Luke xi. 13. written, "Your heavenly Father shall give His Holy Spirit to them that ask Him." But it is a truth meant to humble, meant to keep us low indeed before the eternal Will. Thirdly, the New Birth is illustrated by the action of the wind in respect of evidence given in results. Here is one plain point in our blessed Lord's parable, all-important, yet often overlooked. The wave of air, in its origin, course, and issues, is mysterious, invisible, undefinable; but its presence around me and in my surroundings is to be known by practical results, and by them alone: "Thou hearest the sound, the voice." The trees of the wood, the waters of the mountain lake, you "hear the wind" in them and on them; and thus you ascertain its presence there. "So is every one that is born of the Spirit;" every one. The divinely mysterious process produces known and observable effects; and its presence, its presence not in the abstract but here or there, is to be verified by them, and by them alone. Regeneration, the coming to be one of the children of God, in Augustine's sense of that term, in John the Apostle's sense, in the Lord's sense, EVIDENCE OF RESULTS. 79 is indeed a secret thing" in itself; but its evidences are practical and plain. The Spirit is eternal, divine; but where He effectually works the New Birth, there, in one degree or another, so says the Lord here, you will hear the sound, you will trace results. And what is the sound of the heavenly Wind in the being, in the life? It consists of things which indeed belong to, though they are not the creatures of, the circumstances of the common day: "love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control." It Gal. v. 22, 23. consists, in fact, of love, love in distribution, heaven-given love to God and to man in God. It will be obvious that these remarks have much to do, supposing them to be true, with our interpretation of the function of the blessed Sacrament of Baptism, and in particular of the language of our own baptismal ritual. Into the deeply interesting and important questions so suggested, questions Scriptural, ecclesiastical, historical, questions amongst others of the nature of the absolute language of ceremony as against the more guarded language of biography, I do not enter here, for I think they are not in place in these meditations.1 Only it is right that I should say for my own part that not one word above written has been written in forgetfulness of my obligations as a presbyter of the English Church, or with faltering convictions as to the rightness of the language of its sacramental ritual. All the more earnestly would I say, and not least to my brethren in the ministry of the Word and Sacraments, Let nothing, absolutely nothing, be allowed to obscure our sense of the unutterable moral weight of our Redeemer's words in this great passage of St John: "Ye must be born again. So is every one that is born of the Spirit." William Beveridge, Bishop of St Asaph (1704-1708), was no half-hearted Churchman. Among our elder divines few use language about the holy Sacraments more reverent, I might say more rapturous, than his. Let me close then with a brief extract from his seventythird printed sermon: "Christ's Resurrection the Cause of our Regeneration :" 1 I venture to refer to my Outlines of Christian Doctrine, p. 249, etc. * Works, ed. 1824, vol. iv., p. 240. BEVERIDGE ON REGENERATION. 81 By your care and pains about the things of this world you may perhaps get something in it, and perhaps not, and how much so ever it be, it is nothing at all in comparison of what the children of God all have; 'all things are theirs,' all things that God hath made, and He Himself too that made them. And what can they desire more? There is nothing more for them to desire; and therefore their minds must needs be at rest, and their souls as full as they can hold of all true joy and comfort. 66 Who then would not be in the number of these blessed souls? Who would not be regenerate, and made a child of God, if he might? And who may not, if he will? Blessed be God, we are all as yet capable of it, for now that Christ is risen from the dead and exalted at the right hand of God, to be a Prince and a Saviour, to give repentance and forgiveness of sins, if we do but apply ourselves to Him and believe and trust on Him for it, His Father will be ours too; He will beget us again in His own likeness, and admit us into the glorious liberty of His own children." CHAPTER V. UR last thoughts were given to the work of the Holy Spirit as He effects the New Birth. We considered Him as He deals with Eph. ii. 1. man "dead in trespasses and sins,” and brings him into that wonderful "newness of life" in which "henceforth" he Rom. viii. 15. is to "walk by the Spirit," possessing "the Spirit of adoption, in whom we cry, Abba, Father." Rom. vi. 4. "Our quicken'd souls awake and rise In the present chapter I ask my reader to take a step in some sense backward. In studying the work of Regeneration we also studied, by reason of the spiritual connexion of the two things, some of the phenomena of |