1 John III. 7-11.
Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous. He that committeth sin is of the devil; for the devil sinneth from the beginning. For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that He might destroy the works of the devil. 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. In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil: whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother. For this is the message that ye heard from the beginning, that we should love one another.
I HAVE spoken to you already of the teachers who boasted that they had a knowledge of divine mysteries to which vulgar Christians could make no pretensions. They were the initiated; the rest were novices. Simple people, the little children of the flock, were likely to be much staggered by such lofty words. Their humility made them think that they deserved the contemptuous treatment which was bestowed on them; they could not tell that the others might not have the profound insight for which they gave themselves credit. The old Apostle speaks to them with a confidence which they felt he at least had a right to assume. ‘Little children, let no man deceive you: he that doeth righteousness is righteous, even as He is righteous.’ Knowledge, you are told, is the thing to be chiefly desired. Even so. Knowledge of the Righteous One; knowledge of Him who makes us righteous. And doing righteousness—sincere, just, truthful acts,—are the results and signs of this knowledge. They show whether we have this knowledge or are without it. He comes back to the test which these self-exalting doctors wished to get rid of; the severest test; the most levelling test. But by coming back to it, he vindicates a higher knowledge for the humblest disciples than that which those who refused to be reckoned among mere disciples could claim for themselves. The knowledge of Christ, as the standard of all righteousness, he declares to be the heritage of them all; a knowledge involving practice, and advancing as it advances.
He has told them what will make them righteous; fellowship or intercourse with a Righteous Lord of their spirits. He goes on to tell them how they become sinful; viz. by holding intercourse with an unrighteous spirit, by submitting to him as their Lord. ‘He that committeth sin is of the Devil, for the Devil sinneth from the beginning.’ The word ‘Diabolos’ means Accuser or Slanderer. What he says, giving his words their most literal sense, is, that one who sins or goes astray from God does so by listening to the voice of a spirit who accuses or slanders God. I have often been told by persons whose learning I respect, that this is the doctrine of an old Jew, which we in the nineteenth century have long outlived. They speak, no doubt, for themselves; they mean that there are no facts in their own experience, to which this doctrine of the old Jew corresponds. If it were so with me, I should be silent. For I have found so much in my own mind which his teaching has explained, which I could not have understood without it, that I should think he was probably right where I could not follow him, and that hereafter he might discover something to me which was now hidden from me. But I cannot pretend that this is the case. What he said to the Ephesians about this Accuser does answer to the inmost witness of my conscience.
I know that I did not learn this doctrine by the precept of men. I was not taught it in my childhood; those I reverenced, and still reverence, considered it a fable. As I grew up, I felt the same motives to retain that opinion which act upon many of my contemporaries. The notion of a Devil was associated in my mind with many superstitions which science had confuted; it was held by vulgar people among whom I did not wish to be reckoned. It was quite possible, if I cared for that, to pass muster with the orthodox and respectable, though I was sceptical on this point. But there are some things which are more terrible than being confounded with vulgar people. It is more terrible not to be honest with oneself. It is more terrible to think that one is given over hopelessly to work iniquity. It is more terrible to be cut off from all fellowship with human beings, if they are vulgar.
Now there come to me every day whispers not received through the ear but heard in the heart, that God is not the Being whom Jesus Christ manifested; not a Righteous and True Being; not one whom I may trust; not one who means good to me and to my brethren; not one who cares that I should do right, or who will give me strength to do right. With these whispers come others also very strange, against persons whom I know, persons, possibly, who have done me wrong, quite as likely persons who have done me nothing but good; suspicions of their kindness; doubts of their character; hints that they may be plotting something very evil. Then there are whispers more directly affecting oneself; incitements to think foully and to feel foully; to be malicious against those to whom one owes only forgiveness, affection, gratitude,
It may be that this experience is a peculiar one; but I do not believe it is. I find people of the most opposite characters, living in the most different circumstances, who report the same things of themselves. I read of horrible thoughts of jealousy coming over this mind, horrible thoughts of ambition into that,—and of murder being the result of both. It is, of course, the most natural solution in the world to say, ‘Oh! these suggestions proceeded from some vile servant or companion.’ Possibly they did; but like words from that servant and companion might have gone in at one ear, as we say, and out at the other; they might have been repulsed indignantly; how did they get the dominion over me, over my spirit? ‘Oh! that was your own fault; that shows that you were to blame.’ There is no question that I was to blame wherever the suggestion came from. I know that well enough. No one who has had such thoughts, unless he is a miserable self-deceiver, can shift the blame from himself; he must take it home to himself. But did the thoughts originate with me? I could not say so to please any theorist, or to get credit for ever so much liberality and wisdom. I might have rejected the thoughts, but they were presented to me. I may bewilder myself—all men have bewildered themselves at some time or other, by saying, ‘I shuffled the cards, I played both hands;’ but it will not do; it is not a fair representation of the facts: to a man in earnest, it is a quite maddening explanation of them. Did they, then, originate with some other mortal? It is the same story again. If he is making his confession on his death-bed, he too will speak of the thought having been in some way offered to him. He knows then that this does not make the case better for him; but he uses the language because it is the only natural language; the only language which sets forth the thing as it was.
Let me repeat what I have said once again. St. John never for a moment says or dreams that he who commits sin commits it because the devil or the accuser obliges him to do it. The thought of being obliged or forced is not only not implied in his words; it is contradicted by them. The names Tempter and Accuser do not indicate it; the word Sin excludes it. That must belong to the man himself. I have shown you in a former Lecture how inseparably it is connected with choice and with conscience, i.e. with the man’s own self. What the Apostle does say, is that sin comes from contact or fellowship between our spirit and a sinful spirit; that to commit sin is to become his liegemen, his bondsmen. Do you think I shall assert my responsibility for my own acts more strongly if I throw St. John’s doctrine overboard? It seems to me that I shall then be in the greatest danger of denying my responsibility. I shall fancy that sin is so much a part of me, so much implied in my existence, that I cannot escape it. Under the words, my inclination, my tendency, my disposition, there will lurk all excuses for wrong doing, and at the same time the most utter despair of reformation. And they must cut me off from my fellow creatures.
The inclination, tendency, disposition, which is strong in some of you, is perhaps weak in me; that which is strong in me, is weak in you. Each tries to make out a case for himself; each pleads that his infirmity is irresistible; each looks hardly upon his neighbour’s, of which he knows nothing. It is no fancy—you know that it is what we are all tempted to do continually. It is the secret of the intolerance and want of sympathy among us; it is the secret of our hugging our own vices till they destroy us. But if we heartily believed that we had a common enemy plotting against us all, making use of every man’s peculiar gift or characteristic which is meant for his blessing, to work his ruin, accusing our Father in heaven to us all, accusing every brother to another; persuading each of us that he is not a child of God, that he does not belong to a family of brothers; should we indulge this miserable tenderness of that which is preying upon our own vitals, should we indulge our cruelty by mocking the diseases and derangements of our brothers? Should we not feel that we had a common fight; that each man who stood his own ground firmly was doing something for all; that each might aid some other, even by his wounds and his falls?
He says, ‘for the devil sinneth from the beginning.’ Does that mean that sin was from the beginning; that Evil is as old as Good? Think whether that is possible! Does not the very word sinneth show that it is impossible? Does not that indicate the departure from an object—the transgression of a Law? There was the Object then, there was the Law. Whoever sinned first, confessed Good to be; he said that a law was binding him, and that he wished to shake it off. All, then, which can be intended by this expression, ‘the devil sinneth from the beginning,’ is that there is a spirit who sinned before man sinned, one who tempted or seduced—(I beseech you to use these words in their common every-day sense, and not to put another sense into them which shall connect them with some kind of compulsion)—one who tempted or seduced men to make the experiment of separating themselves from God, of asserting their independence. The phrase ‘from the beginning’ intimates that there has been no period of the existence of human beings in which they have not been liable to the assaults of this Tempter; that accusations against God, reasons for doubting and distrusting Him, have been offered to one man after another, to one generation after another. This is just what the Scripture affirms; just the assumption which goes through the book from Genesis to the Apocalypse.
But though this is true—though the fact of Temptation is implied throughout the Bible, and though its histories signify nothing, if that is not a fact for all men—it is not true that there are frequent allusions to a one Tempter, to an Evil Spirit, in the Old Testament. It is not true that St. John speaks so confidently of a Devil because he was a Jew, and was filled with Hebrew opinions. For, when the Devil is introduced into the Law, the Psalms, and the Prophets, he is spoken of twenty times in any single Gospel or Epistle. How is this? St. John tells us in the next clause of this verse: ‘For this cause the Son of God was manifested that He might destroy the works of the devil.’ This is the characteristically Gospel or New Testament doctrine. The Son of God has been manifested to answer the accusations against God, which all men have heard and believed, which sorrow, sin, and death have appeared to confirm; He has manifested them to be slanders; He has shown forth God as He is; the Light in whom is no darkness. He has been manifested to answer the accusations by which man has been separated from man, the cruel whispers and suspicions which are infused into our hearts one against another. He has been manifested as the common Head of our race; in Him only we can see it; in Him only we can know how blessed and glorious a race it is; in Him each man may honour and reverence every other man. He has been manifested to refute the accusations which each of us hears from the Evil Spirit against himself; accusations which cannot be refuted, which our consciences affirm to be true, while we live apart from Christ and try to have a righteousness and life of our own; accusations which we can throw aside as false and calumnious, when we learn to say with St. Paul, ‘We are dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord;—we live, yet not we, but Christ liveth in us.’
Seeing then that it is the New Testament which sets forth the Son of God, the complete justifier of God, it is the same New Testament which sets forth the Evil Spirit as the accuser of God. Seeing it is the New Testament which sets forth the Son of Man as the complete justifier of Man, it is the New Testament which sets forth the Evil Spirit as the accuser of Man. Seeing it is the New Testament which sets forth the Son of Man as the justifier of each of us from the torments of his own conscience, it is the New Testament which sets forth the Evil Spirit as ever seeking to darken and disturb our consciences. The one revelation confronts the other. The revelation of an author of death would be intolerable if it was not met by a revelation of the Prince of Life. Contemplating them together, they deliver us from that awful question by which the men of the old world were agitated, whether there might not be something of wrong—something to be avoided and fled from—in the character and purposes of the Creator; whether our race might not after all be given up to the curse which it had drawn upon itself; whether any one could dare to say, ‘I am not bound and sold to my enemy; for is not that enemy myself?’ If we accept the message which St. John brought to the Ephesians and lay it up in our hearts, we can solve these questions when they present themselves to us in all different and frightful shapes; we can feel that our most personal and inward struggles are yet human struggles; we can rise up and do God’s work, knowing that whoever is against us He is on our side.
Then follows the sentence,—‘Whosoever is born of God,’ or rather every one that is born of God, ‘doth not commit sin,’ or doeth not sin, ‘because his seed abideth in him, and he cannot sin because he is born of God.’ ‘How,’ you will ask, ‘can this be, if what you said last week is true, that it is the duty of every man to believe that he is born of God; if what you have said now is true that he yields to the evil spirit, when he gives up that faith? If this is the test of being born of God that a man does not sin; can any one of us—(not to say all), claim such a dignity?’ Exactly; that is the right way of stating the difficulty. This sentence cuts off all from that title, if it cuts off any. As I reminded you last Sunday, it is not some one else but St. John himself, who tells us that if any man say, he hath no sin, he deceiveth himself, and the truth is not in him; it is St. John himself who says, ‘If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father.’ What he says here—what he was bound to say, unless all his former teaching respecting God was to be void—is, that no evil thought, word, act whatsoever can have God for its author. But the evil acts which I do, proceed from me. I cannot shift them upon any one else. How then can I say that I am born of God? I do not say it; that evil act is a disclaimer of my heavenly birth; here is the greatest proof that it is a lying act. I make myself another man. I choose another parent. Your common language justifies this teaching. You say to a child or friend, ‘It was not your own true self which came out in those words and acts. It was a vile counterfeit. Send away the changeling! Let me see him whom I love again.’ St. John gives us the rationale of these common expressions. That man, he says, who does the sinful act, is not God’s child; he cannot sin; the seed out of which he is formed is altogether good. What is the practical inference? That every one who has disclaimed his true birth by an evil act should reclaim it; when ‘he comes to himself,’ this is our Lord’s expression, he will remember his true Father; he will say, I will arise and go to Him; he will find His Father on the way to meet him. Before that, he was not himself, he had lost himself.
And now the next verse will explain itself to you without much effort of mine. ‘In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil. Whosoever doeth not righteousness, is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother.’ Sinful acts, words, thoughts, he has declared, cannot have a divine origin. To refer them to the divine seed in a man, is to commit the greatest of all contradictions. But they must have some origin; they must spring from some seed. What must that be called? It must be called, he affirms, a devilish seed. If, therefore, you see sinful acts and righteous acts coming from the same person, you must say that there is in that person a heavenly seed and a hellish seed. And you must say that a man identifying himself with that hellish seed makes himself a child of the devil, though he ought to count himself a child of God. No fear of a contradiction must lead you to shrink from such a statement as this. The contradiction exists; you cannot destroy it by shutting your eyes to it. But you can produce a most fatal confusion of things eternally distinct, eternally opposed, by refusing to state the case as it is, to whatever perplexity of phrase you may be driven. Herein, and herein only, the children of God and the children of the devil are manifest. Nothing but good comes from good; nothing but evil comes from evil. If you declare that nothing but good comes from any man you meet with on this earth, some startling wrong in him will confute your assertion. If you declare that nothing but evil comes from any man you meet with on this earth, some good which you did not expect will confute that assertion. Be honest, then; do not invent theories to explain away facts. Do not hide the facts under delusive formulas which will stand no searching examination. But let all wickedness, without respect of persons, be assigned to the devil as its parent; let all good, without respect of persons, be assigned to God as its parent. And let each person be encouraged to say, I have no right whatever to acknowledge the evil spirit as my parent. If I have done so, it has been under a dark and horrible infatuation. For in very deed nothing in me is of him, but that which is destroying me. No living powers, energies, affections are from him; only that which extinguishes my powers, energies, and affections, only that which is making me not a man. I have a right to say that God is my parent. For every power, energy, affection, that is awake or slumbering in me, I have received from Him. Jesus Christ has said that He is His Father. He has bidden us say, ‘Our Father.’
St. John is sometimes called the Apostle of Love. That they might give us that impression of him, painters have chosen to represent the last of the Apostles—who must have written all his books in his old age, perhaps in extreme old age—as a beardless youth, with a delicate complexion and a feminine expression. I hope Mr. Ruskin has warned us in this College sufficiently of departures from fact, of false ideals, such as these, by whatsoever great names they have been sanctioned. This mode of conceiving St. John is especially misleading and mischievous. Hitherto in this Epistle he has spoken much of righteousness; only once about men loving each other, and that in connexion with keeping a commandment; only once about God’s love to us, and that in connexion with our doing righteousness. His language has been simple and broad; not sentimental at all. He has told us in plain terms of men who lied and did not the truth. His discourse has been that of a father; of a father who would encourage his children, but who, from his care for them, would rather reprove than fondle them. It has been that of a man deeply experienced, not the least of one whose countenance was not furrowed by thought and sorrow. It has been that of one who has known temptations, and has been out in rough weather, not the least of one who has kept himself from contact with evil lest it should spoil his innocence.
I make these remarks here for two reasons. One is that we are coming to that portion of his Epistle in which he does dwell with great particularity upon the love of men for each other and upon the love of God for man; to that portion of it therefore which has won for him this special reputation. I could not enter upon the passages on this subject without warning you that in them, quite as little as in those we have gone through, shall we hear of anything answering to that sentimental love which the artists suppose that he wished to glorify. Love of the brethren, we shall find, is with him a habit or state of mind which leads directly to practice, and is treated as utterly worthless apart from practice. The love of God to man is manifested not in any tenderness to his evil ways, but in bringing him into the right way. The two indications of the offspring of the evil spirit he gives us here are, (1) he doeth not righteousness, (2) he loveth not his brother. We shall find that the two are never separated. Love does not interfere with the strictness of right, but establishes it. Right does not make love less deep, or less universal; apart from right it would be superficial and partial.
These principles are some of the most vital and essential in Christian ethics, and there are none which we are in greater danger of forgetting. If you say to me, ‘But what do you mean by Right, and Love? how do you distinguish one from another? how do you determine when one or another is outraged?’ I reply, ‘These are, indeed, the most needful of all inquiries; I hope that I shall not—I am sure that the Apostle St. John will not—evade them, even if they take the most searching form.’ They do not take the most searching form, as I have tried to shew you before, when you crave for definitions of Right and Love. These it is easy enough to give; different schoolmen could provide twenty or a hundred at a short notice. What we want is some help for discerning right from wrong in the business of every day and hour. What we want is to know when love or hatred has possession of us and is ruling us. When you hear great words like these, words that are wrought into the heart of every language under heaven, you know, you positively know, that there are realities corresponding to them. You cannot take a step without that assumption; if you try to do it, you will find that you are unawares thrusting in a notion of right, a notion of love, which you have framed for yourselves, and are making that the reality. These notions are, indeed, poor things; we must try to get clear of them in moral studies as we do in physical, by a steady experimental pursuit of the truths which are hidden beneath them. I hope we have gained some help from this Epistle in learning what that method is, and in applying it; I hope we shall gain still more hereafter.
I can testify for myself, that no part of it has been of more use to me, than that of which I have spoken to-day. And this was my second reason for alluding to the supposed fondness of St. John, for the softer and tenderer side of morality and of the Gospel. His teaching about the devil is not at all agreeable to those who dwell exclusively on the sunny aspects of the world and of life, and would shut their eyes to whatever is dark and terrible. They like to hear of a Being who is all-gracious and loving; the vision of one who is the enemy of all that is gracious and loving shocks them: they wish to suppose that it belongs to the world’s infancy, and that it disappears as we know more of optics, and can distinguish between real forms and the shadows that are thrown from ourselves. Now, I am quite sure that men in other days did confound shadows which were cast from themselves with objects in Nature; that they saw spectres coming towards them which their own fancy—generally their own guilty fancy—had raised; that they feared where no fear was. I am thankful to any natural philosopher who assists in dispelling any of these phantoms; I believe that, in doing so, he is a useful fellow labourer with the moralist and the theologian. For the moralist and the theologian, if he understands his own business, if he follows St. Paul and St. John, asserts, what all these natural discoveries confirm, that it is not among God’s works one is to look for shapes and forms of evil; that they are very good; that the sorrow and death which have mingled with them and overshadowed them, come from some other source than themselves; that they are groaning to be delivered from these; that their day of emancipation is coming. Moralists and theologians therefore are driven to account for the evil which they see—and which natural philosophers see affecting the world and affecting themselves by spiritual not material agencies. I must think of evil as spiritual, as present, as appealing to my spirit, as appealing to me. I cannot deny its presence, or its influence. But if I believe that the spirit who tempts me to be unrighteous is a deceiver and a liar; that he seeks to make me deny a truth which has been manifested, to distrust a goodness which has come forth to redeem and to unite my race, then I can maintain, hour by hour, the good fight of faith; I can say to the accuser, ‘Get thee behind me. I know that the Son of God has appeared to destroy thy works, I know that He will appear to make Good and Truth triumphant for ever.’