love.

THE SIN AGAINST THE SPIRIT.

23

Balaam's recorded condition remarkably

illustrates every detail of Heb. vi. 4-8.

Meanwhile let us take heed, watching and praying, not to grieve the Spirit of love and holiness. It is better to be dismayed than to presume. But it is best of all most reverently

to trust.

VENI

CHAPTER II

In

ENI CREATOR SPIRITUS, was the thought with which our previous chapter closed. Let us begin again with the same. following the scriptural traces of the doctrine of the blessed Spirit we will remember that He is the promised "Guide into all the

John xvi. 13. truth." By Him we will seek "a right judgment in all things" concerning His revealed glory, such a judgment that we may

evermore rejoice in His holy comfort," the comfort of a happy insight into what He is as Comforter.

I propose to treat in this chapter of two important sides of the doctrine of the Spirit: the Forthcoming of the Spirit in the Holy Trinity from the Father and the Son ("the Dual Procession "), and the work of the Spirit in relation to the Human Nature of our Lord Jesus Christ.

THE DUAL PROCESSION OF THE SPIRIT. 25

1. The words Procession of the Spirit can scarcely be spoken or written without calling up associated thoughts of strife and division within the Christian Church, and the hardly less unhappy remembrance of that ultra-speculative treatment of divine truths which has too often proved a fruitful source of divisions. Not seldom even the most pious and reverent minds have been beguiled into discussing the Nature of God and the eternal Relations of the divine Persons in a tone which would be justified only if we had actually "found out the Almighty unto perfection" and saw Job xi. 7. before us, arranged in a series of absolutely certain premisses, major and minor, all that He knows about HIMSELF. Hence in no small measure arose that great controversy of East and West upon the Dual Procession which led to a final rupture about the year 1050, a rupture never since healed, nay so little healed that as recently as 18631 a declaration was issued from Constantinople condemning as heresy the Western belief, confessed

1 See Smeaton, Doctrine of the Holy Spirit, p. 289.

in our two longer Creeds and in the Fifth Anglican Article.

But notwithstanding all this it is fully possible, I trust, to treat this subject of the Dual Procession, great and also tender as it is, without either a long discussion of the history of belief1 or an unconscious imitation of the speculative tendency referred to. All I ask now to do is to take this doctrine, which our Church, both before and after the Reformation, has as a fact avowed to be Scripture truth, and to look upon it in the serene and blessed light of the revealed and experienced work of the Lord the Life-Giver in His ministry for Christ in the Church and in the soul. We shall surely find it to be no mere phantom of abstract and unlicensed speculation, but a truth of life and love.

What then in effect do we mean when we speak of the Procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son? We mean that in the revealed inner relations of Godhead, in those eternal and necessary relations (" necessary" in the well-understood sense that they are rela

1 For a brief conspectus of the history I may venture to refer to my Outlines of Christian Doctrine, pp. 146, etc.

WHAT THE DUAL PROCESSION MEANS. 27

tions lying in the very Nature of God, relations which in that Nature must be, even as holiness must be in it), while the Father is the eternal Origin of the Eternal Spirit, the Son is concurrently His eternal Origin also. We mean that Godhead is eternally in the Spirit because of the Son as well as because of the Father. We do not mean that the blessed Son is thus the Spirit's Origin in an independent and separated way. All that the Son is, as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, He is "of the Father," and of the Father alone.1 To this He bore abundant personal witness "in the days of His flesh." But we John v. 25, etc. believe that the "all" which He thus eternally derives includes inter alia this-that He is, with the Father, the concurrent Origin of the Holy Spirit.

Such a humble belief is neither an arbitrary and barren demand upon a bewildered or unreflecting assent, nor a thing so sublimated and vanishing as to find no point of contact with life and love. In the first place, it throws some

1 See Pearson, Exposition of the Creed, p. 136, etc.