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THE

CHAPTER I.

HE following chapters have a very simple purpose. They are not intended to constitute a technical treatise, certainly not to carry the reader into elaborate enquiries into the history of doctrines. They are intended to be a reverent review of some, and only some, of the main teachings of the Holy Scriptures concerning the ever-blessed Spirit of God, the heavenly Paraclete, the eternal Third Person, the Lord and Life-Giver, and His revealed work in Redemption. And this review shall be made, by His most merciful assistance, with a constant reference to the actual needs of the human soul, the actual experience of the people of God.

The theme is one of altogether special importance for the believing Church of these latter days. In John Owen's Pneumatologia, his deep, massive, and most spiritual “ Discourse

Concerning the Holy Spirit" (1674), occurs a remarkable passage (bk i., ch. i.), in which he traces through the ages and dispensations a certain progress of divine tests of living orthodoxy, related to each of the Three Persons in succession. Before the First Advent the great testing truth was "the oneness of God's nature and His monarchy over all," with special respect to the Person of the Father. At the First Advent the great question was whether a Church orthodox on the first point would now receive the divine Son, incarnate, sacrificed, and glorified, according to the promise. And when the working of this test had gathered out the Church of Christian believers, and built it on the foundation of the truth of the Person and Work of the Lord Jesus Christ, then the Holy Spirit came in a new prominence and speciality before that Church as a touchstone of true faith. "Wherefore the duty of the Church now immediately respects the Spirit of God, who acts towards it in the name of the Father and of the Son; and with respect unto Him it is that the Church in its present state is capable of an apostasy from God. . . . The sin of

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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

1 D'Aubigné, Hist. de la Réformation du xvime Siècle, liv. v., ch. iv. Köstlin, Luthers Leben, p. 149.

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