Now, this looks a very plain and simple test. And so it is generally taken to be. But is it? No. There are several great difficulties in it. It is not so plain as it seems. The first is that John lays stress the words, "not seen." It is a matter of visibility and invisibility. His argument seems to be that it is, of course, so much easier to love a seen than an unseen person. And his idea is that if you cannot do the easy thing, loving man, you are a liar if you say that you can do the more dificult thing, love an unseen God. But is it so? Is it more easy to love people you see or can see, than people you have never seen or cannot see? I am not at all sure about that. All Americans say they admire and even love George Washington, yet many of them may detest the.man living next door to them. Are we to cal] them liars for saying they love Washington when they don't love the man next door? Englishmen say they love Lord Nelson but do they all love the Chinese whom they see in thousands every day? What about that? Does it not sometimes appear as f we liked people all the better the farther they are removed from us in time and distance? There is David, We are all lovers of David, whom we have not seen. I wonder whether we should have loved him as much if we had seen him, returning from a bout with the Philistines with his gorysword. Absence idealizes people. We all admire and even love the memory of General Gordon. But he was rather a trial to those who had to do with him. I remember reading an article on him by the late Lord Cromer, our plenipotentiary in Egypt. I remember one thing he said, 'What are you to do with a man, who answers a diplomatic document by quoting the prophet Isaiah?' What indeed was a poor Governor, who wanted a plain -answer to do with such a man? We have idealized Queen Victoria since she died. "But it is now coming out that she detested her Liberal statesmen, Mr. Cladstone especially. They reverenced her dignity, but can hardly have loved her overmuch. Are we to say that therefore the religious professions of Mr, Cladstone, and his professed love to God were false, and he a liar? Hardly. Yet according to this interpretation of the text, we seem to be shut up to it. Unseen men and women ox generations gone by are idealized, their robes are the ages, their small irritating faults are swallowed up in the mist of time that envelopes them. So John can hardly have expected us to accept the common meaning attached to his words.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.