THE Apostle now turns to those for whose sake he writes, as a father to his children. Addressing them personally as his children, he presses home upon their hearts a spiritual father's admonitory words: "My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not." The expression, "these things," glances back to that main topic which had been his starting-point, viz. that it is only while walking in the light, that we can be certain of that divine fellowship of life bestowed through Christ. But with this all that follows is connected, and to all this the expression has reference. All which he had said to them respecting the sin still cleaving to the christian, and of the progressive redemption from it for which they may hope, has had for its aim, not to make them lenient towards their own sins, but on the contrary to excite them to a continued and unwearied conflict with sin. In order to apprehend and apply the admonition to abstain from sin, as understood by the Apostle after the law of Christ, our conception of the nature of sin, of what sin is, must be very different from that derived from the superficial moral judgment of the world. For this it is requisite that, trying ourselves by that higher standard, we should learn to detect what is sinful in our own life in order that we may overcome and avoid it; and as the source of the needed resolution, confidence; and alacrity for this, is presupposed the sense of divine forgiveness, and reliance upon the divinely purifying power of the work of redemption. Thus we perceive how all that precedes, starting from that central thought, serves as a basis for the exhortation, "That we sin not."

That connection, which we have noticed, is always present to the Apostle in the light of his christian self-knowledge and his knowledge of man. Hence, to the unconditional exhortation to sin not, he is constrained to add a ground of consolation to those, who, while honestly striving against sin have yet fallen under temptation, and who might thereby become wholly unsettled in regard to the work of their salvation, and be driven to despair. Another would have given this the adversative form: But if any one sin. In the style, however, of the undialectic and unrhetorical John, there is no occasion to change the connective word; as in many cases where another, Paul for instance, would have made this change, with him the simple "and" suffices for all the relations of his several propositions to one another.