PERSONALITY OF THE SPIRIT.

5

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

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

1 Rendered thus among the "Hymns" formerly appended to the Prayer Book :

66

:

Come, Holy Ghost, Creator, come,

And visit all the souls of Thine;

Thou hast inspired our hearts with life,

Inspire them now with life divine.

"Thou art the Comforter, the Gift

Of God most High, the Fire of love,

The everlasting Spring of joy,

And holy Unction from above."

See the whole ancient hymn in Trench's Sacred Latin Poetry, p. 184. It appears to be certainly older than its reputed author, Charlemagne. See too the beautiful hymn to the Holy Spirit by King Robert the Second of France (A.D. 997), ibid, p ·196.

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 Son 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 ПIveûμa associated repeatedly and markedly Πνεῦμα with the masculine IIapákληTоs, the John xiv. 16, 17; masculines ὅς, ἐκεῖνος, αὐτός.1 And let this be read in the light of the wonderful context, in which this blessed Paraclete, this

XV. 26; XVI. 7, 8.

1 And if the question is asked, what language did the Lord Jesus speak that night, Greek or Aramaic; and if Aramaic, how

Advocatus," called in" to the aid of the other

"

wise orphaned " Church, is seen to be such, and to act so, as to be indeed the Substitute, the more than substitute, for the unspeakably real personality of the Saviour in His seen presence. The passage sets the Holy Spirit before us as not the Father, as not the Son, and yet as the "Vicar of Christ" (the phrase is Tertullian's2), the ample Consolation for the absence of the familiar company of the beloved Saviour. It scarcely needs the impressive testimony of the Greek grammar of the sentences to assure us with deep and restful certainty that to the mind of the Saviour that night the Spirit was indeed present as a Person.

In this central and decisive passage then we have the Holy Ghost revealed to us in so many

was the contrast between masculine and neuter conveyed? we reply that the question, most interesting and important in itself, is not in point in our enquiry. For us as believers in the divine character of the Written Word the discourses of the New Testament, and of the Old Testament too, are before us as reports corrected and edited by the Author.

1 For a vindication of the rendering Advocate for Paracletus see Lightfoot, On a Fresh Revision of the N.T., pp. 50-56 Meantime the dear familiar word Comforter, Confortator, remains as a true paraphrase of Paraclete.

De Virginibus Velandis, c. 1.

ITS BEARING ON OTHER SCRIPTURES. 9

words as HIM, not only as It; as the living and conscious Exerciser of true personal will and love, as truly and fully as the First 1 John ii. 1. "Paraclete," the Lord Jesus Christ Himself. And now this central passage radiates out its glory upon the whole system and circle of Scripture truth about the Spirit. From Gen. i. 2 to Rev. xxii. 17 it sheds the warmth of divine personal life into every mention of the blessed Power.1 With the Paschal Discourse in our heart and mind, we know that it was He, not It, who "brooded" over the primeval deep. He, not It, "strove with man," or Gen. i. 2. "ruled in man," of old. He, not Gen. vi. 3. It, was in Joseph in Egypt, and Gen. xli. 38. upon Moses in the wilderness of Numb. xi. 17. wandering, and upon judges and kings of

I well know that it is maintained that in the Greek New Testament, as a rule, Tò IIveûμa denotes the Personal Paraclete, and πveûμɑ without the article not the Person but the influence. With some exceptions I believe this rule holds good. But it leaves quite untouched the line of reasoning in the text here. When we have ascertained that rò IIveûμa is indeed a Person we know that veûμa is a personal influence. And in the general light of Scripture teaching on divine Influences we are abundantly secure in saying that this means nothing less than the divine Person at work.