Chapter VIII: The Holy Spirit and Inspiration (1)

CHARLES GORE.

I. The appeal to 'experience' in religion, whether personal or general, brings before the mind so many associations of ungoverned enthusiasm and untrustworthy fanaticism, that it does not easily commend itself to those of us who are most concerned to be reasonable. And yet, in one form, or another, it is an essential part of the appeal which Christianity makes on its own behalf since the day when Jesus Christ met the question 'Art thou He that should come, or do we look for another?' by pointing to the transforming effect of His work; 'The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.'

The fact is that in current appeals to experience the fault, where there is a fault, lies not in the appeal but in the nature of the experience appealed to. What is meant by the term is often an excited state of feeling, rather than a permanent transformation of the whole moral, intellectual, and physical being of man. Or it is something which seems individual and eccentric, or something confined to a particular class of persons under special conditions of education or of ignorance, or something which other religions besides Christianity have been conspicuous for producing. When a meaning broad and full, and at the same time exact enough, has been given to experience the appeal is essential to Christianity, because Christianity professes to be not a mere record of the past, but a present life, and there is no life where there is no experience.

It will be worth while, then, to bear in mind how freely the original defenders of the Christian Church appealed, like their Master, to facts of experience. Thus we find an individual, like S. Cyprian, recalling the time of his baptism, and the personal experience of illumination and power which it brought with it:--

'Such were my frequent musings: for whereas I was encumbered with the many sins of my past life, which it seemed impossible to be rid of, so I had used myself to give way to my clinging infirmities, and, from despair of better things, to humour the evils of my heart, as slaves born in my house, and my proper offspring. But after that life-giving water succoured me, washing away the stain of former years, and pouring into my cleansed and hallowed breast the light which comes from heaven, after that I drank in the Heavenly Spirit, and was created into a new man by a second birth,--then marvellously what before was doubtful became plain to me, what was hidden was revealed, what was dark began to shine, what was before difficult, now had a way and a means, what had seemed impossible, now could be achieved, what was in me of the guilty flesh, now confessed that it was earthy, what was quickened in me by the Holy Ghost, now had a growth according to God[248].

Again, we find an apologist like S. Athanasius, resting the stress of his argument on behalf of Christ upon what He has done in the world, and specially on the spiritual force He exercises on masses of men, 'drawing them to religion, persuading them to virtue, teaching them immortality, leading them to the desire of heavenly things, revealing the knowledge of the Father, inspiring power over death, shewing each man to himself, abolishing the godlessness of idolatry[249].'

The Fathers of the Christian Church appealed in this way to experience, because Christianity, as they knew, is essentially not a past event, but a present life, a life first manifested in Christ and then perpetuated in His Church. Christianity is a manifested life,--a thing, therefore, like all other forms of life, known not in itself but in its effects, its fruits, its results. Christianity is a manifested life, and it is this because it is the sphere in which the Spirit, the Life-giver, finds His freest and most unhindered activity. The Christian Church is the scene of the intensest, the most vigorous, the richest, the most 'abundant' life that the universe knows, because in a preeminent sense it is the 'Spirit-bearing body.' The Spirit is life; that is His chief characteristic. We may indeed elucidate the idea of spirit by negations; by negation of materiality, of circumscription, of limitation; but the positive conception we are to attach to spirit is the conception of life; and where life is most penetrating, profound, invincible, rational, conscious of God, there in fullest freedom of operation is the Holy Spirit[250].

Thus, obviously enough, the doctrine of the Spirit is no remote or esoteric thing; it is no mere ultimate object of the rapt contemplation of the mystic; it is the doctrine of that wherein God touches man most nearly, most familiarly, in common life. Last in the eternal order of the Divine Being, 'proceeding from the Father and the Son,' the Holy Spirit is the first point of contact with God in the order of human experience[251].

'I believe in the Holy Ghost, the giver of life.' All life is His operation. 'Wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is also life; and wherever life is, there is also the Holy Spirit[252].' Thus if creation takes its rise in the will of the Father, if it finds its law in the being of the Word or Son, yet the effective instrument of creation, the 'finger of God,' the moving principle of vitalization is the Holy Spirit, 'the divider and distributor of the gifts of life[253].'

Nature is one great body, and there is breath in the body; but this breath is not self-originated life, it is the influence of the Divine Spirit. 'By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.' The Spirit, the breath of God, was brooding upon the face of the waters of chaos ere life and order were. It is the sending forth of the breath of God, which is the giving to things of the gift of life; it is the withdrawal of that breath which is their annihilation[254]. So keenly indeed were the Christians of the early period conscious of the one life of nature as the universal evidence of the one Spirit, that it was a point of the charge against Origen that his language seemed to involve an exclusion of the Holy Spirit from nature, and a limitation of His activity to the Church[255]. The whole of life is certainly His. And yet, because His special attribute is holiness, it is in rational natures, which alone are capable of holiness, that He exerts His special influence. A special in-breathing of the Divine Spirit gave to man his proper being[256]. In humanity, made after the Divine Image, it was the original intention of God that the Spirit should find His chiefest joy, building the edifice of a social life in which nature was to find its crown and justification: a life of conscious and free sonship, in which the gifts of God should be not only received, but recognised as His, and consciously used in willing and glad homage to the Divine Giver, in reverent execution of the law of development impressed by the Divine Reason, in the realized fellowship of the Blessed Spirit of knowledge and love. The history of humanity has in fact been a development, but a development the continuity of which is most apparent in that department in which man appears simply as the child of nature, the most perfect and interesting of her products, consciously adapting himself to his environment and moulded by it. This indeed has been so much the case that the facts of the history of civilization have been used, at least plausibly, as an argument against our race really possessing moral freedom at all. Such a use of the facts is, we recognise, not justifiable. It leaves out of consideration some of the most striking elements in human history, and some of the most certain facts of human consciousness. But the very plausibleness of the argument is suggestive. It means that comparatively very few men have been at pains to realize their true freedom; that men in masses have been dominated by the mere forces of nature; or, in other words, that human history presents broadly the record of a one-sided, a distorted development. For man was not meant for merely natural evolution, mere self-adaptation to the 'things that are seen.' The consciousness that he was meant for something higher has tinged his most brilliant physical successes, his greatest triumphs of civilization and art, with the bitterness of remorse, the misery of conscious lawlessness.

Our race was created for conscious fellowship with God, for sonship, for the life of spirit. And it is just in this department that its failure has been most conspicuous. It is here that the Divine Spirit has found His chiefest disappointment. Everywhere He has found rebellion--not everywhere without exception, for 'in every age entering into holy souls, He has made them sons of God and prophets': but everywhere in such a general sense that sin in fact and in its consequences covers the whole region of humanity. In the highest department of created life, where alone lawlessness was possible, because what was asked for was the co-operation of free service to carry out a freely accepted ideal[257],--there alone is the record of lawlessness, the record of the Spirit striving with man, but resisted, rejected, ignored, quenched. Thus the word, which in fact most forcibly characterizes man's spiritual history, so far as it has been according to the mind of God, is not progress, but recovery, or redemption. It is not natural but supernatural--supernatural, that is, in view of the false nature which man made for himself by excluding God. Otherwise the work of redemption is only the reconstitution of the nature which God designed. It is the recovery within the limits of a chosen race and by a deliberate process of limitation, of a state of things which had been intended to be universal[258]. The 'elect' represent not the special purpose of God for a few, but the universal purpose which under the circumstances can only be realized through a few. The hedging in of the few, the drawing of the lines so close, the method of exclusion again and again renewed all down the history of redemption, represents the love of the Divine Spirit ever baffled in the mass, preserving the truth of God in a 'remnant,' an elect body; who themselves escaping the corruption which is in the world, become in their turn a fresh centre from which the restorative influence can flow out upon mankind. Rejected in the world, He secures for Himself a sphere of operations in the Jews, isolating Abraham, giving the law for a hedge, keeping alive in the nation the sense of its vocation by the inspiration of prophets. Again and again baffled in the body of the Jewish nation, He falls back upon the faithful remnant, and keeps alive in _them_ that prospective sonship which was meant to be the vocation of the whole nation: sometimes in narrower, sometimes in broader channels, the purpose of love moves on till the Spirit finds in the Son of Man, the Anointed One, the perfect realization of the destiny of man, the manhood in which He can freely and fully work: 'He came down upon the Son of God, made son of man, accustoming Himself in His case to dwell in the human race, and to repose in man, and to dwell in God's creatures, working out in them the will of the Father, and recovering them from their old nature into the newness of Christ[259].' In Christ humanity is perfect, because in Him it retains no part of that false independence which, in all its manifold forms, is the secret of sin. In Christ humanity is perfect and complete, in ungrudging and unimpaired obedience to the movement of the Divine Spirit, Whose creation it was, Whose organ it gave itself to be. The Spirit anoints Him; the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness; the Spirit gives Him the law of His mission; in the power of the Spirit He works His miracles; in the Holy Spirit He lifts up the voice of human thankfulness to the Divine Father; in the Spirit He offers Himself without spot to God; in the power of the Spirit He is raised from the dead[260]. All that perfect human life had been a life of obedience, of progressive obedience, a gradual learning in each stage of experience what obedience meant[261]; it had been a life of obedience which became propitiatory as it bore loyally, submissively, lovingly, all the heritage of pain and misery in which sin in its long history had involved our manhood, all the agony of that insult and rejection in which sin revealed itself by antagonism to Him--bore it, and by bearing it turned it into the material of His accepted sacrifice. He was obedient unto death. And because He thus made our human nature the organ of a life of perfect obedience, therefore He can go on to make that same humanity, freed from all the limitations of this lower world and glorified in the Spirit at the right hand of God, at once the organ of Divine supremacy over the universe of created things, and (itself become quickening Spirit[262]) the fount to all the sons of obedience and faith of its own life. Christ is the second Adam, who having 'recapitulated the long development of humanity into Himself[263],' taken it up into Himself, that is, and healed its wounds and fructified its barrenness, gives it a fresh start by a new birth from Him. The Spirit coming forth at Pentecost out of His uplifted manhood, as from a glorious fountain of new life[264], perpetuates all its richness, its power, its fulness in the organized society which He prepared and built for the Spirit's habitation. The Church, His Spirit-bearing body, comes forth into the world, not as the exclusive sphere of the Spirit's operations, for 'that breath bloweth where it listeth[265];' but as the special and covenanted sphere of His regular and uniform operation, the place where He is pledged to dwell and to work; the centre marked out and hedged in, whence ever and again proceeds forth anew the work of human recovery; the home where, in spite of sin and imperfection, is ever kept alive the picture of what the Christian life is, that is, of what common human life is meant to be and can become.

Of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church we may note four characteristics.

1. It is _social_. It treats man as a 'social being,' who cannot realize himself in isolation. For no other reason than because grace is the restoration of nature[266], the true, the redeemed humanity, is presented to us as a society or Church. This is apparent with reference to either of the gifts which summarize the essence of the Church's life, grace, or truth. Sacraments are the ordained instruments of grace, and sacraments are in one of their aspects _social_ ceremonies--of incorporation, or restoration, or bestowal of authority, or fraternal sharing of the bread of life. They presuppose a social organization. Those who have attempted to explain why there should be in the Church an apostolic succession of ministers, have seen the grounds of such appointment in the necessity for preserving in a catholic society, which lacks the natural links of race or language or common habitation, a visible and obligatory bond of association[267].

The same fact appears in reference to the truth, the knowledge of God and of the true nature and needs of man, which constitutes one main part of the Christian life. That too is no mere individual illumination. It is 'a rule of faith,' an 'apostolic tradition,' 'a pattern of sound words,' embodied in Holy Scripture and perpetuated in a teaching Church, within the scope of which each individual is to be brought to have his mind and conscience fashioned by it, normally from earliest years. It would be going beyond the province of this essay to stop to prove that from the beginnings of the Christian life, a man was understood to become a Christian and receive the benefits of redemption, by no other means than incorporation into the Christian society.

2. But none the less on account of this social method _the Spirit nourishes individuality_. The very idea of the Spirit's gift is that of an intenser life. Intenser life is more individualized life, for our life becomes richer and fuller only by the intensification of personality and character. Thus Christianity has always trusted to strongly marked character as the means by which religion is propagated. It does not advance as an abstract doctrine, but by the subtle, penetrating influences of personality. It is the illuminated man who becomes a centre of illumination. 'As clear transparent bodies if a ray of light fall on them become radiant themselves and diffuse their splendour all around, so souls illuminated by the indwelling Spirit are rendered spiritual themselves and impart their grace to others[268].' Thus, from the first, Christianity has tended to intensify individual life in a thousand ways, and has gloried in the varieties of disposition and character which the full life of the Spirit develops. The Church expects to see the same variety of life in herself as she witnesses in Nature.

'One and the same rain,' says S. Cyril of Jerusalem to his catechumens, 'comes down upon all the world, yet it becomes white in the lily, and red in the rose, and purple in the violets and pansies, and different and various in all the several kinds; it is one thing in the palm tree and another in the vine, and all in all things. In itself, indeed, it is uniform and changes not, but by adapting itself to the nature of each thing that receives it, it becomes what is appropriate to each. Thus also the Holy Ghost, one and uniform and undivided in Himself, distributes His grace to every man as He wills. He employs the tongue of one man for wisdom; the soul of another He enlightens by prophecy; to another He gives power to drive away devils; to another He gives to interpret the Divine Scriptures; He invigorates one man's self-command; He teaches another the way to give alms: another He teaches to fast and train himself; another He trains for martyrdom; diverse to different men, yet not diverse from Himself[269].'

Nor was this belief in the differences of the Spirit's work a mere abstract theory. In fact the Church life of the early centuries did present an aspect of great variety: not only in the dispositions of individuals, for that will always be observable where human nature is allowed to subsist, but in the types of life and thought cultivated in different parts of the Church. Early in the life of Christianity did something like the Roman type of Catholicism shew itself, but it shewed itself as one among several types of ecclesiasticism, easily distinguishable from what Alexandria or Africa or Antioch nourished and produced.

And what is true in the life of religion as a whole is true in the department of the intellect. Here again the authority of the collective society, the 'rule of faith,' is meant to nourish and quicken, not to crush, individuality. Each individual Christian owes the profoundest deference to the common tradition. Thus to 'keep the traditions' is at all times, and not least in Scripture, a common Christian exhortation. But this common tradition is not meant to be a merely external law. It is meant to pass by the ordinary processes of education into the individual consciousness, and there, because it represents truth, to impart freedom. Thus S. Paul speaks of the developed Christian, 'the man who is spiritual,' as 'judging all things and himself judged of none.' And S. John makes the ground of Christian certainty to lie not in an external authority, but in a personal gift: 'ye have an unction from the Holy One and ye know all things;' 'ye need not that any one teach you[270].' There is then an individual 'inspiration[271],' as well as an inspiration of the whole body, only this inspiration is not barely individual or separatist. As it proceeds out of the society, so it ends in it. It ends by making each person more individualized, more developed in personal characteristics, but for that very reason more conscious of his own incompleteness, more ready to recognise himself as only one member of the perfect Manhood.

The idea of authority is in fact a perfectly simple one. It never received better expression than by Plato when he describes it as the function of the society by a carefully regulated education to implant right instincts, right affections and antipathies, in the growing mind of the child, at a time when he cannot know the reason of things: in order that as the mind develops it may recognise the right reason of things by a certain inner kinship, and welcome truth as a friend[272]. Authority, according to such a view of it, is a necessary schooling of the individual temperament. Thus, we are told that in the judgment of the philosopher Hegel, 'The basis of sound education was ... the submission of the mind to an external lesson, which must be learnt by every one, and even learnt by rote, with utter disregard of individual tastes and desires; only out of this self-abnegation, and submission to be guided and taught, could any originality spring which was worth preserving[273].' In fact, we all recognise the necessity for such external discipline in all departments. Few people like good art, for instance, at first. Probably they are attracted by what is weak but arrests attention by obvious and superficial merits. The standards which artistic authority has erected, the accepted canons of good taste and judgment, do not commend themselves at first as right or natural. But modest and well-disposed people take it for granted at starting that the orthodox judgment will turn out to be right; and they set themselves to school to learn why the artists and poets of great name are great, till their own judgment becomes enlightened, and they understand what at first they took on trust. It was the instinctive perception of this function of authority which made the Church insist so much on the principle 'credo ut intelligam.' The Creed represents the catholic judgment, the highest knowledge of God and the spiritual life granted to man by the Divine Revelation. Let a man put himself to school in the Church with reverence and godly fear, and his own judgment will become enlightened. He will come to say with S. Anselm, 'I give thee thanks, good Lord; because what first I believed by Thy gift, I now understand by Thy illumination[274].'

Such an idea of authority leaves much for the individual to do. It is the reaction of the individual on the society which is to keep the common tradition pure and unnarrowed. The Church has in Holy Scripture the highest expression of the mind of Christ. The familiarity of all its members with this flawless and catholic image is to ward off in each generation that tendency to deteriorate and to become materialised which belongs to all 'traditions.' The individual illumination is thus to react as a purifying force upon the common mind of the Christian society. The individual Christian is to pay the debt of his education, by himself 'testing all things and holding fast that which is good.' Specially gifted individuals from time to time will be needed to effect more or less sudden 'reversions to type,' to the undying type of apostolic teaching[275]. But such a true reformer is quite distinct in idea from the heretic. He reforms; he does not innovate. His note is to restore; not to reject. And the absence of necessity for fundamental rejection comes from this simple fact, that the Christian Creed is rational and true. If any man comes to us and says that he has studied and assimilated the Christian Creed with all the care and reverence in his ability, and has rejected it because he finds it irrational and false, we cannot complain of him[276]. We cannot ask him to accept it though he thinks it false. We do not at all complain of his having inquired and thought freely--only we venture to assure him, with a confidence which can hardly fail to be irritating, because it is confident, that he is mistaken, that he has thought not only freely, but erroneously. When Christianity adopts, as in the modern Romanist system, a different tone, proscribing free inquiry as 'rationalistic,' and making the appeal to antiquity, in order to test the present teaching of the Church, a 'treason and a heresy[277],' it is abjuring its own rational heritage, and adopting a method which Charles Kingsley had good reason to call Manichaean. It is the test of the Church's legitimate tenure that she can encourage free inquiry into her title-deeds.

3. Thirdly, the Spirit claims for His own, and _consecrates the whole of nature_. One Spirit was the original author of all that is; and all that exists is in its essence very good. It is only sin which has produced the appearance of antagonism between the Divine operation and human freedom, or between the spiritual and the material. Thus the humanity of Christ, which is the Spirit's perfect work, exhibits in its perfection how every faculty of human nature, spiritual and physical, is enriched and vitalized, not annihilated, by the closest conceivable interaction of the Divine Energy. This principle, as carried out in the Church, occupies a prominent place in the earliest theology; in part because Montanism, with its pagan idea of inspiration, as an ecstasy which deprived its subject of reason, gave the Church an opportunity of emphasizing that the fullest action of the Spirit, in the case of her inspired men, intensified and did not supersede their own thought, judgment, and individuality; still more because Gnostic dualism, turning every antithesis of nature and grace, of spirit and flesh, of natural and supernatural, into an antagonism, forced upon the Church the assertion of her own true and comprehensive Creed. That everything in Christianity is realized 'in flesh as in spirit' is the constantly reiterated cry of S. Ignatius, who of all men was most 'spiritual.' That the spiritual is not the immaterial, that we become spiritual not by any change or curtailment of nature, not by any depreciation or ignoring of the body, is the constantly asserted principle of S. Irenaeus[278]. And the earliest writers in general emphasize the visible organization of the Church, and the institution of external sacraments, as negations of the false principle which would sunder nature from God, and repudiate the unity of the material and the spiritual which the Word had been made Flesh in order to reveal and to perpetuate.

4. But the unity of the spirit and the flesh, of faith and experience, of God and the world, is certainly not an accomplished fact. On the contrary, dualism is always making appeals which strike home to our present experience. Thus if the Church was to maintain the unity of all things, it could only be by laying great stress upon the ravages which sin had wrought, and upon _the gradualness of the Spirit's method_ in recovery. The Old Testament, for example, presented a most unspiritual appearance. Its material sacrifices, its low standard of morals, its worldliness, were constantly being objected to by the Gnostic and Manichaean sects, who could not tolerate the Old Testament canon. 'But you are ignoring,' the Church replied, 'the gradualness of the Spirit's method.' He lifts man by little and little, He condescends to man's infirmity: He puts up with him as he is, if only He can at the last bring him back to God.

It is of the essence of the New Testament, as the religion of the Incarnation, to be final and catholic: on the other hand, it is of the essence of the Old Testament to be imperfect because it represents a gradual process of education by which man was lifted out of depths of sin and ignorance. That this is the case, and that in consequence the justification of the Old Testament method lies not in itself at any particular stage, but in its result taken as a whole, is a thought very familiar to modern Christians[279]. But it is important to make plain that it was a thought equally familiar to the Fathers of the Christian Church. Thus S. Gregory of Nazianzus, speaking of God's dealings with the Jews of old, describes how, in order to gain the co-operation of man's good will in working for his recovery, He dealt 'after the manner of a schoolmaster or a physician, and while curtailing part of their ancestral customs, tolerated the rest, making some concession to their tastes, just as physicians make their medicines palatable that they may be taken by their patients. For men do not easily abandon what long custom has consecrated. Thus the first law, while it abolished their idols, tolerated their sacrifices; the second, while it abolished their sacrifices, allowed them to be circumcised: then when once they had accepted the removal of what was taken from them, they went further and gave up what had been conceded to them--in the first case their sacrifices, in the second their practice of circumcision--and they became instead of heathens, Jews, instead of Jews, Christians, being betrayed as it were by gradual changes into acceptance of the Gospel[280].' Again, S. Chrysostom explains how it is the very merit of the Old Testament that it has taught us to think things intolerable, which under it were tolerated. 'Do not ask,' he says, 'how these (Old Testament precepts) can be good, now when the need for them is past: ask how they were good when the period required them. Or rather, if you wish, do inquire into their merit even now. It is still conspicuous, and lies in nothing so much as what now enables us to find fault with them. Their highest praise is that we now see them to be defective. If they had not trained us well, so that we became susceptible of higher things, we should not have now seen their deficiency.' Then he shews how under the old law swearing by the true God was allowed to avoid swearing by idols, the worse ill. 'But is not swearing at all of the evil one?' he asks. 'Undoubtedly, now, after this long course of training, but then not. And how can the same thing be good at one time and bad at another? I ask rather, how should it not be so, when we have regard to the plain teaching of the fact of growth in all things, fruits of the earth or acquirements of man? Look at man's own nature; the food, the occupations which suit his infancy, are repulsive to his manhood. Or consider facts of history. All agree that murder is an invention of Satan, yet this very act at a suitable time made Phineas to be honoured with the high priesthood. Phineas' murder "was reckoned to him for righteousness." Just in the same way Abraham obtained an even higher honour for being not a murderer only but what was much worse, a child-murderer. We must not then look at the facts in themselves only, but investigate with attention the period also, the cause, the motive, the difference of persons, and all the attendant circumstances: so only can one get at the truth[281].'

Once more S. Basil: 'Surely it is absolutely infantile and worthy of a child who must be really fed on milk, to be ignorant of the great mystery of our salvation--that just as we received our earliest instruction, so, in exercising unto godliness and going on unto perfection, we were first trained by lessons easy to apprehend and suited to our intelligence. He Who regulates our lives deals with us as those who have been reared in darkness, and gradually accustoms our eyes to the light of truth. For He spares our weakness, and in the depth of the riches of His wisdom and the unsearchable judgments of His understanding adopts this gentle treatment, so well adapted to our needs, accustoming us first to see the shadow of objects, and to look at the sun's reflection in water, so that we may not be suddenly blinded by the exposure to the pure light. By parity of reasoning, the law being a shadow of things to come, and the typical teaching of the prophets, which is the truth darkly, have been devised as exercises for the eyes of the heart, inasmuch as it will be easy for us to pass from these to wisdom hidden in mystery[282].'

In the same spirit was the Church's answer to the difficulties which facts of personal experience were constantly putting in the way of her claims. Churchmen were frequently seen to be vulgar, ignorant, imperfect, sinful. If, in spite of manifold evils existing within her, the Church could still appeal to her fruits, it must be by comparison with what was to be found elsewhere, or by taking in a large area for comparison, or by appealing to her special grounds of hope. In fact, what she represented was a hope, not a realization; a tendency, not a result; a life in process, not a ripened fruit. But then she claimed that this was God's way. 'He loves us not as we are, but as we are becoming[283].' Let but a man once lay hold of the life-giving principle of faith, and God sets a value on him, life has a promise for him, altogether out of proportion to present attainments. For God estimates him, in view of all the forces of a new life which are set loose to work upon him, and he can assure himself that the movement of recovery which he has begun to feel stirring within him will carry him on through eternal ages, beyond what he can ask or think.

It is because of this gradualness of the Spirit's method that it lays so great a strain on human patience. The spiritually-minded of all ages have tended to find the visible Church a very troubled and imperfect home. Most startling disclosures of the actual state of ecclesiastical disorder and moral collapse, may be gathered out of the Christian Fathers. Thus to found a 'pure Church' has been the instinct of impatient zeal since Tertullian's day. But the instinct has to be restrained, the visible Church has to be borne with, because it is the Spirit's purpose to provide a home for the training and improvement of the imperfect. 'Let both grow together unto the harvest.' 'A bruised reed will He not break, and smoking flax will He not quench.' The Church must have her terms of communion, moral and intellectual: this is essential to keep her fundamental principles intact, and to prevent her betraying her secret springs of strength and recovery. But short of this necessity she is tolerant. It is her note to be tolerant, morally and theologically. She is the mother, not the magistrate. No doubt her balanced duty is one difficult to fulfil. At times she has been puritanical, at others morally lax; at times doctrinally lax, at others rigid. But however well or ill she has fulfilled the obligations laid on her, this is her ideal. She is the guardian, the depository of a great gift, a mighty presence, which in its essence is unchanging and perfect, but is realized very imperfectly in her experience and manifested life. This is what S. Thomas Aquinas means when he says 'that to believe _in_ the Church is only possible if we mean by it to believe in the Spirit vivifying the Church[284].' The true self of the Church is the Holy Spirit, but a great deal in the Church at any date does not belong to her true self, and is obscuring the Spirit's mind. Thus the treasure is in earthen vessels, it is sometimes a light hid under a bushel; and the Church is the probation of faith, as well as its encouragement.

It will not be out of place to conclude this review of the Spirit's method in the Church by calling attention to the emphasis which, from the first, Christians laid upon the fact that the animating principle both of their individual lives and of their society as a whole, was nothing less than the Holy Spirit Himself. To know Him was (as against all the philosophical schools, and in a sense in which the same could not be said even of the Divine Word) their peculiar privilege, to possess Him their summary characteristic. Under the old covenant, and in all the various avenues of approach to the Church, men could be the subjects of the Spirit's guidance and could be receiving gifts from Him; but the 'initiated' Christian, baptized and confirmed, possessed not merely His gifts but Himself. He is in the Church, as the 'Vicar of Christ,' in Whose presence Christ Himself is with them. He is the consecrator of every sacrament, and the substance of His own sacramental gifts. The services of ordained men indeed are required for the administration of sacraments, but as ministers simply of a Power higher than themselves, of a Personal Spirit Who indeed is invoked by their ministry, and pledges Himself to respond to their invocations, but never subjects Himself to their power. Therefore the unworthiness of the minister diminishes in no way the efficacy of the sacrament, or the reality of the gift given, because the ministry of men neither creates the gift nor adds to or diminishes its force. He is the giver of the gift, and the gift He gives is the same to all. Only the meagreness of human faith and love restrains the largeness of His bounty and conditions the Thing received by the narrowness and variability of the faculty which receives it. According to our faith is it done to us, and where there is no faith and no love there the grace is equally, in S. Augustine's phrase, present and profitless[285].

II. In something of this way the early Christian writers--and it has seemed better to let them speak for us--teach the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. What they teach is grounded in part on actual experience, in part on the revelation of the being and action of God made once for all in the Person of Jesus Christ and recorded in the New Testament. On this mingled basis of experience and Holy Scripture they passed back from the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as He is operative in the world, to the Theology of His Person. They passed back but slowly, with great hesitation, even unwillingness. Nothing, we may say, was further removed from the Fathers than the easy-going assumption that because we are the subjects of a revelation, therefore we are able to speculate with tolerably complete information about the mysteries which lie beyond experience. The truth that 'we know in part,' we see 'in a glass darkly,' was profoundly impressed upon their minds. God manifested Himself, S. Gregory of Nazianzus tells, in such a way as to escape the nets of our syllogisms, and to shew Himself superior to our logical distinctions. If we expect to find our logic equal to express Him, we shew only our mad presumption, 'we who are not able even to know what lies at our feet, or to count the waves of the sea, or the drops of rain, or the days of the world, much less to fathom the depths of God, and give account of His nature which transcends alike our reason and our power of expression[286].' Besides this, the early theologians realized the obligation of keeping to Holy Scripture--of not being wise 'above that which is written'--and they were conscious of the danger of building on isolated texts of Scripture or of treating its 'simple and untechnical' language as if it was the language of a formal treatise[287].

For these reasons they were cautious in theological speculation. Yet the facts and relationships introduced into the world of experience by the revelation of the Son represent eternal realities, if under great limitations yet still truly, and thus make possible a real security up to a certain point on what lies beyond the unassisted human knowledge. Thus, first, when the Arian movement passed from the denial of the true Godhead of Christ to a similar position with reference to the Holy Spirit, the Christian Church felt itself fully justified alike by its past traditions[288], and by its Scriptures, in emphasizing the personal distinctness and the true Godhead of the Holy Spirit. Unless all Christ's language was an illusion, the Holy Spirit was really personal and really distinct from Himself and the Father; nor could One who was associated with the Father and the Son in all the essentially Divine operations of nature and grace, be less than truly and really God, an essential element in the Eternal Being. The Arian controversy in its earlier stages had disposed of the notion that Christian theology could at any cost admit the conception of a created personality, clothed with Divine attributes and exercising Divine functions.

Secondly, the consideration that the relations manifested in the Incarnation in terms of our experience between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, express transcendent and eternal relations, led the Church to speak of the Holy Ghost as proceeding from the Father, as the unique fount of Godhead, through the Son: or in somewhat less nicely discriminated language 'from the Father and the Son[289].' In the fifth century there is a tendency to use in the East the former, in the West the latter mode of expression, but without any essential difference. Nor can it be said that the causes which were at work later to divide the Eastern and the Western Churches on the subject of the procession of the Holy Ghost, were so much really theological as ecclesiastical and political.

Thirdly, the accurate consideration of the language in which is expressed the relation of Christ to the Holy Spirit, helped the Church to guard the doctrine of the Trinity from the associations of Tritheism. For the coming of the Holy Spirit is clearly spoken of in Holy Scripture as coincident with and involving the coming of Christ. 'While we are illuminated by the Holy Spirit, it is Christ who illuminates us: when we drink in the Spirit, it is Christ we drink.' The Spirit is distinct from Christ--'another Paraclete'--yet in His coming, Christ comes: in His indwelling is the indwelling of the Father and the Son[290]. How can this be? Because the 'Persons' of the Holy Trinity are not to be thought of as distinct individuals, as three Gods. No doubt in our ordinary language, persons are understood to be separate, and mutually exclusive beings. Even in regard to ourselves deeper reflection shews us that our personalities are very far from being as separate as they appear to be on the surface: and with regard to God, it was only with an expressed apology for the imperfection of human language that the Church spoke of the Divine Three, as Three _Persons_ at all. But 'we have no celestial language,' and the word is the only one which will express what Christ's language implies about Himself, the Father, and the Spirit. Only while we use it, it must be understood to express mutual inclusion, not mutual exclusion.

Wherever the Father works, He works essentially and inevitably through the Son and the Spirit; whenever the Son acts, He acts from the Father by the Holy Spirit; whenever the Holy Spirit comes, He brings with Him in His coming the Son and the Father. Thus when an image was necessary to interpret in part the Divine relationships, the Fathers sought it nowhere so much as in the three distinct yet inseparable elements of man's spiritual nature; the triune character of which Plato had already brought into notice, and which is in fact an earthly image, however inadequate, of the Triune God[291].

III. Hitherto nothing has been said about that part of the Holy Spirit's work which is called the inspiration of Scripture. It has been kept to the last because of the great importance of putting it in context with less familiar truths. The Scriptures have, it is a commonplace to say, suffered greatly from being isolated. This is as true whether we are considering them as a source of evidence or as the sphere of inspiration.

As a source of evidence they contain the record of historical facts with some of which at any rate the Creed of Christendom is inseparably interwoven. Thus it is impossible for Christians who know what they are about, to depreciate the importance of the historical evidence for those facts at least of which the Creed contains a summary. But the tendency with books of historical evidence has been, at least till recently, to exaggerate the extent to which the mere evidence of remote facts can compel belief. What we should make of the New Testament record, what estimate we should be able to form of the Person of Jesus Christ and the meaning of His life and work, if it was contained simply in some old manuscripts, or unearthed in some way by antiquaries out of the Syrian sand, it is impossible to say. In order to have grounds for believing the facts, in order to be susceptible of their evidence, we require an antecedent state of conception and expectation. A whole set of presuppositions about God, about the slavery of sin, about the reasonableness of redemption, must be present with us. So only can the facts presented to us in the Gospel come to us as credible things, or as parts of an intelligible universe, correlated elements in a rational whole. Now the work of the Spirit in the Church has been to keep alive and real these presuppositions, this frame of mind. He convinces of sin, of righteousness, of judgment. He does this not merely in isolated individuals however numerous, but in an organized continuous society. The spiritual life of the Church assures me that in desiring union with God, in feeling the burden of sin, in hungering for redemption, I am not doing an eccentric, abnormal thing. I am doing only what belongs to the best and richest movement of humanity. More than this, it assures me that assent to the claims and promises of Jesus Christ satisfies these spiritual needs in such a way as to produce the strongest, the most lasting, the most catholic sort of human character. The historical life of the Church thus in every age 'setting to its seal' that God's offer in Christ is true, reproduces the original 'witness,' commends it to conscience and reason, spans the gulf of the ages, and brings down remote and alien incidents into close and intelligible familiarity. Lotze speaks of revelation as 'either contained in some divine act of historic occurrence, or continually repeated in men's hearts[292].' But in fact the antithesis is not an alternative. The strength of the Christian Creed is that it is both. It is a revelation continuously renewed in men's hearts by an organized and systematic operation of the Spirit in the Church, while at the same time it finds its guarantee and security in certain Divine acts of historic occurrence.

Once more, the belief in the Holy Scriptures as inspired requires to be held in context by the belief in the general action of the Holy Spirit upon the Christian society and the individual soul. It is, we may perhaps say, becoming more and more difficult to believe in the Bible without believing in the Church. The Apostles, indeed,--and the New Testament canon consists largely of the words of Apostles--have an authority which, reasonably considered, is unique, and stands by itself as that of the accredited witnesses of Christ; but when we find them appealing to members of the Church, they appeal not as the possessors of an absolute authority or of a Spirit in which others do not share. They are the ministers of a 'tradition' to which they themselves are subject, a tradition 'once for all delivered[293]:' they appeal to those who hear them as men 'who have an unction from the Holy One and know all things.' The tone in fact of the apostolic writers forces us to regard the spirit in which the Church lives, as co-operating with, and in a real sense limiting, the spirit in which they themselves speak and write. Thus in fact the apostolic writings were written as occasion required, within the Church, and for the Church. They presuppose membership in it and familiarity with its tradition. They are secondary, not primary, instructors; for edification, not for initiation. Nor, in fact, can a hard and fast line be drawn between what lies within and what lies without the canon. For example, Protestantism of an unecclesiastical sort has built upon the Epistle to the Hebrews as much as upon any book of the New Testament. This book is of unknown authorship. If 'Pauline' it is pretty certainty not S. Paul's. In large part it is the judgment of the Church which enables us to draw a line between it and S. Clement's 'scripture.' The line indeed our own judgment approves. The Epistle to the Hebrews and S. Clement's letter are closely linked together, but the latter depends on the former: it is secondary and the other is primary. Yet how narrow is the historical interval between them. How impossible to tear the one from the other. How seemingly irrational to attribute absolute authority to the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews which represents apostolic teaching at second hand[294], and then to interpret it in a sense hostile to the Epistle of Clement, which represents exactly the same stream of apostolic teaching only one short stage lower down. For Clement interprets the high priesthood of Christ in a sense which, instead of excluding, makes it the basis of, the ministerial hierarchy of the Church. Or to put the matter more broadly, how irrational it is, considering the intimate links by which the New Testament canon is bound up with the historic Church, not to accept the mind of the Church, especially when we have its consent down independent lines of tradition, as interpreting the mind of the apostolic writers. Most rational surely is the attitude of the early Church towards Scripture. The Scripture was regarded as the highest utterance of the Spirit, the unique and constant test of the Church's life and teaching. But the Spirit in the Church interpreted the meaning of Scripture. Thus the Church taught and the Scripture tested and verified or corrected her teaching: and this because all was of one piece, the life of the Church including the Scriptures, the inspired writers themselves appealing to the Spirit in the Churches[295].

And now, what is to be said about this, at present, much controverted subject of the inspiration of Holy Scripture? What does the doctrine imply, and what attitude does belief in it involve towards the modern critical treatment of the inspired literature?

1. Let us bear carefully in mind the place which the doctrine holds in the building up of a Christian faith. It is in fact an important part of the superstructure, but it is not among the _bases_ of the Christian belief. The Christian creed asserts the reality of certain historical facts. To these facts, in the Church's name, we claim assent: but we do so on grounds which, so far, are quite independent of the _inspiration_ of the evangelic records. All that we claim to shew at this stage is that they are historical: not historical so as to be absolutely without error, but historical in the general sense, so as to be trustworthy. All that is necessary for faith in Christ is to be found in the moral dispositions which predispose to belief, and make intelligible and credible the thing to be believed: coupled with such acceptance of the generally historical character of the Gospels, and of the trustworthiness of the other apostolic documents, as justifies belief that our Lord was actually born of the Virgin Mary, manifested as the Son of God 'with power according to a spirit of holiness,' crucified, raised again the third day from the dead, exalted to the right hand of the Father, the founder of the Church and the source to it of the informing Spirit.

In all this no claim is made for any special belief as to the method of the Spirit's work in the Scripture or in the Church. Logically such belief follows, does not precede, belief in Christ. Indeed, in the past, Christian apologists have made a great mistake in allowing opponents to advance as objections against the historical character of the Gospel narrative, what are really objections not against its historical character--not such as could tell against the substantially historical character of secular documents--but against a certain view of the meaning of inspiration. Let it be laid down then that Christianity brings with it indeed a doctrine of the inspiration of Holy Scriptures, but is not based upon it[296].