It is very plain that he did not act on the " do nothing" principle, but thought it his duty to contend with all his power for the faith. It was to this sense of active duty that we owe the existence of this Epistle.

Nor did he act on the "run away" principle. He did not say that because heretics had got into the Church therefore he must go out, and so launch forth into empty space, compelled to stand alone because he could find no church in the world in which there was no possibility of the inroad of a heretic. But as a vigorous and well assured witness for Christ he remained where he was, and faithfully contended for the truth.

With this in view, let us rapidly glance over a few points in the Epistle.

(1.) St. John laid down clear, strong, decisive statements of sound doctrine.

He makes the most unqualified statements as to the person of our Blessed Saviour, as to His humanity, ch. iv. 2, and His divinity, ch. iv. 15; while in the opening verse of the first chapter he gives an account of the solid evidence of personal acquaintance on which his convictions rested: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of Life."

He is as clear as possible on the subject of Atonement. He aims straight at the Gnostics, and points out the true safety of the believer. He shows that our safety consists not in a fancied sinlessness, but in the full propitiation through the precious blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. "If we say we have no sin," i.e., in our hearts, "we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us." "If we say that we have not sinned," i.e., in our practice, "we make him a liar, and the truth is not in us." But" if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: And he is the propitiation for our sins."

He is equally clear respecting the new birth. He did not consider Christian victory to be the exclusive privilege of those who fancy that they have attained to what they call a "higher life;" but he laid down the great broad principle, and laid it down as plainly as words can express it, that wherever there is a real new birth there then is victory, for he says with the utmost decision, "Whatsoever is born of God overcometh the world" (ch. v. 4).

(2.) He boldly denounced error. In all these matters he laid down a clear basis of solid scriptural truth. But he went further than this, and spoke of error in a manner exceedingly contrary to the fashion of our own day. The modern fashion is to be so liberal as to suppose that those who differ from us on great, essential, clearly revealed truths are right as well as ourselves.

But there was none of that pseudo-liberality to be found in St. John. He was, what the world would call "bigoted" enough to believe that the opposite to truth was falsehood, and he spoke of such falsehood in language that we who are not inspired men should scarcely venture to employ. For example, in ch. ii. 22, he plainly said that whoever denied that Jesus was the Christ was a liar. In ch. iv. 3, he declared that if any one denied the real manhood of the Lord Jesus, he was the spirit of Antichrist. And in ch. v. 10, that if a man did not believe the divine testimony to the Son of God, he thereby made God a liar. This was strong, plain language, and utterly opposed to those modern ideas which appear to imply that men believe in no such thing as distinctive truth.

(3.) The Apostle taught very clearly, as I have already shown, that true knowledge, and true light, must lead to practical conduct. Read the Epistle carefully through with this Gnostic heresy in your mind, and you will find a flood of light thrown on numberless passages, as, for example, such as ch. ii. 29 and iii. 3.1 But the point to be particularly observed is the standard of this practical conduct. The Gnostics made their own knowledge their standard. They claimed to have light and knowledge, and to be right in all they did according to their own light. But against this most delusive notion St. John aimed his heaviest battery. He showed perfectly clearly that there is only one standard, and that that one standard is not our own light, or our own knowledge, or our own fluctuating attainments, according to which the same thing may be right to-day and wrong to-morrow; but that it is one fixed and unchangeable standard, being nothing else than the Commandments of God. Now St. John is often spoken of as the Apostle pre-eminent for spirituality. People tell us, though I utterly differ from them, that St. James is pre-eminent for practical character, and St. John for spiritual life. We must not stop to debate the question. We may accept it as the creed of Christendom. Now what is the teaching of this most spiritual Apostle? of him who was beloved of the Lord, and who undoubtedly taught us more than any other, of the doctrine of mystical and loving union with the Lord Jesus? I venture to reply that there is not one of the Apostles, not St. James, or St. Paul, nor any other, who made such a point, as he does, of the commandments of God as the one standard of practical conduct. It is true that in ch. iii. 3, he teaches that the perfect character of our Blessed Lord is our standard, for he there says: "And every man that hath this hope in Him purifieth himself,

1 "If ye know that he is righteous, ye know that every one that doeth righteousness is born of him."

even as He is pure." But there is no real difference, for the life of the Lord Jesus was the perfect fulfilling of the law of God. There is not an Apostle who spoke more clearly of the complete propitiation as the one foundation of hope, or of the commandments as the one standard of life and practice.' If, therefore, we desire to contend for the faith as he did, we must never accept any lower standard, nor for one moment be content with our own light as our guide. According to St. John, if the com mandments of God are broken then there is sin, whatever we may think of it, for "sin is the transgression of the law." And so, on the other hand, if we desire the mind of the Lord Jesus Christ, and if there be real love of God in our hearts, we must not be content to go floating about wherever we may fancy that love leads us; but we must be guided simply by His own revealed will as given in His own inspired word, for there we read, "This is the love of God that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not grievous."

(4) In dealing with error, he showed very clearly his own confidence in truth. Believers will be powerless against error if they cannot themselves answer the question, "What is truth?"

Our Lord said to His disciples (Luke xii. 29), “Neither be ye of doubtful mind;" and we may all be perfectly certain that so long as there is a doubtful mind in ourselves we shall never be the means of helping others to the assurance of faith. Thus the Epistle of St. John abounds in declarations of his knowledge. The word yvwokw, to know, from which the Gnostics derived their name, occurs not less than twenty-five times in this Epistle, and if you examine your Cruden's Concordance, you will find the words, "We know," occurring no less than sixteen times in these five short chapters. St. John did not say " we feel," or "we think," but "we know." And if my readers look at the character of this knowledge, they will find that it was not merely the result of inspiration, but the consequence of the calm consideration of well-established evidence. According to i. I, the ear, the eye, and the hands were all called in as witnesses. He had heard the teaching of our Lord; he had witnessed His miracles, and he had handled his risen Saviour; and so, after having weighed the evidence, and thoroughly considered the facts, he was brought to an unchangeable conviction, and might have said, as St. Paul did, "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him against that day."

Now, this is the kind of assured trust that we all require in

As this may surprise some of my readers, let them turn to one or two passages, ch. ii. 3, 4; iii. 24, v. 3.

these difficult times. We want to learn the lesson which St. Paul taught the Thessalonians (2 Thess. ii. 2), "That ye be not soon shaken in mind or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter, as from us, as that the day of Christ is at hand." We want not merely to know the truth, but to know that we know it. We want to be kept in calm repose on the rock, in the full persuasion that the truth is clear, and the evidence for that truth impregnable. We do not want to be driven hither and thither by every wind that bloweth ; or to be hurried into wild extravagance by every new fancy that arises. But we do want to be firmly assured that what is written in the Scriptures, that is sufficient, and that what God has revealed, that is infallible; that so we may be able to use the clear language with which this Epistle concludes (v. 18, 19, 20) :

We know that whosoever is born of God sinneth not.

We know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness.

We know that the Son of God is come, and hath given us an understanding, that we may know Him that is true, and we are in Him that is true, even in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life.

EDWARD HOARE.

ART. V. THE LATER HISTORY OF JERUSALEM.

1. Coins of the Jews. By FREDERIC W. MADDEN, M.R.A.S., Member of the Numismatic Society of London, &c. With

279 Woodcuts and a Plate of Alphabets. London: Trübner & Co. 1881.

2. Le Temple de Jérusalem, Monographie du Haram-es-Chérif, suivie d'un Essai sur la Topographie de la Ville-Sainte. Par le Cte. MELCHIOR DE VOGUÉ. Paris: Noblet et Baudry. 1864.

3. Stirring Times; or Records from Jerusalem. Consular Chronicles from 1853 to 1856. By the late JAMES FINN, M.R.A.S., Her Majesty's Consul for Jerusalem and Palestine from 1849 to 1863. Two vols. London: Kegan Paul & Co. 1878.

THE

HE Biblical interest of Jerusalem is of such paramount importance, it is so sacred, so manifold too and various, comprehending, as it does, both the Old Testament and the New, that very often it is viewed as exhausting the subject. Moreover the destruction of the Holy City by the Romans-in fulfil

ment of prophecy and in punishment of Hebrew sin-isolates the city's later history from the past, and separates off that past from all succeeding generations. And, once more, Christianity is not a local religion; and we have no reason now for looking upon Jerusalem with the thoughts and feelings which on every pious Israelite were anciently imperative.

Thus it is sometimes forgotten that Jerusalem, since the time of its living association with the Bible, has been by no means a dead city, but has held, and still holds, a very great, and even central, place in the history of the world. Again and again, and in divers ways, it has been the focus of warm and affectionate enthusiasm, and the fulcrum of great military and diplomatic movements. Hence a slight and rapid sketch of its later annals may not be without its use; and such a sketch may indeed be the more useful by reason of its being slight and rapid, because thus the whole of this series of centuries, so full of diversified interest, will be seen at a glance.

It will be true to the facts of the case, if we connect the successive periods of this long range of time with the names of eminent men; while in this method there will be the further advantage, that a biographical aspect of the enumeration of events will prevent it from being dull. These names, too, are all really great names; and if each had a distinct personal connection with Jerusalem, as was certainly the case, this is enough to show that Jerusalem is a pivot for history from the declining days of the Roman Empire to the rise of what is termed "The Eastern Question" in the Levant. The names are those of Hadrian, Constantine, Jerome, Justinian, Chosroes II., the Khalif Omar, Godfrey of Bouillon, Saladin, Solyman the Magnificent, Mehemet Ali, and the Emperor Nicholas. They will be here taken separately and in succession; but in looking over the list as a whole, one general thought, full of deep sadness, oppresses the mind; for we see here the first arrival, and then the settling, of the dark Mahomedan cloud, upon the sacred city of the Hebrew Church.

(i.) Beginning with HADRIAN we make a sudden plunge ; and this is really an advantage for us in beginning to take a survey of a period of history which is sharply separated from the past. Since the close of the Jewish War under Titus, there had been an absolute cessation of the existence of Jerusalem, as a home for a community of living men, during more than fifty years. Such a silence, so to speak, in the history of Jerusalem, is a very solemn fact. Hadrian was a great traveller, and a great builder. The incidents of his stay in Egypt are chronicled on the Barberini Obelisk, now to be seen in Rome. The gateway, which bears his name in Athens, is so placed as still to give us a very definite notion of the suburb which he built and