hate Me.' And then His words become sadder and pierce deeper, and
with a tone of wounded love and disappointed effort and almost
surprise at the world's requital to Him, He goes on to say, 'They
hate Me, because they hate the Father.'

So, then, here we have, in very pathetic and solemn words, Christ's
view of the relation of the world to Him and to God.

I. The first point that He signalises is the world's ignorance.

'These things they will do unto you,' and they will do them 'for My
name's sake'; they will do them 'because they know not Him that sent
Me.'

'The world,' in Christ's language, is the aggregate of godless men.
Or, to put it a little more sharply, our Lord, in this context, gives
in His full adhesion to that narrow view which divides those who have
come under the influence of His truth into two portions. There is no
mincing of the matter in the antithesis which Christ here draws; no
hesitation, as if there were a great central mass, too bad for a
blessing perhaps, but too good for a curse; which was neither black
nor white, but neutral grey. No! however it may be with the masses
beyond the reach of the dividing and revealing power of His truth,
the men that come into contact with Him, like a heap of metal filings
brought into contact with a magnet, mass themselves into two bunches,
the one those who yield to the attraction, and the other those who do
not. The one is 'My disciples,' and the other is 'the world.' And
now, says Jesus Christ, all that mass that stands apart from Him,
and, having looked upon Him with the superficial eye of those men
round about Him at that day, or of the men who hear of Him now, have