But, though the polemical intention of the Epistle has been universally recognised, there has been wide diversity of opinion as to its actual object.  By the older commentators generally, it was found in the perilous state of the Church, or Churches, addressed.  They had left their "first love"; they had lapsed into Laodicean lukewarmness and worldliness, so that their sense of the absolute distinction between the Christian and the unchristian in life and belief had become blurred and feeble.  And it was to arouse them from this lethargy - to sharpen the dulness of their spiritual perceptions - that the Epistle was written.  But not only does the Epistle nowhere give any sign of such an intention; it contains many passages which are inconsistent with it (2^{13,14,20,21,27}, 4⁴, 5^18-20).

    Unmistakably its polemic is directed not against such evils as may at any time, and more or less always do, beset the life of the Church from within, but against a definite danger threatening it from without.  There is a "spirit of error" (4⁶) abroad in the world.  From the Church itself (2¹⁹) many false prophets (4¹) have gone forth, corrupters of the gospel, "antichrists" who would deceive the very elect.  And, not to spend time in statement and refutation of other views, it may be asserted as beyond question that the peril against which the Epistle was intended to arm the Church was the spreading influence of Gnosticism, and, specifically, of a form of Gnosticism that was Docetic in doctrine and Antinomian in practice.  A very brief sketch of the essential features of Gnosticism will suffice to show not only that these are clearly reflected in the more explicitly controversial utterances of the Epistle, but that the influence of an anti-Gnostic polemic is traceable in almost every sentence.

    Of the forces with which Christianity had to do battle for its career as the universal religion - Jewish legalism, pagan superstition, Greek speculation, Roman imperialism - none, perhaps, placed it in sharper hazard than Gnosticism, that strange, obscure movement, partly intellectual, partly fanatical, which, in the second century, spread with the swiftness of an epidemic over the Church from Syria to Gaul.  The rise and spread of Gnosticism forms one of the dimmest chapters in Church history; and no attempt need be or can be made here to elucidate its obscurities or unravel its intricacies.  But one fact is clear:  Gnosticism was not, in the proper sense, a "heresy."  Although it became a corrupting influence within the Church, it was an alien by birth.  While the Church yet sojourned within the pale of Judaism, it enjoyed immunity from this plague; but, soon as it broke through these narrow bounds, it found itself in a world where the decaying religions and philosophies of the West were in acute fermentation under the influence of a new and powerful leaven from the East; while the infusion of Christianity itself into this fermenting mass only added to the bewildering multiplicity of Gnostic sects and systems it brought forth.

    That this was the true genesis of Gnosticism, - that it was the result of an irruption of Oriental religious beliefs into the Greco-Roman world, - and that, consequently, it sought to unite in itself two diverse strains, Western intellectualism and Eastern mysticism, is generally admitted.  Different views are held, however, as to which of these is to be regarded as the stock upon which the other was grafted.  It has been the fashion with Church historians of the liberal school to glorify Gnosticism by giving chief prominence to its philosophical aspect.  Oriental elements it admittedly contained, but these, in its most influential representatives at least, had been thoroughly permeated with the Hellenic spirit.  In its historical result it was the "acute Hellenising" of Christianity.  The great Gnostics were the first Christian philosophers; and Gnosticism is to be regarded as, upon the whole, a progressive force.  More recent investigations and a more concrete study¹ of the subject have tended to discredit this estimate.  Naturally, Gnosticism had to make some kind of terms with Hellenic culture, as Christianity itself had to do, in order to win a footing on which it could appeal to those who sought after "wisdom"; but by much the prepotent strain in this singular hybrid was Oriental Dualism.  Many of the Gnostic sects were characterised chief1y by a wild, fanatical, and sometimes obscene cultus; and even in those which, like the Valentinian, made the most ambitious attempts to evolve a philosophy of the universe, Dualism was still the fundamental and formative principle.  It is far truer to call Gnosticism a reactionary than a progressive force, and its most eminent leaders the last upholders of a lost cause, rather than the advance-guard of intellectual progress.²

    But Dualism no less than Monotheism or Pantheism has its philosophy, its reading of the riddle of existence; and it is clear that it was by reason of its speculative pretensions that Gnosticism acquired its influence in the Church.  The name by which the system came to be designated, the Gnosis, indicates a claim to a higher esoteric knowledge³ of Divine things, and a tendency to reckon this the summit of spiritual attainment; a claim and tendency which St. Paul, as early as his First Epistle to the Corinthians, finds occasion to meet with stern resistance (I Cor. 1^19-25, 8¹, 13²), as engendering arrogance and unbrotherly contempt for the less enlightened (8^1,7-11).  This Epistle, it is true, exhibits no trace of anything that can be distinctively called Gnosticism; but it does reveal into how congenial a soil the seeds of Gnosticism were about to fall.  In the Epistle to the Colossians we find that the sower has been at work; in the Pastoral and other later Epistles, that the crop is already ripening.  The innate pride and selfishness of the system became more and more apparent as it took more definite form (I Tim. 6^3-5, 2 Tim. 3^2-5).  Those who possessed the higher knowledge were distinguished from those who were incapable of its possession, as a superior order, almost a higher species, of believers.  The latter were the unspiritual men, yucikoi, pveu/ma mh. e;contej.⁴  The highest Christian attainment was that of intellectual or mystic contemplation.  To "know the depths"⁵ was esteemed not only above the commonplace facts and moralities of the gospel, but above love, virtue, and practical holiness.  When this, the general and most pronounced feature of Gnosticism, is borne in mind, a vivid light is at once shed upon many passages in the Epistle.  In those, especially, in which we find the formula "he that saith" (o` le,gwn), or an equivalent (eva.n ei;pwmen, eva,n tij ei;ph|), it becomes apparent that it is no abstract contingency the writer has in view, but a definitely recognised case.  Thus in 2^4,6,9 we have what may be supposed to be almost verbal quotations of current forms of Gnostic profession (he that saith), "I know Him,"⁶ "I abide in Him," "I am in the light";⁷ and in each case the claim, unsupported by its requisite moral guarantee, is underlined with the writer's "roughest and blackest pencil-mark" as the statement of a liar.  When we observe, moreover, the prominence which the Epistle gives throughout to the idea of knowledge, and the special significance of several of the passages in which it occurs, the conviction grows that one of the purposes chiefly aimed at is not only to refute the arrogant claims of Gnosticism, but to exhibit Apostolic Christianity, believed and lived, as the true Gnosis, - the Divine reality of which Gnosticism was but the fantastic caricature - the truth of experience to which it was the corresponding "lie" (2^4,22 4²⁰).  The confidence he has concerning those to whom he is writing is that they "know Him who is from the beginning," and that they "know the Father" (2¹³).  The final note of exulting assurance upon which the Epistle closes, is that "we know the True One, and we are in the True One" (5²⁰).  This, the knowledge of the ultimate Reality, the Being who is the Eternal Life, is, for Christian and Gnostic alike, the goal of aspiration.  But against the Gnostic conception of this as to be attained exclusively by flights of intellectual speculation or mystic contemplation, the Apostle labours, with the whole force of his spirit, to maintain that it is to be reached only by the lowlier path of obedience and brotherly love; and that by these, conversely, its reality must ever be attested.  To speak of having the knowledge of God without keeping His commandments (2⁴) is self-contradiction.  If God is righteous, then nothing is more certain than that "Every one that doeth righteousness is begotten of Him" (2²⁹), and that "Whosoever doeth not righteousness is not of God" (3¹⁰).  "Whosoever sinneth hath not seen Him, neither known Him" (3⁶).

    Still more strenuously, if that were possible, does the Apostle insist upon brotherly love as at once the condition and the test of the true knowledge of God.  In Gnosticism knowledge was the sum of attainment, the crown of life, the supreme end in itself.   The system was loveless to the core.  St. Paul saw this with a prophet's eye (I Cor. 8¹, 13²), and the contemporary witnesses bear testimony that it bore abundantly its natural fruit.  "Lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, haughty, railers, disobedient to parents, untruthful, unholy, without natural affection, implacable, slanderers" (2 Tim. 3^2,3), are the typical representatives of the Gnostic character as it is portrayed in the later writings of the New Testament.  "They give no heed to love," says Ignatius,⁸ "caring not for the widow, the orphan, or the afflicted, neither for those who are in bonds nor for those who are released from bonds, neither for the hungry nor the thirsty."

    That a religion which destroyed and banished love should call itself Christian, or claim affinity with Christianity, excites the Apostle's hottest indignation.  To him it is the real atheism.  Against it he lifts up his supreme truth, God is Love, with its immediate consequence, that to be without love is the fatal incapacity for knowing God.  "Every one that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God" (4⁷); but, "He that loveth not knoweth not God: for God is Love" (4⁸).  Spiritual illumination, apart from the practice of love, is the vaunt of a self-deceiver (2⁹).  The assumption of a lofty, mystical piety, apart from dutiful conduct in the ordinary relations of life, is ruthlessly dealt with.  "If any man say, I love God" (we can almost hear the voice of the self-complacent "spiritual") "and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"  All these and numerous other passages (2^7,8,10,11, 3^{10b,11,14,17-19,23b}, 4^{11,12,17,18,19,21}, 5^1b) receive fresh point when read in view of the unbrotherly aloofness inherent in Gnosticism.  And, in general, it may be said that the uniquely reiterated emphasis which the Epistle lays upon brotherly love, the almost fierce tone in which the New Commandment is promulgated, is not adequately accounted for by any idiosyncrasy of the writer, on the supposition that he is writing in the abstract, but becomes vividly intelligible as the expression of a jealous wrath excited by actual tendencies that were powerfully assailing the life and fellowship of the Church.

    But if Gnosticism was distinguished by this unethical intellectualism, its deeper characteristic lay in its dualistic conception of existence.  Epiphanius tells us that Basilides began with the inquiry, po,qen to. kako,n (Haer. 24. 6); Clement, that he ended by "deifying the devil" (qeia,zwn me.n to.n dia,bolon, Strom. iv. 12, 87).⁹  This may be taken as a compendious account of Dualism.  It traces back into the eternal the schism of which we are conscious in the world of experience, and posits two independent and antagonistic principles of existence, from which, severally, come all the good and all the evil that exist.  It is true that in those Gnostic systems which were most strongly touched by Hellenic influence, the fundamental dualism was disguised by complicated successions of emanations and hierarchies of aeons and archons, bridging the gulf between absolute transcendent Deity and the material creation.  These cosmogonies were broadly analogous to the materialistic theory of evolution; except that, while modern evolution is from matter upward to "whatever gods there be," Gnostic evolution was from divinity downwards.  Invariably, however, the source and the seat of evil were found in matter, in the body, with its senses and appetites, and in its sensuous earthly environment; and invariably it was held inconceivable that the Divine Nature should have immediate contact with, or influence upon, the material side of existence.

    To such a view of the universe Christianity could be adjusted only by a Docetic interpretation of the Person of Christ.  A veritable incarnation was unthinkable.  The Divine Being could enter into no real union with a corporeal organism.  The Human Nature of Christ and the incidents of His earthly career were, more or less, an illusion.  It is with this Docetic subversion of the truth of the Incarnation that the "antichrists" are specially identified in the Epistle (2^22,23, 4³); and it is against it that St. John directs, with whole-souled force and fervour, his central thesis the complete personal identification of the historical Jesus with the Divine Being who is the "Word of Life," the "Son of God," the " Christ."¹⁰

    A further consequence of the dualistic interpretation of existence is that Sin, in the Christian meaning of Sin, disappears.  In its essence, it is no longer a moral opposition, in the human personality, to good; it is a physical principle inherent in all non-spiritual being.  Not the soul, but the flesh is its organ; and Redemption consists not in the renewal of the moral nature, but in its emancipation from the flesh.  And, again, it becomes apparent that no abstract possibility, but a very definite historical phenomenon, is contemplated in the repeated warning, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."  "If we say that we have not sinned, we make Him a liar, and His word is not in us "(1^8,10)

    With the nobler and more earnest spirits, the practical consequence of this irreconcilable dualism in human nature was the ascetic life.  Only by the mortification of the bodily members and the suppression of natural appetite could the deliverance of the soul from its life-long foe be achieved.  A rigid asceticism is ascribed to various Gnostic sects (Encratites, the followers of Saturninus, etc.), and has left distinct traces in the Epistle to the Colossians (2²¹) and in the Pastoral Epistles (1 Tim. 4³).  But the same principle readily suggested an opposite method of achieving the soul's deliverance from the yoke of the material.  Let the dualism of nature be boldly reduced to practice.  Let body and spirit be treated as separate entities; let each obey its own laws and act according to its own nature, without mutual interference.¹¹  The spiritual nature could not be involved in nor defiled by the deeds of the flesh; and the power of external things was most effectually overcome when they were not allowed to disturb in anywise the tranquillity of the inner man.  Let the flesh indulge every lust, but let the soul soar on the wings of lofty spiritual thought, no more hindered or harassed by the body and its appetites than is the skimming swallow by the barking dog that chases it.  It is evident, from various references in the later New Testament writings (Tit. 1^10,16, 2 Tim. 3^1-7, 2 Pet. 2^12-22, Jude^4,7-19, Rev. 2^14,15,20) that Gnosticism, from its earliest contact with Christianity began to infect the Church with this leaven of all abominableness.  And for the interpretation of our Epistle this Antinomian development of Gnosticism is of special importance.  While there are no direct allusions to it, as there are in Second Peter and Jude, it is ever present to the writer's mind when he is on the ground of ethics.  The moral indifferentism of the Gnostic sheds a vivid light upon such utterances as "sin is lawlessness" (3⁴), and its converse, "every unrighteousness is sin" (5¹⁷).  Especially is it the key, as we shall find, to that difficult passage 2²⁹-3¹⁰, the whole emphasis of which falls upon the "doing" (poiei/n), whether of righteousness or of sin.  Every one that "doeth righteousness" is begotten of God (2²⁹).  He that "doeth sin" "doeth also lawlessness" (3⁴).  He that "doeth righteousness" is righteous (3⁷).  He that "doeth sin" is of the Devil (3⁸).  Every one that is begotten of God "doeth not" sin (3⁷), and every one that "doeth not" righteousness is not of God.  Clearly, in all this trenchant reiteration of the same thought, St. John is not actuated merely by the consideration of the perpetual tendency in men to substitute profession, sentiment and vague aspiration for actual doing of the Will of God.  The writer expressly indicates, indeed, a more definite object of attack (3⁷); and the whole passage presupposes, as familiar to its readers, a doctrine of moral indifferentism, according to which the status of the "spiritual" man is not to be tested by the commonplace facts of moral conduct.

    The detailed examination of this and kindred passages must be deferred to a later stage.¹²  The purpose of the present chapter has been served if it has furnished a general view of the polemical scope of the Epistle, and if it has been shown that in it all the authentic features of Gnosticism, its false estimate of knowledge, its loveless and unbrotherly spirit, its Docetic Christology, its exaltation of the illuminated above moral obligations, are clearly reflected.  It is true that the whole presentation of truth in the Epistle widely overflows the limits of the controversial occasion.  On the one hand, the human tendencies that manifested themselves in Gnosticism are not of any one period or place.  The Gnostic spirit and temper are never dead.  On the other hand, St. John so little meets these with mere denunciation;¹³ he so constantly opposes to the pernicious plausibilities of error the simple, sublime, and satisfying facts and principles of the Christian Revelation; he so lifts every question at issue out of the dust of mere polemics into the lucid atmosphere of eternal truth, that his Epistle pursues its course through the ages, ever bringing to the human soul the vision and the inspiration of the divine life.  Nevertheless, for its interpretation, the polemical aim that pervades it must be recognised.  The great tests of Christianity, the enforcement of which constitutes its chief purpose, - the tests of practical Righteousness and Love, and of Belief in Jesus as God Incarnate, - are those which are of perennial validity and necessity; yet it was just by these that the wolf of Gnosticism could be most unmistakably revealed under its sheep's clothing, and they are presented in such fashion as to certify that this was the object immediately aimed at.

    One point more, though of minor importance, remains for consideration, namely, whether the polemic of the Epistle is directed throughout against the same persons, or whether, in its two branches, the Christological and the ethical, it has different objects of attack. The latter view has been widely held. It is admitted that it is Gnostic error that is controverted in the Christological passages, but not that it is Gnostic immorality that is aimed at in the ethical passages.  On the contrary, it is maintained that the moral laxity against which these are so vigorously directed is within the Church itself.  And on behalf of this view it is argued that, in the Epistle, no charge of teaching or practising moral indifferentism is brought against the "antichrists"; that, apart from the Epistle, there is no proof that Docetism in Asia Minor lay open to such a charge; and that the moral tendencies reflected in the Epistle are such as would naturally spring up in communities where Christianity had already passed from a first to a second generation and become, in some degree, traditional.¹⁴

    But, as has been already said, the tone in which the writer of the Epistle addresses his readers lends no support to this supposition.  He is tenderly solicitous for their safety amid the perils that beset them; but this solicitude nowhere passes into rebuke.  It is plainly suggested, too, that the same spirit of error (4⁶) which is assailing their faith is ready to make a no less deadly assault upon the moral integrity of their Christian life (3⁷ "let no man deceive you," not, "let no man deceive himself").  Of necessity, Dualism led, in practice, either to Asceticism or to the Emancipation of the Flesh; and, in the absence of any allusion in the Epistle to the former, it is a fair inference that, with Gnosticism in Asia Minor, the pendulum had swung, at the date of the Epistle, towards the latter.  This inference is confirmed by the historical data, scanty as these are.  The name associated with the Epistle by unvarying tradition as St. John's chief antagonist is that of Cerinthus.  It seems to be beyond doubt that the Apostle and the heresiarch confronted each other in Ephesus.¹⁵  Unfortunately, the accounts of Cerinthus and his teaching which have come down to us are fragmentary, confused, and, in some points, conflicting.  The residuum of reliable fact is that, according to his teaching, the World and even the Law were created not by the Supreme God, but by a far inferior power; and that he deduced from this a Docetic¹⁶ doctrine of the Incarnation.

    We do not know with equal certainty that he deduced from it the other natural consequence of practical Antinomianism.  But such testimony as we do possess is to that effect.  According to Caius¹⁷ of Rome, a disciple of Irenaeus, Cerinthus developed an elaborate eschatology, the central point of which was a millennium of bliss as sensual as that of the Mohammedan paradise.  This account is confirmed by Dionysius of Alexandria (c. 260), who says that, as Cerinthus was a voluptuary and wholly sensual, he conjectured that Christ's kingdom would consist in those things which he so eagerly desired, in the gratification of his sensual appetites, in eating and drinking and marrying.¹⁸  If such was his programme of the future, we can more readily believe, what is stated on good authority, that his position approximated closely to that of Carpocrates, in whom Gnostic Antinomianism reached its unblushing climax.  And although the only version of his opinions which we have is that given by his opponents, there seems to be no room for doubt as to their real character.  Thus, so far as they go, the historical data harmonise with the internal evidence of the Epistle itself in giving the impression that the different tendencies it combats are such as were naturally combined in one consistently developed Gnostic system, and that the object of its polemic is, throughout, one and the same.

    Note. - Regarding the False Teachers, and especially for the exhaustive account of all that is on record regarding Cerinthus, Brooke's Commentary (xxxviii-lii) ought to be consulted.  His view, differing to some extent from that which is presented in the foregoing chapter, is that the Epistle is directed against various forms of false teaching, the writer summing up the tendencies in them which seemed to him most dangerous and most characteristic of the times.  Amongst these, he is inclined to place the influence of the Jewish controversy.  Although admittedly this is far less prominent than in the Fourth Gospel, the insistence on the confession that Jesus is the Christ makes it probable that one of the dangers which beset the first readers of the Epistle was to accept the view that "Jesus was indeed a prophet, sent by God and endowed with higher powers, but not the Deliverer of the nation, and not the unique Son of God, with whom the writer and his fellow-Christians identified Him."  But it is to be observed that the truth insisted upon is not so much that Jesus is the Christ, as that He is the Christ "come in the flesh," and that this is a specific contradiction of the Docetic Christology rather than a reply to the Jewish assault.  The supposition that the polemic of the Epistle is partly anti-Judaic gains no support from the fact that Judaizing tenets are ascribed (with doubtful accuracy, Mr. Brooke admits) to Cerinthus - as that he insisted on circumcision and keeping of the Sabbath; for of the possible influence of such teaching among its readers the Epistle contains no suggestion.  Mr. Brooke discredits the attribution of immoral practices to Cerinthus by later writers, like Caius; but what the Epistle ascribes to the False Teachers is not so much gross immorality in practice, as an unethical intellectualism or pseudo-spiritualism which opened the way to this, since "doing righteousness" was for it no imperative requirement.  The truth is that, with the help chiefly of Irenaeus and Epiphanius, the situation in ivhich the Epistle was written has to be reconstructed from the Epistle itself.  The three great falsehoods it combats are moral indifferentism, lovelessness, and denial of the reality of the Incarnation.  These may well have been combined in one type of Gnostic teaching, which also may well have been that which is traditionally associated with the name of Cerinthus; and the natural conclusion is that the Epistle was elicited by some critical outbreak of such teaching in Asia Minor.