The people to whom 1 John is addressed are presumably people who have accepted the saving love of God with gratitude, but who are still able to act without love to one another because in them, as in us, love has a beginning and a finite end. The great aim of our life is to make the beginning and the end of love get further and further apart in us, so that there is more and more room, more and more things we can love. In God love has no beginning and no end. As the great seventeenth-century poet John