' The Life of M. W. Dale, 79. " W. J. Patton, Pardon and Assurance, 88.
' John S. Maver.
I JOHN I. 7 219
life would languish. Every living creature would lose its bright- ness and activity ; every plant would wither ; all the material world would lose its charm. How natural was it for men to identify with light the good they felt at work in their hearts, and to mark by darkness the evil with which it had to strive ! Even in the Old Testament, light is the chosen figure for purity, truth, and life ; darkness for impurity, falsehood, and death. Here, then, we find the most probable explanation of the special form in which the Apostle sets his representation of the nature of God. He is anxious to protect his fellow-disciples against the subtle errors by which he sees them surrounded. He wishes especially to guard them against the superstitious notion that there could be the merest shadow of evil in the nature or life of Him whom they had come to know as the God and Father of the Lord Jesus. fy What is suggested by "light" throughout the passage is something absolutely luminous and transparent, in which there is no concealment and no need for any. To say that God is light is to say for one thing that in God there is nothing to hide : if He is dark, it is with excess of light ; it is because He dwells in light that is inaccessible, not because there is anything in Him that of its own nature craves obscurity. This is the line on which our thoughts are led by the following verses, where the opposite of walking in the light is evidently hiding sin, or denying that we have sinned. It is some kind of secrecy — which no doubt has its motive in sin — that is meant by darkness, and this gives us the key to walking in the light. To walk in the light means to live a life in which there is nothing hidden, nothing in which we are insincere with ourselves, nothing in which we seek to impose upon others. We may have, and no doubt we will have, both sin and the sense of sin upon us — " if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us " — but we may walk in the light nevertheless, if we deal truly with our sin ; and it is only as we do so that we enjoy Christian fellowship and are cleansed by the blood of Jesus.
*[| Did you never, in walking the fields, come across a large flat stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all around it, close to its edges ? — and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough,
220 FELLOWSHIP IN THE LIGHT
insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to herself, " It's done brown enough by this time " ? What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over ! Blades of grass flattened down, colourless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or horny-shelled — turtle-bugs, one wants to call them; some of them softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches ; black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage- coaches ; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity ! But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon the compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs — and some of them have a good many — rush about wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay ; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had its hole ; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there ; and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.^
2. Walking in the light. — Life is a walk. It is something to feel that life is a walk ; not a game, a pastime, or outburst of passion ; not a random flight, or a groping, creeping, grovelling crawl, or a mazy, labyrinthian puzzle ; but a walk ; a steady walk ; an onward march and movement ; a business-like, purpose-like, step-by-step advance in front — such a walk as a man girds himself for and shoes himself for, and sets out upon with staff in hand, and firm-set face ; and holds on in, amid stormy wind and drifting snow ; resolute to have it finished and to reach the goal. Such a walk is real life — life in earnest.