Subscriptions and Donations in aid of the General Baptist Missionary Society will be thankfully received by T. Hill, Esq., Arboretum Street, Nottingham, Treasurer; and by the Rev. J. C. Pike and the Rev. H. Wilkinson, Secretaries, Leicester, from whom also Missionary Boxes, Collecting Books and Cards may be obtained.

THE

GENERAL BAPTIST

MAGAZINE.

DECEMBER, 1866.

BROTHERLY LOVE AND UNITY.

BY THE REV. S. COX, NOTTINGHAM.

"He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen ?"-1 John iv. 20.

A SEARCHING question this, my brethren; yet a somewhat questionable argument! From the weight of emphasis laid upon it, St. John obviously intends it for an argument, and a cogent one; you can tell from his tone that he is content with it, that he thinks it irrefragable, unanswerable: yet one is tempted to question, if not to refute, it. "How can I love the God whom I have not seen, if I do not love the brother whom I have seen?" we might say: "Why, it is just because I see my brother, and see too much of him, that I find it so hard to love him." Or, again, we might say, "Not love my Father because I don't love my brother! Why, when I was a child at home, how I used to cuff, and scuffle, and contend with my brothers; what keen pangs of rivalry and jealousy I have felt against them; yet all that did not in any way impair my love for my father." Or, taking a higher tone, we might say, "Not love the good, perfect God, because I cannot love evil or imperfect men! Why it is precisely that in me which makes me love Him that also makes me withhold my love from them; because I love and aspire after that which is perfect, I turn away from men to God." In short, the argument looks so illogical that we may be tempted to conclude, "St. John was no logician. With the profoundest intuitive insight into all the mysteries of Truth and Life, he had very little faculty for argument." But before we come to this conclusion, before, at least, we use it to ward off the heart-searching influence of the question St. John has asked us, let us remember that intuition is, at least in matters of affection, truer and safer than logic, that a conviction springing from the heart is better than the most fault

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less syllogism, that the very deepest truths are precisely those which cannot be proved by argument. You cannot, for instance, demonstrate your own existence or the existence of God, yet you know that you are, and that God is, and that these two are supreme ultimate facts. Try to prove them, and you will fail, as all have failed before you; there will be some weak point in your chain of argument, some assumption in your premises which will vitiate your conclusion. If, for example, you adopt the old philosophical argument, "I think, therefore I am,' which looks safe enough, there are at least two weak dangerous points in it. For one inference from it is, that nothing exists save that which thinks, and thus while affirming your own existence you deny that of the whole material universe, which, perhaps, you did not intend. Moreover, you quietly assume that which you profess to prove: for the "I," the person, who thinks is the very person whose existence you were to demonstrate; yet at the outset, in saying "I think," you take his existence to be granted; for how can he think if he does not already exist? Yet, though you cannot prove, you do not doubt, either your own existence or that of God. These are facts which appeal to that in you which is deeper than logicto consciousness, to intuition; you know a great deal more than you can prove. And there are many cognate facts in the spiritual life which approve themselves to you, which you feel to be true, though you cannot demonstrate their truth. The longer we live, indeed, the less we trust in logic; the more we trust in the simple primitive inspirations of the human heart. We find that logic has limits which are very soon reached, that its power is much slighter than we thought; we find both that the best things cannot be proved, and that to prove a thing ever so surely goes a very little way with men. Convinced against their will, they're of the same opinion still; you must touch will and heart, must rouse the convictions and intuitions latent in and common to all men, before you can win them to the love and obedience of the truth. Now it is to these deeps of our nature that St. John calls from the deeps of his nature when he asks-" He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love the God whom he hath not seen ?" We know and feel that the thought is a true one, even though we may think the argumentative force of it somewhat defective.

But is it so defective as it seems? Let us take up the objections to it which I have suggested, and see what after all they are worth. Is it so much easier, for instance, and more natural to love the perfect God than to love imperfect men? It is, for the perfect, no doubt. But we are imperfect; and to the imperfect, perfection is terrible, if also attractive: it is a standing rebuke to our weakness and defects. While on the other hand our sympathies will go out, do what we may, to those who are of like passions and imperfections with ourselves. Who does not love Abraham, though he shuffled and equivocated about Sarah, and was not altogether admirable in his treatment of Hagar and her son, better than irreproachable Isaac? David was not quite immaculate; yet he is dearer to us than prince Daniel in whom no fault was found. Who does not love ardent blundering Peter all the more for his very faults? and is not even Thomas all the dearer to us because he was so sceptical and hard to convince? We cannot argue, therefore, that to love a perfect God is easier to us than to love imperfect men; for the sympathies of the imperfect are, and must be, with the imperfect.

Brotherly Love and Unity.

443

Again. It may be very true that brothers treat brothers roughly; but is it true that they can injure one another without lessening their love for their father? What do you mean by love? Does it not include obedience when it is felt toward a superior? If boys do not obey their father -and what father does not wish his sons to love and serve one another? -does not their disobedience detract from their love? Well, this is part of the apostle's argument. In the very next verse he tells us, "This commandment have we from God, That he who loveth God love his brother also." And if we do not keep His commandment, what proof have we that we love Him? If we obey our Father, we shall love our brother: if we do not love our brother we disobey our Father, and so far forth fail in love to Him.

The other objection has more in it, I confess. For it is often because we see so much, and too much, of our brother, that we find it hard to love him. We grow familiar with his excellences and blind to them-familiar with his faults and, according to the perverse law of our nature, not blind to these, but more alive to them. Still, this is our infirmity, and we know it. Should not the consciousness of our infirmity impel us to reverse the evil law of our nature, and to be to our brother's faults a little blind, and very kind to his excellences and virtues?

Moreover, it is our brother whom we are to love-one who is in the image of his Father and ours. If we see so much of him, could we not contrive to see some traits of this likeness and to love him for them?

It is from our brother-men, too, and the various relations we sustain to them that we gather our conception of our Father in heaven and of what He is. How, then, can we love Him unless we love them and such likeness to Him as they wear?

And again: What is love? Is it an indolent complacent enjoyment of what charms us? or is it a sacred ennobling passion which is willing to sacrifice itself in order to benefit its object? What is God's love? Does it extend only to the perfect, and consist in a complacent contemplation of their excellences? If it did, what hope were there for us? But if His love embrace the imperfect in order that it may benefit them and lead them on to perfection, should not ours? What is our love worth if it be not the love of God, i.e., the love which is from Him and like His love? What is it worth if it be not a passion as sacred, as self-sacrificing, as devoted to the good of the imperfect as His; although we can only have it in our measure, according to our several capacity ?

The argument of the apostle runs clear, then, however doubtful or questionable it may seem. We cannot love the Father whom we have not seen unless we love the brother whom we have seen-the brother whom God loves, and whom He bids us love with a love like His own.

But, now: If any man have this world's good, or, indeed, the good of the heavenly world, and seeing his brother have need, shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him? If any man say, "O yes, I love my brother, but I will not worship with him, nor sit at the Lord's table with him, nor admit him to an equal share in all my rights in the church, until he thinks exactly as I think and does precisely what I do,"-how much does he love his brother after all? how

dwelleth the love of God in him? When a Christian says, "Though I have as little to do with him as possible, I love so and so as a brother, of course," he means-what does he mean by loving him as a brother? Does he mean that he does not love him like a brother, but suspects him for a heretic who won't see obvious truths, or for a hypocrite who won't see his plain duty? I am afraid, brethren, that that is what, for the most part, we mean by loving a man as a Christian brother: i.e., we don't love him at all, but grudgingly concede to him just as much as we cannot withhold. Again, therefore, I ask, What would become of us if God loved us like that?

Alas! my brethren, there are many signs that we have not outgrown the need of "the new commandment," that even yet we are not a law to ourselves, but need to be held in with bit and bridle lest we bite and devour one another. It would be pleasant to think that, though there was too much cause for the command, "Love one another," when St. John wrote-when Jew hated Gentile and Gentile Jew, when sect hated sect in the Church and out of it, when Pharisee would have no more dealings with Sadducee than Hebrew with Samaritan, nor he who said "I am of Cephas" with him who was "of Paul" than the Circumcision with the Uncircumcision-yet now this new commandment, being nineteen centuries old, had wellnigh done its work. But how can we think it has? There are more sects in the Christian church now than when John was a prisoner for the word of God and the testimony of Jesus Christ. There are more sects-Is there less distrust, and suspicion, and bitterness between them? Try to unite them, if you care to know. Nay, as if it were not shame enough to have so many militant sects, even the members of any one of these cannot be at peace among themselves-will not worship together or commune together; every man must have everything exactly to his mind, even every whim or pique or preference must be gratified, or, careless of the common good, he will fling off and form a church of his own. Again I say, If God loved us as we love one another, if God loved His church as we loved the church, and shewed his love as we shew it-flinging off from us every time we did not think exactly as He thinks, or failed to do His will-what were before us but the prospect of endless confusion rushing down to eternal darkness and loss?

But are there no signs of hope and promise? Do no tendencies toward unity reveal themselves amid all these disruptions and separ tions? I cannot deny that there are such tendencies and signs; and if you have much faith in the public talk of public men, you may well think that the happy millenium of catholic charity cannot be far off now. For twenty years, over all dinner tables and upon all platforms, we have heard the graceful effusions which have caused us to hope. Pædobaptist at such times can see no reason why he should not embrace Baptist, and even the clergy have a gracious word for their Nonconformist brethren. But though we have gone on so long "loving one another in word and in tongue," the lion has not yet laid down with the lamb nor the leopard with the kid. If the love of the tongue has been also a love “in truth," the love of the word has not yet become a love "in deed." We all of us hope that we love the God whom we have not seen; nevertheless it does somehow happen that we do not love the brothers whom we have seen at least we love them only "as brothers," and not enough to unite with