1 John II. 28, 29: III. 1—6.
And now, little children, abide in Him; that, when He shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before Him at His coming. If ye know that He is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him. Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure. Whosoever committeth sin transgresseth also the law: for sin is the transgression of the law. And ye know that He was manifested to take away our sins; and in Him is no sin. Whosoever abideth in Him sinneth not; whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him, neither known Him.
St. JOHN is speaking to his little children as to human beings. He wants them to exercise their proper human privileges. What are these? To eat, to drink, to sleep? or, to remember, to trust, to hope? The first belong to us as animals; the others belong to us as men. The first support the life which each of us has apart from his neighbours; the others are exercises of the life which we have in common, which bind us as man to man. Are these exercises then to be less habitual, less substantial than those? Have they not much more to do with our own very selves? Do they not require as much direction that they may not miss their proper object?
May they not have many objects? May I not remember many friends; trust many promises; hope for many blessings that I have not yet? Assuredly, the more memory, the more trust, the more hope the better. The fear is lest they should wither and perish, not lest they should expand too much or find too many outlets. And we know from bitter experience that they do wither and perish, that there is a tendency in us all to forget, to be distrustful, to despair. Disappointments which we meet with from other men, and still more from ourselves, the loss of the spring of youth that was once in us, the presence of petty cares, the anticipation of coming evils, the sense of evils committed, all are stealing away hour by hour something of our human life. You have seen, perhaps, a man surrounded by all possible outward comforts and luxuries; he has grown old in the midst of them; they have become necessaries to him, of which he does not think, but complains bitterly if he misses any of them. You have seen him girt round by comforts, yet he is altogether without comfort; his heart is dried up within him; his countenance exhibits a vague, vacant longing for something that he has not; everything that he has is weariness and vexation to him; he cares for nothing and no person. The man seems to be gone. Yet he had a mother, who nursed him and watched over him; sisters; perhaps a wife, and children. He may even have friends, who remember him as a cordial companion, full of merriment, intelligence, wit; and who still cleave to him, now that he is only the shadow of what he was. Such a man is a spectacle and a warning to us all. There is nothing in us which there was not in him; he may have had more glow of heart, more of benevolence and geniality than we can boast of. Medical men, who meet with a multitude of such cases, often ask how we can reconcile them with our belief in man’s immortality; ‘for do we not see here,’ they say, ‘an end, not of the body’s life, but of the soul’s life, of all that is worth preserving in this world or any other?’
To such questions I should be unable to make any answer, or to the still more awful questions which present themselves to me, when I think of the spiritual death which I have found in myself, if I did not receive that message which St. John delivered, respecting a Fountain of Life—a divine life from which human life is derived, by which its springs may be renewed, in which it can find its full repose and satisfaction. The words ‘Little children, abide in Him,’ are the simplest encouragement to remember that Christ is this Fountain of Life for every man, to trust in Him, to hope in Him. The word ‘abide’ denotes that we are united to Him; but that it is in our power to deny that we are, and to act as if we were independent of Him. In the fifteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel that truth is illustrated with great fulness. Our Lord says to His disciples, as they walk towards the Mount of Olives, after the last Passover, ‘I am the Vine, ye are the branches. As the branch cannot bear fruit, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in Me.’ The branch has no power to sever itself from the vine; but it may be severed by some accident; then it withers and dies. That is the condition of a natural thing. The man has power to sever himself from the Being who is the spring of all his memory, trust, hopes; he can say, ‘I will try to live by myself and to myself.’ That is the condition of a voluntary or spiritual being. But he need not say this. He may abide in his true proper state. And if he has not done so, if he has struggled to be independent, he may give up that struggle; he may discover that it is a vain struggle; he may learn from the pricking of his conscience that there is One mightier than himself whom he has been fighting against. He may learn what that Friend is; he may turn to Him and say, ‘I desire to abide henceforth in Thee, for I have no strength, no life or goodness of my own.’ This is what St. Paul did when he found, on his way to Damascus, that the Jesus whom he had persecuted was his true Lord. All who received the message of the Gospel from the Apostles, whether Jews or Greeks, did this. They were told that the Lord of their spirits had taken their flesh and had come amongst them, that he might deliver them from their tyrants, and claim them as His subjects and liegemen. They were told that they might turn to Him, and trust in Him, and abide in Him. They had wanted such a Deliverer, such a Lord, such a Brother. They were sure it was not a delusion that they had one. The more they acted on this faith, the more they were sure that it was not.
Every exhortation, then, of their teachers—if those teachers were true to their calling—had this burden: ‘Abide in Him. Do not forget what you are. Do not forego your rights. Do not sink back into the condition of animals.’ This exhortation is strengthened here by the argument: ‘That when He shall appear ye may have confidence, and not be ashamed before Him at His coming.’ I said that the Apostles expected a speedy appearing or manifestation of Jesus as the Judge of their nation and of all nations. I said also that they regarded every judgment upon their own nation or upon any nation in that age, or any age, as a manifestation or appearing of Jesus Christ. They believed Him to be the King of the World; they could not doubt that what we describe as crises or revolutions in the condition of society were, in very deed, discoveries of His purposes, the destruction of something which had interfered with them. Such a doctrine was involved in the belief which they had in Him as the Son of Man. But that same belief obliged them to suppose that a very thin veil is interposed between us and Him, and that when we shut our eyes upon this world that veil is removed. Then the outsides of the world which present themselves to our senses will vanish; the substantial principles and realities which the eye cannot see, but which the spirit confesses and believes in, will stand forth. Christ the Lord of our own selves will appear, when those things that have only been surrounding us disappear. When He does so appear, must it not be a terrible shock to those who have dwelt in the things which are fading away, whose hearts have known no home except them? Must there not be a sense of strangeness, of utter dissonancy, when He of whom we have thought nothing here, whom we have put away as far as we could, is known to be the ground of our being, the Life apart from which there is no life? What words can be used to describe that awakening? St. John’s are the best words and the simplest and truest—though they are not those which a rhetorician would make use of. He speaks of being ‘ashamed’ at His appearing. ‘He has been with us ever since we began to exist, and we knew it not!—He has been doing us good, and we turned away from Him! He has been tempting us into the light, and we chose the darkness.’ Yes! infinite shame, the remorse for a self-chosen alienation,—does not that exceed all the mere outward horror which the fancy pictures to itself; do we not feel that is no picture—that is reality?
But St. John speaks to his disciples of their not being ashamed before Him at His coming, of having confidence in Him. This would be the effect of that abiding in Him to which he has urged them; so they would acquire a growing trust in Him, to whom they were attached. Every step in their experience would deepen it. The accidents of the world which seem contrived to alienate them from it, would drive them to it. Their own weakness, ignorance, sinfulness, would be a perpetual excuse and warrant for it. They would be sure that God Himself was grafting them by all His discipline into that root which alone could cause them to bear fruit. What is there, in the event of death, to shake that confidence? What is the truth to which they awaken, but that which has been every hour becoming more certain to them? It is but the full life of which they had been sipping draughts from time to time. It is but the light to which they had been continually turning from their own darkness.
But our Apostle is never satisfied with emblems, not even with such beautiful emblems as that of the vine and the branches. His meaning is altogether practical. He wants men to be doing righteous, honest acts. He knows it is a very hard thing to do such acts, that there are ten thousand temptations not to do them, but to change them for mere words or professions. So he explains in the 29th verse what he has been saying before, by adding, ‘We know that if He is righteous, every one that doeth righteousness is born of Him.’ Righteous acts spring from a righteous person, as sound healthy branches proceed from a sound healthy root. When he speaks of Christ as the root in which we are to abide, he means that He is the righteous Lord, by fellowship with whom we may be able to do righteousness. He has no notion of divine knowledge which does not lead to this result. As I have said so often, he never separates knowledge from life.
But you observe, he changes his form of expression in the last verse. He leaves natural symbols; he begins to talk of human relations. ‘He that doeth righteousness is born of Him.’ Such a man has the signs of a heavenly parentage; he has a birth from above. Is it that he has earned his relation to God by doing righteous acts? Has he made himself God’s child by some services which he has rendered to Him? No! these are the world’s ethics; in these lies that self-righteousness which the Bible denounces, and which the conscience in us revolts against. Christian ethics proceed on the opposite principle. We do not attach ourselves to Christ by performing righteous acts. We are able to perform righteous acts because we are attached to Him. We do not become God’s children because we are like our Father in heaven. Good; but being the children of a good God, we can be so.
‘Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God; therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not.’ ‘Born of Him,’—think what that means. It means nothing less than this:—‘God, of His own free and infinite love, calls you His children, claims you as His children, in His only begotten Son. Wonder at that announcement as much as you can. Refer your state to God altogether, not the least to yourselves. See in it the proof of what He is. But do not deny it; for so you deny that you can do what is right, what the righteous God would have you do. Say not that it is impossible; for so you say that it is impossible for you not to be unrighteous; untrue men. And remember always that this relation is one between God and your spirits; hidden, therefore, from the world; not to be recognised by those who see with the world’s eyes. If you have ever been disposed to complain that you are not understood when you are acting as God’s children, seeking to obey His will, nay, that the very notion of your being connected with a spiritual family and a spiritual Father is scouted as ridiculous; then remember that He who was called the Only Begotten Son, the well beloved Son—that elder brother in whom we are united, and through whom we claim our filial rights—was unknown to the world, mistaken by the world, for precisely the same reason, because He spake of a Father, trusted a Father, lived in a Father.’
That, as St. John shows us in his Gospel, was not merely a cause why the Pharisees, the leaders of the Jewish religious world, misunderstood Him and reviled Him, but the cause. ‘They knew not,’ he says, ‘that He spake of the Father.’ ‘They have hated,’ Christ says, ‘both me and my Father.’
‘Beloved,’ the Apostle continues, ‘now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He is manifested, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.’ It was a continual temptation to men in the first age, as it is now, to think that they were not the sons of God, that they had no right to claim so high a title. Every time they committed any transgression against God’s law, every time they forgot the duties which they owed to their brethren, the thought would arise in their hearts, ‘Our state is changed; we have no longer a right to that name which betokens a resemblance to God, or sympathy with Him; it may be recovered, but for the present it is lost.’ There was the greatest plausibility in this opinion; it seemed to savour of a becoming humility; it might be justified by the words of holy men, even of St. John himself. And yet it was fatal to all morality; for as I have been saying, to do righteous acts we must be in fellowship with the righteous God; it ministered to the greatest pride and self-righteousness, for it was by the man’s own acts, done when he was in an evil state, that he must entitle himself to God’s favour, and recover His gifts; whatever texts might be twisted into the support of it, practically it condemned the whole Gospel which the Apostles had preached, the baptism with which they were sent to baptize the nations. Therefore he presses the assurance upon them, ‘Now are we the sons of God.’ This faith we must hold fast, for this is the ground of all the good works which God would work in us. We must not suffer any to persuade us, that this is a future or possible blessing, and not one that has been conferred on us already. Not as if there were no future blessings; not as if the love of the Father had exhausted itself in the act of adopting us. There are good things behind the veil, which eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive. We are to be raised to a higher and nobler condition of being; how high, how noble, doth not yet appear. But we do know the kind of good that is in reserve for us, though we do not know the measure or extent of it. ‘We know that when He is manifested, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.’ That is included in our being God’s children; the promise of beholding Him in whose image we are made; the promise of really reflecting that image, instead of any meaner or baser image.
St. John, you see, has not forgotten the subject of Christ’s appearing, whilst he has been reminding the Ephesians of their sonship to God. That appearing is to give them the inheritance which is consequent on their divine birth; that is the manifestation which is to make them what they are intended to be, by showing them what God is. He regards this appearing or manifestation of Christ as not less certain than the appearing or manifestation of the sun in the morning. One he holds to be just as much implied in the constitution of the moral world as the other is in the constitution of the physical world. One, therefore, may be hoped for just as much as the other. When we say at night, ‘We hope the sun will rise to-morrow,’ we do not express any doubt that he will rise; we merely mean that at present he is set. When I say, ‘I hope I shall see the sun to-morrow,’ I speak more doubtfully, for my eyes may be closed on the earth which he illuminates. But in speaking of Christ’s manifestation, the Apostle has no occasion to make this distinction. He believes that Christ rules here and everywhere; that He is the Light of men on this side of death and on the other; but that there His Light will be confessed, not hidden; that there none will be able to shut it out, if they dislike it ever so much.
According to the Ethics in Pope’s ‘Essay on Man,’—
‘Hope springs immortal in the human breast,
Man never is, but always to be blest.’
There is a truth in that statement; the experience of the world shows how it has been kept alive by hope; how men have always been pursuing some object or another; how it seems always to be a little in advance of them, like the end of the rainbow of the boy who is in chase of it. The poet is right in speaking of hope as immortal. It is the very witness and pledge of immortality; to be without it is the sign of death. And yet there is something unspeakably sad in such a view of human existence; that we are cheated into the only good which is possible for us; that what is, has no worth; that shadows have more power over us than substances; that if we could only know the truth of things, we should fold our hands and give over all earnestness and enterprise. Alas! I sometimes think we are not very unlikely to make that experiment. When I see the listless faces of some of our young men, and hear them declare that they have exhausted all sources of enjoyment, almost before the down is off their cheeks, it seems as if we might be permitted to try whether we shall be more sincere and less frivolous, when we no longer anticipate good from anything to come; when we have armed ourselves against disappointment by giving up hope.
Depend upon it, there is no frivolity, there is no insincerity, like that into which a nation falls, when this kind of exhaustion overtakes it; there is no such terrible curse for a man. The only resources left for either are the dicebox and the bottle; one to keep up that excitement which is the bastard form of hope; the other to produce unconsciousness and torpor. But how can these perils which are threatening us so very nearly, be escaped? I believe we must turn from Pope’s or Bolingbroke’s Ethics to St. John’s, that we may find why ‘hope springs immortal in the human breast;’ that we may perceive how the blessedness which is to be, has a ground in the blessedness that is. ‘Now are we the sons of God,’ is the revelation of that ground. That is the true glory of man, the glory which Christ has vindicated for him by taking his nature; a glory which overshadows prince and beggar; a glory which, ever since the Gospel has been received in our land, we have declared to be the possession of little children. But that possession is the commencement of a long hope. The discovery of a Father is not like the discovery of a bag of gold, which we can hold fast against all claimants, and which enables us to eat, drink, and be merry. It is the opening of worlds which that Father has called into existence, which He invites us to explore, of which each may investigate some little portion; of which, after ages upon ages, the wisest will only know a little. It is the opening of wonders deeper than these worlds contain; the wonders of His mind and purpose who created them; depths of love, in which men and angels must be content to be lost. ‘We shall see Him as He is,’ is the short summary, the only one that can be given of this future revelation; with which man can never say that he is, but always that he is to be blest, because there will be something beyond what he has apprehended, for which what he has apprehended makes him long.
This hope, then, is infinite; but it never can be disappointing, because it is the hope of conversing more with realities, of escaping more from what is fantastic and unreal. St. John attributes to it another, even a higher virtue: ‘He that hath this hope in him purifieth himself even as He is pure.’ In the Ethics of the world, especially in those which Christian men have borrowed from the world, hope is often treated as dangerous. ‘beware,’ it is said, ‘of encouraging men to hope too much; when they have attained a higher standard of moral purity and excellence, then we may speak to them of the rewards which God has prepared for those who love Him; till then we should keep them in doubt and uncertainty.’ There is so much truth sprinkled over the outside of this language, as to hide the subtle poison which is within it. St. John makes hope the means, the only means, of purification. Without hope, he intimates, we cannot be pure. And why? All purity comes from the God of Purity; the more we aspire to be like Him, the more we aspire after purity; we cannot aspire unless we believe that it is His will we should be like Him; unless we believe that this is the end and fruition to which He is leading us. What harm can it do any human being to tell him that he may hope to rise out of evil; that he may hope to be a righteous man? ‘Oh,’ you say, ‘but that is not what he hopes for; he is expecting quite a different reward from that.’ Then, the sooner you tell him what reward is prepared for him—what reward he may be sure of, if he does not refuse to desire it, the better. That is the way to cure him of his delusions. Yes! and whatever experienced people may say to the contrary, that is the way to meet the inmost longing of his heart. He may not be conscious of it; he may think he wishes for a stone, but in very deed what he wishes for is bread. The hope that is springing immortal in his heart—the hope that he has been unable to quench, though he has tried to quench it, at many a sweet and many a bitter water, is the hope of being himself better; of some day casting his slough; of some day rising up a real man. You answer what he means, though not perhaps what he says, when you tell him of this hope which maketh not ashamed, when you tell him that he may and shall find all in God which he has failed to find in the world or in himself.
No doubt men exclaimed then, as they may exclaim now, ‘What! you would invite transgressors—people who have broken God’s law—to hope! How audacious!’ St. John anticipates the objection: ‘Every one that doeth sin transgresseth also the law. And sin is the transgression of the law. And ye know that He was manifested to take away our sins, and in Him is no sin. And every one that abideth in Him sinneth not. He that sinneth hath not seen Him, neither known Him.’ As if he had said, ‘If I want to hinder transgression, that is the breach of law, I must get rid of sin, for that leads to all breaches of law; that is the departure from God’s eternal law. Well! Christ was manifested for this very end; that He might deliver us from sin, from the very root of transgression; from the inward disease of which my transgression is the outward symptom. ’And in Him is no sin.’ When, therefore, I bid men hope to see Him, I bid them hope to be free from the principle which issues in the offences that the law condemns. Not to see Him, not to know Him is the cause of sin. To see Him, to know Him, is the emancipation from it.’
A very deep and wide-spreading principle, which St. John enunciates in the most fearless manner. At first it sounds alarming to be told that ‘Every one that sinneth hath not seen Him, nor known Him.’ For he said before, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’ And again, ‘If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the Righteous.’ But he is not contradicting himself. What he is saying is that sin and the sight or knowledge of Christ are antagonistic. The act of sin is the act of shutting our eyes to the true Lord and Deliverer; if we had kept our eyes open, if we had seen and confessed Him, we should not have sinned. This is a truth, and it is an universal truth. It cuts away the pretences of those who call themselves Christians or believers, and make that an excuse for committing sins, because they say God does not treat sins in them as He does in other people. St. John destroys lies and blasphemies of this kind. He affirms once for all, that a man is not a believer, not a Christian, who does any unrighteous and foul acts. But he in nowise hinders any man whatsoever from confessing his sin and betaking himself once more to that hope in God which makes pure.
There is no part of Christian Ethics more profoundly important than this; none on which we are more liable to make mistakes. I have tried to follow St. John step by step, and not to put my own foolish thoughts and interpretations between you and him. I cannot tell you how many of these foolish thoughts and interpretations his words have laid bare in me, and I trust have scattered. If I did not know how much I am inclined every day to doubt whether I have a right to call God my Father, I should never have found how necessary that faith is to you and to all men; if I had not learnt in myself how hard it is to hope, and how much impurity follows from the loss of hope, I should never have had courage to press it upon you and upon all as at once the divinest privilege and the most sacred duty.