And here, as our meditation on this bright oracle closes, let us lastly remember those words of ver. 17; "by faith." by faith." They are allimportant to a practical use of the truth and promise of our Lord's Indwelling. On the one hand they remind us that, if that Indwelling is to be our experience indeed, there is need of genuine personal action on the Christian's own part, action God-taught and God-granted, as we have seen, yet not the less the man's own. The Lord "stands at the door and Rev. iii. 20. knocks;" the man, the inner man, must rise and set it open. Faith is the act of man though it is "the gift of God;" and "by Eph. ii. 8. means of faith" Christ arrives in the heart to dwell there. But on the other hand, because the action of the soul is in this case faith, and nothing else, the words remind us for our "comfort and good hope" that the action is in effect nothing but the nothing but the utmost simplicity of reception. Do we need to define "faith" to ourselves over again? Has not every instance of the use of the word by our

1 See above, p. 106.

See above, p. 108

Lord Himself in the Gospels long ago assured us that it means just personal reliance, personal trust, personal entrustment? It is the open arms which in their emptiness embrace Christ, the open lips which receive Him as the bread of the soul, the life, the all. As in Justification so in this its glorious sequel, our part is to take the Promise as it stands, to take the Thing in the envelope of the Promise, and to act upon its holy presence and reality.

Well has it been said that weak faith may indeed do but weak works but that it canopen a door.

And He who is "the Spirit of faith" is 2 Cor. iv. 13. faith's appropriate Giver, for this as for all things. For this, as for our earliest acts of trust, HE enables us, by manifesting Christ in His divine trustworthiness and putting the soul into contact with Him, the seen, the trusted, the welcomed Lord.

"O Son of God, who lovest me,

I will be Thine alone;

And all I have, and all I am,

Shall henceforth be Thine own."

'See Bp O'Brien, Nature, etc., of Faith, ch. i.

CONCLUSION.

It is a "full and glad. surrender."

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"And

all this hath worked that one and the selfsame SPIRIT."

Our enquiries and meditations on the Person and the Work of the Holy Spirit here draw to a close. It is needless to spend words in owning how fragmentary, how imperfect, even on a very modest standard, the attempt has been. But I can hope and can pray that my reader may have gained here and there a suggestion, perhaps about some forgotten side of a familiar truth, and that he may have felt some stimulus to an ever-deepening search into the divine Word for more and yet more of the treasures of the truth of the Holy Spirit.

And may writer and reader both be found, through His great grace, among the happy ones who, living by the Spirit, walk by the Spirit and by the Spirit draw continually out of the fulness of Jesus Christ, to whom by the Spirit they are conjoined in an unspeakable union.

More than thirty years ago that great man, great thinker and preacher, and great saint,

Adolphe Monod, lay on his sorely suffering and comparatively early deathbed at Paris. Led in his youth through experiences of complicated doubt and profound melancholy to the foot of the atoning Cross of a divine and personal Redeemer, and to the solemn and glad experiences of the work of the Spirit in the believer's life, and to a holy submission and repose before the whole revealed truth of our salvation by grace, he had spent his years and used all his great gifts of intellect and of heart"in the defence and confirmation of the Gospel," with the one longing, loving desire to bring others into the peace and certainty he had found, and to build them up in it.1 Now he was dying, at the age of fifty-four. His beloved ministry was over, and he was looking back on work and onward into the heavenly rest from his Pisgah-top of suffering. One day, in the midst of much physical distress, a few words escaped him, his brief

2

1 An impressive word-portrait of M. Monod is given in M. Guizot's Méditations sur l'État actuel de la Réligion Chrétienne (1866), pp. 170-184.

• Vie, p. 470; Life and Letters (English translation), p. 244.

ALL BY THE HOLY SPIRIT.

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summary of a Christian's peace, strength, aim, and all. I close by repeating them, and invite my reader with me to make them the motto not only of our death hereafter but of our life this day:

"All in Christ; by the Holy Spirit; for the Glory of God. All else is nothing.”