(with 1 Peter 2:17; Hebrews 13:1)
I. Look at the words in which the message is delivered: "That ye love one another," that ye "love the brotherhood," that this "brotherly love continue." It is clear that in the first instance it is Christians, as such, who are spoken to and spoken of. The brotherhood is the body of Christians, then a little company, now a great multitude that no man can number. They stand out from the rest of the world. The hatred of the outside world is taken for granted, and as it were, discounted. This "world," so far as these Chapter s are concerned, is neither to be loved nor hated. It is to be reasoned with, to be convinced of sin, in the end to be overcome. And the great spell that is to overcome it, is the φιλαδελφ ία the love which binds each brother who owns the common bond of the Christian communion. I will not stay to inquire how far this "world" of scripture, this mass of hostile or indifferent outsiders, has a real and formidable existence for us in this nineteenth century of a Christianity which is pledged and destined to overcome it. As regards my present subject, I may forego this inquiry, and assume that the brotherhood is a society far more extended. "Love the brotherhood" cannot now mean less than this, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." No man who has caught anything of the spirit of Christ's teaching as a whole, and still more the spirit of Christ's example, can doubt that to an enlightened Christian the whole world is ideally the brotherhood. Let a large part of your religion always look to the "brotherhood" in its aim. Let Christian private devotion be always fused with Christian public spirit.
II. There is a danger that our religion may be centred either on our own souls, or on the doctrines and watchwords dear to our religious friends, or on some too limited portion of the brotherhood; in fact, that the very conception of brotherhood may be so narrowed as to be degraded and almost unchristianised. We should recognise alike from the Gospel, from history, "from the signs of this most portentous time" that God meant all to be unselfish nations, churches, classes, sexes to work and to live and to die, not for themselves, but for each other, the strong for the weak, the rich for the poor, the educated for the ignorant.
H. M. Butler, Oxford and Cambridge Review,Nov. 1st, 1883.
References: John 15:17. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. iii., p. 80. John 15:17-27. Ibid.,p. 165.