1 John III. 24; and IV. 1—9.
“And he that keepeth His commandments dwelleth in Him, and He in him. And hereby we know that He abideth in us, by the Spirit which He hath given us. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: and every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already it is in the world. Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. They are of the world: therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them. We are of God: he that knoweth God heareth us; he that is not of God heareth not us. Hereby know we the spirit of truth, and the spirit of error. Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not, knoweth not God: for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.”
WE are again reminded, by the first of these verses, that the expression, Abide in me, is characteristic of St. John, and that we could not change it for any more formal or artificial phrase without enfeebling, perhaps destroying, the truth which he is imparting to us. If I call your attention very often to these peculiarities in his language, it is partly because I believe we have an especial interest in vindicating them from the contempt which has been cast upon them, and in restoring them to the place which the language of the schools has usurped. Mr. Carlyle used to talk about an ‘Age of Work’ which is at hand. Such an age, I conceive, will be very impatient of technicalities; will greatly prize all forms of speech which are drawn from realities, and which can be interpreted by the sights and sounds of the common world, by the business of life. Men of business have never made a greater mistake than when they have complained of St. John’s mode of thinking, and of uttering his thoughts, as fantastical. They have a good right to complain of many of the thoughts and of the discourses that pass current in religious circles, as very fantastical. Many of us they have a right to call dreamers. There is flightiness about our talk as if we disdained the earth, and were always trying to mount above it, though we are continually dropping down to it by the force of an irresistible attraction. It is too true, that religious men often scorn the obligations which hold other men to fair and honourable dealing, without acquiring any stronger obligations. Therefore, they are often observed to be less scrupulous in their outward transactions, less consistent in their habitual morality, than those who rarely confess the influence of spiritual fears and hopes. I cannot wonder that practical men, who notice these facts, should strive diligently to clear their minds of what they call the phantoms of an invisible world, and to occupy themselves only with the present and the palpable. But it is not easy to do that, supposing it was desirable. Have you ever known any one who quite succeeded in the effort?
any one who did not feel somewhat restless when his hold on what is present and palpable seemed to be growing feebler? But would it be desirable if it were easy? Would it be honest? Are there not as many facts—facts of ordinary experience—which point to things that we cannot see and touch, as to things that we can? Are there not abundant “proofs” that we have at least as much to do with the one as with the other? Is there not some evidence that we cannot deal bravely with the things which our senses tell us of, that we must be subject to them,—unless we have some standing ground from which we can overlook them?
This is the ground on which St. John would have us ‘abide.’ He at all events has no notion of flying into the air for the sake of shunning the earth. What he affirms is, that the true centre of our human life, of all its thoughts, energies, hopes, is in the unseen world. What he says is, that there is an attractive force drawing us to that centre which is no less potent than the force which draws bodies to the earth as their centre. He affirms that we are created to abide or dwell in God; that in Him, not in our own aspirations or dreams, is the foundation of our life and purposes; that our morality is derived from His morality; that we may have dominion over the things which He has created, because we are related to Himself.
The words so often repeated, ‘He that keepeth His commandment, abideth in Him’ are a death to dreaming; they maintain the practical character of St. John’s teaching. But the scientific character of it would be lost and it would be entirely inconsistent with itself, if the words, ‘And He in him’ had not been added. Wonderful and awful as the idea of God abiding in a man is, you cannot read any portion of the Old Testament, without perceiving that prophets and seers expected a covenant, the ground of which should be, ‘I will dwell in you;’ any portion of the New Testament without perceiving that this is the Covenant of which the Apostles and Evangelists believed themselves to be the heralds. After St. John’s exhortation to the young men respecting the Word of God who dwelt in them and enabled them to overcome the wicked one; after his assurance to his little children that they had an unction from the Holy One, which would enable them to know all things; it would have been strange if he had shrunk from the boldest statements on this subject. To have maintained that we can dwell in God without asserting the converse of the proposition, would have been to change the whole method of his discourse; to have laid a human and not a divine foundation for his ethics.
We are upon very sacred ground. To approach so near the inmost sanctuary of a human soul would be dreadful, even if we were not also approaching Him before whom angels veil their faces. My impulse would be to leave the subject in the mist which commonly surrounds it, and not to encounter questions which may easily become profane. But this course is not possible for us, if it was for our forefathers. The unseen world has been invaded. We cannot help hearing the most frivolous talk about spirits and their doings, and their intercourse with men. The most sturdy materialism has not been proof against what seems the most inconclusive evidence of spiritual powers and presences. But the acceptance of that inconclusive evidence by persons so little likely to be moved by it is conclusive evidence that the spiritual is necessary to man, that he must have it under some conditions. To determine what these conditions shall be, must be of the highest moment. Let us see whether our Apostle will not assist us, and whether we may not walk safely under his guidance in a road which we could not travel without the greatest risks by ourselves.
‘By this we know that He dwelleth in us, even by the Spirit which He hath given us. Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world.’
I have joined these two verses together, though they have been placed by those who divided the New Testament in separate chapters, because I think it is very important that you should understand what the Christian doctrine respecting a Spirit given to us by God, and dwelling with us, has to do with those notions respecting spirits, spiritual influences, spiritual communications, which have been so prevalent in other times, and are so prevalent in ours. The Apostle leads us directly to this inquiry. He speaks first of the Spirit by which we know that God dwells in us; then of other spirits that were in the world, which might or might not be of God. He is evidently not alluding here to that Tempter or Accuser, of whom and his progeny he said so much in the third chapter. He is not pronouncing upon the good or evil of these spiritual influences. But he says they require to be tried. And he intimates very distinctly that there were men in his day who were turning the faith in spiritual influence to an immoral and mischievous account,
He does not then discredit the fact that spiritual influences were widely diffused; he does not monopolize such influences for the Christian Church. How could he discredit this fact? How can we? Are there not myriads of influences about us continually, which ’do not act upon our senses but upon our spirits, which do not proceed from things that may be seen and handled, but from the spirits of men? Are not the influences that you come under in our College of this kind? I do not say whether they are good or evil; but they must be spiritually good or spiritually evil. And an institution for education is not different in that respect from what we call political institutions. People talk of the electors of Mayo having been subjected to spiritual influences, because they were exposed to intimidation by the denunciations of certain priests. This language is correct, but we must not limit it to such cases. The electors of Oxford who vote for Mr. Thackeray in consequence of any speech he may make to them, are just as much under spiritual influence. He says very truly that there are week-day preachers as well as Sunday preachers; preachers in newspapers as in pulpits. And I say that on week-days as on Sundays, you cannot escape from spiritual influences, if you take ever so much pains to escape from them.
If we once understand this statement, we shall listen, I conceive, with far less of vague astonishment than we sometimes do, to the reports of those who say that we may receive communications from the unseen world, from those who do not speak to us with mortal lips and look at us with mortal eyes. Receive communications from them! Why, are we not doing it every day and hour? If a person gives me some doggrel, and tells me that it was sent from Shakespeare or Milton, I may use my discretion whether I shall believe him or not. But if I do not, one main reason will be, because I have received and am receiving spiritual communications from these very persons which do not at all resemble in character or style those which reach me through the new media; because words of theirs written long before we were born, and called by such names as Hamlet and Paradise Lost, are fresh and living communications to us every day, and beget thoughts in us which the recent verses said to proceed from them are quite incapable of begetting.
Writers are for mankind. We are told also that communications come to individuals from those whom they have known and cared for, and who were acquainted with circumstances interesting to them, though perhaps indifferent to the world. Here, again, we have to complain of the exceeding poverty and worthlessness of the messages which are brought to us from the unseen world, not of the assumption that it is right and natural that such should be sent. Are they not sent to us? Is not every recollection of a departed friend in some hour of sadness and temptation—confirming us in a right resolution, restraining us when we would do something wrong—a message from the world of spirits? I speak literally, not figuratively. It is easy to talk of such recollections as only acts of memory. But what is an act of memory? The ancients thought Memory a most wonderful and mysterious power; they called it the Mother of all Arts. I cannot think they were wrong: certainly they did not exaggerate the seriousness and awfulness of that act which brings back to us words that have been spoken, deeds that have been done, our own states of mind, in years that are gone; which brings them back to us as present realities. The more we consider what is implied in such an exercise, the more we must tremble at the greatness of our own being; the more we must feel in what close relation we stand to eternity. And if, instead of saying, ‘I remember a friend, ’I call back his image to me,’ I say, ‘He is actually conversing with me; he is suggesting thoughts to me; he is ’sympathising with me and upholding me when I am ’weak;’ there is an increase of awe, perhaps of joy. But I do not feel that I have introduced a more difficult or incredible kind of speech. I am not sure that it is not a more simple one, more accordant with experience, even more like what men in all ages have felt must be true; more like what the analogies of science would lead one to expect.
I do, indeed, feel for myself that there is a veil between me and those with whom I should most wish to hold converse. It is the veil of my own baseness and corruption—not one that exists, so far as I can perceive, in the nature of things,—not one that need be if one’s pride were exchanged for humility, and one’s suspicion for trust. And the sense of this hindrance makes me regard with more revolting and disgust the sort of intercourse which is carried on through our modern media in England and America; an intercourse which demands no moral purification; which has reference to the idlest topics; which may be carried on in drawing-rooms amidst whispers and talking and the shuffling of cards; which keeps alive all the vanity, restlessness, and folly from which we most need to be delivered. In Mr. Wordsworth’s beautiful poem, Protesilaus says to Laodamia:-
‘The invisible world with thee hath sympathized,
Be thy affections raised and solemnized.’
If we cultivate our sympathies with the invisible world according to the new fashion, our affections are likely to sink even below their ordinary level, to become more frivolous than is their wont.
But in fact what I have called a new fashion is a very old one; there have been traders in spiritual enchantments in all ages. St. John intimates that they abounded in his time. We know that they did. All the writings of the Apostles are full of allusions to them. The Apostles appear to have thought that they had scarcely any more important vocation than to deliver the poor and the rich from the moral dangers to which they were exposed from such men as Simon Magus and Elymas, and from such women as the poor girl at Philippi, who brought her master much gain by soothsaying. But you will observe this difference between their treatment of these cases and that which is common among us. They do not deny that these people had powers, and were able to produce startling effects. They do not say, ‘You are merely using natural, mechanical agents to create an impression that you have some spiritual faculty, that you have relations with the unseen world.’ Probably they would have had some right to make these assertions. If they had known more of physical laws themselves, and had cared to apply their knowledge, they might have shown that the enchanters were ‘one-eyed leaders of the blind;’ that they had just enough acquaintance with Nature to deceive those who had none. This may have been so; but if the Apostles had been perfectly certain in every given instance that it was so, I doubt whether they would have made the same use of their information which we should make of it. For they would have felt that whatever form a lie happens to take, the lie itself is spiritual and not material, the product of a bad spirit, and to be denounced in that character. They would have felt also that it was not a lie in these men to speak of themselves as spiritual, and as subject to spiritual agencies, and as spiritual agents themselves upon other men. These appeared to them great truths, which it was very shocking that any should play with, as if they were not truths, but means of earning money or admiration.
It was not a matter of doubt, but of certainty, that men and women were thrown into convulsions and ecstasies. They boasted that it was the effect of spiritual or demoniacal power. The Apostles could not deny it, and had no desire to deny it. If men are spirits and have a dim notion that they are, and yet have a very faint apprehension of their spiritual dignity, they must be continually sinking into spiritual slavery; they must be the victims of spirits—clothed with bodies or unclothed, speaking to them through mortal organs or without them—which are subtler or stronger than themselves. If they can be raised out of that slavery, if they can acquire the liberty of moral, accountable beings, children of God, that is infinitely desirable. It might not be at all desirable, but a great loss to them, that they should be told, ‘All your sense of being subject to a will stronger than your own, of being its tool and instrument, was a mere imagination. It meant nothing.’ There are philosophical frauds, as there are pious frauds; this, it seems to me, is one. The conscience of a man who has felt the bondage must reject the message. The Apostles would not defy the witness of the conscience. But if they bade the demonised man rise up in Christ’s name, and claim the rights of a man, the use of his will and reason,—the conscience did not reject them, but welcomed them.
They claimed the power to do this, not because they had been endowed with a spirit which distinguished them from other men, but precisely as God’s witnesses that it had pleased Him to baptize all nations, to bestow His Spirit upon a family taken from all classes of men, specially from those who were not mighty, or rich, or noble, or learned. The casting out demons in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, the proclaiming Him to be the anointed of the Father, was the affirming that this Spirit had been given to men, that their chains might be broken asunder, and they might look up as redeemed children to the Father of Spirits. St. John is not here asserting this power for himself, but he is explaining in what sense and for what end it had been committed to him, by telling his flock that it is for them to try the spirits whether they be of God. Each one of them, he affirms, might do this for himself, nay, must do it for himself. The argument whether the spiritual influences that were acting upon them were pernicious or healthy, wicked or charitable, must be pursued in the secret chambers of their souls. But there, in those chambers, they would find, if they sought, the Spirit of all truth, who would enable them to discern between the spirits which were of His own nature, which were working together with Him, and those which only came to fill them with self-conceit, to draw them from their fellows and from God, ultimately to make them victims of every cheat. The Apostle, though unable to follow them into recesses into which only God might enter, could yet supply them with a test which his own experience had ascertained to be infallible.
‘Hereby know ye the Spirit of God. Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God. And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is not of God. And this is that spirit of antichrist whereof ye have heard that it shall come, and even now already is it in the world.’
Something of what is implied in the confession that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh—something of what is implied in saying that He is not come in the flesh—we have heard in that passage of the second chapter where he spoke to us before of the antichrists. Something more of what each implies we shall learn as we proceed in this chapter. But one doctrine was contained in it which greatly concerns spiritual teachers and prophets of all ages, of all countries, whether constituting an order or starting up to proclaim what the members of an order have left unproclaimed. ’To confess that Jesus the anointed is come in the flesh, is to confess that there is a medium of spiritual communications between the visible and the invisible world, between earth and heaven. It is to confess that there is one Mediator for all men. And for any man to say that the visible world is divided from the invisible, and that only by the arts of some priest, or seer, or “medium,” the chasm can be bridged over, and an intercourse created between them; this is to deny that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. The denial may be made by those who in words affirm their faith in Him most loudly. Every spiritual person who thinks highly of himself, and does not clothe himself with the humility of Him who became a servant, and does not desire to assert for every man the rights of fellowship with God and His Son and His angels, must seriously consider whether he is not one of these antichrists.
He continues, ‘Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them; for greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world. They are of the world, therefore speak they of the world, and the world heareth them.’ In what sense and on what grounds the men of the Ephesian church were exhorted not to love the world, or the things that are in the world; why it is affirmed that, if they do, the love of the Father is not in them, we have considered already. Here the world is again formally and directly opposed to God; the spirit of the world to the Spirit of God. Here again it is assumed that the little children of the flock have a right to claim the position of being of God, sons of God; or, to speak more correctly, that they have no right to take up any other position. The danger is, that they may be tempted to forsake that which has been given them, to forget their birthright. In resisting those who promised them such spiritual illuminations as would set them above the commandments, above their fellows, above the faith of a Christ who had taken flesh, in resisting these seducers and determining to maintain the state of little children, to abide in the Father and the Son,—they had overcome a world spirit, a spirit which acknowledged the world as its parent, and which the world was quite ready to own as its child. For though the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eye have so much to do with the nature of a world, yet the world has its own spirit too, or rather a legion of spirits, which fulfil its commands and take possession of its servants. All those tempers which lead men to worship what they see or to worship themselves, or to pursue some vision of selfish glory and happiness, are such spirits; mighty over our feeble wills, but not so mighty as the Spirit of God, who is drawing them back to their Father’s house, when they are most inclined to wander in search of another home and another father.
To understand the next verse aright, we have need to remember what the Apostles’ work on earth was, what they were living and dying to do; otherwise, we may easily read it in a sense which is not only not the true one, but exactly the reverse of the true one: ‘We are of God; he that knoweth God, heareth us; he that is not of God, knoweth not us; by this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.’ ‘Is not that,’ an opponent may exclaim, ‘the very temper of a sectarian? We are right, every one else is wrong. God approves of us, God dislikes all else. You are safe only among us; you must be the servant of the prince of lies, if you do not join with us.’ Let it be admitted at once that the words are not only capable of being so interpreted, but that they have been interpreted so again and again; that we are all continually tempted so to interpret them. And now consider whether St. John could have intended us to do this; whether we shall be yielding to his authority and following his example, if we turn them to this use.
He was the preacher of a Gospel to all nations. That Gospel was the announcement that Jesus Christ had manifested the Life of God, and had opened the kingdom of God to men. The main opposition to this Gospel proceeded from the Jewish sects, each of which desired to attract proselytes to itself, each of which denounced all out of its pale as false and evil. Another part of the opposition proceeded from the worshippers of visible and divided Gods who were bidden to turn from idols to the one living God. When the Church was formed, its great difficulty arose from the sects which sprang up within it, each fraternising in the name of some leader, each denouncing the leaders whom others followed. Those of whom St. John is speaking here as leaving the unpopular Church for the world which welcomed and embraced them, were the founders of sects, each to be distinguished by some opinion and by the name of him who had been its parent. Reflect on these facts, and I think you will come to the conclusion, that when St. John said so boldly, ‘He that knoweth God knoweth us,’ he signified that those who were weary of all opinions and sects, and wanted a Living God, the Father of a whole family in heaven and earth, would find the doors of their Church open day and night to receive them, would find that they were claimed among them as brothers. And in like manner that when he added, ‘He that is not of God knoweth not us,’ he must have meant to say, ‘Those who are seeking for something else than a Living God, for something else than the Father of a family,—must and will turn from us. We shall have no attraction for them. For in this universal name we are determined to fraternise.’ And the final words, ‘By this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error,’ will naturally and necessarily imply, ‘We rest all upon this issue. We are not careful to prove that we are right and that you are wrong. We simply say, God is Truth, and those that forsake Him and His fountain of living water for any muddy cisterns and earthly springs, such as are to be found in schools, sects, systems, are in error. And all we have to do is to abide in Him, and leave the judgment of ourselves and of all men to Him,’
The context of St. John’s life and writings would, I think, very sufficiently fix this sense of the passage and not the other to be its sense. But if any doubt remains in your minds, then turn to the immediate context of this very verse.
‘Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.’ We have reached one of those passages to which I alluded in a former Lecture, those on which St. John’s fame as the Apostle of Love is founded. And what are we to say of it? Are these words, ‘Let us love one another,’ less strict and severe words than the words, ‘Be ye holy,’ which are used in the Old Testament? Has it been more easy to follow this exhortation than that? No; this has been the precept in the whole canon of the Bible, which men have found in practice to be the hardest; the one which they have failed most signally in keeping. Oh! how many times we can most of us remember when we would gladly have made any compromise with our consciences, would gladly have made the most costly sacrifices to God, if He would only have excused us from this duty of loving, of which our nature seemed utterly incapable! St. John knew that men would feel this, that they must feel it. He knew the tricks to which they would resort to persuade themselves that they were obeying this commandment, even when they were transgressing it most flagrantly. He sets it down, therefore, not as a mild substitute for other and earlier rules, but as one which contained them all in itself, and to observe which demanded a power such as all the resources of our human nature and of the world do not supply. And do not suppose that he made the exhortation easier by saying, ‘Let us love one another.’ It is far easier to feel kindly, to act kindly towards those with whom we are seldom brought into contact, whose tempers and prejudices do not rub against ours, whose interests do not clash with ours, than to keep up an habitual, steady, self-sacrificing love towards those whose weaknesses and faults are always forcing themselves upon us, and are stirring up our own. A man may pass good muster as a philanthropist who makes but a poor master to his servants or father to his children. If the members of the Church at Ephesus had such love to one another as St. John demanded, there was little fear of their failing in love towards those that were without.
I might have used a stronger word, I might have said there was no fear at all, for this reason. St. John says, ‘Love is of God.’ As if he had said, ‘I know very well that there is no stock of love in you upon which you can draw that will not soon be exhausted by the demands that are made upon it. I know also that no opinions or doctrines upon one subject or another, will enable you to love one another. Love is of God. It is out of His nature you must derive your power of loving; every other will prove utterly inadequate. “Every one that loveth is born of God.” From Him comes the original capacity to love, by Him it is daily renewed. The loving man has drawn his first breath of life from Him; he receives a fresh breath from Him each morning, as the flowers and trees receive a fresh birth with the rising sun and a fresh baptism in the dew. And “he who loves knows God.” “He has communion with the mind of God; he ’learns what He is by that which he receives from Him.’ It is from an infinite, illimitable Being, then, that St. John bade his little children seek the love which they wanted in every day’s intercourse with one another. Would that infinite, illimitable Being suffer them to restrain their sympathy with any circle narrower than His own? If He bestows His heat and His rain on the unthankful and the evil, would their bounties and affections be confined to the grateful and the good?
How often do we hear the first clause of the next verse quoted as if it stood alone; as if it were a rapturous exaggeration of one quality of the Divine Nature, as if it indicated a forgetfulness of other qualities which balance and counteract this! I read very recently in a religious periodical of large circulation and high authority, that the assertion, ‘God is Love,’ has no doubt a great attraction for ‘the natural man,’ and that it ought not to be suppressed; but that, on the other hand, it ought to be carefully guarded by other statements which are less agreeable. Can the writer of this passage ever have read St. John’s Epistle? Can he have recollected the tremendous sentence which precedes this,—the sentence of which it is the explanation, ‘He that loveth not, knoweth not God’? Is that a sound which is pleasant to the natural man, in him, or in me, or in any one? Does it not make the ‘natural man’ in us tremble and hide itself, as if it were excommunicated and cut off from the presence of God for ever? For St. John certainly means what he says. He is not playing with this awful and divine language. No; he is driving us to despair with it; he is telling us what is required of us, certain that our consciences will echo his decree; on purpose that he may force us to forsake all confidence in our feelings, natural and acquired, in our philosophy, in our humility, in our religion; on purpose that we may fly from ourselves to the Eternal God, who has what we have not, who is what we are not. ‘God is Love,’ is not a proposition uttered in a sudden ecstasy; it is the final revelation to which all others have been tending. Without it all others are mere deceptions and contradictions. Without it there is no ground for individual faith or individual conduct to stand upon. Without it there is no human society. Without it there is nothing left for us but Devil Worship or Atheism.
Some people calling themselves Christians dare to speak of the Incarnation of Christ and the Death of Christ, as if they restrained or modified this primary test, by the application of which St. John discovered what is the Spirit of Truth and the Spirit of Error. Hear how the Apostle speaks of Christ’s manifestation. The statement is familiar to us. It has gone through the whole Epistle. I have tried to examine each word in it accurately. But I wish you to think of it in this connexion. ‘Herein was manifested the love of God to us, that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.’ What Christ did was not to create love in God, but to show it forth. If we believe in Him as St. John bids us believe in Him, we confess that God is Love; only when we do so, are we partakers of His life, or, as it is expressed here, ‘do we live through Him.’
Then comes the full assertion of that great ethical principle which I have been endeavouring to develop in all these Lectures: ‘Herein is Love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.’ The reversal of this principle, the notion that in some way or other our love to God is the ground of His love to us, and the kindred notion that in some way or other He is to be propitiated to us, seem to me fatal to all sound ethical teaching and ethical practice. They are driving numbers to a system of Ethics from which the idea of God is excluded altogether; to Ethics, therefore, which will be consistently and throughout what the Christian Ethics are inconsistently, of this world and for the world; based upon selfishness and terminating in selfishness.
St. John lays the axe to the root of selfishness: ‘Beloved,’ he says, ‘if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.’ The emphasis, I think, should be laid on the word ought. He affirms, as he did before, that Love is the law of the universe; that in loving, we do not perform an act of supererogation, but merely submit to a duty. If God so loved us, not to love is to resist a power which is at every moment acting upon us, and impelling us to all sympathy and all sacrifice.
Thus we are led back to the point from which we started. It seemed wonderful to speak of our dwelling in God, more wonderful to speak of God dwelling in us. But we have been taught by degrees why such language is necessary, why we cannot shrink from it without shrinking from the obligations which our existence as members of a human society involves. To maintain that God is unseen and yet most real; that His Love is the ground of our love; that we only love when we submit to His operations; what is this but to affirm and adopt St. John’s doctrine in the length and breadth of it? He announces it therefore as demonstrated in this sentence, ‘No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us.’ And he repeats also the 24th verse of the last chapter with which I began this Lecture, ‘By this we know that we dwell in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.’
Other spirits, we have said, were to be tried by their likeness or unlikeness to His Spirit. What His Spirit is; how we may understand whether we are yielding to it or to some other; we have now learnt. We have been carried far out of the region of rapping and table turning. Questions about spiritual communications and spiritual life are nothing less than questions what we ourselves will be, whether we would have Hatred or Love to rule over us now and ever.