We wonder to find the command which we have heard so often, delivered once more in the 17th verse. But we presently discover that it is as an introduction to a new subject, and that in relation to that subject the old words have a new force. '_These things I command you, that ye love one another. If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love its own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. Remember the word which I spake to you, The servant is not greater than his Master. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my word, they will keep yours also._' Here the love which He commands them to have for one another--the love which is His own, and which He inspires--is contrasted with the hatred of the world. The one difference which we have already discovered between the world and those whom He chooses out of it, is that they confess a Centre, and that the world confesses none; that they desire to move, each in his own orbit, about this Centre, and that the world acknowledges only a revolution of each man about himself. The world, indeed, cannot realize its own principles. It must have companies, parties, sects,--bodies acknowledging some principle of cohesion, aspiring after a kind of unity. Still, as a world, this is the description of it; and therefore, as a world, it must hate all who say, 'We are a society bound together, not by any law of our own, not by an election of our own, but by God's law and election. And His law is a law of sacrifice. He gives up His Son; His Son gives up Himself. We are to give up ourselves in obedience to His Spirit, that we may do His work.' As He had so lately called them friends, not servants, we may be surprised that here He gave them the old name again. But the title, servant, is not now a dishonourable title for those whom He has called friends. Since the Master became a servant, His friends must be content to be servants, otherwise they do not know what their Lord doeth; they cannot enter into His mind. With this service, too, they must take the hatred and persecution of the world as part of their endowment, as one of the treasures which their Lord shares with them. If it does not hate them, they must always fear that they are not loving each other, or loving it as God loves it.