THE INWARD WITNESS.

283 sively on what they call the internal testimony of the Spirit. I do not undervalue their doctrine as a counter? Quakers weight to much that is coarse, sensual, external, in the language of Churchmen; I think God has appointed it, as a protest against our idolatries. But I do not admit for an instant that they are wiser than St. John, or that they know as well as he did what the witness of the Spirit is. I find them continually setting aside His witness by confounding Him with the thoughts which He inspires in them; with the spirits to which His witness is borne. 1 think they must do this, and must become very exclusive, and also very often the victims of casual impressions, of nervous ecstasies or depressions, if they are not willing to receive God's testimony to others as well as themselves. This is the blessing of the Water and the Blood.' They speak of a gift, a gift of eternal life to Mankind; a gift not bestowed upon those who are conscious of it, but upon all, in that Son who died for all and lives for all.

The words which follow contain the only possible limitation of this gift, and they are in very truth not a limitation but an expansion of it, 'He that hath the Son hath life: and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.' We have no life, we can have no life in ourselves. The Spirit does not witness to us of a miserable, partial, selfish, new life, which is given to us because we are Christians or believers, or have certain rare emotions. He testifies to us of a Universal and Everlasting Life which dwells in the Son of God; which we may enjoy, if we do not desire to be separated from the great family in heaven and earth that is named in Him.

THE NATURE OF PRAYER-VENIAL AND MORTAL SINS.

1 JOHN V. 13-17.

These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God. And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask any thing according to His will, He heareth us: and if we know that He hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him. If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it. All unrighteousness is sin: and there is a sin not unto death.

WE are approaching the conclusion of the Epistle; the words,' These things have I written,' indicate that St. John is about to give an explanation of its general purpose, if not a summary of its contents. Thus much is obvious on the first reading of them. His object was not to make proselytes of those who lay outside the Christian Church. He addressed himself to those who believed on the name of the Son of God.' They were baptized into that Name; they publicly confessed that Name; it was the Name which drew on them the charge of blasphemy from Jewish rulers and scribes; it was the Name, when associated with the person of Jesus the Crucified, which excited the contempt or hostility of the worshippers of the Greek divinities. All

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acts of united worship among the disciples, all their sufferings, recalled this Name.

But if they had no need to be convinced of its worth or its power, what good was an Apostolical Epistle to do them? St. John makes answer: That ye may know that

ye

have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God.' You will wonder at the last clause.

It

sounds as if he proposed to convert them to a faith which they were possessed of already. Before you determine that it is actually so empty of meaning, consider the first clause. That, at all events, is not a commonplace. Ye have eternal life.' Not 'ye may have it; sometime hence 'this unspeakable blessing may be bestowed on you, or on such of you as deserve it.' But, 'it is yours now. The 'gift has been assured to you.' I think many Christians of his day and of ours would rather be startled by the strangeness than by the simplicity of this assertion; would deem it very unlike the notions which they had associated with their traditional faith.

Yet it cannot be said that St. John is introducing a new doctrine at the close of his letter. In the first verses of it he adopted the very language which we meet with here. The Eternal Life is said to have been manifested that they might partake of it, and that so their joy might be full. There has been no inconsistency in any of the sentences which followed that early sentence. All have represented Eternal Life as shown forth in Jesus Christ, as given to men in Jesus Christ. All have been signifying that to believe in Christ is to believe in one who has the Eternal Life of God, that Life which is intended for man who is made in the image of God, that life the loss of which is

Eternal Death. The verse with which I concluded the last Lecture had the same burden: He that hath the Son of God hath life. He that hath not the Son of God, hath not life.'

You can understand, then, why the Apostle wrote to those who believed in the Name of the Son of God, that they might

believe in the Name of the Son of God.' He does not wish to rob them of any faith they had. He does not seek to persuade them that it was good for nothing. It meant far more, not less, than they supposed. He would show them how much it meant, what rights they had which they were not claiming. And this not merely to increase their comfort, not even to enlarge the scope of their knowledge; but to save the belief they had from degenerating into the pride which is the enemy of all belief. If their faith was in a Christ in whom there was not Eternal Life for all men, who only might bestow something called Eternal Life on certain persons, hereafter; they might soon learn to compliment themselves on their superiority to the Jews and Heathens who had not this faith. They might find a certain comfort in looking forward to their exclusion from the blessings which were in reserve for the chosen flock. And yet, all the while, their notion of these blessings would become more and more vague; the Eternal Life would be a mere expression for a certain amount of conceivable or inconceivable happiness. Strange, no doubt, that we should find a compensation for the distance, indistinctness, unreality of our hopes for ourselves, in thinking that other men are cut off from them altogether! Strange;—and yet no reader of history, no reader of his own heart, will deny that our dark unregenerate nature does

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find a miserable consolation in this thought; or that it mixes in fearful confusion with thoughts which have their root in the regenerate will, with the zeal and affection which God Himself has inspired!

St. John permits no vagueness and no exclusiveness. He tells them of a life, an actual divine life, which has been manifested in the Son of Man to men. This is, this must be, the blessing which God desires for His creatures, which God only can bestow upon them. This must be that which they want here. The full fruition of this Life, separated from all the vanity, selfishness, death which mingles with it now, must be what the saints enter into when they cast off their mortal rags. St. John then wrote that all who believed in the Son of God then, or should believe on Him hereafter, might believe in Him in this moral, human, divine sense; not in a sense which might become immoral, inhuman, ungodly.

'And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that, if we ask any thing according to His will, He heareth us: and if we know that He hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him.' He has told us that we have eternal life. What then have we to ask 'for? Is there anything better than eternal life?' Such a question as this would be a most reasonable one if Eternal Life were what so many of us take it to be, a state of repose after toil, a state of security not of dependence. But who that uses language faithfully, associates Life with inanition, and not rather with the highest activity of all powers and energies? Or who that has learnt from bitter experience that to be independent of God is to be in death, can dream of a state which shall have any worth or