Chapter III: Part I (1)

"JOHANNIS EPISTOLÆ, ULTIMUSQUE PRIMÆ VERSICULUS, IN EPHESUM IMPRIMIS
CONVENIUNT."

(BENGEL _in Act._ xix. 21.)

DISCOURSE I.

_THE SURROUNDINGS OF THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST. JOHN._

"Little children, keep yourselves from idols."--I JOHN V. 21.

After the example of a writer of genius, preachers and essayists for the last forty years have constantly applied--or misapplied--some lines from one of the greatest of Christian poems. Dante sings of St. John--

"As he, who looks intent,
And strives with searching ken, how he may see
The sun in his eclipse, and, through decline
Of seeing, loseth power of sight: so I
Gazed on that last resplendence."[2]

The poet meant to be understood of the Apostle's spiritual splendour of soul, of the absorption of his intellect and heart in his conception of the Person of Christ and of the dogma of the Holy Trinity. By these expositors of Dante the image is transferred to the style and structure of his writings. But confusion of thought is not magnificence, and mere obscurity is never sunlike. A blurred sphere and undecided outline is not characteristic of the sun even in eclipse. Dante never intended us to understand that St. John as a writer was distinguished by a beautiful vagueness of sentiment, by bright but tremulously drawn lines of dogmatic creed. It is indeed certain that round St. John himself, at the time when he wrote, there were many minds affected by this vague mysticism. For them, beyond the scanty region of the known, there was a world of darkness whose shadows they desired to penetrate. For them this little island of life was surrounded by waters into whose depths they affected to gaze. They were drawn by a mystic attraction to things which they themselves called the "shadows," the "depths," the "silences." But for St. John these shadows were a negation of the message which he delivered that "God is light, and darkness in Him is none." These silences were the contradiction of the Word who has once for all interpreted God. These depths were "depths of Satan."[3] For the men who were thus enamoured of indefiniteness, of shifting sentiments and flexible creeds, were Gnostic heretics. Now St. John's style, as such, has not the artful variety, the perfect balance in the masses of composition, the finished logical cohesion of the Greek classical writers. Yet it can be loftily or pathetically impressive. It can touch the problems and processes of the moral and spiritual world with a pencil-tip of deathless light, or compress them into symbols which are solemnly or awfully picturesque.[4] Above all St. John has the faculty of enshrining dogma in forms of statement which are firm and precise--accurate enough to be envied by philosophers, subtle enough to defy the passage of heresy through their finely drawn yet powerful lines. Thus in the beginning of his Gospel all false thought upon the Person of Him who is the living theology of His Church is refuted by anticipation--that which in itself or in its certain consequences unhumanises or undeifies the God Man; that which denies the singularity of the One Person who was Incarnate, or the reality and entireness of the Manhood of Him who fixed His Tabernacle[5] of humanity in us.[6]

It is therefore a mistake to look upon the First Epistle of St. John as a creedless composite of miscellaneous sweetnesses, a disconnected rhapsody upon philanthropy. And it will be well to enter upon a serious perusal of it, with a conviction that it did not drop from the sky upon an unknown place, at an unknown time, with an unknown purpose. We can arrive at some definite conclusions as to the circumstances from which it arose, and the sphere in which it was written--at least if we are entitled to say that we have done so in the case of almost any other ancient document of the same nature.

Our simplest plan will be, in the first instance, to trace in the briefest outline the career of St. John after the Ascension of our Lord, so far as it can be followed certainly by Scripture, or with the highest probability from early Church history. We shall then be better able to estimate the degree in which the Epistle fits into the framework of local thought and circumstances in which we desire to place it.

Much of this biography can best be drawn out by tracing the contrast between St. John and St. Peter, which is conveyed with such subtle and exquisite beauty in the closing chapter of the fourth Gospel.

The contrast between the two Apostles is one of _history_ and of _character_.

_Historically_ the work done by each of them for the Church differs in a remarkable way from the other.

We might have anticipated for one so dear to our Lord a distinguished part in spreading the Gospel among the nations of the world. The tone of thought revealed in parts of his Gospel might even have seemed to indicate a remarkable aptitude for such a task. St. John's peculiar appreciation of the visit of the Greeks to Jesus, and his preservation of words which show such deep insight into Greek religious ideas, would apparently promise a great missionary, at least to men of lofty speculative thought.[7] But in the Acts of the Apostles St. John is first overshadowed, then effaced, by the heroes of the missionary epic, St. Peter and St. Paul. After the close of the Gospels he is mentioned five times only. Once his name occurs in a list of the Apostles.[8] Thrice he passes before us with Peter.[9] Once again (the first and last time when we hear of St. John in personal relation with St. Paul) he appears in the Epistle to the Galatians with two others, James and Cephas, as reputed to be pillars of the Church.[10] But whilst we read in the Acts of his taking a certain part in miracles, in preaching, in confirmation; while his boldness is acknowledged by adversaries of the faith; not a line of his individual teaching is recorded. He walks in silence by the side of the Apostle who was more fitted to be a missionary pioneer.[11]

With the materials at our command, it is difficult to say how St. John was employed whilst the first great advance of the cross was in progress. We know for certain that he was at Jerusalem during the second visit of St. Paul. But there is no reason for conjecturing that he was in that city when it was visited by St. Paul on his last voyage[12] (A.D. 60); while we shall presently have occasion to show how markedly the Church tradition connects St. John with Ephesus.

We have next to point out that this contrast in the _history_ of the Apostles is the result of a contrast in their _characters_. This contrast is brought out with a marvellous prophetic symbolism in the miraculous draught of fishes after the Resurrection.

First as regards St. Peter.

"When Simon Peter heard that it was the Lord, he girt his fisher's coat unto him (for he was naked), and did cast himself into the sea."[13] His was the warm energy, the forward impulse of young life, the free bold plunge of an impetuous and chivalrous nature into the waters which are nations and peoples. _In_ he _must_; _on_ he _will_. The prophecy which follows the thrice renewed restitution of the fallen Apostle is as follows: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not. This spake He, signifying by what death He should glorify God, and when He had spoken this, He saith unto him, Follow Me."[14] This, we are told, is obscure; but it is obscure only as to details. To St. Peter it could have conveyed no other impression than that it foretold his martyrdom. "When thou wast young," points to the tract of years up to old age. It has been said that forty is the old age of youth, fifty the youth of old age. But our Lord does not actually define old age by any precise date. He takes what has occurred as a type of Peter's youthfulness of heart and frame--"girding himself," with rapid action, as he had done shortly before; "walking," as he had walked on the white beach of the lake in the early dawn; "whither thou wouldest," as when he had cried with impetuous half defiant independence, "I go a fishing," invited by the auguries of the morning, and of the water. The form of expression seems to indicate that Simon Peter was not to go far into the dark and frozen land; that he was to be growing old, rather than absolutely old.[15] Then should he stretch forth his hands, with the dignified resignation of one who yields manfully to that from which nature would willingly escape. "This spake He," adds the evangelist, "signifying by what death he shall glorify God."[16] What fatal temptation leads so many commentators to minimise such a prediction as this? If the prophecy were the product of a later hand added after the martyrdom of St. Peter, it certainly would have wanted its present inimitable impress of distance and reserve.

It is in the context of this passage that we read most fully and truly the contrast of our Apostle's nature with that of St. Peter. St. John, as Chrysostom has told us in deathless words, was loftier, saw more deeply, pierced right into and through spiritual truths,[17] was more the lover of Jesus than of Christ, as Peter was more the lover of Christ than of Jesus. Below the different work of the two men, and determining it, was this essential difference of nature, which they carried with them into the region of grace. St. John was not so much the great missionary with his sacred restlessness; not so much the oratorical expositor of prophecy with his pointed proofs of correspondence between prediction and fulfilment, and his passionate declamation driving in the conviction of guilt like a sting that pricked the conscience. He was the theologian; the quiet master of the secrets of the spiritual life; the calm strong controversialist who excludes error by constructing truth. The work of such a spirit as his was rather like the finest product of venerable and long established Churches. One gentle word of Jesus sums up the biography of long years which apparently were without the crowded vicissitudes to which other Apostles were exposed. If the old Church history is true, St. John was either not called upon to die for Jesus, or escaped from that death by a miracle. That one word of the Lord was to become a sort of motto of St. John. It occurs some twenty-six times in the brief pages of these Epistles. "If I will that he abide"--abide in the bark, in the Church, in one spot, in life, in spiritual communion with Me. It is to be remembered finally, that not only spiritual, but ecclesiastical consolidation is attributed to St. John by the voice of history. He occupied himself with the visitation of his Churches and the development of Episcopacy.[18] So in the sunset of the Apostolic age stands before us the mitred form of John the Divine. Early Christianity had three successive capitals--Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus. Surely, so long as St. John lived, men looked for a Primate of Christendom not at Rome but at Ephesus.

How different were the two deaths! It was as if in His words our Lord allowed His two Apostles to look into a magic glass, wherein one saw dimly the hurrying feet, the prelude to execution which even the saint wills not; the other the calm life, the gathered disciples, the quiet sinking to rest. In the clear obscure of that prophecy we may discern the outline of Peter's cross, the bowed figure of the saintly old man. Let us be thankful that John "_tarried_." He has left the Church three pictures that can never fade--in the Gospel the picture of Christ, in the Epistles the picture of his own soul, in the Apocalypse the picture of Heaven.

So far we have relied almost exclusively upon indications supplied by Scripture. We now turn to Church history to fill in some particulars of interest.

Ancient tradition unhesitatingly believed that the latter years of St. John's prolonged life, were spent in the city of Ephesus, or province of Asia Minor, with the Virgin-Mother, the sacred legacy from the cross, under his fostering care for a longer or shorter portion of those years. Manifestly he would not have gone to Ephesus during the lifetime of St. Paul. Various circumstances point to the period of his abode there as beginning a little after the fall of Jerusalem (A.D. 67). He lived on until towards the close of the first century of the Christian era, possibly two years later (A.D. 102). With the date of the Apocalypse we are not directly concerned, though we refer it to a very late period in St. John's career, believing that the Apostle did not return from Patmos until just after Domitian's death. The date of the Gospel may be placed between A.D. 80 and 90. And the First Epistle accompanied the Gospel, as we shall see in a subsequent discourse.

The Epistle then, like the Gospel, and contemporaneously with it, saw the light in Ephesus, or in its vicinity. This is proved by three pieces of evidence of the most unquestionable solidity.

(1) The opening chapters of the Apocalypse contain an argument, which cannot be explained away, for the connection of St. John with Asia Minor and with Ephesus. And the argument is independent of the authorship of that wonderful book. _Whoever_ wrote the Book of the Revelation must have felt the most absolute conviction of St. John's abode in Ephesus and temporary exile to Patmos. To have written with a special view of acquiring a hold upon the Churches of Asia Minor, while assuming from the very first as _fact_ what _they_, more than any other Churches in the world, must have known to be _fiction_, would have been to invite immediate and contemptuous rejection. The three earliest chapters of the Revelation are unintelligible, except as the real or assumed utterance of a Primate (in later language) of the Churches of Asia Minor. To the inhabitants of the barren and remote isle of Patmos, Rome and Ephesus almost represented the world; their rocky nest among the waters was scarcely visited except as a brief resting-place for those who sailed from one of those great cities to the other, or for occasional traders from Corinth.

(2) The second evidence is the fragment of the Epistle of Irenæus to Florinus preserved in the fifth book of the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius. Irenæus mentions no dim tradition, appeals to no past which was never present. He has but to question his own recollections of Polycarp, whom he remembered in early life. "Where he sat to talk, his way, his manner of life, his personal appearance, how he used to tell of his intimacy with John, and with the others who had seen the Lord."[19] Irenæus elsewhere distinctly says that "John himself issued the Gospel while living at Ephesus in Asia Minor, and that he survived in that city until Trajan's time."[20]

(3) The third great historical evidence which connects St. John with Ephesus is that of Polycrates, Bishop of Ephesus, who wrote a synodical epistle to Victor and the Roman Church on the quartodeciman question, toward the close of the second century. Polycrates speaks of the great ashes which sleep in Asia Minor until the Advent of the Lord, when He shall raise up His saints. He proceeds to mention Philip who sleeps in Hierapolis; two of his daughters; a third who takes her rest in Ephesus, and "John moreover, who leaned upon the breast of Jesus, who was a high priest bearing the radiant plate of gold upon his forehead."[21]

This threefold evidence would seem to render the sojourn of St. John at Ephesus for many years one of the most solidly attested facts of earlier Church history.

* * * * *

It will be necessary for our purpose to sketch the general condition of Ephesus in St. John's time.

A traveller coming from Antioch of Pisidia (as St. Paul did A.D. 54) descended from the mountain chain which separates the Meander from the Cayster. He passed down by a narrow ravine to the "Asian meadow" celebrated by Homer. There, rising from the valley, partly running up the slope of Mount Coressus, and again higher along the shoulder of Mount Prion, the traveller saw the great city of Ephesus towering upon the hills, with widely scattered suburbs. In the first century the population was immense, and included a strange mixture of races and religions. Large numbers of Jews were settled there, and seem to have possessed a full religious organisation under a High Priest or Chief Rabbi. But the prevailing superstition was the worship of the Ephesian Artemis. The great temple, the priesthood whose chief seems to have enjoyed a royal or quasi-royal rank, the affluence of pilgrims at certain seasons of the year, the industries connected with objects of devotion, supported a swarm of devotees, whose fanaticism was intensified by their material interest in a vast religious establishment. Ephesus boasted of being a theocratic city, the possessor and keeper of a temple glorified by art as well as by devotion. It had a civic calendar marked by a round of splendid festivities associated with the cultus of the goddess. Yet the moral reputation of the city stood at the lowest point, even in the estimation of Greeks. The Greek character was effeminated in Ionia by Asiatic manners, and Ephesus was the most dissolute city of Ionia. Its once superb schools of art became infected by the ostentatious vulgarity of an ever-increasing parvenu opulence. The place was chiefly divided between dissipation and a degrading form of literature. Dancing and music were heard day and night; a protracted revel was visible in the streets. Lascivious romances whose infamy was proverbial were largely sold and passed from hand to hand. Yet there were not a few of a different character. In that divine climate, the very lassitude, which was the reaction from excessive amusement and perpetual sunshine, disposed many minds to seek for refuge in the shadows of a visionary world. Some who had received or inherited Christianity from Aquila and Priscilla, or from St. Paul himself, thirty or forty years before, had contaminated the purity of the faith with inferior elements derived from the contagion of local heresy, or from the infiltration of pagan thought. The Ionian intellect seems to have delighted in imaginative metaphysics; and for minds undisciplined by true logic or the training of severe science imaginative metaphysics is a dangerous form of mental recreation. The adept becomes the slave of his own formulæ, and drifts into partial insanity by a process which seems to himself to be one of indisputable reasoning. Other influences outside Christianity ran in the same direction. Amulets were bought by trembling believers. Astrological calculations were received with the irresistible fascination of terror. Systems of magic, incantations, forms of exorcism, traditions of theosophy, communications with demons--all that we should now sum up under the head of spiritualism--laid their spell upon thousands. No Christian reader of the nineteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles will be inclined to doubt that beneath all this mass of superstition and imposture there lay some dark reality of evil power. At all events the extent of these practices, these "curious arts" in Ephesus at the time of St. Paul's visit, is clearly proved by the extent of the local literature which spiritualism put forth. The value of the books of magic which were burned by penitents of this class, is estimated by St. Luke at fifty thousand pieces of silver--probably about thirteen hundred and fifty pounds of our money![22]

Let us now consider what ideas or allusions in the Epistles of St. John coincide with, and fit into, this Ephesian contexture of life and thought.

We shall have occasion in the third discourse to refer to forms of Christian heresy or of semi-Christian speculation indisputably pointed to by St. John, and prevalent in Asia Minor when the Apostle wrote. But besides this, several other points of contact with Ephesus can be detected in the Epistles before us. (1) The first Epistle closes with a sharp decisive warning, expressed in a form which could only have been employed when those who were addressed habitually lived in an atmosphere saturated with idolatry, where the social temptations to come to terms with idolatrous practices were powerful and ubiquitous. This was no doubt true of many other places at the time, but it was pre-eminently true of Ephesus. Certain of the Gnostic Christian sects in Ionia held lax views about "eating things sacrificed unto idols," although fornication was a general accompaniment of such a compliance. Two of the angels of the Seven Churches of Asia within the Ephesian group--the angels of Pergamum and of Thyatira--receive especial admonition from the Lord upon this subject. These considerations prove that the command, "Children, guard yourselves from the idols," had a very special suitability to the conditions of life in Ephesus. (2) The population of Ephesus was of a very composite kind. Many were attracted to the capital of Ionia by its reputation as the capital of the pleasures of the world. It was also the centre of an enormous trade by land and sea. Ephesus, Alexandria, Antioch and Corinth were the four cities where at that period all races and all religions of civilised men were most largely represented. Now the First Epistle of St. John has a peculiar breadth in its representation of the purposes of God. Christ is not merely the fulfilment of the hopes of one particular people. The Church is not merely destined to be the home of a handful of spiritual citizens. The Atonement is as wide as the race of man. "He is the propitiation for the whole world;" "we have seen, and bear witness that the Father sent the Son as Saviour of the world."[23] A cosmopolitan population is addressed in a cosmopolitan epistle. (3) We have seen that the gaiety and sunshine of Ephesus was sometimes darkened by the shadows of a world of magic, that for some natures Ionia was a land haunted by spiritual terrors. He must be a hasty student who fails to connect the extraordinary narrative in the nineteenth chapter of the Acts with the ample and awful recognition in the Epistle to the Ephesians of the mysterious conflict in the Christian life against evil intelligences, real, though unseen.[24] The brilliant rationalist may dispose of such things by the convenient and compendious method of a sneer. "Such narratives as that" (of St. Paul's struggle with the exorcists at Ephesus) "are disagreeable little spots in everything that is done by the people. Though we cannot do a thousandth part of what St. Paul did, we have a system of physiology and of medicine very superior to his."[25] Perhaps _he_ had a system of spiritual diagnosis very superior to ours. In the epistle to the Angel of the Church of Thyatira, mention is made of "the woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a prophetess,"[26] who led astray the servants of Christ. St. John surely addresses himself to a community where influences precisely of this kind exist, and are recognised when he writes,--"Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.... Every spirit that confesseth not Jesus is not of God."[27] The Church or Churches, which the First Epistle directly contemplates, did not consist of men just converted. Its whole language supposes Christians, some of whom had grown old and were "fathers" in the faith, while others who were younger enjoyed the privilege of having been born and brought up in a Christian atmosphere. They are reminded again and again, with a reiteration which would be unaccountable if it had no special significance, that the commandment "that which they heard," "the word," "the message," is the same which they "had from the _beginning_."[28] Now this will exactly suit the circumstances of a Church like the Ephesian, to which another Apostle had originally preached the Gospel many years before.[29]

On the whole, we have in favour of assigning these Epistles to Ionian and Ephesian surroundings a considerable amount of external evidence. The general characteristics of the First Epistle consonant with the view of their origin which we have advocated are briefly these. (1) It is addressed to readers who were encompassed by peculiar temptations to make a compromise with idolatry. (2) It has an amplitude and generality of tone which befitted one who wrote to a Church which embraced members from many countries, and was thus in contact with men of many races and religions. (3) It has a peculiar solemnity of reference to the invisible world of spiritual evil and to its terrible influence upon the human mind. (4) The Epistle is pervaded by a desire to have it recognised that the creed and law of practice which it asserts is absolutely one with that which had been proclaimed by earlier heralds of the cross to the same community. Every one of these characteristics is consistent with the destination of the Epistle for the Christians of Ephesus in the first instance. Its polemical element, which we are presently to discuss, adds to an accumulation of coincidences which no ingenuity can volatilise away. The Epistle meets Ephesian circumstances; it also strikes at Ionian heresies.

Aïa-so-Louk,[30] the modern name of Ephesus, appears to be derived from two Greek words which speak of St. John the divine, the theologian of the Church. As the memory of the Apostle haunts the city where he so long lived, even in its fall and long decay under its Turkish conquerors,--and the fatal spread of the malaria from the marshes of the Cayster--so a memory of the place seems to rest in turn upon the Epistle, and we read it more satisfactorily while we assign to it the origin attributed to it by Christian antiquity, and keep that memory before our minds.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Cary's _Dante_, _Paradiso_, xxv. 117. Stanley's _Sermons and Essays on the Apostolic Age_, 242.

[3] Apoc. ii. 24.

[4] John xiii. 30 cf. 1 John ii, 11.

[5] εσκηνωσεν εν ἡμιν.

[6] This characteristic of St. John's style is powerfully expressed by the great hymn-writer of the Latin Church.

"Hebet sensus exors styli;
Stylo scribit tam subtili,
Fide tam catholicâ,
Ne de Verbo salutari
Posset quicquam refragari
Pravitas hæretica."
_Adam of St. Victor, Seq._ xxxii.

[7] John xii. 20-34, especially ver. 24.

[8] Acts i. 13.

[9] Acts iii. 4, v. 13, viii. 14.

[10] Gal. ii. 9.

[11] Acts iii. 4, iv. 13, viii. 14. The singular and interesting manuscript of Patmos (Αι περιοδοι του θεολογου) attributed to St. John's disciple, Prochorus, seems to recognise that St. John's chief mission was not that of working miracles. Even in a kind of duel of prodigies between him and the sinister magician of Patmos, the following occurs. "Kynops asked a young man in the multitude where his father then was. 'My father is dead,' he replied, 'he went down yonder in a storm.' Turning to John, the magician said,--'Now then, bring up this young man's father from the dead.' 'I have not come here,' answered the Apostle, 'to raise the dead, but to deliver the living from their errors.'"

[12] Gal. ii. 9; Acts xxi. 17, _sqq._

[13] John xxi. 7.

[14] Ibid., vers. 17, 18, 19.

[15] The beginning of old age would account sufficiently for the anticipation of death in 2 Peter i. 13, 14, 15.

[16] δοξασει ver. 19. The lifelike _shall_ (not _should_) is part of the many minute but vivid touches which make the whole of this scene so full of motion and reality--"I go a fishing" (ver. 3); "_about_ two hundred cubits" (ver. 8); the accurate αιγιαλος (ver. 4. See Trench, _On Parables_, 57; Stanley, _Apostolic Age_, 135).

[17] διορατικωτερος. S. Joann. Chrysost.--_Hom. in Joann._

[18] _Euseb. H. E._, iii. 23. See other quotations in Bilson, _Government of Christ's Church_, p. 365.

[19] _Ap. Euseb. H. E._, v. 20.

[20] _Adv. Hæres._, lib. iii., ch. 1.

[21] ἱερευς το πεταλον πεφορεκως--"Pontifex ejus (sc. _Domini_) auream laminam in fronte habens." So translated by S. Hieron. _Lib. de Vir. Illust._, xlv. The πεταλον is the LXX. rendering of צִיץ, the projecting leaf or plate of radiant gold (Exod. xxviii. 26, xxxix. 30), associated with the "mitre" (Lev. viii. 9). Whether Polycrates speaks literally, or wishes to convey by a metaphor the impression of holiness radiating from St. John's face, we probably cannot decide.

[22] Acts xix. 20, 21. In this description of Ephesus the writer has constantly had in view the passages to which he referred in the _Speakers Commentary, N.T._, iv., 274, 276. He has also studied M. Renan's _Saint Paul_, chap, xii., and the authorities cited in the notes, pp. 329, 350.

[23] St. John ii. 2, iv. 14.

[24] "We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against," etc. Eph. vi. 12-17.

[25] _Saint Paul_, Renan, 318, 319.

[26] For the almost certain reference here to the Chaldean Sybil Sambethe, see Apoc ii. 20, Archdeacon Lee's note in _Speaker's Commentary, N.T._, iv. 527, 534, 535, and Dean Blakesley (art. _Thyatira, Dict. of the Bible_).

[27] 1 John iv. 1, 3.

[28] 1 John ii. 7, ii. 24, iii. 11; 2 John vv. 5, 6. The passage in ii. 24 is a specimen of that simple emphasis, that presentation of a truth or duty under two aspects, which St. John often produces merely by an inversion of the order of the words. "Ye--what ye _heard_ from the beginning let it abide in you. If what from the _beginning_ ye heard abide in you" (ὁ ηκουσατε απ' αρχης ... ὁ απ' αρχης ηκουσατε). The emphasis in the first clause is upon the _fact_ of their having _heard_ the message; in the second upon this feature of the message--that it was given in the _beginning_ of Christianity amongst them, and kept unchanged until the present time. Cf. εντολη παλαια (ii. 7) with αρχαιος = "of the early Christian time," in Polycarp, _Ep. ad Philipp._, i.

[29] Acts xviii. 18-21. To these general links connecting our Epistles with Ephesus, a few of less importance, yet not without significance, may be added. (1) The name of Demetrius (3 John 12) is certainly suggestive of the holy city of the earth-mother (Acts xix. 24, 38). Vitruvius assigns the completion of the temple of Ephesus to an architect of the name, and calls him "servus Dianæ." (2) St. John in his Gospel adopts, as if instinctively, the computation of time which was used in Asia Minor (John iv. 6, xix. 4--Hefel. _Martyrium S. Polycarp_. xxi.). On the same principle he speaks in the Apocalypse of "day and night" (Apoc. iv. 8, vii. 15, xii. 10, xiv. 11, xx. 10); St. Paul, on the other hand, speaks of "night and day" (1 Tim. v. 5). It is a very real indication of the accuracy of the report of words in the Acts that, while St. Luke himself uses either form indifferently (Luke ii. 37, xviii. 2), St. Paul, as quoted by him, always says "night and day" (Acts xx. 31, xxvi. 7). (3) Is it merely fanciful to conjecture that the unusual αγαθοποιων (3 John 11) may be an allusion to the astrological language in which alone the term is ever used outside a very few instances in the sacred writers? "He only is under a good star, and has beneficent omens for his life." Balbillus, one of the most famous astrologers of antiquity, the confidant of Nero and Vespasian, was an Ephesian, and almost supreme in Ephesus, not long before St. John's arrival there. Sueton., _Neron._, 36.

[30] Aïa-so-Louk, a corruption of ἁγιος θεολογος, _holy theologian_ (or ἁγια θεολογου, _holy city of the theologian_). Some scholars, however, assert that the word is often pronounced and written _aiaslyk_, with the common Turkish termination _lyk_. See _S. Paul_ (Renan, 342, note 2).

DISCOURSE II.

_THE CONNECTION OF THE EPISTLE WITH THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN._

Συναδυσι μεν γαρ αλληλοις το ευαγγελιον και ἡ επιστολη. _Dionys.
Alexandr. ap Euseb., H. E., vii., 25._

"And these things write we unto you, that your joy may be
full."--1 JOHN i. 4.

From the wholesale burning of books at Ephesus, as a consequence of awakened convictions, the most pregnant of all commentators upon the New Testament has drawn a powerful lesson. "True religion," says the writer, "puts bad books out of the way." Ephesus at great expense burnt curious and evil volumes, and the "word of God grew and prevailed." And he proceeds to show how just in the very matter where Ephesus had manifested such costly penitence, she was rewarded by being made a sort of depository of the most precious books which ever came from human pens. St. Paul addresses a letter to the Ephesians. Timothy was Bishop of Ephesus when the two great pastoral Epistles were sent to him.[31] All St. John's writings point to the same place. The Gospel and Epistles were written there, or with primary reference to the capital of Ionia.[32] The Apocalypse was in all probability first read at Ephesus.

Of this group of Ephesian books we select two of primary importance--the Gospel and First Epistle of St. John. Let us dwell upon the close and thorough connection of the two documents, upon the interpenetration of the Epistle by the Gospel, by whatever name we may prefer to designate the connection.

It is said indeed by a very high authority, that while the "whole Epistle is permeated with thoughts of the person and work of Christ," yet "direct references to facts of the Gospel are singularly rare." More particularly it is stated that "we find here none of the foundation and (so to speak) crucial events summarised in the earliest Christian confession as we still find them in the Apostles' creed." And among these events are placed, "the Birth of the Virgin Mary, the Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Ascension, the Session, the Coming to Judgment."

To us there seems to be some exaggeration in this way of putting the matter. A writing which accompanied a sacred history, and which was a spiritual comment upon that very history, was not likely to repeat the history upon which it commented, just in the same shape. Surely the Birth is the necessary condition of having come in the flesh. The incident of the piercing of the side, and the water and blood which flowed from it, is distinctly spoken of; and in that the Crucifixion is implied. Shrinking with shame from Jesus at His Coming, which is spoken of in another verse, has no meaning unless that Coming be to Judgment.[33] The sixth chapter is, if we may so say, the section of "the Blood," in the fourth Gospel. That section standing in the Gospel, standing in the great Sacrament of the Church, standing in the perpetually cleansing and purifying efficacy of the Atonement--ever present as a witness, which becomes personal, because identified with a Living Personality[34]--finds its echo and counterpart in the Epistle towards the beginning and near the close.[35]

We now turn to that which is the most conclusive evidence of connection between two documents--one historical, the other moral and spiritual--of which literary composition is capable. Let us suppose that a writer of profound thoughtfulness has finished, after long elaboration, the historical record of an eventful and many-sided life--a life of supreme importance to a nation, or to the general thought and progress of humanity. The book is sent to the representatives of some community or school. The ideas which its subject has uttered to the world, from their breadth and from the occasional obscurity of expression incident to all great spiritual utterances, need some elucidation. The plan is really exhaustive, and combines the facts of the life with a full insight into their relations; but it may be missed by any but thoughtful readers. The author will accompany this main work by something which in modern language we might call an introduction, or appendix, or advertisement, or explanatory pamphlet, or encyclical letter. Now the ancient form of literary composition rendered books packed with thought doubly difficult both to read and write; for they did not admit foot-notes, or marginal analyses, or abstracts. St. John then practically says, first to his readers in Asia Minor, then to the Church for ever--"with this life of Jesus I send you not only thoughts for your spiritual benefit, moulded round His teaching, but something more; I send you an _abstract_, a compendium of contents, at the beginning of this letter; I also send you at its close a key to the plan on which my Gospel is conceived." And surely a careful reader of the Gospel at its first publication would have desired assistance exactly of this nature. He would have wished to have a synopsis of contents, short but comprehensive, and a synoptical view of the author's plan--of the idea which guided him in his choice of incidents so momentous and of teaching so varied.

We have in the First Epistle two synopses of the Gospel which correspond with a perfect precision to these claims.[36] We have: (1) a synopsis of the _contents_ of the Gospel; (2) a synoptical view of the _conception_ from which it was written.

1. We find in the Epistle at the very outset a synopsis of the contents of the Gospel.

"That which was from the beginning, that which we have heard, that which we have seen with our eyes, that which we gazed upon, and our hands handled--_I speak_ concerning the Word who is the Life--that which we have seen and heard, declare we unto you also."

What are the contents of the Gospel? (1) A lofty and dogmatic _proœmium_, which tells us of "the Word who was in the beginning with God--in Whom was life." (2) _Discourses_ and utterances, sometimes running on through pages, sometimes brief and broken. (3) _Works_, sometimes miraculous, sometimes wrought into the common contexture of human life--looks, influences, seen by the very eyes of St. John and others, gazed upon with ever deepening joy and wonder. (4) _Incidents_ which proved that all this issued from One who was intensely human; that it was as real as life and humanity--historical not visionary; the doing and the effluence of a Manhood which could be, and which was, grasped by human hands.

Such is a synopsis of the Gospel precisely as it is given in the beginning of the First Epistle. (1) The Epistle mentions _first_, "that which was from the beginning." There is the compendium of the proœmium of the Gospel. (2) One of the most important constituent parts of the Gospel is to be found in its ample preservation of dialogues, in which the Saviour is one interlocutor; of monologues spoken to the hushed hearts of the disciples, or to the listening Heart of the Father, yet not in tones so low that their love did not find it audible. This element of the narrative is summed up by the writer of the Epistle in two words--"That which we heard."[37] (3) The _works_ of benevolence or power, the doings and sufferings; the pathos or joy which spring up from them in the souls of the disciples, occupy a large portion of the Gospel. All these come under the heading, "that which we have seen with our eyes,[38] that which we gazed upon,"[39] with one unbroken gaze of wonder as so beautiful, and of awe as so divine.[40] (4) The assertion of the _reality of the Manhood_[41] of Him who was yet the Life manifested--a reality through all His words, works, sufferings--finds its strong, bold summary in this compendium of the contents of the Gospel, "and our hands have handled." Nay, a still shorter compendium follows: (1) The Life with the Father. (2) The Life manifested.[42]

2. But we have more than a synopsis which embraces the contents of the Gospel at the beginning of the Epistle. We have towards its close a _second_ synopsis of the whole framework of the Gospel; not now the theory of the Person of Christ, which in such a life was necessarily placed at its beginning, but of the human conception which pervaded the Evangelist's composition.

The second synopsis, not of the contents of the Gospel, but of the aim and conception which it assumed in the form into which it was moulded by St. John, is given by the Epistle with a fulness which omits scarcely a paragraph of the Gospel. In the space of six verses of the fifth chapter the word _witness_, as verb or substantive, is repeated _ten_ times.[43] The simplicity of St. John's artless rhetoric can make no more emphatic claim on our attention. The Gospel is indeed a tissue woven out of many lines of evidence human and divine. Compress its purpose into one single word. No doubt it is supremely the Gospel of the Divinity of Jesus. But, next to that, it may best be defined as the Gospel of _Witness_. These witnesses we may take in the order of the Epistle. St. John feels that his Gospel is more than a book; it is a past made everlastingly present. Such as the great Life was in history, so it stands for ever. Jesus _is_ "the propitiation, _is_ righteous," "is _here_."[44] So the great influences round His Person, the manifold witnesses of His Life, stand witnessing for ever in the Gospel and in the Church. What are these? (1) The Spirit is ever _witnessing_. So our Lord in the Gospel--"when the Comforter is come, He shall witness of Me."[45] No one can doubt that the Spirit is one pre-eminent subject of the Gospel. Indeed, teaching about Him, above all as the witness to Christ, occupies three unbroken chapters in one place.[46] (2) The _water_ is ever witnessing. So long as St. John's Gospel lasts, and permeates the Church with its influence, the water must so testify. There is scarcely a paragraph of it where water is not; almost always with some relation to Christ. The witness of the Baptist[47] is, "I baptize with water." The Jordan itself bears witness that all its waters cannot give that which He bestows who is "preferred before" John.[48] Is not the water of Cana that was made wine a witness to His glory?[49] The birth of "water and of the Spirit,"[50] is another witness. And so in the Gospel section after section. The water of Jacob's well; the water of the pool of Bethesda; the waters of the sea of Galilee, with their stormy waves upon which He walked; the water outpoured at the feast of tabernacles, with its application to the river of living water; the water of Siloam; the water poured into the basin, when Jesus washed the disciples' feet; the water which, with the blood, streamed from the riven side upon the cross; the water of the sea of Galilee in its gentler mood, when Jesus showed Himself on its beach to the seven; as long as all this is recorded in the Gospel, as long as the sacrament of Baptism, with its visible water and its invisible grace working in the regenerate, abides among the faithful;--so long is the water ever witnessing.[51] (3) The Blood is ever "witnessing." Expiation once for all; purification continually from the blood outpoured; drinking the blood of the Son of Man by participation in the sacrament of His love, with the grace and strength that it gives day by day to innumerable souls; the Gospel concentrated into that great sacrifice; the Church's gifts of benediction summarised in the unspeakable Gift; this is the unceasing witness of the _Blood_. (4) Men are ever witnessing. "The witness of men" fills the Gospel from beginning to end. The glorious series of confessions wrung from willing and unwilling hearts form the points of division round which the whole narrative may be grouped. Let us think of all those attestations which lie between the Baptist's precious testimony with the sweet yet fainter utterances of Andrew, Philip, Nathanael, and the perfect creed of Christendom condensed into the burning words of Thomas--"my Lord and my God."[52] What a range of feeling and faith; what a variety of attestation coming from human souls, sometimes wrung from them half unwillingly, sometimes uttered at crisis-moments with an impulse that could not be resisted! The witness of men in the Gospel, and the assurance of one testimony that was to be given by the Apostles individually and collectively,[53] besides the evidences already named includes the following--the witness of Nicodemus, of the Samaritan woman, of the Samaritans, of the impotent man at the pool of Bethesda, of Simon Peter, of the officers of the Jewish authorities, of the blind man, of Pilate.[54] (5) The witness of God occupies also a great position in the fourth Gospel. That witness may be said to be given in five forms: the witness of the Father,[55] of Christ Himself,[56] of the Holy Spirit,[57] of Scripture,[58] of miracles.[59] This great cloud of witnesses, human and divine, finds its appropriate completion in another subjective witness.[60] The whole body of evidence passes from the region of the intellectual to that of the moral and spiritual life. The _evidence_ acquires that _evidentness_ which is to all our knowledge what the sap is to the tree. The faithful carries it in his heart; it goes about with him, rests with him day and night, is close to him in life and death. He, the principle of whose being is belief ever going out of itself and resting its acts of faith on the Son of God, has all that manifold witness in him.[61]

It would be easy to enlarge upon the verbal connection between the Epistle before us and the Gospel which it accompanied. We might draw out (as has often been done) a list of quotations from the Gospel, a whole common treasury of mystic language; but we prefer to leave an undivided impression upon the mind. A document which gives us a synopsis of the _contents_ of another document at the beginning, and a synoptical analysis of its predominant idea at the close, covering the entire work, and capable of absorbing every part of it (except some necessary adjuncts of a rich and crowded narrative), has a connection with it which is vital and absorbing. The Epistle is at once an abstract of the contents of the Gospel, and a key to its purport. To the Gospel, at least to it and the Epistle considered as integrally one, the Apostle refers when he says: "these things write we unto you."[62]

St. John had asserted that one end of his declaration was to make his readers hold fast "fellowship with us," _i.e._, with the Church as the Apostolic Church; aye, and that fellowship of ours is "with the Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ;" "and these things," he continues (with special reference to his Gospel, as spoken of in his opening words), "we write unto you, that your joy may be fulfilled."

There is as truly a joy as a "patience and comfort of the Scriptures." The Apostle here speaks of "your joy," but that implied _his_ also.

All great literature, like all else that is beautiful, is a "joy for ever." To the true student his books are this. But this is so only with a few really great books. We are not speaking of works of exact science. Butler, Pascal, Bacon, Shakespeare, Homer, Scott, theirs is work of which congenial spirits never grow quite tired. But to be capable of giving out joy, books must have been written with it. The Scotch poet tells us, that no poet ever found the Muse, until he had learned to walk beside the brook, and "no think long." That which is not thought over with pleasure; that which, as it gradually rises before the author in its unity, does not fill him with delight; will never permanently give pleasure to readers. He must know joy before he can say--"these things write we unto you, that your joy may be full."

The book that is to give joy must be a part of a man's self. That is just what most books are not. They are laborious, diligent, useful perhaps; they are not interesting or delightful. How touching it is, when the poor old stiff hand must write, and the overworked brain think, for bread! Is there anything so pathetic in literature as Scott setting his back bravely to the wall, and forcing from his imagination the reluctant creations which used to issue with such splendid profusion from its haunted chambers?

Of the conditions under which an inspired writer pursued his labours we know but little. But some conditions are apparent in the books of St. John with which we are now concerned. The fourth Gospel is a book written without _arrière pensée_, without literary conceit, without the paralysing dread of criticism. What verdict the polished society of Ephesus would pronounce; what sneers would circulate in philosophic quarters; what the numerous heretics would murmur in their conventicles; what critics within the Church might venture to whisper, missing perhaps favourite thoughts and catch-words;[63] St. John cared no more than if he were dead. He communed with the memories of the past; he listened for the music of the Voice which had been the teacher of his life. To be faithful to these memories, to recall these words, to be true to Jesus, was his one aim. No one can doubt that the Gospel was written with a full delight. No one who is capable of feeling, ever has doubted that it was written as if with "a feather dropped from an angel's wing;" that without aiming at anything but truth, it attains in parts at least a transcendent beauty. At the close of the proœmium, after the completest theological _formula_ which the Church has ever possessed--the still, even pressure of a tide of thought--we have a parenthetic sentence, like the splendid unexpected rush and swell of a sudden wave ("we beheld the glory, the glory as of the Only-Begotten of the Father"); then after the parenthesis a soft and murmuring fall of the whole great tide ("full of grace and truth"). Can we suppose that the Apostle hung over his sentence with literary zest? The number of writers is small who can give us an everlasting truth by a single word, a single pencil touch; who, having their mind loaded with thought, are wise enough to keep that strong and eloquent silence which is the prerogative only of the highest genius. St. John gives us one of these everlasting pictures, of these inexhaustible symbols, in three little words--"He then having received the sop, went immediately out, and _it was night_."[64] Do we suppose that he admired the perfect effect of that powerful self-restraint? Just before the crucifixion he writes--"Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe, and Pilate saith unto them, Behold the Man!"[65] The pathos, the majesty, the royalty of sorrow, the admiration and pity of Pilate, have been for centuries the inspiration of Christian art. Did St. John congratulate himself upon the image of sorrow and of beauty which stands for ever in these lines? With St. John as a writer it is as with St. John delineated in the fresco at Padua by the genius of Giotto. The form of the ascending saint is made visible through a reticulation of rays of light in colours as splendid as ever came from mortal pencil; but the rays issue entirely from the Saviour, whose face and form are full before him.