, is often perturbed and
dashed by apprehension and dread.

Now John is speaking about the two emotions in themselves, irrespective,
so far as his language goes, of the objects to which they are directed.
What he is saying is true about love and fear, whatever or whosoever
may be loved or dreaded. But the context suggests the application in his
mind, for it is 'boldness before him' about which he has been speaking;
and so it is love and fear directed towards God which are meant in my
text. The experience of hosts of professing Christians is only too
forcible a comment upon the possibility of a partial Love lodging in the
heart side by side with a fellow-lodger, Fear, whom it ought to have
expelled. So there are three things here that I wish to notice--the
empire of fear, the mission of fear, and the expulsion of fear.

I. The empire of fear.

Fear is a shrinking apprehension of evil as befalling us, from the
person or thing which we dread. My text brings us face to face with that
solemn thought that there are conditions of human nature, in which the
God who ought to be our dearest joy and most ardent desire becomes our
ghastliest dread. The root of such an unnatural perversion of all that a
creature ought to feel towards its loving Creator lies in the simple
consciousness of discordance between God and man, which is the shadow
cast over the heart by the fact of sin. God is righteous; God
righteously administers His universe. God enters into relations of
approval or disapproval with His responsible creature. Therefore there
lies, dormant for the most part, but present in every heart, and active
in the measure in which that heart is informed as to itself, the
slumbering, cold dread that between it and God things are _not_ as they
ought to be.

I believe, for my part, that such a dumb, dim consciousness of discord
attaches to all men, though it is often smothered, often ignored, and
often denied. But there it is; the snake hibernates, but it is coiled in
the heart all the same; and warmth will awake it. Then it lifts its
crested head, and shoots out its forked tongue, and venom passes into
the veins. A dread of God is the ghastliest thing in the world, the most
unnatural, but universal, unless expelled by perfect love.

Arising from that discomforting consciousness of discord there come,
likewise, other forms and objects of dread. For if I am out of harmony
with Him, what will be my fate in the midst of a universe adm