John's last sermon, rather than a single biblical verse
little children love one another
The exact compact saying has a patristic witness: Jerome reports that the aged John, carried to the assembly and scarcely able to speak, repeatedly urged his hearers to love one another. When they tired of the repetition, he answered that this was the Lord's command and was sufficient if observed. The inspected English witness is Joseph Cullen Ayer's A Source Book for Ancient Church History (1913), §3(b), which translates an extract from Jerome's Commentary on Galatians. Ayer explicitly cautions that this fourth-century account is late evidence for John's life. Jerome in Ayer.
The saying also condenses Johannine biblical language: John 13:34 commands mutual love, while 1 John 3:18 addresses 'little children' and calls for love in deed and truth. Chesterton makes the plural address do philosophical work: there must be several children, each capable of loving another. The transmitted saying establishes the currency of the words, but does not establish which book or retelling Chesterton knew. Ayer's volume, published five years after Orthodoxy (1908), is a convenient witness here, not a proposed source of influence.
Sources
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