and has led from it a rescued wanderer, lately dead in sins, blinded by the god of this world, Eph. ii. 2. "walking according to its course." In this new convert, whether from open heathenism, or heresy, or infidelity, or from a profession of the blessed Faith which is in name only, we find just the general facts of "the world" individualized. Just that which, in a sense less definite and intense, is done. by the Spirit for the world as world, is done by the same Spirit in a sense most definite, most effectual, for this member of the world as individual will and soul. He has brought the man to "conviction of sin, righteousness, and judgment," in the light of Christ.

And it is manifest, by the way, that the large, wide, work of conviction in the sphere of general opinion is done in no small measure through these isolated occurrences, these deep, individual convictions of sin. So it has been from the beginning. The thousands of definite convictions, repentances, and baptisms at Pentecost, were a mighty means for diffusing through the Jewish public mind an impression about Christ and the Gospel far short indeed

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in itself of regeneration and salvation, yet incalculably precious and important. And so it is to this day. Nothing can more powerfully contribute to keep up, and to raise up, "the world's" public consciousness of sin, righteousness, and judgment than the presence in it, as salt-grains in the mass, of individuals intensely and savingly convinced of those three things for themselves, in the light of immediate dealings for themselves with God in Christ. And nothing would so fatally lower "the world's public moral and quasi-Christian consciousness as that such individual convictions, such personally convinced ones, should become few and fewer, till religion itself should be dissociated in common opinion from the very ideas conveyed by the words, "I have sinned against the Lord;" "What must I do to be saved?”

So without misgiving I take these words of the Lord Jesus, and see in them His assurance that the Holy Spirit, in the Gospel Age, and as the divine Messenger to souls, and Illuminator of souls, about Himself the Saviour, should convince the individual unregenerate heart, in merciful speciality, of sin, and righteousness, and

judgment. He should "open" it to "attend to Acts xvi. 14. its unspeakable need of Christ; and to the sin against the love of God, and against itself, of indifference or refusal in presence of a manifested Christ; and to the awful glory of righteousness, the eternal antithesis to all trangression of the law, a glory now transcendently displayed in the exaltation of the crucified Christ Jesus to the heavens; and to the ineffable rightness, certainty, and eternity of the judicial ruin of sin and all that sides with sin-a ruin already in effect accomplished by the personal triumph of the Son of God over His mysterious personal Antagonist, the world's prince and god. So, according to this passage, should the Spirit of truth, holiness, and love, deal with the individual. Such should be the personal conviction of sin, righteousness, and judgment, under His operating hand. In a way that should make use of all the moral faculties of the man, and yet should work from infinitely above them, and penetrate if it be possible beneath them, He should bring the inner eyes to see something of the realities of this great matter, so that the man should

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say with the voice of his inmost being, "I have sinned against the Lord and His glorious Christ; what must I do?"

May I make bold to turn to my reader, and laying aside the tone of mere enquiry and discussion, speak to him as to a brother man? I venture to ask you, does this brief, fragmentary indication of the Spirit's sin-convincing work correspond in any degree to your consciousness, to your experience? Ah, surely it does. For indeed such things have been taking place in souls ever since the day when at the great Effusion, and as its very first result, three thousand human individuals "were pricked in their heart, and said, Men and brethren, what shall we do?" Paul was convinced Acts ii. 37. of sin, and so was the Philippian Jailer, and so was Augustine, and so was Luther, and so were Hooker, and Pascal, and Bunyan, and Brainerd, and Wesley, and Simeon, and Chalmers,strange collocation of names, men in almost every respect dissimilar, but alike in this common characteristic of conviction of sin. And who shall count the examples of the same work,

here and now, in our time, in our land, in every land where the Gospel of the Son of God has found its way? No law of sex, or age, or temperament, or circumstances, can be traced in the matter; no law but that "of the Spirit of life in Rom. viii. 2. Christ Jesus." This convicting whisper and unveiling finds its way to the youngest and to the most aged conscience, to the miserable and to the happy in external conditions, to the savage and to the scholar, to the profligate and to the man who on every standard short of that of God in Christ is, as Saul of Tarsus was, sincerely moral. So I count it altogether likely that my reader is one who can "set to his seal" that the doctrine of individual conviction of sin by the Holy Spirit is true, is true for him. I do not know, I cannot guess, how it has come to him; the manner, and method, and occasion. Perhaps, as a matter of biography, it has come not in the first pages of his Christian experience, but later. So Zinzendorf, whose conversion came in the first phase of it through an overpowering insight into the love and loveliness of his Redeemer,1 was taught not till later

1 See further below, p. 112.