Visible Goodness
Day 282 – 9 October
Copy the Head Line
“Beloved, do not imitate evil but imitate good. Whoever does good is from God; whoever does evil has not seen God.” (3 John 11, ESV)
A Penny Book from Belfast
Generations of schoolchildren learned to write by copying. Across the top of the page ran a line of faultless script, and beneath it lay empty ruled lines waiting for a small, uncertain hand. One of the men who put such books into the hands of the poor was Vere Foster. Born in Copenhagen in 1819, he served as a British diplomat in South America before the Irish Famine turned his life in another direction. He organised relief, crossed to New York in the steerage of an emigrant ship to see the conditions for himself, caught fever and spent months in hospital on arrival. Afterwards he gave himself to the education of Ireland’s poorest children.
In 1865 he published his Head Line Copy Books in Belfast. They sold for a penny, a million copies went into circulation in the first year, and within a few years they were in use in Ireland, Scotland, England and New York. Foster poured his fortune into schoolhouses and charities, and when he died in Belfast in 1900 he was living in a small attic room, with barely a dozen mourners at his funeral. His penny books had travelled far beyond the few who came to bury him.
The Line Just Written
The head line was the whole point of the page, and it carried a lesson of its own. A child working down the page can easily end up copying the line just written while the model at the top fades from view. Every wobble in that nearer line then gets copied too, and by the bottom of the page the writing may resemble the child’s own slips more than the script it set out to follow. The remedy is simple: look up.
John once wrote to a friend whose church had two lines on the same page, and his short letter amounts to that same advice.
Two Names in One Letter
The friend was Gaius, “the beloved Gaius, whom I love in truth” (3 John 1). In his congregation the loudest example belonged to a man named Diotrephes, “who likes to put himself first” (3 John 9). The Greek behind that phrase, philoprōteuōn (loving first place), appears nowhere else in the New Testament. Diotrephes spread malicious talk about John, refused to welcome travelling believers and stopped others from welcoming them as well (3 John 10). A few lines later John named a very different man: “Demetrius has received a good testimony from everyone, and from the truth itself” (3 John 12).
Between those two portraits sits today’s sentence. One line on the page was loud and close at hand; the other was simply good. John told his friend which one to copy.
The Word Behind “Imitate”
The verb he used is mimou (keep imitating), from mimeomai (to imitate), a word that grew from mimos (a mimic, an actor), the distant ancestor of our English “mime” and “mimic”. It stands in the middle voice, which in Greek often marks a person acting with their own interest bound up in the action, so the copying John asked for was meant to become Gaius’s own.
Then come the two clauses that explain why the head line matters so much. “Whoever does good is from God” renders ho agathopoiōn ek tou theou estin (the one doing good is out of God), and the little word ek (out of) speaks of origin. Goodness done in a human life is a family likeness, showing where that life comes from. The second clause says that the one doing evil ouch heōraken ton theon (has never seen God), and the verb heōraken (has seen) is a perfect tense, a seeing whose effect remains, from a verb Strong’s explains as to discern clearly. The failure lies entirely on the side of the eyes. God hides from no one; the person who keeps doing evil has simply never taken Him in.
John had used that same verb, in that same form, in the opening of his Gospel: “No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him” (John 1:18, KJV). The word behind “declared” is exēgēsato (He made Him known, He explained Him), the root of our “exegesis”. The head line has been written out in full, in flesh and blood, where everyone can see it. Peter reached for the copybook’s own vocabulary when he described it, telling suffering believers that Christ left “an example, so that you might follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21). The noun is hypogrammos (a writing-copy, the model a beginner traced), and no other New Testament writer uses it. Whoever keeps their eyes on that line has seen God in the sense John meant, and in time their goodness starts to carry the family hand.
Beloved Before the First Stroke
That family hand begins with family. John opened his sentence with agapēte (beloved), and the order matters: Gaius was loved before he copied a single letter. Paul wrote in the same spirit, “be imitators of God, as beloved children” (Ephesians 5:1). A small child will often copy a parent it adores without being told to, and imitation in Scripture works that way, flowing out of belonging and purchasing none of it. Nothing is missing from what God has given His children. As they practise what Jesus taught, the likeness written into humanity at creation (Genesis 1:26–27) comes back into view in ordinary days, a page filling up line by line.
When the Hand Wobbles
Every page has its blots, and some days the ink runs badly. A smudged line is no reason to tear the book apart. The model has stayed exactly where it was, at the top of the page, and the next line can start from it again. His goodness never shifts to match our wobbles, so the way back is always the same short distance: lift your eyes from your last line to His.
Friday’s Page
Before the week closes, ask yourself whose line you have been copying. The example closest to hand is often the loudest, and loud examples teach fast: the cynical colleague, the habit of talking people down, the reflex of keeping the newcomer at arm’s length. Then find a Demetrius, someone whose goodness everybody speaks of, and copy one specific thing they do.
Above all, spend five minutes today with a Gospel passage, looking at the head line itself, and then write one line of goodness beneath it with your own life. Welcome the person others are keeping out. Speak well of someone who is absent. Give the credit away. A line like that, copied from the right model, is how the goodness of God becomes visible on an ordinary Friday.
Declaration
My eyes go up to the model line this morning, before the pen moves. I belonged before I copied anything, so I copy freely and without fear of smudges. I refuse to take my lessons from whoever happens to shout nearest. I keep my gaze on the life that showed the world what goodness is, and I let my hand follow its strokes. Where my hand slips, I start the next stroke from the original and leave my last mistake behind. Whoever reads my page today, I want them to recognise the hand it was learned from.
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