something to be said before my text. And John says it immediately; here
it is, 'If any man sin we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ
the righteous, and He is the propitiation for our sins; and not for our
sins only, but for the whole world.' So we have to begin with the blood
shed for us, the means of our pardon, and then we have the advance of
the blood sprinkled on us, the means of our cleansing. If by humble
faith we take the dying Lord for our Saviour, and the channel of our
forgiveness, we shall have the pardon of our sins. If we listen to the
voice that says, 'Ye were sometime darkness, but now are ye light in the
Lord. Walk as children of the light,' we shall have fellowship with the
living Lord, and daily know more and more of the power of His cleansing
blood, making us 'meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints
in light.'

THE COMMANDMENT, OLD YET NEW

'I write no new commandment unto you, but an old commandment which
ye had from the beginning.... Again, a new commandment I write unto
you, which thing is true in him and in you.'--1 John ii. 7, 8.

The simplest words may carry the deepest thoughts. Perhaps angels and
little children speak very much alike. This letter, like all of John's
writing, is pellucid in speech, profound in thought, clear and deep,
like the abysses of mid-ocean. His terms are such as a child can
understand; his sentences short and inartificial: he does not reason, he
declares; he has neither argument nor rhetoric, but he teaches us the
deepest truths, and shows us that we get nearer the centre by insight
than by logic.

Now the words that I have taken for my text are very characteristic of
this Apostle's manner. He has a great, wide-reaching truth to proclaim,
and he puts it in the simplest, most inartificial manner, laying side by
side two artless sentences, and stimulates us by the juxtaposition,
leading us to feel after, and so to make our own, the large lessons that
are in them. Let me, then, try to bring these out.

I. And the first one that strikes me is--'the word' is 'a commandment.'

Now, by 'the word' here the Apostle obviously means, since he speaks
about it as that which these Asiatic Christians 'heard from the
beginning,' the initial truth which was presented for their acceptance
in the story of the life and death of Jesus Christ. That was 'the word'
and, says he, just because it was a history it is a commandment; just
bec