guishing peculiarity: not the exercise of power; not the possession of an inspiration; but the exercise of powers for a holy end,―the receiving of an inspiration from a Holy Being. But many of those who had joined the Church exulted in the gifts for their own sake, in the inspiration for its own sake. These became enchanters and impostors of the worst kind. The spirit of which they boasted, instead of uniting them to their brethren, was merely a ground for self-exaltation. What they were, signified nothing. The wonders they could do was all they thought of, or wished others to think of. Such persons often described themselves as Christs. They used the very name. But whether they did or did not, they were assuming the powers of Christ, for the ends which were the contraries of His ends. They were therefore antichrists. Their chrism or anointing was to set them in high places; His, made Him the servant of all. Theirs, was to make men wonder at them, and be their tools; His, was to make them free, and to give them life. Such persons, therefore, St. John pronounces, were not of them; they did not choose to belong to a brotherhood; what they cared was to assert their independence of others, their superiority to their fellows. It was far better, he intimates, that such men should not continue in the Church, to be its disturbers and tormentors; that they should go out from it, and become its enemies. It was far better that they should not belie the name of Jesus, by acts that were directly the reverse of His; but should at once avow that they renounced Him.

But, continues the Apostle, in words which have surprised many: 'Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye кпого all things.' You will see at once upon what word the

emphasis in this sentence rests-they had an unction, of anointing from the Holy One. God had given them His Holy Spirit. If they believed they had that Spirit, if they submitted to His teaching, these antichrists would not and could not deceive them. A divine instinct would tell them, This is not the kind of being we need; this is not the per'son to whom we owe allegiance; this is not God's anointed 'one.' They could trust to this instinct much better than to any cleverness of theirs in finding out, by collating passages of Scripture, whether such a pretender was or was not the Christ. They might be deceived in their interpretation of a book; their intellects might fail to discern the force of sentences; but if they were simple and childlike, if they yielded to the guidance of that Spirit who was to make them simple and childlike, they would not be deceived about a man, they would know whether he was true or a liar.

I do not wonder that many should think such confidence very much misplaced, seeing that the persons to whom St. John wrote must have been, many of them, ignorant people, or in his own language, little children. But that fact, I suspect, gave good warrant for his confidence. The most experienced people will tell you that they had rather trust the judgment of an innocent woman, even of a child, about character, than their own. The surest divination of a rogue and of an honest man lies in those who are guileless, and who do not boast of their own sagacity. St. John tells us the reason: They have an unction from the Holy One.' A better wisdom is guiding them; they lean upon that wisdom, not finding they can rely upon their own. They know all things, even what seems the most inscrutable, unfathomable thing of all—a human soul.

He adds, therefore, I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth.' There is the modesty and the sound philosophy of an Apostle! Many of us think that we can put the truth into people, by screaming it into their ears. We do not suppose they have any truth in them to which we can make an appeal. St. John had no notion that he could be of the least use to his own dear children of Ephesus unless there was a truth in them, a capacity of distinguishing truth from lies, a sense that one must be the eternal opposite of the other. He can write to them about those antichrists, because they have a chrism, because there is in them a power of listening to his words and of understanding them. The presence of that power does not make the words unnecessary, any more than the fitness of the ground for receiving the rain makes the rain unnecessary. An Apostle can help them to reject those men who would blind them and lead them captive, because they have in them an anointing which shows them that only He Who brings light and freedom is the anointed of the Father.

6

6

• Most

Alas!

These Ephesians had learnt that no lie is of the truth.' Common-place learning enough!' some will say. 'people know as much as that.' Do they, indeed? half the doctors in Christendom have not known it. They have thought that some lies are of the truth, that some lies may serve the truth. Their cleverness has led them to think so. Their notion that the truth was left to them to take care of and keep from harm, and to defend against

impugners, has led them to think so.

6

'fraud, a pious fraud, will help us here.

'Just a little

The people

cannot take in truth; spice it with falsehood, and it will

NO LIE OF THE TRUTH.

149

'go down.'

These have been the sage conclusions of divines and men of God. And so Christ has been mixed with antichrist; so the way has been prepared for antichrist to come in and claim the whole ground which Christ once occupied. It is for the latter days of an age that such a catastrophe as that is reserved. There is a mingling of the false and the true, of the foul and the fair, till then. At length the false appears in its falsehood; the foul asks homage because it is foul. And then they who will not bow down to it, perceive that no lie is of the truth ; that they must purge their hearts of every base mixture. And since they cannot depend upon their own truthfulness, they ask the Spirit of Truth to guide them into all truth.

Now he comes directly to the point: Who is a liar but he that denieth that JESUS is the CHRIST?' He appeals to them as men seeking truth and loving truth, and endowed with a capacity for discerning truth. He says,

6

6

6

These men that I am speaking of, these men that have

gone out from us, affirm very loudly that Jesus, the humble

man, He Who went about doing good, He Who was cruci

fied, is not at all the Christ for human beings. They will 'only honour one who is not a humble man, one who does not C go about doing good, one who has not been crucified. They especially scorn that last characteristic. They say that ' that defeats all the pretensions of Jesus to be a king. He 'could not have submitted to death if He had been. You 'Ephesians have heard these words uttered; you have known 'the people who spoke them. Yes, and the words had an ' attraction for you. The men did look like men who had 'high spiritual pretensions. But what was it in you that 'their words attracted? What was it in you that was in

6

'clined to receive these men? Do you not know that it was 'the lying temper in you which went along with their boast'ing? Do you not know that so far as you yielded to them,

you were yielding to a lying temper? And were you not 'prevented from doing this altogether by a Spirit of Truth 'which forbad you to obey the false inclination within you?

Here then is a clear witness in yourselves, that to say 'Jesus is not the Christ, to set up another Christ who is 'unlike Him, is to be a liar.'

I have hinted already that the grand distinction between Jesus and these antichrists was, that He said He came from a Father, and received His anointing from a Father; and that they came in their own names, boasting of themselves as great ones. This is the contrast which St. John pursues in the following verses: He is antichrist that denieth the Father and the Son.' In his Gospel St. John illustrates this point at great length. All our Lord's discourses with the Jews at Jerusalem which he records, have reference to His Father and His relation to the Father. All their misunderstandings of Him, their rage against Him, their condemnation of Him as a blasphemer, have reference to His language on this point. Ultimately He was put to death as a rebel against Cæsar; as a rival king. But the dislike of the Jews to Him, that which prompted them to deliver Him to the Gentiles, was gathered up in the complaint, He calleth God His Father, making Himself equal with God.' Was He proud; or were they? Was this the height of exaltation, or the depth of self-humiliation? Was it, as the Jews said, that He made Himself equal with God, or, as He said Himself, that He could do nothing without His Father, that what He saw His Father do, He did likewise;

6