2.13 - The Love That Perishes
Chapter 13 The Love That Perishes (1 John 2:15-17) The Rival Loves—“The World” in St John—To be loved and to be loathed—The Church and the World—“All that is in the World”—The Temptations in the Garden and in the Desert—Physical Appetite—Subjection of the Body—Æsthetic Sensibility—The Worlds of Fashion and of Art—Life’s Vainglory—Intellectual Ambition—Pride of Wealth—The Essence of Worldliness—Transience of the Evil World—Of the Roman Empire—Of the Kingdom of Satan on Earth.
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Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world;
If anyone love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
For all that is in the world
The lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of life—
Is not of the Father, but it is of the world.
And the world is passing away, and the lust thereof;
But he that doeth the will of God, abideth for ever.
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“LOVE the Father” (1 John 2:5), love the brethren” (1 John 2:9-11), is the sum of St John’s exhortations; "love not the world” is the key-note of his warnings and dehortations. This is what he has to write to all his "little children,” who “know the Father” by His forgiving love—to the old men who have learnt the mystery of the eternal Son and sounded the depths of the hidden life, to the young men strong in their loyalty to the word of God, who have conquered the world’s evil Prince (1 John 2:12-14). By heeding this warning the Apostle’s readers will abide in the Divine fellowship upon which they have entered, and will hold fast the treasure of eternal life (1 John 1:2-3); they will escape “the darkness blinding the eyes” of worldly men and the peril of relapse into the old sins which have been forgiven them, and will make good the victories, over the Evil One already gained. In this forbidding of love to the world, and in the warning against Anti-Christian teaching that follows it in 1 John 2:18-27, the leading thought with which the letter began arrives at its conclusion. Fellowship in the eternal life is forfeited by attachment to this present evil world; “the love of the world” and “the love of the Father” are mutually exclusive affections—to love the one is to hate the other, to hold to one is to despise the other (Matthew 6:24). And in the struggle the latter of these two is bound to prevail: nothing can persist that defies “the will of God” and that puts itself outside the circle of the Father’s love.
We may study this paragraph by considering in turn the nature of the world whose love the Apostle condemns, its characteristic passions, and the transience of all that belongs to it in comparison with the permanence of the life of love to God.
1. What then is “the world which God’s children must not love? This is an important but difficult question for the interpreter of St John. The Apostle employs the term κόσμος oftener than all the other New Testament writers put together—over twenty times in this Epistle, nearly eighty times in his Gospel; in the Apocalypse it is commonly replaced by ἡγή (“the earth”)—a word very frequent there.
We are not, to understand by “the world” the natural universe, as many of the Gnostics did. Scripture is full of admiration of the works of the Creator; at their making He pronounced them “very good,” and His Son Jesus Christ found in them a pure and high delight. Nor is it the natural system of human existence that the Apostle denounces, the world of sense and physical activity, the daily work by which men secure “the means of life in the world” (1 John 3:17), the engagements of home and friendship, of business and art and civil government. St John and the first Christian teachers throw no disparagement upon the material and secular order of society; the Apostle Paul has, indeed, expressed himself in the opposite sense and vindicates the sacredness of the natural constitution of man’s life in this world (Romans 13:1-7; Ephesians 5:23-31; 1 Timothy 2:3; 1 Timothy 4:1-5). The cosmos St John condemns is not the world as God made it and rules it by His providence, but the world “lying in the power of the Evil One” (1 John 5:19, John 14:30, etc.), the world that is filled with lust and vanity, whose desires are the contrary to those born “of the Father,” the world that knows not God, and therefore “crucified the Lord of glory” and laid on Him the burden of its sin (1 Corinthians 2:8; John 1:29; John 17:25). The Apostle views the world of men around him in its relationship to God; he has few thoughts for any aspect of life but this. The cosmos means to him the prevailing spiritual and moral order of human affairs; and this system of things is hostile to God and alien from His love, and therefore radically evil and doomed to perish. It is in this character that the Apostle, as a son of God and a servant and witness of Christ, has to deal with the world. He speaks of it as he finds it. But there are expressions of opposite strain in St John’s sayings respecting the world. In the second verse of this chapter we read of Christ the Advocate as “the propitiation for the sins of the world”; again, in 1 John 4:14, “the Father hath sent the Son as Saviour of the world”; we see a reason for this mission in the wonderful fact disclosed to us, that “the world was made through” Christ, the eternal Word (John 1:10). How dear, then, the world is to God! He “so loved the world, that He gave” for its salvation “His Son, the Only-begotten.” With strong emphasis the Apostle represents “the whole world”—nothing else and nothing less—as the object of the Father’s redeeminggrace, as the province of Christ’s mission of sacrifice and conquest. The entire race of mankind, and ofmankind in its actual life and present sphere of existence, is embraced and dealt with in the plans of Divine redemption. “The cosmos” signifies man not abstractly considered and apart from nature, but man and nature as a single complex of being, along with the sin and misery in which man is entangled. The sinful and lost world, which Jesus Christ has come into and finds in its ill plight, is the world that God in His love is resolved to save through Him. But while the world has become the object of the pitying loves of God, it is, because of its blind hatred towards Him, the foe of His children. “The world hates” them, as Cain hated Abel, as it hated Jesus to the death (1 John 3:12-13; John 15:18-24, etc.). Out of it come the Antichrists who seduce them (1 John 2:18-26, 1 John 4:1-6); its persecution harasses them; its corruptions and idolatries would destroy them. They have to conquer it; and they can do so by virtue of the Mightier Spirit in hemselves (1 John 4:4)—they have alreadyvanquished the Evil One who holds sway over it. The Tempter vauntingly displayed to Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them,” saying, “All this is delivered unto me”; and well might Satan say so (compare pp. 208, 430). The world in which our Lord passed the days of His flesh was wicked to an extreme degree. Human society, as most of us know it, is in a far better and cleaner condition than in St John’s time. The worldliest men of to-day would be nauseated if taken back 1800 years and set down in one of those imposing Greek or Roman cities in which the Apostles preached. We owe the change to Christ and His servants. The Church of the Redeemer has not toiled and suffered through these centuries without raising the moral standard and softening the temper of civilized mankind. But the bad old world of St John’s time exists; its vices and cruelties flourish, in the most horrible form, amongst heathen peoples. Though combated and checked, it propagates itself in the midst of Christendom, hiding in haunts of shame, poisoning our literature and art, debasing our politics and trade, wearing sometimes the mask of religion and with fine moral phrases and airs of virtue deceiving the very elect. It is still the same enemy of God and destroyer of men,—the world of the carnal mind and the selfish spirit, of the bitter tongue and the evil heart of unbelief; it is a world no less hateful, no less fascinating, than that which plied St John’s disciples in the Asian cities with its terrors and its enchantments. The world is a bewildering paradox; each man bears in his own breast the mirror of the contradiction, its counterpart in little. It is the sphere at once of light and darkness, heaven and hell the Divine and the Satanic wrestle there for mastery, and their forms are confused in the struggle. The world is at once to be loved and to be loathed: to be loved, as God made it and Christ redeemed it; to be loathed and feared, as sin has marred it, as the serpent has drawn over it his trail and charged it with his venom.
“The world” is practically defined by its opposition, to “the love of the Father.” St John does not decide for his people whether this or that avocation is allowable; he nowhere “draws the line” for them between the permissible and the forbidden in employments and recreations. He makes the decision one of spiritual instinct and conscience for the individual case. Everything is prohibited, is marked as evil for the Christian believer, which comes into competition with the love of God; any and every such thing, though innocent to appearance and though safe and lawful under other conditions, is wrong for him, since it chills his heart toward God; such a pursuit, such an affection, proves by its tendency to be “not of the Father but of the world.” St Paul has said, “Whatsoever is not of faith is sin” (Romans 14:23); this Apostle virtually says, “Whatsoever is not of the love of God is sin.” Whatever puts God out of one’s thoughts, whatever weakens the power of religion over the soul, whatever hinders one from doing God’s will in the ordering of his life, whatever sets itself up to rival the love of God in one’s heart—be it even the love of father or mother—this belongs to what St John understands by “the world.” The world has a separate being for each man; it may meet him in the cloister ads well as in the theatre, it follows him into the sanctuary from the exchange. “The world” is not made up of so many outward objects that can be specified; it is the sum of those influences emanating from met and things around us, which draw us away from God. It is the awful down-dragging current in life. “The spirit of the world” is the atmosphere, laden with germs of disease, which constantly exhales from the moral corruption and ungodliness of mankind, and it penetrates everywhere.
“The world” being thus ubiquitous, evidently mere exclusion and prohibition are ineffectual defences. Jesus would not have His disciples “taken out of the world,” in order to be “kept from its evil” (John 17:15). There must of course be separation from manifest wrong, and “no fellowship” admitted “with the works of darkness” (Ephesians 5:11). But antipathy is not salvation; local distance gives no security. It is not enough to mark off certain places, certain pursuits and associations, and to say, “Now these belong to the world: I will hold aloof from them, and I shall be safe”—though there are things with which a Christian man can no more identify himself than Christ with Belial. Nor will it suffice to say, “Such and such persons are worldly people; I will keep clear of them, and I shall escape the contamination of the world”—though, to be sure, there are those with whom a religious man will as little consort as light with darkness. But this kind of protection is quite inadequate, and may be fatally deceptive. For the world has secret allies within us, and the love of it is native to our hearts. There is no way of conquering its affections and casting out its lusts but by the power of a stronger passion. Nothing will save ourselves, nothing will save our modern Churches, from the engulfing tide of worldliness, but “the expulsive power of a new affection”; the “pouring out of the love of God in our hearts through the Holy Spirit that was given unto us,” is the one safeguard (Romans 5:5). The true love thrusts out the false. Spiritual religion is the only antidote to idolatry, and the baptism of the Holy Ghost the cure for worldliness in the Church. God must fill the man’s being and occupy it for Himself; nothing else wilt expel the world, with its vain desires and its sordid and slavish cares, from the temple of the soul.
2. The unlovely features of the world should repel the children of God, and make friendship between them and it impossible; St John speaks of them as “the things that are in the world,”—the passions which animate it and the pursuits which occupy it. These are “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the vainglory of this life,” which make up, in the Apostle’s view, “all that is in the world”: who can love things like these? The three categories of moral evil named must be understood in their widest sense, for they embrace the characteristics of the world’s ungodliness as a whole.
They are defined as “not of the Father”—they form no part of God’s creation and spring from no seed of His sowing—“but of the world,” being “tares” that were later sow by an enemy’s hand, diseases of the blood that had their rise within the frame of man’s existence.55 The dispositions named are corruptions, and not of “that which was from the beginning”; sin is finite and creaturely in origin, and will be transient in its reign; “the world and its lust are passing.” Sin is not primordial and essential to humanity; its development is a dark episode in the history of the universe. In this trinity of evil, there are two lusts and one vaunt, two forms of depravation arising from our needs and one from our possessions,—unholy desire for things one has not, and unholy pride in things one has. The three correspond, broadly speaking, to the three attractions of the forbidden fruit which overcame our mother Eve in the garden, and to the three temptations overcome by the Seed of the Woman in the desert.
(1) Under the lust of the flesh are included all corrupt bodily desires. “The woman saw that the tree was good for food” (Genesis 3:6); the Tempter said to Jesus, after His long fast, “Command that these stones become bread” (Matthew 4:3). Such is the appeal which sin makes to our poor hungry bodies. The primitive temptation, the imperious craving of physical need under circumstances orally prohibiting gratification, assails with more or less of violence and frequency every child of man. The body has its claims, its legitimate and appointed appetites; the force of the temptation lies in this fact—the attraction is not merely that of pleasure and self-indulgence, it is that of fitness and seeming necessity: as “food” the fruit offers itself, and it is “good for food”; yet there is a veto! Unless the tempted man knows the heavenly Father, as Jesus did, and has tasted in His word “the true bread from heaven,” unless a spiritual hunger has been awakened that is keener than the fleshly, he will naturally consult for his appetites and “make provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof”; he will make food, in some shape or other, the end of his labour and the regulative necessity of his life. To the earthly man and from the mere physical standpoint, food is the prime criterion of value. This order of desire holds an immense place, and a necessary place, in the economy of life. Jesus Christ perfectly recognized in His teaching, and His works of mercy, man’s earthly wants; He made them the province of God’s daily providence; He told His disciples that “their heavenly Father knoweth that they have need of all these things” and will see that they are “added” to those who “seek first His kingdom and righteousness” (Matthew 6:24-34). But to put these things first is, He showed, to subordinate life to the means of living and to become a slave of Mammon instead of a child of God. When bodily desire of any sort breaks through its limits, when it absorbs the mind and fills the heart and masters the man, then it has swollen into a lust, which darkens the soul and disorders the whole frame of life.
Every species of disordered appetite is included under “the lust of the flesh” in the phraseology of Scripture,— every form of licence, every longing that looks beyond the fences of temperance and chastity. Beside fleshly desires that have a natural basis, there are a multitude of adventitious and injurious appetites, which habit and fashion have engendered; such is the lust for strong drink in our English population. In New Testament times sexual vice was the most conspicuous and ruinous form of animalism, and is marked out specifically as “the lust of the flesh”; it became the occasion of the severest rebukes and warnings, particularly in some of St Paul’s Epistles. Modern worldly society appears to be gravitating towards the same condition; and “the corruption that is in the world through lust” needs to be put to shame in many quarters, with Apostolic plainness and sternness of reproof. It is eating into the vitals of manhood and national life, and threatening to undermine our Western civilization, as it did in the case of ancient Greece, and Rome. Let no man dream that he is out of the reach of sensual seduction, while he is in the flesh. No matter how refined or spiritual he has become, he has a body, and must watch and rule it. When the baits of physical pleasure lose their grossness, they become so much the more insidious, and the more enervating and depraving in their effects. “I keep my body under,” writes St Paul to the lax and self-indulgent Corinthians—“I make it my slave and not my master, lest after that I have preached to others, I should become myself a castaway” (1 Corinthians 9:27). If the holy Apostle needed such vigilance and strictness in bodily regimen, who does not?
Great as the subjection of the poor to bodily conditions may seem to be, they are not in the greatest danger in this respect. It is the affluent who are beset above others by the temptations of sense. Luxury and indolence are more ruinous to the moral nature than crushing poverty. For this reason, amongst others, it is hard for rich men to “enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Neither rich nor poor will break the bondage of the flesh except as our Master did, by faith in the better bread, in the “word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.” In that strength one is “able to bridle the whole body”; but scarcely otherwise.
(2) The lust of the eyes denotes an order of temptation different from the last; it is concerned with taste as distinguished from appetite. The esthetic sensibilities are generated at the juncture of flesh and spirit; these give rise to pleasures of soul superior to those of sense and mere physical existence; they come into play along with the elementary cravings, where the latter allow them room. “The woman saw that the tree was a delight to the eyes”—a perception showing that the pains of hunger were not severe; she observed that the forbidden fruit was goodly to behold, as well as good to eat. Eve was the mother of all the painters and poets, no less than of all the famishing children of mankind. “The Devil taketh Jesus up into an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” Both these representative temptations appealed to the sense of beauty and glory in the soul; their range lay beyond the material and utilitarian interests of life. “The lust of the flesh” is excited through the eyes; but it is not properly “the lust of the eyes.” These create a world of their own full of wealth and enjoyment, which has its peculiar perils and corruptions, its glamour and witchery. Neighbouring to the realm of form and colour ruled by the eye, is that of tone and measure belonging to the ear: the two constitute one chief province of life, the domain of art and beauty; in this sphere, we may take it, the Apostle’s “lust of the eyes” found its place.
There is the world of dress and fashion, which exists for the eyes alone. What excitements, temptations, heart-burnings, follies, extravagances it contains! How large a part of human life—of the exercise of thought and skill, of the manifestation and the testing of character—revolves about the question, “Wherewithal shall we be clothed?” The exercise of taste, the sense of fitness and beauty, in matters of personal appearance and social intercourse, of expression and handiwork, are inborn faculties. These sensibilities belong to our God-given nature; in the higher forms of genius, they bespeak an inspiration of the Almighty; but they have their diseases and excesses. The craving for adornment, and for the luxuries of beauty, grows by indulgence into a veritable lust, that may be as lawless and wasteful as any sensual appetite. There is nothing which makes a human being more frivolous and heartless, which eats away more completely the spiritual capacities, than the unbridled passion for dress and display.
Beyond the world of fashion rises the grander and enduring realm of plastic and poetic art, the product of powers the loftiest that man possesses. The world in which the Apostle John moved had reached a high level of achievement in this direction. No other people has been endowed with such an eye and sense for beauty as the ancient Greeks; the broken relics of their work are the models and the despair of our artists to-day. The finest modern cities would look mean and ugly beside the creations of the ancient architects and sculptors. But a deadly taint of corruption ran through that wondrous activity of genius. The world of art has its idolatries, its revolts, its meretricious elements. St James was a Hebrew puritan,—the last man in the world to appreciate Hellenic art; but he has written the history of its fall: “Lust, when it hath conceived, bringeth forth sin; and sin, when arrived at full growth, bringeth forth death” (James 1:15). God’s curse fell in blight and defacement and shameful ruin on all that magnificent classic civilization. Restraint, reverence, is half the secret of noble craftsmanship. “When it grows blind to the beauty of holiness, when it forgets its spiritual ideal and gives the rein to licence, art loses its vigour in losing its purity; its loveliness allies itself to foulness, and becomes a horror. The motto, “Art for art’s sake,” if this signifies indifference to the religious interests of life and repudiation of ethical motives, is sheer idolatry; it means the enthronement of pleasure in the place of duty. Sterility is the doom of such isolation, in any field of human work. Impotence comes on every faculty that severs itself from the kingdom of God and withholds its tribute to His glory.
(3) It was the vainglory of life to which our blessed Lord was tempted, when the Evil One said to Him on the temple-pinnacle, “Cast thyself down from hence; for it is written, He shall give His angels charge concerning thee”—as though Jesus should have paraded His trust in the Father, and His supernatural powers, to win the applause of the multitude and a ready credence for His Messiahship. “Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”: so the Serpent promised, and stirred in the soul of the woman the deep craving for knowledge, the pride and ambition of the intellect. Eve was the mother of all the thinkers, of the philosophers and scientists, along with the poets and artists of the race; their faculties slumbered in her breast. Granted the story of the Fall to be a poem, its inspired author has struck his finest note in adding this attraction to the charm of the forbidden fruit of Eden. The “knowledge of good and evil” promised to Eve, the Tempter appears already to possess; this emancipate him from fears and scruples, and gives him the “subtlety” which astonishes the mother’s simple mindand excites her envy; she “saw that the tree was tobe desired to make one wise.” Conceit of knowledge is the especial sin of Satan, which set itself by direct intent against the ordinance of God; he claimed to see behind the Divine law, to judge it and despise its threatenings in virtue of his own godlike insight. “Knowledge is power”; but that is a surface knowledge, however extensive and minute, which discerns not the “eternal power and Godhead” in the works of the Creator; it is a spurious and treacherous knowledge that deems itself wiser than conscience and that asks the sceptic question, “Yea, hath God said?” when His Voice sounds in the soul’s ear. There is nothing more daring, and more intoxicating to our human nature, than the arrogance of knowledge. How puny its pretensions, how narrow its farthest range, in the presence of the All-wise and Infinite God! The words employed by St John, in 1 John 2:16, both for “vainglory” and for “life” are notable. Life in this passage is βίος, not ζωή—the βίος of 1 John 3:17 (“If anyone has the livelihood of this world”), not the ζωή of 1 John 1:1-2 (“The life was manifested,” etc.); it is the βίος (“living’) which the father of the prodigal, in the parable of Luke chapter 15 (Luke 15:12-32), divided to his sons. The pride here in question is ἀλαζονεία, which in earlier Greek meant “swagger” or “braggadocio.” The only other example of the term in the New Testament is in James 4:16: the travelling Jewish trader boastfully tells of his schemes,—how he will visit this town and that, and make so much gain in each; “So,” writes the inspired satirist, “you glory in your vauntings!” Such ἀλαζόνες, “braggarts,” St Paul condemns in Romans 1:30, 2 Timothy 3:2, distinguishing them from the “over-weening” (ὑπερήφανοι). The “vainglory of life” that St John ascribes to “the world,” is therefore an ostentation of worldly possessions or advantages, the disposition to “show off” and to make other people look small. In its crudest form this temper manifests itself in the vulgar rich man, proud of his money, of his house, his table and his wines, of his pictures or his horses; in the vain woman, proud of her beauty and its admirers, proud of her jewels and dresses, of her fashionable style and fashionable friends. The like “vainglory” is seen in the criminal relating his daring exploits and clever rogueries; in the actor puffed up by his triumphs on the stage, or the artist vaunting his genius and fame, and the prices that his work commands; in the preacher who, while he gives the glory to God, speaks of his crowded congregations and recounts his conversions with a self-complacent air; in the sectarian, who magnifies his own communion, its numbers and wealth and men of talent and the place it fills in the public eye, or its national glory and antiquity, disparaging other bodies of his Master’s servants because they cannot boast these distinctions. All pluming of oneself upon outward things, all conceit of them as though they added worth and importance to oneself, is essential worldliness; it is a part of “the vainglory of this life,” and is “not of the Father but of the world.” Filled with such desires and vanities, though the objects with which they are concerned should be ever so innocent in themselves and good and fitting in their degree, we are like children who should spend all their thoughts in plots and quarrels about cakes and toys, having no wish for their parents’ company and no sense of their parents’ love, shown to them in these gifts and in better things besides. The boons of the world and of temporal livelihood are trash and frippery, compared to the Father’s love and the wealth of His eternal kingdom.
3. Finally, St John declares the transience of worldly passions and possessions: “the world is passing away, and the lust of it.” In saying this, the Apostle is not thinking of the destruction of the visible universe; he foretells the abolition of the existing moral economy of human life, of “the present evil world.” “The darkness” of rebellion towards God and of hatred amongst risen “is passing away”—so he wrote in 1 John 2:8; with “the world,” filled with this darkness and dominated by it, is in course of dissolution. The seer of the Apocalypse had witnessed the fall of Jerusalem—“the great city, which is called spiritually Sodom and Egypt, where their Lord was crucified” (Revelation 11:8). He foresaw in the Spirit at Patmos the overthrow of the new Babylon, “drunken with the blood of the saints.” For the Empire of Rome had declared war against Christ; she had proscribed Christianity. Doing this, she passed sentence of death upon herself. That inightiest of world-kingdoms the Apostle looked upon as a gigantic iniquity, a domain overshadowed and dominated by Satan. Like the old empires that had trampled upon Israel, Rome must pass into ruin and oblivion. Foul lust and demonic pride possessed it, and were conspicuous in its rulers. It was Rome of which St John drew the lurid picture found in Rev chapter 17 “On her forehead is a name written: Mystery, Babylon the great, the mother of the harlots and of the abominations of the earth” (Revelation 17:5). On the “scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy” (Revelation 17:3b), he sees her riding to perdition. St John’s foresight was justified in due time; the Babylon of his visions fell under the stroke of God’s judgements. But her abominations (survived, to propagate themselves under new forms. The present evil world descends from that of St John’s day; there is continuity in the kingdom of Satan, as in that of God. Yet the dominion of darkness wanes from age to age; slowly and surely the light gains upon it (compare p. 172). With that vile world of Paganism, its passions are decaying. Lust must lose its hold of human life. The Son of God is fulfilling the end for which He vas manifested, “to destroy the works of the Devil” (1 John 3:8). Higher ambitions, more serious thoughts, more spiritual cravings, will displace the frivolity and animalism of our times.
Through the ruin of empires and the fall of human pride, through the overthrow of worldly systems decayed with evil, God’s will remains, the enduring foundation of truth and right; the purpose of His grace toward men moves onward to its accomplishment. He who “does the will of God” making it his own, whose life is yielded to its service and is spent in its furtherance, partakes of its eternity. He also, with the Holy Will to which he has yoked himself, “abideth forever.”
“Leave me, O Love which reachest but to dust, And thou, my mind, aspire to higher things;
Grow rich in that which never taketh rust;
Whatever fades, but fading pleasure brings.
Draw in thy beams, and humble all thy might To that sweet yoke where lasting freedoms be; Which breaks the clouds, and opens forth the light That cloth both shine and give us sight to see.
0 take fast hold; let that light be thy guide In this small course which birth draws out to death; And think how ill beseemeth him to slide, Who seeketh heaven, and comes of heavenly breath.
Then farewell, world; thy uttermost I see;
Eternal Love, maintain Thy life in me.” —PHILIP SIDNEY.