see,

His order? Did He not look upon it and say, 'Lo! it is very good'? Does not our own Apostle speak of His loving the world; of His so loving it as to give His onlybegotten Son for it? The word is the same here as there. How then can these young men be told that they are not to love that which He, in whose image they are created, is said so earnestly to love? How can they be told, that if they have this love, the love of the Father is not in them?

Assuredly, it is God's world, God's order; assuredly, He did form it and pronounce it good; assuredly, that love of which St. John speaks, includes every fowl of the air, and insect, and flower of the field; but is especially directed towards that creature who has wilfully erred and strayed, who has brought disorder into God's order. All this we must remember. We shall not understand St. John's precept unless we do. And how has disorder come into this order? for that it is there, we all confess. It has come from men falling in love with this order, or with some of the things in it, and setting them up and making them into gods. It has come from each man seeing the reflection of himself in the world, and becoming enamoured of that, and pursuing that. It has come from each man beginning to dream that he is the centre either of this world, or of some little world that he has made for himself out of it. It has come from the multiplication of these little worlds, with their little miserable centres, and from these worlds clashing one against another; and from those who dwell in them becoming discontented with their own, and wishing to escape into some other. All these disorders spring from that kind of love which St. John bids these young men beware of. They are to beware of it, because if

it possesses them, and overmasters them, they will assuredly lose all sense that they ever did belong to a Father, and that they are still His children. They are to beware of it, because if they have this love, this disorderly, irregular love for the world, they cannot have that love of it which their Father has; they cannot so love it that for the sake of putting down the disorders that are in it, and making it indeed a true order, and bringing it to revolve about its true centre, they would be ready to give up themselves. This selfish love is the counterfeit of that self-sacrificing love; the counterfeit, and therefore its great antagonist. The Father's love must prevail over this, or it will drive that Father's love out of us.

St. John is never afraid of an apparent contradiction when it might save his readers from a real contradiction. Of course, the thought which suggests itself to us would have suggested itself to the men in his day. How can he 'tell us that God loves the world, and yet that we are not ' to love it?' The opposition which is on the surface of his language may be the best way of leading us to the harmony which lies below it. The Father's love to the world which He has created is never absent from the Apostle's mind. He does not wish it to be ever absent from the minds of the young men to whom he is writing. If they keep up the recollection of it, they will in new circumstances and amidst new trials retain the freshness of their childish feelings; the home and the family will be dearer to them than ever. They will find the world an order indeed; they will find in it the most wonderful adaptations to their own natures, each sense having something which answers to it; each power and energy having

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something on which to exercise itself. They will find adaptations in the world not to their own uses only, but to the uses of all the creatures which dwell in it. And beyond all this,—as we were told in that beautiful lecture which was delivered here some weeks ago,—the student will perceive a typical form in the different kinds whereof the world consists, which he cannot explain by any adaptations, which recals,—that, I think, was the lecturer's phrase, and I doubt if he could have found a better or a more devout onethe work of a human artist who makes his picture or statue after a form that was present to him, though the observer may only rise by slow degrees and by long study, to apprehend what it was. How delightful the contemplation of the world in this sense is to one who has been

taught that he is a child of God, our poet Cowper tells us in these lines of his 'Winter Morning Walk :'—

'His are the mountains, and the valleys His,
And the resplendent rivers, His to enjoy

With a propriety that none can feel,

But who, with filial confidence inspired,

Can lift to heaven an unpresumptuous eye,

And smiling say,-"My Father made them all!”,

But we must not disguise it-there is a tremendous power in these objects when we first come into close converse with them. Another English poet has described it in his splendid poem on the 'Intimations of Immortality from Recollections in Early Childhood: '

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely Nurse doth all she can

To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,

Forget the glories he hath known,

And that imperial palace whence he came.'

In another passage of the same ode he speaks in even

a more melancholy strain :

'Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy ;

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.'

Wordsworth testifies from his own experience to the truth of St. John's doctrine. He explains how the earth, by its very loveliness, by its very harmony, may turn the man, who has a higher origin and a higher destiny, into its victim and slave. And he explains as truly what the result is. The beauty of the world becomes fainter and dimmer to us as we give up our souls to it. When heaven was about us, earth looked very lovely ;) when we came down into earth and believed that we had to do with nothing but that, earth became flat and dull; its trees, its flowers, its sunlight, lost their charms; they became monotonous, more wearisome each day because we could not see beyond them.

Here, then, are good reasons why the young men shall not love the world, neither the things that are in the world. For if they do, first, their strength will forsake them; they will give up the power that is in them to the things on which the power is to be exerted; they will be ruled by that which they are meant to rule. Next, they will not have any real insight into these things or any real sympathy with them. It may sound strange to say so, but it is true. Those who love the world, those who surrender themselves

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to it, never understand it, never in the best sense enjoy it; they are too much on the level of it,-yes, too much below the level of it, for they look up to it, they depend upon it-to be capable of contemplating it and of appreciating what is most exquisite in it. You have proofs of this continually. The sensualist does not know what the delights of sense are; he is out of temper when he is denied them; he is out of temper when he possesses them. Nothing is exactly to his liking; he expected what he cannot procure; gout or a liver complaint comes in to make the gratification impossible. That is a single instance; you may multiply the instances in all directions. The lover of praise and reputation is continually baulked of the flattery that has become necessary to him. He detects something disagreeable in that which is most highly flavoured; a rough word is a torment to him. In one of these cases the man is dependent chiefly upon material things, though men are needed to dress and prepare them. In the other, he is dependent upon the words that go out of men's lips. Both belong to the world; both are parts of the order which God has created; both therefore in themselves are good. But the man who yields up his heart to them-who, as we say, falls in love with them-makes himself in the judgment of all, even of those who commit the same error, a poor creature. Heathen philosophers had pronounced sentence upon such as he is, long before St. John said, 'Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.' They had pronounced the sentence partly from observation of the results to which such devotion led, partly from a consciousness that they were men and must have some kindred with beings higher than themselves, with another world than this.