* A FatTier's Letters to his Son, 128.
i64 A NEW BEGINNING
that tremendous and thrilliDg contrast which he draws between the great Christian pictures in their manifest incompleteness and the early Greek statues with their manifest completeness of beauty and grace ? Many of us have felt the contrast. It would be well for us all if we fought our way with him through the depression to which the thought sometimes gives birth. How vividly he sets forth the truth that a sense of incompleteness is the first condition of completeness ! You must ever be born again to higher completeness if you would believe in a life to come, and the very fact that you recognize your imperfection is the best thing about you. It is finiteness in view and purpose that is our besetting sin. It was finiteness of view and purpose that gave to the old classic statues a chance to seem complete, and their very finiteness is the proof of their utter incompleteness ; out of that came at once their possibilities and their impossibilities.^
Growth came when, looking your last on them all.
You turned your eyes inwardly one fine day And cried with a start — What if we so small
Be greater and grander the while than they? Are they perfect of lineament, perfect of stature?
In both, of such lower types are we Precisely because of our wider nature;
For time, theirs — ours, for eternity.
To-day's brief passion limits their range;
It seethes with the morrow for us and more. They are perfect — how else ? they shall never change :
We are faulty — why not? we have time in store. The Artificer's hand is not arrested
With us; we are rough-hewn, nowise polished: They stand for our copy, and, once invested
With all they can teach, we shall see them abolished.
'Tis a life-long toil till our lump be leaven —
The better! What's come to perfection perishes. Things learned on earth, we shall practise in heaven.
2. How close and personal are the lessons which we may learn from our Lord's treatment of Nicodemus ! He had lost a great opportunity in resisting the teaching of John. The " way of the Lord " would have been prepared in his heart had he listened to the desert preacher. He would not now have been sitting
1 R. Eyton, The. Glory of the Lord, 26.
ST. JOHN III. 5 165
bewildered and amazed at the teaching of Jesus. Neglect of light and truth is always punished. Every duty we omit obscures some truth we should have known. As one of Browning's characters says —
I see a duty and do it not, therefore I see no higher. We must be faithful to the light which comes to us, if we would be readvfor the greater light when it arises.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, )
And^what we have_been makes us what we are. 7
We can never tell how muchwr1tose''byunfal3i^^ the
truths which touch the conscience or to the light which shows the way of duty. The demands from which we shrink or which we refuse are not always done with when we turn away from them. They meet us again. The sin we know, the duty we have neglected, the right which we have disobeyed, present themselves to us again. They have to be confessed, performed, obeyed, before we can enter the kingdom of life and peace.
(1) The first evidence of the reality of the new attitude to the past is that the sinner ceases from sin. This is the meaning of the words of St. John (1 John iii. 9): "Whosoever is born of God doth not commit sin; for his seed remaineth in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God." The passage of which this forms a part is sometimes quoted as proving the sinlessness of all those who are partakers of what is called higher life. The sixth verse especially is thus appealed to. But these passages do not refer to any particular class who have attained this higher life of which they speak, but to all, according to the sixth verse, who have either seen or known Christ, and, according to the ninth verse, to all who have been born again. If the passage teaches the perfect sinlessness in thought, word, and act of any individual, it is of every one that has been bom of the Spirit. But that is not the meaning of the passage. The tense employed in the Greek is the tense employed to denote habit, and the word is that made use of by St. John himself to express habitual practice. The word rendered " commit " in 1 John iii. 9 is the same word as is rendered " keep " in John vii. 19 : " None of you keepeth the law " ; and the one verse may explain the other. As none of the Jews kept the law, so those who have been bom again do not
i66 A NEW BEGINNING
keep sin. With their whole heart they have given up their wicked ways; their habits are changed; they have abandoned their former ways ; they hate the sins they once loved, and they prove by their life and conversation that a real change has taken place in their heart. That this is the true meaning of the passage is proved beyond all doubt by the tenth verse, " In this the children of God are manifest, and the children of the devil; whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God, neither he that loveth not his brother."