VITAL IMPORTANCE OF THE SUBJECT.

3

despising His Person and rejecting His Work now is of the same nature with idolatry of old, and with the Jews' rejection of the Person of the Son."

The statement is perhaps too absolute in form to embrace all the data of revelation and experience. But it is at least an indication of great spiritual facts, and a solemn caution to the Christian of the present day to take heed lest he lose hold of the truth of the blessed Spirit in its humbling but beatifying fulness. All too easily, amidst prevalent fashions of opinion in the modern Church, we may insensibly, unconsciously, let that truth fall from us. We may take up with a view of human nature in its fallen estate which shall practically dispense with the need of the regenerating and sanctifying Holy Ghost. We may take up with a view of sacred order and divine ordinances which shall in effect put His sovereign and mysterious work into other hands than His. May He, the Lord, the Life-Giver, personal, sovereign, loving, mighty, preserve us from unfaithfulness of regard towards His blessed Person, from untruth of view of His divine work. May He keep us indeed "men of the Spirit," filling us, that we may be so, with Himself.

As we approach our subject more immediately, let us very deliberately take the attitude of invocation and adoration. Who can rightly think and discourse about the Holy Spirit of God save by that same Spirit, and as seeking with humblest reverence to follow the very syllables and footsteps of that written Word which has Him everywhere for its true Author?

It is recorded in the story of the German Reformation that on one of its most memorable occasions, the disputation between Eck and Luther before Duke George of Saxony at the castle of the Pleissenburg, the controversy was preluded by the solemn chant of the Veni Creator, sung thrice over while the whole assembly knelt.1 With the voices of the soul may we, writer and reader, so now unite, as we approach not a great battle of arguments but a

PERSONALITY OF THE SPIRIT.

5

series of quiet meditations upon the Person and the Work of the Lord the Spirit.

"Veni, Creator Spiritus,
Mentes tuorum visita;
Imple superna gratia
Quæ Tu creasti pectora;

"Qui Paraclitus diceris,
Altissimi donum Dei,
Fons vivus, Ignis, Caritas,
Et spiritalis Unctio." 1

In the present chapter I propose to speak of the revealed PERSONALITY of the Holy Spirit as the all-important preliminary to all other thoughts concerning Him. Upon His Divinity, His Deity, there is little practical need that I should dwell, so plain it is on the very surface of Scripture that the Holy Spirit, whether personal or not, is divine, is a Power of the divine Order. But is it He, or IT? Is it a divine faculty, influence, phase, mode, or a divine Person?

Now the most direct answer to this question, and at the same time the deepest and tenderest, is to go at once to the central passage of all Scripture in the matter. All over the blessed Book from its very first lines onward lie scattered mentions of the Spirit and His work. Here and there we have passages which go almost the length of revealing explicitly His personality; here and there passages which fully go that length, fairly interpreted. But there is one precious section of Scripture which is to these scattered rays as their combining focus, the glorious ruling passage of the subject. And where and what is it? Not some great chapter of apostolic argument and exposition, such as those in which the Godhead of the Sor: is asserted, or the holy paradox of Justification by Faith explained and applied to the trembling, weary conscience and longing heart. No; for the decisive teaching on the Personality of the

THE PASCHAL DISCOURSE.

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Holy Ghost we go yet deeper into the Scripture tabernacle; we enter its Holiest; we open the pages where the Lord Jesus Himself teaches with His own lips the secrets of spiritual life. There, as it were under the John xiv.-xvi. Shechinah itself, lies our doctrinal stronghold for this article of faith. There speaks the Christ of God, in an hour of supreme tenderness, and from which all ideas of the rhetorical and the merely poetical are infinitely distant; and He speaks with repetition and emphasis of this same Holy Spirit, and He speaks of Him as personal. My readers are well aware of the fact. But it is never in vain to impress such a fact again upon the soul by re-examination of the infallible words. Let me ask that the Greek be once more opened, and this divine grammatical anomaly once more studied-the neuter Πνεῦμα associated repeatedly and markedly with the masculine Παράκλητος, the John xiv. 16, 17; masculines ὅς, ἐκεῖνος, αὐτός.1 And 7, 8. let this be read in the light of the wonderful context, in which this blessed Paraclete, this