ther from ourselves or
from Him. Bring it all out into the light. And although with a penitent
heart, and a face suffused with blushes, we have sometimes to say, 'See,
Father, what I have done!' it is far better that the revealing light
should shine down upon us, and like the sunshine on wet linen, melt away
the foulness which it touches, than that we should huddle the ugly thing
up in a corner, to be one day revealed and transfixed by the flash of
the light turned into lightning. 'He that doeth the truth cometh to the
light, that his deeds may be made manifest.'

II. So much, then, for my first point; the second is: The companions of
the men that walk in the light.

I have already pointed out that the accurate, perhaps pedantically
accurate, form of the antithesis would have been: 'If we walk in the
light as He is in the light, we have fellowship with God.' But John
says, first, 'we have fellowship one with another.' Underlying that, as
I shall have to say in a moment, there is the other thought: 'We have
fellowship with God.' But he deals with the other side of the truth
first. That just comes to this, that the only cement that perfectly
knits men to each other is their common possession of that light, and
the consequent fellowship with God. There are plenty of other bonds that
draw us to one another; but these, if they are not strengthened by this
deepest of all bonds, the affinity of souls, that are moving together in
the realm of light and purity, are precarious, and apt to snap. Sin
separates men quite as much as it separates each man from God. It is the
wedge driven into the tree that rends it apart. Human society with its
various bonds is like the iron hoop that may be put around the barrel
staves, giving them a quasi-unity. The one thing that builds men
together into a whole is that each shall be, as it were, embedded in the
rock which is the foundation, and the building will rise into a holy
temple in the Lord. Sin separates; as the prophet confessed, 'All we
like sheep have gone astray, every one to _his own way_,' and the flock
is broken up into a multitude of scattered sheep. Social enthusiasts may
learn the lesson that the only way by which brotherhood among men can
become anything else than a name, and probably end, as it did in the
great French Revolution, in 'brothers' making hecatombs of their
brethren under the guillotine, is that it shall be the corollary from
the Fatherhood of God. If we walk in th