1 John II. 15—18.
Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.
You remember the words of which I spoke to you last Sunday, ‘I write unto you, little children, because ye have known the Father. I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong. I think it is especially for these young men that St. John designs the precept, ’Love not the world,’ which I have just read to you. But we shall not understand that precept, nor the reason of it, nor the place which it holds in Christian ethics, if we do not recollect also what he has said to the children.
We talk of sons going out into the world. Hitherto they have been dwelling in the house of their father. Day by day they have had experience of his care and government. They have had experience of it when they were right, and when they were wrong; when they have done the things which he commanded them, and when they have disobeyed him; when they have confessed their faults, when they have received his forgiveness, when they have suffered the punishments he has appointed for them.
This going out into the world we speak of as if it were a loss of some of these blessings. It may be a loss of them altogether; the father and the father’s house may be altogether forgotten. We may come into an atmosphere as unlike that as possible, and we may prefer it because it is unlike. The world may seem to us a good world, because it sets us free from the restraints of the family in which we have been brought up.
But, on the other hand, all children look forward to this time of going out into the world. Their fathers encourage them to look forward to it. They tell them that it is what is appointed for them; they tell them that they are to work in the world, and make their way in the world; they tell them their discipline in the nursery has been intended to prepare them for the world. This is not the language of inconsiderate, or mercenary, or ambitious parents. It is the language of parents who remember that their sons are ’to have a life of their own, that they are to shift for themselves, that they will not fulfil the purpose of their existence, unless they fall in with evil men as well as with good men, with things that may do them hurt as well as with things that may profit them. It is the language of men who reflect, that though there are a number of disorders in the world, yet that the world itself is an Order. That is what the word means; at all events, the Greek word which St. John uses, if not the English word which we use.
Well, as I have shown you already, St. John is regarding all those Ephesians to whom he is writing, as members of one family, in different stages of their growth. The children, the young men, the fathers, are all treated as sons of God, and as brothers of each other. Christ has revealed to them their Father; Christ has revealed to them their brotherhood in Him. These are not fantastic titles; they belong to real human beings. So St. John would have them understand that what is true in particular families, is true also of this great family. There is a time of childhood, a time when the name of a Father, and the care of a Father, and the forgiveness of a Father, are all in all. It seems as if nothing was wanted, but that name, and the belief that we are under that eye. This is a genial, blessed time, which may last longer with some than with others. Numbers who die in their early years, numbers, perhaps, who have been awakened in their later life to a sense of their Father’s forgiveness and goodness, may go to their graves without having any other belief than this, without having needed any other. Sometimes we may count them fortunate, we may be inclined to envy them. But we are not to envy them. If another state is provided for us, that is the state which is best for us. If we are to be thrown upon the world, there is a law which will be given us for the world, which is an advance upon the law that we had in our childhood, though it need not be the least inconsistent with that, though it need not drive that out of our minds.
St. John, therefore, has not consoled these young men who had lost the smooth cheeks of infancy, who had acquired a strength which does not belong to infancy. He has not treated them as unhappy for having made this exchange; he has given them assurances of the victory which had already been won for them, the recollection of which was to fit them for their own battles. He has told them what the particular wisdom is which they want and which they can now enter into, because they want it. They must believe that they have the Word of God dwelling in them; they must learn that there is One who is speaking to them in their consciences, who is quickening their hearts, who will go with them where they go, and stay with them where they stay; who knows what they are thinking, wishing, doing at every moment; who can give them the right thoughts, the right wishes, and guide them to the right acts. To make this discovery, to find that they have such a Friend, such a Teacher with them continually, is a compensation for a thousand losses; it is worth while to know a thousand evils which they did not know in infancy, if they may know also of this Deliverer from evil, this Director to all good.
But while he looks thus encouragingly and hopefully upon these youths, while he sees in them the strength of the time that is, as well as of the time that is to come, he is also fully alive himself, and he wishes them to be alive, to the danger of their new position. They may forget their heavenly Father’s house, just as any child may forget his earthly father’s house. And the cause will be the same. The attractions of the outward world, the attractions of the things that are in this world, these are likely to put a great chasm between one period of their life and another; these may cause that the love of the Father shall not be in them.
But are the cases parallel? The family of my parents is manifestly separated from the general world; to pass from one to the other is a great change indeed—like the crossing an ocean, like entering into another hemisphere. But is not the world God’s world? Is not the order which we see, His order? Did He not look upon it and say, ‘Lo, it is very good’? Does not our own Apostle speak of His loving the world; of His so loving it as to give His only-begotten Son for it? The word is the same here as there. How then can these young men be told that they are not to love that which He, in whose image they are created, is said so earnestly to love? How can they be told, that if they have this love, the love of the Father is not in them?
Assuredly, it is God’s world, God’s order; assuredly, He did form it and pronounce it good; assuredly, that love of which St. John speaks, includes every fowl of the air, and insect, and flower of the field; but is especially directed towards that creature who has wilfully erred and strayed, who has brought disorder into God’s order. All this we must remember. We shall not understand St. John’s precept unless we do. And how has disorder come into this order? for that it is there, we all confess. It has come from men falling in love with this order, or with some of the things in it, and setting them up and making them of themselves in the world, and becoming enamoured of that, and pursuing that. It has come from each man beginning to dream that he is the centre either of this world, or of some little world that he has made for himself out of it. It has come from the multiplication of these little worlds, with their little miserable centres, and from these worlds clashing one against another; and from those who dwell in them becoming discontented with their own, and wishing to escape into some other. All these disorders spring from that kind of love which St. John bids these young men beware of. They are to beware of it, because if it possesses them, and overmasters them, they will assuredly lose all sense that they ever did belong to a Father, and that they are still His children. They are to beware of it, because if they have this love, this disorderly, irregular love for the world, they cannot have that love of it which their Father has; they cannot so love it that for the sake of putting down the disorders that are in it, and making it indeed a true order, and bringing it to revolve about its true centre, they would be ready to give up themselves. This selfish love is the counterfeit of that self-sacrificing love; the counterfeit, and therefore its great antagonist. The Father’s love must prevail over this, or it will drive that Father’s love out of us.
St. John is never afraid of an apparent contradiction when it might save his readers from a real contradiction. Of course, the thought which suggests itself to us would have suggested itself to the men in his day. ‘How can he tell us that God loves the world, and yet that we are not to love it?’ The opposition which is on the surface of his language may be the best way of leading us to the harmony which lies below it. The Father’s love to the world which He has created is never absent from the Apostle’s mind. He does not wish it to be ever absent from the minds of the young men to whom he is writing. If they keep up the recollection of it, they will in new circumstances and amidst new trials retain the freshness of their childish feelings; the home and the family will be dearer to them than ever. They will find the world an order indeed; they will find in it the most wonderful adaptations to their own natures, each sense having something which answers to it; each power and energy having something on which to exercise itself. They will find adaptations in the world not to their own uses only, but to the uses of all the creatures which dwell in it. And beyond all this,—as we were told in that beautiful lecture which was delivered here some weeks ago,—the student will perceive a typical form in the different kinds whereof the world consists, which he cannot explain by any adaptations, which recalls,—that, I think, was the lecturer’s phrase, and I doubt if he could have found a better or a more devout one,—the work of a human artist who makes his picture or statue after a form that was present to him, though the observer may only rise by slow degrees and by long study, to apprehend what it was. How delightful the contemplation of the world in this sense is to one who has been taught that he is a child of God, our poet Cowper tells us in these lines of his ‘Winter Morning Walk:’—
‘His are the mountains, and the valleys His,
And the resplendent rivers, His to enjoy
With a propriety that none can feel,
But who, with filial confidence inspired,
Can lift to heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
And smiling say,—“My Father made them all!”’
But we must not disguise it—there is a tremendous power in these objects when we first come into close converse with them. Another English poet has described it in his splendid poem on the ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections in Early Childhood:’
‘Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a Mother’s mind
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came,’
In another passage of the same ode he speaks in even a more melancholy strain :—
‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy;
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.’
Wordsworth testifies from his own experience to the truth of St. John’s doctrine. He explains how the earth, by its very loveliness, by its very harmony, may turn the man, who has a higher origin and a higher destiny, into its victim and slave. And he explains as truly what the result is. The beauty of the world becomes fainter and dimmer to us as we give up our souls to it. When heaven was about us, earth looked very lovely; when we came down into earth and believed that we had to do with nothing but that, earth became flat and dull; its trees, its flowers, its sunlight, lost their charms; they became monotonous, more wearisome each day because we could not see beyond them.
Here, then, are good reasons why the young men shall not love the world, neither the things that are in the world. For if they do, first, their strength will forsake them; they will give up the power that is in them to the things on which the power is to be exerted; they will be ruled by that which they are meant to rule. Next, they will not have any real insight into these things or any real sympathy with them. It may sound strange to say so, but it is true. Those who love the world, those who surrender themselves to it, never understand it, never in the best sense enjoy it; they are too much on the level of it,—yes, too much below the level of it,—for they look up to it, they depend upon it—to be capable of contemplating it and of appreciating what is most exquisite in it. You have proofs of this continually. The sensualist does not know what the delights of sense are; he is out of temper when he is denied them; he is out of temper when he possesses them. Nothing is exactly to his liking; he expected what he cannot procure; gout or a liver complaint comes in to make the gratification impossible. That is a single instance; you may multiply the instances in all directions. The lover of praise and reputation is continually baulked of the flattery that has become necessary to him. He detects something disagreeable in that which is most highly flavoured; a rough word is a torment to him. In one of these cases the man is dependent chiefly upon material things, though men are needed to dress and prepare them. In the other, he is dependent upon the words that go out of men’s lips. Both belong to the world; both are parts of the order which God has created; both therefore in themselves are good. But the man who yields up his heart to them—who, as we say, falls in love with them—makes himself in the judgment of all, even of those who commit the same error, a poor creature. Heathen philosophers had pronounced sentence upon such as he is, long before St. John said, ‘Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.’ They had pronounced the sentence partly from observation of the results to which such devotion led, partly from a consciousness that they were men and must have some kindred with beings higher than themselves, with another world than this.
But they were not able to explain satisfactorily the facts of which they took notice, because they could not tell what that kindred was of which they dreamed. When St. John said, ‘If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him,’ he interprets this judgment of the wise heathens; he shows what was the warrant for it. At the same time he takes the harshness out of it. Men become the slaves of the world because they do not know that they have a Father of their spirits; because they do not know that He created this order, and put them into it, and that He sustains them in it. They do not know that all the love which is seeking to satisfy itself in these things flows from Him; that the love is nearer to them than it is to these things; that all the beauty which they see in these things is a sign and pledge of it; and a message to them concerning Him from whom it has been derived. ‘For,’ the Apostle goes on, ‘all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.’ These words require some thought before we can take in the full force of them; but one remark is obvious. That which the Apostle is condemning here is no part of the order of nature; it is not Sun, or Moon, or Stars that he finds fault with; it is something in man, something which belongs to his flesh, his eye, his inward character. Is it, then, the order of human society that he is finding fault with? Is he complaining of family life, national laws, the bonds of fellowship between the members of the same nation or between different nations? Is it not rather that which disturbs family life, draws down the vengeance of the laws, tears the bond of fellowship asunder? The appetites which must be indulged whatever is sacrificed to them; the eye which must have its idol, however poor that idol is, and however much that is noble is cast down for the sake of it; the pride of wealth, place, character, which must be pampered on whomsoever it tramples;—are not these the curses of mankind, do not they bring a curse on the world?
But if they bring curses upon the world and proceed from man, why does he say they are ‘of’ the world? Because he contemplates men as occupying a position between God and the world. All that constitutes them, truly and properly, comes to them from God, who has made them in His image. Their social impulses are from Him; their sense of law is from Him; their love is from Him. But their eagerness to get things for themselves is not of Him; their recklessness of obligations is not of Him; that lust which, as Milton says, is hard by hate, is not from Him. These come from their putting the world in His place; from the turning the world into their God. Then it becomes their torment, and they become its torment. That which is best in it often proves the source of the greatest covetousness and pride; this covetousness and pride turn the order upside down, and convert it into confusion. The world, then, though altogether good to the man who refers it to a Father, is the provocative of all evil in him when it becomes separated from his Father, and is substituted for Him. Then it changes what is highest and noblest in man into that which is lowest and basest.
Some will say, ‘But these young men to whom St. John wrote were godly young men, to whom he gave credit for all right and holy purposes.’ I believe it; and therefore such words as these were all the more necessary for them. It is an idle fashion of preachers to bid people who have sold themselves to the world, not to love it. They do not love it; their love is all dried up and exhausted. They tell you so. They say, ‘It is a dreary business altogether; we wish we were fairly out of it; only, we do not know what is to come after; that may be worse.’ Talk not to such men of giving up love. Try whether there is not some object which even in the midst of their weariness, yes, even because they are so weary,—they may be tempted to embrace. Tell them of a Father’s love which is seeking them out; which has allowed them to wander away from home, and to feel famine and to feed upon husks, that they may be driven to seek Him—that so the yoke of the world may be broken from their necks; it never can be broken by exhortations about the vanity of enjoyments which they know much better than the preacher does, to be insipid and insincere. It is the man who is full of the highest, bravest, most godly impulses, who rejoices in the belief that he has a Father in heaven, and that He is good, and that the world is overflowing with His goodness,—it is just he who needs this warning, ‘Love not the world’—needs it not that the fire in his heart may burn less vehemently; not that he may be chilled with prudential notions; but precisely that the fire may not die out and leave only a few smouldering ashes behind; precisely that he may not sink into a dry, withered, heartless creature, a despiser of all youthful aspirations and hopes. ‘Love not the world,’ St. John. For there is a love in you that the world did not kindle, that your heavenly Father has kindled; love it not, lest you should be turned into worldlings, whose misery is their incapacity of loving anything. He uses the general phrase, ‘world,’ though these young men might perhaps be taken into very different regions of the earth and into very different societies. He does not draw lines, and say, ‘That is the world you are to shun; here is a region where you may dwell safely.’ They were to shun no place and no men; they were to love all places and all men; but in all places and among all men, there would be a world which they were not to love. They would carry that world about with them, for they would carry the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life about with them. They were to fear the world; but their chief fear was to be of themselves: they were to fear the world, but their fear was to be lest the world’s love should separate them from the love which was blessing and renovating the world.
I think these distinctions, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, prove themselves to be very accurate and very complete distinctions in practice, though an ordinary philosopher may perhaps adopt some other classification of those tendencies which connect us with the world and give it a dominion over us. To the lust of the flesh may be referred the crimes and miseries that have been produced by gluttony, drunkenness, and the irregular intercourse of the sexes; an appalling catalogue, certainly, which no mortal eye could dare to gaze upon. To the lust of the eye may be referred all worship of visible things, with the divisions, persecutions, hatreds, superstitions which this worship has produced in different countries and ages. To the pride or boasting of life,—where you are not to understand by life, for the Greek words are entirely different, either natural or spiritual life, such as the Apostle spoke of in the first chapter of the Epistle, but all that belongs to the outside of existence, houses, lands, whatever exalts a man above his fellow,—to this head we must refer the oppressor’s wrongs, and that contumely which Hamlet reckons among the things that are harder to bear even than the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ In these three divisions I suspect all the mischiefs which have befallen our race may be reckoned, and each of us is taught by the Apostle, and may know by experience, that the seeds of the evils so enumerated are in himself.
Against the ripening of these seeds the young man is to watch. So far as he sells himself to the world, so far, he may be sure, they will ripen and bear fruit. But the Apostle gives him an aid against this prostration of soul which, if he uses it, will be very effectual. It is the recollection, that all he is boasting of as his, passes away, is even now in the act of passing away.
These sensual pleasures, these gods of our creation, these lusts which we are feeding, have their death doom upon them; they are here to-day and will be gone to-morrow. The world, the order which is fashioned out of these, is not God’s order, but a perversion of God’s order,—that which we have substituted for His. Therefore it has no subsistence, no endurance. ‘But he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.’ He has attached himself to the Unchangeable, the Eternal. He belongs to an order which cannot disappear. It is the order of Him Whose children we are; of Him Who created the world and all that is in it; of Him Who loved the world, and sent His Son into it to claim as His.
Here a deep and grand subject opens upon us at which I cannot but glance, though I must glance at it. That Word Who is said to be dwelling with these young men, to be upholding them against the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, that Word Who is to keep them at one with the forgiving Father they knew in childhood, and Who has promised to be with them till the end; that Eternal Word is declared in St. John’s Gospel to be the same by Whom the worlds were created, and without Whom was not anything made that was made. The Divine Artist fashioned the whole universe. And He it is Who, as St. John speaks again, ‘was made flesh and dwelt among us.’ He is that ‘only begotten Son which taketh away the sin of the world.’ Therefore the young men, who by this Word are kept from that false selfish love of the world which is so dangerous to their faith and their freedom, may look for a blessed reward. They may come now or hereafter to know the world, not in its fleeting fashions, which pass away, but as it is constituted in Him who is to abide for ever and ever. They may know it with a true divine knowledge; they may love it with a true divine affection. I have quoted some lines from Cowper already. I will quote one more passage from the same poem. It is in a higher measure, I think, than that of his ordinary song. I wish that all divines, and all naturalists, and all artists would ponder it. I would commend it to you as containing truths in which every human being has a right to share:—
’So reads he nature, whom the lamp of truth
Illuminates. Thy lamp, mysterious Word!
Which whoso sees, no longer wanders lost,
With intellects bemaz’d in endless doubt,
But runs the road of wisdom. Thou hast built,
With means that were not till by thee employ’d,
Worlds, that had never been hadst thou in strength
Been less, or less benevolent than strong.
They are thy witnesses, who speak thy power
And goodness infinite, but speak in ears
That hear not, or receive not their report.
In vain thy creatures testify of thee
Till thou proclaim thyself. Theirs is indeed
A teaching voice; but ’tis the praise of thine
That whom it teaches it makes prompt to learn,
And with the boon gives talents for its use.
Till Thou art heard, imaginations vain
Possess the heart, and fables false as hell,
Yet deem’d oracular, lure down to death
The uninform’d and heedless souls of men.
We give to Chance, blind Chance, ourselves as blind.
The glory of thy work, which yet appears
Perfect and unimpeachable of blame,
Challenging human scrutiny, and proved
Then skilful most, when most severely judged.
But Chance is not; or is not where thou reign’st.
Thy Providence forbids that fickle power
(If power she be, that works but to confound)
To mix her wild vagaries with thy laws.
Yet thus we dote, refusing while we can,
Instructions, and inventing to ourselves
Gods such as guilt makes welcome, gods that sleep,
Or disregard our follies, or that sit,
Amused spectators of this bustling stage.
Thee we reject, unable to abide
Thy purity, till pure as thou art pure,
Made such by thee, we love thee for that cause
For which we shunn’d and hated thee before.
Then we are free: then liberty, like day,
Breaks on the soul, and by a flash from heaven
Fires all the faculties with glorious joy.
A voice is heard, that mortal ears hear not.
Thou hast touched them; ’tis the voice of song,
Aloud Hosanna sent from all thy works,
Which he that hears it with a shout repeats.
And adds his rapture to the general praise.
In that blest moment, Nature, throwing wide
Her veil opaque, discloses with a smile
The Author of her beauties, who, retired
Behind his own creation, works unseen
By the impure, and hears his power denied.
Thou art the source and centre of all minds,
Their only point of rest, eternal Word!
From thee departing, they are lost and rove
At random, without honour, hope, or peace.
From thee is all that soothes the life of man,
His high endeavour, and his glad success,
His strength to suffer, and his will to serve
But oh thou bounteous Giver of all good,
Thou art of all thy gifts thyself the crown!
Give what thou canst, without thee we are poor:
And with thee rich, take what thou wilt away.’