Theological Essays/XIV

I suppose there is nothing which is causing so much unbelief, here and everywhere, as a comparison of the. hopes which Scripture seems to hold out of the effects that should follow the revelation of Christ with the history of the world since He appeared in it. I apprehend this difficulty is felt much more strongly in our day than in former days. There are several reasons why it must be so. We have been led to consider the different portions of history more in relation to each other than our fathers did. The records of the old Pagan world have been brought side by side with those of the Christian Church. Great differences have been observed in them, no doubt—more differences than were perceived formerly. But though all new inquiries may show us more clearly what crimes, what contradiction of moral principles, what superstition existed in the countries whose literature we have been most taught to prize, they show us also that our ancestors were not mistaken in speaking of the patriotism and nobleness of particular men in those countries, of the ideal which they set before themselves, nay, of ​the homage which was paid to that ideal by the body of their countrymen,—proving it to be national, not individual. "What other conclusion does the history of the later world suggest? There, too, is crime, contradiction of moral principles, fearful superstition. There, too, are facts which show that many have set before themselves a high standard, and have done various acts in conformity with it; there, too, we see that their contemporaries, who often persecuted them and cast out their names as evil, yet confessed that their aim was the right aim; there we find proofs that they were not creating a rule for themselves, but following one which would have been good for all men. Where is the great alteration? Are not all things much as they were from the beginning? In some respects is there not a change for the worse? Does not Christendom confess by the pains which it has taken that its sons should study the lore of the old Pagan world, that something is to be gained from that lore which is not to be found among its own treasures? Have not some crimes, against which the old world protested, been canonised by what has been called the faith of the new? Have not some of the old virtues been disparaged, even trampled under foot, by the professors of the same faith?"

There is another cause for the new strength which these reflections have gained in our time. If we thought, as many divines in the last century thought, that the appearance of an illustrious Teacher, a great Messiah, in the world, who promulgated a sublime code of morals, and did certain extraordinary acts to illustrate its truth, is all that was signified by the New Testament Dispensation and the name "Christianity," we might not be under any great obligation ​to explain why that Teacher had not been much more heeded than those who preceded Him, why the announcement of His code has not ensured obedience to it, why His miracles may be acknowledged as singular occurrences for the time which witnessed them, and yet may have left no distinct practical impression upon human life. But we have abandoned,—I think, have been compelled to abandon, this apparently secure position. The hearts of suffering men have demanded from the book which we told them con- tained the charter of their inheritance, have found in it,—information which these statements did not convey. They have asked whether God had merely laid down rules for them, without giving them any power to follow the rules; whether He had bidden them love Him and their neighbours, without taking account of the tremendous inclination they had to care only for themselves, or supplying them with any means to overcome it. They have craved for some influence over themselves, a quickening, transforming influence. And they have thought that the Bible very distinctly met these necessities of theirs. In the New Testament, especially, they have discovered continual reference to a Spirit who should work in men to do those acts which they were least able of themselves to do, who should help their infirmities, who should teach them what they wanted, and how they might ask for it, who should knit together those whom place, time, jealousies had divided. They have perceived that the promise of this Spirit is put forth as the most obvious and characteristic promise of the Christian dispensation. The very name of Christ, they have learnt, indicates that He was Himself endowed or anointed with a Spirit; the preaching of His forerunner, and all ​His own preaching declared that He had received it Himself, to the end that He might bestow it upon His disciples then and in ages to come. Churchmen have discovered that the language of our formularies, as well as of the Scriptures, is in accordance with these convictions. We have learned to speak habitually of a dispensation of the Spirit; we have said that our Lord's coming in the flesh would have effected very little, that His moral teaching would have been necessarily inoperative, if He had not carried out His own assurance, and sent His Spirit to enlighten and renew hearts which would have been otherwise dark and lifeless.

But if we adopt this language, we ought to understand that we give every one a right to ask us some searching questions. They will take this form—

"A Divine Spirit," you tell us, "has been given to men, given for the very purpose of moulding their lives into conformity with the law which has been pro- claimed to them. Surely, then, you are bound to show some evidence of that conformity. It cannot suffice merely to complain of men's disobedience or incredulity. Do you mean there has not been a power which could overcome these? It cannot avail to talk of a world, or flesh, or Devil. Do you mean that these are stronger than God?"

There are several ways of evading this difficulty, of which Christian teachers and students have not failed to avail themselves. "We can point you," they have said, "to fruits of faith and love which can only have been produced by a divine influence; we can show you that those who have done the best deeds and cherished the best thoughts have traced them to this influence. More than this we are not bound to do. Nay, ​we are bound to draw a broad line between these and the multitude who do not confess any spiritual influence, who are not the subjects of any."

To a reader of the New Testament this statement must be most unsatisfactory. The Apostles speak of the holy men of old as moved by the Holy Ghost; no one who reads the words of those men can doubt that they referred every true thing in themselves to a divine source. Yet the Apostles teach us, and they teach us, that they were looking forward to a blessing which had not been given them, and which later ages should in- herit. This expectation, as I showed in my last Essay, pointed not merely to the manifestation of a great king, but also to the manifestation of Him from whom their thoughts and impulses had proceeded.

The Christian kingdom cannot be described as a dispensation of the Spirit if these anticipations were not fulfilled. The Apostles must have deceived their hearers, if the condition of those who lived after Christ's glorification was not better in this respect than that of those who waited for His coming. The story of the descent of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, and of the signs which accompanied it, and of the preaching which followed it, must be thrown aside altogether, if no great blessing was then vouchsafed to mankind,—if a few here and there may vindicate and appropriate to themselves a treasure which the true men who under- stood its nature best were impatient to acknowledge as universal.

Some of those who could not acquiesce in so limited a view of the language of the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles as this, have suggested that since the holy Scriptures are the work of the Divine Spirit, the complete Bible may perhaps be that common possession ​which distinguishes the new world from the old. To possess a divine history which was growing for centuries, in its order and fulness, so that all the steps of it may be traced, and the issue to which it was leading distinctly apprehended, is no doubt an incalculable advantage. But if what I said in the last Essay is true, we lose altogether the sense and symmetry of this history unless we look upon the revelation of the Divine Spirit to men as that which explains the past to us, and binds it to the future. Nay, according to its own showing, we have not the capacity of judging of its particular passages, and of their relation to each other, unless we partake of the Spirit by which its writers were guided. So that to put the book as the substitute for the gift of which it testifies, or as including it, is as flagrant a contradiction as we can possibly fall into.

A popular ecclesiastical historian of the last century, quite alive to this inconsistency, and at the same time aware of the wretched divisions and horrible atrocities which he should have to record, has resorted to the hypothesis that there have been certain "lapses" of the Spirit in different periods, like in their principle, though not in their outward tokens, to that of which Whitsuntide reminds us. Such lapses, he thought, would account for the revival of moral light and life after long ages of superstition and degeneracy; for such events as the Reformation in the sixteenth century, and for others nearer to his own day, to which he attached a similar, and almost equal significance. I shall not now inquire whether his theory will account for these facts, or, if it does, whether there are not others equally demanding interpretation for which it does not account. I would only remark that the phrase, occasional "lapses" of ​the Spirit, cannot be an exact counterpart of that which our Lord uses when He speaks of a Spirit who shall abide with His disciples for ever; and that what we have to consider is whether such a description corresponds with the experience of Christendom, or contradicts it.

Finally, in our own day, a number of persons fancy they have discovered a sufficient equivalent for the doctrine of Scripture respecting a divine Spirit imparted to man, in the belief that man himself has a spiritual nature,—that all his powers, energies, affections, show him to be more than a creature of flesh and blood. The doctrine of the Creed, they say, is only an old theocratic mode of enunciating a truth which belongs to the consciousness of all men, and of which some races have had a much keener intuition than the Jews. As I have already maintained that the Gospels and Epistles assert not merely that man has a spiritual nature, but that he is a spiritual being—as I have spoken of our Lord's ascension, according to the ordinary view of it, as being the practical vindication of our spiritual position and spiritual capacities—I certainly cannot refuse to connect the doctrine of the coming of a divine Comforter with that human principle. St. John connects them; for he says, "The Spirit was not yet given, because that Jesus was not yet glorified." But both he and St. Paul take the greatest possible pains to distinguish them. A mighty gift, according to the one, was bestowed upon God's creature as soon as that creature was capable of receiving it. "The Spirit," according to the other, "witnesseth with our spirit that we are the sons of God."

It would have been obviously unfitting that I should reckon amongst these methods of explaining the words of our Lord and His Apostles that to which a Phrygian ​heretic of the second century resorted, when he affirmed that the Comforter whom our Lord promised was a bodily teacher, who was to fill up the gaps in His doctrine. But since that proposition, even accompanied with the assertion that Montanus himself was the fulfiller of the promise, had plausibility enough to secure the support of so able a man as Tertullian, and since it has reappeared in various shapes ever since, and was never more likely to appear than now, I think it is worth while to consider why it has seemed to those who entertained it to answer more exactly to our Lord's language than any mere notion of an invisible influence.

Such an influence is continually spoken of in Scripture. The symbols of "rain" and "dew" serve beautifully to describe its silent, penetrating, life-giving, orderly nature. But what is there in such symbols which corresponds to these words?—

"And when He is come, He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment: of Sin, because they believe not on Me; of Righteousness, because I go to My Father, and ye see Me no more; of Judgment, because the Prince of this world is judged."

All here is personal in the strictest sense. I will send Him, He shall come, He shall reprove. Is a Teacher, a Helper, a Sustainer, like moisture or vapour? I apprehend, then, that if a man has been much vexed, as Tertullian with his fierce African nature was, by Gnostical Teachers, who have no associations with Spirit except these,—who do habitually confound it with vapour, and do not even attach to vapour that sense of power which the sight of a locomotive engine suggests to us,—he is very likely to adopt a coarse material counterpart of reality, and, as the punishment ​of his intemperate folly, to become the victim of some feeble impostor. A great lesson lies, I think, in that painful experience. If Christ has shown that the body which He took did not constitute His personality, but that, because He was a Person, because He was the Son of God, He could raise, redeem, and glorify His body; if He has shown a man not to be a person because he has a body, but that he only claims and realises his personality then when he maintains his relation to God, and holds his body as a subject; if the Evil Spirit is not less personal because he comes to us and came to Christ in no bodily shape; if we can only worship the living and true God as a Person and a Father;—then I believe we shall accept the words which I have quoted in the most literal sense when we take them in their most spiritual sense. There is indeed a deep question growing out of this concerning the relation of the Person of the Comforter to the Son, who says He will send Him,—to the Father, from whom He is said to proceed. That question I reserve for a future Essay. In this I propose only to inquire whether, if we acknowledge this Spirit as a Person, and if we accept our Lord's account of His work, we shall not have a solution of the difficulty with which I started—the only interpretation of the dark as well as of the bright passages in the History of Christendom.

1. I suppose no one doubts that the feelings about Sin in the modern world have been very different from any which can be traced in the old. I have little need to make out a proof of this fact, because it will be rather eagerly accepted as a concession by those who hold that Christianity has operated injuriously on the welfare of mankind. They will say, "It is certainly true that there has been a terror in the minds of men ​respecting a number of practices and habits which seemed very innocent to Pagans, comparatively innocent even to Jews. There has been a fear of teaching, tasting, handling, which belonged in an immeasurably less degree to Greeks and Romans. A dark shadow has been cast over the face of nature, and over social life." I shall not now inquire to what extent these charges are true, because I have considered the subject in my second Essay; and I have had occasion in every succeeding one to make use of the conclusions at which I arrived in the course of it. I spoke of an evil which lies beneath the transgression for which laws affix punishment, beneath the habits and temperament to which the mere ethical philosopher confines himself. This evil lies close to myself; I become conscious of it when I think of myself; I cannot refer it to the operation of outward circumstances; I am rather obliged to confess it as the cause of anything wrong which affects me in them. I said that undoubtedly this sense of personal evil had set men upon devising a multitude of schemes for avoiding its present anguish, for escaping from the terrors of which it seemed pregnant in the future, for conciliating the Power whom it might have offended. If, then, it is true that this sense of personal evil did not exist to at all the same extent before the coming of Christ as it has existed since; that though we may trace clear anticipations of it in some of the great thinkers of the old world, as well as in the popular belief, yet that for the most part both are occupied with the less radical and inward forms of evil, it is quite to be expected that the superstitions of the latter time should have had oftentimes a worse character than those of the former, that the wickedness should be of a more ​conscious kind, that the man should be in more direct open war with himself, with his fellows, and with his Creator. All this sounds very shocking, and very confirmatory of that which the objector urges. And yet I maintained that it is good for a man thus to know what is going on within him; thus to see himself stript bare of appearances and plausibilities; thus to be prevented from transferring to accidents, which he cannot remedy, what may be cured when he sees it and confesses it as his own. And I urged that all the mischief of those contrivances which the man himself has imagined, or his priest suggested, for the sake of soothing his pain, lies in this, that they throw him back into a region of phantoms and shadows, out of which this dreadful experience is intended to lead him,—that they hinder him from seeking the moral freedom which is awaiting him if he will receive it.

For there is another set of facts, as we have seen, in the history of Christendom, to which also there is only a most imperfect parallel in the ancient world. We find men emerging out of darkness into a marvellous light, coming to understand what that strife in themselves meant, and how and why they had fallen into it, coming to see that their true state is that of union with One higher than themselves, their King and their Deliverer, in whom they were created, apart from whom they cannot subsist, in trusting whom they lose that feverish self-consciousness which has been their death, and acquire a pure and true and common life.

Now, what is it that one wants to make these two sets of facts, which comprise so much of what is most dismal and most blessed in the individual, and in the social experience of eighteen centuries, intelligible to ​us? Is it not the belief that some Person has been leading men, in spite of all struggles and reluctance on their parts, in spite of all efforts to escape from the reality of things, in spite of all the soothing or irritating prescriptions of earthly doctors, to a knowledge of what they are according to that separate, unnatural, immoral condition which they have imagined for themselves, and of what they are according to the true and blessed order which God has established for them? And is not this precisely what is expressed in the words, "The Comforter shall reprove" (or convict) "the world of sin, because they believe not on Me?"

Nothing in those words determines how this or that man shall receive the influence which is exerted upon him. The "world" is said to be the subject of the conviction; the whole of Society will be acted upon by the divine Spirit. And yet it is not to the outside world that He will speak. A conviction of Sin must be addressed to the conscience, the inner man, the person from whom thoughts, words, and acts flow. There will, it is said, be this silent mysterious operation. It will produce results. These results may be merely fear, cowardice, horror of God, contrivances to escape from Him. They may be trust in Him as a Friend and Deliverer, a renunciation of all self-seeking experiments, rest in the Son of man; they may be any condition of feeling between these two extremes. On this subject we have no information; we require none. We want to know who is speaking to us; what He is saying, to what issue He would lead us, what there is in us which may yield to Him or resist Him. On these points we have all the light we require—all that can help us to obedience and peace. If we wish to limit the movements of that Spirit ​which bloweth where it listeth, that we may prove ourselves to be within the circle of His influence, we offer a sad evidence that we are resisting Him.

2. If the conscience of sin is characteristic of the new world as distinguished from the old, I do not think any one can doubt that there has been also a higher standard of righteousness than any which can be traced in the best men and the best nations that classical history introduces to us. I make this remark with a full recollection of the apparent objections to it which I noticed before, and with the greatest desire to admit their reasonableness. I acknowledge that the elevation of the Christian standard has been a plea for treating the love of city and country which the Greek and Roman heroes exhibited as mundane and heathenish. I acknowledge that this feeling has prevailed, among Protestants as well as Romanists, and that whenever and wherever it has prevailed, there has been the best excuse for exclaiming against the popular religious doctrines and doctors as immoral and anti-social,—for declaring that the patriotism which they despised was better and truer than anything which they put in its place. I admit, as I did in my Essay on Regeneration, that spiritual or ecclesiastical maxims of life have proved not only hostile to civil life, but to domestic,—to those relations upon which God, in the Jewish dispensation, put such high honour, which he takes as the very instruments of revealing Himself, which St. Paul connects with the life and substance of the Church. And this being the case, it has followed, of course, that the ideal Righteousness has sunk into a meaner and more degrading form of Self-righteousness than any which can be found beyond the circle of Christendom. Nay, it would seem as if the self​righteous practices which have tormented the world else- where have their centre and explanation in Christian Society.

Among all, the fearful contradictions which have gathered about the idea of Sacrifice, and have made the giving up of Self the plea for the most intense calculating Selfishness, have received their fullest illustration from the acts and conceptions of Christian men. Among them, too, the horrible notion of making the safety of the soul a motive for violations of Truth, nay, of making Truth merely a means to safety, has led to such intricacies of deception and of cruelty as it would be hard to find examples of in the countries where it has never been proclaimed that the Lord God is a God of Truth and without iniquity, One who hateth robbery for burnt-offering.

I do not want to conceal one of these terrible observations; we have need to meditate them more and more deeply. I only want you to dwell as earnestly on another class of observations which appear utterly opposed to them, and yet which cannot be separated from them. That wicked contempt for national and domestic life to which I alluded is connected with such an idea of a universal fellowship,—of a union with men as men, of duties owing to all men everywhere, with such evidences that this idea is not a barren one, not a mere maxim or theory, but a mighty operative principle,—as you can scarcely perceive the faintest foreshadowing of among the greatest citizens of the old republics. That grovelling notion of men practising acts of devotion that they may avert some penalty or buy some prize, has been associated with such a resolute casting away of life, reputation, hope, everything, when other men were to be blessed, and ​the love of God to them was to be declared,—with such an overpowering belief in a charity that is mightier than Sin, Death, the Devil, which can penetrate the being of man, and utterly destroy the selfishness there,—as you can only hear the feeblest prophecy of in the highest raptures of ancient poets and philosophers; and yet the realisation of it has been among peasants and feeble women. That blasphemous notion of lying for God, which has defiled the morality of Romanists and Protestants, has been accompanied in the minds of both with a persuasion that Truth is higher than Heaven and deeper than Hell, that God Himself is the Truth; that everything is to be parted with for the sake of that. I do not say that the best men in the old world had not a conviction that this must be so, or that we do not owe them gratitude unspeakable for having testified that man's business in life is to seek for that which is, to believe in it that he may find it, and to strip himself of all phantoms and shadows which interfere with the apprehension of it. God be thanked for having raised up such witnesses to Himself. What I say is, that the witness has been found to be real and substantial by tens of thousands who have known nothing of dialectics, whose only training has been that of poverty, sickness, the prison, the rack. These were their schoolmasters; by these they were lifted up to feel that there was a perfect Righteousness, a universal self-sacrificing Love, an eternal Truth, of which they were inheritors.

And here is the solution of the mystery. "When He cometh, He shall convince the world of Righteousness, because I go to My Father, and ye see Me no more." There had been a standard of eternal righteousness, love, self-sacrifice, exhibited in the world,—exhibited ​by a man carrying mortal flesh, dying a death which we die. And that man had gone out of sight, had seemed to leave no traces of Himself on earth. But a voice was ever whispering at men's hearts, "He is ascended on high to His Father and your Father. That Righteousness which was seen here is now yours; it is for one and all of you. You are participators in that sacrifice which He has offered for all, and which He is presenting as your Intercessor to His Father. You may know that Truth, and that Truth may make you free, of which He came into the world, and died, and has ascended, to testify."

How otherwise we could bring these different warring experiences into harmony I cannot conceive. The wisdom of Church teachers will not explain them; they have been often the great agents in corruption, and when they have been otherwise the secret must be accounted for. The innate nobleness of man will not explain them, for we have to interpret proofs of his debasement. His innate evil will not explain them, for we have to interpret high thoughts and glorious deeds. If we believed that there had been a Spirit of Truth, not acting upon the surface of men's minds, but carrying on a controversy with them in their inmost being, encountering all the rebellions of the cowardly, reluctant Will, all its desires to become a mere Self-will, bringing out its darkness, as light always must, into fuller and stronger relief, making the devilish apparent because it was confronted with the divine; if we could believe that this was a Comforter, a divine Person, stronger than His enemies, able to strengthen man to all fixed resolutions and noble purposes,—to bring the objects which he perceives dimly and at a distance within the sphere of his vision; able to in​spire longings and hopes when the spirit of man is most bent and cowed; able to point him upwards to a Father in Heaven when he is most ready to call himself merely a son of earth; able at the same time to make him understand his work on earth, and to endow him with powers for performing it; able to support him in suffering, to give him glimpses of the substantial glory into which Christ has entered through suffering; able to make him perceive that everything which is merely his own is perishable, that what is most divine is common to him with his fellows;—then I think we need not choose the bright spots of modern history and conceal its horrors; the more courageously we face the one, the more hope will come to us from the contemplation of the other.

3. For assuredly there has been, and is, a conviction working in the minds of men the most various and unlike each other that this kind of conflict is not to go on for ever. There is a sense of Judgment, of some great decision, that is to settle for ever which of these is the stronger, the Evil, or the Good with which the Evil has been so intricately combined. This thought of Judgment has been itself as perplexed as either of the others. Men have fancied they were to prepare for judgment by eschewing their common duties, by devoting themselves to the work of saving their own souls. They have fancied that if by any means they could escape from judgment, it would be an unspeakable blessing. They have fancied that Christ came not, as He said, to save the world, but to save them, that they might not be judged like their fellows. The strangest results, doctrinal and practical, have followed from these habits of mind, and from the encouragement which Christian teachers have ​given to them; some of them I pointed out in my twelfth Essay. But in the midst of these we perceive a deep and settled desire for judgment,—a longing that there should not be a perpetual confusion of Sin and Righteousness, of Truth and Falsehood,—a certainty that if Christ is King, there cannot be. While there has been, and is, such a dread of judgment as there never was in the old world, there has been, and is, such a passionate craving for judgment as the heroes of it may have now and then felt in hopeful moments when the contradictions of the world became very oppressive, but such as certainly never became a part of their abiding convictions. For it is evident that the feelings respecting Judgment must correspond to those respecting Sin and Righteousness. If our thoughts of these are superficial, our thoughts of that will be; if we connect them with the very substance of our being, the judgment will bear reference to that. The awfulness of the thoughts of Judgment which we in Christendom have entertained has been the inevitable consequence of Sin coming out in such close, tremendous connection with our own selves,—of the Righteousness which opposes it being brought so close to us. The hopefulness of our thoughts respecting Judgment has arisen, in like manner, from the sense of a mighty struggle in the inmost region of our thoughts and consciences between the powers of good and evil, from the certainty that the good is mightier even there, and that God, being absolutely righteous, is on the side of the good against the evil. But what external doctrine about the righteousness of God could have kept this faith alive in any single heart, far more in the heart of Christendom, for eighteen centuries? What confidence that Christ had come and preached ​of good being mightier than ill,—nay, had shown it in His own person to be mightier,—could have kept it alive; or how could that confidence have been itself preserved? "When He cometh, He shall convince the World of judgment, because the Prince of this world is judged." Yes! The Spirit has been saying to every generation—He is saying very emphatically to ours: "It is not uncertain what the issue of the battle between right and wrong, truth and lies, will be. It is known; you may know it. The evil power seems to have a mighty ascendency. If you look at the outside of history, if you merely dwell upon statistics, you will come to the conclusion that the good is very weak indeed. But examine the inner life of the world, search into the principles and causes of its peace and order, of its misery and confusion; above all, look into the principles and causes of the right and truth you have sought and done, of the wrong and falsehood to which you have yielded, and you will find in the one the pledges of endurance and eternity, in the other, of swift and sudden destruction. It is true for you; it is true for mankind; Christ has proved it; and though heaven and earth pass away, His words, His acts, His triumphs, do not pass away. He will bring forth righteousness to judgment."

To speak of this conviction merely as some gracious influence which steals into certain gentle, prepared, believing hearts, is altogether to misinterpret its nature, and to make such influences unintelligible to the persons who receive them. They are worth nothing to any one who calls them his own. They soon become occasions of pride and self-glorification, or else of despondency, because the feelings which were so serene and pleasant yesterday are turbulent and gloomy to​day; unless they are traced to One whose presence does not depend upon any of our changeable moods. No doubt it is a paradox that we have the Comforter, and ask for the Comforter; that we pray for Him, and could not pray without Him. No doubt it is a paradox that He is with those who feel His presence least; that when we seem for a moment to feel He is ours, He is gone. These are paradoxes; for everything which has relation to our internal being puts on a strange shape when it takes the form of a proposition. Every man finds this out for himself when he begins to think and suffer. The difficulty is not increased by referring our thoughts and feelings to One who overlooks them, and knows them, and sympathises with them. It is saved from being intolerable. If we were forced to think that all which Scripture tells us of One who grieves with us, and for us, and whom we may grieve, is mere fiction, the burden of existence would have nothing to lighten it. Few as there may be who attach a distinct meaning to those words, all would find an infinite loss if they were taken away. For they belong to all, and we cheat ourselves of the blessing they might afford us, and the light they throw upon God's ways, by denying them to any.

Again, it cannot be that this Teacher is merely speaking to us out of the Bible. To have Him speaking there in broad common words; to have Him setting before us thoughts that were thought, and feelings that were felt, ages ago, and which we may, nevertheless, assert as ours; to have Him there, unfolding the steps of a world-drama which has reached a divine catastrophe, and yet which is moving on to another catastrophe,—we being persons in it now, and able to understand the passing scenes of it by those which are ​presented to us in the book,—and to be sure that the same Divine Person who appeared at the opening of it has been present throughout, and will gather all round Himself at the end; this is wonderful: this is a sign to us that we are not to control the Spirit, or make Him the mere minister of our experiences. But the Comforter is not in the book if He is not convincing the world.

And therefore it cannot be that He descends now and then, at distant intervals, in uncertain lapses, like the Angel into the pool of Bethesda. There may be great crises in the education of the world—times when it starts up, after years or centuries of paralysis, into a more vigorous and healthy life; when buried truths come forth out of their caves, and cast away their grave-clothes; when there seems to be a new heaven and a new earth, because the clouds which hid the face of one, and hindered the quickening processes of the other, have passed away. But such moments, however surprising they may seem to us, obey some fixed law, and are connected by close, however invisible, links, and denote the action and inspiration of One who is dwelling in the midst of us.

But oh, how melancholy if we must resolve this Spirit into the spiritual movements, affections, powers of the creatures whom He came to guide and animate! Thanks be to God for the witness which is borne in our day for the spirituality, not of a few men, but of man as man. It is His teaching, His way of declaring His Son to us, the battle of His Spirit with our pettishness and vanity. But if we substitute the lesson for the Teacher; if man falls down and worships his own faculties of worship; if he determines to be a God because he has the capacity of knowing God, what a ​tyranny of particular spiritual men is he preparing for himself, what a slavery to mere gifts, what a rivalry of impostors, each pretending to be the spiritual and divine man who can guide the rest; ultimately, what an abyss of Materialism! We shall not have one Montanus claiming to be the Comforter; but each little neighbourhood and sect will have its own Montanus, its petty prophet, to take the place of the Spirit who guideth into all truth.

"After all, how easy it has been for the Unitarian to deny the Personality of the Holy Spirit, and even to find Scriptural excuses for his denial!" It is most easy for him, and for all of us. I could find a thou- sand excuses if I wanted them; I should not despair of bringing any texts by skilful processes to vote on my side; after a time I might convince myself that that was their most natural meaning. But I cannot find that it is an object for which I ought to spend this labour. I cannot find that I should be much the gainer if I persuaded myself that I had not this Friend, and Teacher, and Comforter with me. I do not mean in ease, or satisfaction, or peace of mind. These, one is never to keep at the expense of truth. In fact, I have never discovered how one can keep them, if one prefers them to truth. But it seems to me that I shall not love the truth better, if I feel I have not a Spirit of Truth guiding me towards it. I think I should give up the pursuit altogether; I should take up with any appearances or falsehoods that looked plausible.

"It is not, however," some Unitarian will say, "a proof of our having a gift, that we have a need of it. Locke's argument against the Papists has always passed muster with us. You say there is an infallible ​authority, because we should be the better for having one; how much better we should be off if we were all infallible, and yet we are not." I am bold enough to differ both with Locke and the Papists. I do not think we should be better for having an infallible mortal guide, or for being infallible ourselves. If either state were good for us, I believe it would have been appointed for us. I think we have an infallible, immortal Guide, and that this is what we need. But do not accept the evidence of your wishes or necessities, if you think that unsatisfactory. Try whether you can solve the problems of the world without the belief in this personal Teacher. Or if you do not care for the problems of the world, try whether you can solve the problems of your own heart. I speak boldly to you on this point, for I am satisfied that you have this Comforter with you as I have; that He is convincing you of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, as well as me. I am sure there is a spirit of lies, who is always striving to lead me into all falsehood, and to separate me from you and from all men. I believe we shall understand one another when we know that his adversary is with us, to make us true and to make us one. The unity of the Spirit, however, and what is involved in it, I reserve for my next subject.