THE SECOND AND THIRD EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN.
The elder unto the elect lady and her children, whom I love in the truth; and not I only, but also all they that have known the truth; for the truth’s sake, which dwelleth in us, and shall be with us for ever. Grace be with you, mercy, and peace, from God the Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love. I rejoiced greatly that I found of thy children walking in truth, as we have received a commandment from the Father. And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another. And this is love, that we walk after His commandments. This is the commandment, That, as ye have heard from the beginning ye should walk in it. For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. Look to yourselves, that we lose not those things which we have wrought, but that we receive a full reward. Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son. If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds. Having many things to write unto you, I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full. The children of thy elect sister greet thee. Amen.
The elder unto the well-beloved Gaius, whom I love in the truth. Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth. For I rejoiced greatly, when the brethren came and testified of the truth that is in thee, even as thou walkest in the truth. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children walk in truth. Beloved, thou doest faithfully whatsoever thou doest to the brethren, and to strangers; which have borne witness of thy charity before the church: whom if thou bring forward on their journey after a godly sort, thou shalt do well: because that for his name’s sake they went forth, taking nothing of the Gentiles. We therefore ought to receive such, that we might be fellow-helpers to the truth. I wrote unto the church: but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them, receiveth us not. Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his deeds which he doeth, prating against us with malicious words: and not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and forbiddeth them that would, and casteth them out of the church. Beloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is good. He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God. Demetrius hath good report of all men, and of the truth itself: yea, and we also bear record; and ye know that our record is true. I had many things to write, but I will not with ink and pen write unto thee: but I trust I shall shortly see thee, and we shall speak face to face. Peace be to thee. Our friends salute thee. Greet the friends by name.
St. John’s First Epistle, like most of the Epistles in the New Testament, is addressed to a Society. He may have instructed that Society in the principles of Christian Morals. But has he given any hints about the kind of character which he desires most, which he admires most, in an individual? Has he set before us any example—besides the great Universal Example—of that which he would wish us to be?
At first sight it seems strange that such letters as these to the Elect Lady and to Gaius should have been preserved, and that they should form part of the Canon of the New Testament. If you knew how many Gospels, professing to contain narratives of our Lord’s acts upon earth,—how many Epistles professing to come from Apostles and apostolical men,—had been cast aside, you might wonder even more that these had stood the wear and tear of eighteen centuries, and had kept their place among the sacred books. For they have nothing which could recommend them to the taste of the ages which received them; much which was uncongenial to it. There was a craving in the earlier ages, as there has been since, for stories of startling events; of miracles such as Apostles might have been expected to perform. Ecclesiastical writers, a century or two after the age of St. John, talked of his having been cast into a cauldron of boiling oil, and of his coming out unhurt. How gladly would they have found some hint or allusion to confirm that tale in a letter which was attributed to him! But these letters contain no such hint; they are of the simplest, most commonplace kind. Again, the notion became prevalent very soon in the Church,—it gained strength every century, outward circumstances conspiring with inward feelings to deepen it,—that the morality of the Gospel was of a new and peculiar kind; that the strong male qualities which were admired in the old world were discarded by it; that its graces were wholly passive and feminine; that the woman was not only raised by it to a higher level, but that it was her glory to be alone; that the less she had to do with wedlock and the bearing of children, the more blessed and holy her life was. How eagerly would any confirmation of these sentiments from the last of the Apostles, from him who was emphatically the Apostle of the coming dispensation, have been welcomed! What a delight to find him who had been brought up a Jew, who, as such, had been taught to think nobly of wedlock, and even to regard barrenness as a curse of womankind, saying, ‘Now all this is changed; the Incar- ’nation has introduced an entirely different ideal of life ’into the world; not only is it not now possible for women ’to do the noblest services to the commonwealth and to mankind, though they are not mothers of children, but’ to be so is to reduce themselves to a lower level, to make ’ themselves less dear and precious in God’s sight.’ Some occasion for proclaiming these great Christian maxims, if he held them to be such, the Apostle would surely seize. And what an occasion is here! A letter to an Elect Lady! To one who has chosen the good part, or whom God has chosen to be His handmaid! Now, if ever, we shall find what we are looking for. Ah, no! This Elect Lady has children. She is addressed as a mother. The aged Jewish Apostle does not drop a hint that he thinks less nobly of that calling than Abraham, or Moses, or David, or Hannah, or any of those on whose words or on whose deeds he had loved to dwell in his youth.
These are reasons which may make us sure that the old Church would not have forged such an Epistle as this second (I will speak of the third presently), and would not have been specially inclined to admit its claim to apostolical weight and authority. They are, therefore, reasons which may make us confident that we are not wrong in accepting it as a genuine witness of the mind of St. John, conveyed in his own childlike manner. So considered, I believe we shall find that, short as it is, few documents have been bequeathed to us of greater interest and significance.
I have referred to one characteristic of this letter already. It is the one which presents itself to us the moment we begin to read. The elder—(the Apostle does not care to describe himself by any greater title than that; he is adopting the tone of an elder brother, rather than of a father)—is writing to a lady of whom we know nothing except from his account of her,—to one on whom he bestows the title of elect. What that title means we shall soon learn from himself. In the meantime the lady is not alone. She is surrounded by her family; he addresses her children as if they were inseparable from her. He says of them all, ‘Whom I love in the truth, and not I only, but all they that have known the truth; for the truth’s sake which dwelleth in us, and shall be with us for ever.’
Here is a word repeated three times in one sentence. Is it an idle repetition? Why does the Apostle begin with speaking to this lady and her children of the truth? why does every passage that follows relate to living in the truth, or walking in the truth? Evidently this is the key-word in the mind of the writer. Whatever else he says has reference to this. He says that he loves them. But it is impossible to pretend that the emphasis is on the verb love. He loves them in the truth. Others love them as he does. But it is ‘they that have known the truth.’ There may have been many winning and graceful qualities in this lady, and in one or in all of her children. Doubtless there were. But the Apostle, and those who love them most, love them for ‘the truth’s sake which dwelleth in them, and shall be in them always.’
I must fix your attention upon this last clause. As you are now familiar with St. John’s language, its form will not surprise you. This phrase, ‘dwelling’ or ‘abiding,’ is that which has met us so often, which we have ascertained to be the characteristic phrase of his former Epistle. But we want it that we may not go astray respecting that expression which is occupying us here. We are frequently told—and told by persons to whose authority on many subjects I defer—that truth belongs to Propositions.
Mr. Mill sets forth this maxim with his usual admirable precision at the commencement of his ‘Logic’; in doing so, he is perfectly in accordance with a great number (a large majority) of Church doctors. They have maintained that agreement with certain propositions constitutes truth, that disagreement with them constitutes falsehood. And seeing that people in general cannot be expected to arrive at safe and certain conclusions about propositions concerning the deepest and most difficult subjects, they have said, and laymen have acquiesced, that there must be some infallible dictator to determine which propositions on such subjects are true and which are false.
What I wish you to observe is, that St. John cannot agree with Mr. Mill and with these Church doctors in this judgment of theirs; he cannot look at truth from their point of view. To speak of the ‘truth which dwelleth in us,’ meaning thereby the assent to or agreement with certain propositions, which dwelleth in us, would have been nonsense. To speak of loving this lady and her children in the agreement with or assent to certain propositions, would have been also nonsense. If we are not prepared to accuse him of such absurdity,—if we will permit him to explain what he means, without binding him by notions of which his writings give us no hint,—we may perhaps find that he is not so far from common sense and common life as he is from the wisdom of the schools; that he is not the less able to help us because he may have put himself under their ban.
The last words, almost, of the general Epistle were, ‘He 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.’ Long before we arrived at this sentence, we found him speaking of our dwelling in God, and God dwelling in us; we found that we could not dilute the expression, or empty it of any of its awfulness, without contradicting every previous statement of the Apostle, without setting at nought altogether his idea of the Christian revelation. If we apply these observations now, we cannot adopt any other inference than this, that the Truth which dwelleth in us, and will dwell in us for ever, is He Who is, and was, and is to come, that true God whose life eternal Jesus came to manifest, that we might be partakers of it and might show it forth in our acts. Truth, according to St. John, is not dead, but living; not a notion, or set of notions which we comprehend, but a Being who comprehends us; not a theory concerning God, but God Himself. And therefore he can love in this truth; he cannot love out of this truth. For there is no love but of God, and God is love; therefore all who know this truth, who are in communion with it, love one another for its sake, by its power.
And therefore he can go on: ‘Grace be with you, mercy and peace, from God the Father, and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love.’ Grace, in Scripture, comprehends all the senses that it bears, separately and apart, in our common dialects. When you say of a royal person, ‘How gracious he is;’ when you say of a beautiful woman, ‘What grace there is in her;’ when you speak of a man not having the grace to return a benefit that has been done to him; you indicate some aspect of that grace which the Source of all good bestows upon men; which becomes in them a comeliness answering to His from whom it is derived; which awakens the reaction that we call gratitude or thanksgiving. And this Grace being manifested towards creatures who have need of daily forgiveness, is inseparable from Mercy; which, like it, proceeds from the nature of the being who shows it, and becomes an element in the nature of the being to whom it is showed: the merciful obtaining mercy. And this Grace or Mercy flowing forth towards creatures who have been alienated from their Creator, who have been at war with Him,—and being at war with Him, have been, necessarily, at war with each other and themselves—becomes Peace or Atonement. But that the Grace, because it is royal, free, and undeserved, may not be supposed to be capricious; that the Mercy may not be taken as dependent on the mercy which it calls forth; that the Peace may not be judged by the results which it produces here, where oftentimes the proclamation of it is the signal of fresh fighting; they are declared to come from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Son of the Father, in truth and love; these being the essential Godhead; these dwelling absolutely in the Father; shining forth to all in the life of the Son; while the Spirit in whom they are eternally united, imparts them to the family in heaven and earth.
For Heaven and Earth are truly united when an apostle has bestowed this heavenly benediction on pilgrims upon earth. See how easily he passes from one to the other: ‘I rejoiced greatly that I found of thy children walking in the truth, as we have received a commandment from the Father.’ Who these children were we can form no conjecture; nor do we want to form any. They were probably very simple people, nowise noticeable in the crowd around them, except by doing their common business more faithfully, by being freer than others from pretension, by judging their fellow-creatures less, by not being at the mercy of boasters and charlatans. They were true in word and deed, true in life; such men as one meets with from time to time in all classes; such as one is sure St. John would have rejoiced to meet with; for no cause but this, that they are true. They do not talk of their sincerity; no people so little; they are afraid of their own insincerity; they feel continually tempted to it; they do not think any people in the world as much in danger of becoming hypocrites as they are. But they walk in the truth; they live not in themselves, but in Him who is true. They depend upon Him to keep them true, and to tell them of their falsehoods. They are sure that His truth is compassing the whole universe. They desire that every man should know it, and that it should make him free. This was the truth of the children of the elect lady; and this was her own. She was a true woman, as they were true men or women; not affecting anything high for herself; not wishing to be anything else than God had made her to be; fighting against the vanity and conceit which might make her wish to shine in the world or in the church, as a model of beauty, or wit, or saintship. Such a woman, whatever be her outward condition, must have the grace of a lady, because she has the grace of God.
This lady and her children are walking in the truth, ‘we have received a commandment from the Father.’
In lecturing on the former Epistle, I have had frequent occasion to speak of the connexion between love and keeping the commandments. It is a subject to which St. John often recurs. It belonged to that office which I conceive was peculiarly his, of uniting the old world to the new, the Law to the Gospel. A Jew who walked in the ordinances of the Lord habitually recollected that the Lord had taken his nation to be a people of inheritance to Himself, that he was devoted and consecrated to the service of an unseen King. One who walked in the truth, after Christ had appeared, was not different from his ancestor; he, too, was under a commandment; he, too, was simply obeying a will. Only it was a will which had revealed itself. He was brought into direct contact with the Mind which the law expressed, with the Spirit of Him who gave it. It was a grander and more responsible, more divine, position; but it might be described in nearly the same language; it equally involved obedience; the obedience of a child; a Father had given the commandment.
But He who was now revealed as a Father, had always been a Father; therefore the Apostle says, ‘And now I beseech thee, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment unto thee, but that which we had from the beginning, that we love one another.’ No one was more likely than a woman to think that the precept of loving was something altogether different in kind from the precepts of the old law; no one was more likely to say, ‘Love has nothing to do with precepts; it springs up unbidden in the heart.’ And no one was more likely than a woman to suffer from these very natural opinions; to turn love into a mere taste and sentiment; to suppose it had its origin in herself, and that its continuance might be trusted to her strong feelings; to separate it from obedience; to make it unpractical; so to divorce it from self-denial and endurance. Nothing would be so fatal to all that is noblest in the female character, to the sacrificing and persevering affection for which women have been so eminent, as this temper of mind. Nothing, therefore, appears more entirely appropriate than the Apostle’s double admonition, which is enforced in the following verse: ‘This is love, that we walk after His commandments; this is the commandment, That, as ye have heard from the beginning, ye should walk in it.’ The repetition of this sentence in so very short a letter would appear unaccountable, if St. John had not been made aware—or if that Spirit who guided his thoughts had not been aware—that the woman would be taught by high authorities to set the virtues of the new world in contrast with those of the old; to exalt feminine peculiarities above those of men; and so would learn not to walk in the truth, but to think she was most godly when she was most despising the order of God’s universe.
It is not, however, to this class of teachers that St. John directly alludes in the next verse: ‘For many deceivers are entered into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist.’ You have heard already who these deceivers were, and why such a hard name as that of antichrists is bestowed upon them. They had left the church because they could not tolerate the notion that the Son of God had taken an actual body, and had died in it on the cross. They were far too spiritual, they said, for any such earthly doctrine. Their Christ had entered into the world to save the spirits of certain elect people who had been enslaved by the vile flesh which they said was the cause of all evil. A plausible, tempting theory,—one which appealed to many noble instincts in the persons who listened to it, and supported itself by some of their saddest experiences, while it flattered their conceit and their exclusiveness. It addressed itself with peculiar power—so we gather from many passages in other Epistles, so we might guess if we had not these passages—to the minds of women who were vain of their intellectual or spiritual gifts, and who had perhaps known too much of the corruptions and perils of their time.
These were often the prophetesses, as well as the receivers, of the maxims which treated the flesh as essentially evil, and denied Christ’s association with it. St. John was more deeply convinced, even than his brother apostles, that this denial involved the denial of the whole Gospel. It said that they were not witnesses of a reconciliation of God with men; it said that Christ had not shown forth the eternal life of God, in the acts, words, death of a man; it substituted another Christ of a different nature and character from Jesus; it set up a proud Spirit coming in his own name, for a Son who submitted in all things to a Father’s will, and glorified Him. St. John cannot express those convictions more strongly than he expressed them in his general letter; but he applies them with earnestness to the case of the particular lady to whom he is writing here. He warns her of the danger which her dread of evil, her spiritual desires, her humility, may expose her, if she does not adhere to the plain commandment which she had from the beginning: ‘Look to yourselves, that we lose not those things that we have wrought, but that we receive a full reward.’ He uses—dexterously, we might say, if dexterity meant as it ought to mean, that which belongs to the right, and not as it does often mean, that which is clever and opposed to straightforwardness—he uses the very phrases which the deceivers were probably in the habit of using. They would urge their disciples not to miss the full reward; not to be content with the low condition of the novice; to aim at initiation into the highest mysteries, at the perfection which was reserved for the elect. And they would talk—we know in the next century they did talk—of arriving at a knowledge of God by some wonderful process, by some special road; obedience to the outward law being an unnecessary means to the end, the transgression of it being sometimes a sign that they had reached a further stage in spiritual elevation. To such pretensions, I doubt not, St. John alludes: ‘Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son.’
The tenth and eleventh verses have been rather favourites, with some religious men, Romanists as well as Protestants. For the sake of them, the disagreeable passages in the rest of the Epistle have been forgiven; it has been thought to possess a certain inspired and canonical worth. I do not esteem them above the rest of the letter, but I esteem them as a part of it, and I am anxious to know what use we ought to make of them. ‘If there come any unto you, and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into your house, neither bid him God speed: for he that biddeth him God speed is partaker of his evil deeds.’ St. John himself—one of a small despised minority, belonging to a body who were called heretics by the great body of the Jews, who were denounced as rebels against the gods, probably as absolutely atheists, by the heathens,—St. John, writing to a lady whom he loves in the truth, who he believes is walking in the truth, warns her not to receive into her house, or bid God speed to teachers who were proclaiming a certain doctrine which he believed to be mischievous. Such a sentence delivered by a person for whom we have a profound reverence, obliges us to ask, What the doctrine so condemned is? The answer is explicit. It is, that Jesus Christ has not come in the flesh. On this answer, I believe, the whole of modern history is a commentary. To the belief that Jesus Christ the Son of God has come in the flesh, I can trace an idea of God diffused through society which is at variance altogether with the dark superstitions to which the world had been prone; an idea of Man and his true greatness entirely different from those debasing notions which the religions of the earth had sanctioned; an idea of the worth and sacredness of all men whatsoever and of all common occupations which these religions had utterly discouraged. I can trace through the history of Christendom a continual conflict with this idea of God, of Man, of common men, of common occupations; a continual effort to restore, under the name of Christianity, under the sanction of the Christian priesthood, those dark thoughts and superstitions (and to make them darker) which the belief that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh has shaken, and is destined, as I trust, at last wholly to undermine. Had those men, then, whom St. John denounces as deceivers and antichrists,—those men who went forth boasting that they had a purer and fuller revelation than the common one,—succeeded in their purpose, had they drawn the Church generally after them,—every blessing which we owe to the Gospel would, I judge, have been lost; every curse which we owe to the superstitions that existed before the Gospel, and that have corrupted it, would, I judge, have been multiplied a thousand fold. Here is justification enough for the Apostle, if he wanted justification. Not to have warned the Elect Lady of giving entertainment to such men, of bidding them God speed, would have been not merely to leave her at their mercy, but to withhold from the ages to come a lesson that was at least as necessary for them.
Once more, then, I demand, ‘How may I take advantage of this lesson?’ It is easy to fix upon certain persons and say, ‘These are heretics, these are infidels; St. John meant that you were not to receive them into your house, or bid them God speed.’ Most assuredly, in as far as they are teaching and preaching that Jesus Christ is not come in the flesh, I will not bid them God speed; I will, God being my helper, warn them with all the power I have, that they are doing an injury to their fellow-men, that they are robbing them of the truth which is the one great barrier against a cruel conception of God, against a degrading conception of humanity, against worship of riches, against the degradation of labour. But I am also bound to remember that there is no courage whatever, no imitation of St. John’s example, in denouncing men who are denounced already; those who belong to a minority, I being in a majority. I must be prepared, God being my helper, also to lift up my voice against any denials of Jesus Christ being come in the flesh, which have had and still have the sanction of numbers, the weight of authority, on their side; against any practical denial of the principle, while the mere form of words which asserts it is lazily admitted, perhaps passionately defended. I cannot in the least pretend to be obeying the apostolical authority unless I am prepared to take this course, though it may be a far less easy and convenient one than the other. PREPARED, I say, each of us should be to take it, if God shows us by evident signs that some outrage has been committed upon this great divine and human doctrine, which is doing extensive mischief under high authority; and that He means us to bear witness on behalf of it. So Luther felt when Tetzel sold indulgences in his own neighbourhood under the direction of Leo X. That was a denial of Christ which was more certain to undermine the faith of the Gospel than any nominally infidel teaching;—of which there was abundance in the sixteenth century, the abuses of the Church having produced a very general unbelief. But in the meantime the right course for those who feel deeply that Christ is the Centre of the universe, the source and spring of life to all men; that He took flesh for the sake of all men; is to be purging their own minds of whatever is inconsistent with this doctrine, and to be asserting it as often as they have the opportunity, by their acts even more than by their words. I conceive that I should not be asserting it, either by act or by word, if, in seeming compliance with St. John’s words, I refused to receive into my house a person whom others called, or who called himself, a heretic or an infidel. I should, by so doing, be confirming him in his notion that Christ is not the common brother of men; I should be doing just what the Pharisees would have had St. Paul and St. John do,—that which in Christ’s name they refused to do,—separate themselves from the Gentiles.
The last sentences of this letter to the Elect Lady remind us that it is what it professes to be, a letter to a friend; that the friendship was the more natural and human because it was grounded on the truth, and that other ladies also elect were, like this one, not nuns but mothers. ‘Having many things to write unto you, I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come unto you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full. The children of thy elect sister greet thee. Amen.’
At first you may be chiefly struck with the resemblance between the second and third Epistle. They have a common characteristic. Gaius is found in the truth, like the elect lady: Gaius, like her, walks in the truth. Truth of life, grounded upon trust in the living and true God, is that which St. John desires and prizes in man as much as in woman; all qualities are trifles in comparison with that: it is the substance, apart from which all qualities are mere shadows. The elder writes to him with all affection: he is his well beloved; he wishes him health and advancement: outward and inward; the sound mind, in the sound body. Yet his great joy is that the brethren testify of his truth. No joy is like that to the old man. His children might be reputed as brilliantly pious or charitable; but are they true? That is what he cares to hear; those tidings satisfy him.
But notwithstanding this fundamental likeness, I think you will feel at once that the letter to the man is materially different from the letter to the woman. Their truth has the same root; it is the same essentially; but it is differently exercised. The elect lady is in the midst of her family, liable to the visits of strangers, some of whom she will entertain cordially, some of whom may have mischievous designs. But the acts of Gaius are before the Church. His tastes and occupations are public. Instead of being warned against the seductions of false teachers, he is commended for the charity with which he has brought forward on their journey men who were devoting themselves to Christ’s cause among the Gentiles, and who for that reason were suspected by certain men coveting preeminence in the Church. Herein are the duties of the man; herein are his dangers. Simple duties;—those of using the opportunities that had been given him, to be a fellow helper with the truth, to aid honest, disinterested, misrepresented labourers. Nothing grand, nothing above the standard of humanity; but just the acts that spread a blessing around; just the acts that discover the truth within. Simple dangers;—the wish for authority; the jealousy of others; the impatience of guidance. Nothing terrible, nothing which Christians in general regard as sins; only an entire departure from the life of Christ; only the causes which have torn the Church in pieces. Diotrephes, of whom we have a sketch in the 10th verse, was probably a Jewish Christian, determined to assert the superiority of the circumcised race in the Church; not able to exclude Gentiles altogether; but throwing impediments in the way of those who would open the door to them; consciously or unconsciously glorifying himself in the name of his nation and of God; a pattern of tens of thousands who were to arise afterwards, and who would attain the dominion they claimed, when there was no longer a venerable apostle to put down their prating, to expose the essential meanness of their pride.
St. John’s hints for avoiding the influence and tyranny of such men, for not being tempted by the example of their ambition, are very childlike. Wise doctors would smile at them. I question whether you will find any as effectual. ‘Beloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is good. He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God.’ Diotrephes was no doubt a wonderful talker; a man who overawed all with whom he came in contact, by his confidence in himself, and by his denunciations of those whom he wished to crush. It was a great temptation to encounter such a man with his own weapons; to give fierce word for fierce word; contempt for contempt. But those who sincerely loved what was good; who cleaved to that; recognised it in whomsoever they found it; confessed it to be God’s; hated whatever was not good; whatever was base, malicious, intriguing;—these men would really overcome the blusterer; for they would never aspire to be like him. Such a quiet, steady love of good the Apostle appears to bring before us in the person of Demetrius; one who had good report of all men, and of the truth itself; one of whom the Apostle himself could speak confidently. Who he was, we may know in that day when the truth itself shall bear witness of him, and of all who have loved it in all ages; and when every form of pretension and falsehood shall flee away. Why may we not believe that in that day also the Apostle, and those in far off countries and ages who have learnt the truth which he spoke with his lips or wrote with pen and ink, may speak with each other ‘face to face, may greet each other by name?’
I have one word to say before I conclude this Lecture. We are sometimes told by Christian apologists, that women have acquired an honour since the preaching of the Gospel which was almost denied them in the old world; and that because the feminine type of character is commended to us by the example of Him who was emphatically the Sufferer. I believe both assertions have a foundation of truth in them; but that they are not true: and therefore would not have been adopted or commended by the Apostle. It is not true that women were not honoured in the old world. I have alluded to the Jewish feeling about mothers. In that character the highest and divinest promises rested upon them. But they do not only appear as mothers. Deborah is a judge and a prophetess of the people. Miriam leads the songs which celebrate the deliverance of the nation from Pharaoh. Greek history, again, pays high honour to women. The Trojan war, the subject of its earliest legends, of its noblest song, is undertaken in vindication of female honour and the sacredness of the marriage bond. In the Homeric poems, the freewoman is treated with reverence; even the captive taken in war is not without honour. The Roman State, which almost rests on the authority of fathers, was anything but neglectful of the mother and the wife. The traditional origin of the Republic is the retribution for the wrong done to Lucretia. One of the earliest stories, that of Coriolanus, illustrates the honour which even the proudest, most wilful son paid to her who had borne and nursed him. Some of the noblest recollections of the perishing commonwealth are connected with the name of Cornelia the mother of the Gracchi, and Portia the wife of Brutus. It is dishonest to overlook these facts; and being dishonest, it is unchristian. We do not honour Christ by disparaging that which took place before He dwelt on earth. If we believe St. John, He was before all worlds. He was in the world and was the Light of men. ‘The Greek reverence for women, the Roman reverence for women, was as much the effect of His teaching and culture as that which the purest knight exhibited in the middle ages, or that which appears in the best men of our day. He came upon earth in the midst of a foul and adulterous age. Jews, Greeks, Romans, under the Caesars, had almost equally forgotten the sacredness of marriage, the holiness of women. And that Society was therefore doomed. The Christian Church came into it and did not renovate it; but was partly corrupted by it, partly was the cause of its destruction. The worst Christians became like the world into which they had fallen. The better stood aloof from it; they thought they were not to touch it, taste it, handle it. They could, therefore, do it no good, and they bequeathed to after times the notion that the Christian age was not to recover and restore that which had been holy and true in the former ages, but to set up an opposite standard of its own. God, however, was working out His own ends, and the ignorance of His servants could not defeat them. He raised up the Gothic or Teutonic race; gave them in their barbarism and paganism a reverence for women and for human relationships which those whom they conquered had lost; made them at the same time fierce protestants on behalf of the manly virtues, against the effeminacy of priests and monks. So He prepared the way for a homelier morality, as well as a deeper faith; a morality and a faith which should have Truth for their ground.’
But is not this Teutonic reverence for manliness inconsistent with the example of Jesus Christ? I say, No; emphatically, No. Jesus Christ is the Sacrifice; you cannot describe Him by any other name which is so characteristic and so glorious. But He is the King sacrificing Himself for His subjects. Read the Gospels, and see whether they do not regard Him first of all as a King; whether they do not present Him to us speaking with authority, commanding the winds and waves to be still, casting out the unclean spirits, ruling the multitudes, causing His accusers to tremble and fall down. Hear Him as He stands before Pontius Pilate in His hour of submission and surrender, just before He is crucified, uttering these royal words— ‘For this cause was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I might bear witness of the Truth.’ Jesus Christ, the Head of humanity, exhibits the perfect type of that nature which belongs to the man and the woman. Neither the woman is without the man, nor the man without the woman, in Him. But He does not sink the attributes of the man in those of the woman. He clothes the woman with the glory of the man. Truth is essentially the manly virtue. But He proclaims it as the test of His Truth that He does not come in His own Name; that He glorifies His Father; that He does His Will; that to fulfil that Will He becomes a servant. Here is Truth wedded to Obedience, the characteristic of the Woman. She can live in the Truth, she can die for the Truth, without departing from her feminine simplicity and dependence. About opinions and propositions she may not know much; if she sets great store by them, the probability is that she will surrender herself to some priest of her own choosing and become anything but truthful in St. John’s sense; helping also to destroy whatever there is of truthfulness in her director. But living Truth, the truth in a person, she can confess; that she can represent in her own character and acts.
What I have been just saying has a very intimate connexion with a subject which you will find largely discussed in Ethical books, sometimes at the very threshold of them. The eminent writer, of whom I spoke in my first Lecture, begins by affirming that every study and pursuit aims at some End; that there is an End which men as men are pursuing. This end he designates by a word which I think he would gladly have exchanged for another, if he could have found it. I told you how anxious he was to avoid any allusion to his country’s faith, what pains he takes to construct his Ethical system without it. But the language of a country must express the habitual convictions of that country; its faith will insinuate itself whether you wish it or not. The Greeks were emphatically worshippers of Demons; that is to say, of powers intermediate between the supreme unknown Being, whom they sometimes called Fate, and human creatures; powers partaking of human feelings, passions, caprices. Their notion then of the best possible condition of existence for a man was of one in which the Demons were on the whole propitious to him; the word Eudaimonia indicated what they most desired. The philosopher must take this expression, awkward as it is for his purpose—and must try to discover some definition of it which shall, as little as possible, recall its etymology, which shall have as little as possible to do with Demons and their influences.
You may think this was the misfortune of his Paganism. Partly but not altogether. Pope is placed in a dilemma as serious by the English language, in which he wrote, and of which he was a great master. He speaks of ‘Happiness as our being’s end and aim.’ Now what is the derivation of ‘happiness?’ Evidently it is connected with that which happens; its root is Hap or Luck. Can you suppose that Pope, or any sound-headed thinker, regarded the end of man’s being as good Luck? Of course not; he is as anxious to forget the meaning of his English word as Aristotle is to forget the meaning of the equivalent Greek word. All that either means to say is, ‘There is what the Algebraist would call an x, an unknown quantity, which all men are in search of. They call it Eudaimonia, or Happiness or Luck. We are to find a value for this x. We are to fix a meaning to this loose phrase, which shall take out of it, as far as may be, all associations with mere accident or chance; which shall change it into something real, permanent, substantial.’
That admirable man whom I have quoted in a former Lecture, refers in a striking Sermon, on ‘The Christian Aim and Motive,’ (Robertson’s Sermons, 3rd Series, p. 238,) to Pope’s line, and expresses himself about it in this strong language. ‘Brethren, Happiness is not our being’s end and aim. The Christian’s aim is Perfection, not Happiness, and every one of the Sons of God must have something of that spirit which marked their Master; that holy sadness, that peculiar unrest, that high and lofty melancholy, which belongs to a spirit which strives after heights to which it can never attain.’ Mr. Robertson is not contradicting Pope so much as he would at first appear to do. He is rather finding a value for the unknown quantity. He pronounces its value to be Perfection. I am sure that what he means is as right as the language which he adopts is bold and striking. Man cannot be satisfied with anything short of what is Perfect. He must have perpetual ‘unrest’ till he finds what is Perfect.
When so profoundly reverent a man as Mr. Robertson attributes this unrest to Jesus Christ, we are obliged, just because the word gives us a start, just because it shocks us, to ask what he can intend by it. The answer, I believe, leads to a very important and radical principle. The Son of God did not rest in Himself, but in His Father: apart from Him it was impossible for Him to rest. And this is also true, as the preacher says, of all the sons of God. They can have no rest in themselves; they must have a ‘peculiar unrest,’ a discontent with everything that is their own. But Jesus Christ says, ‘Come unto me all that are weary and heavy-laden; for I am meek and lowly of heart; and ye shall find rest to your souls.’ It was His own rest to which He invited them; the rest and satisfaction in a will which was perfectly true and good. Because He rested in that will, because He delighted in it, He had a perpetual sorrow in seeing it resisted, a ‘baptism’—such were His own words—‘to be baptized with, and how was He ’straitened till it was accomplished?’ But this sorrow was not only compatible with the rest of which He had spoken; one was inseparable from the other. He who dwells in the truth, must suffer till truth triumphs once and for ever.
In one sense I can admit that man is always striving after the unattainable. Truth will always seem deeper, broader, higher, the nearer we approach it; the more we converse with the eternal, the less shall we dream of comprehending it. But does not our unrest come from the desire to hold that in the hollow of our hands which holds us; in which we are living? Christ came to deliver us from this unrest. He plunged into the deep waters. They sustained Him; He tells us that they will sustain us. The unfathomable truth of which He bore witness is our home and dwelling-place. To be in fellowship with that, is to be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. To be struggling with whatever opposes that, in ourselves and in our brethren, is to be entering into Christ’s work on earth. And this truth, though it is ever discovering more of its wonders and its glory, is the same that was in the beginning, the same that men in every age have sought and struggled for. Some of them called it the favour or good pleasure of capricious Demons. What they wanted, what their inmost hearts told them must be, was a righteousness and love, without variableness or the shadow of a turning. They called it, and call it still, Happiness. What they want is that which is beyond all chance or hap, a Being in whom their being can find its end and aim. They have climbed up to heaven, and gone down to the deep in search of it. Lo! it is near to them; their hearts may turn to it and repose in it. They hoped to find it in some condition of their own minds. They do find it when, worn out with their own efforts, they say, ‘Thou who art the truth, Thou in whom is the eternal life, hold us up, for we are Thine.’