Holy Spirit should descend upon His disciples and upon His Church; that it should be the office of the Holy Spirit, as the ages passed, to display in clearer and truer light the nature of sin and of righteousness and the ultimate victory of good over evil, to educe the fulness of Divine truth from the words which He had spoken in His human life, and to endow and enrich His Church and her ministers with the spiritual power of forgiving or retaining sins. He taught also that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was the one unpardonable sin.

Spirituality is the keynote of our Lord's Gospel as it was of His own life. He said Himself, "It is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I have spoken unto you are Spirit and are life." 1 But the source of all spirituality is the Holy Spirit. From Him, from His sacred influence, there stream into human hearts the grace, the purity, the love, the holiness, the sense of something better far than earth, the passionate desire for Heaven, which constitute the supreme motive of the true Christian life.

But the revelation of the Holy Spirit, when fully apprehended, evinces a wonderful and pathetic sympathy of relation between our Lord and His disciples in all times. As they gaze upwards humbly and painfully, with eyes that fail for the very brightness of the vision which awes them, to the serene and sacred height of His perfection, so, while He sits in tranquil sovereignty, He sends forth from the Father the Eternal Spirit into the hearts of men and women and of the generations 1 St. John vi. 63.

that seek to know and do His will, and into the great heart of His Church, that she may be guided and inspired and exalted above herself, and may become the light and glory of the world.

This is the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as our Lord revealed it.

But Christians to-day are not in the position of those to whom our Lord's words were originally spoken. They stand not in the dawn but in the evening of His Revelation; they can test His words by the experience of Christian history. Nor is any study which Christianity affords more valuable than a comparison of our Lord's words with their historical fulfilment.

L

CHAPTER III

THE REVELATION IN THE OTHER BOOKS OF

THE NEW TESTAMENT

THE present Essay, starting from the Gospels, will review, however inadequately, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the other writings of the New Testament, in the patristic literature of the early Christian centuries, and in the history of the ecclesiastical councils in which the doctrine gradually received its permanent form.

The writings of the New Testament may be suitably considered in three groups, viz.—A. The Acts of the Apostles; B. The Pauline Epistles; C. The other books. It will be proper to ask what is the teaching, express or implicit, of these several writings upon the Holy Spirit, how far it agrees, not in character only, but in scope and method with the Gospels, whether and in what sense it departs from them or adds to them, and what is its general witness to the action of the Holy Spirit in the primitive Church. For in all these writings the Presence of the Holy Spirit may be said to occupy a commanding place; it is the prominent pervading article of faith in them all.

"Just as in the Old

Testament the central phenomenon is Prophecy, so in the New Testament the central phenomenon is the outpouring of the Spirit.”1

A. The Acts of the Apostles.

The writer of the Acts, who is almost certainly St. Luke, opens his narrative in words which link it to the third Gospel. In St. Luke xxiv. 49 our Lord is represented as saying, "Behold, I send forth the promise of my Father upon you: but tarry ye in the city (of Jerusalem), until ye be clothed with power from on high.”

In Acts i. 4 it is related that, "being assembled together with them, (He) charged them not to depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father, which, saith he, ye heard from me."

The whole tenor of the two passages, and especially, perhaps, the singular phrase, "the promise of the Father," suggests that they are two accounts of the same event in the same handwriting. It is the gift of the Holy Spirit-predicted by our Lord in the Gospel and consummated in the Actswhich is, as has been said, the principal link between them.

The descent of the Holy Spirit upon the infant Church at Pentecost was the birth of universal Christianity. The narrative of it in the 2nd chapter of the Acts is so well known as to stand in no need of reproduction. But as in other narratives which have been considered, e.g. in our Lord's interview with Nicodemus, or in His Appearance to His disciples after His Resurrection, there are some

1 Sanday, "On Inspiration" (Bampton Lectures), p. 398.

few points which must be set out in their true light.

(1) On the day of Pentecost, as on the day of our Lord's Baptism, the Holy Spirit assumed an external visible form. What the "bodily form like a dove" was on the one occasion, the "cloven (or "distributed") tongues like as of fire" were on the other; they were the vehicle or representative of the Holy Spirit. That the "tongues like as of fire" were an objective reality cannot be questioned in view of the explicit statement that "it (the fire) sat upon each one of them."

(2) The descent of the Holy Spirit at the Pentecost is associated with the two elements of fire and wind. "Suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven (or "distributed ") tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each one of them.' This is not the only place in the Acts where the descent of the Holy Spirit is symbolised and signified by a strong wind. It is told in the 4th chapter that" when they (the Apostles) had prayed, the place was shaken wherein they were gathered together; and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spake the word of God with boldness." 2 But the wind, as has been already said, is chosen by our Lord Himself as a type of the Holy Spirit in His conversation with Nicodemus. It is, as has been also said, recommended as a type not only in itself, but by the identity of the word for "wind " and for "Spirit" in the three sacred languages.