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Spirit sustained six weeks of fasting and met the Tempter under mysterious conditions. And some may think that we should infer a similar reference wherever the Fulness is spoken of; as if it implied a miracle-working power for instance in the Pisidian Christians, or in the Ephesians who are here enjoined to be "filled in the Spirit."

But it seems clear that this inference is by no means necessary. And the proof of this statement lies in the general testimony of the Word of God, which now in successive chapters we have been collecting, to the character of the highest ranges of the Holy One's work. Those highest ranges have to do with not the miraculous, in our common sense of that word, but the moral; the transfiguration of the will, of the heart, of the soul, by the immediate action of the Lord the Spirit. And there would be surely an anomaly, a disproportion, in a real appropriation of the glorious phraseology of His FULNESS to the abnormal and (from a true view-point) not noblest and most perfect kind of His operation. As we study the description of the Fruit of the Spirit, and (what will be

before us in our closing chapter) the Indwelling of Christ in the heart by the Spirit, we are surely right in being certain that, whatever the Fulness has to do with tongues and prophecies, it has its very highest concern with the believer's spiritual knowledge of His glorious Lord in the life of faith, and with the true manifestation of that life in the loveliness of a holy walk. To be filled with the Spirit is a phrase intensely connected with the fulness of our consecration to the will and work of God in human life.

I would not be mistaken, as if I meant to relegate off-hand to the apostolic age alone all manifestations of the presence and power of God through His people in the way of sign and wonder. I do gather, both from the history of the Church and from that pregnant Scripture, I Cor. xiii. 8, that on the whole the commonly called miraculous displays of that power were intended for the first days only, or at least in a degree altogether peculiar. That period had characteristic conditions and needs which can never quite recur, even where the Gospel is a new thing among the heathen of our time. For the Gospel was then every

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where and absolutely new, with no history as yet behind it, no results of long years to give it their credentials. I do not think, with some earnest Christians, that the Christian Church is "responsible" for the abeyance of miraculous manifestation, by a lack of faith while faith might at any time claim the wonder-working power. I believe on the other hand that subtle dangers and strong temptations lie concealed where the Christian, or the community, is eager for the gift of such miraculous faculties rather than for an everdeepening abasement of self before the Holy One and an ever closer and more chastened walk with Him. But meanwhile it is no part of such convictions to deny à priori the possibility of signs and wonders in any age, our own or another, since the apostolic. Only it seems to me to be certain not merely that upon the whole such operation is not the will of God now as it was of old, but that this is so because more and more His people are to be led in His plan of teaching to rest in that "more excellent way" which already in that wonderful first age the Apostle preferred to

1 Cor. xii. 31. even "the best gifts" of the other kind.1

But let us now take up the Apostle's word to the Ephesians: Be ye filled with the Spirit; πληροῦσθε ἐν Πνεύματι.

It will be seen, as we look into the context, and as we recall what has now been said on the two phases of manifestation of the Fulness, that we have here a precept not for a crisis but for the whole habit of the Christian's life. Not the least reference to works of wonder occurs in the context. "Psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs," are the manifestation of the Fulness specially and at once in view, and the blessed habit of thankfulness, and the habitual readiness to forget self in the interests of others, and then all the lovely details of the life of a sanctified home. And we must observe that the preceptive verb (λŋpovσle) is in the present or continuing tense. It enjoins a course, a habit, not a critical effort or venture. It lays it upon

1 I commend to the reader's attention the late Dean Goode's Modern Claims to the Possession of the Extraordinary Gifts of the Spirit, stated and examined (1834).

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the believer so to use the open spiritual secrets of his life in the Lord as to enter upon and walk in a state of divine Fulness which shall be, above all things, useful and rich in blessing for the needs of the daily path, and shall result, whatever else it results in, in a temper of continual modesty and unselfish serviceableness towards all around him. We must observe further the exact wording of the phrase in its last words: "Be ye filled in the Spirit, ev IIveúμari." It is as if the Apostle had written at large, "Be filled with that Holy Spirit in whom you are; you are in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in Rom. viii. 9. you; see now to it that by His grace you are in such relations of faith and submission with Him that He who is within you shall be no longer, if hitherto, a well-head hidden beneath the débris of disobedience and unbelief, but springing, rising, unhindered in His blessed overflow, till all regions of the inner man 'live' indeed where that river cometh ; till all parts of your Ezek. xlvii. 9. outward walk and work are ruled by the Spirit of God, and a holy abundance goes