1 JOHN V. 18—21.
We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not; but he that is begotten of God keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not, And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness, And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols. Amen.
CAN we be certain of any principles in Ethics? St. John declares that we can. He says that he has not been making probable guesses about the grounds of human actions, the relations of man to God, the nature of God Himself. These are things that he knows. Nay, he is not content with claiming this knowledge himself. He uses the plural pronoun; he declares that his disciples, his little children, ‘know’ that which he knows.
I.
What do they know? He had just said, ‘All unrighteousness is sin: there is a sin not unto death.’ He says now, ‘We know that he that is born of God sinneth not.’ You may remember that we met with this language before. I inquired how it was consistent with the words, ‘If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.’ Evidently we could not bring these statements into accordance by modifying either. We could not, for instance, pretend that he meant merely that those who were born of God did not sin a great deal, very terribly. Or again, that he did not address himself to Christian men, to ‘true believers,’ when he spoke of confessing sins. These would have been dishonest subterfuges, which would have robbed us not of one of the Apostle’s assertions, but of both, and would have left an impression on the mind of every reader that he was himself an untrustworthy man, who played loosely with words. I said, we must determine to construe each sentence accurately, to give it its full force; then we might consider how they should be reconciled. So we discovered that the apparent contradictions in St. John arose from a real contradiction in us; that sin itself is a contradiction, and that we cannot express ourselves rightly and satisfactorily about it, so as to describe undoubted facts, without using phrases, which, when they are looked at on the surface, clash with each other. The way to ascertain the meaning of each, and the veracity of each, was to bring them home to our consciences. ‘Man, ’dost not thou know certainly that there is something wrong in thee, something that is struggling against the truth in thee? Darest thou deny it? Hast not thou found that when the truth is strongest within thee, when it is clearest to thee, thou art least disposed to question the existence of this enemy; thou art most aware of his presence? Is it not, then, thy indifference to truth, thy wish to ignore it, which leads thee to say, “I have no sin in me?”’ Is there not a self-deception, a lie, in that denial?’ I do not think any man will bear this probing without being either brought to the confession which St. John demands of him, or stammering and shuffling in a way that is equally derisive about the fact, though far less creditable to him.
But in the process of this inquiry, what has come to light? There is a truth in him, in the man who confesses his sin. There is a truth against which the sin is fighting; there is a truth with which the man has a right to associate himself, to say, ‘It is for me; I am for it.’ There is a truth which authorizes him to disclaim his sin, to say, ‘I will none of it; closely as it approaches me, I entirely repudiate its pretension to be a part of me, or to govern me.’ The confession of the sin that is in us is nothing less than this disclaimer, this renunciation, of the sin. But to whom do we confess the sin? who, besides ourselves, do we conceive is interested in that renunciation? We confess the sin to God; we believe He is interested in our renunciation of it. Why? Because we confess that the ‘truth in us’ is His truth; that it is there because we are related to Him; there, because we are not our own, but His. The sin is the denial of this relationship; the setting up to be independent of Him. The truth which the sin rebels against is, first, the truth that is in God Himself; secondly, the truth that we are born of Him, that we are His children.
Here, then, is the vindication of the proposition, taken in its broadest, strongest form: ‘He that is born of God doth not commit sin.’ Fix upon a set of persons, proclaim, ‘These are God’s children;’ and you must dilute the doctrine, you must reduce it almost to nothing, in order to make it coincide with the facts of these persons’ lives. But take the Apostle to say to each man, ‘that in you which is born of God doth not commit sin, and if you habitually, at every moment, claimed your rights as a child of His, you would not commit sin;’ and I believe the conscience which confesses sin would cry, ‘I know it; it is so. I know it by every righteous act I have done, I know it by every wrong act I have done. I did righteous acts because I yielded myself to God, because I owned Him as my Father; I did wrong acts because I would have a way and will of my own; because I would not own the truth; because I would not say, “He is with me; He is the root of what is right in me.”’
There is no part of St. John’s Epistle which more than this convinces me that Christian ethics are, in the highest sense, scientific ethics; nay, that we cannot have a science of ethics, in the full sense of the words, till we accept the principles which the Apostle sets forth to us. For that there are confusions in the world, innumerable confusions, all acknowledge; we may not call these confusions ‘sins;’ perhaps we avoid the word. But, at all events, they produce some of the effects which men attribute to sin. And evidently there can be no science of confusions. They set at nought science; by their very name they refuse to be brought into any order. Accordingly, writers on ethics are driven to speak of the happiness that men might attain, the virtues that men might exhibit. They affirm, and rightly affirm, that these are intended for man; that these are according to his constitution. They say, ‘If men only knew what their constitution is, even what their physical constitution is, how many evils might they avoid! If they were only better educated, what blessings would follow!’ All which may be exceedingly true, but practical people do not heed it. They reply, ‘We cannot pursue ideals. Somehow or other, we suppose things will last for our time. We were not born to set them right. The world is very corrupt, no doubt. But are we not a parcel of it?’ Thus the science of life and the business are set in continual opposition, and every day makes the distance between them greater and the conflict fiercer.
But is it so if I can say to every man, ‘Friend, thou art our part and parcel of the world; thou art not pledged and sold to its corruptions; thou hast another parentage; thou art a man; thou art a child of God; and as such thou art holy and righteous; as such the corruptions and anomalies of the world are odious to thee, are thy enemies; thou hatest them; thou art at war with them. Yes! understand thy constitution! Know what thou art by the law of thy creation, of thy redemption. Take up thy freedom’? Are the science of life and the business of life in hostility then? No; for the science of life is expressed in the words, ‘He that is born of God doth not commit sin;’ that is the law of our existence. ‘And he that is begotten of God’ (the tense of the participle is different, but there is no change in the word, as our translation might lead you to suppose) ‘keepeth himself, and that wicked one toucheth him not.’ This is the practice of life. By reminding ourselves of our true birth, by betaking ourselves to our real parent, we may separate ourselves from the sin that is in us, we may resist the evil spirit who would persuade us that we belong to him, not to the God of truth.
The Apostle then, I think, has vindicated his first assertion. He not only knows himself,—he can appeal to his readers in one age or another, whether they do not know,—that he that is born of God sinneth not. If their answer at first is in the negative, he is sure that one day they will reply with a confidence as great as his own, ‘It is so. Kepler, the astronomer, said he could wait for men to discover the true law of the heavenly bodies. “If God has waited six thousand years, I can wait two hundred,” said the noble physical discoverer. The Apostle could speak as calmly and bravely, more cheerfully. ’God in His Son has declared Himself to us as our Father. We may tell men that they are His children. In His own due time He will confirm our words to the Universe, if now there are but a few little children here and there who give heed to them.’
II.
And thus his next assurance explains itself to us, which sounds, perhaps, to many, both audacious and uncharitable. ‘We KNOW that we are of God, and that the whole world lieth in wickedness.’ ‘We know that we are of God’ is an equivalent statement to this, ‘We know by repeated experiments that there is in ourselves no good thing; that we cannot of ourselves do the things which we ought to do. We know also, by repeated experiments, that when our Lord taught us to say, “Our Father,” He did not mock us, nor encourage us to mock God. This prayer we have ascertained to be a true prayer; if that is false, everything in the universe is false; it is the foundation of our thoughts, acts, hopes; they have no other.’
But, ‘We know that the whole world lieth in wickedness,’ or ‘in the wicked one!’ What can one make of such an assertion as that? I do not want to make anything of it but what I find. How could St. John account for the fraud, cruelty, superstition, tyranny, which he saw in the Pagan world and the Jewish world? Were they of God? Did they come from the will of God? Were they not to be explained by the fact that Jews as much as Pagans did not believe that God was a Father; did not believe that He was Love; did not believe that He had reconciled the world to Himself in His Son; did not believe that they were the children of God? Were they not, then, believing a lie; confessing the Spirit of Lies? Were they not making him their father; receiving his inspirations?
You say that St. John and the Ephesians might think so, but could they know it? In replying to a similar objection, I alluded just now to the speech of a famous German, who prepared the way, by his discoveries, for our Newton. There was an Italian predecessor of Newton, as brave, as true-hearted;—I mean Galileo. I am sure you have often heard those words of his, which he is said to have shouted through the door of the chamber in which he had been confined by the Inquisition, for saying that the Earth moves round the Sun; ‘However, it does move.’ The Cardinals said it did not; the learned men of his time said it did not; the popular opinion of the time said it did not. And this impudent Galileo cries out, ‘It goes on in spite of you; and you, cardinals, doctors, people, are moving with it. And you cannot set aside God’s doctrine by yours.’ He cast his bread upon the waters. He knew quite well that it would be found after many days. St. John’s arrogance is of the same kind. ‘Doctors of the Sanhedrim,’ he says, ‘High Priests of Rome, Senators, Emperors, Philosophers, People, you believe God not to be a Father, but to be a tyrant, or a mere vague Essence; not to have claimed men as His children, but to be at a hopeless distance from them, and not to care for them at all. I, a fisherman, and “this silly flock of Ephesians,” say, “However, He was Father; however, we are His children.” And we know it. We know that you are asserting a lie, and that we are asserting a truth. We can venture all on that conviction. Other days will judge between us. It will be seen whether the mighty majority or the contemptible minority has spoken the thing as it is.’
Perhaps you may say to me, ‘Oh, then, now at all events you change your note. You appeal to majorities against a minority.’ I do no such thing. Galileo’s truth does not rest upon the verdict of a majority; a few have been forced to confess it by irresistible evidence; it has commended itself to mankind by its practical results, by the powers which it has enabled men to wield, by the confusions which it has scattered. St. John’s truth does not rest upon the verdict of a majority. There never has been a time when it has had a majority in its favour. There never has been a time when the very same classes which contradicted Galileo’s doctrine have not contradicted it and tried to hunt it down. The Inquisition has been far more active in proclaiming ‘God is not a Father, God is a Tyrant,’ than in saying, ‘The Earth does not move round the Sun.’ Cardinals have been more busy in hiding from men the truth that they are reconciled to God in His Son, than in hiding from them any proposition of astronomy. And we who are removed from the influence of the Inquisition and Cardinals, are not more ready than those who are under their influence, to think of God as a reconciled Father; we are just as ready as they are to regard Him as a tyrant and an enemy. And, in general, philosophers amongst us, as in the ages immediately after Christ, pour contempt on the notion that it is possible to know anything of God, to know that He is a Father, to know that He loves the world. London working men must learn to adopt the daring tone of the Galilean fisherman. They must begin to affirm boldly, ‘God has taken us to be His children, seeing that we have that nature in which Jesus Christ died. It is so; though all the philosophers, all the theological doctors, all the priests, all the rich, the easy and comfortable people in Christendom suspend their mutual hatreds to affirm, “You, at all events, are fools; you can know nothing.”’
But is not this confidence—this claim to certainty—that which has been the great warrant and cause of persecution in other times? might it not become so in ours, if the opportunity were afforded us? No doubt, you and I should be in the same danger of becoming persecutors, as any men in former days, provided we had the same external power as they had; for the internal temptations are not less in us than in them; we are not less internally dogmatic and proud, and anxious to crush every one’s thought but our own; therefore let us pray that we may never have the means of indulging these vile inclinations. But it is not true that calm trust has made any man a persecutor. He who trusts, like Kepler, can wait. As the prophet said, ages before Kepler was born, ‘He that believeth doth not make haste.’ Those who say, ‘God is the Father of men in Christ,’ must be sure that He will prove Himself to be their Father. Till we have lost our senses, we cannot suppose that we shall make our fellow-men more ready to embrace that truth by proving that we are not their brothers. No! depend upon it your temptation and mine to put down one who differs with us, has a different origin from this. When we have some opinion which we are not sure of, which we cannot rest in, yet which is dear to us because it is ours; then the impulse to crush those who will not accept it, who cannot see the force of our arguments, is very strong indeed. Habits of courtesy, deference to the rules of society, may restrain it to a certain extent, but not completely; those who cannot get the most effectual weapons try others; bitter epithets, secret slanders, are substituted for the gag of the ruling dogmatist and the dagger of the fanatic. An individual Christian is often very furious and intolerant at a certain stage of his life. For the conviction that he exists to proclaim a truth which concerns all men, and which it is miserable for men to reject, mingles strangely and incoherently with the thought that this truth is his opinion which he is to defend against all assailants, which he is to establish. Hence a fierce effervescence, like that produced by the meeting of an alkali and an acid; hence, oftentimes, indifference, when that effervescence has subsided, like the neutral salt in the other case. And if the result be otherwise, it is always, I believe, because God substitutes the certainty which comes from dependence on Him for the positiveness which is the result of confidence in ourselves or in any human authority. With respect to Christian rulers, when they have persecuted, it has always been from a distrust in the certainty of God’s own truth, leading very naturally and directly to the notion that it is their duty to enforce positive decrees of their own in exchange for it.
III.
Once more St. John says, ‘And we know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ.’ The two former propositions had vindicated such a knowledge for handicraftsmen and women as the wisest of the earth had not dared to boast of. What was the source of it? How could they explain their advantage over prophets and kings, Jewish as much as Heathen? They could only say, ‘The Son of God has come. He from whom prophets and kings derived their illumination; who they said must be; who they believed would manifest Himself not as their king, but as the King of men; not as their light, but as the Light of the world; He has not disappointed their expectation, has not cheated the race which, in every country and period, had been feeling after such a ruler, such a teacher. He has come; we KNOW that He has; for whereas we were seeking God where He was not to be found, calling upon Him where He was not near—asking earth, and sky, and sea to tell us whether He was not with them, and receiving the same dreary answer from all;—now He has given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true; the eyes of our spirits have been opened to discern the Father of our spirits; to confess with awe and trembling, not a being whom we have created, but Him who is, and was, and is to come; not one who depends upon our thoughts, feelings, imaginations, but Him in whom we are living and moving and having our being. Not as if the Absolute Truth and Goodness were brought down to our level; not as if He were less awful, less perfect now than in the days when Solomon declared that the heaven of heavens could not contain Him, how much less the house which he had built; but that He has met with us in that Son, in whom ’alone He declared Himself to the generations of old; but that He has come in whom we were originally created to be sons of God; but that we are in Him, even in Jesus Christ, and can therefore call His Father our Father, can therefore say that the truth in which He dwelt before the worlds is a truth for us and in us.’
IV.
‘This is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols.’ So St. John concludes his Epistle. He was a Jew, you see, to the last. His work was to bear witness against idols; his work was to testify of the living and true God. He existed only to do this; he existed only to save his own generation, to save the generations to come, from worshipping a lie, from seeking a happiness that would prove to be a lie. ‘This Jesus Christ,’ he says, ‘in whom we are created, of whom we are members, ’this Lord of our spirits, this Light of our understandings; ’this is He in whom alone we can find the true God. This is ’He whom men have been seeking in heaven and earth, and ’in the waters under the earth. This is He in whom alone ’they can find that eternal life, for which they are thirsting, ’and which they are trying to find in the visible earth, ’or in some fantastic heaven, or in some depths which none ’have been able to sound. Little children, believe that you ’have not to ascend into heaven, or to go into the furthest ’corners of the earth, or to go down into the abyss of hell, ’that you may find God. He is near you; He is with you. ’Trust Him; abide in Him; be perpetually renewing your ’life at His fountain; then you will not bow down to the ’creatures of His hand; then you will not confound the ’bright images cast forth by the minds which He has made ’in His image—which He has endued with a portion of His ’own creative power,—with your Creator and Father. You ’will adore Him, in His Son, and He will enable you, by ’His Spirit, to offer up yourselves, and all your powers, and ’the earth which He has placed under you, as sacrifices to ’Him.’
I had meant to conclude my Lectures with these words; there are none in which I would rather gather up all that I have said to you, or wished for you. But I cannot resolve to pass over the two short letters which St. John addressed to an elect lady and to Gaius. In these letters I discover the simplest, broadest statement which I have seen anywhere, that the foundation of all Christian life, of all practical morality, is TRUTH. Alas! how few of us believe that! how few that believe it dare to act upon the belief! Therefore, I should be shrinking from a duty, I should be leaving this treatise most imperfect, if I failed to claim the Apostle, who has been suspected of sacrificing everything to Love, as a witness for a principle apart from which love is a worthless and contemptible affectation.