to justification, and vice versa. It is very common, for example, to find writers on the Higher Christian life urging us to become "completely crucified with Christ," and "utterly dead to sin." But these are not experiences or attainments; they are fundamental facts. The Revised New Testament throws a flood of light on this point, by putting all allusions to the believer's death with Christ, in the past definite tense where they belong. It is simply a fact that when Christ our substitute died on the cross for us, we died virtually or judicially through him, to the law and to sin. As saith the Scripture, "If One died for all, then all died." It is this past definite transaction which forms the basis of our acceptance with "He that hath died is justified from sin." † Here is something that has to do directly with our justification by faith, and not with our sanctification by the Spirit. God. On the other hand, the error has sometimes been committed of insisting on the higher spiritual experiences as an evidence of conversion; the witness of the Spirit and the sealing of the Spirit being demanded as prerequisite to baptism and admission to the church. A glance at the Acts of the Apostles shows us that it was not so in the beginning. The record of the first admissions to the church is very simple. "Then they that gladly received the word were baptized." A consent of the heart to Christ and to his gospel was the solitary condition of initiation into the church, and the deeper operations of the Holy Ghost followed in their order. In what we have written we have given far larger space to the second stage of the two-fold life, but we have brought it into constant contrast with the first, in order to emphasize these distinctions and set them clearly before the mind. 2. We have endeavored to throw all possible light on this subject from the records of Christian experience. It is evident, if we stop to think of the matter, that the Spirit must be studied in his operations. The fault of most treatises on the third Person of the Trinity is that they are too abstract. A Spirit can only be made known to us by his outward acts and manifestations. Our Lord hints this in his simile of the wind blowing where it listeth. We can see the swaying of the trees and the heaving of the waters, but we can not discern the wind that caused these motions. So we can see the power of the Holy Ghost in the lives of Christians, in conversions and revivals; in the acts of believers and in the triumphs of the church; but we cannot recognize him by himself, since he is invisible and immaterial. Why is it that the Acts of the Apostles gives us so much knowledge of the Holy Ghost? Because it is the life of the Spirit seen in the words and deeds of the body of believers: it is the Invisible made visible in working and conduct and testimony. Indeed the Acts of the Apostles might be rightly named the Acts of the Holy Spirit. As the gospels are a record "of all that Jesus began both to do and teach until the day in which he was taken up," so the Acts are the record of all that the Holy Spirit began both to do and teach after that he came down and inhabited the body of the faithful And if we learn so much from these first beginnings of his working, is there not much. to learn from his continuings in the subsequent history of the church? We judge so; and hence we have called to our aid the lives of the saints of all the Christian ages. Having drawn our scheme of the doctrine of the Spirit from the Scriptures, we have sought to fill up the outline from the records of religious biography. For Christian experience, if it be true and divinely inspired, is but the Bible translated and printed in illuminated text, scripture "writ large," for the benefit of dim eyes that cannot read the fine print of doctrine. Let our readers judge for themselves of the significance of thẹ spiritual transactions herein recorded. 3. Finally, in all that we have written we have had chiefly in mind the help and quickening of Christian ministers and workers. No elaborate treatise has been attempted; no exhaustive discussion of the person and ministry of the Holy Spirit. Rather have we attempted an easy colloquy with our readers, blending scripture exposition with religious incident, letting the voice of God be heard now in his inspired word, and now in the echoes which that word has awakened in Christian consciousness. And upon all, we have sought and do now seek, the illuminating and sanctifying and consecrating influences of the Holy Paraclete that what in our discourse is true and according to the mind of God may be blessed to his people; and that whatever is amiss may be graciously forgiven and overuled. 1 |