Thus there 1g every reason why wa should attach great importance to a man nearly one hundred years old who sets out to treat of what. the margin calls "our case'. The love of God_is manifested "in our case'. His meaning is that substantially we are all in the same case. We do not all have to work in the marble quarries, but there is a marble query of some kind for every man in the world. There is a hard and inexplicable experience te go through and more than one. Human nature is the same in adi ages and death and eternity loom over cts as they did ever John, troubles vex us and sins have their old habit of staring gin the face Jong after th jigs a thoughtful man 7 nek ha uted, what he is going to do about them, and making 'a stil more thoughtful man wonder what God is going to do about them. The "case" of man is a very complicated one. it has relations with the past, with the eternal future, and both of these mixed up with our present life and all its activities and responsibilities, Our case, in fact, is a very seriously helpless one. We are utterly powerless to do anything to make things right for ourselves as to death and eternity; we cannot recall and wride our past sins; we have only a small outfit of moral power, We seem to have been a long time getting to the text but there is a great dear in the kind of approach we make to a subject. And this account of John as an authority, speaking from a very full experience, has seemed to me the best way of approach to the text. What John is trying to tell the people to whom he is writing is this: "What is the essence of this Gospel, that has been so much to him and that has borne him through so many trials: 'Herein was the love of God manifested in our case, that God hath sent his only-begotten Son into the world.' " The first thing then, that he tells them is, that God himself had come into the, world when Jesus Christ came. Here, indeed is news! John was a Jew. He belonged to the nation which had always had a grand conception of God. Had there been no Jows there could have been no Christians. No! God—holy, gracious, forgiving iniquity and sin, vet' high and lifted up. the infinite and eternal! What. does not the world owe to the Jews for having kept that grand faith alive in a sinful world, black and debased with idolatries and cruel rites? John had always believed in thig great and gracious God, the God of his fathers. And he had believed that this great and gracious God had for centuries sent prophets and psalmists and wise men to reveal him to men, to make known his will and his loving purposes to mankind. Moses, Isaiah, Daniel were among them. And great indeed they were and are Still. Only Christ's apostles come anywhere near them in the common estimation of mankind. But John had found that a wonderful thing had happened in the history of his people. and of the world. God had not sent just another prophet into the world, somewhat holier than his predecessors such as Isaiah, but God had himself come into the world in Jesus with whom he had tramped the roads of Palestine for
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.