CHAPTER 15 BIRTH AND VICTORY 1 John 5:3 ST. JOHN here connects the Christian Birth with Victory. He tells us that of the supernatural life the destined and (so to speak) natural end is Conquest. Now in this there is a contrast between the law of nature and the law of grace. No doubt the first is... [ Continue Reading ]
CHAPTER 16 THE GOSPEL AS A GOSPEL OF WITNESS; THE THREE WITNESSES 1 John 5:6 IT has been said that Apostles and apostolic men were as far as possible removed from common sense, and have no conception of evidence in our acceptation of the word. About this statement there is scarcely even superficia... [ Continue Reading ]
CHAPTER 17 THE WITNESS OF MEN (APPLIED TO THE RESURRECTION) 1 John 5:9 AT an early period in the Christian Church the passage in which these words occur was selected as a fitting Epistle for the First Sunday after Easter, when believers may be supposed to review the whole body of witness to the r... [ Continue Reading ]
CHAPTER 18 SIN UNTO DEATH 1 John 5:17 THE Church has ever spoken of seven deadly sins. Here is the ugly catalogue. Pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, hatred, sloth. Many of us pray often "from fornication and all other deadly sin, Good Lord deliver us." This language rightly understood is... [ Continue Reading ]
CHAPTER 4 THE IMAGE OF ST. JOHN'S SOUL IN HIS EPISTLE 1 John 5:18 Much has been said in the last few years of a series of subtle and delicate experiments in sound. Means have been devised of doing for the ear something analogous to that which glasses do for another sense, and of making the results... [ Continue Reading ]
CHAPTER 1 PART 1 1 John THE SURROUNDINGS OF THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST. JOHN. 1 John 5:21 AFTER the example of a writer of genius, preachers and essayists for the last forty years have constantly applied-or misapplied-some lines from one of the greatest of Christian poems. Dante writes of St. John-... [ Continue Reading ]