NINTH PRIMARY CONVICTION I THE text points us to an aspect of the function of the Holy Spirit which is not very often distinctly considered. In the dispensation which Pentecost was to open He-the Divine Personal Comforter -was to "take" continually, with a living activity, of that illimitable fulness which was Christ's own possession, and announce it to Christ's people. The word, thrice repeated in three verses like a Divine refrain, implies repetition, and strengthening with repetition; it is solemn, majestic, authoritative-in the LXX. almost sacerdotal. This function of the Holy Spirit is often overlooked. The boundless fulness of that which the Saviour calls "Mine," and which He pauses to define by "all things as many as the Father hath," defies the artificial analysis of a sermon. But we may, I hope with profit, consider the office of the Holy Ghost in relation (1) to Christ's words, and (2) to His Church. The second part of these reflections will lead us directly to the subject intrusted to me this day, "Church Extension over the Colonies and Dependencies of the British Empire." II 1. The Holy Ghost is the perpetual commentator upon the words of Jesus. Let me direct your attention to four characteris tics of those words: (1) Many of them are pervaded by allusions to common objects or derived from every-day experience: birds, fishes, dogs, foxes, swine, serpents; in the inanimate creation, trees, flowers, waters that leap in light, winds that seem to tremble into speech, fields whitening with grain, signs of the footsteps of nearing summer in leaf and bud, harvest, the living face of the sky-alluring, or lowering sullenly; lessons sweet or terrible, solemn or pathetic, from the lamp-wick, the reed, the salt, the loaf, the pruning of the vine or the cutting of its twigs, the most abject fatalities of human life; lessons from the piece of money, the skin wine-bottle, the play of children, the popular story of enchanted city or giant's castle; deeper things, sighs or sobs from the great ocean of human life, some murmur of whose infinite pathos reaches every one in the little ripples of home. Now, observe that if Jesus were indeed what He claimed to be, He must in a large degree have thus spoken. (2) The language of such a teacher must be permanent. Unless new sheets are to be added, or a revision to be made with every new age, such a message must be addressed to permanent wants and feelings. In the lifetime of many of us thought has already spoken in several dialects. Terminologies are dialects, a Volapük aspiring to be a universal language. Thought has talked Hegel, Coleridge, Mill, Hamilton, Comte (to speak only of the dead). Sometimes the tone of the expositors of this language is half unintelligibly sad, sometimes simply offensive. "Systems making a pretence to perfect knowledge have a tendency to gender acquiescence," and infallibility contradicted has a tendency to become abusive. The philosopher scolds at large at all who are so impenetrably stupid as not to understand or not to agree with him; and a modest acceptance of the Apostles' Creed or of the New Testament may make one painfully surmise some occult connection between the unconditioned and the ill-conditioned. A system which aspires to be universal and permanent must get rid of the argot of academies, and address a permanent and universal audience. Otherwise, philosophy shares the doom of literature; as style, or delineations of character, not founded upon any natural taste proper to the human species, but upon the growth of a particular period-factitious and affected humors, artificially grafted on the common stock of real life-drop into oblivion. Shakespeare himself cannot make Don Armado the euphuist or Holofernes the pedant quite real for us. That which is true of literature is equally true of philosophy. Eccentric philosophy bears within itself the seeds of death. (3) The language of such a teacher must be |