WE

CHAPTER IX

E approach the revelation of the blessed Comforter and His work given to us through St Paul. In the present chapter we shall attempt a sort of conspectus of the subject, and in the remaining chapters seek to take up in more detail some of the greater and more commanding truths thus given.

It is a large and wonderful field. The writings of St John, as we have seen, present us with a mass of treasure for our doctrine of the Spirit. On the great subject of His Personality in particular their witness is supreme in importance. But the Epistles of St Paul fairly overflow with the glorious theme of the Spirit and His work, and in respect of some of His great redeeming and sanctifying operations their witness is practically unique. Is not this remarkable, let me ask by the way, this fulness

of the doctrine of the Spirit in St Paul? We are accustomed, and rightly, to regard St Paul as the great commissioned teacher and vindicator of that other region of vital truth—our Acceptance, our Justification, for the Redeemer's merits, by faith in His blood, by simplest acceptance of the divine imputed Righteousness.1 It is then all the more impressive to find that to this same St Paul we must go for the fullest scriptural account of Christ in us by the Spirit as well as of "Christ for us" in His merits. If the precious sentences, "Justified Rom. iii. 24, 26. freely by His grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus"; "That He might be just and the justifier of him that believeth in Jesus," are deeply and distinctively Pauline, so too are those others, "Your body I Cor. vi. 19. is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you"; God is shed abroad in our

Rom. v. 5.

"The love of

hearts by the

On that side of doctrine I may refer to Hooker's great Discourse of Justification, and to G. S. Faber's Primitive Doctrine of Justification. I venture to add, as giving briefer or more popular statements, my own Outlines of Christian Doctrine, pp. 183, etc.; Union with Christ, pp. 65, etc.; and The Lord our Righteousness, a tract.

THE SPIRIT IN ST PAUL'S WRITINGS. 165

Holy Ghost"; ; "Strengthened with might by His Spirit . . . that Christ mày dwell Eph. iii, 16, 17. in your hearts by faith"; "Be ye Eph. v. 18. filled with the Spirit"; "Walk by Gal. v. 25. the Spirit"; "By the Spirit mortify the deeds of the body"; and so on, through Rom. viii. 13. a long chain of utterances living and glowing with the blessedness of our divine life, and peace, and strength, and "joy in Rom. xiv. 17. the Holy Ghost." In this double phenomenon of the writings of St Paul-this large and jealous vindication on the one hand of the way of our Acceptance through "the obedience of the One" and through it Rom. v. 19. alone, and yet this even more pervading and continuous assertion of our life and walk by the Spirit on the other hand-I read great and pregnant lessons. For one thing I learn that what God has so joined together man must not from either side put asunder, in faith, or teaching, or life. Perfectly distinct in conception, the two ranges of truth are indissolubly wedded together in purpose and in result. And for another thing I learn that in some all-important respects the one of these ranges of truth exists

and is revealed for the sake of the other, and not the other for the sake of the one. Justification, Acceptance, Peace with God, Redemption from the Curse of the Law-these things are revealed (thanks be to God, they are revealed) not for themselves, so to speak, as if they were ends and goals in the way of grace, but for the sake of our living by the Spirit, and walking by the Spirit, and being the living temples of the Spirit, and thus being conformed to the image of the Son of the Father, and entering thus on a never-ending course of "serving in the newness Rom. vii. 6. of the Spirit." St Paul's writings, alike in their argument and in their proportions, are inspired reminders to us how to keep these things related in our own thought, and faith, and life. We are redeemed from the just sentence of the broken law" in order that we may receive the promise of the Spirit by faith;" so it stands explicitly, and most memorably, in Gal. iii. 13, 14. Not for one moment, really, are we viewed as simply saved from present and future wrath as if that were an end in itself, the change of our hearts and lives coming in merely as evidence that we are secure.

That

OF ACCEPTANCE AND HOLINESS.

Phil. 1. 20.

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change is, we may boldly say, the absolutely necessary raison d'être of the work of ransom and acceptance. We are accepted that we may be holy; that we may live entirely to the Lord; "that Christ may be magnified in our body"; in other words that the blessed Spirit, now as it were liberated to flow upon us and to spring up within us, may have His way and will in all we are and all we shall be for ever.

Is it not so? And shall not our faith, our witness, our teaching, take this apostolic line? Shall we not stand fast, faster than ever, in the truth of the Justifying Righteousness received by faith alone, but so as always to enjoy and to commend the always related and always crowning truth of "the promise of the Spirit," received also by faith alone? Happy the soul which, standing on the rock of the one truth, drinks the inexhaustible fountain of the other, day by day, and hour by hour. Happy the

66

Church where that rock and that fountain alike 'do follow them," in the work of witness in word and in life to the reality of God in Christ.