TENDERNESS OF THIS TRUTH.

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to discredit, or minimize, or ignore, the belief of the Personality of the blessed Spirit. In what interest and to what end, one asks, is such a tendency accepted or promoted? Surely not with the hope of presenting the Christian plan, the process of eternal love and goodness, in fairer, tenderer, or more living colours and glories. If a reference to personal experience may be permitted I may indeed here "set to my seal." Never shall I forget the gain to conscious faith and peace which came to my own soul, not long after a first decisive and appropriating view of the Crucified Lord as the sinner's Sacrifice of peace, from a more intelligent and conscious hold upon the living and most gracious Personality of that Holy Spirit through whose mercy the soul had got that blessed view. It was a new development 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 such a "time of finding," gratitude, 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 because it violates nothing, has awakened and regenerated 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, and spared not His own Son, giving Him over for us all. If I may reverently use the simile, it is as when to two notes of the musical triad the related third note is added, and there results, in the words of the music-loving poet, "not a fourth sound, but a star."1

As our enquiry proceeds we shall have continual occasion of course to recur to this primary theme, the Personality of the Holy Ghost; and much that is omitted in this preliminary statement will thus be supplied. we have at least aimed here at the great mark of setting the sacred fact, as a fact, well before us, and letting it take its large place anew in

1 Browning, Abt Vogler.

But

IT CLAIMS A LARGE PLACE.

15

the consciousness, and so in the action, of the believing man. That place is surely meant to be a large one, in the light of the Paschal Discourse, as we have traced its import. There the blessed Person of the Paraclete is revealed as just about to fill the void of the disciples' hearts with a whole wealth of personal, gracious action, abiding, revealing, teaching, leading, conveying into the inmost receptacle the presence of Christ, so that He while absent should be present, while invisible should be seen. Surely such a presence and such an action was intended to call forth on the happy Christian's part a reverent and loving reciprocation. If thus the Spirit was to deal with him, he was to deal with the Spirit in holy recognition, and adoring gratitude, and confiding love. "The Spirit with our Rom. viii. 16. spirit" is a phrase meant to carry endless blessed applications in the experiences of the life of faith.

As we close, the question perhaps arises from the thoughts just suggested, whether acts of direct adoration to the Holy Spirit are prescribed to us in the Scriptures. It is certainly

remarkable that we have very little in their pages which bears explicitly on the question, a fact which however falls very naturally in with what we have already seen of the general comparative reticence of the Author of the Book about His own nature and glory. And, again, it is a fact in harmony with what we have seen of the character of His work for the Christian, a work pre-eminently subjective, so profoundly so as to occasion such a statement as that of St Paul that the Spirit intercedes for the saints Rom. viii. 27. with groanings that cannot be uttered, words whose context at least suggests that the intercession has its action in the region of the inner man, and breathes itself or groans itself forth through the regenerate human spirit. If it is the Holy Spirit's special function not only to speak to and deal with, but also to speak and work through, the man He renews and sanctifies, we can just so far understand that He the less presents Himself for our articulate adoration, But meanwhile the sacred rightfulness of our worship of the Holy Spirit is as surely established as anything can be that rests on large and immediate inferences from

PRAYER TO THE SPIRIT.

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the Scriptures. If He is divine, and if He is personal, how can how can we help the attitude of adoration when, leaving for the moment the thought of His work in us, we isolate in our view the thought of Him the Worker? Scripture practically prescribes to us such an attitude when it gives us our Lord's own account, in His baptismal formula, of the Eternal NAME as His disciples were to know it—“The Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ;" and when in the Acts and the Epistles the Holy Ghost is set before us as not only doing His work in the inmost being of the individual but presiding in sacred majesty over the community; and when in the Revelation He, in the mysti- Acts xv. 28. cal sevenfoldness of His operation, I Cor. xii. 11-13. Seven yet One, appears in that solemn prelude as the concurrent Giver, with the Father and the Son, of grace and peace; Rev. i. 4. above all when in the Paschal Dis- John xiv. 16. course the adorable and adored Lord Jesus presents Him to our faith as co-ordinate with Himself in glory and grace, Comforter."

Acts v. 3.

Acts xiii. 2.

"another