the authorized
rites, yet in their hearts they had a perilously
false idea of God. And the spiritual essence of
idolatry is either to enthrone in our heart some
other object than God (" covetousness which is
idolatry "), or to entertain wrong ideas of Him.
When St. John says, " Keep yourselves from
idols," he is not surely warning the Christians
against heathen idolatry of such a danger the
Epistle gives us no hint but warning them
against enthroning in their minds false ideas
of God, something else than the real God :
such false ideas as in this Epistle he has ascribed
to the spirit of antichrist. And if we look around
us to-day and take note of the ideas of God in
man s mind, often so strangely different from
those which our Lord would teach us, we shall
confess that we need to examine ourselves afresh
under the heading of the second commandment ;
that we need to make sure that the God whom
we are worshipping is not an idol of our ima
gination or of other men s imagination, but
" the real God."
THE SECOND EPISTLE
THIS second Epistle is, unlike the first Epistle,
properly a letter from a person, describing himself
by a familiar title, conveying a salutation, like
St. Paul s or St. Peter s letters, beginning, again
like St. Paul s, with an expression of thankful
ness before going on to warning and admonition,
and ending up with the promise of a visit and
a message from the circle of the writer.
It is written to an " elect lady/ The early
Church had apparently no tradition as to the
circumstances of the letter. Clement took it
to be written to a certain Babylonian 1 lady,
Elect by name. But, if it were written to an
individual, it would appear much more probable,
on various grounds, that her personal name is
not given. However, it may, I think, be taken
almost for certain that it is, as Jerome supposed,
written to a Church personified, as in 1 Peter
v. 13 the Church in Rome is called " she that
1 Why he gives her this place of residence we cannot conjecture,
221
222 St. John s Epistles
is in Babylon elect together with you." Then,
of course, her " children " are the members of
the Church. What makes this theory convincing
is that the " thy " and " thee " of vers. 4 and 5
pass into the "ye" and "you" of vers. 6, 8,
10, 12 ; and that "the children of thine elect
sister " (ver. 13) most naturally means the
members of the writer s own Church.
And who was the author of it ? The internal
evidence seems to stamp it as by the same author
as the first Epistle that is, St. John the Apostle.
Thus, " Love in truth " (ver. 1) recalls 1 John
iii. 1 . The co-ordination of the Father and the
Son (vers. 3 and 9), the co-ordination of love,
obedience, and adherence to the original faith,
the faith of the Incarnation (vers. 6-7), the
phrase " the commandment which we had from
the beginning, that we love one another "
(ver. 5), and indeed the whole spirit and phrase
ology of the letter recall the first Epistle un
mistakably. 1 And yet it can be no imitator s
work, for the salutation (ver. 3) is in its wording
peculiar * ; and the characterization of " the
1 In detail for ver. 5 cf. 1 John ii. 7 ; for ver. 6 cf. 1 John
v. 3 and ii. 5 ; and for ver. 7 cf. 1 John ii. 18-26 and iv. 2, 3.
2 " Shall be with us " instead of " be with you."
The second Epistle 223
antichrist " as denying that " Jesus Christ
cometh [not " has come " in the flesh/ 5 and
the denunciation of false progress (ver. 9), and
the demand that no sympathy should be shown
the false teacher (ver. 10), strike new notes
which are indeed thoroughly Johannine, but
original and interesting, and not such as could
be ascribed to an imitator. So with Irenaeus
and Clement of Alexandria we accept it as
truly St. John s. There were, indeed, some in
the early Church who doubted. This was
perhaps due, at first, to the fact that this short
letter to a Church, containing on a superficial
view nothing of importance which was not at
greater length in the first Epistle, had very
little diffusion. Somewhat later the fact that
the author describes himself as " the elder
[presbyter]/ probably told against it, presbyter
being the name given to the second order of
the ministry, or else to those venerable men of
the generation after the apostles, amongst whom
there was supposed to have been another John
called " the presbyter." But in the first age
ecclesiastical designations were not fixed. Peter
calls himself a presbyter (1 Peter v. 1), and early
bishops are often so called. St. John, in fact
224 St. John s Epistles
(except in the Apocalypse, if that is by him),
never uses the term " apostle " at all. And he
may well have loved to call himself " the elder/
partly with reference to age and partly with
reference to office ; and it may have become
a familiar title of reverence and affection in
Asia. On the whole, we may accept St. John s
authorship without doubt. Presumably, the
Church to which St. John wrote was one of the
Asiatic Churches amongst which he ministered,
but we have no right to fix on any one in
particular.
The elder unto the elect lady and her children, whom I
love in truth ; and not I only, but also all they that know
the truth ; for the truth s sake which abideth in us, and
it shall be with us for ever : Grace, mercy, peace shall be
with us, from God the Father, and from Jesus Christ, the
Son of the Father, in truth and love.
I rejoice greatly that I have found certain of thy children
walking in truth, even as we received commandment from
the Father. And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though
I wrote to thee a new commandment, but that which we
had from the beginning, that we love one another. And
this is love, that we should walk after his commandments.
This is the commandment, even as ye heard from the
beginning, that ye should walk in it. For many deceivers
are gone forth into the world, even they that confess not
that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh. This is the deceiver
and the antichrist. Look to yourselves, that ye lose not
the things which we have wrought, but that ye receive a
The second Epistle 225
full reward. Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not
in the teaching of Christ, hath not God : he that abideth
in the teaching, the same hath both the Father and the
Son. If any one cometh unto you, and bringeth not this
teaching, receive him not into your house, and give him
no greeting : for he that giveth him greeting partaketh
in his evil works.
Having many things to write unto you, I would not
write them with paper and ink : but I hope to come unto
you, and to speak face to face, that your joy may be
fulfilled. The children of thine elect sister salute thee.
Ver. 2. For the truth s sake. St. John writes
" on account of," i.e. to maintain the true faith
sorely threatened, as we learn in the first Epistle ;
but, in spite of all attacks, he is confident that
it will endure " with us," even as it abides " in
us " by the Spirit of truth.
Ver. 3. Grace, mercy, peace, is also St. Paul s
salutation in his Epistles to Timothy. " Grace,"
here only used in these Epistles, describes the
favourable action of God towards us as unmerited
and absolute, mercy describes its character,
and peace its consequence in us. St. John
does not imprecate these blessings on those to
whom he writes, like St. Paul, but simply assures
them of their continuance with us. " Jesus
Christ, the Son of the Father," is, as far as words
go, a title unique in the New Testament.
226 St. John s Epistles
Ver. 4. Certain of thy children walking in
truth. Doubtless some also had gone after
" the deceivers. " But it is tactful, where warn
ing has to be given, to begin with what merits
thankfulness.
Ver. 7. Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh. This
is one of the most significant phrases in the
Epistle. It can only refer to the future, final,
coming of Christ. The antichrists then are
characterized not only by the denial that Christ
" has come in the flesh," but also by the denial
that He still exists in the flesh and is still to
come from heaven, " as ye beheld him going
into heaven/ 1 This is very important. Doubt
less, there is a sense in which Christ is not now
in " the flesh " ; as St. Paul says, " flesh and
blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God," and
" the last Adam became a life-giving spirit/ *
Flesh in this sense, as coupled with blood,
describes our present mortal body, which must
either be changed or dissolved for the spiritual
body to be " given/ But 1 " all flesh is not the
same flesh," and the body of the resurrection
may also be described as flesh. So in our
Lord s discourse about eating His flesh and
1 Acts i. 11. 2 1 Cor. xv. 45-6.
The second Epistle 227
drinking His blood, He first emphasizes the
reality of the gift, and then directs the thoughts
of His hearers to a state of glory not yet realized,
when He shall have ascended up where He was
before, and the things He has been talking about,
His flesh and blood, will be spirit and life : for
"it is the spirit that quickeneth ; the flesh pro-
fiteth nothing." l And the indications given us
of our Lord s body after He was risen from the
dead indicate that He was no longer " in the
days of His flesh," * or subject to its conditions
or limitations. His body was simply the perfect
expression of His will and purpose. But it was
the same body which He had taken of Mary
and in which He lived and suffered. It bore,
on occasion, at least, the marks of His crucifixion.
As being the same body, Christ could still be
described as "in the flesh " : and His heavenly
state that is, the state in which He will return
is here, in fact, so described by St. John, and
he insists on the description because it em
phasizes the fact that the glorified body of our
Redeemer though He is now " quickening
spirit" and the flesh and blood with which
He feeds His people are spiritual " spirit and
1 John vi. 63. 2 Heb, v. 7.
16
228 St. John s Epistles
life " is still the same body. He is still
to come in the flesh/ and to deny this is
the mark of antichrist. This is very im
portant. 1
Indeed to-day we need St. John s warning.
We are in the gravest danger of " losing the
things which we " that is, he and the other
apostolic founders "have wrought," and
converting the historical Christianity of
the creeds into an idealism like that of the
Gnostics.
1 In the same way, doubtless, St. John would justify belief
in " the resurrection of the flesh " in our case. Not because
our resurrection bodies are to be of " flesh and blood," i.e. in the
condition of our mortal bodies, or because there is to be, at the
resurrection, a re-collection of the present changing physical
atoms of our bodies, but because the spiritual body is to be the
same body in some sense, bearing the marks of its old experiences,
the real record of what we have done and suffered, though its
material elements are changed. There must remain a difference,
as St. Paul makes plain, between the process by which, in the
case of us who die in the course of nature, the spiritual body is
to be given to us in place of our mortal body which decays, and,
on the other hand, the process by which Christ s body was
transformed into the resurrection body, and also the process by
which " in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye," the bodies
of those who at the last are not to die at all are, in St. Paul s
expectation, to be " changed." Still, in a real sense, all we
(whether we die or are "changed") shall be, like Christ, in
St. John s sense, in the flesh.
The second Epistle 229
Ver. 9. These Gnostic antichrists professed
to be the " progressives " of their day. They
were, in fact, the intellectuals, and, as so being,
they made, as Tertullian tells us, a vast number
of converts among the ablest people. But
their progress was a progress beyond " the
teaching of Christ," beyond " the teaching "
otherwise described as what " ye heard from
the beginning/ the original Gospel both in its
facts and ideas. Therefore, St. John will have
none of this false progress. And, in fact, history
has justified him. In spite of the force of
Gnostic idealism it was the historical faith and
the concrete Church which survived. And we
shall see, or our children will see, the same
result again. Many current idealisms and
religions will pass away, but the Catholic faith
and Church will prove their inherent toughness
and survival power.
Ver. 10. And just as St. Paul denounces,
with his tremendous anathema, those who
preach " any other gospel/ * so St. John would
have his disciples show the wandering teachers
of the Gnostic heresy no manner of sympathy.
To receive a teacher of falsehood, when he is
1 Gal. i. 9.
230 St. John s Epistks
out for propaganda purposes, to the hospitality
of one s home and to make him welcome, is
to make oneself responsible for what he is
doing.
Certainly this brief Epistle has much to teach
us.
THE THIED EPISTLE
THIS is certainly an Epistle to an individual,
Gains (which was a very common name), and
is also plainly from the same hand as the second
Epistle. It describes an interesting situation,
but leaves so much undisclosed that we cannot
feel any great certainty about it, except that
important people in the Church could even in
the age and neighbourhood of the apostle St.
John behave very badly to him and resist his
authority. Clement tells us, it will be remem
bered, that St. John s later activity at Ephesus
included the appointment of bishops in neigh
bouring Churches. 1 These bishops were, like
the later bishops, and unlike the earlier pres
byter-bishops, single rulers. They succeeded
to the office of apostolic delegates, like Timothy
and Titus, only more strictly localized. Such
are the bishops of the letters of Ignatius, written
some fifteen years later. Diotrephes was pro-
1 See above, p, 6,
231
232 St. John s Epistles
bably one of them. And being an ambitious
man, he resented St. John s authority and
determined to show his independence of it.
We can imagine his arguing that his episcopal
office was also apostolic. We should note that
he is not, as far as appears, in conflict with his
presbyters as if he were usurping authority over
them, but only in conflict with St. John. His
independence of him he chose to show by refusing
to entertain those who came from him. In the
first days movements were propagated not by
newspapers, but by circulating missionaries.
So the Gnostics were propagating their views :
they " went out into the world " (ver. 7), and
St. John has just bidden a Church not to enter
tain these messengers of falsehood. We might
suppose that St. John s envoys were sent out
to counteract this false teaching. They are,
in fact, described as going forth " because of
the Name," relying exclusively on the support
of the faithful, and to give them hospitality is
to " co-operate with the truth" (ver. 8). And
Diotrephes, it appears, had dealt with them
exactly as St. John had exhorted the Church
addressed in his second Epistle to deal with the
Gnostic missionaries. He had refused to enter-
The third Epistle 233
tain them and had excommunicated those who,
like Gains, acted otherwise. But St. John does
not hint that Diotrephes was disposed to heresy.
If that had been so, his denunciation would have
taken a different form. He was simply an
ambitious man who wanted to show his inde
pendence of " the presbyter," and St. John
assumes that in refusing to give hospitality to
his messengers he is simply affronting him and
not basing his action on difference of doctrine.
St. John is going to visit the Church, and is
confident that when he is there he will be able
to show up Diotrephes s evil purpose in its true
light. Meanwhile he had written to the Church
perhaps it is the second Epistle that he is
referring to but fears Diotrephes may suppress
his letter, and takes the opportunity to send
this private letter by Demetrius, one of his
envoys, to Gaius, a member of the Church of
which Diotrephes was presumably the bishop,
who had been actively opposing him and had
suffered for it. Whether Gaius was layman
or presbyter, we cannot say. Anyway, this
little letter gives us a picture of factions in an
apostolic Church and of a movement of rebellion
even against the aged apostle. This is, of course,
234 St. John s Epistles
no new thing. St. Paul had endured the like.
Also it gives us an interesting picture of the
circulation of bands of missionaries, and their
total dependence upon finding support in the
different Churches they visited, and of the way
in which questions of orthodoxy and personal
rivalries between leaders in different Churches
would have interfered with their welcome and
left them destitute.
Perhaps nothing more is necessary by way
of explaining conjecturally, it must be ad
mitted this third Epistle.
3 JOHN
The elder unto Gaius the beloved, whom I love in truth.
Beloved, I pray that in all things thou mayest prosper
and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth. For I
rejoiced greatly, when brethren came and bare witness
unto thy truth, even as thou walkest in truth. Greater
joy have I none than this, to hear of my children walking
in the truth.
Beloved, thou doest a faithful work in whatsoever thou
doest toward them that are brethren and strangers withal ;
who bare witness to thy love before the church : whom
thou wilt do well to set forward on their journey worthily
of God : because that for the sake of the Name they went
forth, taking nothing of the Gentiles. We therefore ought
to welcome such, that we may be fellow-workers with the
truth.
I wrote somewhat unto the church : but Diotrephes
The third Epistle 235
who loveth to have the pre-eminence among them, receiveth
us not. Therefore, if I come, I will bring to remembrance
his works which he doeth, prating against us with wicked
words : and not content therewith, neither doth he himself
receive the brethren, and them that would he forbiddeth,
and casteth them out of the church. Beloved, imitate
not that which is evil, but that which is good. He that
doeth good is of God : he that doeth evil hath not seen
God. Demetrius hath the witness of all men, and of the
truth itself : yea, we also bear witness ; and thou knowest
that our witness is true.
I had many things to write unto thee, but I am unwilling
to write them to thee with ink and pen : but I hope shortly
to see thee, and we shall speak face to face. Peace be
unto thee. The friends salute thee. Salute the friends
by name.
APPENDED NOTE (see p. 38)
DR. DRUMMOND (Character and Authorship of the Fourth
Gospel, pp. 32 ff.) suggests that when Clement, on the
authority of " the presbyters from the beginning," i.e.
the immediate disciples of the apostles, calls the Fourth
Gospel a " spiritual gospel " by contrast to the other
three, he meant that John " set forth his higher and more
secret doctrine in the form of allegory." Dr. Inge (Cam
bridge Biblical Essays, ix. p. 260-1) makes the same sugges
tion. But, as has been already observed (p. 38), Origen,
who explains at length the view of the great Alexandrians,
makes in two places, in one of which we have the original
Greek, an express reservation which excludes the idea
that the facts related of our Lord, and, in particular, His
miracles, including the raising of Lazarus, are intended
as merely allegorical. Origen, it is true, makes alarming
general statements about the " myriad " things, even in
the Gospels which are not literally true. But he had not
our mind and was not contemplating our problem. He
gives a great number of examples of what he means.
They are injunctions, as "to pluck out our right eye and
cut off our right hand," which must be interpreted alle-
gorically, or statements of Christ s manhood which, in order
to be true, would need to be balanced by statements of His
godhead, or chronological inexactitudes, etc. As far as I
have observed, there is only one recorded incident in our
Lord s life for which he suggests a purely allegorical inter
pretation, and that is (not in St. John s Gospel) the incident
236
Appended Note 237
in the Temptation where the devil is recorded to have
taken Jesus up into " an exceeding high mountain and
showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory
of them" ; it being, as he says, physically impossible from
any high mountain to see the kingdoms of the Persians
and Indians and Scythians and Parthians and discern their
glory. I suppose we should most of us agree so far with
Origen as to hold that this account of the temptation must
have been originally given by our Lord to His disciples as
a vivid presentation of what passed in His mind, though
it was perhaps misunderstood by the evangelists as the
record of a physical experience. But, on the whole, we
have Origen s assurance that the things recorded of Christ,
including His miracles, and in particular those of St. John,
must be taken literally.
The passages to be studied are especially the passage
from the De Principis, iv., given in Philocalia, cap. 1 ;
the commentary on St. John, torn, x., the beginning ; and
the passage from the commentary on the Galatians, last
fragment, from Rufinus s translation of Pamphilus s
Apology for Origen.
On the degree of trustworthiness to be ascribed to
Rufinus as a translator of Origen c/. Robinson s preface
to the Philocalia, pp. xxxi ff.
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The Epistles of St.
John
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DATE
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