MYSTICAL UNION; A TRUTH FOR USE. 45

life. Having the Spirit, we will remember how fully and truly by the Spirit we possess the Son. And in weakness, in sadness, in temptation, under the burthening sense it may be of spiritual decline, we will without delay or misgiving use our wonderful treasure. We will by the Spirit enjoy our possession of the Son, not after the hour of need but in it. With such a Bond to such a Head, why should we for one minute walk in failure? Nay, "when we are weak, then are we strong;" "in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." 1

2 Cor. xii. 10. I Cor. vi. II.

And now to advance more directly to the

study of the work of the

men and our salvation."

Holy Spirit "for us

And do Thou, most

blessed Spirit of God, shine on us and in us as we go!

1 I would earnestly commend to my readers Marshall's Gospel Mystery of Sanctification (first published about 1680). It is very old-fashioned, and by no means light reading; but it is full of truth inestimably precious to those who seek to walk with God at once in humble watchfulness and holy liberty. further p. 174.

See

It might seem right that we should here first consider His divine work in creation, in the "old creation," in "nature." For in a large range of Scripture passages, from Gen. i. 2 onwards, we find Him mysteriously but distinctly revealed as the immediate divine Agent in the making and manipulation, so to speak, of material things.

But our proposed subject (p. 1) is the Spirit's work in redemption, a subject which indeed will give us material enough. All I would do here is to call attention in a general way to this Scriptural connexion of the SPIRIT with the world of Matter. It is one among the many suggestions in the divine Word that matter has for its immediate basis the absolutely immaterial will and power of God; that in this respect, as in others, la dernière raison des choses, c'est Dieu.1 suggestions, it reminds the believer, as he rests on his God for spiritual life and power, that the whole material universe, wrought by the

And, like all those other

1 Pascal. For a good account of pagan, apocryphal, and Scriptural views of matter see the note (by Dr F. W. Farrar) on Wisdom xi. 17 in the Speaker's Commentary.

THE SPIRIT AND THE SCRIPTURES. 47

same will that saves him, is infinitely pliable in its Maker's hands for the ultimate good of His spiritual new creation.

Reverently leaving alone, then, this field of truth I turn deliberately to another for some brief but earnest recollections and suggestions. That other field is the work of the Holy Spirit in relation to the Holy Scriptures.

I hardly need say that I am aware of the present gravity of that subject, and of the extreme difficulty of speaking upon it to edification amidst the unsettlement, and indeed tumult, of present speculations and negations. But it may be both possible and helpful to take it up in this chapter along a line single, in a sense simple, and yet all-important. We will adhere strictly to the terms of our great subject -the Holy Spirit's work in relation to the Scriptures. It appears to me that many widely prevalent present views of the nature and function of the written Word, however much truth of detail may enter into their formation, err in their ensemble by their deeply humanitarian, naturalistic character. Taking up the perfectly true position that human agency and natural

process are largely present as factors in the production of Scripture, many an able theorist declines, or however fails, to see that nevertheless the resultant of the factors of production is not humanitarian, nor naturalistic, but the divine Word, the supernatural Oracle. All this failure is the effect far less of a patient and inductive study of the phenomena than of the general influence of the modern tendency to simplify and unify phenomena under laws as general as possible. It comes not a little of an instinctive wish to see a likeness, a homogeneity, and ultimately a oneness, under all spiritual operations and experiences. And so the "inspiration" of Prophet and Apostle is classified as the same in genus, and even in species, as the "inspiration" of the Christian believer of our day in his walk of faith and obedience; as a development-in some respects very high, no doubt, but still only a development of the general "consciousness" of the Church and its members. Isaiah, or the Isaiahs, and St Paul, were inspired undoubtedly; but so, and in essentially the same way, were Augustine and Anselm, Tauler and

IS THE BIBLE "AS ANOTHER BOOK"? 49

Savonarola, Luther and Bunyan, Oberlin and Elizabeth Fry, nay Plato and Virgil, Shakespeare and Wordsworth, nay the earnest explorer of the structure and processes of material nature, or of the human spirit, or of the written products of that spirit, in whatever region, "secular" or "sacred," human or divine. To all Christian minds and lives, indeed to all grave and elevated minds and lives, Christian or not, some fragments of eternal verities have been somehow disclosed. These they have rendered into word, or act, or both, not always exactly, not always truly, perhaps not always even truthfully, but still so as to give some hints and "broken lights" of the eternal archetype and original. To the devout men who produced the Biblical Literature such disclosures were made in a very remarkable degree, and Scripture accordingly gives us hints of archetypal and eternal truths in a very remarkable way. But to them, as to others, those hints were conveyed only naturally, through their moral nature, through experience and reflexion. And so in order to gather up these hints given in the Bible we