heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handy-work;"a and "the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof." How could faith possibly be the victory that overcometh such a world as this? The natural world is itself a revelation of God; it is not faith's foe, it may well be faith's support. Does St. John then mean by the world the entire human family; the whole world of men? We find the word, undoubtedly, used in this sense, also, in the Bible. When our Lord tells His disciples, "Ye are the light of the world; " or when He says, that the field in which the Heavenly Sower sows His seed is the world; or when He cries, "Woe to the world because of offences;"e or "I am the Light of the world;" or "I speak to the world those things which I have heard of Him;" He means human beings in general. And this sense is even more apparent in St. Paul's description of the public estimate of the Apostles: "We are made as the filth of the world, and are the offscouring of all men unto this day" where "all men," for so it should be rendered, and "the world" are clearly parallel expressions. And the Pharisees, as reported by St. John, use the word "world" in this sense of "everybody;" when, referring to our Lord's popularity, they cry, in their vexation, "Behold, the world is gone after Him."i This use of the word is popular as well as classical: it is found in Shakespeare and Milton; but it is not St. John's meaning in the present passage. For this world, which thus comprises all human beings, included the Christian Church and St. John himself. Whereas the world of which St. John is speaking is plainly a world with which St. John has nothing to do; a world which is hostile to all that he has at heart; a world to be overcome by every one that is born of God, by St. John himself, and by the Christians whom he is addressing. In this passage, then, the world means human life and society, so far as it is alienated from God, through being centred on material objects and aims, and thus opposed to God's Spirit and His kingdom. And this is the sense of the word in the majority of cases where it occurs in the writings of St. John. This is the world of which our Lord said to the Jews: "The world cannot hate you, but Me it hateth."a This is the world of which He observed that "it could not receive the Spirit of truth." This is the world with whose gift of false peace to its votaries He contrasted His Own: "My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you." This is the world of whose prince our Lord said, "he hath nothing in Me." Respecting this world, He warned His disciples: "If the world hate you, ye know that it hated Me before it hated you. If ye were of the world, the world would love its own but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." To this world He referred in His Intercessory Prayer: "I pray not for the world, but for them that Thou hast given Me. They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world." St. John bids us not to love; passes away, with the desires thereof; h which is, in its essence and active movement, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life;i which, he says, lies, as a whole, in wickedness; and which "whatsoever is born е a St. John vii. 7. This is the world which which, as he proclaims, с a " e of God overcometh." This world, according to St. Paul, has a spirit of its own, opposed to the Spirit of God; b and there are "things of the world" opposed to "the things of God;" and rudiments and elements of the world which are not after Christ;d and there is a "sorrow of the world that worketh death," as contrasted with a "godly sorrow unto repentance, not to be repented of;" so that, gazing on the Cross of Christ, St. Paul says "that by it the world is crucified to him, and he to the world "f_ so utter is the moral separation between them. To the same purpose is St. James's definition of true religion and undefiled, before God and the Father;-it consists not only in active philanthropy, but in a man's keeping himself unspotted from the world. And there is the even more solemn warning of the same Apostle, "that the friendship of the world is enmity with God." h II. This body of language shows that the conception of the world as human life, so far as it is alienated from God, is one of the most prominent and distinct truths brought before us in the New Testament. The world is a living tradition of disloyalty and dislike to God and His kingdom, just as the Church is or was meant to be a living tradition of faith, hope, and charity; a mass of loyal, affectionate, energetic devotion to the cause of God. The world is human nature, sacrificing the spiritual to the material, the future to the present, the unseen and the eternal to that which touches the senses and which perishes with time. The world is a mighty flood of thoughts, feelings, principles of action, conventional prejudices, dislikes, attachments, which has been gathering around human life for ages; impregnating it, impelling it, moulding it, degrading it. Of the millions of millions of human beings who have lived, nearly every one probably has contributed something, his own little addition, to the great tradition of materialised life which St. John calls the world. Every one too must have received something from it. According to his circumstances the same man acts upon the world, or, in turn, is acted on by it. And the world, at different times, wears different forms. Sometimes it is a solid, compact mass; an organisation of pronounced ungodliness. Sometimes it is a subtle, thin, hardly-suspected influence; a power altogether airy and impalpable, which yet does most powerfully penetrate, inform, and shape human life. When the Apostle St. John spoke of the world, he was no doubt thinking of it generally as an organisation. The world of the Apostolic age was the Roman society and Empire; with the exception of the small Christian Church. When a Christian of that day named the world, his thoughts first rested on the vast array of wealth, prestige, and power, whose centre was at Rome. He thought of all that had made Egypt, and Assyria, and Babylon, and Tyre, to be what they had been, brought together on a larger and more splendid scale. He thought of the fleets in the Mediterranean; of the legions on the Euphrates and the Danube; of the great company of officials who administered the provinces and cities of the Empire; of the merchants whose enterprises were carrying them even beyond the limits of the Roman rule; of the numerous and powerful literary class, which set itself to educate taste, and to inform and control opinion; of the immense slave population which ministered to the com fort and luxury of these masters of men; and, above all, at the summit of the whole, of the Cæsar of the day, throned in a splendour and majesty, which seemed to other men even to transcend the limits of human existence. He thought of this complex yet organised mass of elegance, of brutality, of power, of degradation, of intelligence, of wealth, of hideous misery, which had been built up by the labour and suffering of an imperial race, during five centuries of vicissitude and effort; and then his thoughts turned to the source and centre of this great organisation, to the Empire city, to Rome. Rome was the very core and essence of the world. To Rome all the streams of human effort converged; from Rome they radiated; within Rome were the minds and energies which impelled and controlled the vast machine of government; at Rome was to be found the representative ability and the representative vice of the complex whole. When two Apostles sought a name with religious significance for Rome, they at once thought of that older seat of empire, which, in pride, and wealth, and oppressiveness, and ungodliness, was foremost in an earlier age of the world's history. Both St. Peter in his First Epistle, and St. John in the Revelation,b salute Pagan Rome as Babylon; as the typical centre of organised worldly power among the sons of men, at the very height of its alienation from Almighty God. The world then of the Apostolic age was primarily a vast organisation. But it was not a world that could last. "After these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power. And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen. . . . And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, a I St. Pet. v. 13. b Rev. xviii. 2. |