made in the Christian centuries to the thought of that Spirit as informing and inspiring the Church of Christ! Yet an oblivion of the Holy Spirit characterises the dark hours in the religious life of a Church or of an individual soul. It is when religion has grown materialised, when faith has sunk into a form, when human hearts are set more upon ceremony than upon righteousness, and human ears listen more keenly and intently for the far-off dying echoes of an ancient law than for the living present voice of inspiration, that the belief in the Holy Spirit becomes necessarily dull and inoperative. And the greater the mechanical tendency of an age in religious life, the greater is the need to revive men's faith in the Holy Spirit.

Upon the whole, it is a curious fact that the relative proportions of particular doctrines in the New Testament and in Christian history often present so significant a contrast. Thus the doctrine

of the Church or the doctrine of Holy Communion fill comparatively few verses in the Gospels and Epistles, far fewer indeed than the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Yet these are the doctrines which have rent Christendom asunder in the last four centuries; while over the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, which once, though for a brief while only, excited strong theological animosity, a peace as of death has seemed to reign. Even to-day, while men dispute about the Church or the Communion, they seldom dwell upon the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and never dwell upon it in the fierce and angry temper of controversy.

It is possible, perhaps, to regret the decadence

of a living faith in the Holy Spirit and yet not to regard it as inexplicable; for human nature labours under a remarkable difficulty of apprehending as a whole whatever subject is offered to its observation. It takes notice of parts or phases of a complex truth, but it does not realise all the truth. Thus in the realm of art there is a disposition to criticise a painting, even when it represents a landscape, not so much by the general comprehensive effect of its various features, although it is there that the charm of the painting probably lies, as by some one particular feature taken alone. Similarly, while Nature creates no simple harmonious character, but always characters of light and shade, in which good and ill, humour and sadness, passion and patience are in various measures intertwined and intermixed, the criticism of such characters is apt to look upon them not as human beings but as types, each representative of some special quality and of no others—

Scriptor honoratum si forte reponis Achillem,
Impiger, iracundus, inexorabilis, acer

Jura neget sibi nata, nihil non arroget armis.
Sit Medea ferox invictaque, flebilis Ino,
Perfidus Ixion, Io vaga, tristis Orestes.1

The difficulty of attending at one time to many aspects of a composite whole lies in the character of humanity itself. Life, like Nature, is always manifold, but human judgments upon it are often partial and incomplete. And this law holds good in the human estimate of Divine truth. Christianity

1 Horace, Ars Poetica, 120-124.

entered the world as a system complete and complex, built up of many parts which are dependent one upon another, each in itself perhaps scarcely intelligible, but in relation to the others fraught with a high and holy significance. It is like some vast cathedral, where nave and transept and choir and lofty pillars and delicate tracery and painted windows must be viewed together, and each in relation and subordination to the whole, if the general effect upon the mind is to be appreciated.

It follows that the due "proportion of faith" is necessary to the faith itself. The loss of this proportion is heresy. For most heresies of ecclesiastical history have not been untruths, but perversions and exaggerations, or, at the best perhaps, one-sided views of sacred truth. And the evil of heresy is that, as soon as one truth or one aspect of truth assumes a dominant interest in men's eyes, all else comes to seem unimportant and evanescent, and in the end. is apt to fade out of sight. Christian history may, in fact, be divided into several ages according to the prevalence of particular doctrines at certain times. There has been the age of our Lord's Divinity, the age of Catholic orthodoxy, the age of the Church's unity, the age of the religious life in communities; and since the Reformation and among the Reformed Churches, the age of justification by faith, the age of personal conversion, the age of return to the principles and practices of the sub- Apostolic Church. But there has not been, I think, what may be called the age of the Holy Spirit. It was only in the fight against the Macedonian heresy, and in the agony of severance between the Eastern and

Western Churches, that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit loomed for a brief while into greatness, and then (as will presently be shown) it took a character singularly alien from the thoughts and motives of the modern Christian world. And yet it is one of the few doctrines which may be said to occupy a primary position in the New Testament.

If the New Testament is the standard of value or importance as between the various doctrines of the Christian Creed, then the doctrine of the Holy Spirit necessarily claims little less than a primacy of importance in the devout and reverent thought of the Christian world.

It is there more prominent, as has been said, than the doctrine of the Church. In the New Testament the references to the Church are strangely few. Our Lord, it is true, expressly declared His intention of founding a Church against which "the gates of hell (i.e. "of Hades") should not prevail." And although He seldom speaks of a Church, the idea of a society called by His name and inspired by His revelation is frequent, and indeed essential, in His teaching. But of the Christian society or Church, of its nature, its character, its constitution, the system of its law, the methods of its ministry, He said little. St. Paul, as his Epistles indicate, was much more occupied with local or individual churches than with the Church as a Catholic body. But in the Epistles as in the Gospels, long passages turn upon the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise of the Spirit, His nature, His function, His descent at Pentecost, His subsequent operation, His relation to the human

spirit, His testimony, His influence, and the graces and virtues of which He is the author-are subjects constantly present to the Christians of the New Testament, and strangely forgotten by Christians in the later history of the Church.

Again, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is more prominent in the New Testament than the Holy Communion. The Holy Communion, by the circumstances of its institution and its special relation to the death of Him who instituted it, has ever occupied a commanding position in minds and hearts of Christians. Yet even when such passages as occur in the sixth and fifteenth chapters of St. John's Gospel are taken in due reference to the mystical doctrine of the Eucharist, it remains true that the doctrine of the Holy Communion does not occupy so large a space as the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in the pages of the New Testament. It may be suggested that the pure spirituality of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit has militated against its popularity; for human nature instinctively desires what is visible or palpable or material. How strong the desire is, the Roman hypothesis of Transubstantiation may sufficiently declare. For whereas our Lord said, "It is expedient for you that I go away," and in these words showed the higher value to be set upon His spiritual than upon His bodily presence, His followers have aimed at keeping Him in a bodily or quasi-bodily form; and thus it is that the doctrine of His presence in the consecrated bread or wine, however it may have been interpreted, has proved more attractive and persuasive than the doctrine of