So, while watchfully and reverently seeking to remember the laws of Scripture proportion, and that according to it the believer's relation to the Spirit is not so much that of direct adoration as of a reliance which wholly implies it, let us trustfully and thankfully worship Him, and ask blessing of Him, as our spirits shall be moved to such action under His grace. Let us ever and again recollect, with deliberate contemplation and faith, what by His word we know of Him, and of His presence in us and His work for us, and then let us not only "pray Jude 20. in the Holy Ghost" but also to Him, whether in the words of some ancient Veni, or in the many songs of supplication which have been given us, surely not without His leading, in these latter days of His gracious dispensation. One such out of many let me quote and let me use, breathed from the soul and mind of my own beloved and Spirit-taught father long ago, and sung by him (how often! in tones how well remembered !) in his hours of adoration to the last : "Come, Holy Comforter, celestial Light, THE SIN AGAINST THE SPIRIT. Come, Holy Comforter, celestial Fire, "Come, Holy Comforter, a Saviour's love 19 ADDENDUM TO CHAPTER I. THE SIN OF RAILING (βλασφημία) AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST. (Matt. xii. 31, 32; Mark iii. 28-30; Luke xii. 10. See Heb. vi. 4-8, x. 26-31; 1 John v. 16.) On this awful and mysterious subject I offer only a very few words, and these are offered mainly because of the connexion of the subject with that of the Personality of the Holy Spirit. For it appears to be justly reckoned among the proofs of the Personality that this unspeakably dread warning should be given, in which railing against the Spirit is seen as a sin comparable in kind with railing against the holy personal Saviour. For myself I feel, as surely many a Christian does, how very much easier it is to say what this great acme and last development1 of sin is not than what it is. Whatever it is, it is always and for ever true that the man who as a fact comes penitent to the feet of Christ for pardon finds it. And whatever it is, the Saviour's own words of warning surely imply that it is not, so to speak, a terrible accident of the sinful soul's action but (see Müller cited in the note) a development, the result of a process, the outcome of a deliberately formed condition. In order to it there needs, assuredly, the concurrence of great and God-given light upon good and evil, sin and salvation (see Heb. vi.), with a resolved, deliberate, and matured hostility and repulsion on the part of the will; a personal hatred of recognized eternal holiness. 1 See some excellent remarks on the Unpardonable Sin as being not an isolated sin but sin in its full development, in Julius Müller, Christian Doctrine of Sin, T. & T. Clark's Eng. Trans., i., p. 418, etc. THE SIN AGAINST THE SPIRIT. 21 Why is this sin unpardonable? Because, surely, it is such a closing of the door of repentance by the created personality against itself as, by laws of spiritual nature which we cannot analyse but may in part divine, shuts up the personality finally against grace; denies all possible ground, all nidus, to the action of Him whom it has in some sense seen and yet deliberately hated. And some further light, if I mistake not, is thrown on this irremissibility by the fact that the Gospel, the Dispensation of the Spirit (see e.g. 2 Cor. iii. 6-8), is seen in Scripture as the final message of divine mercy. He who in the full light of this final Gospel deliberately rejects its message and its Messenger, casts off the last offers, the justly and necessarily last, of salvation. No more powerful, tender, prevailing secrets of conquest and persuasion lie beyond. This comes out in Heb. x., where the possible apostate back from Christ to antichristian Judaism is warned that no new sacrifice for sin will meet his awful need. The old offerings have done their work for ever; and Calvary will not be repeated. From one point of view we may thus say that the warnings of the Saviour in the Gospels mean, in effect, that while a merciful forbearance could, in the nature of things, be extended for His sake to that rejection of Him which was committed "in the days of His flesh," while He stood before His enemies as preeminently "The Son of MAN," it would be otherwise when He was deliberately and finally refused under the dispensation of that Holy Spirit who should bear witness to Him in His accomplished work and glory as "the Captain of salvation made perfect." 1 Can the truly regenerate commit this sin ? I venture to say yes, and no. In themselves, and as relying more on their regeneration than their Regenerator, yes. In Him, and under His covenant of grace, I humbly believe, no and never. Heb. vi. 4-8, as it appears to me (the weighty remarks of J. Müller notwithstanding), deals with the case not of the soul vivified with the divine life of holiness and love by the Spirit of Christ, but of the soul gifted by that Spirit with the fullest light separable from 1 See Whitby, On the New Testament, Appendix to St Matthew xii. |