So it is that we are apt to treat this text. Its language is very bold and strong. St. John seems to say that if only we rightly use what he tells us, we shall be freed from all sin. It is a claim which sounds as extravagant as if a doctor should claim to have found a panacea for all disease. " I write unto you that ye may not sin."
2. Perhaps we might say (though we must not abuse the saying) that St. John had two pictures in his mind as he
»49
250 AN ADVOCATE WITH THE FATHER
described the Christian life, the one, the ideal Christian, the other, the actual believer. Think of an artist standing before a great picture which he is painting. He has two visions of it — one on the canvas and the other in his own mind. That on the canvas is imperfect ; the outlines are there, but the colouring is inharmonious; the expression is feeble, the life is wanting, and the subduing power which belongs to a great work has yet to be created. Not so the vision in the mind, that is perfect. The forms are finished, every part is complete in itself, and right in its relation to every other ; the colours mingle and agree like notes in sweetest music, and the picture as a whole is instinct with life, and clothed with beauty and grandeur. Now suppose the artist were to sit down to write a description of this picture. Looking at the canvas, he would speak of the imperfections of the work ; but gazing upon the vision within, he would write of its com- pleteness, power, and majesty. This is just what St. John did. Looking upon the actual Christian he spoke of sin, confession, pardon, and spiritual warfare ; but while doing this the vision of the ideal hovered before his mind, and he wrote : " He sinneth not — he cannot sin."
II There was one department of human life which was strange and unfamiliar to Westcott, and in which he moved with rare and doubtful steps. It was the world of sin. He told us little about it. It was alien to him. Why pry into it, or analyze it, or explore it ? He loathed it ; and passed it by, wherever it was possible. He preferred to uplift the ideal, and leave it to work its own victory. If the sun were but up, would not the night, by that very fact, have departed ? Somehow, that dark world is more tenacious and persistent than he quite allowed for. When his Archdeacons presented to him the carefully collected case of an Incumbent who had broken every Commandment, he dismissed it on the ground (so it was reported) that his category of humanity refused to admit the existence of such a sinner. As the terrible facts of his northern towns forced themselves upon his notice, he became more vividly aware of the awful volume of evil. But still, however deeply this disturbed him, it did not provoke him to examine more closely the conditions of sin. It remained a perturbing misery rather than an intelligible experience. His purity of soul recoiled from its mystery, and still sought for refuge in asserting the Ideal. This accounts for a certain white intensity of optimism which characterizes his writings, and which
I JOHN II. I, 2 251
keeps them slightly aloof from things as they are. We wonder, as we read, whether he has quite taken the full measure of the facts. We sometimes feel as if the atmosphere were too fine to live in, and as if the springs of human motive were left untouched. There is no scathing light suddenly let in, to lay bare the secrets of the soul, such as flashes from the pages of Newman's sermons. We are not brought up to judgment at the awful bar. This work was not for him. Eather it was his to persuade us that all things were possible with God ; that evil was an alien thing, and might be done away; that human nature had the impulse in it of eternity ; that the entire body of humanity was moving towards its redemption in Christ Jesus.^
3. St. John is not making terms with sin, first setting up deliverance from sin as an ideal, and then admitting that after all sin will be actual. St. John is here making further provision against sin. If one sin excluded us for ever from God's fellow- ship, and for ever thrust us back into the outer darkness, we would be hopeless indeed. It would not be worth our while to rouse ourselves to any effort to escape sin. But it is not so. We have an Advocate, and a Propitiation that abundantly prevails. And so, too, we can deal with all that mass of sin which we feel as a crushing weight on us, or see as a barrier excluding and shutting up our approach to God.
4. Notice, further, that he addresses the whole Church of God. " My little children " — it is the language of venerable age. The writer had lived long; sixty years at least had passed since he beheld the Incarnate Glory, the glory of God in the face of Christ. It is the language of ineffable love. He had lived so near the heart of love that he had become impregnated and saturated with it. He might be old, but that was young ; he might be weak, but that was strong ; his mind might be giving way beneath the pressure of age and infirmity, but the eyes of his heart were as clear-sighted as in the days when he first beheld Christ on the shores of the lake. It is the language of great authority. At the feet of this man other inspired teachers might have been prepared to sit. We can imagine that many of the minor prophets of the Old Testament, for instance, would have been glad to form a class around this venerable man, whose head had leaned upon