Notes of a Sermon preached by the Rev. C. E. Darwent in Union Church, Tientsin, Sunday Morning, January 28.
Text: I, John IV.20. "If a man say, I love God, and hate th his brother, he is a liar: for he that lovett not his brother, whom he hath seen, cannot love God, whom. he hath not seen."
This verse is an illustration of a very paradoxical fact, that is, a fact that you would not think could be a fact. It is, that the hardest and most terrible sayings are from the lips of the mildest people, the very people you would think could not possibly say them. This is curious,-but has a deep reason in it.- When a really quiet, peaceful, mild man is stirred up, and lets himself go, his language may make the flesh creep, Whereas One pays no attention to that kind of a man who is always in a flare. There was Spurgeon. A kinder man never lived. He started and maintained an orphanage out of pure love for the fatherless. He said he would "work his fingers to the.bone" wather than let them starve; yet read his sermons on the wilfully sinful, and you will admit that my contention is fact. The great-fest case of this is the Lord Jesus himself. He was love embodied. We sing "Gentle Jesus, meek and mild." He prayed his Father to forgive those who crucified him; he didn't reply to his accusers; yet, read the 28rd chapter of St. Matthew's gospel, and what do we read? We read this of the religious leaders of his nation, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?" I wonder what would hap) to any of us, if we talked in that way about any class of people whatever! It would be called most immoderate language. And so we have strong language from John. We should not have been surprised if Peter had said this. He was a peppery person. Hoe was impulsive; and impulsive people are apt to blurt it out, and call a man a liar. But John! We do not think of him boiling over as easily as Peter did. John} has a great name for mildness. The great painters always paint John as a very mild young man, indeed I doubt whether anybody iver was so mild as' they paint John. Look up your illustrated Bible, and you will see that this is the case. Was there ever in the world as sheeplike a man as they represent John to have. been? Yet here he is calling quite respectable people liars. It is a serious thing to do. No one takes it so calmly as the man in the story that goes round. He asked an acquaintance whether is was true that he had called him aliar. "Yes, I said you are a big liar.' "Oh," said the man, just wanted to know whether you! said it." Not many would take it like that. To-day we tone things down. We blame a man's circumstances, or his bringing up, and we-all know Mr. Winston Churchill's delicate way of calling a man a liar; he "is guilty of a terminological inexactitude." John never thought of that. He says, plainly, that certain people are liars. And he was an old man, near a hundred years old when he said this. And there is another thing; he must have thought that what he said was according to the mind of his Master, and no one knew the Lord better than John. What then, is it that he says? He says that if people talk about their love for God, and you know they do not love their fellow man, they are lying, because if you do not love people you have seen, it is absurd to boast that you love someone you have not seen. Let us look into, and see what he means. Up to this point in the letter John has been dwelling on the love of God to us sinful men. That is the greatest of all facts. It is one that is beyond us, how to understand that a holy God can love such people as we are, because we all know what frightful blots there are on any little loveableness that even the most loveable people have got on them. It must be a pure grace. But now John is discoursing on the other side, our love to God. And he is concerned for it to be genuine. He abhors anything savouring of falsity, deceit of ourselves, untruth, and so he seems to propose this as a test by Which we can know whether we love God or not; if we do not love man, whom we can see, then we may know that all our talk about loving God, whom we cannot see, is nonsense.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.