_Try the spirits; i.e. every doctrine that you hear: for now are many false teachers, false doctors, and false prophets. (Witham) --- Try, &c. viz. by examining whether their teaching be agreeable to the rule of the Catholic faith and the doctrine of the Church. For, as he says, (ver. 6) "He that kn... [ Continue Reading ]
By this is the Spirit of God known. He gives the new converts first general mark, by which they might have good grounds to think that the teachers they met with in those days had a good spirit, were of God, if they confessed and acknowledged Jesus Christ to have come from heaven and to have been mad... [ Continue Reading ]
_That dissolveth Jesus, viz. either by denying his humanity or his divinity. (Challoner) --- This is antichrist; [2] i.e. such is the spirit of antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh, or is to come in the latter times. --- And he is now already in the world, not the chief and great antich... [ Continue Reading ]
_You....little children, born anew in Christ by baptism, have overcome him, (i.e. every such antichrist) not by your own strength, but by the grace of Christ, because greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world; i.e. the Spirit of God in you is above all your enemies. (Witham)_... [ Continue Reading ]
_They are of the world. Such antichrists and heretics are guided by a worldly spirit, teaching men to follow the corrupt customs and inclinations of the world and the flesh, therefore the world heareth them, and men are more easily seduced by them. (Witham)_... [ Continue Reading ]
We (Christians) are of God, have received the Spirit; we, the apostles of Christ, were lawfully sent by him. --- He that knoweth God, heareth us, &c. That is, they who love and serve God, and comply with the doctrine of his Son, Jesus Christ, hear and follow the doctrine which we were commissioned b... [ Continue Reading ]
Let us love one another. This is the repeated admonition of St. John, the evangelist, both in this epistle and to the end of his life, as St. Jerome relates in his Epist. ad Galat. (cap. vi. tom. 4, part 1, p. 414) that the apostle being very old, and when carried to Church meetings of the Christian... [ Continue Reading ]
_No man hath seen God at any time. No mortal man hath seen God and the perfections of his divine Majesty in such a manner as the blessed in heaven, but we have powerful motives to love and serve him, and to love our neighbour for his sake. (Witham)_... [ Continue Reading ]
_The charity of God (which may either signify the love by which we love God, or by which God loves us) perfected with us, or in us, and so possesseth our souls, as to give us an humble confidence of our salvation, when we shall appear before his tribunal at the day of judgment: because as he is, we... [ Continue Reading ]
Fear is not in charity, &c. By the fear, which a perfect charity and love of God excludes, we may understand a fear of temporal losses in this world, of the loss of goods, of banishment, of torments, of death itself, which the love of God made so many glorious martyrs contemn; or an anxious servile... [ Continue Reading ]
_He that loveth not his brother, whom he seeth, how can he love God, whom he seeth not? By this is signified, that it is more easy and natural to love the things that we see, and that enter by the senses. Pretend not then to love the invisible God, whose perfections are hidden from you in this life,... [ Continue Reading ]