n the light is essential
to fellowship with God. Only, in his usual fashion, he turns the
antithesis into a somewhat different form, so as to suggest another
aspect of the truth, and instead of saying, as we might expect for the
verbal accuracy of the contrast, 'If we walk in the light, as He is in
the light, we have fellowship with God,' he says, 'we have fellowship
one with another.' Then he adds a still further result of that walk,
'the blood of Jesus cleanses from all sin.'

Now there are three things: walking in the light, which is the only
Christian walk; the companions of those who walk in the light; and the
progressive cleansing which is given.

I. Note this 'Walking in the light,' which is the only Christian walk.

In all languages, light is the natural symbol for three things:
knowledge, joy, purity. The one ray is broken into its three constituent
parts. But just as there are some surfaces which are sensitive to the
violet rays, say, of the spectrum, and not to the others, so John's
intense moral earnestness makes him mainly sensitive to the symbolism
which makes light the expression, not so much of knowledge or of joy, as
of moral purity. And although that is not exclusively his use of the
emblem, it is predominately so, and it is so here. To 'walk in the
light' then, is, speaking generally, to have purity, righteousness,
goodness, as the very element and atmosphere in which our progressive
and changeful life is carried on.

Note, too, before I go further, that very significant antithesis: we
'walk'; He _is_--God _is_ in the light essentially, changelessly,
undisturbedly, eternally; and the light in which He is, His 'own calm
home, His habitation from eternity,' is light which has flowed out from
Himself as a halo round the midnight moon. It is all one in substance to
say God is in light, or, as the Psalmist has it, 'He covered Himself
with light as with a garment,' and to say, 'God is light.'

But, side by side with that changeless abiding in the perfect purity,
which is inaccessible, the Apostle ventures to put, not in contrast
only, but in parallel (_as_ He is), our changing, effortful, active,
progressive life in the light (God is); we walk.

So, then, the essential of a Christian character is that the light of
purity and moral goodness shall be as the very orb, in the midst of
which it stands and advances. That implies effort, and it implies
activity, and it implies progress. And we are only Chris