ypvxiKov and St. John by t6 yeyewqixivov iK Tijs capKbs is not any metaphysical abstraction, but human beings as they are encountered in the world ; and it needs no argument that they must become other than they are, through and through, if they are to dwell with God. It needs no argu- ment, either, that they cannot make themselves other than they are. To be born again they must be born of a power which comes from above, and that power — as the whole experience of his life taught St. John, and had taught St. Paul before him — was the power of the Spirit. To be born again is to be born of God. When the truth is put in this way — in what we may call without offence the onesidedly religious way — its mysteriousness is apparent. The action of God through which the new life emerges in men cannot be prescribed or calculated ; it is as unquestionable in its effects as His action in nature, but there is something in it which eludes control. The sense of this underlies all the predestinarian passages both in St. John and St. Paul, but, of course, these are not to be read alone. We should completely misrepresent both Apostles if we supposed that their sense of depend- ence upon God for being the new men they were impaired their sense of responsibility in this rela- tion. The mind is apt, and perhaps the feeble or insincere mind is glad, to escape from the moral to the metaphysical, from Mt 18^ to Jn 3^ ; there is more to talk about and less to do ; but there is no ground for bringing this charge against the Apostles. St. John's interest in this passage is not in the earthly truth (v.i2) of the necessity of re- generation— it needs no revelation from above to make that plain ; bitter experience teaches it to all men ; his interest is in the possibility and the method of regeneration, the heavenly truths which only Jesus can reveal. The new birth is a birth of water and spirit (v.^) : in other words, it is a birth which is realized through Christian baptism. 'J'hat the Spirit is the important matter appears from the fact that the water is only mentioned once, and then the Spirit alone (vv.^-s). Here, as in the case of St. Paul (see above), baptism must be taken in the whole circumstances and conditions in which it was familiar to the Evangeli.st. It was not the baptism of unconscious infants, but that of penitent and confessing believers. The importance of it in this passage is seen when we look on to v.'^''-. The heavenly truth (v.^^) of the passage is that the power through which men are born again is lodged in the Son of Man lifted up as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness. The baptism through which the new birth comes is baptism in His name — baptism, as in Ro 6, into His death and resur- rection— baptism which means the believing aban- donment of the soul to the love of God revealed in that strange ' uplifting ' which includes both the Cross and the throne, a believing abandonment for which man's responsibility is complete, and the refusal of which is the only fatal sin (3^6). When we realize that this is the connexion of ideas in the conversation with Nicodemus, we see that it falls into line with the teaching of St. Paul, entirely so far as its substance is concerned, and more nearly than is at first apparent even in form ; while the teaching of both Apostles is securely based at once on their experience as Christians and on thoroughly attested words of Jesus.
It is as easy with regard to St. John as with regard to St. Paul to ask questions connected with his doctrine of regeneration to which he himself does not afford any answer. Thus the new birth is made dependent somehow on baptism ; but it has been argued that in li^f. ' children of God ' are spoken of, who were 'born of God,' before the Incarnation, and that in 11^2 i children of God' are spoken of as 'scattered throughout the world' who
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are to be gathered into one by the death of Jesus. As to the first of these passages, the interpretation whicli refers it to the ages before the incarnation seems to the writer more than doubtful, but in any case the Logos doctrine is a way of expressing the truth that the meaning and power of the Incarnation and Passion are independent of time. In the second passage ' children of God ' is pro- bably prophetic ; there are men everywhere who will gather yet round the Cross of Jesus, and by tlie power wliich descends from it into their souls be born again as riKva deov. Another kind of question with regard to those who are born of God is raised by some passages in the 1st Epistle. In ch. 1^ it is said of Christians, ' If we say that we have not sin, we deceive ourselves,' and in v.^'^ ' If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar.' But in ch. 3^ we read, 'Every one that is born of God doth not sin, for his seed remaineth in him ; and he cannot sin, because he has been born of God.' 'I'his is in another form tlie same difficulty which we encounter in St. Paul when he says in one breath, 'You are dead,' and in the next, 'Put to deatli, therefore ' ; or when we try to tell whether any given spiritual experience is that of the re- generate or the unregenerate man. The regenerate and the unregenerate man, for better or worse, cannot be separated in this summary way. The practical interest of the Apostles compels us to interpret them everywhere through experiences that we can understand ; hence it is vain to seek in them any suggestion of what regeneration can mean in the case of baptized infants. There is no indication in the NT that they ever contemplated any such case. Kegeneration is a moral experience regarded as the work of God, and repentance is the same moral experience regarded from the side of man ; but neither in the one aspect nor the other can we speak of it in the case of beings who have as yet no moral experience at all.