_This then is the message which we have heard of him, and
declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no
darkness at all._--1 John i. 5.
_And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the
world, and men loved darkness rather than light; because
their deeds were evil._--John iii. 19.
We call the story of Jesus, told so differently, yet to my mind so
consistently, by four narrators, _the gospel_. What makes this tale
_the good news_? Is everything in the story of Christ's life on earth
good news? Is it good news that the one only good man was served by his
fellow-men as Jesus was served--cast out of the world in torture and
shame? Is it good news that he came to his own, and his own received
him not? What makes it fit, I repeat, to call the tale _good news_? If
we asked this or that theologian, we should, in so far as he was a true
man, and answered from his own heart and not from the tradition of the
elders, understand what he saw in it that made it good news to him,
though it might involve what would be anything but good news to some of
us. The deliverance it might seem to this or that man to bring, might
be founded on such notions of God as to not a few of us contain as
little of good as of news. To share in the deliverance which some men
find in what they call the gospel--for all do not apply the word to the
tale itself, but to certain deductions made from the epistles and their
own consciousness of evil--we should have to believe such things of God
as would be the opposite of an evangel to us--yea, a message from hell
itself; we should have to imagine that whose possibility would be worse
than any ill from which their 'good news' might offer us deliverance:
we must first believe in an unjust God, from whom we have to seek
refuge. True, they call him just, but say he does that which seems to
the best in me the essence of injustice. They will tell me I judge
after the flesh: I answer, Is it then to the flesh the Lord appeals
when he says, 'Yea, and why even of yourselves judge ye not what is
right?' Is he not the light that lighteth every man that cometh into
the world? They tell me I was born in sin, and I know it to be true;
they tell me also that I am judged with the same severity as if I had
been born in righteousness, and that I know to be false. They make it a
consequence of the purity and justice of God that he will judge us,
born in evil, for which birth we were not accountable, by our
sinfulness, instead of by our guilt. They tell me, or at least give me
to understand, that every wrong thing I have done makes me subject to
be treated as if I had done that thing with the free will of one who
had in him no taint of evil--when, perhaps, I did not at the time
recognize the thing as evil, or recognized it only in the vaguest
fashion. Is there any gospel in telling me that God is unjust, but that
there is a way of deliverance from him? Show me my God unjust, and you
wake in me a damnation from which no power can deliver me--least of all
God himself. It may be good news to such as are content to have a God
capable of unrighteousness, if only he be on their side!
Who would not rejoice to hear from Matthew, or Mark, or Luke, what, in
a few words, he meant by the word _gospel_--or rather, what in the
story of Jesus made him call it _good news_! Each would probably give a
different answer to the question, all the answers consistent, and each
a germ from which the others might be reasoned; but in the case of
John, we have his answer to the question: he gives us in one sentence
of two members, not indeed the gospel according to John, but the gospel
according to Jesus Christ himself. He had often told the story of
Jesus, the good news of what he was, and did, and said: what in it all
did John look upon as the essence of the goodness of its news? In his
gospel he gives us all _about_ him, the message _concerning_ him; now
he tells us what in it makes it to himself and to us good news--tells
us the very goodness of the good news. It is not now his own message
about Jesus, but the soul of that message--that which makes it
gospel--the news Jesus brought concerning the Father, and gave to the
disciples as his message for them to deliver to men. Throughout the
story, Jesus, in all he does, and is, and says, is telling the news
concerning his father, which he was sent to give to John and his
companions, that they might hand it on to their brothers; but here,
in so many words, John tells us what he himself has heard from The
Word--what in sum he has gathered from Jesus as the message he has to
declare. He has received it in no systematic form; it is what a life,
_the_ life, what a man, _the_ man, has taught him. The Word is the
Lord; the Lord is the gospel. The good news is no fagot of sticks of a
man's gathering on the Sabbath.
Every man must read the Word for himself. One may read it in one shape,
another in another: all will be right if it be indeed the Word they
read, and they read it by the lamp of obedience. He who is willing to
do the will of the Father shall know the truth of the teaching of
Jesus. The spirit is 'given to them that obey him.'
But let us hear how John reads the Word--near what is John's version of
the gospel.
'This then is the message,' he says, 'which we have heard of him, and
declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.'
Ah, my heart, this is indeed the good news for thee! This is a gospel!
If God be light, what more, what else can I seek than God, than God
himself! Away with your doctrines! Away with your salvation from the
'justice' of a God whom it is a horror to imagine! Away with your iron
cages of false metaphysics! I am saved--for God is light! My God, I
come to thee. That thou shouldst be thyself is enough for time and
eternity, for my soul and all its endless need. Whatever seems to me
darkness, that I will not believe of my God. If I should mistake, and
call that darkness which is light, will he not reveal the matter to me,
setting it in the light that lighteth every man, showing me that I saw
but the husk of the thing, not the kernel? Will he not break open the
shell for me, and let the truth of it, his thought, stream out upon me?
He will not let it hurt me to mistake the light for darkness, while I
take not the darkness for light. The one comes from blindness of the
intellect, the other from blindness of heart and will. I love the
light, and will not believe at the word of any man, or upon the
conviction of any man, that that which seems to me darkness is in God.
Where would the good news be if John said, 'God is light, but you
cannot see his light; you cannot tell, you have no notion, what light
is; what God means by light, is not what you mean by light; what God
calls light may be horrible darkness to you, for you are of another
nature from him!' Where, I say, would be the good news of that? It is
true, the light of God may be so bright that we see nothing; but that
is not darkness, it is infinite hope of light. It is true also that to
the wicked 'the day of the Lord is darkness, and not light;' but is
that because the conscience of the wicked man judges of good and evil
oppositely to the conscience of the good man? When he says, 'Evil, be
thou my good,' he means by _evil_ what God means by evil, and by _good_
he means _pleasure_. He cannot make the meanings change places. To say
that what our deepest conscience calls darkness may be light to God, is
blasphemy; to say light in God and light in man are of differing kinds,
is to speak against the spirit of light. God is light far beyond what
we can see, but what we mean by light, God means by light; and what is
light to God is light to us, or would be light to us if we saw it, and
will be light to us when we do see it. God means us to be jubilant in
the fact that he is light--that he is what his children, made in his
image, mean when they say _light_; that what in him is dark to them, is
dark by excellent glory, by too much cause of jubilation; that, however
dark it may be to their eyes, it is light even as they mean it, light
for their eyes and souls and hearts to take in the moment they are
enough of eyes, enough of souls, enough of hearts, to receive it in its
very being. Living Light, thou wilt not have me believe anything dark
of thee! thou wilt have me so sure of thee as to dare to say that is
not of God which I see dark, see unlike the Master! If I am not honest
enough, if the eye in me be not single enough to see thy light, thou
wilt punish me, I thank thee, and purge my eyes from their darkness,
that they may let the light in, and so I become an inheritor, with thy
other children, of that light which is thy Godhead, and makes thy
creatures need to worship thee. 'In thy light we shall see light.'
All man will not, in our present imperfection, see the same light; but
light is light notwithstanding, and what each does see, is his safety
if he obeys it. In proportion as we have the image of Christ mirrored
in us, we shall know what is and is not light. But never will anything
prove to be light that is not of the same kind with that which we mean
by light, with that in a thing which makes us call it light. The
darkness yet left in us makes us sometimes doubt of a thing whether it
be light or darkness; but when the eye is single, the whole body will
be full of light.
To fear the light is to be untrue, or at least it comes of untruth. No
being, for himself or for another, needs fear the light of God. Nothing
can be in light inimical to our nature, which is of God, or to anything
in us that is worthy. All fear of the light, all dread lest there
should be something dangerous in it, comes of the darkness still in
those of us who do not love the truth with all our hearts; it will
vanish as we are more and more interpenetrated with the light. In a
word, there is no way of thought or action which we count admirable in
man, in which God is not altogether adorable. There is no loveliness,
nothing that makes man dear to his brother man, that is not in God,
only it is infinitely better in God. He is God our saviour. Jesus is
our saviour because God is our saviour. He is the God of comfort and
consolation. He will soothe and satisfy his children better than any
mother her infant. The only thing he will not give them is--leave to
stay in the dark. If a child cry, 'I want the darkness,' and complain
that he will not give it, yet he will not give it. He gives what his
child needs--often by refusing what he asks. If his child say, 'I will
not be good; I prefer to die; let me die!' his dealing with that child
will be as if he said--'No; I have the right to content you, not
giving you your own will but mine, which is your one good. You shall
not die; you shall live to thank me that I would not hear your prayer.
You know what you ask, but not what you refuse.' There are good things
God must delay giving until his child has a pocket to hold them--till
he gets his child to make that pocket. He must first make him fit to
receive and to have. There is no part of our nature that shall not be
satisfied--and that not by lessening it, but by enlarging it to embrace
an ever-enlarging enough.
Come to God, then, my brother, my sister, with all thy desires and
instincts, all thy lofty ideals, all thy longing for purity and
unselfishness, all thy yearning to love and be true, all thy aspiration
after self-forgetfulness and child-life in the breath of the Father;
come to him with all thy weaknesses, all thy shames, all thy
futilities; with all thy helplessness over thy own thoughts; with all
thy failure, yea, with the sick sense of having missed the tide of true
affairs; come to him with all thy doubts, fears, dishonesties,
meannesses, paltrinesses, misjudgments, wearinesses, disappointments,
and stalenesses: be sure he will take thee and all thy miserable brood,
whether of draggle-winged angels, or covert-seeking snakes, into his
care, the angels for life, the snakes for death, and thee for liberty
in his limitless heart! For he is light, and in him is no darkness at
all. If he were a king, a governor; if the name that described him were
_The Almighty_, thou mightst well doubt whether there could be light
enough in him for thee and thy darkness; but he is thy father, and more
thy father than the word can mean in any lips but his who said, 'my
father and your father, my God and your God;' and such a father is
light, an infinite, perfect light. If he were any less or any other
than he is, and thou couldst yet go on growing, thou must at length
come to the point where thou wouldst be dissatisfied with him; but he
is light, and in him is no darkness at all. If anything seem to be in
him that you cannot be content with, be sure that the ripening of thy
love to thy fellows and to him, the source of thy being, will make thee
at length know that anything else than just what he is would have been
to thee an endless loss. Be not afraid to build upon the rock Christ,
as if thy holy imagination might build too high and heavy for that
rock, and it must give way and crumble beneath the weight of thy divine
idea. Let no one persuade thee that there is in him a little darkness,
because of something he has said which his creature interprets into
darkness. The interpretation is the work of the enemy--a handful of
tares of darkness sown in the light. Neither let thy cowardly
conscience receive any word as light because another calls it light,
while it looks to thee dark. Say either the thing is not what it seems,
or God never said or did it. But, of all evils, to misinterpret what
God does, and then say the thing as interpreted must be right because
God does it, is of the devil. Do not try to believe anything that
affects thee as darkness. Even if thou mistake and refuse something
true thereby, thou wilt do less wrong to Christ by such a refusal than
thou wouldst by accepting as his what thou canst see only as darkness.
It is impossible thou art seeing a true, a real thing--seeing it as it
is, I mean--if it looks to thee darkness. But let thy words be few,
lest thou say with thy tongue what thou wilt afterward repent with thy
heart. Above all things believe in the light, that it is what thou
callest light, though the darkness in thee may give thee cause at a
time to doubt whether thou art verily seeing the light.
'But there is another side to the matter: God is light indeed, but
there _is_ darkness; darkness is death, and men are in it.'
Yes; darkness is death, but not death to him that comes out of it.
It may sound paradoxical, but no man is condemned for anything he has
done; he is condemned for continuing to do wrong. He is condemned for
not coming out of the darkness, for not coming to the light, the living
God, who sent the light, his son, into the world to guide him home. Let
us hear what John says about the darkness.
For here also we have, I think, the word of the apostle himself: at the
13th verse he begins, I think, to speak in his own person. In the 19th
verse he says, 'And this is the condemnation,'--not that men are
sinners--not that they have done that which, even at the moment, they
were ashamed of--not that they have committed murder, not that they
have betrayed man or woman, not that they have ground the faces of the
poor, making money by the groans of their fellows--not for any hideous
thing are they condemned, but that they will not leave such doings
behind, and do them no more: 'This is the condemnation, that light is
come into the world, and men' would not come out of the darkness to the
light, but 'loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were
evil.' Choosing evil, clinging to evil, loving the darkness because it
suits with their deeds, therefore turning their backs on the inbreaking
light, how can they but be condemned--if God be true, if he be light,
and darkness be alien to him! Whatever of honesty is in man, whatever
of judgment is left in the world, must allow that their condemnation is
in the very nature of things, that it must rest on them and abide.
But if one happens to utter some individual truth which another man has
made into one of the cogs of his system, he is in danger of being
supposed to accept all the toothed wheels and their relations in that
system. I therefore go on to say that it does not follow, because light
has come into the world, that it has fallen upon this or that man. He
has his portion of the light that lighteth every man, but the
revelation of God in Christ may not yet have reached him. A man might
see and pass the Lord in a crowd, nor be to blame like the Jews of
Jerusalem for not knowing him. A man like Nathanael might have started
and stopped at the merest glimpse of him, but all growing men are not
yet like him without guile. Everyone who has not yet come to the light
is not necessarily keeping his face turned away from it. We dare not
say that this or that man would not have come to the light had he seen
it; we do not know that he will not come to the light the moment he
does see it. God gives every man time. There is a light that lightens
sage and savage, but the glory of God in the face of Jesus may not have
shined on this sage or that savage. The condemnation is of those who,
having seen Jesus, refuse to come to him, or pretend to come to him but
do not the things he says. They have all sorts of excuses at hand; but
as soon as a man begins to make excuse, the time has come when he might
be doing that from which he excuses himself. How many are there not
who, believing there is something somewhere with the claim of light
upon them, go on and on to get more out of the darkness! This
consciousness, all neglected by them, gives broad ground for the
expostulation of the Lord--'Ye will not come unto me that ye might have
life!'
'All manner of sin and blasphemy,' the Lord said, 'shall be forgiven
unto men; but the blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven.'
God speaks, as it were, in this manner: 'I forgive you everything. Not
a word more shall be said about your sins--only come out of them; come
out of the darkness of your exile; come into the light of your home, of
your birthright, and do evil no more. Lie no more; cheat no more;
oppress no more; slander no more; envy no more; be neither greedy nor
vain; love your neighbour as I love you; be my good child; trust in
your father. I am light; come to me, and you shall see things as I see
them, and hate the evil thing. I will make you love the thing which now
you call good and love not. I forgive all the past.'
'I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the
darkness: forgive me that too.'
'No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin
of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to
forgive that sin. It would be to take part in it. To side with wrong
against right, with murder against life, cannot be forgiven. The thing
that is past I pass, but he who goes on doing the same, annihilates
this my forgiveness, makes it of no effect. Let a man have committed
any sin whatever, I forgive him; but to choose to go on sinning--how
can I forgive that? It would be to nourish and cherish evil! It would
be to let my creation go to ruin. Shall I keep you alive to do things
hateful in the sight of all true men? If a man refuse to come out of
his sin, he must suffer the vengeance of a love that would be no love
if it left him there. Shall I allow my creature to be the thing my soul
hates?'
There is no excuse for this refusal. If we were punished for every
fault, there would be no end, no respite; we should have no quiet
wherein to repent; but God passes by all he can. He passes by and
forgets a thousand sins, yea, tens of thousands, forgiving them
all--only we must begin to be good, begin to do evil no more. He
who refuses must be punished and punished--punished through all the
ages--punished until he gives way, yields, and comes to the light, that
his deeds may be seen by himself to be what they are, and be by himself
reproved, and the Father at last have his child again. For the man who
in this world resists to the full, there may be, perhaps, a whole age
or era in the history of the universe during which his sin shall not be
forgiven; but _never_ can it be forgiven until he repents. How can they
who will not repent be forgiven, save in the sense that God does and
will do all he can to make them repent? Who knows but such sin may need
for its cure the continuous punishment of an aeon?
There are three conceivable kinds of punishment--first, that of mere
retribution, which I take to be entirely and only human--therefore,
indeed, more properly inhuman, for that which is not divine is not
essential to humanity, and is of evil, and an intrusion upon the human;
second, that which works repentance; and third, that which refines and
purifies, working for holiness. But the punishment that falls on whom
the Lord loveth because they have repented, is a very different thing
from the punishment that falls on those whom he loveth in deed but
cannot forgive because they hold fast by their sins.
There are also various ways in which the word _forgive_ can be used. A
man might say to his son--'My boy, I forgive you. You did not know what
you were doing. I will say no more about it.' Or he might say--'My boy,
I forgive you; but I must punish you, for you have done the same thing
several times, and I must make you remember.' Or, again, he might
say--'I am seriously angry with you. I cannot forgive you. I must
punish you severely. The thing was too shameful! I cannot pass it by.'
Or, once more, he might say--'Except you alter your ways entirely, I
shall have nothing more to do with you. You need not come to me. I will
not take the responsibility of anything you do. So far from answering
for you, I shall feel bound in honesty to warn my friends not to put
confidence in you. Never, never, till I see a greater difference in you
than I dare hope to see in this world, will I forgive you. I can no
more regard you as one of the family. I would die to save you, but I
cannot forgive you. There is nothing in you now on which to rest
forgiveness. To say, I forgive you, would be to say, Do anything you
like; I do not care what you do.' So God may forgive and punish; and he
may punish and not forgive, that he may rescue. To forgive the sin
against the holy spirit would be to damn the universe to the pit of
lies, to render it impossible for the man so forgiven ever to be saved.
He cannot forgive the man who will not come to the light because his
deeds are evil. Against that man his fatherly heart is _moved with
indignation_.