Robert S. Candlish's exposition of 1 John was the ripe fruit of years of careful and loving study of the great themes of Johannine teaching.

His aim was not a detailed technical commentary after the fashion of much nineteenth-century German exegesis, but to set on display the heights and depths of the letter's theology: it can be studied aright exegetically, he insisted, only when it is studied devotionally. Preaching and exposition of a kind rarely attempted now.