science and, as an element of it, foreknowledge are clearly ascribed to the Holy Spirit.

(2) His sanctification, which is implied in such expressions as "the vessel of His (i.e. God's) Spirit,' meaning Jacob, in the Epistle of Barnabas, or "clothed in the Holy Spirit of these virgins" in the Shepherd of Hermas.2

4

(3) There are also in the Shepherd of Hermas two or three passages 3 where the Holy Spirit is described, after Ezekiel's manner, as actually taking the writer and "bearing him away through a pathless track, through which no man could pass." No passage is perhaps so original, or so nearly grotesque, as that in which St. Ignatius tells the Ephesians * that they are "stones of a temple, prepared beforehand for an edifice of God the Father, being hoisted up to the heights by the engine of Jesus Christ, which is the Cross, and using the Holy Spirit as a rope." But even this is a passage in which the conception of the Holy Spirit, as "helping our infirmity" is perfectly Scriptural; for it is the Holy Spirit who attests and evinces human spirituality, and draws the hearts and consciences of men upon earth upwards to God.

Upon the whole, in estimating the testimony of the Apostolic Fathers to the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, it is necessary to remember how slight and scanty their writings are as evidences of apostolic belief. They do not constitute, nor indeed do the books of the New Testament, a body of doctrine ; they are partial and fragmentary-the wreckage, it

2 Parable ix. 24.

SII.

3 Vision i. and ii.

4 $ 9.

5 Rom. viii. 26.

may almost be said, of a great literature; they were composed spontaneously, and as if at random, according as the circumstances of some special Church or person evoked them; they are not in general designed to formulate a Creed, still less to originate it; but they contain such direction or counsel, or help, or encouragement, or sympathy, or rebuke, as might be necessary or desirable in the particular relation of their authors and recipients.

It may be frankly admitted that there are some aspects of the Holy Spirit's Nature or Operation which are not so clearly set out as one would have expected them to be in writings of the first or second Christian century. The "gifts" of the Holy Spirit so conspicuous in St. Paul's Epistles-are missing here. His "works" are left in comparative obscurity. Of His wonderfully searching and testing influence upon the human spirit, there is no trace. Even of His sanctifying energy no direct mention is expressly made.

But while the picture of the Holy Spirit, as the Apostolic Fathers paint it, is incomplete, yet, so far as it goes, it is wholly congruous and consistent with the narrative of St. Luke or the letters of St. Paul. As the Old Testament presents in mere outline, and the New in full detail, the conception, which is foreign to all secular literature, of a Personal Divine Being, whose constant influence is exercised in illumination, grace, and sanctity upon the hearts and consciences of spiritual men, so the Apostolic Fathers acknowledge such an influence in themselves and the Church of their time; they are conscious and glad of it; they look to it in distress and

difficulty for support, and believe it to be the very voice of God. But neither the writers of the New Testament nor the Apostolic Fathers attempt to define the Nature or Mission of the Holy Spirit in formal terms; they speak of a Person, and an influence which He exerts, and an experience resulting from it; but who the Person was in relation to the Godhead, or how He works, or how they realize His influence, are questions which are not answered, because they do not, as it seems, call for an answer; they relate to parts of general Christian sentiment and tradition; they lie in the spiritual atmosphere which all Christians breathe. For the age of faith precedes the age of definition, and it is not until faith becomes clouded that it is necessary to ask or answer questions.

Beyond the Apostolic Fathers in their testimony to the nature and office of the Holy Spirit, it is not the purpose of this Essay to go. A complete examination of patristic authority would immoderately widen its limits. For when the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is set forth, as revealed by our Lord and accepted and interpreted by His Apostles and their immediate successors, the proof that it has been ever a Catholic doctrine, clear and consistent, may be held to be adequate; and all that remains is to speak of its application to modern thought. But there is still occasion for some few remarks upon the place of the doctrine in conciliar definition.

CHAPTER V

THE REVELATION IN THE CREEDS

THE Ecumenical Councils of the Church occupy an imposing and commanding position in her history. They represent that Christian Catholic unanimity which was hers once, and was her especial pride and glory, but was afterwards broken, and, since the severance of the Eastern and Western Churches, has been lost and can never now, unless through God's direct interposition, be regained. They are the expressions or realisations of an ideal to which all Christians regretfully look back, and for which all Christians with an intense feeling yearn and pray.

The Creeds and Canons of the Ecumenical Councils were the answers of the Church to questions already raised. It was not the business of the Councils to raise questions in doctrine or practice; but when a question had been started and had got some way,—when it was debated and discussed, and men's minds were divided about it, when it threatened to violate the unity or sympathy of the Church, then a Council, summoned from the whole Christian world or approved by the whole Christian world, was the regular constitutional means of

settling it. There can be no room for surprise, then, that particular questions do not occur in the acts of this or that Council; they were not prominent at the date of the Council, however serious they may have been before or afterwards; and the Council simply left them alone.

Thus it is that the Ecumenical Councils afford not a complete ecclesiastical history of the centuries. in which they were held, but, as it were, a military history of the Church's campaigns against enemies without or traitors within her camp; they exhibit the Church, not in her quiet daily ministries of compassion and charity, but as contending for the truth, resisting and rebutting error, defining orthodoxy or, at the best, laying down the original lines of her own organisation and procedure.

Yet no documents so ancient and authoritative as the Creeds and Canons of the united Church can fail in testimony, whether it be explicit or implied, to the faith of Christendom. It is right to consider, then, how far they assert the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, as it has been already traced in the New Testament and in the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, and how far they amplify it, if at all, by addition, or elucidate it by definition or interpretation. And in this consideration the general spirit of the Councils will be as instructive as their express declarations.

In all the Councils, except the First Council of Constantinople, the Divine Being and the Personal Presence of the Holy Spirit, as well as the special relation of the Holy Spirit to our Lord in His taken to be simple axioms of the

human life, were