"JOHANNIS EPISTOLÆ, ULTIMUSQUE PRIMÆ VERSICULUS, IN EPHESUM IMPRIMIS CONVENIUNT." (BENGEL _in Act._ xix. 21.) DISCOURSE I. _THE SURROUNDINGS OF THE FIRST EPISTLE OF ST. JOHN._ "Little children, keep yourselves from idols."--I JOHN V. 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 sings of St. John-- "As he, who looks intent, And strives with searching ken, how he may see The sun in his eclipse, and, through decline Of seeing, loseth power of sight: so I Gazed on that last resplendence."[2] The poet meant to be understood of the Apostle's spiritual splendour of soul, of the absorption of his intellect and heart in his conception of the Person of Christ and of the dogma of the Holy Trinity. By these expositors of Dante the image is transferred to the style and structure of his writings. But confusion of thought is not magnificence, and mere obscurity is never sunlike. A blurred sphere and undecided outline is not characteristic of the sun even in eclipse. Dante never intended us to understand that St. John as a writer was distinguished by a beautiful vagueness of sentiment, by bright but tremulously drawn lines of dogmatic creed. It is indeed certain that round St. John himself, at the time when he wrote, there were many minds affected by this vague mysticism. For them, beyond the scanty region of the known, there was a world of darkness whose shadows they desired to penetrate. For them this little island of life was surrounded by waters into whose depths they affected to gaze. They were drawn by a mystic attraction to things which they themselves called the "shadows," the "depths," the "silences." But for St. John these shadows were a negation of the message which he delivered that "God is light, and darkness in Him is none." These silences were the contradiction of the Word who has once for all interpreted God. These depths were "depths of Satan."[3] For the men who were thus enamoured of indefiniteness, of shifting sentiments and flexible creeds, were Gnostic heretics. Now St. John's style, as such, has not the artful variety, the perfect balance in the masses of composition, the finished logical cohesion of the Greek classical writers. Yet it can be loftily or pathetically impressive. It can touch the problems and processes of the moral and spiritual world with a pencil-tip of deathless light, or compress them into symbols which are solemnly or awfully picturesque.[4] Above all St. John has the faculty of enshrining dogma in forms of statement which are firm and precise--accurate enough to be envied by philosophers, subtle enough to defy the passage of heresy through their finely drawn yet powerful lines.