LIBRARY OF CONGRESS,

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I UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

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DANIEL STEELE

THE

Gospel of the Comforter.

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BY

DANIEL STEELE, S. T. D.

Recent Professor of Systematic Theology in Boston University. Author of “Love Enthroned,” “Mile-Stone Papers,” “Antinomianism Revived,” “Commentaries on Leviticus, Numbers and Joshua,”

“ Half Hours with St. Paul,” “ Defence of Christian Per¬ fection,” and co-Author of “ People’s New Testa¬ ment Commentary,” and of “ Binney’s Theo¬ logical Compend Improved.”

BOSTON :

THE CHRISTIAN WITNESS COMPANY.

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To My Two Dutiful Christian Daughters,

Caroline Binney Steele and

Mary Grace Steele, and

TO ALL OTHER BELIEVERS IN CHRIST WHO ASPIRE TO A KNOWLEDGE

of the Most Vital Christian Doctrine, and

to a Realization of the Deepest Spiritual Experience, through the Abiding Comforter,

THIS VOLUME

IS PRAYERFULLY AND HOPEFULLY INSCRIBED.'

PREFACE.

This book is experimental and practical rather than theo¬ logical. But since every scriptural experience must be based on the truth apprehended by the intellect, there should be a clear and scientific statement of this truth. Hence the first few chapters of this volume on the various offices of the Holy Spirit are filled with arguments in proof of His personality and divinity, after the style of the systematic theologians. The scriptural proof texts will be found in the notes.

One of the favorable signs of the times is the increasing number of books on the Holy Spirit. Quite an extended examination of these recent volumes reveals in nearly all of them one obvious defect, the omission of the direct witness of the Spirit to the believer’s adoption into the family of God, and His agency in entire sanctification in this life. In guard¬ ing against these omissions, we ourselves may have omitted some important topics in a theme so vast as that which is the subject of this volume. If we have done so, we ask the for¬ bearance of the Christian public for our inadequate treatment of a theme which has occupied our thoughts during more than a quarter of a century. As we advanced the subject en¬ larged in our thought until we had transcended the limits of a single volume. For this reason a long chapter in eight sections on “ Assurance Through the Spirit” has been reluc¬ tantly omitted. It may be the Lord’s will that my life be so prolonged as to enable me to expand it into a future volume. If this be so, in the words of St. Peter, "I will endeavor that you may be able after my decease to have these things always in remembrance.”

P. S,

Milton, Mass., Nov. 8, 1897,

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CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I.	Names of the Holy Spirit ....			PAGE i
II.	The Holy Spirit and the Trinity			14
III.	Personality and Divinity of the Holy Spirit			20
IV.	The Holy Spirit the Executive of the Godhead			26
V.	The Work of the Holy Spirit before Pentecost			32
VI.	The Paraclete’s Conviction of Sin			39
VII.	The Paraclete’s Conviction of Righteousness			48
VIII.	The Paraclete’s Conviction of Judgment			52
IX.	The Pentecostal Attestation			60
X.	The Gain of the Paraclete ....			70
XI.	Praying to the Holy Spirit ....			82
£U.	The Law of the Spirit .....			88
XIII.	Miracles of the Holy Spirit			99
XIV.	The Spirit’s Work in Regeneration			104
XV.	Christ our Sanctification through the Spirit			118
XVI.	The Witness of the Spirit ....			133
XVII.	Christ’s Two Receptions and Two Bestowals of the Spirit,	*47
XVIII.	The Paraclete’s “ Ecce • Homo ” in the Believer			160
XIX.	The Holy Spirit and Conscience			164
XX.	The Unity of the Spirit ....			174
XXI.	Enlargement of Heart by the Spirit			184
XXII.	Knowing the Spirit .			190
XXIII.	The Freedom of the Holy Spirit			202
XXIV.	The Testings of the Holy Spirit .			211
XXV.	The Holy Spirit and Singing			216
XXVI.	Preaching with Demonstration of the Spirit			224
XXVII.	Walking in the Comfort of the Holy Spirit .			255
XXVIII.	Spiritual Babes and Spiritual Men			265
XXIX.	The Spirit’s Presidency in the Church			270
XXX.	Dishonoring the Holy Spirit			276
XXXI.	The Fulness of the Spirit ....			294
XXXII.	The Spirit an Unclaimed Deposit			299
XXXIII.	The Spirit as Rivers of Living Water .			3°4
XXXIV.	The Extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit .			308
XXXV.	Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit			318
XXXVI.	The Holy Spirit the Conservator of Orthodoxy			325
	Appendix . . .....			349

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The Father’s Promise of the Spirit.

I will pour out my Spirit unto you. Proverbs i. 23.

I will pour out my Spirit upon thy seed. Isaiah xliv. 3. I will put my Spirit within you. Ezekiel xxxvi. 27.

I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh. Joel ii. 28.

The Son’s Promise of the Spirit.

How much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him. Luke xi. 13. (This has been called the dawn of Pentecost.)

I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Com¬ forter, that he may abide with you forever ; even the Spirit of truth. John xiv. 16.

The Comforter , which is the Holy Ghost ', whom the Father will send in my name. John xiv. 26.

When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father , even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father , he shall testify of me. John xv. 26.

It is expedient for you that * I go away : for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you ; but if I depart, I will send him unto you. John xvi. 7.

When he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth : whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak. He shall glorify me : for he shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you. John xvi. 13, 14.

Behold, I send the promise of my Father upon you. Luke xxiv. 49.

Wait for the promise of the Father , which ye have heard of me. Acts i. 4.

But ye shall receive power after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you. Acts i. 8.

Theology without the Holy Spirit is not only a cold stone , it is a deadly poison . — Prof. Beck of Tubingen.

The place given to the Holy Spirit in the heart of the most decided Christians is altogether out of proportion to that which it occupies in the Word of God. — Bishop Ryle.

The Father and His unmerited grace , the Son and His ex¬ piatory sacrifice , have been much more studied in our day than the Holy Spirit , His person, His work, and all that new world which He creates in the heart. — Adolph Monod.

Man is a vessel destined to receive God, a vessel which must be enlarged in proportion as it is filled, and filled in proportion as it is enlarged. — Godet. .

The Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost descended into the temple of His apostles, which He had prepared for Himself, as a shower of sanctification and a perpetual Comforter. — Augustine.

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

CHAPTER I.

NAMES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

HE first name that is found in the Bible is Ruach

1 Elohim, the Spirit of God. He moved upon the face of the waters. The word spirit literally sig¬ nifies breath. All nations express things immaterial by the use of the most subtile material representatives. The best symbol for the invisible, immaterial thinking agent in man is the wind or breath, that kind of matter which is the thinnest and has least of the grosser ele¬ ments. Says Martin Luther : “ They who desire to speak of God without these material envelopes strive to scald heaven without ladders. For it is necessary, when God reveals Himself to us that He should do this through some veil or kind of wrapper, and say, ‘ Lo, under this involucrum , or cover, you certainly grasp me.’” The Old Testament form of statement is not that God is spirit, but rather that he has the Spirit and sends Him forth out of Himself.

This may have suggested to the thoughtful Hebrew that the Spirit is God and is a personality distinct from Him from whom He proceeds.

i

2

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

The only other Old Testament designation is the Holy Spirit. This occurs only in Ps. li. 1 1 and Isa. lxiii. io, ii. In the New it is very common. The adjective holy cannot be distinctive of the quality of purity which is not found in equal degree in the Father and the Son. Both are holy. Hence, as it is not de¬ scriptive of an attribute peculiar to the Spirit, we infer that it points to the peculiar office of the Spirit, in the redemptive scheme, to make men holy. The Holy Spirit, then, is the scriptural term for the Sanc- tifier , a term not found in the Scriptures as a designa¬ tion of the Spirit. Holy Spirit is a name in English preferable to Holy Ghost, for the reason that words like men flourish and decay. Ghost and ghostly were once dignified words, as “ ghostly adviser ” for spiritual adviser. But these words have become degraded so that it would sound strange to us and repulsive to hear the words “ the Ghost of God.” Hence we commend the American revisers for substituting uniformly Holy Spirit for Holy Ghost.

When the time came for Christ to depart He intro¬ duced a new name to designate the Spirit whom He would send to continue His work — the Paraclete , a term used only four times in the four Gospels, and all of them in the consolatory address in John xiv.-xvi. and trans¬ lated “ Comforter,” strengthener, from the Latin con- fortare , to strengthen. In I John ii. i it is translated “ advocate ” and is descriptive of Christ, our intercessor in heaven. Paraclete is a Greek word signifying either, passively, the near called, as an assistant, monitor, teacher and guide ; or, actively, the near caller, calling

NAMES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

3

the believer near to God, or giving access to Him by inspiring confidence and strength. He is also called the Spirit of truth or reality, because He is the inspirer of revealed truth, which He makes blessedly real to the believer in Christ.

Twice He is styled the Spirit of grace, since He is the dispenser of the divine favor to all men, either by conviction of sin in order to bless them by turning them away from their iniquities, or by imparting to believers spiritual life, witnessing to their adoption and perfect¬ ing their holiness.

He is called also the Spirit of supplication because He teaches us how to pray and for what to pray ; the Spirit of revelation because He reveals Christ to the eye of faith ; the Spirit of wisdom because He imparts wis¬ dom ; the Spirit of adoption because He certifies the believer’s sonship ; and the Spirit of Christ because He was sent by the Father through the mediation of the Son. He is called the Spirit of God because He is one with God in His nature. This leads us to the scriptu¬ ral proofs that the Holy Spirit is consubstantial with God and is a person. The two doctrines of the per¬ sonality and the divinity of the Spirit go together. The identity of God and the Spirit of God runs through the Holy Scriptures. Whoever the Spirit is, there is no distinction between Him and God, just as there is no distinction between the man and the spirit of the man (I Cor. ii. 1 1).

In the description of the guilt incurred by an apostate from Christ to Judaism is found another phrase descrip¬ tive of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of grace (Heb. x.

4

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

29). If this is not the irremissible sin, it is sin at its climax. The Son of God is trampled down with ruth¬ less scorn and hatred, His “ precious blood ” is counted as that of either an ordinary man or that of a guilty criminal. Then the description reaches the summit of wickedness, the sin of all sins, the irremissible sin — “ and insulted the Spirit of grace.” Most modern exegetes say that the Spirit is thus called because He is the gift of grace. But by referring to Zechariah xii. 10 we find the expression “Spirit of grace and supplication,” evi¬ dently implying that the Spirit is “ the source of grace ” and the inspirer of all true prayer (Delitzsch). He is the source of grace not only in His own person, but He is the channel through which the love of the Father and the grace of His Son are poured upon penitent believers. The importance of the Spirit’s office in human salvation cannot be overestimated. The Father’s love and the Son’s self-sacrifice in the scheme of redemption are ineffectual without the Spirit’s personal agency in applying the provisions of salvation. He is the appointed and indispensable almoner of the divine bounty and messenger of the King’s pardon. If a city has a bureau of charities, its poor who proudly refuse its help and rely on the general benevolence of the city government, and starve because of their folly, are no more unreasonable than are those who admit that they are sinners, but are trusting in the fatherhood of God for forgiveness, ignoring His bureau of pardon, through the mediation of His Son, as administered by His accred¬ ited commissioner, the Spirit of grace. Many Chris¬ tians who are almost destitute of spiritual strength

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feith-^AtvBrapnaB^.jyliWft Haihas.iftpkn giYPlTi P<i lifei. „-„iw infill hwri rMp » fl}gflf.sfiRlpd|IJtbfiIJSpiwtj (pfjytrutl^,,lllI<^WhatuJ^ tr u th ? ”, ,, Jesj^p i Ch^t ^cUned ,tp, ansyfey, , Bias's , qflPSh tion, not because^t^jisi^^p^filterma"t«Khi#ffiQVttijte define, but because the truth, -lpiostniftetfdpd, Jpyi.the ..splf-j ish Roman procurator had a moral eiqfnerjftijwhipht hp had no capacity to receive. Christ could makp^bhfifl eyes see, but He could not make a blind soul perceive while persisting in a course of sin. Moral truth can be apprehended only by an active moral sense in sympa¬ thy with it. To awaken this sense in dead souls was one part of the mission of Christ. The other part was to reveal the truth. “ To this end was I born, that I should bear witness unto the truth.” All saving truth is centred in His person. “I am the truth; ” not stract, but concrete, in the form of facts adapted,^ man’s faculties, or truths cast in a human mould. Tr,pth is conformity to fact or reality. Eternal happinp$£-7js in building on the granite of reality and laying eypry hewn stone by the plumb line of truth. There c^tl ,bp no other destiny for a character thus constructed, 7/ Efilt sin is a lie. The motive to the first human sip a lie. “Thou shalt not surely die.” All the wops},qf the human generations and eternities are serpents ppil^dipp in that delusion. Yet eternal well-being is^

Christ for every one of the serpent-deceived, fiaep i^h.Q will receive Him by faith. For spiritual realities address our physical senses, but our faith, *QnJy^, The

6

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

gheat danger lies in the pleasing delusions of sin and cftfr proneness to embrace them in preference to sober truth. I do not compliment my race nor do I misrep¬ resent them when I say in the words of the great Amer¬ ican showman, “ Men love humbug and sham.” They delight in being beguiled and duped. This strange in¬ fatuation for what is false is what gives Satan his chief p+6wer for doing harm. For no truly wise man wants tb foster illusions. They end in pain, and if persisted Iri they lead to eternal sorrow. No sane man ever Chose naked evil or pain as an ultimate end. He al¬ ways chooses what seems to him at the time a good, a means of happiness. The mind has the power to in¬ vest the chosen object with all the colors, of the rain¬ bow, though it be as black as midnight. The drunkard sees happiness in the cup where the serpent lies con¬ cealed. He could see the serpent if he wished. The worldling sees supreme good in millions of money, be- itig wilfully blind to the day just ahead when he would ^?Ve it all for “an inch of time” in which to prepare for eternity.

To dispel these illusions and break their power to d^coy men to eternal ruin the Son of God came into the world. He revealed the real good, which is His Father’s approval. His love is heaven. He disclosed the infallible standard by which to estimate things. Biit Jesus Christ, who is the incarnation of truth, has Withdrawn His visible presence from our world. How cUn He now help us to divest ourselves of delusions de¬ structive to our eternal blessedness? He has left a successor whose office it is to testify of Christ and to

NAMES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

7

reveal Him and His standard of values to us. He takes of the things of Christ and shows them unto us. With¬ out His agency the absent Christ would be forgotten and His power to sway each successive generation keep¬ ing abreast of the ages would have been entirely lost. Even the memory of Him would have perished, as President Warren intimates in his hymn to the Holy Spirit :

“ I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost,

I love to worship Thee ;

My risen Lord for aye were lost But for Thy company.”

It is His office in respect to the truth revealed by Christ to make it real and vivid to men bewildered and seduced by falsehoods. Sinful pleasures sway them be¬ cause they are near and present. The Holy Spirit brings eternal verities near and makes them outweigh the vanities of this life. He supplies a new measuring rod, a sense of eternity, and convicts the soul of folly in neglecting its happiness millions of ages hence. He lifts every man at some point in probation to a mount of vision above the mirage, where, as Longfellow says,

‘ 4 Uplifted the land floats vague in the ether ;

Ships and the shadows of ships hang in the motionless air.”

In this golden hour the disenchanted soul freed from all illusions gets a view of realities unfolded by the Spirit of truth. Happy indeed is he if from that view his future life is conformed to those realities. Unspeak¬ ably wretched will he be if he comes down from this mount of vision unchanged in moral purpose, and sinks into the shadowy illusions of sin for the rest of his life

8

THE' &KWELM OF HI HIE O<?)MH0RTER.

to pursue phantom pleasures and'to '^irisp bubblies1 smitten by the arrow of death, a forgotten reality.’ « The most precious hour in a sinner’s life is this hour o’f dor-1- rect spiritual vision commonly spoken of as conviction of sin. Then it is that the Spirit of truth becomes the reprover by holding up to the soul two pictures, the dark reality of what it is,, and the bright possibility of what it still may be by being “ not disobedient to the heavenly vision.” But if the soul-refuses to obey and per¬ sists in this refusal till disobedience hardens into fixed¬ ness of character, there will sooner or later be another vision which will awaken remorse ; by the dark reality of what is and hereafter must forever be will ever hang the splendid ideal of what it might have been , the most doleful words in the English language. Again, the designation Spirit of truth might have been translated Spirit of reality. He is thus called by Jesus because He works in human souls only through the instrumentality of truth. He regenerates only through Christian truth. Men are begotten children of God through the word of God. They are sanctified through the truth. The truth is the instrument; the Spirit is the efficient worker. The stability of the new life consists in having the “ loins girt about with truth.” Victory in warfare is through a vigorous wielding of “ the sword of the Spirit, the word of God.” When the Spirit con¬ victs of sin, He takes such religious truth as He finds in the mind and makes it vivid and real. Conviction is the distinct realization of the person’s lack of conformity to the requirement of the truth. There is no proof that the Holy Spirit .ever acts immediately upon the soul

NAMES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

9

without the medium of some truth lodged in the intel¬ lect, affording light for the activity of the will. Suc¬ cessful preaching is by manifestation of the truth ac¬ companied by the demonstration of the Spirit. The failure of many preachers arises from their dependence solely on the saving efficacy of the truth without the Spirit’s office to make it real. There is a legend that the eloquent head of a monastery died, and that while his body was lying in state before burial one of Satan’s imps took possession of the corpse, raised it to seeming life, and preached an orthodox sermon through the lips of the dead abbot. The evil spirit returned to pandemonium and boasted of his exploit. When asked by Satan whether he did not run the risk of con¬ verting some soul by his orthodox sermon, he replied :

“ Sire, do you not well know that orthodoxy without the unction of the Spirit never saves, but always damns? ” John Wesley asserts that an impenitent man may be as orthodox as the devil, who believes and trembles, but is not improved in character by his faith and his fear.

Where the truth, the Spirit’s instrument, is only par¬ tially presented, His work is defective, as in the case of souls moved to a religious life by singing joyful hymns, as “ Sweet By and By,” and by a suppression of the * awakening truths of original depravity and the deserts of actual sin, the holiness of the law and the terrors of the Lord. Such fragmentary views of God’s character as exhibit only His fatherhood, concealing His unbend¬ ing justice in upholding the majesty of law in the pun¬ ishment of sin, limit the Spirit to the production of a

IO

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

short-lived verdure on the stony ground. Nevertheless, the Spirit may find in some Pagans and Mohammedans truths of natural religion sufficient to inspire them with the fear of God and to make them His servants, but He cannot assure them of pardon and sonship to God till they have heard of Jesus Christ and have received Him by an obedient faith both as Saviour and Lord (John i. 12). Such will be saved through Christ though they know Him not, but they can have no assurance of salva¬ tion till they have believed in Him. The Spirit gives real¬ ity to the Old Testament, the prophetic record, and to the New Testament, the historic record of Christ’s life. He impresses upon us the fact that Jesus is living and present — that He is what He was. His birth, His ser¬ mon on the mount, His parables, His miracles, His fare¬ well discourse, His high-priestly prayer, His words on the cross, to Spirit-illumined souls do not belong to a distant antiquity, but are perpetually as fresh as the morning paper. The Spirit telegraphs the Gospels across the chasm of centuries and millenniums as recent news from heaven. “ What are you so greedily read¬ ing, grandpa? ” said a child to a Bible-studying saint of four score years intently reading the word of God. “ News,” was the reply. To the spiritual mind Christ is present giving life to His words spoken eighteen hun¬ dred years ago. Thus He verifies His own promise, “ Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” Thus He makes His words spirit and life. Statesmen are present in the governments which they have founded. Thus Washington is present in the American Constitution, and Bonaparte in the Code

NAMES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. I i

Napoleon. Authors are present in succeeding ages in their books. Thus Homer and Plato are marching down the generations. But the presence of Christ through the Comforter is entirely different. It is a real spiritual and personal presence, invisible to all, but felt by the truly regenerate. “ The Paraclete takes of the things of Christ and shows them to us. He shall testify of me.* He shall glorify me.” It is said that the per¬ sonal presence of Napoleon on the field of battle was equal to a re-enforcement of ten thousand men. But he could not be present in every battle of the French down the ages, for the allied nations caged him up in St. Helena, and death soon imprisoned him in the tomb. But Jesus Christ is present' to every tempted believer and in every Waterloo of His church, not as a hallowed and inspiring memory, but .a veritable personality, man¬ ifesting Himself to the loving heart. This is true be¬ cause the Comforter is emphatically the Spirit of Christ. To fail to realize this truth is not to have heard whether there be any Holy Ghost. We are to be on our guard against commingling the risen Son of God with the Spirit. They are distinct personalities while one in substance. The Spirit is the organ through which the Son now communicates with the believer and with the world. He is the revealer by whose activity in human hearts redemptive truth is transformed into knowledge in such a manner that faith becomes knowledge (Eph. iv. 13). The Holy Spirit is the channel of reality. He gives eyesight to the spiritually blind. He gives visi¬ bility, substance, color and weight to truths which are as airy nothings to the sense-imprisoned soul. Vague,

* See Appendix, Note A.

2

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

shadowy and unreal are spiritual truths to the carnal heart. The inward vision, the spirit of revelation (Eph. i. 17) is wanting. “ Whom the- world receiveth not, be¬ cause it seeth him not, neither knoweth him.” Granite realities indeed are gospel truths to him who has re¬ ceived the Comforter. The sordid earth and the shin¬ ing orbs are soap bubbles in comparison. The things that are seen are temporal and evanescent, and the things' that are not seen are changeless and eternal. Thus the Holy Spirit leads us up to that mount of vis¬ ion where we see things with God’s eyes, where the world’s reals become the believer’s unreals, and the things unreal to blind unbelief become real to open- eyed faith. The feet which press this mount will not be lured by mammon from ministries to the Master.

“As by the light of opening day The stars are all concealed,

So earthly glories fade away When Jesus is revealed.”

The truly spiritual man, actuated by a motive power incomprehensible to the natural man, must appear vis¬ ionary and fanatical. He is like a train moving up a steep grade with no locomotive ; a ship moving against wind and waves with neither sail nor oar nor engine ; or a magnet uniformly pointing to the pole swayed by a power too subtle for our coarse senses to grasp. Yet it is a very shallow philosophy which* rejects the Para¬ clete and His work in the believing soul because the divine worker is invisible, and at the same time assents to the demonstration of Sir Isaac Newton that all the heavenly bodies are impelled by an invisible force called gravitation, and to the masterly argument of the great-

NAMES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

13

est American mathematician, Prof. Benjamin Pierce of Harvard College, that all physical force originates in spirit. The last chapter of his “ Mechanics ” demon¬ strates the spiritual origin of force. How glaring the inconsistency of those who accept this conclusion of a spiritualistic philosophy in the realm of physics and of metaphysics, and in the realm of theology reject the revelation of a spiritual agent morally transforming be¬ lieving souls because of His invisibility !

Such people to be consistent ought to abstain from riding in an electric car, reading by an incandescent light, and communicating by an electro-magnetic tele¬ graph or telephone because the imponderable agent is invisible and mysterious.

In attempting to awaken and call forth from the tomb dead souls, the great purpose of gospel preaching, it is a fatal mistake to neglect the Spirit of reality. The truth, however clearly unfolded and eloquently applied, will be no substitute for this grand factor in human sal¬ vation. Here again is the failure of much Sunday- school teaching and preaching which is evangelical in doctrine. It is unevangelical in spirit because it does not depend on the Spirit of truth to give vividness and reality to the gospel. The picture is thrown upon the canvas, but in the absence of the eye-opener who purges the film from blind eyes there is no vision. The day of judgment, heaven and hell are fables to the natural man till made solid realities by the Holy Ghost. Rhetoric is no substitute. Pyrotechnics are not power. They may fill the pews with admirers ; they will never crowd the altar with penitents.

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

CHAPTER II.

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE TRINITY.

HE doctrine of the personality and divinity of the

1 Holy Spirit is intimately connected with the most mysterious yet most practical fact of revelation — the fundamental doctrine of the Trinity of God. It is mysterious because it is above reason, not contrary to it, and lies wholly in the realm of faith. It is practical because it is inseparably involved in all true Christian worship and is the mainspring of all effective evangel¬ ism. It is fundamental because its removal from the Christian system subverts every distinctive doctrine. It protects all such truths, especially the exceeding sinfulness of sin and the efficacy of the atonement. Unitarians have been accustomed to say that philoso¬ phy sustains their denial of the Trinity. This is a great mistake. The latest utterance of philosophic theism is that the Unitarian conception of Deity is utterly inade¬ quate to preserve His personality and moral attributes from degenerating into naturalism and pantheism, and that the Trinitarian conception is the only effectual safe¬ guard against such an outcome and the only rock on which reason can securely rest.

I will briefly show you the logic of this movement of modern philosophy towards Trinitarianism. The ad¬ vance movement of thought in this century, far from

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE TRINITY.

5

expelling the Trinity from its place in the mind of Christendom, has caused it to strike deeper root and grow with fresh vigor. This is the argument in a nut¬ shell : Love, the basis of all God’s moral attributes, can¬ not exist in that simplicity, that abstract self identity of the divine nature which is the essence of the Unitarian conception. Why? If God existed from eternity be¬ fore He created a person on whom His love could pour itself, He was from eternity having the active, diffusive principle of love in His bosom, the very substance and substratum of His being, with no object to love. This is unthinkable ! Eternal love without a personal ob¬ ject ! Hence philosophy must either deny the existence of love in God, together with all its manifestations in the forms of holiness, justice, wisdom and truth, or sup¬ ply such an object from eternity. This first alternative divests God of all His moral attributes and takes us more than half way to atheism. The first verse of St. John’s Gospel supplies an object of the Father’s love before His first creative act : “ In the beginning [from eternity] was [not was created] the Logos, and the Logos was with God [face to face is the idea in the Greek], and the Logos was God.” This Logos became flesh, and while tabernacling in humanity had a memory which went back beyond the creation of the universe to “the glory which he had with the Father before the world was.” In these words of unsurpassed majesty, which no creature ever dared to use, we have an enlarge¬ ment and enrichment of the concept of Deity in striking contrast with what Phillips Brooks called “the meagre God of Unitarianism,” a simple, abstract unity, a mere

1$ 7 THE i GOSPEL . QE THE i COMFORTER.

paujse.or primed farce.) Hence ,thq tnecdssit$h ofhatl Hast p, dualism .af, persons, in the (divine, nature to< sbsta)in -the completeness.,, of ■: the.,idiv,ine(l life and character. /The Hew. Testament, reveals., suah a duali&mi land - -atidslithe Thyd.FersQmas essential, to the perfection lofifulborfoed divinity! i Hence we, see that the Trinity ■ is <,noti aido^ trii|ie. i whieh ,basi been arbitrarily imposed (U<po<i> • faith hyM^tjetnal. auithanity,. overriding i r.ep$.on,. hut -iMifc one which seconds .with reason^! after, ki is,, revealed, ahd> lex + plains and .sup ports Christian experience^ I Evedyi evan-t geJijcal believer i ,w,ho, .through faith! itl i Christ obyi: dhe ihuminaticn. ,and t impulse .of I the, , Holly Spirit! >hd$n had conscious access , to, the, Father resulting. ,in Totfgivehiesg and cqmmun.ionnhas tested) the* dbctriite.Lof >the Tri-fiitiy ar^dr found ,4t true. Ilts, deniersnjmustn reckon with! thb beattphiWsophy representing the, demands- of.<thbihighi est intehigience;; then (they musUcttnVlnce of-thein^stuL pendaus.4elusion thies millions! whew have I through faith in .they diyinq Christ experienced ithpn wltnpss. * of nthel Spiral attesting theimadoption. and assuring >theriil of-fOr-l g^yeniess. . r .But I every j growing . Christian . .verijfres *» the- trnthr.pf, the Trinity ever.yi day iojf I his' life. He comes! to nthe., Father! through ithe > mediation J of I the«<S.c}nl and' receives, the. Hioly, Spirit las , the iComfotiter,*heHpdry guide!! light* , life, , andiwellspring , of joy, .just as! evfeny astnon<<b^ m#r proves the (truth, lof, the CoperiHicnn.itheoryi of the solar. ,systqm by tusimg, it and .arriving! at> results exjperT mentally verified by the use of his telescope, .‘ >£ Through hjm j ;[, Christ], we i,[Je)WS,(and .Gentiles],, both have )«our» access, m one Spirit unto the Father! ”.(EphmL r8).,w... . . .The ,be^fc .statement,. of itjie , -.Scriptures ; about* God is'

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE TRINITY.

1/

that He is one in nature with a threefoldness which we call personality, that He has a Son who is not a crea¬ ture, whose existence is grounded not in the divine will, as our existence is, but His being is grounded in the divine nature so that He has all the attributes of God. His sonship dates not from His human birth but from eternity, being the I AM before Abraham was born (John viii. 58, Revised Version, margin). The Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, having their na¬ ture; the Father is self-existent. The Son’s being is grounded in the Father, and the Spirit’s existence rests on the Father and the Son from whom He proceeds. The Trinity, dimly disclosed in the Old Testament, is clearly revealed in the New Testament after Pentecost, when the Third Person came with power as the suc¬ cessor of the Son in the administration of the kingdom of God on the earth. The succession, which is indi¬ cated by the words Father, Son and Holy Ghost, is a philosophical progress and culmination. God reveals Himlselffto -all men in His Son ; He communicates Him¬ self *|n < the -Holy! -Spirit to all who believe in the Son; H& r^vbaLs Hirtifeelff (to lidan’fc intellect that through it He mahk -transform the'lhdart aAd make'it a partaker of the- divine I natu re!, nbt'divine'as* Hb” iS ‘ dpJinb, bid holy a&lHd fis: hoiliy.n Thisl (succession alfe<b intim&tds the OPdbf of the- dispensations "unfolded on ' the ,f&atth?( '‘We* haYfef every i reason 1 -to (believe ‘that' ‘the ' dispbnsatibA of1 ‘the Spirit- jsuthe lafc-t and .rriofet. ^bHoti^ bralrof C’h’ristlihMtj/ on thfe‘4arth,nth^t>ltihe (secant! (coming1 ‘taf 'Christ- Will ‘be to judge. ibh«l world and wind* A p* human* history 'On'* fthte planet^ and <not -to* 'inauguralte'thd dispensation of CHrlstfS

8

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

bodily presence again with its limitations to one place at the same time. We do not believe that the order of progress is to be reversed after reaching its climax in the dispensation of the Paraclete, who is to abide with believers forever. It is certain that faith in an invisible personality is a higher exercise and more blessed than faith in a visible manifestation. This is hinted at by the risen Christ to Thomas, “ Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed : blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.” We are living in the best era for spiritual development which this world will ever see — the era of Pentecost. Let us make the best pos¬ sible use of it and profit by its wonderful privileges, the indwelling Comforter bringing the Father and the Son to abide in us forever. Just note the gradation of honor in respect to the dwelling of God among men : ist. One nation was specially honored when Jehovah made His dwelling in the midst of the camp and the pillar of cloud and of fire betokened the presence of the King of kings and the Lord of lords. 2d. God selects one human body and soul for His abode ; for in Jesus dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. And, lastly, we reach the climax, the whole Trinity dwelling in every true believer who evinces perfect love by unhesi¬ tating obedience. This eclipses all the millennial glo¬ ries this side of the glassy sea, the new heaven and new earth. Hence the reasonableness of our conclusion that the descent of the Holy Ghost is the completion of Christian theology, and His indwelling in the believer is the crowning honor and blessedness. “ In the person of Christ,” says Joseph Parker, “truth was outward,

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE TRINITY. 1 9

visible and most beautiful ; in the person of the Holy Spirit truth is inward, spiritual, all-transfiguring. By the very necessity of the case the bodily Christ could be but a passing figure, but by a gracious mystery He caused Himself to be succeeded by an eternal Presence, •even the Spirit of truth, which abideth forever.’ *

See Appendix, Note B.

20

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

CHAPTER III.

THE PERSONALITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

IT may be impossible to give an exhaustive and ac¬ curate definition of personality as applied to the distinctions in the Godhead. The term “ person," borrowed from the stage as its Latin derivation shows, per and sonare , to sound through, or to speak through a mask, hence a character in a play, may not be the best word to denote these distinctions. Be that as it may, the Christian world has accepted it, and it is now impossible for any one man to displace it by a better word. As applied to a human being, it implies that the body is not the real man, but the spirit which acts through the material organism. Thus we infer that spirituality is one element of personality, which implies self-consciousness, intelligence, desire, moral discrimi¬ nation, identity and freedom of will. To these attri¬ butes of personality we may add power, or causality, which cannot originate in matter. The free agent in a limited sphere is a first cause. He causes his own moral acts. He is the sole creator of character.

Now if we examine the Holy Scriptures we will find that these marks of personality are all applied to the Holy Spirit. This is not clearly seen in the Old Testa¬ ment, though when it is read in the light of the New it is manifestly there also. We know that there are

THE* PERSONALITY* OF* ' THE* '*HOLY * SPIRIT. f2T

,pieit$Qni(icaticins.of dualities* in iH&biiew'pdetry'hAd'th&t fWisd.QR} isildescribield figuratively* hsl speaking add ,actL ^ng\as ,sl person, dwelling ^ith* »Crod/ ifrbhn' » e^ertiit^,1 abxi giving counsel tot Hin^rin.loreafttabai* But in thc-Gbspels and, J£pi$ltleis wei have Ino poebila flights "©>f th’d iMagina1 tiq>nj j but . thexijnost simple- prose. > stiatembAt' • ofi'faetfe and truths* I “(There.is nb triaob.bf ipoetry in thfeUait,ldfdj course. of Jesusi.iiYthq.eole.mh and* tefiderihbur' between the rBasch&l .supper* and the! agony in * tHe <-gaddeh,' whed H*e nought I • fid prepare* t^rlis« disciples «lfbi? '-the • sddneiss^ loneliness*,, dqspqin .and . fepriiwhkhl they -Would expert enco in a (few hoiirs..^. Then.. He used ho«- dark?1 parables*,1 no.^agua generalizations,. •uO'dblefulldle^iesr'- He>f3pbke plainly and definitely of anothdr* Comforted to -takd His place, /doc thei same .Work that He* had doWe in-deathm^ and ..guyings*, and. \ that s He • wbbld stay forever:^1 * Hte wfuildubei^ presenoe/J a .person -whd* th'dUgh’jinvrsittte1 WQuldvbe. really. (nearer itto thenttMif He 1 had* ‘beteh/tte-’ cause. Hetwjoudd (be jin* them,. ntore-than cOrhpensatifig* for tdkfcwjthdraWal tofi Hid bodily 'form. Nef$ >th‘etJpeK-> sonal pronouns relating. do, the* !M©ly>Spirit m the^'fol-1 lowingcbrief. promise) d«! I will * pray) the1 'Fatherland ^hb1 shall * give you. anbtheri I Paraclete, * that 1 he ' majM

abidjei with yoru dorever^x even the-Sipiribof thitH ;.whomt the. .Rather will eend in my nanhe.ywhdmdthe 'worldeaiW- n©t, receive,* because it Jmbwtth him-rtQtt *but»-}M -kiiow him i for he diweileth .with you . * He shall teach you hi! ■ t hi n g-s. i Count * the .times the masfcbline* personal pro1 * noun is tiBeds hetand himb.^We are 'aWare th&ti flrteumAi' spirit, -k , grammatically ney ter, but fr'ha9',ftdnmefe!‘ur neuter signification when * applied tb^thb •Gomforter1

22

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

than it has when applied to man (I Cor. ii. n) and to God the Father (John iv. 24). Hence the pronoun relating to the Holy Spirit should never be it or itself as in Rom. viii. 16, rightly changed to himself in the Revised Version. In the words “ He shall glorify me,” by no just law of interpretation can personality be denied of the first word while predicated of the last.

Says Dr. John Owen : “ It is impossible to prove the Father to be a Person, or the Son to be a Person, in any other way than we may prove the Holy Ghost to be so. For He to whom all personal properties, attri¬ butes, adjuncts and operations are ascribed, and to whom nothing is ascribed but what properly belongs to a per¬ son, He is a Person ; and so are we taught to believe Him to be. Thus we know the Father to be a Person, and the Son also. . . . There is no personal property belonging to the divine nature that is not equally as¬ cribed to the Holy Ghost.” “ The Holy Ghost spake ” (Acts i. 16); “ it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost” (Mark xiii. 11). The Paraclete speaks of Himself as having authority in the Church. “ The Holy Ghost said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them.” In their journey Paul and Silas “ were forbidden by the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia.” The Holy Ghost made elders at Ephesus, “ bishops to feed the church of God ” (Acts xx. 28). Such verbs as these describe His personal acts. He teaches, comforts, guides, sanc¬ tifies, testifies, glorifies, distributes gifts as He wills, makes intercession and is grieved. . “ If a wise and honest man should come and tell you that in a certain

THE PERSONALITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. 23

country where he has been there is an excellent gov¬ ernor who wisely discharges the duties of his office, who hears causes, discerns right, distributes justice, relieves the poor and comforts the distressed, would you not believe that he intended by this description a righteous, wise, diligent, intelligent person? Could you imagine him to mean that the sun or the wind, by {heir benign influences, rendered the country fruitful and temperate, and disposed the inhabitants to mutual kindness and benignity; and that the governor is a mere figure of speech? It is exactly thus in the case before us The Scriptures tell us that the Holy Spirit governs the Church, appoints overseers, discerns, com¬ forts, strengthens and disposes all things according to the counsel of His own will. Can any man credit this testimony and conceive otherwise of the Spirit than as a holy, wise, intelligent Person? Can such ex¬ pressions refer to quality, an effect or influence of the power of God, who doeth all these things figuratively ; that He has a will and tmderstanding figuratively, is sinned against figuratively, and so of all that is said of Him ?

“ It is true that some things peculiar to persons are sometimes ascribed to things ; as charity is said to hope, to believe, to bear ; the Scripture is said to see and foresee, to speak and to judge. The heavens and the earth are said to hear, and the fields to be joyful, and the trees to clap their hands. But these ascriptions are only occasional , and a plain description of the things themselves is given us in other places. But as to the Spirit of God, the constant uniform expressions con-

24

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

cerning Him are such as declare Him to be a Person , endowed with all personal properties.” *

Our final proof of the personality of the Spirit is derived from the requirement of faith, which is the only door through which God comes into the human soul. The stronger the faith the larger the capacity to receive the divine guest. Faith attains its highest vigor when it grasps a personal object and not an abstrac-* tion, the blesser and not the blessing. God in Christ awakens faith in a higher degree than the attempted conception of an infinite Being boundless and vague. Faith culminates in its strength where it addresses a personal Father revealed in a personal incarnate Son and claims the personal Paraclete. Grace then flows into the soul in largest streams, in Mississippi’s and Amazons “ of living water.” Hear the testimony of a professor in Cambridge University, England :f “If reference to personal experience may be permitted, I may indeed ‘ here set my seal.’ Never shall I forget the gain to conscious faith and peace which came to my soul not long after a first decisive and appro¬ priating view of the crucified Lord as the sinner’s sacrifice of peace, from a more intelligent and con¬ scious hold upon the living and most gracious per¬ sonality of that Holy Spirit through whose mercy the soul had got that blessed view. It was a new develop¬ ment of insight into the love of God. It was a new contact as it were with the inner and eternal movements of redeeming goodness and power, a new discovery in divine resources. At a ‘ time of finding,’ gratitude

* Dr. John Owen, “ On the Spirit,” Chapter III.

t H. C. G. Moule, principal of Ridley Hall and author of “ Vent Creator."

THE PERSONALITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

and love and adoration gain a new, a newly realized reason and motive power and rest. He who with His secret skill, and with a power not the less almighty be¬ cause it violates nothing, has awakened and regener¬ ated the man, now shines before his inner sight with the smile of a personal and eternal kindness and amity, and is seen standing side by side, in union unspeakable yet without confusion, with Him who has suffered and redeemed, and with Him who laid the mighty plan of grace and willed its all-merciful success.” This testi¬ mony of Prof. Moule to a work of grace after regener¬ ation hinges on the condition of his getting a “ con¬ scious hold upon the living and most gracious per¬ sonality of the Holy Spirit,” a “ hold ” possible only to him who has already been born of the Spirit.*

See Appendix, Note C.

26

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER,

CHAPTER IV.

THE EXECUTIVE OF THE GODHEAD.

FOR several years our mind has been laboring to invent some concise expression for the sum of all the offices of the Third Person of the Trinity in the transformation, sanctification and habitation of souls who fully believe in Christ Jesus. . At last Dr. Hodge has struck out with his die the very coin which our own mint has failed to stamp and contribute to the currency of Christian experience and theological dis¬ cussion. “ The Holy Ghost is the executive of the''/ Godhead.” This clear-cut conception and expression of the work of the Spirit is exceedingly beautiful be¬ cause it is indisputably true. Law emanates from the Father, mercy and judgment are committed to the Son, while the executive of both Persons is the ever- blessed Spirit. Here we have the three departments of government — the legislative, the judicial and the executive. Through the Holy Spirit the Father and the Son operate on human souls, reproving, regenerat¬ ing, witnessing and sanctifying. We now see how a person may honor the Father and in a measure the Son and yet fail of attaining the highest spiritual grace through a failure to honor the Holy Ghost, the blessed Comforter; just as a man may show all proper respect to the lawmaking and law-interpreting departments of

THE EXECUTIVE OF THE GODHEAD.

27

our own government, and secure their action., and then miss his purpose at last by ignoring the last link neces¬ sary to its realization — the executive officer, without whose agency statutes and courts are ineffectual. We fear that there are many Christians who inadvertently fail in their tribute of respect, faith and worship to the Holy Ghost, regarding Him as an impersonal emana¬ tion or influence streaming from God, or as only an¬ other name for the Father, who can just as well without Him reach and transfigure their sin-stained souls through the blood of the Lamb that taketh away the sins of the world.

To human reason this looks very plausible. But Christian experience, especially in its advanced stages, has proved it to be fallacious. We must believe in the Holy Ghost as an indispensable agent in the production of spiritual life both in its incipiency and in its fulness. There is a sense in which He is now the most impor¬ tant active factor in the production of Christian charac¬ ter. The work of the Father in the gift of the Son and the work of the Son in pouring out His own blood as a sin offering are completed past acts. But the work of the Spirit in each individual believer is incomplete. They very greatly mistake who suppose that He fully accomplished His mission to our world on the day of Pentecost, or at the farthest when He had inspired the last word of the New Testament, and that He then withdrew, leaving the Church under the reign of fixed spiritual laws. Such a creed as this chills the soul and deadens all the fires of faith and love. Let the entire Church come to a full realization that the Comforter

28

THE GOSPE-L OF THE COMFORTER.

came to abide and that He is now descending in per¬ sonal Pentecosts as certainly and as demonstrably in the consciousness of every perfect believer as He did in the upper room in Jerusalem, then will the glory of the dispensation of the Spirit begin to be generally seen and “ the executive of the Godhead ” receive fitting honor. “ To have faith in Christ and not to have faith in the Spirit seems to be a great contradiction ; yet we submit it for the judgment of candid inquirers whether this very contradiction is not strikingly exhibited in the case of almost all who profess to be followers of Christ. To know the Father, we must know the Son; to know Christ, we must know the Spirit.” * This is our privi¬ lege : “Ye shall know him. He shall testify of me.” We suspect that much of the repugnance among good Christian people to an instantaneous sanctification comes from a sort of a naturalistic view of the kingdom of grace left to the operation of fixed laws in the ab¬ sence of the King. They forget that the King has left in His stead a personal successor and vicegerent clothed with omnipotent power. “ The day of Pente¬ cost was a pattern day ; all the days of this dispensa¬ tion should have been like it, or should have exceeded it. But alas ! the Church has fallen down to the state in which it was before this blessing had been bestowed, and it is necessary for us to ask Christ to begin over again. We of course in respect to knowledge — intel¬ lectual knowledge of spiritual things — are far in ad¬ vance of the point where the disciples were before the Pentecost. But it should be borne in mind that when

* “ Love Revealed,” George Bowen.

THE EXECUTIVE OF THE GODHEAD.

29

truths have once been fully revealed and made a part of orthodoxy, the holding of them does not necessarily imply any operation of the Spirit of God. We deceive ourselves, doubtless, in this way, imagining that because we have the whole Scriptures and are conversant with all its great truths the Spirit of God is necessarily work¬ ing in us. We need a baptism of the Spirit as much as the apostles did at the time of Christ’s resurrection.” * That was not a mere dash of rhetoric which fell from the pen of John Fletcher when he spoke of the Pente¬ cost as the opening of “ the kingdom of the Holy Ghost.” He has the signet ring of our glorified King Jesus, and reigns over the family on earth as the Son of man reigns over the family above. He has not shut Himself up as an impersonal force in the tomb of uniform law, but He walks through the earth a glorious personality, with the keys of divine power attached to His girdle and with the rod of empire in His right hand. He works miracles in the realm of spirit as did Immanuel in the realm of matter. The new Creator of the soul performs a greater work than the original Creator of man, inasmuch as the former works upon material which is capable of an eternal re¬ sistance to His plastic touch, while in matter there was no such antagonism.

In that sublime formula of worship, the Te Deum Lau- damus , which has dropped from the lips of dying sires to living sons for fifteen centuries, there is found this sentence referring to the work of Christ in opening the dispensation of the Spirit, “ When Thou hadst overcome

* “ Love Revealed,” George Bowen.

30

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

the sharpness of death, Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers/’ To make the Church real¬ ize the presence of “ the executive of the Godhead,” there must be more praying in the Holy Ghost, more preaching with the demonstration of the Spirit, more singing with the spirit and testifying as the Spirit giveth utterance, with the attesting fruits of the Spirit, love, joy and peace. There must be more faith in the Holy Spirit as the greatest gift that men can wish or that heaven can send. We belie His presence when in our fruitless lives we present Him as a barren tree with no golden fruit to attract and feed hungry souls. This poor, blind world, which apprehends only sensible things, physical causes and effects, must be lifted up by the lever of sanctified character from the low plane of naturalism to apprehend the presence of the super¬ natural on earth, the standing miracle of Christianity — the Holy Spirit dwelling in human hearts and trans¬ figuring human lives. How glorious will be that era when the brief credo , “ I believe in the Holy Ghost,” has descended from the head into the heart of the Church, or has ascended from an intellectual assent into assured knowledge (John xiv. 17). Then, and not till then, will Jesus, the glorified Bridegroom, have the entire heart of His bride, for then will the - Spirit, the Bridegroom’s looking-glass, fully reflect His loveliness to her eyes as the chief among ten thousand. “ He shall glorify me; for he shall receive of mine, and shall show it unto you.” How cheering the thought that this period of intense spiritual illumination and power is not fixed by the decree of God in the distant

THE EXECUTIVE OF THE GODHEAD.

31

future, but that it may be inaugurated in our own day by a simple, all-surrendering faith in Christ’s promise of the Comforter. There are indications of the dawn of that returning day of Pentecost when the Spirit shall be poured out in His fulness upon all who “ know the exceeding greatness of Christ’s power to usward who believe.” The eastern sky has streaks of light betok¬ ening the sunrise of a day of power. Christians of every name, lone watchers on the mountain tops, now see the edge of the ascending disk, and are shouting to the inhabitants of the dark valleys below to awake and arise and behold the splendors of the King of day.

Reader, the perfect restoration of the reign of the Spirit over the Church involves your personal co-oper¬ ation, the entire consecration of your heart, your vic¬ tory over the world, your crucifixion with Christ, the entire cleansing of your heart and the transformation of your body into “ a temple of the Holy Ghost, the habitation of God through the Spirit.” Are you ready to be nailed to the cross? By the “you ” I mean the old self-life. You should be willing to enter into that state of conscious deadness to self in which the great German reformer was when he said, “ If any one knocks at the door of my breast and says, Who lives here? I will answer, Not Martin Luther, but Jesus Christ.”

32 THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

CHAPTER V.

THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT BEFORE THE DAY OF PENTECOST.

THIS is an inquiry into an obscure subject, but necessary for the clear setting forth of His con¬ trasted work as the Paraclete.

I. The conviction for sin does not seem to have been so pungent. Men were driven back from their apostasies by repentance, more through the scourge of divine judgments, wars, locusts, plagues, captivities, than by an inner sense of the exceeding turpitude of sin.

2. The Old Testament conversion was a moral change wrought by the will of the penitent, influenced by the Spirit of God, rather than a new creation or a new birth. The very surprise of Nicodemus indicates that the idea of regeneration as a radical spiritual trans ¬ formation was unfamiliar to the Jewish mind. The predominant purpose may be changed from vice to virtue in reliance on divine help, as in the case of re¬ formed drunkards, without regeneration. This is our idea of conversion during the period of Mosaism and under the preaching of John the Baptist. To assert that John’s converts were spiritually changed is to de¬ clare that John lost in a few months more regenerated probationers for Jesus than Methodism ever lost in her

THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT BEFORE PENTECOST. 33

entire history of a hundred and fifty years. There are many Old Testament converts in our modern churches.

3. There was no assurance of acceptance with God certified to the penitent soul, no witness of the Spirit, in fact no pardon, but rather the pretermission of sins, as Paul teaches in Rom. iii. 25, where he uses 7 rapeoic, passing by, for fyem?, forgiveness.

4. Old Testament piety was characterized by bond¬ age, the New by freedom. Those who were as chil¬ dren under tutors and governors were made free by Christ, free indeed. For where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty, the dungeon doors swing open and the fetters fall.

5. It naturally follows that there was no permanent state of reconciliation, because there was no permanent basis for it in an atonement made once for all and all- sufficient during all time. (See the Epistle to the He¬ brews, where the failure of the altar offerings to remove the consciousness of sin is emphatically announced.) There was, through the offerings, a temporary peace of mind attained, but no satisfaction concerning the whole standing of the sinner before God. Full pardon was in the future. O Israel, wait for the Lord. He will re¬ deem Israel from all his sins. The legal sacrifices of the sincere and penitent Israelite availed to maintain his corporate membership in the Old Testament cove¬ nant, and to secure an operation of grace ; but still the Holy of Holies remained closed to him, and he was destitute of that knowledge of personal salvation without which he was not “ made perfect as pertaining to the conscience.” He could not attain that inward

34

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

consciousness of perfect reconciliation with God and perfectly satisfied longings after salvation and that undis¬ turbed peace which is enjoyed by the genuine believer in Christ under the dispensation of the Comforter.

6. There was no conscious indwelling of the Spirit in Old Testament saints because there was no new or spiritual man in which He could abide. Hence their experiences, with a few extraordinary exceptions like David, were sombre, not sunny. Outside of the Psalms and Isaiah there is little gladness and less exultation. The fruit of the Spirit is joy. They had not the tree, the abiding Comforter, how could they have the fruit? The kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. They had in imperfection two thirds of the kingdom, ceremonial purity and legal righteousness, an intermittent peace, but to the joy of the Holy Ghost they were strangers because He did not dwell in their hearts. The notion of divine son- ship as conferred upon Israel as a nation, and then upon the anointed king, is found in the Old Testament. But the sonship of individuals is a glorious gospel prom¬ ise, the distinctive prerogative of believers in Christ. John i. 12: “To as many as received him gave he power to become the sons of God.” For this reason one such believer is greater than John, whose spiritual stature overtopped all the saints before him, even Abra¬ ham, the founder, and Moses, the lawgiver, of the Hebrew commonwealth.

7. Of course entire sanctification except in a cere¬ monial sense was not enjoyed by the Old Testament saints. This could not be in the absence of the in-

THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT BEFORE PENTECOST. 35

dwelling sanctifier. This again is held up as an attain¬ ment in Messianic times. Ezek. xxxvi. 25-29: “ I will sprinkle clean water upon you.” In enumerating these defects in Old Testament saints I have spoken of them generally. It will be easy to find an exception to each point which I have made, as Enoch, who had assurance; David, the joy of forgiveness ; and Isaiah, who was sanc¬ tified by the symbolic coal of fire laid upon his lips. But the exception proves the rule.

To the objection that I have given the Holy Spirit no eminent place in Old Testament experiences, I an¬ swer that He has all the place that can be assigned to strong outward influence, but not a conscious indwell¬ ing in the individual. In fact, the gifts of the Spirit before Pentecost were largely external rather than in¬ ternal, rather gifts than grace ; such as skill to Beza- leel, prescience to the prophets, strength to Samson, valor and administrative ability to the Judges and the kingly instinct to Saul. After Pentecost there were outward gifts arbitrarily bestowed ; as charismata , dis¬ tributed by the Spirit severally to whomsoever He will ; but the chief gift was the Spirit Himself permanently abiding in the soul as the sanctifier, the endowment of power, the wellspring of joy and the inspirer of all gracious dispositions. The graces of the Spirit, especially the grace that leads the choral procession, Love , are infinitely superior to all the outward gifts of tongues, intrepretation, healing, etc.

The operations of the Spirit on the world at large and on impenitent Hebrews before Pentecost effected little more than to create a basis of responsibility. Few

36 THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

seem to have been savingly influenced. His striving with the sinners before the flood (Gen. vi. 3) was a signal failure, only one family being saved. Nehemiah (ix. 20) says of the vast host of disobedient Israelites in the wilderness, “ Thou gavest also thy good Spirit to instruct them, and withheldest not thy manna from their mouth.” They seem, like modern sinners, to have appropriated the manna, but to have rejected the instructions of the good Spirit, for only two or three adult men who left Egypt out of a million got into Canaan. We do not say that all except these failed to attain eternal life, for Moses is certainly in heaven. Nor is this failure a matter of surprise when we con¬ sider that the distinct mission of the Spirit had not begun, and that in pre-Pentecostal times He had very poor tools to work with — the light of natural religion in pagan minds and the types and shadows of Mosaism with which to move the Hebrew heart. But since the ascension He has had all the facts and wonderful reali¬ ties of the gospel of Christ.

The distinctness of the Spirit’s work since the ascen¬ sion of Christ is apparent to all readers of the New Testament. Dean Alford is so impressed with this fact that he writes in capitals these words descriptive of the office of the Comforter, that it is TOTALLY DIS¬ TINCT from all His previous working. These are some of the characteristics of His mission :

1. Distinct promise ; the Spirit of promise, the prom¬ ise of the Father.

2. An instantaneous coming, an event as sharply defined in history as the birth of Christ.

THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT BEFORE PENTECOST. 3 7

3. Permanence; He came to stay, to abide forever.

4. He enters into the interior personality of the be¬ liever, and dwells within him, putting the law of God, the law of love, into his innermost heart, the source and nutriment of a new life interpenetrating his soul in a manner as mysterious as the coexistence of the Trinity of persons in one divine nature.

5. His whole work has a most intimate relation to the person of Christ, as if to hold up a mirror to re¬ flect the form of the invisible and glorified Saviour into the consciousness of the believer, affording a spir¬ itual manifestation of Christ.

“ When I say that pious Jews and our Lord’s disci¬ ples before the day of Pentecost were strangers to the great outpouring of the Spirit, I do not mean that they were strangers to His directing, sanctifying and en¬ livening influences according to their dispensation. . . . Nevertheless they were not fully baptized. The Com¬ forter who visited them did not properly dwell in them. Although they had wrought miracles by His power, ‘the promise of the Father ’ was not yet fulfilled to them. They would have been puzzled with such ques¬ tions as these : ‘ Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed ? ’ ‘ Is he fallen upon you ? ’ ‘ Is the love of God shed abroad in your hearts by the Holy Ghost given unto you ? ’ ‘ Is the fountain springing up into everlasting life opened in your breast?’ ... If these and like questions would have perplexed the apostles before Christ had opened His spiritual baptism and set up His kingdom with power in their hearts, we ought not to be surprised that professors who knew only the

38

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER,

baptism of John should ingenuously confess they ‘ never heard there was a Holy Ghost [to be received] since they believed.’ Nor should we wonder if devout Jews and easy Laodiceans should even mock and say, ‘ You would have us filled with new wine ; ’ but ‘we are rich and increased in goods, and have need of noth¬ ing.’ ‘ The water of our old cisterns is preferable to the new wine of your enthusiastic doctrine, and our bap¬ tismal ponds to your baptismal flames.’ ” (Fletcher.)

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF SIN.

39

CHAPTER VI.

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF SIN.

A ND he, when he is come, will convict the world of sin.” Of what form of sin? Not of those social offences called crimes, violations of the precepts and prohibitions of the decalogue, the basis of the criminal code in all civilized countries. Human courts are competent to convict of crime. Nor does the Spirit convict of those injuries to ourselves known as vices, moral delinquencies not named in the Ten Commandments. Conscience is sufficient to convict of these, aided by self-love and self-respect. But human law and conscience combined cannot eradicate evil from the heart. Philosophy has tried it and failed. Poetry, especially comedy and satire, have ineffectually attempted to convict the world of sin in all past ages. They have chastised cutaneous sins, denouncing the drunkard, the glutton, the opium user, the fornicator. All these were self-condemned before the shaft of ridi¬ cule was hurled at them. Each of them could say :

“I see the right, and I approve it too ;

Condemn the wrong, and yet the wrong pursue.”

But is not God’s law thundering from Sinai a suffi¬ cient witness to convict of sin? No, it never did con¬ vince the world that sin is evil per se, a thing to be

40

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

abominated, to be abhorred and shunned because of its inherent hatefulness and unspeakable vileness. The divine law is effectual only as it causes sin to be dreaded and avoided merely because of the punishment which will surely visit it. There is needed more than an accuser and punisher of sin, a power which can not only probe and search the heart and turn it inside out, exposing to the sunlight all its loathsome leprosies, but a power which can effect a radical cure. The sin¬ ful heart needs a surgeon so sharp-sighted as to detect this deadly disease under all its disguises of euphonious names, and a physician so skilful as to apply an effect¬ ual remedy. That healer of the sinful soul is the di¬ vine Comforter, mercifully sent, not to torment the world by forbidding its pleasures, but to bless the world by turning it away from its iniquities. Sins of every kind are the fruit of an invisible root to which they bear no out¬ ward resemblance. This root is too subtile for human laws and courts to see. It requires anointed eyes. No human philosophy had ever found the sum and sub¬ stance, the poisonous essence of sin, in unbelief. How can this be the all-inclusive sin? Is not historic doubt respecting persons and events innocent and even com¬ mendable? To such questions of a shallow rationalism we answer that unbelief in respect to Christ is more than withholding intellectual assent to a historic record. It is ingratitude towards a Benefactor and Saviour, and re¬ bellion against a rightful Ruler, a refusal to bow the knee to the personal revelation of God. The cause of this unbelief is not intellectual, arising from a lack of evidences, but moral, arising from a- lack of willingness.

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF SIN.

Christ is rejected because He lays the axe at the root sin, plants a hedge of thorns across the path of sinful pleasure, and kindles a consuming flame in the house of the worldling’s idols. The Holy Spirit convicts unbe¬ lievers of a lie when they pretend that their unbelief toward Christ is merely honest doubt. It is because faith in Him draws after it what is conceived to be the unpleasant obligation to obey Him, that they are unbe¬ lieving. In fact, the Greek Testament has but one word for unbelief and disobedience. In truth and verity, however boldly and persistently the world may deny it, the fact is that unbelief in respect to Christ lies in the will so corrupt that it hugs sin and will not let it be taken away by the Son of God, who came into the world and submitted to the shame and agony of the cross for this very purpose. Not all unbelievers are as honest as the African chief, Sekeletu, with whom David Livingstone met in his explorations. Says that great missionary : “ Sekeletu pressed me to name anything I desired, and it should be given. I explained that my object was to elevate him and his people to be Chris¬ tians. He replied, ‘ I do not wish to learn to read the Book, for I am afraid it might change my heart and make me content with one wife, like Sechele [a con¬ verted chief]. No, no, I want always to have five wives at least.’ ” Here is a frank admission that the difficulty in believing in Christ does not lie in defective evidence of His right to rule the heart and life, but in the pur¬ pose of the sinner to have his own way. Equally frank was that son of Abrahan, a Pole, who, when asked by ,t j American Christian whether the Jews’ rejection of

42

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

Jesus, the Messiah, was because they would not believe or because they could not, spitefully replied, “ Ve vill not believe, ve vill not believe.” But gospel-hardened sinners do not have such candor. Instead of acknowl¬ edging the real obstacle in their own will, they devise some pretext, some Intellectual difficulty in the way of faith, with which they sophisticate -conscience and excuse their godlessness.

The Spirit of inspiration teaches that the sin of unbe¬ lief denies God’s moral attribute of truth. “ He that believeth not God’s witness concerning his Son, that eternal life is in him [and in Him only], hath made him a liar” (I John v. 9-12).

It is a favorite plea of those who reject Christ as their personal Saviour that faith is not in the province of the will, and that consequently we are not accountable for it as the pivot of destiny. But this falsehood is shown up by the Holy Ghost, who ever insists that the culpa¬ bility of unbelief lies in the fact that it is a wilful, obsti¬ nate and persistent aversion to Christ’s requirements. It is this activity of the Spirit in demonstrating the truth to every mind and conscience by showing the things of Christ , His divinity, His sinlessness, His con¬ descending love evinced by His self-sacrificing life and atoning death, that renders every hearer of the gospel accountable to the Judge of the quick and the dead for his acceptance or his rejection of Jesus Christ as his rightful King. “ He that believeth shall be saved ; he that believeth not shall be damned.” The -convicting debate which the Spirit carries on with the world has this surprising peculiarity : The momentous question of

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF SIN. 43

eternal destiny does not turn upon man’s treatment of God the Father, but rather his disposition towards His Son. This is the sin which towers above all and com¬ prises all. “ Because they believe not on ME.” That is to say, the world did not believe in Him as God manifest in the flesh in the person of His only begotten Son, the appointed King and Redeemer of mankind. “For God, as He is in Himself, in the mystery of His own unapproachable being, as He dwells in the bright abyss of His own timeless eternity, before the glory of whose face the archangels veil their eyes, whom no one has known or can know except the only begotten Son and the Spirit who is one with the Father and the Son, can hardly become a distinct object even of faith to man.” It is only when He vouchsafes to come forth out of His absolute Godhood, in the person of His Son and of His Spirit, that He is pleased to make Himself known to men by these two divine witnesses, the rep¬ resentatives of His glory, without whom no creature could, know anything or believe anything about God.

Underlying the Spirit’s argument in the inmost depths of the soul where character originates from free choice, is the doctrine of the supreme Godhood (corrupted into Godhead) of Jesus Christ. For if He were a crea¬ ture, the highest in the universe next to the throne of God (Channing), it would be a sin to trust in Him rather than solely in the Creator. The Spirit recognizes the supreme divinity and not the creaturehood of the Son of man, the Son of God. For this reason orthodoxy in all the Christian ages has emphasized and exalted that primary truth which Luther, after the theological

44

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

errors of the dark ages, so fully apprehended and so lucidly proclaimed, that evangelical, saving faith is the ground of all good in man, and the want of it is the source of all evil. This truth the Spirit’s convincing agency always implies when He gives a clear perception of the deformity and damnableness of the absence of faith in Christ as the chosen state of heart. The Spirit demolishes all the subterfuges and excuses by which depravity endeavors to palliate unbelief and to white¬ wash the vileness of his ingratitude to Jesus Christ, his best friend and benefactor.

Another truth implied in the Spirit’s conviction of the world is that present salvation and eternal life de¬ pend solely on faith in Christ for which there can be no substitute. By this declaration the pious, God-fearing pagan living up to his best light is not excluded from salvation. He evinces that he has the spirit of faith and the purpose of righteousness which are accepted in the involuntary absence of a knowledge of the historic Christ. He has engraven on his own character, through co-operation with the universal activity of the Holy Spirit, the imperfect outlines of the image of Christ, styled by Joseph Cook “ the essential Christ.” When the apostles demonstrated to the conscience of the Jews that there was salvation in no other name, not even in Abraham their father nor in Moses their lawgiver, they were convicted of the most stupendous crime possible, but not beyond the forgiving grace of their disowned and crucified Messiah. Great as was their first crime of murdering their King, their second offence of reject¬ ing His claims did not place them individually beyond

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF SIN. 45

His pardoning mercy, if they would repent and believe, although it sealed their national doom. Their unbelief vitiated all their fancied righteousness sought from the law and rendered it detestable and all their sacrifices abominable to the searcher of hearts. They were pre¬ eminently guilty of unbelief. The temporal conse¬ quences to their nation manifestly confirm the assertion that it was the most heinous of all sins. The Spirit not only convicts unbelievers of wilful sin, but He also con¬ victs the regenerate of “ sin improperly so called ” (Wesley), a wrong state of the sensibilities lying back of the will. Even after the will has, through the new birth, been brought into the attitude of submission to Christ, there remain tendencies and propensities peril¬ ous to the spiritual life and antagonistic to the new principle of love to God which is now enthroned within. This rendered many of the Corinthians “ carnal,” so that Paul hesitated to call them “ spiritual,” though they were, “ as babes in Christ,” possessing a feeble spiritual life instead of that more abundant life which Christ came to impart. This lingering carnality, “the easily besetting ” or closely clinging sin, styled by Delitzsch “the indwelling evil,” was the force which was impelling many of the Galatians downward instead of upward ; for, having begun in the Spirit, they were ending in the flesh. We must ascribe to the same cause that lack of perfect loyalty and perfect devotion to Christ in all of Paul’s band of missionary helpers in Rome, Timothy excepted, of whom the sorrowful apostle says, “For they all seek their own, not the things of Jesus Christ.” By such a remark as this the apostle to the Gentiles

4 6

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

does not de-Christianize those members of Christ’s body who are still actuated by selfishness. Rather he repre¬ sents them as weak and defective believers who have not yet submitted to a total self-crucifixion as. a pre¬ requisite to perfect love to Christ. Paul does not in¬ clude himself and Timothy in this class (Phil. ii. 19-21).

A light estimate of sin is the bane of modern Chris¬ tian thought.* It is attended by a depreciation of the moral law. Since the law underlies the atonement, whatever lessens the majesty of the law detracts from the necessity and value of the atonement. Thus these fundamentals all suffer loss when one of them, sin, law, atonement, is discounted. To these three vital doctrines we may add the pardon of sin and sanctification, to¬ gether with eternal retribution. When one of these doctrines is undervalued, all are soon weakened. Says Principal Moule : “ A full, strong current of opinion in the professing Church of Christ runs at the present day directly against a grave, thoroughgoing doctrine of sin and its correlative truths of eternal judgment and of the unspeakable need of the atoning blood and of a living personal faith in the crucified and risen One. One would think that some earnest teachers had learned, by some other path surely than that of the Word of God, to look with temperate eyes upon sin as a phenomenon sure at last to disappear under long processes of divine order.” The final evanescence of moral evil is a pleasing delusion of liberalism which cannot endure the idea of sin as an eternal blot on the face of the universe. A careful, candid study of the

* See Appendix, Note D.

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF SIN.

47

parables of Christ shows the human family in the day of judgment separated and sentenced to the opposite destinies of punishment and reward with no hint of an ultimate reunion. Moral evil as a finality under the government of omnipotent goodness is a problem of less difficulty than the permission of sin by absolute holiness. The argument which justifies the arbitrary non-prevention of sin will justify its sovereign non-ex¬ tinction. But we need no such argument. God has only one way for the extinction of sin, the blood of His Son presented by penitent faith. He will never crush sin with an almighty trip hammer, as Universalists desire ; nor will He crush the sinner into nonentity to suit annihilationism. Hence final impenitence can have no other sequence than everlasting misery. Without any revelation Plato comes to this conclusion. His moral reason demanded it. Hence it is not unreasonable. What is the remedy for inadequate and superficial views of sin as a transient, cutaneous disease soon to be out¬ grown by the soul? Preach earnestly and persistently The office of the Paraclete as the convincer of the stu¬ pendous sin of unbelief toward Christ, of righteousness and of judgment to come. Liberalism can be cured only by the awakening truths of Christ’s gospel. No office of the Comforter can be neglected without moral disaster, which always overtakes those who advance beyond the New Testament in their fancied progress. “ Whosoever goeth onward and abideth not in the teaching of Christ hath not God ” (II John 9, Revised Version).

48

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

CHAPTER VII.

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. HE Spirit’s conviction of righteousness — His exhi¬

bition of a perfect model of righteous human

character — was as necessary for the moral recov¬ ery of fallen men as the conviction of sin. By the dark picture of what the sinner is, must be suspended the bright ideal of what he ought to be. This ideal no fallen man is able, without the Spirit’s aid, correctly to portray. He alone can photograph it upon the pre¬ pared tablet of the soul. Conviction of sin prepares the tablet. In the normal unfolding of the child there arises the ability to discover the distinction between right and wrong. But this moral sense is so drugged from childhood upward with the threefold opiates, selfishness, worldliness and fleshly-mindedness, that the soul has no conception of the high moral attain¬ ments for which it was created, and comes to look upon it as becoming and inevitable to desire sensual pleas- sures, to seek after them and indulge in them with only such limitation as self-love may suggest. The or¬ dinary course of education in all pagan families, and in many homes nominally Christian, is such as tends more and more to inflame the worldly and fleshly stimu¬ lants of action, more and more to draw the youth out of quiet meditation into the race-course of intellectual

paraclete’s conviction of righteousness. 49

emulation, athletic strife, business competition, or the whirlpool of sensual pleasure. The world is full of false notions of honor and false estimates of interest. Hence the natural man knows nothing of a perfect at¬ tainable righteousness. Study the moral character of the pagan gods of the most cultured nations ; for here, if anywhere, we may find among the gods worshipped by these nations an expression of their highest ideals of righteousness. But we find on Mount Olympus among the gods of Grecian and Roman mythology only deified lust, deified hatred, deified theft, deified jealousy and deified bloodthirstiness.

Nor is there anything in the best human philosophies in heathenism that can be safely held up as the pat¬ tern of perfect righteousness. Ignoring the fact that man at his climax reflects the image of his Creator, philosophy denudes Him of all the human virtues, piles up a lot of abstractions and negations powerless to purify and elevate human society, and then wonders that it is steadily sinking into the depths of hopeless moral degeneracy.

Study the pagan poets, their epics and tragedies, their satires and comedies, and their lyrics also, and you will no longer express your surprise at Plato’s ex¬ clusion of the poets from his ideal republic. Instead of delineating the portrait of spotless righteousness, they glorify human vices, and with all the splendors of genius they so adorn the contentions and debasing passions of men as to incite to their imitation.

Even in Christian lands some modern writers who reject Christ have gone back to paganism, and have

50

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

raised from the dead the idea that might is right , a monstrous idea which was laid in its grave by Socrates more than twenty-two hundred years ago. But what is the Comforter’s irrefutable proof of the perfect right¬ eousness of Christ? He Himself answers, “Because I go to the Father, and ye see me no more.” The world placed Him between two thieves ; but God, who cannot err, has set Him between Himself and the Holy Spirit, far above all principality and power. Never was the righteousness of the world so contradicted as when He to whom Barabbas was preferred, was received by the Father amid the acclamations of all the holy orders of intelligences around His throne. The pure and per¬ fect righteousness of Jesus is now forever vindicated. “Despised and rejected of men,” yea, of all men, — for what the Jews, the best nation, did, all other nations would have done, — He has been received and adored by all the heavenly world. This is a sufficient proof of His righteousness.

But how do we know that He has been thus re¬ ceived? It is true that no human eye saw Him after the cloud received Him from the sight of His upward- gazing disciples. It is also true that no angelic wit¬ ness of the reception and coronation has come down to this world and made oath to this glorious fact. But a greater witness has come down, and is now testi¬ fying to every human conscience that Jesus sits en¬ throned with His Father. This testimony is twofold: first, in the inspired gospel record where the fact stands undisputed ; and, secondly, in the heart of every hearer of the gospel, where the duty of penitent faith in Him

paraclete’s conviction of righteousness. 51

is urged upon the conscience as the first and greatest duty. It may be that “ the fulness of time” for which God waited before He “sent forth his Son” (Gal. iv. 4) was the period required for the demonstration of the world’s utter inability to originate those moral ideals which could turn men from sin to righteousness. He waited till the Greeks, the most aesthetic nation, had reached the perfection of art in painting, sculpture and architecture ; till the greatest orators had uttered their matchless speeches ; till the greatest poets had been laurel crowned ; till the greatest philosophers had ut¬ tered their “ divine peradventures,” and till all the leading ethnic religions had set up moral monstrosi¬ ties to be worshipped in their temples; till Greece amid the splendors of art was rotting in licentiousness, and till all-conquering Rome, on her seven hills burn¬ ing the incense of her adoration to Might, was pour¬ ing contempt on all the passive virtues, meekness, patience, forgiveness and philanthropy. Then God permitted His well-beloved Son to unite Himself with humanity, to present to all men the perfect model of character, and to teach every man the duty of repro¬ ducing that sinless character in himself. Then, as a crowning gift, to render the gift of His Son available in the highest degree, He sent down the divine Paraclete to assist man’s wandering eye to gaze steadfastly upon this divine and human model of holiness, and to steady his hand to copy the matchless beauties of that heavenly pattern. This was the second work of the Comforter, to convince the world of righteousness, because this too was a work which He alone could accomplish.

52

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF JUDGMENT. UDGMENT is the sanction of law. Since Jesus

J came not to destroy the law but to fill it full of meaning, His commission to the Paraclete must effect the same purpose to honor the law by declaring its sentence against sin. Says Tholuck : “ The meaning of our Lord’s words is, When the divine principle of the Spirit shall spread among my disciples and pro¬ duce its extraordinary effects in mankind, people will be forced to confess that the power of the evil spirit which opposes me in the ungodly feelings of men is broken. By the incarnation and coming of the Saviour an inward judgment was commenced in the hearts of men of which the last judgment is only the outward manifestation.” The atoning death of Christ declaring God’s abhorrence of sin and His mercy to sinners was the defeat of Satan, the usurping ruler called “ the god of this world.” Christ Jesus through death condition¬ ally emancipated every human soul from Satanic bond¬ age, and thus “ destroyed him who hath the power of death, that is, the devil.”

But how can the casting out of “ the prince of this world ” demonstrate that every one who refuses to trust in Christ with true obedience and to seek justification through reliance on the atonement for sin made by

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF JUDGMENT. 53

Him will be found on the left hand of the Judge and hear his own condemnation pronounced in the last day? Our answer is this : All who take on the Satanic char¬ acter must expect the Satanic doom ; all who bear the devil’s image must share his destiny. So all who bear the likeness of Christ will share His glory. “ After the whole dilemma between sin and righteousness is clearly set forth, the Spirit finally announces the judgment of Satan in such a way that He not only comforts believ¬ ers with the perfect comfort declared in Rom. viii. 33, 34, but also reproves unbelievers with that awful judg¬ ment, as a last sting, in their inmost hearts, Will ye then absolutely be and continue the devils ? Will ye be judged with him?” (Stier.) Satan is condemned now for our benefit if we yield to the Spirit’s voice in our hearts and accept the righteousness which Christ provides and the Comforter inworks ; or we abide with God’s great ad¬ versary in the judgment if we continue in sin with the world. This third and last conviction of the Spirit clearly implies that in the estimation of the Spirit of truth the existence of the devil must needs belong to some fundamental article of saving truth without which we cannot correctly estimate the enormity of sin, the value of righteousness and the necessity of the atone¬ ment by which it was procured. In this third convic¬ tion the victory of righteousness over sin is completed. In this our salvation is infallibly secured if we but will it. The Spirit never coerces a free agent.

The discussion of the three convictions which the Paraclete effects in men, especially men who are en¬ lightened by gospel truth, shows in what way He glori-

54

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

fies the Son of God. The first question is, Why does He not glorify the Father? He does. If the Father and Son are one in nature, as the Son asserts (John xiv. 9), it follows that honors ascribed to the Son glorify the Father. “ He that acknowledgeth the Son hath the Father also” (I John ii. 23). There can be no jeal¬ ousy between them, because they are one in divinity, and in their distinct personalities they aim at one pur¬ pose in the scheme of redemption.

The personality of the Son is much more easily grasped by men’s narrow minds, because it is divested of that vagueness and abstract infinitude which belong to our conception of God. Hence, the Son’s person¬ ality having been exhibited in a concrete form, within the limits of humanity, has become far more affecting and influential, when contemplated with all its historic incidents, lowly birth, poverty, youthful toil, kindly deeds, beneficent miracles, wise sayings, transparent parables, rejection by the Jews, arrest by the midnight mob, unjust condemnation, tragic execution and glori¬ ous resurrection. It is this historic setting of the Son’s personality which the Holy Spirit can use with the best effect in producing conviction of sin. The only element which we have failed to enumerate needful for this re¬ sult is assent to distinctive Christian truth, especially to Christ’s claim of supreme divinity. Truth separate from a sense of the authority of God does not convict of sin and spiritually vitalize man’s moral nature. Says Dr. Walker, “ Conscience will enforce no moral duty unless it sees God in it.” It will respond to no other voice than that of the moral Ruler and final Judge of

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF JUDGMENT. 55

all free moral agents. So long as Jesus was regarded as a man only, His preaching had meagre results in the number of His disciples. But after His supreme divinity was demonstrated by His conquest of death, ascension to heaven and effusion of the Holy Spirit, men were converted by the thousands in a day. Like causes produce like effects in every age. Wherever in depen¬ dence on the Spirit of truth the whole gospel is preached, including Christ’s triumph over the grave in proof of His Godhead, unbelievers are convinced of sin, righteousness and judgment. But wherever Jesus Christ is presented as a model of moral excellence, but a mere man like ourselves, there is no conscience awakened to see the enormity of sin and to turn from it with a perfect loathing. Revivals can no more come from such preaching than orange groves can spring up and bear fruit among the glaciers of Alaska. Genuine conversions must be preceded by a painful sense of the enormity of sin, which comes only from the belief that Christ is the divine Saviour. This belief, though not saving, is the necessary stepping-stone to that all-sur¬ rendering reliance on Him as both Saviour and Lord which is the condition of salvation. It is not enough' to know Him historically as the Son of man. He must be known as the Son of God. This knowledge flesh and blood cannot impart. “ No man can say Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit” (I Cor. xii. 3, Revised Version). This gracious ability to arrive at a belief in the supreme divinity of Christ is imparted to all candid readers of the entire New Testament who have a dis¬ position to follow whither the truth may lead. It is not

56

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

enough to read the first three Gospels. The sincere inquirer must proceed to the fourth if he would be convinced that the Son of man is also the Son of God, equal to the Father in power and glory. Then he will hear Him say, “All things [attributes] that the Father hath are mine : therefore said I, that he [the Comforter] taketh of mine and shall declare it unto you ” (John xvi. 15). Thus the Comforter glorified Christ by attesting His perfect power to save from the guilt of sin through faith in His blood shed as a conditional substitute for the punishment of sin.

Then the Comforter, as “ the Spirit of adoption,” glorifies Christ as the Saviour by crying in the believer’s heart, “Abba, Father.” This inspired feeling of son- ship is the gift of Christ. “ But as many as received him, to them gave he the right to become children of God, even to them that believe on his name.” Thus the three divine Persons are glorified in the new birth of a soul.

“ With joy the Father doth approve The fruit of His eternal love ;

The Son looks down with joy and sees The purchase of His agonies ;

The Spirit takes delight to view The contrite soul He forms anew ;

And saints and angels join to sing The growing empire of their King.”

Again, the Paraclete glorifies Christ by inwardly revealing Him as the chief among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely. In that wonderful address respecting the coming and offices of His successor, another Comforter, in John xiv.-xvi., aptly styled the

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF JUDGMENT. 5 7

Trinitarian Discourse, Jesus says respecting every dis¬ ciple who evinces the genuineness of his love by his obedience, “ I will love him, and will manifest myself unto him.” That this is not a spiritual phenomenon attending regeneration is evident from the fact that those whom Christ thus addressed were already regenerated. This is implied in His prayer in John xvii., appropriately called His high-priestly prayer : “ They are thine. . . . They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” Then He prays for a further work to be wrought in them : “ Sanctify them through thy truth. ... I sanctify [consecrate to the one work of redemp¬ tion] myself, that they themselves may be truly sancti¬ fied.” With respect to these two future events, Christ’s manifestation to the believer and His sanctification, the inference is natural that the former is intimately con¬ nected with the latter as a means to an end. The mani¬ festation is by the Holy Spirit, the representative of Christ, who does not manifest Himself, but magnifies, glorifies, deifies the personality of the Son of God, for whom He is cleansing the heart as the temple of His everlasting abode.

In entire sanctification the Holy Spirit violates no law of mental philosophy, but strictly conforms His work to the nature and faculties of the mind. The stronger affection expels the weaker. Drop golden eagles plentifully in the path of beggars scrambling for cents, and the awakened thirst for gold will cure the mania for copper. The superior banishes the inferior. It was Dr. Chalmers who eloquently discoursed on “ The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” To ex-

58 THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

pel all proneness to sin, all that is required is to inspire an unconquerable love of holiness, not in the abstract, but as embodied in a person in the sphere of the human affections, a person who by his self-sacrifice has laid in our minds a foundation for eternal gratitude. Then will this new affection instantly expel all base loves and keep them out so long as this new affection is enthroned within. Now it is the office of the Paraclete to inspire this affection. This He does by pouring light upon the person of the divine Christ, making Him a bright reality, a sun above the king of day, infinitely superior in splendors. This manifestation of Christ in the heart was an experience of Paul in addition to His revelation of Himself to the eye and the ear of the chief perse¬ cutor as he drew near to Damascus. The outward mani¬ festation arrested his career of hostility to Christ; the inward revelation awakened an undying love, the mo¬ tive power of that heroic course of labors, privations, perils and sufferings which ended when Rome’s impe¬ rial axe severed his head from his body. During all this period, as Chrysostom says, “ Paul had Christ speaking within himself.” Thus by deep inward reve¬ lations, as well as by outward manifestations, was the great apostle prepared, as every preacher should be, for the work of the ministry. Well does Bengel argue that the Son of God must first be revealed in the preacher before He can be revealed by him. This rev¬ elation of Christ in Paul’s consciousness was the sum and substance of that “ excellency of knowledge of Jesus Christ, for whom he suffered the loss of all things.” The time of this inward revelation of Christ by the

THE PARACLETE’S CONVICTION OF JUDGMENT. 59

Holy Spirit is unknown. The exegetes agree that it is not identical with Saul’s vision of the risen Christ, and that it must have occurred afterward, either in Da¬ mascus, in Arabia, or after his return from that country while sojourning in his native Tarsus.

6o

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

CHAPTER IX.

THE PENTECOSTAL ATTESTATION.

WE remark that Pentecost is the final, indispen¬ sable and standing attestation of the Lordship of Jesus Christ and of the truth of all His declarations. In other words, the gift of the Paraclete, not merely as a solitary event, but as a perpetual dis¬ pensation of grace and power, is absolutely necessary to the perfection of the Christian evidences. The res¬ urrection of Christ, according to Paul in I Cor. xv. and all Christian apologists, is the fundamental proof of His divine mission. It is my purpose to show that this greatest, miracle, taken by itself as an isolated event, without the standing and perpetual attestation of the Pentecostal dispensation as a predicted sequence, would have been insufficient for the establishment of Christianity against the universal opposition of Jews and Gentiles, including ten imperial edicts of persecu¬ tion and extermination beginning with Nero, A. D. 64, and ending with Diocletian, A. D. 313. Much less would it have been sufficient to perpetuate the gospel eighteen hundred years as a system dominating the world’s best thought and keeping in advance of the progress of the ages. We mean to say that the empty tomb without the tongues of fire descending from gener¬ ation to generation on Spirit-baptized believers would

THE PENTECbSTAL ATTESTATION.

6

have been inadequate to the permanent enthronement of Christianity over mankind. If “ another Comforter” had not succeeded Christ, His mission, with all His mir¬ acles, including His victory over the tomb, would have been a failure, and His sermons and parables would long since have been forgotten. This idea is beauti¬ fully expressed in the first verse and the last of Presi¬ dent W. F. Warren’s hymn.*

“ I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost,

I love to worship Thee ;

My risen Lord for aye were lost But for Thy company.

“ I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost,

I love to worship Thee ;

With Thee each day is Pentecost,

Each night nativity.”

If the Paraclete had come to testify of Himself and to do an independent work irrespective of Christ, His mis¬ sion would not have conserved the memory of Christ, but would have eclipsed it. If He had come in the name of the Father to maintain the meagre unity of God in the bare and simple sense taught by so-called liberal Christianity, the outcome would have been the final oblivion of Jesus Christ following the denial of everything supernatural in His birth and ministry.

But He proceeded from the Father and the Son spe¬ cially charged with the office of testifying of the Son, yea, of glorifying Him, not only in the gospel record, which He should inspire, and in the doctrines to be un¬ folded in apostolic sermons and epistles, but by His

*No. 272, Hymnal of the Methodist Episcopal Church.

62 THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

indwelling presence in the consciousness of believers, revealing Christ in them in a manner wholly indescriba¬ ble but blessedly real and certain. We do not wonder at the tenacity with which western Christianity has insisted on the “ filioque ” (and from the Son) in the creed respecting the procession of the Holy Ghost. This enlargement of the creed not only conserves the dignity of the Son of God and harmonizes with His Trinitarian address in John xiv— xvi. and with other texts in which the Paraclete is called the “ Spirit of Christ” (Rom. viii. 9), the “Spirit of Jesus” (Acts xvi. 7, Revised Version) and “Christ” (Eph. iii. 17), but it is confirmed by the experience of all who testify that the Comforter “has taken up His lasting abode in their hearts.” (Alford.) These rejoice in a wonderful magnifying of Christ and in an inexpressible increase of love to Him. If troubled before by doubts of His di¬ vinity, their doubts are forever dispelled, and “ in the Holy Spirit” they gladly and spontaneously “say, Jesus is Lord” (I Cor. xii. 3, Revised Version). They are as sure of his Godhead as was Thomas in the presence of his risen Master when he exclaimed, “ My Lord and my God” (John xx. 28). A notable instance of deliverance from doubt on this fundamental doctrine of orthodoxy by the baptism of the Spirit occurred in the experience of Dr. Wilbur Fisk at Well fleet early in his ministry.*

This intimate identification of the Spirit’s mission with the person of Christ and the success of His work was because in the wisdom of God it was seen to be

* See his Life by Dr. G. Prentice.

THE PENTECOSTAL ATTESTATION.

63

necessary to the establishment and universal spread of His kingdom. There is truth in the argument that the existence of the Church as the visible exponent of Christ’s kingdom is the great proof of the resurrection and divinity of its Founder. This is true. But our Contention is that the Church, which was not organized when Jesus Christ, its living head, ascended, would not have had a beginning on the earth without the Pentecostal gift. This idea has found expression in that beautiful and inspiring formula of worship, the Te Deum Laudamus , called by Canon Liddon “ at once a hymn, a prayer and a creed,” in these sub¬ lime words, “ When Thou hadst overcome the sharp¬ ness of death, Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.” This dates the founding of the Church on the day of Pentecost. It was then that Christ, in the person of the Paraclete, like the sunrise described by the poet Horace, Altera dies , sol idem (Another day, the same sun), gathered together the Church of the firstborn of the Spirit on the earth, the first to receive the Spirit of adoption and to head the procession of redeemed souls through all the Christian ages.

Without Pentecost the resurrection of Christ would soon have been confounded with the prodigies of the Greek and Roman mythologies. There would, after a few years or generations, have been no one interested in defending this historic fact, and after the death of the apostles there would have been no witnesses to the resurrection power as a transforming spiritual ex¬ perience. The historical facts without a spiritual life

64

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

built on them, preaching and defending them and dy¬ ing for them a martyr’s death, would have had no champion to advocate them and to perpetuate the re¬ membrance of them.

We do not read that the company of disciples was at all increased by the story of the resurrection of Christ repeated again and again during nearly fifty days. This bare historic fact made no converts. Facts alone, though miraculous, and truth alone, though undoubted, have no regenerating power. Only life can beget life. For seven weeks the company of believers had all the facts of the gospel except the ascension complete, and for ten days they had the climax, the ascension of Christ, but there was no increase of their numbers. But on the fiftieth day three thousand believed on Jesus as the divine Saviour. Something must have happened. There is no effect without a cause. In this hidden cause lies the secret of the final triumph of Christ. Let me illustrate. In the late American Civil War, in the absence of Gen. Sheridan, the Federal com¬ mander in the valley of Shenandoah, his army was un¬ expectedly attacked in camp and routed. They threw down their arms and ran like frightened sheep. This scared herd of soldiers without arms suddenly turned about, met and conquered the over-confident foe, re¬ gained their lost artillery and camp and drove Gen. Early and his Confederate army in a disorderly flight and captured his artillery. What caused the change from a disgraceful rout to a glorious victory? It was the sudden arrival of their valiant commander riding bareheaded at breakneck speed. What caused the

THE PENTECOSTAL ATTESTATION.

65

sudden great victory of the gospel? What produced the conversion of three thousand in a day? It was the sudden arrival on the field of the divine Commander in the mysterious, invisible, conquering personality of an¬ other. It is vain to attribute the initial force of Chris¬ tianity to the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. You have first to account for his sudden transformation from a bloody persecutor. But he was not converted during the fifty days after the crucifixion. Even if he had been it would be as paradoxical to ascribe the first tri¬ umph of Christianity to the accession of a persecutor as it would be to attribute Sheridan’s victory, plucked out of defeat, to the presence of the chief of Gen. Early’s staff* rallying the running Federal soldiers to fight the army he had just deserted in treason to the Confederacy.

In every generation there are needed living witnesses to corroborate the resurrection of Christ. For these on the witness stand of every age He has made provision in the gift of the Holy Ghost. “ Believers started to life when He did, and their resurrection is a triumph¬ ant proof of His resurrection.” On the day of Pente¬ cost the astonished Jews saw a hundred and twenty duplicates of the resurrection of Jesus. A feeble, al¬ most pulseless life they had before, but now they have a stalwart and abundant life. Every Christian who has had a personal Pentecost is a new attestation of the basal proof of Christianity, the resurrection of its Author. Every believer, if he lives at the summit of his privilege, is to an unbelieving world a risen Christ. O Spirit divine, multiply on the earth the number of such fac-similes of the resurrection of the God-Man as

66

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

shall overwhelm the scepticism of the world and bring hosts of unbelievers to crown Jesus Lord of all !

“ It is the vocation of every believer, in every gener¬ ation, to afford in his own person the evidence that Christ has risen. Art thou a Christian? Thou art one whom Christ has chosen to convey to men the proof that He is risen. This is thy vocation. Wilt thou roll back the stone upon the sepulchre and make the world believe that Christ is still there? This thou art actually doing if thou walk not in the Spirit.”*

Pentecost is not only a convincing and perpetual proof of the Messiahship of Jesus, but it is also an at¬ testation to His righteousness. What was the world’s judgment of His character is shown in their crucifying Him as a malefactor between two thieves. Why do I say the world did this when only a few individuals out of hundreds of millions had any part in this appalling wickedness? Because the few were exponents of the many. Jesus was rejected not only by the Jews; “ He was rejected of men,” as He is to-day rejected by every natural heart. Majorities everywhere, even in so-called Christian lands, choose Barabbas and condemn Jesus of Nazareth, shouting, “ Crucify ! crucify ! ” His reputa¬ tion with men needed vindication, and Pentecost was that vindication. How? He declared that when He should go to the Father He would receive the promised Holy Ghost as the great gift which He would bestow upon men. John’s words imply that this gift could not be imparted before Jesus was glorified. Hence the effusion of the Spirit is a proof to all men that the de¬ spised and crucified Son of man has been received at

♦ George Bowen.

THE PENTECOSTAL ATTESTATION.

67

court, approved of his Father and crowned Lord of all. This is God’s justification set over against man’s con¬ demnation. Have we any Scripture for this? Listen. “ He will convict the world in respect of sin and of righteousness, because I go to the Father.” My recep¬ tion in heaven will reverse my rejection on earth. God’s approval outweighs man’s vilification.

The Pentecostal gift demonstrates Christ’s omnipo¬ tence. Just before He stepped from God’s footstool to His throne He said, “ All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.” No person can give what he does not possess.* To bestow a personality all power¬ ful is to possess all power. The Holy Spirit has all power. In creation He “ moved upon the face of the waters ” and “ garnished the heavens.” In Providence, by the Spirit, the successive generations are created and the face of the earth is renewed (Ps. civ. 30). The Spirit distributes nine extraordinary gifts, and among them “ the working of miracles” (I Cor. xii. 10).

The gift of the Spirit by Jesus in the same way proves His omniscience, “ for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God ” (I Cor. ii. 10). This text also proves the omnipresence of the Son of God, as does the fact that the Spirit in convicting the world is present with every soul as a reprover, and in uttering in the heart of every child of God, “ Abba, Father,” He is

* Early in the nineteenth century there was an African pastor of a Methodist Epis¬ copal church in Boston whose name was Snowden. It was in the days of Channing, when the Unitarians were more Biblical than they are in modern times in the advocacy of doctrines, or rather in the indication of their negations. To this negro preacher a Unitarian pastor one day in a bookstore propounded this question : “ Father Snowden, what was the Son before the Father gave to Him all power?” Instantly this self- educated, or rather Spirit-educated Ethiopian replied, “What was the Father after He gave the Son all power? ”

68

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

with every believing soul present as a Comforter. The personal giver must have all the attributes of the per¬ sonal gift.

In the conclusion of this argument we infer from the identity of attributes of the giver and the gift that our opinion of the one must determine our opinion of the other. “ Tell me,” says George Bowen, “ what think ye of Christ, and I will tell you what you ought to think of the Spirit. Or tell me what ye think of the Spirit and I will tell you what ye think of Christ.” Unworthy, nar¬ row and vague opinions about the Spirit imply the same in your conception of Christ. Because the Spirit is prac¬ tically nearer to us, being the finger of Christ’s power, belittling views of the Spirit are more disastrous. “The Spirit in the believer testifies of Jesus, that He has ascended on high and that He is the Mediator be¬ tween God and man. The Spirit is powerful just according to the degree in which the believer yields himself to His influences and makes way for Him in his affection, in his intellect and in his life.” Are not heaven and earth waiting, groaning, travailing for such a testimony to the crucified and risen Saviour as has not yet been given in the Church on earth? To reveal Christ the believer is in the world and the Spirit is in the believer. Am I thus revealing Christ, His conde¬ scension, purity, love, unworldliness, meekness, all-suf¬ fering and unchangeableness, in every part and parcel of my life? Are my talents, tastes and opportunities made over to Christ to witness for Him? Only when the witnessing Spirit came down were the apostles, though brimful of ten thousand facts in the life of

THE PENTECOSTAL ATTESTATION.

69

Jesus, able to testify to Him effectively. “ Modern Christians have enough materials stored in their minds to make thousands of discourses about Christ, but our lips are sealed and our lives ineloquent until the Spirit of Pentecost come upon us and make Christ’s truth live in us and shine through our transfigured lives.” (George Bowen.)

70

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

CHAPTER X.

THE GAIN OF THE PARACLETE.

THE withdrawal of the visible Christ and the substi¬ tution of His invisible presence in the Paraclete whom He sent was the introduction of His dis - ciples into a higher school of faith. Hitherto they had walked chiefly by sight. The miracles of their Master had appealed to their reason through the senses. They were not entirely destitute of faith, else they would not have forsaken their fish-nets and followed the Man of Nazareth. But their faith was weak; it needed to be exercised and developed by struggles in a far dif¬ ferent arena. They must be taught the spiritual nature of Messiah’s kingdom. The visible presence of Christ as a veritable man had been a help to the primary lesson they had already learned ; it would be a hin¬ drance to the advanced lesson now to be learned. They must learn that deliverance from sin and restoration to true holiness consist not in outward ceremonials and prescribed rituals, nor in abstract truths grasped by the intellect, but in a vital union with a personal Saviour effected by the Spirit. While Jesus sat there before them in the body the mystery of this spiritual union was altogether beyond their comprehension. The enigma could be explained only by His removal. “It is expedient for you that I go away.” This expediency

THE GAIN OF THE PARACLETE.

7

is strongly stated by Draseke as quoted by Stier: “ The old Messiah in the flesh is with them ; therefore the new Comforter, the Spirit, is far from them. What hindered their being comforted? Jesus Himself, who, comforting, stood before them, was the hindrance. As long as He, this Messiah, bearing all the prophetic marks upon Him, stood before them in person, this, His person, continued to be a foundation and prop to that system of vanities which bewitched their heads and hearts. The form must pass away from their eyes before the Spirit could enter their souls. It was good for them that Jesus should go away. Before He, the Christ after the flesh, went away, the Christ after the Spirit could not come. When the former vanished the latter appeared.”

The visible, tangible Messiah was the false foundation of all their erroneous notions about a splendid worldly kingdom. The ascension of Christ, the removal of His human form from the eyes of His disciples, was neces¬ sary to initiate a purely spiritual kingdom, the basis of which is faith in a risen and invisible Messiah enthroned in heaven. For the same reason the bodily absence of Christ will continue till He descends to judge the quick and the dead and terminate the probationary history of mankind on the earth. His reign as a visible king for a thousand years would be a long step backward. It would destroy the conditions of the development of that stalwart faith which Christ has pronounced specially blessed : “ Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.”

Again, it was expedient for Jesus to substitute for His

72

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

visible presence the invisible Comforter for the emanci¬ pation of the Jews from “ the letter that killeth ” — a complex ritual which they had for more than fourteen centuries obeyed with a mechanical precision. This altar ritual, chiefly of bloody sacrifices typifying the atonement in Christ’s death, had accomplished its pur¬ pose and should now be laid on the shelf as one of “the beggarly elements” — a rudimentary and preparatory dispensation. Also the burdensome law of ceremonial purity, designed to lead a sinful nation up to the idea of spiritual purity, must now be abrogated because it had become a yoke upon the neck of an unspiritual people.

How can this ingrained hereditary worship of “ the letter that killeth ” all joyful freedom of service be done away without destroying the religious spirit? Christ herein exhibits divine wisdom. He enforced no cere¬ monial law, nor did He formally abrogate any. But He inculcated the true spirit in which that law should be administered while the Mosaic dispensation should con¬ tinue. He did not command fasting, but corrected its disgusting ostentation, while intimating that it was not in harmony with His joyful gospel, but, rather, as incon¬ gruous as a new patch on an old garment (Matt, ix: i 5-17, Revised Version). He did not abolish bloody sacrifices, but prescribed the spirit of reconciliation in which they should be laid upon the altar. He knew that faith in His atonement would supersede the altar ritual without its formal repeal. He did not re-enact the law of tithes, but He insisted that while it continued it should be ac¬ companied by justice, mercy, faith and love. He sought to enthrone in all hearts supreme love to God as the

THE GAIN OF THE PARACLETE.

73

sum of all duties toward God. Then He sends down the Spirit of love, who sheds abroad the love of God in the heart. This inspiration of the evangelical Spirit gradually overcomes the spirit of bondage to the letter, the legal spirit, first in Stephen, then in Saul of Tarsus, and then in the whole Gentile section of the Church, and finally in Peter and the believing Jews. Thus the whole Levitical law is quietly laid aside without a convulsion destructive of faith in revelation. To accomplish this amazing change it was necessary that the God-Man should retire and the God-Spirit should be His suc¬ cessor.

It is quite obvious that Christ’s efficiency in His sav¬ ing contact with human souls is indefinitely increased by His representative, the Comforter. While on the earth in the limits of the body His range of beneficent effort must be restricted to a few of the many millions of mankind. His method was to individualize. In healing He laid His hands on every one. There was no healing in the mass. If men’s diseased bodies required individualization, much more do their depraved souls. Through the Paraclete the Great Physician can simultaneously medicate millions of sin-sick souls on all the islands of the sea and in both hemispheres wher¬ ever His gospel is preached. “ After the ascension, wherever there was a believer there was an omnipotent Christ. A thousand cities might simultaneously behold the displays of His power. On the day of Pentecost a thousand of the fiercest enemies of Christ laid down their weapons and proclaimed Him Lord to the glory of God the Father. The hearts of His own immediate

74 THE gosfel of the comforter.

disciples, so imperfectly subdued during His ministry, having been brought into complete subjection by the outpouring of the Spirit from the throne of their risen Lord, He went forth conquering and to conquer. It was sufficiently manifest then that Christ had all power in heaven and in earth.” (George Bowen.)

But not only is the quantity of His work multiplied infinitely, but the quality is vastly improved through the mission of the Spirit. While in the body on the earth the work of reconstructing fallen human nature must be done from the outside, at a distance from the centre of personality within. But the Spirit can inter¬ penetrate the soul, impart spiritual life, and lodge the transforming principle in the very core of our being. Yea, He Himself, with my free consent makes my heart His domicile, His earthly holy of holies, thus imparting and conserving holiness at the fountain of action and character. This He can more effectually do than did Jesus in the flesh. For the Comforter does not take up His abode in my body merely, nor in my intellect, nor in any one of my mental powers ; but in my spirit, which He found as a mere unused capacity and filled with His subtle energies which stream forth, quickening intellect, sensibilities and will, chastening every bodily appetite, and in this way sanctifying the material organism through which my spirit acts. Not in what we know , but in what we are , does the Spirit take up His abode. Taking possession of the unexplored recesses of my spirit, the Holy Spirit, after my voluntary surrender and self-effacement, is in a position to inspire and safely guide me individually through all the perils and turning

THE GAIN OF THE PARACLETE.

;s

points of my probation. Thus I am, through the Paraclete, on more intimate terms with the Lord Jesus than ever was “ that disciple whom Jesus loved ” and who leaned on His bosom. It is this spiritual privilege, this closer intimacy with God in His Son, that makes the least in the kingdom of God, the spiritual kingdom established on the day of Pentecost, greater than John the Baptist, even though he was greater than Abraham, the founder, and Moses, the lawgiver, of the greatest na¬ tion on earth in God’s eyes. Hence we emphatically indorse the strong declaration of Alford, especially his capitalized words : “ This ‘ the Comforter will not come if I go not,’ is a convincing proof that the gift of the Spirit at and since the day of Pentecost is something TOTALLY DISTINCT from anything before that time ; a new and loftier dispensation.”

The declaration that it was expedient, or “ good,” as Luther translates it, for Christ to go away in order that the Comforter might come, proves the fact that the work of the Holy Spirit is so indispensable a comple¬ ment to His own work that His bodily withdrawal, which is the condition of the Spirit’s advent, should awaken great joy in the hearts of His disciples. A few disciples, comparatively, had seen Him in His humilia¬ tion, rejected of men ; now One was to come who should be a mirror in which all disciples in all lands and in all gen¬ erations should see Him glorified, and, seeing, “should be transformed into the same image from glory to glory.” Without Jesus radiant with divinity, the Com¬ forter would have nothing to reproduce in the heart of the believer. “ It would be like removing from the

;6

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

photographer’s studio the person whose features the sun is about to fix on the plate prepared to receive them.”

The radical dissimilarity between the old and the new dispensation is seen in the following particulars : In the old dispensation the Spirit externally wrought upon men, but He did not in His person dwell in believers; His working was occasional and for a short time ; He did not permanently abide in them. He was external ; He did not incarnate Himself in believers. His action was intermittent, irregular, and apparently without any law. He came and went like Noah’s dove, finding no abid¬ ing place. But in the new dispensation there is a “ law of the Spirit” by which all believers may receive Him as a permanent dweller in the heart, as another dove seen by John the Baptist descending upon Jesus and abiding on Him as a part of His person. In the Old Testament the Spirit bestowed gifts of an intellectual and physical nature — prophecy to the seventy elders, •skill to Bezaleel, the kingly feeling to Saul, and strength to Samson. But the Comforter dispenses the various graces, such as saintly inward virtues, love, gentleness, goodness, etc. “ Affianced of the soul, the Spirit went oft to see His betrothed, but was not yet one with her ; the marriage was not consummated until the Pentecost, after the glorification of Jesus Christ.”

Another great gain to the disciples in the exchange of the bodily presence of Christ on the earth for His spiritual presence in their hearts, by the Comforter’s coming and indwelling, was in the clearer evidence of his Messiahship and divinity. Doubtless the disciples

THE GAIN OE THE PARACLETE.

77

at the first intimation of Christ’s intended departure asked of one another, “ What proofs can we hereafter point to that we have not followed a pretender if the great miracle worker removes? His amazing miracles have been our chief argument with our enemies hith¬ erto. Nothing can supply their place in even keeping ourselves from serious doubts. What shall we do?” Little could they possibly comprehend that an invisible divine Person could descend from heaven, enter into their very being, pouring a light more resplendent than the sun upon the person of Christ, giving an intuitive perception of His supreme Godhood as indisputable as any self-evident truth of the human reason. They knew nothing of the self-evidencing power of the Spirit to glorify the Son of God in their consciousness and to plant their feet for evermore on the sunlit summit of full assurance and certain knowledge so frequently spoken of by Paul under the strengthened word epignosis .

The death of Christ was deemed by His disciples as the greatest possible disaster, but it redeemed a world of sinners lost. So the departure of their Master was deemed a privation for which they could imagine no compensation, but it removed the' barrier which kept Him from access to their inmost selves. Hitherto He had been imprisoned within walls of flesh obstructing the full communication of Himself to their hearts, just as the unbroken alabaster flask kept the delicious per¬ fumes from filling all the house, every crack and crev¬ ice, with its pervasive odors.

When the God-Man was on the earth He was farther from His disciples, even when He washed their feet,

78 THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

than the sun is from the earth, 93,000,000 miles away. But when He came in the form of the Comforter this distance was annihilated. The disciples now have an eternal sunrise within their hearts. They are ensphered in the Spirit, who reveals Christ. They are enveloped in His personality; they are “ in Christ.”

“ To have the Holy Spirit of God coming through the human nature of our Lord, entering into our spir¬ its, identifying Himself with us, and becoming our very own just as He was the Spirit of Christ Jesus on earth, — surely this is a blessedness worth any sacrifice, for it is the beginning of the indwelling of God Himself.”

I am quite sure that many of my Christian readers will think that I have too highly colored the pre-emi¬ nent superiority of the conscious abiding of the Spirit within to the visible presence of Christ instructing, as¬ suring and cheering His disciples. They may assert that they have no such experience, and. yet that they love Christ. I do not doubt their testimony. The difficulty is easily explained. Their experience of the presence of the Holy Spirit is meagre and unsatisfac¬ tory, because they so little know and honor Him as a person. A person is sensitive when he is spoken of as it and treated as a thing. There may be a faith in Jesus that attains forgiveness, while a faith that claims the abiding Comforter as the Christian’s heritage is lack¬ ing. He that believes in Christ for all that He has promised, “ out of him shall flow rivers of living water.” This promise has not become obsolete. There are many modern witnesses to its fulfilment, though the number is not commensurate with the communion roll

THE GAIN OF THE PARACLETE.

79

of the visible Church. Yet by a candid and patient study of God’s Word, the ground of faith, and by a self-surrender and self-effacement which put the soul wholly in the hands of the Great Physician with unwa¬ vering trust, the utmost stain of evil may be removed, and the presence of Christ be as real as it was to Mary Magdalene.

There are many evangelical Christians who are rest¬ ing in a head-knowledge of Christ to the exclusion of that heart-knowledge which comes from the presence of the Paraclete. It is in a sense true of them that “the letter killeth,” while they might have the Spirit that giveth the more abundant life. The external knowledge of Christ is valuable ; but it may be used as a bar to that intimate internal knowledge of Him who dwells only where He is welcomed' and enthroned. He comes to reign. Orthodoxy is commendable ; but a trust in it and a reliance on the sufficiency of reli¬ gious knowledge may obstruct the fulness of the Spirit. A pauper may be told that he may take from the open treasury of Dives as much silver coin as he can carry in his hands. After filling his hands a bag of gold coin is poured out, and he is permitted to appropriate all that his hands can hold. If he has ordinary wisdom he will drop the silver and grasp the gold. Thus Paul dropped Judaism, not because it was untrue, but be¬ cause it was an obstruction to his appropriation of “ the excellency of knowledge of Christ Jesus.” He afterwards did what every Christian must do if he would realize the true, spiritual Christ within. When it pleased God “ to reveal his Son ” in Paul, some time

8o

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

after his conversion, probably in Arabia while in his three years’ theological course under the tuition of the Holy Ghost, he ceased “ to know Christ after the flesh,” in contrast with knowing Him as a bright reality “ after the Spirit,” the source of ineffable bliss and transcendent life.

Resting in the external knowledge of Christ attained on the plane of nature is a life akin to legalism, a life of effort and failure which must be abandoned to open the door for the incoming and indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Even the apostles trained by Christ “ had to let go, to lose, to die to their old way of knowing Christ, and to- receive as a gift an entirely new life of intercourse with Him.” This may account for the fact that there is so little reminiscence of the incidents in the earthly life of Jesus and even of His miracles in the Epistles of James, Peter, John and Jude, and scarcely any at all in Paul’s. What power would come to the Church if its members would imitate the apostles in ac¬ quiring this new, efficacious and transforming knowl¬ edge of Christ imparted by the indwelling Spirit ! Doubt would then find no dwelling place. Worldly pleasures would lose their seductive ppwer.

“ As by the light of opening day The stars are all concealed,

So earthly pleasures fade away When Jesus is revealed.

What a gain Christ intended the outpouring of the Spirit and His indwelling in the consciousness of His disciples would be in substantiating the -truth of Christ’s resurrection as an undeniable fact to the onlooking

THE GAIN OF THE PARACLETE.

8l

world ! Says George Bowen, “ Is not the great thing wanted this, that the Spirit of God should be so poured out on Christ’s people that men should be made aware of His presence with them and of His presence at the right hand of God?” The work of the Holy Spirit in my heart is God’s credential to me individually. All that Christ did for me profits me nothing if the Holy Spirit does not come into my heart and bring it all home to me. As Christ fulfilled and ended the cere¬ monial law, so the Paraclete is the complement of the gospel and the end of the “ law of sin.”

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‘ CHAPTER XI.

PRAYING TO THE HOLY SPIRIT.

HE fact that there are only a few instances of

1 prayer to the Holy Spirit, and these are only when He is named with the other Persons of the Trinity, has led some persons to refrain from praying to the Paraclete. But there are good reasons for the infrequency of prayer to the Third Person of the ador¬ able Trinity.

When we take into consideration the disposition of the Spirit to conceal Himself in magnifying the Son and the Father revealed in the Son, and when we note the fact that the Holy Spirit is the inspirer of the Bible, it is natural that there should be a comparative silence respecting honors ascribed to Himself. He may purposely have omitted from the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles and the Revelation, the record of the adora¬ tion of Himself by men and angels. This would have been in harmony with His mission to glorify Christ and not Himself.

Again, to give prominence to His claim to be wor¬ shipped might interfere with our dependence on Him to suggest what we should pray for and to make inter¬ cession within us. “ If it is His special function not only to speak to and deal with, but also to speak and work through, the' man whom He renews and sanctifies,

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we can just so far understand that He the less frequently presents Himself for our articulate adoration.” Yet there can be no question of its rightfulness and pro¬ priety, inasmuch as His equality with the Father and the Son is assumed in the prescribed formula of bap¬ tism : “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” The form of benediction also implies prayer to the Third Person of the Trinity. “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion [communication] of the Holy Ghost, be with you all” (II Cor. xiii. 14), is an act of adoration to the three alike. The same may be said of the blessing pronounced upon the seven churches in Rev. i. 4, where the perfection of the offices of the Holy Spirit is spoken of in the Hebrew idiom of sevenfold¬ ness. It is to be noted also that in this text the Spirit is not mentioned after the Son, but after Him whose name signifies “ he who is, and was, and is to come',” i. e., Jehovah. Says Prof. Moule, “ The believer’s re¬ lation to the Spirit is not so much that of direct adora¬ tion as of a reliance which wholly implies it.”

The Scriptures ascribe divine titles and attributes to the Holy Spirit equally with the Father and the Son (Acts v. 3, 4; Acts xxviii. 25 with Isa. vi. 9; Heb. iii. 7-9 with Ex. xvii. 7).

The equality of the three divine Persons in unity is formulated in the Christian covenant and commission : “ All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all nations, bap¬ tizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt, xxviii. 18, 19).

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Richard Watson, the standard theologian of Metho¬ dism for one hundred years, says on this text: “The form exhibits three persons without any note of superi¬ ority or inferiority, except the mere order in which they are placed. It conveys authority in the united name, and the authority is therefore equal. It supposes . . . faith, that is, not merely belief, but, as the object of religious profession and adherence, trust in each, or collectively in the one name which unites the three in one. It implies devotion to the service of each, the yielding of obedience, the consecration of every power of mind and body to each, and therefore each must have equal right to this surrender and to the authority which it implies.” (Institutes, Vol. I, page 635.)

It should be borne in mind that all orthodox be¬ lievers must pray to the Holy Spirit when they pray to God. For the Christian concept of God is that in the one divine substance there are three subsistences, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, or three Persons in the one divine nature. This may not be distinctly before the minds of some Christians when they pray. Nevertheless, prayer reaches its full evangelical devel¬ opment and efficiency in the consciousness that through the divine Son we have access by the one divine Spirit unto the Father (Eph. ii. 18). The treasures of devotion of the whole Church, the products of holy men who have composed petitions and hymns, contain invocations to the Holy Spirit, such as “ Veni , Creator Spiritusp

“ Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire And lighten with celestial fire,”

PRAYING TO THE HOLY SPIRIT. 85

and the “ Veni, Sancte Spiritus ,” thus in part translated by Ray Palmer :

“ Come, Holy Ghost, in love Shed on us from above Thine own bright ray !

Divinely good Thou art ;

Thy sacred gift impart To gladden each sad heart :

O come to-day ! ”

Since the Spirit, equal in power and majesty to the Father and the Son, is the agent by whom both touch believing souls and impart the wealth of their love, it is natural that He should also be the object of devotion and that His ministration of grace should be invoked, at least in impassioned ejaculatory prayer.

Here we note an error in the Plymouth Brethren, who discourage prayer for the Holy Ghost because He was given once for all on the day of Pentecost. This error arises from overlooking two facts : 1 . That the spir¬

itual capacity of the normal believer is ever increasing and needs an ever-enlarging fulness of the Spirit. It will not do to confound mechanical fulness with vital fulness. Dr. William Arthur’s illustration of the dif¬ ference between these is worth repeating. At evening fill two vessels with milk, an earthen pitcher and a healthy baby. In the morning you will find the pitcher full and the baby empty and crying to be filled again. The Christian is not an earthen pitcher which can be kept mechanically full, but a “ newborn babe desiring the sincere milk of the word, that he may grow thereby.” Hence the propriety of constant prayer for the Spirit to be more and more fully realized. 2. An-

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THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

other fact not noted by the Brethren is the example of repeated asking and receiving of the Spirit even in Pentecostal days. On the first day after Christ arose the apostles received the Holy Ghost from the mouth of Jesus (John xx. 22), and after forty days they were in a ten days’ prayer meeting with one accord in prayer for the Holy Spirit in larger realization of His presence within them, as we infer from Peter’s sermon and its glorious sequel, the tongues of fire.

The law of spiritual growth is by successive uplifts or baptisms of the Spirit. By a study of the Acts of the Apostles we find that the same persons who “ were all filled with the Holy Ghost ” (Acts ii. 4) were a few days or weeks afterwards, again in answer to prayer, “ all filled with the Holy Ghost ” (iii. 31).

“ Prayer is the Christian’s vital breath ;

We enter heaven by prayer.11

What is the object for which the believer prays ex¬ cept it be for an ever-increasing fulness of the Spirit?

But did not Christ refer to the Holy Spirit when He said to the woman at the well, “ Whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst”? Yes, but the tense of the verb “ drinketh ” denotes con¬ tinued appropriation. If the Christian thirsts for any other water, it is because he has ceased to drink of Christ’s “ living water.” Says Bengel, “ Truly that water, as far as it depends on itself, has in it an ever¬ lasting virtue, and when thirst returns, the defect is on the part of the man, not of the water.” The life ema¬ nating from Christ must be constantly made our own anew. “ He that cometh [continually*] unto me shall

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never hunger ; and he that believeth [uninterruptedly] on me shall never thirst ” (John vi. 35). Says Tholuck : “ The figure means, this water will once for all be re¬ ceived into the inner nature, will be immanent in man, and will attend him through every stage of his being, even to eternity. The need of an increase of this water is not thereby excluded.”

The Holy Spirit, of which water is a symbol (John viii. 39), is as a river of life flowing from the Father and the Son (Rev. xxii. 1) into all hearts open skyward, and incessant prayer for the Spirit keeps our hearts thus open. “ How much more shall your heavenly Father be continually giving the Holy Spirit to them that constantly ask him.”

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THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER,

CHAPTER XII.

THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT.

IN the Epistle to the Romans Paul speaks of the two laws or uniform and controlling forces — the law of sin producing spiritual death, and the law of the Spirit inspiring spiritual life which becomes eternal on the condition of persevering faith. In the thought of many people the Spirit is capricious in His action, and sovereign in the sense that He is a law unto Himself, observing no conditions and establishing no regular or¬ der of sequences by which His aid may be secured. Perhaps this error may be truthfully ascribed to that religious teaching which magnifies the sovereignty of God as exercised unconditionally. In some instances it may be traced to a misunderstanding of Christ’s com¬ parison of the mystery of the new birth to “ the wind blowing as it listeth.” He did not intimate that the winds are not under physical laws, but rather that science had not then, as it has not now, a knowledge of pneumatics sufficient to predict with infallible certainty what will be the direction and intensity of the wind an hour hence. Some infer that the Holy Spirit acts on men in promoting revivals of religion with the same uncertainty and apparent lawlessness. Hence revivals come to a church like thunderstorms, without regard to any human conditions. This idea is confirmed by a

THE LAW OF THE SPIRIT.

8c

faulty translation of a sentence in Peter’s sermon m Solomon’s porch, Acts iii. 19, “ Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the pres¬ ence of the Lord.” This rendering of the text com¬ mands sinners to be ready for the blotting out of their sins whenever it may please God to send the times of refreshing. The correct rendering makes the times of refreshing or revival depend on the commanded human condition of repentance, “ Repent . . . that so there may come seasons,” etc. (Revised Version). In fact the Spirit is endeavoring to produce in every sinner peni¬ tence for sin and faith in Christ, in order that He may impart spiritual life and be God’s messenger of adop¬ tion, inspiring the joyful cry, “ Abba, Father.” This is the purpose for which He is reproving the world. He yearns to inspire in every human soul the gladness of the filial feeling in place of the dread and foreboding of punishment which haunt conscious guilt. He de¬ lights to take up His abode in the believer. His per¬ sonality interpenetrates ours just in proportion to the perfectness of our self-surrender. It is a wise remark of Dr. A. J. Gordon that the Spirit, like the wind, al¬ ways moves toward a vacuum. By entire consecration make your heart vacant of all love of the world, and the Holy Spirit will come in Pentecostal power and fill the vacuum.

The reasons why so few are thus filled are various.

I. Many do not know that this fulness of the Spirit is the privilege of all Christians. They think it is an exceptional experience of a favored few, “ the elect of

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the elect.” They think it is not modest to assume that they belong to this small company. This narrow view of the gift of the abiding Paraclete weakens faith. They dare not appropriate the gift which may not be¬ long to them, and so they fail to realize their full heri¬ tage in Christ.

2. Others imagine that they must always have a propensity to sin, and that they must sin a little to keep them humble. As the fulness of the Spirit would not be consistent with depravity and occasional sins, they deem it not a normal experience, and abstain from ef¬ fort to receive it.

3. Many fail because they do not know the law of the Spirit, the conditions by which He works His won¬ ders in human hearts. Till within a very few years the whole race of men failed to utilize a mighty force in nature, the power of electricity, to light, heat and trans¬ port men, move the world’s machinery and convey in¬ telligence with the speed of lightning under the seas and over the continents. As we look back upon it what a slow and sleepy world it was, simply because it did not know the law of electricity or the conditions of all these utilities. But men began to study and to ex¬ periment, conforming to the ascertained qualities of this mysterious agent and gaining more and more power to harness this tremendous force to the chariot of human progress. What new electrical discoveries and inven¬ tions are in the future we cannot tell because we have not reached the end of the chapter of electrical knowl¬ edge. John Wesley used to tell his people that as believers they were weak because they were not more

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knowing. This is the cause of much of the weakness of modern Christians. They do not by day and by night study the law of the Spirit as Edison studied the law of electricity* in the production of light and the re¬ production of articulate sounds. Many nominal Chris¬ tians “ have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost ” consciously receivable by the indi¬ vidual believer in Jesus Christ. When by the diligent study of the Word of God they believe that the Spirit has a personal existence and that He stands at the door of their hearts and knocks, then they will be able to fulfil the conditions of His full incoming and permanent abiding. What hinders such a universal experience? Ignorance, unbelief, worldly pleasures, neglect of Bible study and prayer, satisfaction with mere formalism, un¬ willingness to be identified with the so-called spiritual extremists and cranks, and dislike to stand alone with Christ or to be crucified with Him. It is the law of the Spirit to enter in where the door is opened and He is cordially welcomed with His scourge of small cords to drive out everything which profanes the temple of the human soul and body. “ For the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are.”

4. But some are not consciously filled with the Holy Spirit because He comes as a refiner and purifier. They are unwilling to submit themselves to this pain¬ ful purgation. They shrink from the crucible by which the divine Refiner sits till He can see His own perfect image in the mirror of molten gold purified of all dross. They admire the Son of God and desire to be conformed to His image, but they dislike the pro-

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THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

cess of total and irreversible self-surrender and self¬ crucifixion. They cannot truthfully sing :

u O that in me the sacred fire Might now begin to glow,

Burn up the dross of base desire,

And make the mountains flow ! ”

God can do His perfect work in a soul only when the will is in the attitude of complete, trustful sub¬ mission. Only when the will thus bows to God’s will does faith in His promises mount up to its climax. For this Paul prayed, “that ye may know what is the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who be¬ lieve.” Then he adds the measure of that power which stands ready to transfigure believers, “according to the working of his mighty power, which he wrought in Christ when he raised him from the dead.” The greatest miracle in the universe, the miracle attested by men, by angels and by God, is the resurrection of His Son. Even the creation of the world was not so striking an exhibition of omnipotence. Yet Paul as¬ sures us that the same resurrection power in “ its ex¬ ceeding greatness” stands ready to work its wonders in “ us who believe ” with that faith which appropriates the largest promises of God. This highest upreaching of faith is possible only to the deepest submission of the human will. To this point of entire self-surrender every believer has the gracious ability to descend with¬ out the incentive of outward adversities, losses, be¬ reavements. disappointments, persecutions and bodily afflictions. These, as in the case of Job, are necessary to the revelation to the world of our perfect trust, loy-

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alty and submission to God, but not to the production of these virtues. Many have had the spirit of the martyrs who were never led to the stake. The axe and block were once deemed necessary to Christian perfection. But this is a mistake. God takes the will for the deed. We can climb to as high spiritual alti¬ tudes in the sunshine as in the storm ; yes, to higher. There is such a thing as an equation of spiritual ad¬ vantages. Those who are on the verge of the twen¬ tieth century may achieve as lofty Christian excel¬ lences as the believers who listened to the preaching of Peter at Pentecost. The gift of the Holy Spirit has suffered no diminution because of the intervening cen¬ turies. Like Christ, the giver of the Paraclete, He is the same yesterday, to-day and forever. Fulfil the conditions, and the humblest modern believer may receive Him in the perfect performance of His offices as graciously and as effectively as did the company in the upper room. The externals of sound and tongues of fire were no part of the essential and inward grace bestowed in the Comforter.

When any local church, any company of believers associated for spiritual ends, fulfils the social condi¬ tions, — all of one accord in one place making the re¬ ception of the Holy Spirit their only business for at least ten days, — Pentecost will be repeated in every essential particular. Their hearts will be purified by faith, and they will be endowed with a marvellous spiritual insight and courage and utterance.

It is not the law of the Spirit that His transfiguring power should decrease with the lapse of ages, nor with

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THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

the spread of education and the growth of intelligence and culture. It is true that there is an intellectual pride with a pretence to culture which boasts that it has outgrown such so-called crudities as disfigured Christianity on the day of Pentecost. These over¬ wise philosophers insist that the doctrine that one personality, even though divine, can interpenetrate a human personality and consciously abide therein, vio¬ lates all the known principles of mental philosophy and lays the foundation of various forms of fanaticism, in the end destructive of all morality and sound piety. Our reply to this is that the greater the value of a coin the greater its liability to be counterfeited. The highest possible experience for men dwelling in houses of clay is to be inhabited by God in the person of His Spirit. This is a mystery next to the incarnation of the Son of God in human form.

It is natural that the proclamation that both the body and soul of every believer may through simple faith become the habitation of God through the Spirit, should aw’aken the hostility of the great adversary of all goodness, and that he should endeavor to discredit this glorious privilege of the indwelling Paraclete by inspiring counterfeits grossly defective in moral char¬ acter or greatly unbalanced in mental equipoise. This he has done in every revival of genuine spirituality since the first effusion of the Spirit of promise, as in the days of Luther and also in Wesley’s times. But as men of common sense still continue to put gold in their purses despite the spurious coin occasionally uttered, so wise men and women will by the prayer of faith

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receive, as the greatest boon possible to mortals, the Holy Spirit as a distinct and permanently abiding bless¬ ing. Such wise people, if asked how can the divine thus dwell in the human, the infinite in the finite, and both personalities be preserved, will no more attempt to explain this mystery than they will the enigma of electricity filling a mass of iron while both remain unchanged, and that of the immaterial spirit inhabiting the material body while both retain their identity. The rays of the sun after passing through a double convex lens of ice will kindle a fire. So the Holy Spirit has kindled an inextinguishable fire in many an icy heart. The facts in both the natural and the spirit¬ ual realm must stand, though our poor philosophy is baffled in accounting for the manner of the facts. It is enough for us to know the conditions by which the facts are produced, where the fact itself is of tran¬ scendent value, as that man may be indwelt by God. This honor and blessedness, unknown to the patriarchs, to the Israelites, the chosen people of God, and even to the twelve apostles before Pentecost, is now offered to the most illiterate and obscure believer in Jesus Christ who will comply with the conditions by which a per¬ sonal Pentecost may be experienced.

In answer to our exposition of “the law of the Spirit ” as invariably cleansing and filling all who exercise an all-surrending faith, it may be alleged that Paul teaches that the Spirit performs the work of His offices in “every man severally as he will.” This is said, not of the graces of the Spirit, but of the distribution of His nine extraordinary gifts enumerated in I Cor. xii. 8-II.

9 6 THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

The Spirit Himself is Christ’s gift to every one “ who loves him and keeps his commandments.” He is to be in us, and we are to “know him;” i. e.} to be con¬ scious of His abiding in us “ forever.” Not only the Spirit but also the Father and the Son “ make their abode ” with us. All this is promised in John xiv. 1 5- 23 ; not sovereignly to whomsoever the Spirit wills, but universally without exception wherever there is evangelical love to Christ evidenced by obedience. This it is which makes the least in the Pentecostal king¬ dom greater than Christ’s forerunner, who was ranked by Him as superior to Abraham, the founder of God’s earthly church, and to Moses, the lawgiver of the world.

Many people are so dazzled by the splendor of the outward and extraordinary gifts of the Spirit that they undervalue the infinitely superior boon of the indwell¬ ing of the giver Himself, imparting life and adorning with all the Christian graces. To put gifts above grace is an old mistake. Simon Magus is not the last in¬ stance of this kind. Many are now eager to possess the gift of healing who would not cross the street to receive the grace of perfected holiness. It is a very serious error to regard anything as superior to the fruit of the Spirit. Churches fall into it when, seeking after a pastor, they first ask, “ Is he brilliant in the pulpit?” “Is he rhetorical, poetical, oratorical?” “If he is we must have him.” The question respecting his piety, his fulness of the Spirit, his grip of faith, his knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, the basis of faith, and the indispensable qualification for such preaching as saves

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and sanctifies, is not emphasized, and frequently is not asked at all. Occasionally we find a church inquiring for a Barnabas. “ For he was a good man, and full of the Holy Ghost and of faith : and much people was added unto the Lord.” Yet his name, “ son of ex¬ hortation,” as in the Revision, is not suggestive of pulpit oratory of the classical sort.

The doctrine of the law of the Spirit is very beauti¬ fully stated by Christ in His dialogue with the Samari¬ tan woman at Jacob’s well. “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink, thou wouldst have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.” The gift which He would have bestowed was the Holy Spirit, according to John vii. 38, 39, “ This he spake of the Spirit, which they who believe on Him should receive: for the Holy Ghost was not yet given, because Jesus was not glori¬ fied.” Note the invariable law of certain receiving following confident asking: If thou hadst asked, He would have given. There is the same invariable order of effect following cause in the spiritual realm as there is in the material realm. Turn the faucet, and you get a stream of water so long as the faucet is connected with the reservoir on a higher level. Try this a thousand times, and the same effect follows. Turn the spigot of true prayer, and the living water, the personal Holy Spirit, is poured out upon the thirsty soul. It has been well said that God answers all true prayer and wishes to receive more. In the bosom of the Infinite Father there is a shoreless and fathomless Lake Superior of living waters ready to fill millions and billions of human

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spirits when they supply the aqueducts. In fact, the main aqueduct was laid by God Himself on the day of Pentecost, and the water of life is brought to every door. To appropriate it we must lay the individual service-pipe.

“ Angelic spirits, countless souls,

Of Thee have drunk their fill ;

And to eternity will drink Thy joy and glory still.

4 ‘ O little heart of mine ! shall pain Or sorrow make thee moan,

When all this God is all for thee,

A Father all thine own? ”

Before leaving this charming scene of Jacob’s well, we call attention to another spiritual law. Not only does receiving depend on asking, but asking depends on knowing. “ If thou knewest, thou wouldst have asked.” Many souls wander for years in painful thirst because no one tells them of the supply of water within their reach. Hence the need of ceaseless tes¬ timony by those who have found the unfailing fountain Hence the pressure of the missionary motive upon all who “ have been made partakers of the Holy Ghost.” Interest in Christian missions in pagan lands and city slums is a fair gauge of the spirituality of an individ ual and of a church.

If knowing depends on testimony, the inquiry arises, How many witnesses have we among our readers who can attest the fulness of the Spirit?

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CHAPTER XIII.

MIRACLES OF THE HOLY GHOST.

THE question is often asked, What are “ the greater works ” which believers in Christ shall do ? This marvellous promise is found in His consolatory address a few days before His death. The chief topic of encouragement, comfort and hope is the Paraclete whom the risen Lord will bestow. His works will be more wonderful than the physical miracles of Jesus Christ. This is declared in John xiv. 12-17. I quote Dr. Campbell’s version, which is remarkable chiefly for its punctuation. It must be borne in mind that there is no punctuation in the original. “ Verily, verily, I say unto you” — a formula “in which the Son of God speaks out of His coequality with the Father ” (Stier) — “ He who believeth on me, shall himself do such works as I do ; nay, even greater than these shall he do; because I go to my Father, and will do whatso¬ ever ye shall ask in my name. That the Father may be glorified in the Son, whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, I will do.” It is worthy of note that this doing greater works, this survival of the supernatural from age to age, is not the exclusive prerogative of the apostles, but it belongs, to every one, however humble, who be¬ lieves on Christ. Again, our greater works are done by the glorified Jesus on the throne above in response

IOO

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

to our faith. In the same breath He declares that He will do the greater works which we shall do. This paradox He explains in His next utterance : “ If ye love me, keep my commandments ; and I will entreat the Father, and he will give you another Monitor to continue with you forever, even the Spirit of truth.” This “ Helper, Advocate ; Greek, Paraclete ” (Revised Version, margin) will be the divine agent sent down from heaven to do these greater miracles through be¬ lievers in Christ. This brings us to “ the miracles of the Holy Ghost ” which in the Old Testament are physical, as when Ezekiel says, “ The Spirit lifted me up and took me away.” .The same manifestation of supernatural physical power by the Holy Ghost was experienced by Philip : V The Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, that the eunuch saw him no more.” But the promise under discussion does not relate to mira¬ cles in the realm of matter, but rather to those in the province of mind, in the re-creation of the human soul, called figuratively birth from above, or the new birth, the resurrection of a dead soul, the new creation. This spiritual miracle is greater than any physical miracle wrought by Christ before He burst asunder the gates of death by His inherent power to take again the life which He had laid down, for the following reasons:

i. Physical miracles were temporal in their effects. Those raised from sickness died of disease in a few years. The multitudes fed by miracle hungered again in a few hours. The eyes into which Jesus by a word let in the light were soon darkened again by the shad¬ ows of the tomb. The tongue of the dumb loosened

MIRACLES OF THE HOLY GHOST.

IOI

by the Son of man was soon silenced by the touch of death. But miracles wrought in the transfiguration of the soul are enduring unto eternal life. “ He that be- lieveth on the Son hath eternal life ” within the grasp of his free agency. Jesus healed the body for time, the Spirit heals the soul for eternity. “ A healed leper may appear to be a greater miracle than a renewed soul, but in reality, in comparison, he is hardly a miracle at all ! ” (Joseph Parker.)

2. The results of spiritual miracles are far more valuable. Mind is far superior to matter. Hence “ to minister to a mind diseased and pluck from the mem¬ ory a rooted sorrow ” is an achievement in a higher realm and of immensely greater value. For this reason Christ Himself did not place a primary emphasis on physical wonders as His credentials, and they are scarcely so much as referred to in the apostolic writ¬ ings. Peter, who had seen them all, mentions them only once, and then only to Christ’s murderers in Jerusalem, who were incapable of appreciating any higher proof of His Messiahship : “ Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs.” St. Paul magnifies those spiritual marvels which God wrought by the Holy Spirit in the regeneration and sanctification of souls. In his estima¬ tion “ the shining in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ ” was a greater act than the Fiat lux which illumined the first day of creation (II Cor. iv. 6).

3. To transform a spirit from death to life, from sin to holiness, requires a higher power than any change

102

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

wrought in matter. Spirit is a self-determining person¬ ality which may successfully withstand omnipotence, or rather, physical omnipotence is inapplicable to the pro¬ duction of spiritual effects. Sin cannot be crushed out of a soul with an almighty trip hammer. God can transform inert matter as He may will, but He is power¬ less to regenerate a stubborn human will ; but in the presence of a consenting will He displays to the aston¬ ished universe “ the exceeding greatness of his power to usward who believe.” Hence the age of the most notable miracles is now in the very zenith of its glory. They are visible in every land where the gospel is preached in faith. Boston has just witnessed the transformation of a burglar and drunkard into a mis¬ sionary on the Congo. Recovered from the slums and converted in the Kneeland Street Rescue Mission, he immediately wrote to the governor of Maryland, the scene of his crimes, offering at his request to appear in court, testify against himself, and be sentenced to the penitentiary. In the absence of such a request he volunteered to go to a deadly clime to preach Christ mighty to save. “ When the proud Brahman has re¬ ceived the truth as it is in Jesus, and extended the right hand of Christian fellowship to the meanest member of the lowest caste whom he has met at the Lord’s Sup¬ per, a greater miracle has been wrought than in the healing of the lame or the raising of the dead.” To put God’s law “ in the inward parts ” of a tribe of thieves in India, as the Holy Spirit has done through Bishop J. M. Thoburn, transforming them into sons of God, “ is more than to fill the firmament with stars.”

MIRACLES OF THE HOLY GHOST.

103

“ Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, ... and it shall be unto Jehovah for an everlasting miracle that shall not be cut off.” Spiritual miracles, in the regeneration of depraved and wicked men, are the standing proof of the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Re¬ generation, crowned with the entire sanctification of a soul once dead in sin, loving what God hates and hat¬ ing what God loves, is the supreme miracle of the Holy Ghost vividly portrayed by Paul : “ Fornicators, idol¬ aters, adulterers, effeminate [catamites], nor abusers of themselves with mankind [sodomites], nor thieves [robbers, Conybeare and Howson], nor covetous [wan¬ tons, Conybeare and Howson], nor drunkards, nor re- vilers, shall inherit the kingdom of God ” (I Cor. vi. 9, 10). What a rogues’ gallery is this ! as vile a gang of criminals as ever broke jail. What can the Holy Spirit do with these but to abandon them forever? But, hold ! let us read further: “And such were some of you; but ye washed yourselves [Revised Version, margin], but ye were sanctified, but ye were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and by THE Spirit of our God.” The^ Paraclete has transformed them all into a company of saints bearing the image of Christ and candidates for promotion to thrones beside the archangels. Bad men have been transformed into good men standing in the same shoes.

104

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE SPIRIT’S WORK IN REGENERATION.

REGENERATION is the lodgement by the Holy Spirit of the new principle of life. This is love to God, which is the ruling motive of every gen¬ uine Christian. There is a radical and an essential dif¬ ference between those who are born again and the best of those who lay claim to only natural goodness, a beautiful moral character revolving around self as a centre. But the great transition from spiritual death to spiritual life does not make the child of God at once complete in holiness. The Holy Spirit in sanctifica¬ tion does not work magically, nor mechanically like a washing machine, “ but by the influence of grace, in accordance with the essential constitution of man, and in the way of a vital process, only by degrees com¬ pletely renewing the soul.” While the Spirit in the new birth touches the whole nature, the thoughts, the feelings and the will, so that the man is a new creature, his renewal is not complete in any part. At first he is in spiritual knowledge only a babe. His faith is un¬ steady and often mingled with distrust, while his love is not usually strong enough to secure uninterrupted victory over temptation. The enthronement of love does not immediately render the pleasures of sin unat¬ tractive, nor destroy the painfulnes9 of self-denial, nor

THE SPIRIT’S WORK IN REGENERATION. 105

instantaneously change sinful habits. Such is the state of immature converts to Christ, “the flesh lusting against the Spirit.” The Corinthians were character¬ ized as “ carnal, walking as men.” We know that John says that “ he that has been born of God sinneth not” when he is describing those whom he styles “ fathers” or adult believers, just as Paul describes the same class as having “ crucified the flesh with the passions and lusts.* Neither of these apostles is describing an ideal Christian, as some teach who deny the possibility of complete deliverance from depravity in this life. They are describing regeneration at its climax, the glorious possibilities of the birth from above, when it has culmi¬ nated in perfected holiness.

Bishop Foster sums up the defects of the experience of regeneration in a "more comprehensive manner than we remember seeing in any theological treatise. He does not minify the experience of regeneration, but declares it to be a glorious experience. He, however, shows -its defects in this manner : “ I note, third, that dissatisfiedness of the soul with itself is a common ex¬ perience of all regenerate souls, varying from intense distress at times to mild regret. Its experiences are not satisfactory. It has a prevailing consciousness of inexcusable defects. It does not reach its ideal. It feels the chiding of the Holy Spirit. It lashes itself with reprovings. It often carries an unhealed wound because of its unfaithfulness or failure to be what it feels it ought to be. There is the abiding consciousness that there is something better for it. When it is upheld

See Appendix, Note E.

io 6 THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

and sustained in an average experience, and others think well of it, and there is no external failure visible to other eyes, it discerns inward poverties which grieve and distress it. It would love more, be more patient, more brave, more trusting, more cheerful, stronger, more robust; it would work more and do more and be more. There are holy yearnings in it after something higher and nobler. There is often a distressing sense of remaining evil in it. I think I am safe in saying this is universal experience, subsequent to the experience of regeneration. This has been called in our theologiz¬ ing and in the theologizing of all the Christian schools, ‘ the remains of the carnal mind,’ ‘ unextracted roots of inbred sin,’ ‘the spirit of the flesh,’ ‘ natural corruption,’ ‘ seeds of depravity,’ ‘ the old man,’ and by various other semi-scriptural names. These phrases all point to a fact, but not unfrequently a sensuous meaning is at¬ tached to them which leads wide apart from the truth which they aim to represent. They are supposed to represent some sediment or infusion in the soul or in the body, or in both, which must be washed out. What }s meant and what is true is this : when the soul is for¬ given and its affections are turned to righteousness, so that it passes from under the dominion of evil, impulses and inclination to evil are not completely eradicated. They still arise and assert themselves. They assail and disturb the peace of the soul. They have a constant tendency to prevail with it. They find support in its old habits and in its native lusts — that is, desires and cravings.”* In the above truthful condensation of ex-

* Merrick Lectures on “ The Philosophy of Christian Experience.'

THE SPIRIT’S WORK IN REGENERATION. 107

perience it will be noticed that the bishop teaches that we are not entirely sanctified at conversion — a doctrine often denied in the Church to-day. He teaches as John Wesley did, that there remains yet that which needs a farther work of the Spirit, which is called, in the lan¬ guage of theology, entire sanctification, which supple¬ ments the defects of the soul still remaining after regen¬ eration.

The adverse influences and tendencies which con¬ tinue after the new birth imperil the very existence of the new principle of love to God by overcoming and choking it, unless it is continually nourished and strengthened by divine grace. Strength is supplied to the believer by the inner presence of the Holy Spirit. His indwelling is by faith. If faith declines, the Spirit’s sphere in the soul is narrowed. If confidence in God is “ cast away ” — a possible act against which we are warned in the Scriptures (Heb. x. 35) — then the Spirit withdraws, or rather, is excluded by unbelief, and love, the vital spark of the spiritual life, expires. Hence the question whether the Spirit shall be a merely transient impulse toward purity, or a lasting power, depends on the free will of the regenerate soul. The parable of the sower is exemplified to-day in the case of those who have no depth of earth. Their love to Christ soon degenerates into a mere sentiment with little or no influence on practical life, and in a short time the sentiment itself entirely evaporates, and the soul becomes “twice dead, plucked up by the roots” (Jude 12). What is the safeguard against such a disaster? It is such an indwelling of the fulness of the

o8

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

Spirit as excludes everything contrary to the divine nature by filling and flooding the soul with a love that is ever enlarging the vessel and ever filling it to the brim. Then love is perfect in the sense that it is no longer mixed in kind and so weak in degree as to be unable to encounter the temptation successfully. Says Prof. Candlish : “ The new life of Christianity is a unity, and though, on account of the imperfect and abnormal condition of most Christians, it does not show itself with perfect symmetry, yet it tends toward moral excellence and perfection in every direction, and the more vigor¬ ous the central principle of religious life is, the more will particular virtues be developed and increased.” This is progress toward entire sanctification by the Holy Spirit, and is a necessary condition of that crown¬ ing work. The question is often asked, “Why does not the Spirit entirely sanctify when He regenerates?” We answer, it is because that neither the consecration nor the faith of the penitent sinner is adequate to this com¬ plete work. The person then surrenders his bad things, he lays down his arms, quits hjs rebellion and sues for pardon. This is all that his faith grasps. But he soon learns that a deeper consecration is requisite, that all his good things, his possessions, his bodily powers, his intellectual faculties must be fully consecrated to Christ. To pour all his money into the treasury of his imperilled country and to give his life by enlisting in her military service is far different from the act of surrender as a prisoner of war. In the next place, faith for entire sanc¬ tification is a far higher act, involving a deeper knowl¬ edge of one’s spiritual needs and a larger comprehen-

THE SPIRIT’S WORK IN REGENERATION. 109

sion of the vastness of the supply found in Jesus Christ. This deeper knowledge is not found in the spiritual babe.

Moreover, at the risk of being suspected of predes- tinarianism, I insist on another reason why the Spirit does not entirely purge the soul at the new birth. The impartation of spiritual life to a dead soul is wrought by the Spirit alone without the soul’s co-operation, though it is active in repentance, faith and turning to the Lord. It is active in conversion, but passive in re¬ generation. Theologians would call the first a case of synergism and the second an instance of monergism. If our distinction between these works of the Spirit is correct, it affords a sufficient reason why entire sanctifi¬ cation could not be wrought by the Spirit at the time of the new birth. The old man cannot be crucified with¬ out the co-operation of the new man. He must sign the death warrant of that sin in the flesh which the Son of God by His sacrifice for sin has condemned, in order to make that condemnation effectual for the destruction of “the body of sin” (Rom. vi. 6). “In implanting the new life at first, the Holy Spirit has to deal with a soul that is indeed essentially active, but in regard to spirituality insensible or opposed to the call of God. Hence this work is entirely due to divine power ; we are His workmanship, created in Christ unto good works. But in the preservation and development of the new life the Spirit has to deal with a soul that is now spiritually alive and able and inclined to work in the same direction as His work.” * In sanctification “ we are God’s fellow-workers ” (I Cor. iii. 9, Revised

* Prof. Candlish.

I 10

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

Version). Hence the momentous import of the exhor¬ tation of Paul, “ Carry out with fear and trembling your own salvation. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” * The occasion for fear and trembling arises from the fact that God’s work in me may fail to reach perfection because of my failure to work perfectly with Him. It is indeed a solemn and awful thing to be fellow-workers with the holy God in the production of the most valu¬ able thing in the universe, a holy character. In the work of purifying ourselves while God is refining us how careful should we be lest through lack of faith in His exceedingly great and precious promises we should mar the work of His Spirit in perfectly conforming us to the image of His Son. As a slight motion may spoil the image which the king of day is imprinting on the pre¬ pared plate, so a little self-indulgence or heedlessness or wavering of faith may blur the image of Christ which the Spirit is creating in me. I am responsible not only for all that I can do towards completed holiness, which is perfect consecration, but I am also responsible for all that the Holy Ghost can do with my co-operation.

The work of the Holy Spirit in the progressive sanc¬ tification of the newborn soul is indirect : in opening the heart to receive the truth, f the instrument of puri-

* Dean Alford’s version of Phil. ii. 12, 13.

t“ In II Thess. ii. 13, sanctification of the Spirit is placed in close connection with belief of the truth. And from Acts xxvi. 18 we learn that not only forgiveness of sins, but a lot among the sanctified, is obtained by faith in Christ. This accords with the broad principles asserted in Mark ix. 23, * All things are possible to him who believes in Gal. iii. 14, ‘ That we may receive the promise of the Spirit through faith,’ and in Acts xv. 9, ‘By faith having purified their hearts,’ and with a great mass of Bible teaching which I have not space to quote and expound. In Rom. vi. 11, St. Paul bids us ‘ Reckon ourselves to be dead to sin, but living for God in Christ Jesus.’ This reckon¬ ing is the mental process of faith, for it results in assurance resting upon the promise of God.” — J. A. Beet’s “ Holiness as Understood by the Writers of the Bible, ” page 55.

THE SPIRIT’S WORK IN REGENERATION.

I I I

fication ; in giving vigor to the spiritual life ; in strength¬ ening the will to resist temptation, and in diminishing the power of evil habits. It is repressive of depravity rather than totally destructive.

The entire eradication of the propensity to sin is by the direct and instantaneous act of the Holy Spirit re¬ sponsive to a special act of faith in Christ claiming the full heritage of the believer. “ When we learn that God claims us for His own, and when, after fruitless personal efforts to render Him the devotion He requires, we learn for the first time that God will work in us by the agency of His Spirit and by actual spiritual contact with Christ the devotion He requires, and when we venture to believe, ... we find by happy experience that according to our faith it is done to us. The ex¬ perience thus gained becomes an era in our spiritual life. We feel that we are then holy in a sense unknown to us before.” * It is in reference to this distinctive act of the Sanctifier that it is noted by an eminent expositor “ that in the New Testament we never read expressly and unmistakably of sanctification as a gradual process.” This is said in view of the almost universal use of the aorist tense of the verbs to sanctify and to cleanse.

To this distinct and decisive action of the Holy Spirit in the extinction of proneness to sin, bringing the believer into the land of rest, in marvellous contrast with His previous wilderness experience, after His re¬ generation, there are too many intelligent and trust¬ worthy witnesses to be lightly passed by as of no ac¬ count. They assure us that they were truly converted

* J. A . Beet’s “ Holiness as Understood by the Writers of the Bible,” page 60.

I 12

THE GOSPEL OF THE COMFORTER.

and received the direct witness of the Spirit to their adoption ; that they did not backslide, but grew in grace ; that they were not conscious of living in wilful violation of any known law of God, and that they could testify that there is no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus. But they solemnly aver that through all their regenerate life, before receiving Christ for their entire sanctification, they were conscious of a strong inward enemy whom they were striving to bind and cast out but always failed ; that by the study of the Scriptures they found that this rebel within was called “ the old man,” whom theologians style “ original sin;” that after reading or hearing the testimony of those en¬ tirely consecrated souls who had through specific faith and importunate prayer found complete deliverance, they definitely sought for this distinctive work of the Holy Ghost, and at an ever-memorable date they emerged into a blissful consciousness of inward purity and profound peace far beyond all former experiences. This victory many have attested decades and scores of years. Dr. Asa Mahan, whose temper in his youth was so ungovernable that his father predicted that in a fit of anger he would kill some one and expiate his crime on the scaffold, and whose irascibility in the early years of his Christian ministry was the cause of untold grief, testifies to a change wrought by the Holy Spirit so great as to make the last forty years of his life years undisturbed by one gust of irritability, though he often met with insults and other occasions to call it forth if it had been slumbering within. The Sanctifier had cast out this demon and so adorned the place of

THE SPIRIT’S WORK IN REGENERATION. I 1 3

his former abode with the fruits of the Spirit and so filled it with His own permanent fulness that he could not return though he may have “ taken with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself.” The Lord be praised ! There is a power which not only cleanses but also keeps. It is to be noted that the wit¬ nesses to whom we refer agree in testifying that this entire sanctification was subsequent to regeneration, and that it was accomplished by the Spirit in an in¬ stant, and not by the processes of growth.

This negative work of the Spirit in the eradication of inherited proneness to sin is followed by an illimitable development of all the Christian graces. One may reach the point where sin is all destroyed and love be¬ come perfect, i. e ., pure and unmixed, and yet his power of moral discernment and his mental enlargement be capable of increase through time and through eternity. His spiritual development will be commen¬ surate.

Perfection in degree of love is never to be attained.

Perfection in kind is the gift of the Holy Ghost to the believer now.

There prevails in certain religious circles the doc¬ trine that in the new birth a new nature is created, while the old nature, or old man, continues till physical death extinguishes his life. It is said that the old nature is nailed to the cross, but he does not die so long as the human spirit acts through a material organism. Denial of the possibility of entire sanctification in the present life is an obvious inference. Another outcome of this error is that depravity is necessary, and that it is be-

I 14 THE gospel of the comforter.

yond the reach of the Holy Spirit in the application of the blood of Christ which cleanses from all sin. Hence the notion of two natures existing in every Christian, however consecrated, so long as he is in the body, the one a new creation and therefore sinless, and the other sinful and beyond all hope of change for the better, is exceedingly mischievous, palliating and excusing evil propensities. When we speak of the Holy Spirit as the indwelling Sanctifier we will examine the alleged scriptural proofs of this doctrine. We insist that the work of the Spirit in the new creation of the penitent believer in Christ is not the creation of new faculties, but the rectification of those already existing, weak¬ ened and marred by sin. He has no need of a new reason, for even after the fall, reason in man grasps the same self-evident truths that exist in God. In fact, the modern teaching of philosophy is that truths of intui¬ tion are the activity of God immanent in the soul of man. , His sensibilities, both natural and moral,