GREEK. LATIN.
Και αι εντολαι αυτου Et mandata eius gravia
βαρειαι ουκ εισιν· ὁτι non sunt. Quoniam
παν το γεγεννημενον εκ omne quod natum est
του Θεου νικα τον ex Deo vincit mundum:
κοσμον· και αυτη εστιν et hæc est victoria
ἡ νικη ἡ νικησασα τον quæ vincit mundum,
κοσμον, ἡ πιστις ἡμων. fides nostra. Quis est
τις εστιν ὁ νικων τον qui vincit mundum nisi
κοσμον, ει μη ὁ πιστευων qui credit quoniam
ὁτι Ιησους εστιν ὁ υιος Iesus est Filius Dei?
του Θεου; Ουτος εστιν Hic est qui venit per
ὁ ελθων δι ὑδατος και aquam et sanguinem,
αιματος, Ιησους ὁ Χριστος· Iesus Christus: non in
ουκ εν τω ὑδατι aqua solum, sed in
μονον, αλλ' εν τω ὑδατι aqua et sanguine. Et
και εν τω αιματι· και το Spiritus est qui testificatur
πνευμα εστι το μαρτυρουν, quoniam Christus
ὁτι το πνευμα est veritas. Quia
εστιν ἡ αληθεια. ὁτι tres sunt qui testimonium
τρεις εισιν οι μαρτυρουντες, dant, Spiritus
το πνευμα, και et aqua et sanguis, et
το ὑδωρ, και το αιμα· tres unum sunt. Si
και οι τρεις εις το ἑν testimonium hominum
εισιν. Ει την μαρτυριαν accipimus, testimonium
των ανθρωπων λαμβανομεν, Dei maius est: quoniam
ἡ μαρτυρια του hoc est testimonium
Θεου μειζων εστιν· ὁτι Dei quod
αυτη εστιν ἡ μαρτυρια maius est, quia testificatus
του Θεου, ὁτι μεμαρτυρηκεν est de Filio suo.
περι του υιου Qui credit in Filio Dei,
αυτου. ὁ πιστευων εις habet testimonium Dei
τον υιον του Θεου, εχει in se: qui non credit
την μαρτυριαν εν αυτω. mendacem facit eum:
ὁ μη πιστευων τω quoniam non credidit
Θεω, ψευστην πεποιηκεν in testimonio quod
αυτον, ὁτι ου πεπιστευκεν testificatus est Deus
εις την μαρτυριαν, ἡν de Filio suo. Et hoc
μεμαρτυρηκεν ὁ Θεος est testimonium, quoniam
περι του υιου αυτου. vitam eternam
Και αυτη εστιν ἡ μαρτυρια dedit nobis Deus, et
ὁτι ζωην αιωνιον hæc vita in Filio eius.
εδωκεν ἡμιν ὁ Θεος· και Qui habet Filium habet
αυτη ἡ ζωη εν τω υιω vitam: qui non habet
αυτου εστιν. ὁ εχων filium vitam non habet.
τον υιον, εχει την ζωην· Hæc scripsi vobis ut
ὁ μη εχων τον υιον του sciatis quoniam vitam
Θεου, την ζωην ουκ εχει. habetis æternam, qui
Ταυτα εγραψα ὑμιν ἱνα creditis in nomine
ειδητε ὁτι ζωην εχετε Filii Dei. Et hæc est
αιωνιον, οι πιστευοντες fiducia quam habemus
εις το ὁνομα του υιου ad eum quia quodcumque
του Θεου. Και αυτη petierimus secundum
εστιν ἡ παρρησια ἡν voluntatem
εχομεν προς αυτον, ὁτι eius audit nos. Et
εαν τι αιτωμεθα κατα scimus quoniam audit
το θελημα αυτου, ακουει nos quicquid petierimus,
ἡμων· και εαν οιδαμεν scimus quoniam
ὁτι ακουει ἡμων ὁ αν habemus petitiones
αιτωμεθα, οιδαμεν ὁτι quas postulamus ab eo.
εχομεν τα αιτηματα α Qui scit fratrem suum
ητηκαμεν παρ' αυτου. peccare peccatum non
Εαν τις ιδη τον αδελφον ad mortem, petit, et
αυτου αμαρτανοντα dabit ei vitam, peccantibus
αμαρτιαν μη προς θανατον, non ad mortem.
αιτησει, και δωσει Est peccatum ad mortem:
αυτω ζωην τοις ἁμαρτανουσι non pro illo dico
μη προς θανατον. ut roget quis. Omnis
εστιν αμαρτια προς iniquitas peccatum est:
θανατον· ου περι εκεινης et est peccatum ad
λεγω ἱνα ερωτηση· πασα mortem.
αδικια αμαρτια εστιν,
και εστιν αμαρτια ου
προς θανατον.
AUTHORISED VERSION. REVISED VERSION.
And His commandments And His commandments
are not grievous. are not grievous.
For whatsoever is born For whatsoever is begotten
of God overcometh the of God overcometh
world: and this is the the world: and
victory that overcometh this is the victory that
the world, _even_ our hath overcome the
faith. Who is he that world, _even_ our faith.
overcometh the world, And who is he that
but he that believeth overcometh the world,
that Jesus is the Son but he that believeth
of God? This is He that Jesus is the Son
that came by water of God? This is He
and blood, _even_ Jesus that came by water
Christ; not by water and blood, _even_ Jesus
only, but by water and Christ; not with the
blood. And it is the water only, but with
Spirit that beareth witness, the water and with the
because the Spirit blood. And it is the
is truth. For there Spirit that beareth
are three that bear witness, because the
record in heaven, the Spirit is the truth.
Father, the Word, and For there are three
the Holy Ghost: and who bear witness, the
these three are one. Spirit, and the water,
And there are three and the blood: and the
that bear witness in three agree in one. If
earth, the spirit, and we receive the witness
the water, and the of men, the witness of
blood: and these three God is greater: for the
agree in one. If we witness of God is this,
receive the witness of that He hath borne
men, the witness of witness concerning His
God is greater: for Son. He that believeth
this is the witness of on the Son of God hath
God which He hath the witness in him: he
testified of His Son. that believeth not God
He that believeth on hath made Him a liar:
the Son of God hath because he hath not
the witness in himself: believed in the witness
he that believeth not that God hath borne
God hath made Him a concerning His Son.
liar; because he believeth And the witness is
not the record this, that God gave
that God gave of His unto us eternal life,
Son. And this is the and this life is in His
record, that God hath Son. He that hath the
given to us eternal life, Son hath the life; he
and this life is in His that hath not the Son
Son. He that hath the of God hath not the life.
Son hath life; _and_ he These things have I
that hath not the Son written unto you, that
of God hath not life. ye may know that ye
These things have I have eternal life, _even_
written unto you that unto you that believe
believe on the name of on the name of the Son
the Son of God; that of God. And this is
ye may know that ye the boldness which we
have eternal life, and have toward Him, that,
that ye may believe on if we ask any thing
the name of the Son of according to His will,
God. And this is the He heareth us: and if
confidence that we we know that He heareth
have in Him, that, if us whatsoever we
ask any thing according ask, we know that
to His will, He we have the petitions
heareth us: and if we which we have asked
know that He hear us, of Him. If any man
whatsoever we ask, see his brother sinning
we know that we have a sin not unto death,
the petitions that we he shall ask, and _God_
desired of Him. If will give him life for
any man see his brother them that sin not unto
sin a sin _which is_ death. (There is a sin
not unto death, he shall unto death). There
ask, and He shall give is sin unto death; not
him life for them that concerning this _sin_ am
sin not unto death. I saying that he should
There is a sin unto make request. All
death: I do not say unrighteousness is sin,
that he shall pray for and there is sin not
it. All unrighteousness unto death.
is sin: and there
is a sin not unto death.
ANOTHER VERSION.
And His commandments
are not heavy,
for whatsoever is born
of God conquereth the
world: and this is the
conquest that hath conquered
the world--the
Faith of us. Who is
he that is conquering
the world, but he that
is believing that Jesus
is the Son of God?
This is He that came
by water and blood--Jesus
Christ: not with
the water only, but
with the water and
with the blood. And
the Spirit is that which
is ever witnessing that
the Spirit is the truth.
For three are they who
are ever witnessing, the
Spirit and the water
and the blood: and the
three agree in one.
If we receive the witness
of men the witness
of God is greater;
because the witness of
God is this, because (_I
say_) He hath witnessed
concerning His Son.
He that is believing on
the Son of God hath the
witness in him, he that
is not believing God
hath made Him a liar:
because he is not a
believer in the witness
that God witnessed
concerning His Son.
And this is the witness,
that God gave
unto us eternal life,
and this life is in His
Son. He that hath the
Son hath the life, he
that hath not the Son
of God hath not the
life. These things have
I written unto you that
ye may know that ye
have eternal life--ye
that are believing in
the name of the Son
of God! And this is
the boldness which we
have to Himward, that
if we ask any thing
according to His will,
He is hearing us: and
if we know that He is
hearing us, we know
that we have the desires
that we have
desired from Him. If
any man see his brother
sinning sin not unto
death, he shall ask,
and _God_ shall give him
life--(I _mean_ for those
who are not sinning
unto death). Not concerning
this _sin_ am I
saying that he should
make request. All unrighteousness
is sin,
and there is sin not
unto death.
DISCOURSE XI.
_BIRTH AND VICTORY._
"And His commandments are not grievous. For whatsoever is born of
God overcometh the world: and this is the victory that overcometh
the world, even our faith. Who is he that overcometh the world, but
he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?"--1 JOHN v. 3, 4, 5.
St. John here connects the Christian birth with victory. He tells us
that of the supernatural life the destined and (so to speak) natural
end is conquest.
Now in this there is a _contrast_ between the law of nature and the
law of grace. No doubt the first is marvellous. It may even, if we
will, in one sense be termed a victory; for it is the proof of a
successful contest with the blind fatalities of natural environment.
It is in itself the conquest of a something which has conquered a
world below it. The first faint cry of the baby is a wail no doubt;
but in its very utterance there is a half triumphant undertone.
Boyhood, youth, opening manhood--at least in those who are physically
and intellectually gifted--generally possess some share of "the
rapture of the strife" with nature and with their contemporaries.
"Youth hath triumphal mornings; its days bound
From night as from a victory."
But sooner or later that which pessimists style "the martyrdom of
life" sets in. However brightly the drama opens, the last scene is
always tragic. Our natural birth inevitably ends in defeat.
A birth and a defeat is thus the epitome of each life which is
naturally brought into the field of our present human existence. The
defeat is sighed over, sometimes consummated, in every cradle; it is
attested by every grave.
But if birth and defeat is the motto of the natural life, birth and
victory is the motto of every one born into the city of God.
This victory is spoken of in our verses as a victory along the whole
line. It is the conquest of the collective Church, of the whole mass of
regenerate humanity, so far as it has been true to the principle of its
birth[276]--the conquest of the Faith which is "The Faith of _us_,"[277]
who are knit together in one communion and fellowship in the mystical
body of the Son of God, Christ our Lord. But it is something more than
that. The general victory is also a victory in detail. Every true
individual believer shares in it.[278] The battle is a battle of
soldiers. The abstract ideal victory is realised and made concrete in
each life of struggle which is a life of enduring faith. The triumph is
not merely one of a school, or of a party. The question rings with a
triumphant challenge down the ranks--"who is the ever-conqueror of the
world, but the ever-believer that Jesus is the Son of God?"
We are thus brought to two of St. John's great master-conceptions,
both of which came to him from _hearing_ the Lord who is the
Life--both of which are to be read in connection with the fourth
Gospel--the Christian's _Birth_ and his _victory_.
I.
The Apostle introduces the idea of the birth which has its origin from
God precisely by the same process to which attention has already been
more than once directed.
St. John frequently mentions some great subject; at first like a
musician who with perfect command of his instrument, touches what
seems to be an almost random key, faintly, as if incidentally and half
wandering from his theme. But just as the sound appears to be absorbed
by the purpose of the composition, or all but lost in the distance,
the same chord is struck again more decidedly; and then, after more or
less interval, is brought out with a music so full and sonorous, that
we perceive that it has been one of the master's leading ideas from
the very first. So, when the subject is first spoken of, we
hear--"every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him."[279] The
subject is suspended for a while; then comes a somewhat more marked
reference. "Whosoever is born of God is not a doer of sin; and he
cannot continue sinning, because of God he is born." There is yet one
more tender recurrence to the favourite theme--"every one that loveth
is born of God."[280] Then, finally here at last the chord, so often
struck, grown bolder since the prelude, gathers all the music round
it. It interweaves with itself another strain which has similarly been
gaining amplitude of volume in its course, until we have a great _Te
Deum_, dominated by two chords of Birth and Victory. "This _is_ the
conquest that has _conquered_ the world--the Faith which is of us."
We shall never come to any adequate notion of St. John's conception of
the Birth of God, without tracing the place in his Gospel to which his
asterisk in this place refers. To one passage only can we turn--our
Lord's conversation with Nicodemus. "Except a man be born again, he
cannot see the kingdom of God--except a man be born of water and of
the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God."[281] The germ of
the idea of entrance into the city, the kingdom of God, by means of a
new birth, is in that storehouse of theological conceptions, the
psalter. There is one psalm of a Korahite seer, enigmatical it may be,
shadowed with the darkness of a divine compression,[282] obscure from
the glory that rings it round, and from the gush of joy in its few and
broken words. The 87th Psalm is the psalm of the font, the hymn of
regeneration. The nations once of the world are mentioned among them
that know the Lord. They are counted when He writeth up the peoples.
Glorious things are spoken of the City of God. Three times over the
burden of the song is the new birth by which the aliens were made free
of Sion.
This one was born there,
This one and that one was born in her,
This one was born there.[283]
All joyous life is thus brought into the city of the new-born. "The
singers, the solemn dances, the fresh and glancing springs, are in
thee."[284] Hence, from the notification of men being born again in
order to see and enter into the kingdom, our Lord, as if in surprise,
meets the Pharisee's question--"how can these things be?"--with
another--"art thou that teacher in Israel,[285] and understandest not
these things?" Jesus tells His Church for ever that every one of His
disciples must be brought into contact with two worlds, with two
influences--one outward, the other inward; one material, the other
spiritual; one earthly, the other heavenly; one visible and
sacramental, the other invisible and divine. Out of these he must come
forth new-born.
Of course it may be said that "the water" here coupled with the Spirit
is _figurative_. But let it be observed first, that from the very
constitution of St. John's intellectual and moral being things outward
and visible were not annihilated by the spiritual transparency which he
imparted to them. Water, literal water, is everywhere in his writings.
In his Gospel more especially he seems to be ever seeing, ever hearing
it. He loved it from the associations of his own early life, and from
the mention made of it by his Master. And as in the Gospel water is, so
to speak, one of the three great factors and centres of the book;[286]
so now in the Epistle, it still seems to glance and murmur before him.
"The water" is one of the three abiding witnesses in the Epistle also.
Surely, then, our Apostle would be eminently unlikely to express "the
Spirit of God" _without_ the outward water by "water _and_ the Spirit."
But above all, Christians should beware of a "licentious and deluding
alchemy of interpretation which maketh of anything whatsoever it
listeth." In immortal words--"when the letter of the law hath two things
plainly and expressly specified, water and the Spirit; water, as a duty
required on our part, the Spirit, as a gift which God bestoweth; there
is danger in so presuming to interpret it, as if the clause which
concerneth ourselves were more than needed. We may by such rare
expositions attain perhaps in the end to be thought witty, but with ill
advice."[287]
But, it will further be asked, whether we bring the Saviour's
saying--"except any one be born again of water and the Spirit"--into
direct connection with the baptism of infants? Above all, whether we
are not encouraging every baptised person to hold that somehow or
other he will have a part in the victory of the regenerate?
We need no other answer than that which is implied in the very force
of the word here used by St. John--"all that is born of God conquereth
the world." "That is born" is the participle perfect.[288] The force
of the perfect is not simply past action, but such action lasting on
in its effects. Our text, then, speaks only of those who having been
born again into the kingdom continue in a corresponding condition, and
unfold the life which they have received. The Saviour spoke first and
chiefly of the initial act. The Apostle's circumstances, now in his
old age, naturally led him to look on from that. St. John is no
"idolater of the immediate." Has the gift received by his spiritual
children worn long and lasted well? What of the new life which should
have issued from the New Birth? Regenerate in the past, are they
renewed in the present?
This simple piece of exegesis lets us at once perceive that another
verse in this Epistle, often considered of almost hopeless perplexity,
is in truth only the perfection of sanctified (nay, it may be said, of
moral) common-sense; an intuition of moral and spiritual instinct.
"Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin: for his seed remaineth in
him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God." We have just seen
the real significance of the words "he that is born of God"--he for whom
his past birth lasts on in its effects. "He _doeth_ not sin," is not a
sin-doer, makes it not his "trade," as an old commentator says. Nay, "he
is not able to be" (to keep on) "sinning." "He cannot sin." He cannot!
There is no physical impossibility. Angels will not sweep him away upon
their resistless pinions. The Spirit will not hold him by the hand as if
with a mailed grasp, until the blood spirts from his finger-tips, that
he may not take the wine-cup, or walk out to the guilty assignation. The
compulsion of God is like that which is exercised upon us by some
pathetic wounded-looking face that gazes after us with a sweet reproach.
Tell the honest poor man with a large family of some safe and
expeditious way of transferring his neighbour's money to his own pocket.
He will answer, "I cannot steal:" that is, "I cannot steal, however
much it may physically be within my capacity, without a burning shame,
an agony to my nature worse than death." On some day of fierce heat,
hold a draught of iced wine to a total abstainer, and invite him to
drink. "I cannot," will be his reply. Cannot! He can, so far as his hand
goes; he cannot, without doing violence to a conviction, to a promise,
to his own sense of truth. And he who continues in the fulness of his
God-given Birth "does not _do_ sin," "cannot be sinning." Not that he is
sinless, not that he never fails, or does not sometimes fall; not that
sin ceases to be sin to him, because he thinks that he has a standing in
Christ. But he cannot go on in sin without being untrue to his birth;
without a stain upon that finer, whiter, more sensitive conscience,
which is called "spirit" in a son of God; without a convulsion in his
whole being which is the precursor of death, or an insensibility which
is death actually begun.
How many such texts as these are practically useless to most of us! The
armoury of God is full of keen swords which we refrain from handling,
because they have been misused by others. None is more neglected than
this. The fanatic has shrieked out--"sin in my case! I _cannot_ sin. _I_
may hold a sin in my bosom; and God may hold me in His arms for all
that. At least, I may hold that which would be a sin in you and most
others; but to _me_ it is _not_ sin." On the other hand, stupid goodness
maunders out some unintelligible paraphrase, until pew and reader yawn
from very weariness. Divine truth in its purity and plainness is thus
discredited by the exaggeration of the one, or buried in the leaden
winding-sheet of the stupidity of the other.
In leaving this portion of our subject we may compare the view latent
in the very idea of infant baptism with that of the leader of a
well-known sect upon the beginnings of the spiritual life in children.
"May not children grow up into salvation, without knowing the exact
moment of their conversion?" asks "General" Booth. His answer is--"yes,
it may be so; and we trust that in the future this will be the usual way
in which children may be brought to Christ." The writer goes on to tell
us how the New Birth will take place in future. "When the conditions
named in the first pages of this volume are complied with--when the
parents are godly, and the children are surrounded by holy influences
and examples from their birth, and trained up in the spirit of their
early dedication--they will _doubtless come to know and love and trust
their Saviour in the ordinary course of things_. The Holy Ghost will
take possession of them from the first. Mothers and fathers will, as it
were, put them into the Saviour's arms in their swaddling clothes, and
He will take them, and bless them, and sanctify them from the very womb,
and make them His own, without their knowing the hour or the place when
they pass from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. In
fact, with such little ones it shall never be very dark, for their
natural birth shall be, as it were, in the spiritual twilight, which
begins with the dim dawn, and increases gradually until the noonday
brightness is reached; so answering to the prophetic description, 'The
path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more
unto the perfect day.'"[289]
No one will deny that this is tenderly and beautifully written. But
objections to its teaching will crowd upon the mind of thoughtful
Christians. It seems to defer to a period in the future, to a new era
incalculably distant, when Christendom shall be absorbed in
Salvationism, that which St. John in his day contemplated as the normal
condition of believers, which the Church has always held to be capable
of realization, which has been actually realized in no few whom most of
us must have known. Further; the fountain-heads of thought, like those
of the Nile, are wrapped in obscurity. By what process grace may work
with the very young is an insoluble problem in psychology, which
Christianity has not revealed. We know nothing further than that Christ
blessed little children. That blessing was _impartial_, for it was
communicated to all who were brought to Him; it was _real_, otherwise He
would not have blessed them at all. That He conveys to them such grace
as they are capable of receiving is all that we can know. And yet again;
the Salvationist theory exalts parents and surroundings into the place
of Christ. It deposes His sacrament, which lies at the root of St.
John's language, and boasts that it will secure Christ's end, apparently
without any recognition of Christ's _means_.
II.
The second great idea in the verses at the head of this discourse is
_Victory_. The intended issue of the new birth is conquest--"all that
is born of God conquers the world."
The idea of victory is almost[290] exclusively confined to St. John's
writings. The idea is first expressed by Jesus--"be of good cheer: I
have conquered the world."[291] The first prelusive touch in the
Epistle, hints at the fulfilment of the Saviour's comfortable word in
one class of the Apostle's spiritual children. "I write unto you,
young men, because ye have conquered the wicked one. I have written
unto you, young men, because ye have conquered the wicked one."[292]
Next, a bolder and ampler strain--"ye are of God, little children, and
have conquered them: because greater is He that is in you, than he
that is in the world."[293] Then with a magnificent persistence, the
trumpet of Christ wakens echoes to its music all down and round the
defile through which the host is passing--"all that is born of God
conquereth the world: and this is the conquest that has conquered the
world--the Faith which is ours."[294] When, in St. John's other great
book, we pass with the seer into Patmos, the air is, indeed, "full of
noises and sweet sounds." But dominant over all is a storm of triumph,
a passionate exultation of victory. Thus each epistle to each of the
seven Churches closes with a promise "to him that _conquereth_."
The text promises _two_ forms of victory.
1. A victory is promised to the Church universal. "_All that_ is born
of God conquereth the world." This conquest is concentrated in, almost
identified with "the Faith." Primarily, in this place, the term (here
alone found in our Epistle) is not the faith by _which we believe_,
but the Faith _which is_ believed--as in some other places;[295] not
faith subjective, but The Faith objectively.[296] Here is the dogmatic
principle. The Faith involves definite knowledge of definite
principles. The religious knowledge, which is not capable of being put
into definite propositions, we need not trouble ourselves greatly
about. But we are guarded from over-dogmatism. The word "of us" which
follows "the Faith" is a mediating link between the objective and the
subjective. First, we possess this Faith as a common heritage. Then,
as in the Apostle's creed we begin to individualise this common
possession by prefixing "I believe" to every article of it. Then the
victory contained in the creed, the victory which the creed _is_ (for
more truly again than of Duty may it be said of Faith, "thou who _art
victory_"[297]), is made over to each who believes. Each, and each
alone, who in soul is ever believing, in practice is ever victorious.
This declaration is full of promise for missionary work. There is no
system of error, however ancient, subtle, or highly organised, which
must not go down before the strong collective life of the regenerate.
No less encouraging is it at home. No form of sin is incapable of
being overthrown. No school of anti-Christian thought is invulnerable
or invincible. There are other apostates besides Julian who will
cry--"Galilæe, vicisti!"
2. The second victory promised is individual, for each of us. Not only
where cathedral-spires lift high the triumphant cross; on
battle-fields which have added kingdoms to Christendom; by the
martyr's stake, or in the arena of the Coliseum, have these words
proved true. The victory comes down to us. In hospitals, in shops, in
courts, in ships, in sick-rooms, they are fulfilled for us. We see
their truth in the patience, sweetness, resignation, of little
children, of old men, of weak women. They give a high consecration and
a glorious meaning to much of the suffering that we see. What, we are
sometimes tempted to cry--is _this_ Christ's Army? are these His
soldiers, who can go anywhere and do anything? Poor weary ones! with
white lips, and the beads of death-sweat on their faces, and the
thorns of pain ringed like a crown round their foreheads; so wan, so
worn, so tired, so suffering, that even our love dares not pray for
them to live a little longer yet. Are these the elect of the elect,
the vanguard of the regenerate, who carry the flag of the cross where
its folds are waved by the storm of battle; whom St. John sees
advancing up the slope with such a burst of cheers and such a swell of
music that the words--"this is the conquest"--spring spontaneously
from his lips? Perhaps the angels answer with a voice which we cannot
hear--"whatsoever is born of God conquereth the world." May we fight
so manfully that each may render if not his "pure" yet his purified
"soul unto his captain Christ,
Under whose colours he hath fought so long:"
--that we may know something of the great text in the Epistle to the
Romans, with its matchless translation--"we are more than conquerors
through Him who loved us"[298]--that arrogance of victory which is at
once so splendid and so saintly.
FOOTNOTES:
[276] This is expressed, after St. John's fashion, by the neuter, παν
το γεγεννημενον εκ του Θεου. ver. 4.
[277] ἡ πιστις ἡμων, ver. 4.
[278] ὁ νικων τον κοσμον, ὁ πιστευων, ver. 5.
[279] 1 John ii. 29.
[280] 1 John iv. 7.
[281] John iii. 5.
[282] σφοδρα αινιγματωδης και σκοτεινως ειρημενος. Euseb.
[283]
יֻלָּר־שָׁמ וֶה. Ver. 4.
יֻלַּר־בָּהּ וְאִישׁ אִישׁ. Ver. 5.
יֻלָּר־שָׁמ וֶה. Ver. 6. Psalm lxxxvii.
[284]
"Both they who sing and they who dance,
With sacred song are there;
In thee fresh brooks and soft streams glance,
And all my fountains clear."
MILTON, Paraphrase Ps. lxxxvii. 7.
This, on the whole, seems to be considered the most tenable
interpretation.
[285] Συ ει ὁ διδασκαλος του Ισραηλ; John iii. 10.
[286] John i. 26, ii. 6, 9, iii. 5-22, iv. 6-16, v. 3, vii. 37, 39,
ix. 7, xiii. 1-5, xix. 34.
[287] Hooker, _E. P._, V. lix. (4).
[288] So the perfect is used throughout. γεγεννηται. ii. 29, iii. 9,
iv. 7. παν το γεγεννημενον. v. 4. Very remarkably below, πας ὁ
γεγεννημενος--αλλα ὁ γεννηθεις εκ του Θεου; the first of the
regenerate man who continues in that condition of grace, the second of
the Begotten Son of God who keeps His servant. 1 John v. 18.
[289] _Training of children; or How to Make the Children into Saints
and Soldiers of Jesus Christ._ By the General of the Salvation Army.
London: Salvation Army Book Stores, pp. 162, 163.
[290] Not quite, cf. Rom. viii. 37, xii, 21; 1 Cor. xv. 55, 57. The
substantive νικη occurs only 1 John v. 4. A slightly different form
(νικος) is in Matt. xii. 20; 1 Cor. xv. 54, 55, 57.
[291] John xvi. 33.
[292] John ii. 13, 14.
[293] 1 John iv. 4.
[294] It does not seem possible to convey to the English reader the
fourfold harping upon the word (1 John v. 4, 5) by any other rendering.
"The _victory_ that hath _overcome_ the world" (R.V.) fails in this. The
noble translation of ὑπερνικωμεν (Rom. viii. 37), happily retained by
the Revisers, is rendered consistent by the translation here proposed.
[295] Apoc. ii. 13, xiv. 12.
[296] Fides _quæ creditur_, not _quâ creditur_.
[297]
"Thou who art victory!" WORDSWORTH, _Ode to Duty_.
[298] ὑπερνικωμεν. Rom. viii. 37.
DISCOURSE XII.
_THE GOSPEL AS A GOSPEL OF WITNESS; THE THREE WITNESSES._
"It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is
truth. For there are three that bear witness, the Spirit, and the
water, and the blood; and these three agree in one. If we receive
the witness of men, the witness of God is greater, for this is the
witness of God which He hath testified of His Son. He that
believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself."--1 JOHN
v. 6-10.
It has been said that Apostles and apostolic men were as far as
possible removed from common-sense, and have no conception of evidence
in our acceptation of the word. About this statement there is scarcely
even superficial plausibility. Common-sense is the measure of ordinary
human tact among palpable realities. In relation to human existence it
is the balance of the estimative faculties; the instinctive summary of
inductions which makes us rightly credulous and rightly incredulous,
which teaches us the supreme lesson of life, when to say "yes," and
when to say "no." Uncommon sense is superhuman tact among no less real
but at present impalpable realities; the spiritual faculty of forming
spiritual inductions aright. So St. John among the three great canons
of primary truth with which he closes his Epistle writes--"we know
that the Son of God hath come and is present, and hath given us
understanding, that we know Him who is true."[299] So with
_evidences_. Apostles did not draw them out with the same logical
precision, or rather not in the same logical form, which the modern
spirit demands. Yet they rested their conclusions upon the same
abiding principle of evidence, the primary axiom of our entire social
life--that there is a degree of human evidence which practically
cannot deceive. "If we receive the witness of men." The form of
expression implies that we certainly do.[300]
Peculiar difficulty has been felt in understanding the paragraph. And
one portion of it remains difficult after any explanation. But we
shall succeed in apprehending it as a whole only upon condition of
taking one guiding principle of interpretation with us.
The word _witness_ is St. John's central thought here. He is
determined to beat it into the minds of his readers by the most
unsparing iteration. He repeats it ten times over, as substantive or
verb, in six verses.[301] His object is to turn our attention to his
Gospel, and to this distinguishing feature of it--its being from
beginning to end a Gospel of _witness_. This witness he declares to be
fivefold. (1) The witness of the Spirit, of which the fourth Gospel is
pre-eminently full. (2) The witness of the Divine Humanity, of the
God-Man who is not man deified, but God humanified. This verse is no
doubt partly polemical, against heretics of the day, who would clip
the great picture of the Gospel, and force it into the petty frame of
their theory. This is He (the Apostle urges) who came on the stage of
the world's and the Church's history[302] as the Messiah, under the
condition, so to speak, of water and blood;[303] bringing with Him,
accompanied by, not the water only, but the water and the blood.[304]
Cerinthus separated the Christ, the divine Æon, from Jesus the holy
but mortal man. The two, the divine potency and the human existence,
met at the waters of Jordan, on the day of the Baptism, when the
Christ united Himself to Jesus. But the union was brief and
unessential. Before the crucifixion, the divine ideal Christ withdrew.
The man suffered. The impassible immortal potency was far away in
heaven. St. John denies the fortuitous juxta-position of two
accidentally-united existences. We worship one Lord Jesus Christ,
attested not only by Baptism in Jordan, the witness of water, but by
the death on Calvary, the witness of blood. He came by water and
blood, as the means by which His office was manifested; but with the
water and with the blood, as the sphere in which He exercises that
office. When we turn to the Gospel, and look at the pierced side, we
read of blood and water, the order of actual history and physiological
fact. But here St. John takes the ideal, mystical, sacramental order,
water and blood--cleansing and redemption--and the sacraments which
perpetually symbolise and convey them. Thus we have Spirit, water,
blood. Three are they who are ever witnessing.[305] These are three
great centres round which St. John's Gospel turns.[306] These are the
three genuine witnesses, the trinity of witness, the shadow of the
Trinity in heaven. (3) Again the fourth Gospel is a Gospel of human
witness, a tissue woven out of many lines of human attestation. It
records the cries of human souls overheard and noted down at the
supreme crisis-moment of life, from the Baptist, Philip, and
Nathanael, to the everlasting spontaneous creed of Christendom on its
knees before Jesus, the cry of Thomas ever rushing molten from a heart
of fire--"my Lord and my God." (4) But if we receive, as we assuredly
must and do receive, the overpowering and soul-subduing mass of
attesting human evidence, how much more must we receive the Divine
witness, the witness of God so conspicuously exhibited in the Gospel
of St. John! "The witness of God is greater, because _this_" (even the
history in the pages to which he adverts) "is the witness; because" (I
say with triumphant reiteration) "He hath witnessed concerning His
Son."[307] This witness of God in the last Gospel is given in four
forms--by Scripture,[308] by the Father,[309] by the Son Himself,[310]
by His works.[311] (5) This great volume of witness is consummated and
brought home by another. He who not merely coldly assents to the word
of Christ, but lifts the whole burden of his belief on to the Son of
God,[312] hath the witness in him. That which was logical and external
becomes internal and experimental.
In this ever-memorable passage, all scholars know that an
interpolation has taken place. The words--"in heaven the Father, the
Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one. And there are three
that bear witness in earth"--are a gloss. A great sentence of one of
the first of critics may well reassure any weak believers who dread
the candour of Christian criticism, or suppose that it has impaired
the evidence for the great dogma of the Trinity. "If the fourth
century knew that text, let it come in, in God's name; but if that age
did not know it, then Arianism in its height was beaten down without
the help of that verse; and, let the _fact_ prove as it will, the
_doctrine_ is unshaken."[313] The human material with which they have
been clamped should not blind us to the value of the heavenly jewels
which seemed to be marred by their earthly setting.
* * * * *
It is constantly said--as we think with considerable
misapprehension--that in his Epistle St. John may imply, but does not
refer directly to any particular incident in, his Gospel. It is our
conviction that St. John very specially includes the Resurrection--the
central point of the evidences of Christianity--among the things
attested by the witness of men. We propose in another discourse to
examine the Resurrection from St. John's point of view.
FOOTNOTES:
[299] δεδωκεν ἡμιν διανοιαν ἱνα γινωσκομεν κ.τ.λ. 1 John v. 20. N. T.
lexicographers give as its meaning _intelligentia_ (_einsicht_). See
Grimm. _Bretschn._, s.v. Prof. Westcott remarks that "generally nouns
which express intellectual powers are rare in St. John's writings."
But διανοια is the word by which the LXX. translate the Hebrew לֵב,
and has thus a moral and emotional tinge imparted to it. We may
compare the sense in which Aristotle uses it in his Poetics for the
cast of thought, or general sentiment. (_Poet._, vi.)
[300] ει την μαρτυριαν των ανθρωπων λαμβανομεν. 1 John v. 9.
[301] The A. V. (very unhappily) tried to minimise this reiteration by
the introduction of synonyms in four places--"bear record," "record"
(vv. 7, 10, 11), "hath testified" (ver. 9).
[302] ὁ ελθων.
[303] δι ὑδατος και αιματος.
[304] ουκ εν τω ὑδατι μονον, αλλ' εν τω ὑδατι και εν τω αιματι.
[305] τρεις εισιν οι μαρτυρουντες, ver. 7.
[306] The _Water_, John iii. 5, cf. i. 26-33, ii. 9, iii. 23, iv. 13,
v. 4, ix. 7. The _Blood_, vi. 53, 54, 56, xix. 34. The _Spirit_, vii.
39, xiv., xv., xvi., xx. 22. The water centres in _Baptism_ (iii. 5);
the blood is symbolised, exhibited, in Holy _Communion_ (vi.); the
Spirit is perpetually making them effective, and especially by the
appointed ministry (xx. 22).
[307] ὁτι αυτη εστιν ἡ μαρτυρια του Θεου, ὁτι μεμαρτυρηκεν περι του
υιου αυτου, ver. 9.
[308] v. 39, 46, etc.
[309] viii. 18.
[310] viii. 17, 18.
[311] ver. 36, x. 25.
[312] ὁ πιστευων εις τον υιον του Θεου, ver. 10. (See Bihs Ellicott on
the force of various prepositions with πιστευω. _Comment, on Pastoral
Epistles_.)
[313] Bentley. Letter of January 1st, 1717.
DISCOURSE XIII.
_THE WITNESS OF MEN_ (_APPLIED TO THE RESURRECTION_).
"If we receive the witness of men."--1 JOHN v. 9.
At an early period in the Christian Church the passage in which these
words occur, was selected as a fitting Epistle for the First Sunday
after Easter, when believers may be supposed to review the whole body
of witness to the risen Lord and to triumph in the victory of faith. A
consideration of the unity of essential principles in the narratives
of the Resurrection will afford the best illustration of the
comprehensive canon--"if we receive the witness of men."--if we
consider the unity of essential principles in the narratives of the
Resurrection, and draw the natural conclusions from them.
I.
Let us note the unity of essential principles in the narratives of the
Resurrection.
St. Matthew hastens on from Jerusalem to the appearance in Galilee.
"Behold! He goeth before you _into Galilee_," is, in some sense, the
key of the 28th chapter. St. Luke, on the other hand, speaks only of
manifestations in Jerusalem or its neighbourhood.
Now St. John's Resurrection history falls in the 20th chapter into
four pieces, with three manifestations in Jerusalem. The 21st chapter
(the appendix-chapter) also falls into four pieces, with one
manifestation to the seven disciples in Galilee.
St. John makes no profession of telling us all the appearances which
were known to the Church, or even all of which he was personally
cognisant. In the treasures of the old man's memory there were many
more which, for whatever reason, he did not write. But these distinct
continuous specimens of a permitted communing with the eternal
glorified life (supplemented on subsequent thought by another in the
last chapter) are as good as three or four hundred for the great
purpose of the Apostle. "These are written that ye might believe that
Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God."[314]
Throughout St. John's narrative every impartial reader will find
delicacy of thought, abundance of matter, minuteness of detail. He
will find something more. While he feels that he is not in cloudland
or dreamland, he will yet recognise that he walks in a land which is
wonderful, because the central figure in it is One whose name is
Wonderful. The fact is fact, and yet it is something more. For a short
time poetry and history are absolutely coincident. Here, if anywhere,
is Herder's saying true, that the fourth Gospel seems to be written
with a feather which has dropped from an angel's wing.
The unity in essential principles which has been claimed for these
narratives taken together is not a lifeless identity in details. It is
scarcely to be worked out by the dissecting-maps of elaborate harmonies.
It is not the imaginative unity which is poetry; nor the mechanical
unity, which is fabrication; nor the passionless unity, which is
commended in a police-report. It is not the thin unity of plain-song; it
is the rich, unity of dissimilar tones blended into a fugue.
This unity may be considered in two essential agreements of the four
Resurrection histories.
1. All the Evangelists agree in reticence on one point--in abstinence
from one claim.
If any of us were framing for himself a body of such evidence for the
Resurrection as should almost extort acquiescence, he would assuredly
insist that the Lord should have been seen and recognised after the
Resurrection by miscellaneous crowds--or, at the very least, by hostile
individuals. Not only by a tender Mary Magdalene, an impulsive Peter, a
rapt John, a Thomas through all his unbelief nervously anxious to be
convinced. Let Him be seen by Pilate, by Caiaphas, by some of the Roman
soldiers, of the priests, of the Jewish populace. Certainly, if the
Evangelists had simply aimed at effective presentation of evidence, they
would have put forward statements of this kind.
But the apostolic principle--the apostolic canon of Resurrection
evidence--was very different. St. Luke has preserved it for us, as it
is given by St. Peter. "Him God raised up the third day, and gave Him
to be made manifest after He rose again from the dead, not to all the
people, but unto witnesses chosen before of God, even to us."[315] He
shall, indeed, appear again to all the people, to every eye; but that
shall be at the great Advent. St. John, with his ideal tenderness, has
preserved a word of Jesus, which gives us St. Peter's canon of
Resurrection evidence, in a lovelier and more spiritual form. Christ
as He rose at Easter should be visible, but only to the eye of love,
only to the eye which life fills with tears and heaven with
light--"yet a little while, and the world seeth Me no more; but ye see
Me ... He that loveth Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will
manifest Myself to Him."[316] Round that ideal canon St. John's
Resurrection-history is twined with undying tendrils. Those words may
be written by us with our softest pencils over the 20th and 21st
chapters of the fourth Gospel. There is--very possibly there can
be--under our present human conditions, no manifestation of Him who
was dead and now liveth, except to belief, or to that kind of doubt
which springs from love.
That which is true of St. John is true of all the Evangelists.
They take that Gospel, which is the life of their life. They bare its
bosom to the stab of Celsus,[317] to the bitter sneer plagiarised by
Renan--"why did He not appear to all, to His judges and enemies? Why
only to one excitable woman, and a circle of His initiated?" "The
hallucination of a hysterical woman endowed Christendom with a risen
God."[318] An apocryphal Gospel unconsciously violates this apostolic,
or rather divine canon, by stating that Jesus gave His grave-clothes
to one of the High Priest's servants.[319] There was every reason but
one why St. John and the other Evangelists _should have_ narrated such
stories. There was only one reason why they _should not_, but that was
all-sufficient. Their Master was the Truth as well as the Life. They
dared not lie.
Here, then, is one essential accordance in the narratives of the
Resurrection. They record no appearances of Jesus to enemies or to
unbelievers.
2. A second unity of essential principle will be found in the
impression produced upon the witnesses.
There was, indeed, a moment of terror at the sepulchre, when they had
seen the angel clothed in the long white garment. "They trembled, and
were amazed; neither said they anything to any man; for they were
afraid." So writes St. Mark.[320] And no such word ever formed the
close of a Gospel! On the Easter Sunday evening there was another
moment when they were "terrified and affrighted, and supposed that
they had seen a spirit."[321] But this passes away like a shadow. For
man, the Risen Jesus turns doubt into faith, faith into joy. For
woman, He turns sorrow into joy. From the sacred wounds joy rains over
into their souls. "He showed them His hands and His feet ... while
they yet believed not for joy and wondered." "He showed unto them His
hands and His side. Then were the disciples glad when they saw the
Lord."[322] Each face of those who beheld Him wore after that a smile
through all tears and forms of death. "Come," cried the great Swedish
singer, gazing upon the dead face of a holy friend, "come and see this
great sight. Here is a woman who has seen Christ." Many of us know
what she meant, for we too have looked upon those dear to us who have
seen Christ. Over all the awful stillness--under all the cold
whiteness as of snow or marble--that strange soft light, that subdued
radiance, what shall we call it? wonder, love, sweetness, pardon,
purity, rest, worship, discovery. The poor face often dimmed with
tears, tears of penitence, of pain, of sorrow, some perhaps which we
caused to flow, is looking upon a great sight. Of such the beautiful
text is true, written by a sacred poet in a language of which so many
verbs are pictures. "They looked unto Him, and _were lightened_."[323]
That meeting of lights without a name it is which makes up what angels
call joy. There remained some of that light on all who had seen the
Risen Lord. Each might say--"have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord?"
This effect, like every effect, had a cause.
Scripture implies in the Risen Jesus a form with all heaviness and
suffering lifted off it--with the glory, freshness, elasticity, of the
new life, overflowing with beauty and power. He had a voice with some of
the pathos of affection, making its sweet concession to human
sensibility: saying, "Mary," "Thomas," "Simon, son of Jonas." He had a
presence at once so majestic that they durst not question Him, yet so
full of magnetic attraction that Magdalene clings to His feet, and Peter
flings himself into the waters when he is sure that it is the Lord.[324]
Now let it be remarked that this consideration entirely disposes of
that afterthought of critical ingenuity which has taken the place of
the base old Jewish theory--"His disciples came by night, and stole
Him away."[325] That theory, indeed, has been blown into space by
Christian apologetics. And now not a few are turning to the solution
that He did not really die upon the cross, but was taken down alive.
There are other, and more than sufficient refutations. One from the
character of the august Sufferer, who would not have deigned to
receive adoration upon false pretences. One from the minute
observation by St. John of the physiological effect of the thrust of
the soldier's lance, to which he also reverts in the context.
But here, we only ask what effect the appearance of the Saviour among
His disciples, supposing that He had not died, must unquestionably
have had.
He would only have been taken down from the cross something more than
thirty hours. His brow punctured with the crown of thorns; the wounds in
hands, feet, and side, yet unhealed; the back raw and torn with
scourges; the frame cramped by the frightful tension of six long
hours--a lacerated and shattered man, awakened to agony by the coolness
of the sepulchre and by the pungency of the spices; a spectral,
trembling, fevered, lamed, skulking thing--could that have seemed the
Prince of Life, the Lord of Glory, the Bright and Morning Star? Those
who had seen Him in Gethsemane and on the cross, and then on Easter, and
during the forty days, can scarcely speak of His Resurrection without
using language which attains to more than lyrical elevation. Think of
St. Peter's anthemlike burst. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ, who hath begotten us again to a lively hope, by the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Think of the words which
St. John heard Him utter. "I am the First and the Living, and behold! I
became dead, and I am, living unto the ages of ages."[326]
Let us, then, fix our attention upon the unity of all the Resurrection
narratives in these two essential principles. (1) The appearances of
the Risen Lord to belief and love only. (2) The impression common to
all the narrators of glory on His part, of joy on theirs.
We shall be ready to believe that this was part of the great body of
proof which was in the Apostle's mind, when pointing to the Gospel
with which this Epistle was associated, he wrote of this human but
most convincing testimony--"if we receive," as assuredly we do, "the
witness of men"--of evangelists among the number.
II.
Too often such discussions as these end unpractically enough. Too often
"When the critic has done his best,
The pearl of price at reason's test
On the Professor's lecture table
Lies, dust and ashes levigable."
But, after all, we may well ask: can we afford to dispense with this
well-balanced probability? Is it well for us to face life and death
without taking it, in some form, into the account?
Now at the present moment, it may safely be said that, for the best
and noblest intellects imbued with the modern philosophy, as for the
best and noblest of old who were imbued with the ancient philosophy,
external to Christian revelation, immortality is still, as before, a
fair chance, a beautiful "perhaps," a splendid possibility.
Evolutionism is growing and maturing somewhere another Butler, who
will write in another, and possibly more satisfying chapter, than that
least convincing of any in the _Analogy_--"of a Future State."
What has Darwinism to say on the matter?
Much. Natural selection seems to be a pitiless worker; its instrument
is _death_. But, when we broaden our survey, the sum-total of the
result is everywhere advance--what is mainly worthy of notice, in man
the advance of goodness and virtue. For of goodness, as of freedom,
"The battle once begun
Though baffled oft, is always won."
Humanity has had to travel thousands of miles, inch by inch, towards
the light. We have made such progress that we can see that in time,
relatively short, we shall be in noonday. After long ages of strife,
of victory for hard hearts and strong sinews, goodness begins to wipe
away the sweat of agony from her brow; and will stand, sweet, smiling,
triumphant in the world. A gracious life is free for man; generation
after generation a softer ideal stands before us, and we can conceive
a day when "the meek shall inherit the earth." Do not say that
evolution, if proved _à outrance_, brutalises man. Far from it. It
lifts him from below out of the brute creation. What theology calls
original sin, modern philosophy the brute inheritance--the ape, and
the goat, and the tiger--is dying out of man. The perfecting of human
nature and of human society stands out as the goal of creation. In a
sense, all creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God.
Nor need the true Darwinian necessarily fear materialism. "Livers
secrete bile--brains secrete thought," is smart and plausible, but it
is shallow. Brain and thought are, no doubt, connected--but the
connection is of simultaneousness, of two things in concordance
indeed, but not related as cause and effect. If cerebral physiology
speaks of annihilation when the brain is destroyed, she speaks
ignorantly and without a brief.
The greatest thinkers in the Natural Religion department of the new
philosophy seem then to be very much in the same position as those in
the same department of the old. For immortality there is a sublime
probability. With man, and man's advance in goodness and virtue as the
goal of creation, who shall say that the thing so long provided for,
the goal of creation, is likely to perish? Annihilation is a
hypothesis; immortality is a hypothesis. But immortality is the more
likely as well as the more beautiful of the two. We may believe in it,
not as a thing demonstrated, but as an act of faith that "God will not
put us to permanent intellectual confusion."[327]
But we may well ask whether it is wise and well to refuse to intrench
this probability behind another. Is it likely that He who has so much
care for us as to make us the goal of a drama a million times more
complex than our fathers dreamed of; who lets us see that He has not
removed us out of his sight; will leave Himself, and with Himself our
hopes, without witness in history? History is especially human; human
evidence the branch of moral science of which man is master--for man
is the best interpreter of man. The primary axiom of family, of
social, of legal, of moral life, is, that there is a kind and degree
of human evidence which we ought not to refuse; that if credulity is
voracious in belief, incredulity is no less voracious in negation;
that if there is a credulity which is simple, there is an incredulity
which is unreasonable and perilous. Is it then safe to grope for the
keys of death in darkness, and turn from the hand that holds them out;
to face the ugly realities of the pit with less consolation than is
the portion of our inheritance in the faith of Christ?
"The disciples," John tells us, "went away again unto their own home.
But Mary was standing without at the sepulchre weeping."[328] Weeping!
What else is possible while we are _outside_, while we _stand_--what
else until we _stoop_ down from our proud grief to the sepulchre,
humble our speculative pride, and condescend to gaze at the death of
Jesus face to face? When we do so, we forget the hundred voices that
tell us that the Resurrection is partly invented, partly imagined,
partly ideally true. We may not see angels in white, nor hear their
"why weepest thou?" But assuredly we shall hear a sweeter voice, and a
stronger than theirs; and our name will be on it, and His name will
rush to our lips in the language most expressive to us--as Mary said
unto Him in _Hebrew_,[329] Rabboni. Then we shall find that the grey
of morning is passing; that the thin thread of scarlet upon the
distant hills is deepening into dawn; that in that world where Christ
is the dominant law the ruling principle is not natural selection
which works through death, but supernatural selection which works
through life; that "because He lives, we shall live also."[330]
With the reception of the witness of men then, and among them of such
men as the writer of the fourth Gospel, all follows. For Christ,
"Earth breaks up--time drops away;--
In flows Heaven with its new day
Of endless life, when He who trod,
Very Man and very God,
This earth in weakness, shame, and pain,
Dying the death whose signs remain
Up yonder on the accursëd tree;
Shall come again, no more to be
Of captivity the thrall--
But the true God all in all,
King of kings, and Lord of lords,
As His servant John received the words--
'I died, and live for evermore.'"
For us there comes the hope in Paradise--the connection with the
living dead--the pulsation through the isthmus of the Church, from sea
to sea, from us to them--the tears not without smiles as we think of
the long summer-day when Christ who is our life shall appear--the
manifestation of the sons of God, when "them that sleep in Jesus will
God bring with Him." Our resurrection shall be a fact of history,
because His is a fact of history; and we receive it as such--partly
from the reasonable motive of reasonable human belief on sufficient
evidence for practical conviction.
All the long chain of manifold witness to Christ is consummated and
crowned when it passes into the inner world of the individual life.
"He that believeth on the Son of God, hath the witness in him,"
_i.e._, in himself![331] Correlative to this, stands a terrible truth.
He of whom we must conceive that he believes not God,[332] has made
Him a liar--nothing less, because his time for receiving Christ came
and went, and with this crisis his unbelief stands a completed present
act as the result of his past;[333] unbelief stretching over to the
completed witness of God concerning His Son;[334]--human unbelief
co-extensive with divine witness.
But that sweet witness in a man's self is not merely in books or
syllogisms. It is the creed of a living soul. It lies folded within a
man's heart, and never dies--part of the great principle of
victory[335] fought and won over again in each true life[336]--until
the man dies, and ceasing then only because he sees that which is the
object of its witness.
FOOTNOTES:
[314] The writer is entirely persuaded that St. John in chap. xx. 30,
31, refers to the _Resurrection_ "signs," and not to miracles generally.
[315] Acts x. 41, 42. It is to be regretted that the R. V. has not
boldly given us such an arrangement of the words in this important
passage as would at once connect "made manifest" with "after He rose
again from the dead," and avoid making the Apostle state that the
chosen witnesses ate and drank with Christ after the Resurrection. St.
Peter mentions that particular characteristic of the Apostles which
made them judges not to be gainsayed of the identity of the Risen One
with Him with whom they used to eat and drink.
[316] John xiv. 19-21.
[317] Τις τουτο ειδεν; γυνη παροιστρος, και ει τις αλλος των εκ της
αυτης γοητειας. Ὁτε μεν ηπιστειτο εν σωματι πασιν ανιδην (freely,
without restraint) εκηρυττεν, ὁτε δε πιστιν αν ισχυραν παρειχεν εκ
νεκρων αναστας ἑνι μονω γυναιω και τοις ἑαυτου θεασιωταις (adepts,
initiated) κρυβδην παρεφαινετω ... εχρην ειπερ οντως θειαν δυναμιν
εκφηναι ηθελεν ὁ Ιησους αυτοις τοις επηρεασι και τω καταδικασαντι και
ὁλως πασιν οφθηναι. [Celsus, _ap. Orig._, 2, 55, 59, 70, 63.] The
passage is given in Rudolph Anger's invaluable _Synopsis Evang. cum
locis qui supersunt parallelis litterarum et traditionum Evang.
Irenæo. antiquiorum._ p. 254.
[318] γυνη παροιστρος, Celsus. "Moments sacrés ou la passion d'une
hallucinée donne au monde un Dieu ressuscité." Renan, _Vie de Jesus_,
434.
[319] "Post Resurrectionem ... Dominus quum dedisset sindonem servo
sacerdotis"--Evang. ad Heb.--Matt. xxvii. 59.--R. Anger, _Synopsis
Evang._, 288.
[320] Mark xvi. 8.
[321] Luke xxiv. 37.
[322] Luke xxiv. 41; John xx. 20.
[323] Ps. xxxiv. 15.
[324] John xxi. 12, cf. 7.
[325] Matt. xxviii. 13.
[326] 1 Peter i. 3, 4; Apoc. i. 17, 18.
[327] See _The Destiny of Man, viewed in the light of his origin_, by
John Fiske, especially the three remarkable chapters pp. 96-119.
[328] John xx. 10, 11.
[329] The word Ἑβραιστι had unfortunately dropped out of the T. R.
John xx. 16.
[330] John xiv. 19.
[331] εν ἑαυτω, ver. 10.
[332] ὁ μη πιστευων τω Θεω, _Ibid._
[333] ου πεπιστευκεν, _Ibid._
[334] εις την μαρτυριαν ἡν μεμαρτυρηκεν ὁ Θεος περι του υιου αυτου.
_Ibid._
[335] παν το γεγεννημενον εκ του Θεου νικα τον κοσμον. ver. 4.
[336] With the neuter in ver. 4, contrast the individualising
masculine in ver. 5, τις εστιν ὁ νικων.
DISCOURSE XIV.
_SIN UNTO DEATH._
"There is a sin unto death."--1 JOHN v. 17.
The Church has ever spoken of seven deadly sins. Here is the ugly
catalogue. Pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, hatred, sloth.
Many of us pray often "from fornication and all other deadly sin, Good
Lord deliver us." This language rightly understood is sound and true;
yet, without careful thought, the term may lead us into two errors.
1. On hearing of _deadly_ sin we are apt instinctively to oppose it to
_venial_. But we cannot define by any _quantitative_ test what venial
sin may be for any given soul. To do that we must know the complete
history of each soul; and the complete genealogy, conception, birth,
and autobiography of each sin. Men catch at the term _venial_ because
they love to minimise a thing so tremendous as sin. The world sides
with the casuists whom it satirises; and speaks of a "white lie," of a
foible, of an inaccuracy, when "the 'white lie' may be that of St.
Peter, the foible that of David, and the inaccuracy that of Ananias!"
2. There is a second mistake into which we often fall in speaking of
deadly sin. Our imagination nearly always assumes some one definite
outward act; some single individual sin. This may partly be due to a
seemingly slight mistranslation in the text. It should not run "there
is _a_ sin," but "there is sin unto" (_i.e._, in the direction of,
towards) "death."
The text means something deeper and further-reaching than any single
sin, deadly though it may be justly called.
The author of the fourth Gospel learned a whole mystic language from the
life of Jesus. Death, in the great Master's vocabulary, was more than a
single action. It was again wholly different from bodily death by the
visitation of God. There are two realms for man's soul co-extensive with
the universe and with itself. One which leads towards God is called
_Life_; one which leads from Him is called _Death_. There is a radiant
passage by which the soul is translated from the death which is death
indeed, to the life which is life indeed. There is another passage by
which we pass from life to death; _i.e._, fall back towards _spiritual_
(which is not necessarily eternal) death.
There is then a general condition and contexture; there is an atmosphere
and position of soul in which the true life flickers, and is on the way
to death. One who visited an island on the coast of Scotland has told
how he found in a valley open to the spray of the north-west ocean a
clump of fir trees. For a time they grew well, until they became high
enough to catch the prevalent blast. They were still standing, but had
taken a fixed set, and were reddened as if singed by the breath of fire.
The island glen might be "swept on starry nights by balms of spring;"
the summer sun as it sank might touch the poor stems with a momentary
radiance. The trees were still _living,_ but only with that cortical
vitality which is the tree's death in life. Their doom was evident; they
could have but a few more seasons. If the traveller cared some years
hence to visit that islet set in stormy waters, he would find the firs
blanched like a skeleton's bones. Nothing remained for them but the sure
fall, and the fated rottenness.
The analogy indeed is not complete. The tree in such surroundings
_must_ die; it can make for itself no new condition of existence; it
can hear no sweet question on the breeze that washes through the
grove, "why will ye die?" It cannot look upward--as it is scourged by
the driving spray, and tormented by the fierce wind--and cry, "O God
of my life, give me life." It has no will; it cannot transplant
itself. But the human tree can root itself in a happier place. Some
divine spring may clothe it with green again. As it was passing from
life toward death, so by the grace of God in prayers and sacraments,
through penitence and faith, it may pass from death to life.
The Church then is not wrong when she speaks of "deadly sin." The
number _seven_ is not merely a mystic fancy. But the _seven_ "deadly
sins" are seven attributes of the whole character; seven master-ideas;
seven general conditions of a human soul alienated from God; seven
forms of aversion from true life, and of reversion to true death. The
style of St. John has often been called "senile;" it certainly has the
oracular and sententious quietude of old age in its almost lapidary
repose. Yet a terrible light sometimes leaps from its simple and
stately lines. Are there not a hundred hearts among us who know that
as years pass they are drifting further and further from Him who is
the Life? Will they not allow that St. John was right when, looking
round the range of the Church, he asserted that there is such a thing
as "sin unto death?"
It may be useful to take that one of the seven deadly sins which
people are the most surprised to find in the list.
How and why is sloth deadly sin?
There is a distinction between sloth as _vice_ and sloth as _sin_. The
deadly _sin_ of _sloth_ often exists where the _vice_ has no place.
The sleepy music of Thomson's "Castle of Indolence" does not describe
the slumber of the spiritual sluggard. Spiritual sloth is want of care
and of love for all things in the spiritual order. Its conceptions are
shallow and hasty. For it the Church is a department of the civil
service; her worship and rites are submitted to, as one submits to a
minor surgical operation. Prayer is the waste of a few minutes daily
in concession to a sentiment which it might require trouble to
eradicate. For the slothful Christian, saints are incorrigibly stupid;
martyrs incorrigibly obstinate; clergymen incorrigibly professional;
missionaries incorrigibly restless; sisterhoods incorrigibly tender;
white lips that can just whisper Jesus incorrigibly awful. For the
slothful, God, Christ, death, judgment have no real significance. The
Atonement is a plank far away to be clutched by dying fingers in the
article of death, that we may gurgle out "yes," when asked "are you
happy"? Hell is an ugly word, Heaven a beautiful one which means a sky
or an Utopia. Apathy in all spiritual thought, languor in every work
of God, fear of injudicious and expensive zeal; secret dislike of
those whose fervour puts us to shame, and a miserable adroitness in
keeping out of their way; such are the signs of the spirit of sloth.
And with this a long series of sins of omission--"slumbering and
sleeping while the Bridegroom tarries"--"unprofitable servants."
We have said that the _vice_ of sloth is generally distinct from the
_sin_. There is, however, one day of the week on which the sin is apt
to wear the drowsy features of the _vice--Sunday_. If there is any day
on which we might be supposed to do something towards the spiritual
world it must be Sunday. Yet what have any of us done for God on any
Sunday? Probably we can scarcely tell. We slept late, we lingered over
our dressing, we never thought of Holy Communion; after Church (if we
went there) we loitered with friends; we lounged in the Park; we
whiled away an hour at lunch; we turned over a novel, with secret
dislike of the benevolent arrangements which give the postman some
rest. Such have been in the main our past Sundays. Such will be those
which remain, more or fewer, till the arrival of a date written in a
calendar which eye hath not seen. The last evening of the closing year
is called by an old poet, "the twilight of two years, nor past, nor
next." What shall we call the last Sunday of our year of life?
Turn to the first chapter of St. Mark. Think of that day of our Lord's
ministry which is recorded more fully than any other. What a day! First
that teaching in the Synagogue, when men "were astonished," not at His
volubility, but at His "doctrine," drawn from depths of thought. Then
the awful meeting with the powers of the world unseen. Next the
utterance of the words in the sick room which renovated the fevered
frame. Afterwards an interval for the simple festival of home. And then
we see the sin, the sorrow, the sufferings crowded at the door. A few
hours more, while yet there is but the pale dawn before the meteor
sunrise of Syria, He rises from sleep to plunge His wearied brow in the
dews of prayer. And finally the intrusion of others upon that sacred
solitude, and the work of preaching, helping, pitying, healing closes in
upon Him again with a circle which is of steel, because it is duty--of
delight, because it is love. O the divine monotony of one of those
golden days of God upon earth! And yet we are offended because He who is
the same for ever, sends from heaven that message with its terrible
plainness--"because thou art lukewarm, I will spue thee out of my
mouth." We are angry that the Church classes sloth as deadly sin, when
the Church's Master has said--"thou wicked and _slothful_ servant."
DISCOURSE XV.
_THE TERRIBLE TRUISM WHICH HAS NO EXCEPTION._
"All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death."--
1 JOHN v. 17.
Let us begin by detaching awhile from its context this oracular
utterance: "all unrighteousness is sin." Is this true universally, or
is it not?
A clear consistent answer is necessary, because a strange form of the
doctrine of indulgences (long whispered in the ears) has lately been
proclaimed from the housetops, with a considerable measure of apparent
acceptance.
Here is the singular dispensation from St. John's rigorous canon to
which we refer.
Three such indulgences have been accorded at various times to certain
favoured classes or persons. (1) "The moral law does not exist for the
elect." This was the doctrine of certain Gnostics in St. John's day;
of certain fanatics in every age. (2) "Things absolutely forbidden to
the mass of mankind, are allowable for people of commanding rank."
Accommodating Prelates, and accommodating Reformers have left the
burden of defending these ignoble concessions to future generations.
(3) A yet baser dispensation has been freely given by very vulgar
casuists. "The chosen of Fortune"--the men at whose magic touch every
stock seems to rise--may be allowed unusual forms of enjoying the
unusual success which has crowned their career.
Such are, or such _were_, the dispensations from St. John's canon
permitted to themselves, or to others, by the elect of _Heaven_, by
the elect of _station_, and by the elect of _fortune_.
Another election hath obtained the perilous exception now--the
election of _genius_. Those who endow the world with music, with art,
with romance, with poetry, are entitled to the reversion. "All
unrighteousness is sin"--except for _them_. (1) The indulgence is no
longer valid for those who affect intimacy with heaven (partly perhaps
because it is suspected that there is no heaven to be intimate with).
(2) The indulgence is not extended to the men who apparently rule over
nations, since it has been discovered that nations rule over them. (3)
It is not accorded to the constructors of fortunes; they are too many,
and too uninteresting, though possibly figures could be conceived
almost capable of buying it. But (generally speaking) men of these
three classes must pace along the dust of the narrow road by the
signpost of the law, if they would escape the censure of society.
For genius alone there is no such inconvenient restriction. Many men, of
course, deliberately prefer the "primrose path," but they can no more
avoid indignant hisses by the way than they can extinguish the
"everlasting bonfire" at the awful close of their journey. With the man
of genius it seems that it is otherwise. He shall "walk in the ways of
his heart, and in the sight of his eyes;" but, "for all these things"
the tribunals of certain schools of a delicate criticism (delicate
criticism can be so indelicate!) will never allow him "to be brought
into judgment." Some literary oracles, biographers, or reviewers, are
not content to keep a reverential silence, and to murmur a secret
prayer. They will drag into light the saddest, the meanest, the most
selfish doings of genius. Not the least service to his generation, and
to English literature, of the true poet and critic lately taken from
us,[337] was the superb scorn, the exquisite wit, with which his
indignant purity transfixed such doctrines. A strange winged thing, no
doubt, genius sometimes is; alternately beating the abyss with splendid
pinions, and eating dust which is the "serpent's meat." But for all
that, we cannot see with the critic when he tries to prove that the
reptile's crawling is part of the angel's flight; and the dust on which
he grovels one with the infinite purity of the azure distances.
The arguments of the apologists for moral eccentricity of genius may be
thus summed up:--The man of genius bestows upon humanity gifts which are
on a different line from any other. He enriches it on the side where it
is poorest; the side of the Ideal. But the very temperament in virtue of
which a man is capable of such transcendent work makes him passionate
and capricious. To be _imaginative_ is to be _exceptional_; and these
exceptional beings live for mankind rather than for themselves. When
their conduct comes to be discussed, the only question is whether that
conduct was adapted to forward the superb self-development which is of
such inestimable value to the world. If the gratification of any desire
was necessary for that self-development, genius itself being the judge,
the cause is ended. In winning that gratification hearts may be broken,
souls defiled, lives wrecked. The daintiest songs of the man of genius
may rise to the accompaniment of domestic sobs, and the music which he
seems to warble at the gates of heaven may be trilled over the white
upturned face of one who has died in misery. What matter! Morality is so
icy, and so intolerant; its doctrines have the ungentlemanlike rigour of
the Athanasian Creed. Genius breaks hearts with such supreme
gracefulness, such perfect wit, that they are arrant Philistines who
refuse to smile.
We who have the text full in our mind answer all this in the words of
the old man of Ephesus. For all that angel-softness which he learned
from the heart of Christ, his voice is as strong as it is sweet and
calm. Over all the storm of passion, over all the babble of successive
sophistries, clear and eternal it rings out--"_all_ unrighteousness is
sin." To which the apologist, little abashed, replies--"of course we
all know _that_--quite true as a general rule, but then men of genius
have bought a splendid dispensation by paying a splendid price, and so
_their_ inconsistencies are not sin."
There are two assumptions at the root of this apology for the
aberrations of genius which should be examined. (1) The temperament of
men of genius is held to constitute an excuse from which there is no
appeal. Such men indeed are sometimes not slow to put forward this
plea for themselves. No doubt there are trials peculiar to every
temperament. Those of men of genius are probably very great. They are
children of the sunshine and of the storm; the grey monotony of
ordinary life is distasteful to them. Things which others find it easy
to accept convulse their sensitive organisation. Many can produce
their finest works only on condition of being sheltered where no
bills shall find their way by the post; where no sound, not even the
crowing of cocks, shall break the haunted silence. If the letter comes
in one case, and if the cock crows in the other, the first may
possibly never be remembered, but the second is never forgotten.
For this, as for every other form of human temperament--that of the
dunce, as well as of the genius--allowance must in truth be made. In
that one of the lives of the English Poets, where the great moralist
has gone nearest to making concessions to this fallacy of temperament,
he utters this just warning. "No wise man will easily presume to say,
had I been in Savage's condition I should have lived better than
Savage." But we must not bring in the temperament of the man of genius
as the standard of his conduct unless we are prepared to admit the
same standard in every other case. God is no respecter of persons. For
each, conscience is of the same texture, law of the same material. As
all have the same cross of infinite mercy, the same judgment of
perfect impartiality, so have they the same law of inexorable _duty_.
(2) The necessary _disorder_ and _feverishness_ of high literary and
artistic inspiration is a _second_ postulate of the pleas to which I
refer. But, is it true that disorder _creates inspiration_; or is a
condition of it?
All great work is ordered work; and in producing it the faculties must
be exercised harmoniously and with order. True inspiration, therefore,
should not be caricatured into a flushed and dishevelled thing. Labour
always precedes it. It has been prepared for by education. And that
education would have been painful but for the glorious efflorescence
of materials collected and assimilated, which is the compensation for
any toil. The very dissatisfaction with its own performances, the
result of the lofty ideal which is inseparable from genius, is at once
a stimulus and a balm. The man of genius apparently writes, or paints,
as the birds sing, or as the spring colours the flowers; but his
subject has long possessed his mind, and the inspiration is the child
of thought and of ordered labour. Destroying the peace of one's own
family or of another's, being flushed with the preoccupation of guilty
passion, will not accelerate, but retard the advent of those happy
moments which are not without reason called creative. Thus, the
inspiration of genius is akin to the inspiration of prophecy. The
prophet tutored himself by a fitting education. He became assimilated
to the noble things in the future which he foresaw. Isaiah's heart
grew royal; his style wore the majesty of a king, before he sang the
King of sorrow with His infinite pathos, and the King of righteousness
with His infinite glory. Many prophets attuned their spirits by
listening to such music as lulls, not inflames passion. Others walked
where "beauty born of murmuring sound" might pass into their strain.
Think of Ezekiel by the river of Chebar, with the soft sweep of waters
in his ear, and their cool breath upon his cheek. Think of St. John
with the shaft of light from heaven's opened door upon his upturned
brow, and the boom of the Ægean upon the rocks of Patmos around him.
"The note of the heathen seer" (said the greatest preacher of the
Greek Church) "is to be contorted, constrained, excited, like a
maniac; the note of a prophet is to be wakeful, self-possessed, nobly
self-conscious."[338] We may apply this test to the distinction
between genius, and the dissipated affectation of genius.
Let us then refuse our assent to a doctrine of indulgences applied to
genius on the ground of _temperament_ or of literary and artistic
_inspiration_. "Why," we are often asked, "why force your narrow
judgment upon an angry or a laughing world?" What have you to do with
the conduct of gifted men? Genius means exuberance. Why "blame the
Niagara River" because it will not assume the pace and manner of "a
Dutch canal"? Never indeed should we force that judgment upon any,
unless they force it upon us. Let us avoid as far as we may posthumous
gossip over the grave of genius. It is an unwholesome curiosity which
rewards the blackbird for that bubbling song of ecstasy in the
thicket, by gloating upon the ugly worm which he swallows greedily
after the shower. The pen or pencil has dropped from the cold fingers.
After all its thought and sin, after all its toil and agony, the soul
is with its Judge. Let the painter of the lovely picture, the writer
of the deathless words, be for us like the priest. The washing of
regeneration is no less wrought through the unworthy minister; the
precious gift is no less conveyed when a polluted hand has broken the
bread and blessed the cup. But if we are forced to speak, let us
refuse to accept an _ex post facto_ morality invented to excuse a
worthless absolution. Especially so when the most sacred of all rights
is concerned. It is not enough to say that a man of genius dissents
from the received standard of conduct. He cannot make fugitive
inclination the only principle of a connection which he promised to
recognise as paramount. A passage in the Psalms,[339] has been called
"The catechism of Heaven." "The catechism of Fame" differs from "the
catechism of Heaven." "Who shall ascend unto the hill of Fame?" "He
that possesses genius." "Who shall ascend unto the hill of the Lord?"
"He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; He that hath sworn to his
neighbour and disappointeth him not" (or disappointeth _her_ not)
"though it were to his own hindrance"--aye, to the hindrance of his
self-development. Strange that the rough Hebrew should still have to
teach us chivalry as well as religion! In St. John's Epistle we find
the two great axioms about sin, in its two essential aspects. "Sin is
the transgression of the law:" there is its aspect chiefly _Godward_.
"All unrighteousness" (mainly injustice, denial of the rights of
others) "is sin:" there is its aspect chiefly _manward_.
Yes, the principle of the text is rigid, inexorable, eternal. Nothing
can make its way out of those terrible meshes. It is without favour,
without exception. It gives no dispensation, and proclaims no
indulgences, to the man of genius, or to any other. If it were
otherwise, the righteous God, the Author of creation and redemption,
would be dethroned. And _that_ is a graver thing than to dethrone even
the author of "Queen Mab," and of "The Epipsychidion." Here is the
jurisprudence of the "great white Throne" summed up in four words:
"_all unrighteousness is sin_."
So far, in the last discourse, and in this, we have ventured to
isolate these two great principles from their context. But this
process is always attended with peculiar loss in St. John's writings.
And as some may think perhaps that the promise[340] just succeeding is
falsified we must here run the risk of bringing in another thread of
thought. Yet indeed the whole paragraph[341] has its source in an
intense faith in the _efficacy of prayer_, specially as exercised in
_intercessory prayer_.
(1) The efficacy of prayer.[342] This is the very sign of contrast with,
of opposition to, the modern spirit, which is the negation of _prayer_.
What is the real value of prayer?
Very little, says the modern spirit. Prayer is the stimulant, the
Dutch courage of the moral world. Prayer is a power, not because it
_is_ efficacious, but because it is _believed_ to be so.
A modern Rabbi, with nothing of his Judaism left but a rabid antipathy
to the Founder of the Church, guided by Spinoza and Kant, has turned
fiercely upon the Lord's prayer.[343] He takes those petitions which
stand alone among the liturgies of earth in being capable of being
translated into every language. He cuts off one pearl after another from
the string. Let us look at two specimens. "Our Father which art in
Heaven." Heaven! the very name has a breath of magic, a suggestion of
beauty, of grandeur, of purity in it. It moves us as nothing else can.
We instinctively lift our heads; the brow grows proud of that splendid
home, and the eye is wetted with a tear and lighted with a ray, as it
looks into those depths of golden sunset which are full for the young of
the radiant mystery of life, for the old of the pathetic mystery of
death.[344] Yes, but for modern science Heaven means air, or atmosphere,
and the address itself is contradictory. "Forgive us." But surely the
guilt cannot be forgiven, except by the person against whom it is
committed. There is no other forgiveness. A mother (whose daughter went
out upon the cruel London streets) carried into execution a thought
bestowed upon her by the inexhaustible ingenuity of love. The poor woman
got her own photograph taken, and a friend managed to have copies of it
hung in several halls and haunts of infamy with these words clearly
written below--"come home, I forgive you." The tender subtlety of love
was successful at last; and the poor haggard outcast's face was touched
by her mother's lips. "But the heart of God," says this enemy of prayer,
"is not as a woman's heart." (Pardon the words, O loving Father! Thou
who hast said "Yea, she may forget, yet will I not forget thee." Pardon,
O pierced Human Love! who hast graven the name of every soul on the
palms of Thy hands with the nails of the crucifixion.) Repentance
subjectively seems a reality when mother and child meet with a burst of
passionate tears, and the polluted brow feels purified by their molten
downfall; but repentance _objectively_ is seen to be an absurdity by
every one who grasps the conception of law. The penitential Psalms may
be the _lyrics_ of repentance, the Gospel for the third Sunday after
Trinity its _idyll_, the cross its _symbol_, the wounds of Christ its
_theology_ and _inspiration_. But the course of Nature, the hard logic
of life is its refutation--the flames that burn, the waves that drown,
the machine that crushes, the society that condemns, and that neither
can, nor will forgive.
Enough, and more than enough of this. The monster of ignorance who has
never learnt a prayer, has hitherto been looked upon as one of the
saddest of sights. But there is something sadder--the monster of
over-cultivation, the wreck of schools, the priggish fanatic of
godlessness. Alas! for the nature which has become like a plant
artificially trained and twisted to turn away from the light. Alas!
for the heart which has hardened itself into stone until it cannot
beat faster, or soar higher, even when men are saying with happy
enthusiasm, or when the organ is lifting upward to the heaven of
heavens the cry which is at once the creed of an everlasting dogma and
the hymn of a triumphant hope--"with Thee is the well of Life, and in
Thy light shall we see light." Now having heard the answer of the
modern spirit to the question "what is the real value of prayer?"
think of the answer of the spirit of the Church as given by St. John
in this paragraph. That answer is not drawn out in a syllogism. St.
John appeals to our consciousness of a divine life. "That ye may know
that ye have eternal life." This _knowledge_ issues in _confidence,
i.e._, literally the sweet possibility of saying out all to God. And
this confidence is never disappointed for any believing child of God.
"If we know that He hear us, we know that we have the petitions that
we desired of Him."[345]
On the 16th verse we need only say, that the greatness of our
brother's spiritual need does not cease to be a title to our sympathy.
St. John is not speaking of all requests, but of the fulness of
brotherly intercession.
* * * * *
One question and one warning in conclusion; and that question is this.
Do we take part in this great ministry of love? Is our voice heard in
the full music of the prayers of intercession that are ever going up to
the Throne, and bringing down the gift of life? Do _we_ pray for others?
In one sense all who know true affection and the sweetness of _true_
prayer do pray for others. We have never loved with supreme affection
any for whom we have not interceded, whose names we have not baptized
in the fountain of prayer. Prayer takes up a tablet from the hand of
love written over with names; that tablet death itself can only break
when the heart has turned Sadducee.
Jesus (we sometimes think) gives one strange proof of the love which
yet passeth knowledge. "Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and
Lazarus;" "when He had heard therefore" [O that strange therefore!]
"that Lazarus was sick, He abode _two days_ still in the same place
where He was." Ah! sometimes not two days, but two years, and
sometimes evermore, He seems to remain. When the income dwindles with
the dwindling span of life; when the best beloved must leave us for
many years, and carries away our sunshine with him; when the life of a
husband is in danger--then we pray; "O Father, for Jesu's sake spare
that precious life; enable me to provide for these helpless ones;
bless these children in their going out and coming in, and let me see
them once again before the night cometh, and my hands are folded for
the long rest." Yes, but have we prayed at our Communion "because of
that Holy Sacrament in it, and with it," that He would give them the
grace which they need--the life which shall save them from sin unto
death? Round us, close to us in our homes, there are cold hands,
hearts that beat feebly. Let us fulfil St. John's teaching, by praying
to Him who is the life that He would chafe those cold hands with His
hand of love, and quicken those dying hearts by contact with that
wounded heart which is a heart of fire.
NOTES
Ch. v. 3-17.
Ver. 3. This section should begin with the words "And His commandments
are not heavy"--and should not be separated from what follows, because
they give one reason of the victory whereof he proceeds to speak. "His
commandments are not heavy, for all that is born of God conquereth the
world." What a picture of the sweetness of a life of service! What a
gentle smile must have been on the old man's face as he said, "His
commandments are not grievous!"
Vers. 7, 8. This passage with its apparent obscurity, and famous
interpolation, demands some additional notice. As to _criticism_ and
_interpretation_.
(1) _Critically._ Since the publication of J. J. Griesbach's
celebrated work (_Diatribe in locum_ 1 John v. 7, 8, Tom. ii., N.T.
Halle: 1806), first German, and latterly English, opinion has become
absolutely unanimous in agreeing with Griesbach that "the words
included between brackets are spurious, and should therefore be
eliminated from the Sacred Text." Even the famous Roman Catholic
scholar, Scholts, in his great critical edition of the New Testament,
in two volumes (Bonn: 1836), boldly dropped the disputed passage from
the text. The interpolated passage has certainly no support in any
uncial manuscript, or ancient version, or Greek Father of the four
first centuries. (2) As to _interpretation_, the faith has lost
nothing by the honesty of her wisest defenders. The whole of the
genuine passage is intensely Trinitarian. The interpolation is nothing
but an exposition written into the text. The three genuine witnesses
do really point to the Three Witnesses in Heaven. Bengel's saying
expresses the permanent feeling of Christendom, which no criticism can
do away with: "This trine array of witnesses on earth is supported by,
and has above and beneath it the Trinity, which is Heavenly,
archetypal, fundamental, everlasting." The whole context recognizes
three special works of the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity. "This
is the witness of God," _i.e._ of the Father (ver. 9); "this is He
that came by water and blood," _i.e._ the Son (ver. 6); "it is the
Spirit that witnesseth," _i.e._ the Holy Ghost (_ibid._).
A fuller examination of this passage, from a polemical point of view,
will be found in the third of the introductory discourses. It will be
well, however, to indicate here the immediate controversial reference
in the Spirit, the water, and the blood. There is abundant proof that
the popular heretical philosophy of Asia Minor struck Christianity
precisely in three vital places. It denied--
(1) The Incarnation--consequently
(2) The Redemption--consequently
(3) The Sacraments.
But the mention of the water and the blood in connection with the
Person of the Son Incarnate and Crucified established exactly these
three points. Narrated as it was by an eye-witness, it established:--
(1) The reality of the Incarnation--consequently
(2) The reality of Redemption--for the blood of Jesus cleanses from
all sin (1 John i. 7)--consequently
(3) The reality of Sacraments.
We have articulate evidence of the denial of the two sacraments by the
Docetic idealists of Asia Minor. The _Philosophumena_ tells us of the
view of baptism held by one of their principal sects. "According to them
the promise of the laver of regeneration is nothing more than the
introduction into the 'unfading pleasure' of him that is washed (as they
say) with living water, and anointed with 'chrism that speaketh
not.'"[346] The testimony of Ignatius is express as to the other
sacrament. "From Eucharist and prayer they abstain on account of not
confessing that the Eucharist is flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ which
suffered for our sins." ["Water and blood" should be noted in Heb. ix.
19. Water is not mentioned in Exod. xxiv. 6.]--(_Ep. ad Smyrn._ vii.)
FOOTNOTES:
[337] Mr. Matthew Arnold.
[338] This is true as a general rule; but there were exceptions.
[339] See Ps. xv. Cf. Ps. xxiv. 3-7.
[340] 1 John v. 15.
[341] 1 John v. 14, 18.
[342] Vv. 14, 15.
[343] _Historical and Critical Commentary on Leviticus._ By M. M.
Kalisch. Part 1. Theology of the Past and Future, 431, 438.
[344] This is denied by De Wette (_Ueber die Religion_, Vorlesungen,
106).
[345] The form of expression indicates _not_ necessarily the very
things asked, but the spiritual essence and substance.
[346] Ἡ γαρ επαγγελια του λουτρου ουκ αλλη τις εστι κατ' αυτους, ἡ το
εισαγαγειν εις την αμαραντον ἡδονην τον λουομενον κατ' αυτους ζωντ
ὑδατι και χριομενον αλαλω χρισματι.--(_Philosoph._, p. 140, de
Naassenis.)