He adds, therefore, I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth.' There is the modesty and the sound philosophy of an Apostle! Many of us think that we can put the truth into people, by screaming it into their ears. We do not suppose they have any truth in them to which we can make an appeal. St. John had no notion that he could be of the least use to his own dear children of Ephesus unless there was a truth in them, a capacity of distinguishing truth from lies, a sense that one must be the eternal opposite of the other. He can write to them about those antichrists, because they have a chrism, because there is in them a power of listening to his words and of understanding them. The presence of that power does not make the words unnecessary, any more than the fitness of the ground for receiving the rain makes the rain unnecessary. An Apostle can help them to reject those men who would blind them and lead them captive, because they have in them an anointing which shows them that only He Who brings light and freedom is the anointed of the Father.

These Ephesians had learnt that no lie is of the truth.' 'Common-place learning enough!' some will say. • Most people know as much as that.' Do they, indeed? Alas! half the doctors in Christendom have not known it. They have thought that some lies are of the truth, that some lies may serve the truth. Their cleverness has led them to think so. Their notion that the truth was left to them to take care of and keep from harm, and to defend against impugners, has led them to think so. 'Just a little 'fraud, a pious fraud, will help us here.

The people cannot take in truth; spice it with falsehood, and it will

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'go down.' These have been the sage conclusions of divines and men of God. And so Christ has been mixed with antichrist; so the way has been prepared for antichrist to come in and claim the whole ground which Christ once occupied. It is for the latter days of an age that such a catastrophe as that is reserved. There is a mingling of the false and the true, of the foul and the fair, till then. At length the false appears in its falsehood; the foul asks homage because it is foul. And then they who will not bow down to it, perceive that no lie is of the truth; that they must purge their hearts of every base mixture. And since they cannot depend upon their own truthfulness, they ask the Spirit of Truth to guide them into all truth.

Now he comes directly to the point: Who is a liar but he that denieth that JESUS is the CHRIST?' He appeals to them as men seeking truth and loving truth, and endowed with a capacity for discerning truth. He says, 'These men that I am speaking of, these men that have 'gone out from us, affirm very loudly that Jesus, the humble man, He Who went about doing good, He Who was cruci

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fied, is not at all the Christ for human beings. They will only honour one who is not a humble man, one who does not go about doing good, one who has not been crucified. They ' especially scorn that last characteristic. They say that 'that defeats all the pretensions of Jesus to be a king. He 'could not have submitted to death if He had been. You 'Ephesians have heard these words uttered; you have known 'the people who spoke them. Yes, and the words had an ' attraction for you. The men did look like men who had high spiritual pretensions. But what was it in you that their words attracted? What was it in you that was in

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'clined to receive these men? Do you not know that it was 'the lying temper in you which went along with their boast'ing? Do you not know that so far as you yielded to them, you were yielding to a lying temper? And were you not prevented from doing this altogether by a Spirit of Truth which forbad you to obey the false inclination within you? Here then is a clear witness in yourselves, that to say Jesus is not the Christ, to set up another Christ who is 'unlike Him, is to be a liar.'

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I have hinted already that the grand distinction between Jesus and these antichrists was, that He said He came from a Father, and received His anointing from a Father; and that they came in their own names, boasting of themselves as great ones. This is the contrast which St. John pursues in the following verses: He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.' In his Gospel St. John illustrates this point at great length. All our Lord's discourses with the Jews at Jerusalem which he records, have reference to His Father and His relation to the Father. All their misunderstandings of Him, their rage against Him, their condemnation of Him as a blasphemer, have reference to His language on this point. Ultimately He was put to death as a rebel against Cæsar; as a rival king. But the dislike of the Jews to Him, that which prompted them to deliver Him to the Gentiles, was gathered up in the complaint, He calleth God His Father, making Himself equal with God.' Was He proud; or were they? Was this the height of exaltation, or the depth of self-humiliation? Was it, as the Jews said, that He made Himself equal with God, or, as He said Himself, that He could do nothing without His Father, that what He saw His Father do, He did likewise;

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that He came down from the Father to become in all things like the meanest of men? All the difference between Christian ethics and antichristian ethics; between the ethics which treats it as the highest glory of God that He can stoop to us, and the ethics which makes it our highest glory that we can lift ourselves to be as Gods,-is latent in this question.

I will not press it further upon you now. It will come before us again in connexion with the beautiful verse which opens the next chapter. But I cannot conclude without saying that I am not so far as I may seem from those who speak of this day as one of the latter days. I cannot tell how close we may be to the end of our age, to our judgment. If we are very close to it, the hints which St. John gives us respecting the end of his age, respecting the judgment which was approaching then, will be all the more precious, and should be all the more earnestly pondered. God gives us what we need for our necessities. We may require to be warned of antichrists, and to be told what they will be like, as much as the Ephesians. Certainly we want to know the characteristics of the true Christ as much as they did; certainly we cannot know them unless that same anointing Spirit who abided with them, who is truth and no lie, has been assured to us and to our children for ever.

6 Nov 42.

THE PLACE OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE FATHER, THE SON, AND THE SPIRIT, IN CHRISTIAN ETHICS.

1 JOHN II. 23-28.

Let that therefore abide in
If that which ye have heard

Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father: [but] he that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also. you, which ye have heard from the beginning. from the beginning shall remain in you, ye also shall continue in the Son, and in the Father. And this is the promise that He hath promised us, even eternal life. These things have I written unto you concerning them that seduce you. But the anointing which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in Him. And now, little children, abide in Him; that, when He shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before Him at His coming.

OUR translators appear to have doubted whether the last clause of the 23d verse is genuine; for they have taken the very unusual course of printing it in Italics, as they print words which they insert to fill up the sense of the original. Modern scholars, I believe, do not share in this suspicion; they suppose the words' He that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also,' to be St. John's as much as those which precede them. Certainly, they make his meaning somewhat clearer; but it would not be obscure, I think, if they were absent.

One peculiarity you must notice in each of these clauses.