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<h1>WHEN THE HOLY GHOST IS COME.</h1>
<p align='center'>BY</p>
<h2>COLONEL S. L. BRENGLE,</h2>
<h3>Edited by BRAMWELL BOOTH.</h3>
<a name="foreword"></a>
<h1>Foreword.</h1>
<p>The Salvation Army, contrary to what has often been
thought by
surface observers, has owed its existence, its strength,
and its
success chiefly to our careful attention to the profoundest<br>
questions of the soul.</p>
<p>And still, as always, we wish to urge upon all the
study of those
great practical truths, without the proclamation of
which our
work for men would cease to have any abiding value.
We glory in
the knowledge of Christ as a perfect Saviour just
as much for
this, our own time, as for any past generation, or
for any
generation yet to come. The pretence that this age
has reached
some superior development, whether mental or moral,
for which a
new kind of Saviour is needed, seems to us absurd.
And we do not
believe it can long endure where Christ is really
known.</p>
<p>To the most thoughtful, therefore, as well as to those
who have
the least time for thought, I earnestly commend the
words of
devout and practical men upon those great questions,
which I hope
to see reproduced in the series of which the present
volume is
the first. Prayerful reading of their messages cannot
but lead to
immediate action, to a complete self-abandonment to
God, and to a
realizing faith in His power to use every one of His
sons and
daughters for the healing of the world’s open
sores and the
triumph of His Rule.</p>
<p>BRAMWELL BOOTH. LONDON, January, 1909.</p>
<h1>Contents.</h1>
<p><a href="#foreword">Foreword</a></p>
<p><a href="#preface">Preface</a></p>
<ol style="list-style-type: upper-roman">
<li><a href="#chapter1">Who Is He?</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter2">Preparing His House</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter3">Is the Baptism with the Holy Spirit a Third Blessing?</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter4">The Witness of the Spirit</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter5">Purity</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter6">Power</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter7">Trying the Spirits</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter8">Guidance</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter9">The Meek and Lowly Heart</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter10">Hope</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter11">The Holy Spirit’s Substitute for Gossip and Evil-Speaking</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter12">The Sin Against the Holy Ghost</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter13">Offences Against the Holy Ghost</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter14">The Holy Spirit and Sound Doctrine</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter15">Praying in the Spirit</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter16">Characteristics of the Anointed Preacher</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter17">Preaching</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter18">The Sheathed Sword: A Law of the Spirit</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter19">Vicotry through the Holy Spirit Over Suffering</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter20">The Overflowing Blessing</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter21">Importance of the Doctrine and Experience of Holiness to Spiritual Leaders</a></li>
<li><a href="#chapter22">Victory Over Evil Temper by the Power of the Holy Spirit</a></li>
</ol>
<a name="preface"></a>
<h1>Preface.</h1>
<p>It is no small pleasure to me to commend this book
to all who love God, and in particular to those who
are labouring to serve Him in the ranks of The Salvation
Army. I believe that it will prove useful in the most
important ways—­in its bearing, that is,
upon many of the practical difficulties and problems
of daily life.</p>
<p>The writer, Colonel Brengle, gives us not only of
the fruit of an orderly and well-stored mind on the
great subject before us, but—­ and this
is the more important—­he tells us of the
actual work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of ordinary
men and women, as he has witnessed the results of
that work amidst his many labours for the Salvation
and Holiness of the people. It is for them he writes.
It is to them, living the common life, bound to others
by the obligations of ordinary social intercourse,
toiling at their secular occupations, and rubbing
shoulders with the multitude in the market-place,
that his message comes. I venture to hope that his
words will make it plain to some of them that the highest
intercourse with the Divine is their privilege; that
the special province of the Holy Ghost is to lead
men into the truest devotion to God, and to the advancement
of His Kingdom on earth, even while they are carrying
on the common avocations associated with earning their
daily bread.</p>
<p>The only purpose of God having a practical bearing
on our lives is His purpose to save men from sin and
its awful consequences, and make them conform to His
will in this world as in the next. The work of the
Holy Spirit is to help us to achieve that purpose.
Without His help we are unable to overcome the difficulties
that are in the way, whether we consider them from
the standpoint of the world or of the individual. If
anyone could have looked at the state of the world
at the time of our Lord’s death he would surely
have regarded the work which the Apostles were commissioned
to attempt as the most utterly wild and impracticable
enterprise that the human mind could conceive. And
it was so, but for one fact. That fact was the promise
of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, to be the great
Helper in the undertaking.</p>
<p>And equally in the work of uniting the individual
soul with God’s purpose that Spirit is our Helper.
In the work of righteousness He is a Partner with
us. In the life of faith and prayer He is our unwavering
Prompter and Guide. In the submission of our wills
to God and the chastening of our spirits He is the
great Co-worker with us. In the bearing of burdens
and the enduring of trial and sorrow He joins hands
with us to lead us on. In the purifying of every power
from the taint of sin He is our Sanctifier.</p>
<p>All this is practical. It has to do with to-day—­with
every bit of to-day. In fact, so far from the sphere
of the Holy Spirit being limited to the pulpit or
the platform, or to the inward experiences of the
religious life, He is just as truly and properly concerned
with the affairs of the shop and the street, the nursery
and the kitchen, the chamber of suffering and the
home of penury, as with preaching the Gospel or healing
the sick.</p>
<p>Now it is to lead its readers to a personal experience
of all this that this book has been written. No mere
intellectual assent to the truth it sets forth can
satisfy its author, any more than it can benefit his
readers. What he seeks, and what I join him in devoutly
asking of God, is that you, dear friend, who may take
this little volume into your hands, may see what an
infinite privilege is yours, and may begin to act
with God the Holy Ghost, and to open your whole being
to Him, that He may work with you.</p>
<p><i>Bramwell Booth</i>.<br>
<i>London</i>, January, 1909.</p>
<a name="chapter1"></a>
<h1>I.</h1>
<h2>Who Is He?</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>On that last eventful evening in the upper room, just
after the Passover feast, Jesus spoke to His disciples
about His departure, and, having commanded them to
love one another, He besought them not to be troubled
in heart, but to hold fast their faith in Him, assuring
them that, though He was to die and leave them, He
was but going to the Father’s many-mansioned
house to prepare a place for them.</p>
<p>But already they were troubled, for what could this
death and departure mean but the destruction of all
their hopes, of all their cherished plans? Jesus had
drawn them away from their fishing-boats, their places
of custom and daily employment, and inspired them
with high personal and patriotic ambitions, and encouraged
them to believe that He was the Seed of David, the
promised Messiah; and they hoped that He would cast
out Pilate and his hated Roman garrison, restore the
kingdom to Israel, and sit on David’s throne,
a King, reigning in righteousness and undisputed power
and majesty for ever. And then, were they not to be
His Ministers of State and chief men in His Kingdom?</p>
<p>He was their Leader, directing their labours; their
Teacher, instructing their ignorance and solving their
doubts and all their puzzling problems; their Defence,
stilling the stormy sea and answering for them when
questioned by wise and wily enemies.</p>
<p>They were poor and unlearned and weak. In Him was
all their help, and what would they do, what could
they do, without Him? They were without social standing,
without financial prestige, without learning or intellectual
equipment, without political or military power. He
was their All, and without Him they were as helpless
as little children, as defenceless as lambs in the
midst of wolves. How could their poor hearts be otherwise
than troubled?</p>
<p>But then He gave them a strange, wonderful, reassuring
promise: He said, “If ye love Me, keep My commandments.
And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you
another Comforter, that He may abide with you for
ever” (John xiv. 15, 16). I am going away, but
Another shall come, who will fill My place. He shall
not go away, but abide with you for ever, and He “shall
be in you.” And later He added: “It is
expedient for you"—­that is, better for you-“that
I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will
not come.”</p>
<p>Who is this other One—­this Comforter? He
must be some august Divine Person, and not a mere
influence or impersonal force, for how else could
He take and fill the place of Jesus? How else could
it be said that it was better to have Him than to have
Jesus remaining in the flesh? He must be strong and
wise, and tender and true, to take the place of the
Blessed One who is to die and depart. Who is He?</p>
<p>John, writing in the Greek language, calls Him “Paraclete,”
but we in English call Him Comforter. But Paraclete
means more, much more than Comforter. It means “one
called in to help: an advocate, a helper.” The
same word is used of Jesus in i John ii. i: “We
have an Advocate,” a Paraclete, a Helper, “with
the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.” Just
as Jesus had gone to be the disciples’ Advocate,
their Helper in the Heavens, so this other Paraclete
was to be their Advocate, their Helper on earth. He
would be their Comforter when comfort was needed; but
He would be more; He would be also their Teacher,
Guide, Strengthener, as Jesus had been. At every point
of need there would He be as an ever-present and all-wise,
almighty Helper. He would meet their need with His
sufficiency; their weakness with His strength; their
foolishness with His wisdom; their ignorance with His
knowledge; their blindness and short-sightedness with
His perfect, all-embracing vision. Hallelujah! What
a Comforter! Why should they be troubled?</p>
<p>They were weak, but He would strengthen them with
might in the inner man (Eph. iii. 16). They were to
give the world the words of Jesus, and teach all nations
(Matthew xxviii. 19, 20); and He would teach them
all things, and bring to their remembrance whatsoever
Jesus had said to them (John xiv. 26).</p>
<p>They were to guide their converts in the right way,
and He was to guide them into all truth (John xvi.
13). They were to attack hoary systems of evil, and
inbred and actively intrenched sin, in every human
heart; but He was to go before them, preparing the
way for conquest, by convincing the world of sin, of
righteousness, and of judgment (John xvi. 8). They
were to bear heavy burdens and face superhuman tasks,
but He was to give them power (Acts i. 8). Indeed,
He was to be a Comforter, a Strengthener, a Helper.</p>
<p>Jesus had been external to them. Often they missed
Him. Sometimes He was asleep when they felt they sorely
needed Him. Sometimes He was on the mountains, while
they were in the valley vainly trying to cast out
stubborn devils, or wearily toiling on the tumultuous,
wind-tossed sea. Sometimes He was surrounded by vast
crowds, and He entered into high disputes with the
doctors of the law, and they had to wait till He was
alone to seek explanations of His teachings. But they
were never to lose this other Helper in the crowd,
nor be separated for an instant from Him, for no human
being, nor untoward circumstance, nor physical necessity,
could ever come between Him and them, for, said Jesus,
“He shall be in you.”</p>
<p>From the words used to declare the sayings, the doings,
the offices and works of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit,
we are forced to conclude that He is a Divine Person.
Out of the multitude of Scriptures which might be
quoted, note this passage, which, as nearly as is
possible with human language, reveals to us His personality:
“Now there were in the Church that was at Antioch
certain prophets and teachers... As they ministered
to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate
Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have
called them. And when they had fasted and prayed,
and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.
So they, being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, departed
into Seleucia” (Acts xiii. 1-4).</p>
<p>Further on we read that they “were forbidden
of the Holy Ghost to preach the word in Asia”;
and when they would have gone into Bithynia, “the
Spirit suffered them not” (Acts xvi. 6, 7).</p>
<p>Again, when the messengers of Cornelius, the Roman
centurion, were seeking Peter, “the Spirit said
unto him, Behold, three men seek thee. Arise, therefore,
and get thee down, and go with them, doubting nothing:
for I have sent them” (Acts x. 19, 20).</p>
<p>These are but a few of the passages of Scripture that
might be quoted to establish the fact of His personality—­His
power to think, to will, to act, to speak; and if
His personality is not made plain in these Scriptures,
then it is impossible for human language to make it
so.</p>
<p>Indeed, I am persuaded that if an intelligent heathen,
who had never seen the Bible, should for the first
time read the four Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles,
he would say that the personality of the Holy Spirit
is as clearly revealed in the Acts as is the personality
of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. In truth, the Acts
of the Apostles are in a large measure the acts of
the Holy Spirit, and the disciples were not more certainly
under the immediate direction of Jesus during the
three years of His earthly ministry than they were
under the direct leadership of the Spirit after Pentecost.</p>
<p>But, while there are those that admit His personality,
yet in their loyalty to the Divine Unity they deny
the Trinity, and maintain that the Holy Spirit is
only the Father manifesting Himself as Spirit, without
any distinction in personality. But this view cannot
be harmonised with certain Scriptures. While the Bible
and reason plainly declare that there is but one God,
yet the Scriptures as clearly reveal that there are
three Persons in the Godhead—­Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost.</p>
<p>The form of Paul’s benediction to the Corinthians
proves the doctrine:—–­</p>
<p>“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the
love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost,
be with you all. Amen” (2 Cor. xiii. 14).</p>
<p>Again, it is taught in the promise of Jesus, already
quoted, “And I will pray the Father, and He
shall give you another Comforter... the Spirit of
Truth” (John xiv. 16, 17). Here the three Persons
of the Godhead are clearly revealed. The Son prays;
the Father answers; the Spirit comes.</p>
<p>The Holy Spirit is “another Comforter,”
a second Comforter succeeding the first, who was Jesus,
and both were given by the Father.</p>
<p>Do you say, “I cannot understand it”?
Neither do I. Who can understand it? God does not
expect us to understand it. Nor would He have us puzzle
our heads and trouble our hearts in attempting to
understand it or harmonise it with our knowledge of
arithmetic.</p>
<p>Note this: it is only the <i>fact</i> that is revealed;
<i>how</i> there can be three Persons in one Godhead
is not revealed.</p>
<p>The <i>how</i> is a mystery, and is not a matter of
faith at all; but the <i>fact</i> is a matter of revelation,
and therefore a matter of faith. I myself am a mysterious
trinity of body, mind, and spirit. The fact I believe,
but the <i>how</i> is not a thing to believe. It is
at this point that many puzzle and perplex themselves
needlessly.</p>
<p>In the ordinary affairs of life we grasp facts, and
hold them fast, without puzzling ourselves over the
<i>how</i> of things. Who can explain <i>how</i> food
sustains life; how light reveals material objects,
how sound conveys ideas to our minds? It is the fact
we know and believe, but the <i>how</i> we pass by
as a mystery unrevealed. What God has revealed, we
believe. We cannot understand <i>how</i> Jesus turned
water into wine; <i>how</i> He multiplied a few loaves
and fishes and fed thousands; <i>how</i> He stilled
the stormy sea; <i>how</i> He opened blind eyes, healed
lepers, and raised the dead by a word. But the facts
we believe. Wireless telegraphic messages are sent
over the vast wastes of ocean. That is a fact, and
we believe it. But <i>how</i> they go we do not know.
That is not something to believe. It is a matter of
pure speculation, and is unexplained.</p>
<p>An old servant of God has pointed out that it is the
fact of the Trinity, and not the <i>manner</i> of
it, which God has revealed, and made a subject for
our faith.</p>
<p>But while the Scriptures reveal to us the fact of
the personality of the Holy Spirit, and it is a subject
for our faith, to those in whom He dwells this fact
may become a matter of sacred knowledge, of blessed
experience.</p>
<p>How else can we account for the positive and assured
way in which the Apostles and disciples spoke of the
Holy Ghost on and after the day of Pentecost, if they
did not know Him? Immediately after the fiery baptism,
with its blessed filling, Peter stood before the people,
and said: “This is that which was spoken by the
prophet Joel: And it shall come to pass in the last
days, saith God, I will pour out My Spirit upon all
flesh”; then he exhorted the people and assured
them that if they would meet certain simple conditions
they should “receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.”
He said to Ananias, “Why hath Satan filled thine
heart to lie to the Holy Ghost?” He declared
to the High Priest and Council that he and his fellow-Apostles
were witnesses of the resurrection of Jesus: and added,
“And so is also the Holy Ghost, whom God hath
given to them that obey Him.” Without any apology
or explanation, or “think so” or “hope
so,” they speak of being “filled”
(not simply with some new, strange experience or emotion,
but) “with the Holy Ghost.” Certainly they
must have known Him. And if they knew Him, may not
we?</p>
<p>Paul says: “Now we have received, not the spirit
of the world, but the Spirit which is of God; that
we might know the things that are freely given to
us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the
words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which
the Holy Ghost teacheth” (I Cor. ii. 12, 13).
And if we know the words, may we not know the Teacher
of the words?</p>
<p>John Wesley says:—­</p>
<p>“The knowledge of the Three-One God is interwoven
with all true Christian faith, with all vital religion.
I do not say,” he adds, “that every real
Christian can say, with the Marquis de Renty, ’I
bear about with me continually an experimental verity,
and a fullness of the ever-blessed’Trinity.
I apprehend that this is not the experience of “babes,”
but rather “fathers in Christ."’ But I
know not how anyone can be a Christian believer till
he ‘hath the witness in himself,’ till
’the Spirit of God witnesses with his spirit
that he is a child of God’; that is, in effect,
till God the Holy Ghost witnesses that God the Father
has accepted him through the merits of God the Son.</p>
<p>“Not that every Christian believer adverts to
this; perhaps, at first, not one in twenty; but, if
you ask them a few questions, you will easily find
it is implied in what he believes.”</p>
<p>I shall never forget my joy, mingled with awe and
wonder, when this dawned upon my consciousness. For
several weeks I had been searching the Scriptures,
ransacking my heart, humbling my soul, and crying
to God almost day and night for a pure heart and the
baptism with the Holy Ghost, when one glad, sweet day
(it was January 9th, 1885) this text suddenly opened
to my understanding: “If we confess our sins,
He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and
to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”; and
I was enabled to believe without any doubt that the
precious blood cleansed my heart, even mine, from
all sin. Shortly after that, while reading these words
of Jesus to Martha: “I am the resurrection and
the life; he that believeth on Me, though he were
dead, yet shall he live; and he that liveth and believeth
on Me shall never die,” instantly my heart was
melted like wax before fire; Jesus Christ was revealed
to my spiritual consciousness, revealed in me, and
my soul was filled with unutterable love. I walked
in a heaven of love. Then one day, with amazement,
I said to a friend: “This is the perfect love
about which the Apostle John wrote; but it is beyond
all I dreamed of; in it is personality; this love
thinks, wills, talks with me, corrects me, instructs
and teaches me.” And then I knew that God the
Holy Ghost was in this love, and that this love was
God, for “God is love.”</p>
<p>Oh, the rapture mingled with reverential, holy fear—­for
it is a rapturous, yet divinely fearful thing—­to
be indwelt by the Holy Ghost, to be a temple of the
Living God! Great heights are always opposite great
depths, and from the heights of this blessed experience
many have plunged into the dark depths of fanaticism.
But we must not draw back from the experience through
fear. All danger will be avoided by meekness and lowliness
of heart; by humble, faithful service; by esteeming
others better than ourselves, and in honour preferring
them before ourselves; by keeping an open, teachable
spirit; in a word, by looking steadily unto Jesus,
to whom the Holy Spirit continually points us: for
He would not have us fix our attention exclusively
upon Himself and His work <i>in</i> us, but also upon
the Crucified One and His work <i>for</i> us, that
we may walk in the steps of Him whose blood purchases
our pardon, and makes and keeps us clean.</p>
<p> “Great Paraclete! to Thee we cry:<br>
O highest Gift of God most high!<br>
O Fount of life! O Fire of love!<br>
And sweet Anointing from above!</p>
<p> “Our senses touch with light and
fire;<br>
Our hearts with tender love inspire;<br>
And with endurance from on high<br>
The weakness of our flesh supply.</p>
<p> “Far back our enemy repel,<br>
And let Thy peace within us dwell;<br>
So may we, having Thee for Guide,<br>
Turn from each hurtful thing aside.</p>
<p> “Oh, may Thy grace on us bestow<br>
The Father and the Son to know,<br>
And evermore to hold confessed<br>
Thyself of Each the Spirit blest.”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter2"></a>
<h1>II.</h1>
<h2>Preparing His House</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>Jesus said, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee,
Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he
cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. That which is
born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born
of the Spirit is spirit.” And Paul wrote to the
Romans that, “If any man have not the Spirit
of Christ, he is none of His.”</p>
<p>So it must be that every child of God, every truly
converted person, has the Holy Spirit in some gracious
manner and measure, else he would not be a child of
God; for it is only “as many as are led by the
Spirit of God” that “are the sons of God.”</p>
<p>It is the Holy Spirit who convicts us of sin, who
makes us feel how good and righteous, and just and
patient God is, and how guilty we are, and how unfit
for Heaven, and how near to Hell. It is the Holy Spirit
who leads us to true repentance and confession and
amendment of life; and when our repentance is complete,
and our surrender is unconditional, it is He who reasons
with us, and calms our fears, and soothes our troubled
hearts, and banishes our darkness, and enables us
to look to Jesus, and believe on Him for the forgiveness
of all our sins and the salvation of our souls. And
when we yield and trust, and are accepted of the Lord,
and are saved by grace, it is He who assures us of
the Father’s favour, and notifies us that we
are saved. “The Spirit Himself beareth witness
with our spirit that we are the children of God.”
He is “the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry,
Abba, Father.”</p>
<p> “And His that gentle voice we hear,<br>
Soft as the breath of even;<br>
That checks each thought, that calms each fear,<br>
And speaks of Heaven.”</p>
<p>It is He who strengthens the new convert
to fight against and overcome sin, and it is He
who “begets within him a hope of fuller righteousness
through faith in Christ.”</p>
<p> “And every virtue we possess,<br>
And every victory won,<br>
And every thought of holiness,<br>
Are His alone.”</p>
<p>Blessed be God for this work of the Holy Spirit within
the heart of every true child of His!</p>
<p>But, great and gracious as is this work, it is not
the fiery pentecostal baptism with the Spirit which
is promised; it is not the fullness of the Holy Ghost
to which we are exhorted. It is only the clear dawn
of the day, and not the rising of the day-star. This
is only the initial work of the Spirit. It is perfect
of its kind, but it is preparatory to another and fuller
work, about which I wish to write.</p>
<p>Jesus said to His disciples, concerning the Holy Spirit,
that “the world” (the unsaved, unrepentant)
“cannot receive” Him, “because it
seeth Him not, neither knoweth Him”; because
they resist Him, and will not permit Him to work in
their hearts. And then Jesus added, “but ye
know Him; for He dwelleth with you....” He had
begun His work in them, but there was more to follow,
for Jesus said, “and shall be in you.”</p>
<p>When a man is building himself a house, he is in and
out of it and round about it. But we do not say he
lives in it until it has been completed. And it is
in that sense that Jesus said, “He dwelleth
with you.” But when the house is finished, the
owner sweeps out all the chips and saw-dust, scrubs
the floor, lays down his carpets, hangs up his pictures,
arranges his furniture, and moves in with his family.
Then he is in the fullest sense within it. He abides
there. Now, it is in that sense that Jesus meant that
the Holy Spirit should be in them. This is fitly expressed
in one of our songs:-</p>
<p> “Holy Spirit, come, Oh, come!<br>
Let Thy work in me be done!<br>
All that hinders shall be thrown
aside;<br>
Make me fit to be Thy dwelling.”</p>
<p>Previous to Pentecost He was with them, using the
searching preaching of John the Baptist, and the life,
the words, the example, the sufferings, and the death
and resurrection of Jesus as instruments with which
to fashion their hearts for His indwelling. As the
truth was declared to them in the words of Jesus,
pictured to them in His doings, exemplified in His
daily life, and fulfilled in His death and His rising
from the dead, the Holy Spirit wrought mightily within
them; but He could not yet find perfect rest in their
hearts; therefore He did not yet abide within them.</p>
<p>They had forsaken all to follow Christ. They had been
commissioned to preach the Gospel, to heal the sick,
to cleanse the lepers, to raise the dead, to cast
out devils. Their names were written in Heaven. They
were not of the world, even as Jesus was not of the
world, for they belonged to Him and to the Father.
They knew the Holy Spirit, for He was with them, working
in them, but not yet living in them, for they were
yet carnal; that is, they were selfish, each seeking
the best place for himself. They disputed among themselves
as to which should be the greatest. They were bigoted,
wanting to call down fire from Heaven to consume those
who would not receive Jesus, and forbidding those
who would not follow them to cast out devils in His
name. They were positive and loud in their professions
of devotion and loyalty to Jesus when alone with Him.
They declared they would die with Him. But they were
fearful, timid, and false to Him when the testing
time came. When the mocking crowd appeared, and danger
was near, they all forsook Him, and fled; while Peter
cursed and swore, and denied that he knew Him.</p>
<p>But the Holy Spirit did not forsake them. He still
wrought within them, and, no doubt, used their very
mistakes and miserable failures to perfect within
them the spirit of humility and perfect self-abasement
in order that they might safely be exalted. And on
the day of Pentecost His work of preparation was complete,
and He moved in to abide for ever. Hallelujah!</p>
<p>And this experience of theirs before Pentecost is
the common experience of all true converts. Every
child of God knows that the Holy Spirit is with him;
realises that He is working within, striving to set
the house in order. And with many who are properly
taught and gladly obedient, this work is done quickly,
and the heavenly Dove, the Blessed One, takes up his
constant abode within them; the toil and strife with
inbred sin is ended by its destruction, and they enter
at once into the sabbath of full salvation.</p>
<p>Surely this is possible. The disciples could not receive
the Holy Spirit till Jesus was glorified; because
not until then was the foundation for perfect, intelligent,
unwavering faith laid. But since the day of Pentecost,
He may be received immediately by those who have repented
of all sin, who have believed on Jesus, and been born
again. Some have assured me that they were sanctified
wholly and filled with the Spirit within a few hours
of their conversion. I have no doubt that this was
so with many of the three thousand who were converted
under Peter’s preaching on the day of Pentecost.</p>
<p>But often this work is slow, for He can only work
effectually as we work with Him, practising intelligent
and obedient faith. Some days the work prospers and
seems almost complete, and then peace and joy and
comfort abound in the heart; at other times the work
is hindered, and oftentimes almost or quite undone,
by the strivings and stirrings of inbred sin, by fits
of temper, by lightness and frivolity, by neglect
of watchfulness and prayer, and the patient, attentive
study of His word; by worldliness, by unholy ambitions,
by jealousies and envyings, by uncharitable suspicions
and harsh judgments and selfish indulgences, and slowness
to believe.</p>
<p>“The flesh lusteth against the Spirit,”
seeks to bring the soul back under the bondage of
sin again, while the Spirit wars against the flesh,
which is “the old man,” “the carnal
mind.” The Spirit seeks to bring every thought
into “captivity to the obedience of Christ,”
to lead the soul to that point of glad, whole-hearted
consecration to its Lord, and that simple, perfect
faith in the merits of His blood which shall enable
Him to cast out “the old man,” destroy
“the carnal mind,” and, making the heart
His temple, enthrone Christ within.</p>
<p> “Here on earth a temple stands,<br />
Temple never built with hands;<br />
There the Lord doth fill the place<br />
With the glory of His grace.<br />
Cleansed by Christ’s atoning blood,<br />
<i>Thou</i> art this fair house of God.<br />
Thoughts, desires, that enter there,<br />
Should they not be pure and fair?<br />
Meet for holy courts and blest,<br />
Courts of stillness and of rest,<br />
Where the soul, a priest in white,<br />
Singeth praises day and night;<br />
Glory of the love divine,<br />
Filling all this heart of mine.”</p>
<p>My brother, my sister, what is your experience just
now? Are you filled with the Spirit? Or is the old
man still warring against Him in your heart? Oh, that
you may receive Him fully by faith just now!</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter3"></a>
<h1>III.</h1>
<h2>Is the Baptism with the Holy Spirit a Third Blessing?</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>There is much difference of opinion among many of
God’s children as to the time and order of the
baptism with the Holy Spirit, and many who believe
that entire cleansing is subsequent to salvation,
ask if the baptism with the Spirit is not subsequent
to cleansing, and, therefore, a third blessing.</p>
<p>There are four classes of teachers whose views appear
to differ about this subject. There are:-</p>
<p>1. Those who emphasise cleansing; who say much of
a clean heart, but little, if anything, about the
fullness of the Holy Spirit and power from on High.</p>
<p>2. Those who emphasise the baptism with the Holy Ghost
and fullness of the Spirit, but say little or nothing
of cleansing from inbred sin and the destruction of
the carnal mind.</p>
<p>3. Those who say much of both, but separate them into
two distinct experiences, often widely separated in
time.</p>
<p>4. Those who teach that the truth is in the union
of the two, and that, while we may separate them in
their order, putting cleansing first, we cannot separate
them as to time, since it is the baptism that cleanses,
just as the darkness vanishes before the flash of
the electric light when the right button is touched;
just as the Augean stables were cleansed, in the fabled
story of Grecian mythology, when Hercules turned in
the floods of the River Arno; the refuse went out
as the rushing waters poured in.</p>
<p>There are three very blessed portions of Scripture
which show us that this is God’s order, and
two that plainly show us that cleansing and the baptism
are not separate in time.</p>
<p>In Psalm li. 10 and 12, David prays, “Create
in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit
within me.... Uphold me with Thy free Spirit.”
First the cleansing, then the filling that upholds:
for as it is my spirit within me that upholds my body,
so it is God’s Spirit within that upholds my
soul.</p>
<p>In Ezekiel xxxvi. 25 and 27, the Lord says, “Then
will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall
be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your
idols, will I cleanse you.... And I will put My Spirit
within you.”</p>
<p>Here again, the order is first cleansing, then filling.</p>
<p>In John xvii. 15-26, Jesus prays for His disciples,
and says: “I pray not that Thou shouldst take
them out of the world, but that Thou shouldst keep
them from the evil.... Sanctify them;... that they
all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in
Thee; that they also may be one in Us;... I in them,
and Thou in Me, that they may be made perfect in one;...
that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be
in them, and I in them.”</p>
<p>Here, again, it is first sanctification (cleansing,
being made holy), then filling, divine union with
the Father and the Son through the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>These Scriptures make plain the order of God’s
work, and if we looked at them alone, without diligently
comparing Scripture with Scripture, as God would have
us do, we might perhaps conclude that the cleansing
and filling were as distinct and separate in time
as they are in this order of statement.</p>
<p>But other Scriptures give us abundant light on that
side of the subject. In Isaiah vi. 1-8, we have the
record of the prophet’s sanctification, and
we notice that the cleansing and the filling were
not separate in time. The cleansing was not <i>before</i>
the baptism, but <i>by</i> the baptism. The “live
coal” was laid upon his mouth, and touched his
lips; and by this fiery baptism his iniquity was taken
away and his sin was purged.</p>
<p>In Acts x. 44, we read of Peter’s preaching
Jesus to Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and his household;
and “while Peter yet spake these words, the
Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word”;
and in Acts xv. 7-9, at the first Council in Jerusalem,
we have Peter’s rehearsal of the experience of
Cornelius and his household. Peter says: “Men
and brethren, ye know how that a good while ago God
made choice among us, that the Gentiles by my mouth
should hear the word of the Gospel, and believe. And
God, which knoweth the hearts, bare them witness,
giving them the Holy Ghost, even as He did unto us;
and put no difference between us and them, purifying
their hearts by faith.” Here we see that their
believing, and the sudden descent of the Holy Ghost
with cleansing power into their hearts, constitute
one blessed experience.</p>
<p>What patient, waiting, expectant faith reckons done,
the baptism with the Holy Ghost actually accomplishes.
Between the act of faith by which a man begins to
reckon himself “dead indeed unto sin, but alive
unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans
vi. 11), and the act of the Holy Spirit, which makes
the reckoning good, there may be an interval of time,
“a little while” (Hebrews x. 37); but
the act and state of steadfastly, patiently, joyously,
perfectly believing, which is man’s part, and
the act of baptising with the Holy Ghost, cleansing
as by fire, which is God’s part, bring about
the one experience of entire sanctification, and must
not and cannot be logically looked upon as two distinct
blessings, any more than the act of the husband and
the act of the wife can be separated in the one experience
of marriage.</p>
<p>There are two works and two workers: God and man.
Just as my right arm and my left arm work when my
two hands come together, but the union of the two
hands constitute one experience.</p>
<p>If my left arm acts quickly, my right arm will surely
respond. And so, if the soul, renouncing self and
sin and the world, with ardour of faith in the precious
blood for cleansing, and in the promise of the gift
of the Holy Spirit, draws nigh to God, God will draw
nigh to that soul, and the blessed union will be effected
suddenly: and in that instant, what faith has reckoned
done will be done, the death-stroke will be given to
“the old man,” sin will die, and the heart
will be clean indeed, and wholly alive toward God
through our Lord Jesus Christ. It will not be a mere
“make-believe” experience, but a gloriously
real one.</p>
<p>It is possible that some have been led into confusion
of thought on this subject by not considering all
the Scriptures bearing on it. What is it that cleanses
or sanctifies, and how? Jesus prays: “Sanctify
them through Thy truth: Thy word is truth.” Here
it is the word, or truth, that sanctifies.</p>
<p>John says: “The blood of Jesus Christ His Son
cleanseth us from all sin.” Here it is the blood.</p>
<p>Peter says: “God...put no difference between
us and them, purifying their hearts by faith.”
And Paul says: “That they may receive forgiveness
of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified
by faith.” Here it is by faith.</p>
<p>Again, Paul writes: “God hath from the beginning
chosen you to salvation through sanctification of
the Spirit” (2 Thess. ii. 13). And again, “That
the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable,
being sanctified by the Holy Ghost” (Romans xv.
16). And Peter writes: “To the strangers...
elect... through sanctification of the Spirit”
(1 Peter i. I, 2). Here it is the Spirit that sanctifies
or makes clean and holy.</p>
<p>Is there, then, confusion here? Jesus says, “the
truth”; John says, “the blood”;
Paul and Peter say, “faith,” and “the
Holy Ghost.” Can these be reconciled? Let us
see.</p>
<p>Here is a child in a burning house. A man at the peril
of his life rushes to the spot above which the child
stands in awful danger, and cries out, “Jump,
and I will catch you!”</p>
<p>The child hears, believes, leaps, and the man receives
him; but just as he turns and places the boy in safety,
a falling timber smites him to the ground wounded
to death, and his flowing blood sprinkles the boy
whom he has saved.</p>
<p>A breathless spectator says: “The child’s
faith saved him.” Another says: “How quick
the lad was! His courageous leap saved him.”
Another says: “Bless the child! He was in awful
danger, and he just barely saved himself.” Another
says: “That man’s word just reached the
boy’s ear in the nick of time, and saved him.”
Another says: “God bless that man! He saved that
child.” And yet another says: “That boy
was saved by blood; by the sacrifice of that heroic
man!”</p>
<p>Now, what saved the child? Without the man’s
presence and promise there would have been no faith;
and without faith there would have been no saving
action, and the boy would have perished. The man’s
word saved him by inspiring faith. Faith saved him
by leading to proper action. He saved himself by leaping.
The man saved him by sacrificing his own life in order
to catch him when he leaped out.</p>
<p>Not the child himself alone, nor his faith, nor his
brave leap, nor his rescuer’s word, nor his
blood, nor the man himself saved the boy, but they
all together saved him; and the boy was not saved
till he was in the arms of the man.</p>
<p>And so it is faith and works, and the word and the
blood and the Holy Ghost that sanctify.</p>
<p>The blood, the sacrifice of Christ, underlies all,
and is the meritorious cause of every blessing we
receive, but the Holy Spirit is the active Agent by
whom the merits of the blood are applied to our needs.</p>
<p>During the American Civil War certain men committed
some dastardly and unlawful deeds, and were sentenced
to be shot. On the day of the execution they stood
in a row confronted by soldiers with loaded muskets,
waiting the command to fire. Just before the command
was given, the commanding officer felt a touch on
his elbow, and, turning, saw a young man by his side,
who said, “Sir, there in that row, waiting to
be shot, is a married man. He has a wife and children.
He is their bread-winner. If you shoot him, he will
be sorely missed. <i>Let me take his place.</i>”</p>
<p>“All right,” said the officer; “take
his place, if you wish; but you will be shot.”</p>
<p>“I quite understand that,” replied the
young man; “but no one will miss me”;
and, going to the condemned man, he pushed him aside,
and took his place.</p>
<p>Soon the command to fire was given. The volley rang
out, and the young hero dropped dead with a bullet
through his heart, while the other man went free.</p>
<p>His freedom came to him by blood. Had he, however,
neglected the great salvation, and, despising the
blood shed for him, and refusing the sacrifice of
the friend and the righteous claims of the law, persisted
in the same evil ways, he, too, would have been shot.
The blood, though shed for him, would not have availed
to set him free. But he accepted the sacrifice, submitted
to the law, and went home to his wife and children;
but it was by the blood; every breath he henceforth
drew, every throb of his heart, every blessing he
enjoyed, or possibly could enjoy, came to him by the
blood. He owed everything from that day forth to the
blood, and every fleeting moment, every passing day,
and every rolling year but increased his debt to the
blood which had been shed for him.</p>
<p>And so we owe all to the blood of Christ, for we were
under sentence of death—­"The soul that
sinneth it shall die”; and we have all sinned,
and God, to be holy, must frown upon sin, and utterly
condemn it, and must execute His sentence against it.</p>
<p>But Jesus suffered for our sins. He died for us. “He
was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised
for our iniquities;... and with His stripes we are
healed.” “Ye know that ye were not redeemed
with corruptible things, as silver and gold... but
with the precious blood of Christ” (i Peter
i. 18, 19); “Who loved me, and gave Himself
for me” (Gal. ii. 20). And now every blessing
we ever had, or ever shall have, comes to us by the
Divine Sacrifice, by “the precious blood.”
And “How shall we escape, if we neglect so great
salvation?” His blood is the meritorious cause
not only of our pardon, but of our cleansing, our
sanctification; but the Holy Spirit is the ever-present,
living, active Cause.</p>
<p>The truth or word which sanctifies is the record God
has given us of His will and of that Divine Sacrifice,
that “precious blood.” The faith that
purifies is that sure confidence in that word which
leads to renunciation of all self-righteousness, that
utter abandonment to God’s will, and full dependence
on the merits of “the precious blood,”
the “faith that works by love,” for “faith
without works is dead.” And thus we draw nigh
to God, and God draws nigh to us, and the Holy Ghost
falls upon us, comes into us, and cleanses our hearts
by the destruction of sin, and the shedding abroad
within us of the love of God.</p>
<p>The advocates of entire sanctification as an experience
wrought in the soul by the baptism with the Spirit
subsequent to regeneration call it “the second
blessing.”</p>
<p>But many good people object to the term, and say that
they have received the first, second, third, and fiftieth
blessing; and no doubt they have; and yet the people
who speak of “the second blessing” are
right, in the sense in which they use the term; and
in that sense there are but the two blessings.</p>
<p>Some years ago a man heard things about a lady that
filled him with admiration for her, and made him feel
that they were of one mind and heart. Later, he met
her for the first time, and fell in love with her.
After some months, following an enlarged acquaintance
and much consideration and prayer, he told her of
his love, and asked her to become his wife; and after
due consideration and prayer on her part she consented,
and they promised themselves to each other; they plighted
their faith, and in a sense gave themselves to each
other.</p>
<p>That was the first blessing, and it filled him with
great peace and joy, but not perfect peace and joy.
Now, there were many blessings following that before
the great second blessing came. Every letter he received,
every tender look, every pressure of the hand, every
tone of her voice, every fresh assurance of enduring
and increasing affection was a blessing; but it was
not the second blessing.</p>
<p>But one day, after patient waiting, which might have
been shortened by mutual consent, if they had thought
it wise, and after full preparation, they came together
in the presence of friends and before a man of God,
and in the most solemn and irrevocable manner gave
themselves to each other to become one, and were pronounced
man and wife. That was the second blessing, an epochal
experience, unlike anything which preceded, or anything
to follow. And now their peace and joy and rest were
full.</p>
<p>There had to be the first and second blessings in
this relationship of man and wife, but there is no
third. And yet in the sense of those who say they
have received fifty blessings from the Lord, there
have been countless blessings in their wedded life;
indeed, it has been a river of blessing, broadening
and deepening in gladness and joy and sweet affections
and fellowship with the increasing years.</p>
<p>But let us not confuse thought by disputing over terms
and wrangling about words.</p>
<p>The first blessing in Jesus Christ is salvation, with
its negative side of remission of sins and forgiveness,
and its positive side of renewal or regeneration—­the
new birth—­one experience.</p>
<p>And the second blessing is entire sanctification,
with its negative side of cleansing, and its positive
side of filling with the Holy Ghost—­one
whole, rounded, glorious, epochal experience. And
while there may be many refreshings, girdings, illuminations,
and secret tokens and assurances of love and favour,
there is no third blessing in this large sense, in
this present time.</p>
<p>But when time is no more, when the ever-lasting doors
have lifted up, and the King of Glory comes in with
His Bride, and, for ever redeemed and crowned, He
makes us to sit down with Him on His throne, then
in eternity we shall have the third blessing—­we
shall be glorified.</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter4"></a>
<h1>IV.</h1>
<h2>The Witness of the Spirit</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>How shall I know that I am accepted of God?—­that
I am saved or sanctified? The Bible declares God’s
love and pity for sinners, including me, and reveals
His offer of mercy to me in Jesus Christ, on condition
that I fully repent of my sins, and yielding myself
to Him, believe on Jesus Christ, and taking up my cross,
follow Him. But how shall I know that I have met these
conditions in a way to satisfy Him, and that I am
myself saved?</p>
<p>1. The Bible cannot tell me this. It tells me what
to do, but it does not tell me when I have done it,
any more than the sign-board at the country cross-roads,
pointing out the road leading to the city, tells me
when I have got to the city.</p>
<p>2. My religious teachers and friends cannot tell me,
for they cannot read my heart, nor the mind of God
toward me. How can they know when I have in my heart
repented and believed, and when His righteous anger
is turned away?</p>
<p>They can encourage me to repent, believe, obey, and
can assure me that, if I do, He will accept me, and
I shall be saved; but beyond that they cannot go.</p>
<p>3. My own heart, owing to its darkness and deceitfulness
and liability to error, is not a safe witness previous
to the assurance God Himself gives. If my neighbour
is justly offended with me, it is not my own heart,
but his testimony that first assures me of his favour
once more.</p>
<p>How, then, shall I know that I am justified or wholly
sanctified? There is but one way, and that is by the
witness of the Holy Spirit. God must notify me, and
make me to know it; and this He does, when, despairing
of my own works of righteousness, I cast my poor soul
fully and in faith upon Jesus. “For ye have not
received the spirit of bondage again to fear,”
says Paul, “but ye have received the spirit
of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit
itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are
the children of God” (Romans viii. 15, 16). “And
because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit
of His Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father”
(Gal. iv. 6). Unless He Himself assures me, I shall
never know that He accepts me, but must continue in
uncertainty all my days.</p>
<p> “Come, Holy Ghost, Thyself impress<br>
On my expanding heart:<br>
And show that in the Father’s
grace<br>
I share a filial part.”</p>
<p>The General says: “Assurance is produced by
the revelation of forgiveness and acceptance made
by God Himself directly to the soul. This is the witness
of the Spirit. It is God testifying in my soul that
He has loved me, and given Himself for me, and washed
me from my sins in His own blood. Nothing short of
this <i>actual revelation</i>, made by God Himself,
can make anyone sure of salvation.”</p>
<p>John Wesley says: “By the testimony of the Spirit,
I mean an inward impression of the soul, whereby the
Spirit of God immediately and directly witnesses to
my spirit that I am a child of God; that ‘Jesus
hath loved me, and given Himself for me’; that
all my sins are blotted out, and I, even I, am reconciled
to God.”</p>
<p>This witness of the Spirit addressed to my consciousness
enables me to sing with joyful assurance:—­</p>
<p> “My God is reconciled;<br>
His pardoning voice I hear:<br>
He owns me for His child;<br>
I can no longer fear:<br>
With confidence I now draw nigh,<br>
And, ‘Father, Abba, Father,’
cry.”</p>
<p>When the Holy Spirit witnesses to me that I am saved
and adopted into God’s family as His child,
then other evidences begin to abound also. For instance:—­</p>
<p>1. My own spirit witnesses that I am a new creature.
I know that old things have passed away, and all things
have become new. My very thoughts and desires have
been changed. Love and joy and peace reign within
me. My heart no longer condemns me. Pride and selfishness,
and lust and temper, no longer control my thoughts
nor lead captive my will. I am a new creature, and
I know it, and I infer without doubt that this is
the work of God in me.</p>
<p>2. My conscience bears witness that I am honest and
true in all my purposes and intentions; that I am
without guile; that my eye is single to the glory
of God, and that with all simplicity and sincerity
of heart I serve Him; and, since by nature I am only
sinful, I again infer that this sincerity of heart
is His blessed work in my soul, and is a fruit of
salvation.</p>
<p>3. The Bible becomes a witness to my salvation. In
it are accurately portrayed the true characteristics
of the children of God; and as I study it prayerfully,
and find these characteristics in my heart and life,
I again infer that I am saved. This is true self-examination,
and is most useful.</p>
<p>These evidences are most important to guard us against
any mistake as to the witness of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>The witness of the Spirit is not likely to be mistaken
for something else, just as the sun is not likely
to be mistaken for a lesser light, a glow-worm or
a moon. But one who has not seen the sun might mistake
some lesser light for the sun. So an unsaved man may
mistake some flash of fancy, some pleasant emotion,
for the witness of the Spirit. But if he is honest,
the absence of these secondary evidences and witnesses
will correct him. He must know that so long as sin
masters him, reigns within him, and he is devoid of
the tempers, graces, and dispositions of God’s
people, as portrayed in the Bible, that he is mistaken
in supposing that he has the witness of the Spirit.
The Holy Spirit cannot witness to what does not exist.
He cannot lie. Not until sin is forgiven does He witness
to the fact. Not until we are justified from our old
sins and born again does He witness that we are children
of God; and when He does so witness, these secondary
evidences always follow. Charles Wesley expresses this
in one of his matchless hymns:—­</p>
<p> “How can a sinner know<br>
His sins on earth forgiven?<br>
How can my gracious Saviour show<br>
My name inscribed in Heaven?</p>
<p> “We who in Christ believe<br>
That He for us hath died,<br>
We all His unknown peace receive,<br>
And feel His blood applied.</p>
<p> “His love, surpassing far<br>
The love of all beneath,<br>
We find within our hearts, and dare<br>
The pointless darts of death.</p>
<p> “Stronger than death and hell<br>
The mystic power we prove;<br>
And conquerors of the world, we dwell<br>
In Heaven, who dwell in love.”</p>
<p>The witness of the Spirit is far more comprehensive
than many suppose. Multitudes do not believe that
there is any such thing, while others confine it to
the forgiveness of sins and adoption into the family
of God. But the truth is that the Holy Spirit witnesses
to much more than this.</p>
<p>He witnesses to the sinner that he is guilty, condemned
before God, and lost. This we call conviction; but
it is none other than the witness of the Spirit to
the sinner’s true condition; and when a man
realises it, nothing can convince him to the contrary.
His friends may point out his good works, his kindly
disposition, and try to assure him that he is not
a bad man; but, so long as the Spirit continues to
witness to his guilt, nothing can console him or reassure
his quaking heart. This convicting witness may come
to a sinner at any time, but it is usually given under
the searching preaching of the Gospel, or the burning
testimony of those who have been gloriously saved
and sanctified; or in time of danger, when the soul
is awed into silence, so that it can hear the “still
small voice” of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>Again, the Holy Spirit not only witnesses to the forgiveness
of sins and acceptance with God, but He also witnesses
to sanctification. “For by one offering,”
says the Apostle, “He” (that is, Jesus)
“hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified.
Whereof the Holy Ghost also is a witness to us”
(Hebrews x. 14, 15).</p>
<p>Indeed, one who has this witness can no more doubt
it than a man with two good eyes can doubt the existence
of the sun when he steps forth into the splendour
of a cloudless noon-day. It satisfies him, and he
cries out exultingly, “We know, we know!”
Hallelujah!</p>
<p>Paul seems to teach that the Holy Spirit witnesses
to every good thing God works in us, for he says:
“We have received, not the spirit of the world,
but the Spirit which is of God; that we might know
the things that are freely given to us of God”
(1 Cor. ii. 12). It is for our comfort and encouragement
to know our acceptance of God and our rights, privileges,
and possessions in Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit
is given for this purpose, that we may <i>know</i>.</p>
<p>But it is important to bear in mind God’s plan
of work in this matter.</p>
<p>1. The witness of the Spirit is dependent upon our
faith. God does not give it to those who do not believe
in Jesus; and if our faith wavers, the witness will
become intermittent; and if faith fails, it will be
withdrawn. Owing to the unsteadiness of their faith,
many young converts get into uncertainty. Happy are
they at such times if some one is at hand to instruct
and encourage them to look steadfastly to Jesus. But,
alas! many old Christians through unsteady faith walk
in gloom and uncertainty, and, instead of encouraging
the young, they discourage them. Steadfast faith will
keep the inward witness bright.</p>
<p>2. We must not get our attention off Jesus, and the
promises of God in Him, and fix it upon the witness
of the Spirit. The witness continues only while we
look unto Jesus, and trust and obey Him. When we take
our eyes off Him, the witness is gone. Many people
fail here. Instead of quietly and confidently looking
unto Jesus, and trusting Him, they are vainly looking
for the witness; which is as though a man should try
to realise the sweetness of honey, without receiving
it in his mouth; or the beauty of a picture, while
having his eyes turned inward upon himself instead
of outward upon the picture. Jesus saves. Look to
Him, and He will send the Spirit to witness to His
work.</p>
<p>3. The witness may be brightened by diligence in the
discharge of duty, by frequent seasons of glad prayer,
by definite testimony to salvation and sanctification,
and by stirring up our faith.</p>
<p>4. The witness may be dulled by neglect of duty, by
sloth in prayer, by inattention to the Bible, by indefinite,
hesitating testimony, and by carelessness, when we
should be careful to walk soberly and steadfastly
with the Lord.</p>
<p>5. I dare not say that the witness of the Spirit is
dependent upon our health, but there are some forms
of nervous and organic disease that seem to so distract
or becloud the mind as to interfere with the clear
discernment of the witness of the Spirit. I knew a
nervous little child who would be so distracted with
fear by an approaching carriage, when being carried
across the street in her father’s arms, that
she seemed to be incapable of hearing or heeding his
reassuring voice. It may be that there are some diseases
that for the time prevent the sufferer from discerning
the reassuring witness of the Heavenly Father. Dr.
Asa Mahan told me of an experience of this kind which
he had in a very dangerous sickness. And Dr. Daniel
Steele had a similar experience while lying at the
point of death with typhoid fever. But some of the
happiest Christians the world has seen have been racked
with pain and tortured with disease.</p>
<p>And so there may be seasons of fierce temptation when
the witness is not clearly discerned; but we may rest
assured that if our hearts cleave to Jesus Christ
and duty, He will never leave or forsake us. Blessed
be God!</p>
<p>6. But the witness will be lost if we wilfully sin,
or persistently neglect to follow where He leads.
This witness is a pearl of great price, and Satan
will try to steal it from us; therefore, we must guard
it with watchful prayer continually.</p>
<p>7. If lost, it may be found again by prayer and faith
and a dutiful taking up of the cross which has been
laid down. Thousands who have lost it have found it
again, and often they have found it with increased
brightness and glory. If you have lost it, my brother,
look up in faith to your loving God, and He will restore
it to you. It is possible to live on the right side
of plain duty without the witness, but you cannot be
sure of your salvation, joyful in service, or glad
in God, without it; and since it is promised to all
God’s children, no one who professes to be His
should be without it.</p>
<p>If you have it not, my brother or sister, seek it
now by faith in Jesus. Go to Him, and do not let Him
go till He notifies you that you are His. Listen to
Charles Wesley:—­</p>
<p> “From the world of sin, and noise,<br>
And hurry, I withdraw;<br>
For the small and inward voice<br>
I wait with humble awe;<br>
Silent am I now and still,<br>
Dare not in Thy presence move;<br>
To my waiting soul reveal<br>
The secret of Thy love.”</p>
<p>Do you want the witness to abide? Then study the word
of God, and live by it; sing and make melody in your
heart to the Lord; praise the Lord with your first
waking breath in the morning, and thank Him with your
last waking breath at night; flee from sin; keep on
believing; look to Jesus, cleave to Him, follow Him
gladly, trust the efficacy of His blood, and the witness
will abide in your heart. Be patient with the Lord.
Let Him mould you, and “He will save, He will
rejoice over thee with joy; He will rest in His love,
He will joy over thee with singing” (Zeph. iii.
17); and you shall no longer doubt, but know that you
are His. Hallelujah!</p>
<p> “There are in this loud stunning
tide<br>
Of human care and crime,<br>
With whom the melodies abide<br>
Of th’ everlasting chime;<br>
Who carry music in their heart<br>
Through dusky lane and wrangling mart,<br>
Plying their task with busier feet<br>
Because their secret souls a holy strain
repeat.”</p>
<p>And that “holy strain” is but the echo
of the Lord’s song in their heart, which is
the witness of the Spirit.</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter5"></a>
<h1>V.</h1>
<h2>Purity</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>A minister of the Gospel, after listening to an eminent
servant of God preaching on entire sanctification
through the baptism with the Spirit, wrote to him,
saying: “I like your teaching on the baptism
with the Holy Ghost. I need it, and am seeking it;
but I do not care much for entire sanctification or
heart-cleansing. Pray for me that I may be filled
with the Holy Ghost.”</p>
<p>The brother knew him well, and immediately replied:
“I am so glad you believe in the baptism with
the Holy Ghost, and are so earnestly seeking it. I
join my prayer with yours that you may receive that
gift. But let me say to you, that if you get the gift
of the Holy Ghost, you will have to take entire sanctification
with it, for the first thing the baptism with the Holy
Ghost does is to cleanse the heart from all sin.”</p>
<p>Thank God, he humbled himself, permitted the Lord
to sanctify him, and he was filled with the Holy Spirit,
and mightily empowered to work for God.</p>
<p>Many have looked at the promise of power when the
Holy Ghost is come, the energy of Peter’s preaching
on the day of Pentecost, and the marvellous results
which followed, and they have hastily and erroneously
jumped to the conclusion that the baptism with the
Holy Ghost is for work and service only.</p>
<p>It does bring power—­the power of God, and
it does fit for service, probably the most important
service to which any created beings are commissioned,
the proclamation of salvation and the conditions of
peace to a lost world; but not that alone, nor primarily.
The primary, the basal work of the baptism, is that
of cleansing.</p>
<p>You may turn a flood into your millrace, but until
it sweeps away the logs and brushwood and dirt that
obstruct the course, you cannot get power to turn
the wheels of your mill. The flood first washes out
the obstructions, and then you have power.</p>
<p>The great hindrance in the hearts of God’s children
to the power of the Holy Ghost is inbred sin—­that
dark, defiant, evil something within that struggles
for the mastery of the soul, and will not submit to
be meek and lowly, and patient and forbearing and
holy, as was Jesus; and when the Holy Spirit comes,
His first work is to sweep away that something, that
carnal principle, and make free and clean all the
channels of the soul.</p>
<p>Peter was filled with power on the day of Pentecost;
but evidently the purifying effect of the baptism
made a deeper and more lasting impression upon his
mind than the empowering effect; for years after,
in that first Council in Jerusalem, recorded in the
fifteenth chapter of Acts, he stood up and told about
the spiritual baptism of Cornelius, the Roman centurion,
and his household, and he said: “And God, which
knoweth the hearts, bare them witness, giving them
the Holy Ghost, even as He did unto us; and put no
difference between us and them, purifying their hearts
by faith.” Here he calls attention not to power,
but to purity, as the effect of the baptism. When
the Holy Ghost comes in to abide, “the old man”
goes out. Praise the Lord!</p>
<p>This destruction of inbred sin is made perfectly plain
in that wonderful Old Testament type of the baptism
with the Holy Ghost and fire recorded in the sixth
chapter of Isaiah. The prophet was a most earnest
preacher of righteousness (see Isaiah i. 10-20), yet
he was not sanctified wholly. But he had a vision of
the Lord upon His Throne, and the seraphims crying
one to another: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord
of Hosts: the whole earth is full of His glory.”
And the very “posts of the door moved at the
voice of him that cried”; and how much more
should the heart of the prophet be moved! And so it
was; and he cried out: “Woe is me! for I am
undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell
in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine
eyes have seen the King, the Lord of Hosts.”</p>
<p>When unsanctified men have a vision of God, it is
not their lack of power, but their lack of purity,
their unlikeness to Christ, the Holy One, that troubles
them. And so it was with the prophet. But he adds:
“Then flew one of the seraphims unto me, having
a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with the
tongs from off the altar. And he laid it upon my mouth,
and said, Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine
iniquity is taken away, and thy sin purged.”
Here again, it is purity rather than power to which
our attention is directed.</p>
<p>Again, in the thirty-sixth chapter of Ezekiel, we
have another type of this spiritual baptism. In Isaiah
the type was that of fire, but here it is that of
water; for water and oil, and the wind and rain and
dew, are all used as types of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>The Lord says, through Ezekiel: “Then will I
sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean;
from all your filthiness, and from all your idols,
will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you,
and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will
take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I
will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put My
Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes,
and ye shall keep My judgments, and do them.”</p>
<p>Here again, the incoming of the Holy Spirit means
the outgoing of all sin, of “all your filthiness,
and of all your idols.” How plainly it is taught!
And yet, many of God’s dear children do not
believe it is their privilege to be free from sin and
pure in heart in this life. But, may we not? Let us
consider this.</p>
<p>1. It is certainly <i>desirable</i>. Every sincere
Christian—­and none can be a Christian who
is not sincere—­wants to be free from sin,
to be pure in heart, to be like Christ. Sin is hateful
to every true child of God. The Spirit within him
cries out against the sin, the wrong temper, the pride,
the lust, the selfishness, the evil that lurks within
the heart. Surely, it is desirable to be free from
sin.</p>
<p> “He wills that I should holy be:<br>
That holiness I long to feel;<br>
That full Divine conformity<br>
To all my Saviour’s righteous
will.”</p>
<p>2. It is <i>necessary</i>, for “without holiness
no man shall see the Lord.” Sometime, somehow,
somewhere, sin must go out of our hearts—­all
sin—­or we cannot go into Heaven. Sin would
spoil Heaven just as it spoils earth; just as it spoils
the peace of hearts and homes, of families and neighbourhoods
and nations here. Why God in His wisdom allows sin
in the world, I do not know, I cannot understand.
But this I understand: that He has one world into
which He will not let sin enter. He has notified us
in advance that no sin, nothing that defiles, can
enter Heaven, can mar the blessedness of that holy
place. “Who shall ascend into the hill of the
Lord? or who shall stand in His holy place? He that
hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted
up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully”
We must get rid of sin to get into Heaven, to enjoy
the full favour of God. It is necessary.</p>
<p> “Choose I must, and soon must choose<br>
Holiness, or Heaven lose.<br>
If what Heaven loves I hate,<br>
Shut for me is Heaven’s gate!</p>
<p> “Endless sin means endless woe;<br>
Into endless sin I go<br>
If my soul, from reason rent,<br>
Takes from sin its final bent.</p>
<p> “As the stream its channel grooves,<br>
And within that channel moves;<br>
So does habit’s deepest tide<br>
Groove its bed and there abide.</p>
<p> “Light obeyed increaseth light;<br>
Light resisted bringeth night;<br>
Who shall give me will to choose<br>
If the love of light I lose?</p>
<p> “Speed, my soul, this instant yield;<br>
Let the light its sceptre wield.<br>
While thy God prolongs His grace,<br>
Haste thee to His holy face.”</p>
<p>3. This purification from sin is <i>promised</i>.
Nothing can be plainer than the promise of God on
this point. “Then will I sprinkle clean water
upon you, and ye shall be clean; from <i>all</i> your
filthiness and from <i>all</i> your idols will I cleanse
you.” When all is removed, nothing remains. When
all filthiness and all idols are taken away, none
are left.</p>
<p>“But where sin abounded, grace did much more
abound; that as sin hath reigned unto death, even
so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal
life by Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans v. 20,
21). Grace reigns, not through sin, but “through
righteousness” which has expelled sin. Grace
brings in righteousness and sin goes out.</p>
<p>“If we walk in the light, as He is in the light,
we have fellowship one with another, and the blood
of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin”
(1 John i. 7). Hallelujah!</p>
<p>“Being then made free from sin, ye became the
servants of righteousness” (Romans vi. 18).</p>
<p>These are sample promises and assurances any one of
which is sufficient to encourage us to believe that
our Heavenly Father will save us from all sin, if
we meet His conditions.</p>
<p>4. And that deliverance is <i>possible</i>. It was
for this that Jesus Christ, the Father’s Son,
came into the world, and suffered and died, that He
might “save His people from their sins”
(Matthew i. 21). It was for this that He shed His precious
blood: to “cleanse us from all sin.” It
was for this that the word of God, with its wonderful
promises, was given: “That by these ye might
be partakers of the Divine nature, having escaped the
corruption that is in the world through lust”
(2 Peter i. 4); by which is meant, escape from inbred
sin. It was for this that ministers of the Gospel—­Salvation
Army Officers—­are given, “for the
perfecting of the saints” (Eph. iv. 12), for
the saving and sanctifying of men (Acts xxvi. 18).
It is primarily for this that the Holy Ghost comes
as a baptism of fire: that sin might be consumed out
of us, so that we might be “made meet for the
inheritance of the saints in light”; that so
we might be ready without a moment’s warning
to go into the midst of the heavenly hosts in white
garments, “washed in the blood of the Lamb.”
Glory be to God for ever and ever!</p>
<p>And shall all these mighty agents and this heavenly
provision, and these gracious purposes of God, fail
to destroy sin out of any obedient, believing heart?
Is sin omnipotent? No!</p>
<p>If you, my brother, my sister, will look unto Jesus
just now, trusting the merits of His blood, and receive
the Holy Spirit into your heart, you shall be “made
free from sin”; it “shall not have dominion
over you.” Hallelujah! Under the fiery touch
of His holy presence, your iniquity shall be taken
away, and your sin shall be purged. And you yourself
shall burn as did the bush on the mount of God which
Moses saw; yet you, like the bush, shall not be consumed;
and by this holy fire, this flame of love, that consumes
sin, you shall be made proof against that unquenchable
fire that consumes sinners.</p>
<p> “Come, Holy Ghost, Thy mighty aid bestowing;<br>
Destroy the works of sin, the self, the pride;<br>
Burn, burn in me, my idols overthrowing:<br>
Prepare my heart for Him, for my Lord crucified.”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter6"></a>
<h1>VI.</h1>
<h2>Power</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>Just before His ascension, Jesus met His disciples
for the last time, and repeated His command that they
should “not depart from Jerusalem, but wait
for the promise of the Father,” and reiterated
His promise that they should be “baptised with
the Holy Ghost not many days hence.”</p>
<p>Then “they asked of Him, saying, Lord, wilt
Thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel?”
They were still eager for an earthly kingdom. But
“He said unto them, It is not for you to know
the time or the seasons, which the Father hath put
in His own power,” or authority. And then He
added, “But ye shall receive power after that
the Holy Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>They wanted power, and He assured them that they should
have it, but said nothing of its nature, or the work
and activities into which it would thrust them, and
for which it would equip them, beyond the fact that
they should be witnesses unto Him “in Jerusalem
and Samaria, and unto the uttermost parts of the earth.”
After that the Holy Ghost Himself was henceforth to
be their Teacher.</p>
<p>And then Jesus left them. Earth lost its power to
hold Him, and while they beheld Him He began to ascend;
a cloud bent low from Heaven, receiving Him out of
sight, and they were left alone, with His promise
of power ringing in their ears, and His command to
“wait for the promise of the Father” checking
any impatience that might lead them to “go a-fishing,”
as Peter had done some days before, or cause an undue
haste to begin their life-work of witnessing for Him
before God’s appointed time.</p>
<p>For ten days they waited, not listlessly, but eagerly,
as a maid for her mistress, or a servant for his master,
who is expected to come at any moment; they forgot
their personal ambitions; they ceased to judge and
criticise one another, and in the sweet unity of brotherly
love, “with one accord” they rejoiced,
they prayed, they waited; and then on the day of Pentecost,
at their early morning prayer meeting, when they were
all present, the windows of Heaven were opened, and
such a blessing as they could not contain was poured
out upon them. “And suddenly there came a sound
from Heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled
all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared
unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat
upon each of them. And they were all filled with the
Holy Ghost.”</p>
<p>This was the inaugural day of the Church of God: the
dawn of the dispensation of the Holy Spirit; the beginning
of the days of power.</p>
<p>In the morning of that day there were only a few Christians
in the world; the New Testament was not written, and
it is doubtful if they had among them all a copy of
the Old Testament; they had no church buildings, no
colleges, no religious books and papers; they were
poor and despised, unlearned and ignorant; but before
night they had enrolled three thousand converts from
among those who, a few weeks before, had crucified
their Lord, and they had aroused and filled all Jerusalem
with questionings and amazement.</p>
<p>What was the secret? Power. What was the secret? God
the Holy Ghost. He had come, and this work was His
work, and they were His instruments.</p>
<p>When Jesus came, a body was prepared for Him (Hebrews
x. 5), and through that body He wrought His wondrous
works; but when the other Comforter comes, He takes
possession of those bodies that are freely and fully
presented to Him, and He touches their lips with grace;
He shines peacefully and gloriously on their faces;
He flashes beams of pity and compassion and heavenly
affection from their eyes; He kindles a fire of love
in their hearts, and lights the flame of truth in
their minds. They become His temple, and their hearts
are a holy of holies in which His blessed presence
ever abides, and from that central citadel He works,
enduing the man who has received Him with power.</p>
<p>If you ask how the Holy Spirit can dwell within us
and work through us without destroying our personality,
I cannot tell. How can the electric fluid fill and
transform a dead wire into a live one, which you dare
not touch? How can a magnetic current fill a piece
of steel, and transform it into a mighty force which
by its touch can raise tons of iron, as a child would
lift a feather? How can fire dwell in a piece of iron
until its very appearance is that of fire, and it
becomes a fire-brand? I cannot tell.</p>
<p>Now, what fire and electricity and magnetism do in
iron and steel, the Holy Spirit does in the spirits
of men who believe on Jesus, follow Him wholly, and
trust Him intelligently. He dwells in them, and inspires
them, till they are all alive with the very life of
God.</p>
<p>The transformation wrought in men by the baptism with
the Holy Ghost, and the power that fills them, are
amazing beyond measure. The Holy Spirit gives—­</p>
<p>1. <i>Power over the world</i>. They become</p>
<p> “Dead to the world and all its toys,<br>
Its idle pomps and fading joys.”</p>
<p>The world masters and enslaves people who have not
the Holy Spirit. To one man it offers money, and he
falls down and worships; sells his conscience and
character for gold. To another it offers power, and
he falls down and worships and sacrifices his principles
and sears his conscience for power. To another it
offers pleasure; to another learning; to another fame,
and they fall down and worship, and sell themselves
for these things. But the man filled with the Holy
Ghost is free. He can turn from these things without
a pang, as he would from pebbles; or, he can take
them and use them as his servants for the glory of
God and the good of men.</p>
<p>What did Peter and James and John care for the great
places in the kingdoms of this world after they were
filled with the Holy Ghost? They would not have exchanged
places with Herod the king or with Cæsar himself.
For the gratification of any personal ambition these
things were no more attractive to them now than the
lordship over a tribe of ants on their tiny hill. They
were now kings and priests unto God, and theirs was
an everlasting kingdom, and its glory exceeds the
glory of the kingdoms of this world as the splendour
of the sun exceeds that of the glow-worm.</p>
<p>The head of some great business enterprises was making
many thousands of dollars every year; but when the
Holy Spirit filled him money lost its power over him.
He still retained his position, and made vast sums;
but, as a steward of the Lord, he poured it into God’s
work, and has been doing so for more than thirty years.</p>
<p>The disciples in Jerusalem after Pentecost held all
their possessions in common, so completely were they
freed from the power and love of money.</p>
<p>A rising young lawyer got filled with the Spirit,
and the next day said to his client: “I cannot
plead your case. I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus”;
and he became one of the mightiest preachers the world
has ever seen.</p>
<p>A popular lad got the fiery baptism, and went to his
baseball team, and said: “Boys, you swear, and
I am now a Christian, and I cannot play with you any
more”; and God made him the wonder of all his
old friends, and a happy winner of souls.</p>
<p>A fashionable woman got the baptism, and God gave
her power to break away from her worldly set and surroundings,
live wholly for Him, and gave her an influence that
girdled the globe.</p>
<p>Paul said: “The world is crucified unto me,
and I unto the world.” Men could whip, and stone,
and imprison his body, and cut off his head, but his
soul was free. It was enslaved and driven by no unholy
or inordinate ambition, by no lust for gold, by no
desire for power or fame, by no fear of man, by no
shame of worldly censure or adverse public opinion.
He had power over the world, and this same power is
the birthright of every converted man, and the present
possession of every one who is wholly sanctified by
the baptism with the Holy Ghost.</p>
<p>2. <i>Power over the flesh</i>. The body which God
intended for a “house beautiful” for the
soul, and a temple holy unto Himself, is often reduced
to a sty, where the imprisoned soul wallows in lusts
and passions, and degrades itself below the level of
beasts. But this baptism gives a man power over his
body.</p>
<p>God has given to man such desires and passions as
are necessary to secure his continued existence, and
not one is in itself evil, but good and only good;
and when controlled and used, but not abused, will
help to develop and maintain the purest and highest
manhood. The appetites for food and drink are necessary
to life. Another desire is intended to secure the
continuance of the human race. And so all the desires
and appetites of the body have useful ends, and were
given to us in love by our Heavenly Father for high
and essential purposes, and are necessary to us as
human beings.</p>
<p>But the soul, cut off from fellowship with God, by
sin, seeks satisfaction in sensual excesses, and the
unlawful gratification of these appetites, and so
sinks to depths of degradation to which no beast ever
falls. Thus man becomes a slave; swollen and raging
passion takes the place of innocent appetites and desires.</p>
<p>Now, when the Holy Spirit enters the heart and sanctifies
the soul, He does not destroy these desires, but He
purifies and regulates them. He reinforces the soul
with the fear and love of God, and gives it power,
complete power, over the fleshly appetites. He restores
it to its full fellowship with God and its kingship
over the body.</p>
<p>But while these appetites and desires are not in themselves
sinful, but are necessary for our welfare and our complete
manhood, and while their diseased and abnormal power
is cured when we are sanctified, they are still avenues
through which we may be tempted. Therefore, they must
be guarded with care and ruled in wisdom. Many people
stumble at and reject the doctrine of entire sanctification,
because they do not understand these things. They
mistake that which is natural and essential to a human
being for the diseased and abnormal propensity caused
by sin, and so miss the blessed truth of full salvation.</p>
<p>I knew a doctor, who had used tobacco for over sixty
years, delivered from the abnormal appetite instantly
through sanctification of the Spirit. I knew an old
man, who had been a drunkard for over fifty years,
similarly delivered. I knew a young man, the slave
of a vicious habit of the flesh, who was set free
at once by the fiery baptism. The electric current
cannot transform the dead wire into a live one quicker
than the Holy Spirit can flood a soul with light and
love, destroy the carnal mind, and fill a man with
power over all sin.</p>
<p>3. <i>Power over the Devil</i>. The indwelling presence
of the Holy Spirit destroys all doubt as to the personality
of the Devil. He is discerned, and his malice is felt
and known as never before.</p>
<p>In the dark a man may be so skilfully attacked that
his enemy is not discovered, but not in the day. Many
people in these days deny that there is any Devil,
only evil; but they are in the dark, so much in the
dark that they not only say that there is no Devil,
but that there is no personal God, only good. But the
day comes with the Holy Spirit’s entrance, and
then God is intimately known and the Devil is discovered.
And as he assailed Jesus after His baptism with the
Spirit, so he does to-day all who receive the Holy
Ghost. He comes as an angel of light to deceive, and
as a roaring lion to devour and overcome with fear;
but the soul filled with the Spirit outwits the Devil,
and, clad in the whole armour of God, overcomes the
old enemy.</p>
<p>“Power over all the power of the enemy”
is God’s purpose for all His children. Power
to do the will of God patiently and effectively, with
naturalness and ease, or to suffer the will of God
with patience and good cheer, comes with this blessed
baptism. It is power for service or sacrifice, according
to God’s will. Have you this power? If not,
it is for you. Yield yourself fully to Christ just
now, and if you ask in faith you shall receive.</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<h1>VII.</h1>
<h2>Trying the Spirits</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>Those who have not the Holy Spirit, or who do not
heed Him, fall easily and naturally into formalism,
substituting lifeless ceremonies, sacraments, genuflections,
and ritualistic performances for the free, glad, living
worship inspired by the indwelling Spirit. They sing,
but not from the heart. They say their prayers, but
they do not really pray. “I prayed last night,
mother,” said a child. “Why, my child,
you pray every night!” replied the mother. “No,”
said the child, “I only said prayers, but last
night I really prayed.” And his face shone.
He had opened his heart to the Holy Spirit, and had
at last really talked with God and worshipped.</p>
<p>But those who receive the Holy Spirit may fall into
fanaticism, unless they follow the command of John
to “try the spirits, whether they are of God.”</p>
<p>We are commanded to “despise not prophesyings,”
but at the same time we are commanded to “prove
all things.” “Many false prophets are
gone out into the world,” and, if possible, will
lead us astray. So we must beware. As some one has
written, we must “Believe not every spirit;
regard not, trust not, follow not, every pretender
to the Spirit of God, or every professor of vision,
or inspiration, or revelation from God.”</p>
<p>The higher and more intense the life, the more carefully
must it be guarded, lest it be endangered and go astray.
It is so in the natural world, and likewise in the
spiritual world.</p>
<p>When Satan can no longer rock people to sleep with
religious lullabys, or satisfy them with the lifeless
form, then he comes as an angel of light, probably
in the person of some professor or teacher of religion,
and seeks to usurp the place of the Holy Spirit; but
instead of leading “into all truth,” he
leads the unwary soul into deadly error; instead of
directing him on to the highway of holiness, and into
the path of perfect peace, where no ravenous beast
ever comes, he leads him into a wilderness where the
soul, stripped of its beautiful garments of salvation,
is robbed and wounded and left to die, if some good
Samaritan, with patient pity and Christlike love,
come not that way.</p>
<p>1. When the Holy Spirit comes in His fullness, He
strips men of their self-righteousness and pride and
conceit. They see themselves as the chief of sinners,
and realise that only through the stripes of Jesus
are they healed; and ever after, as they live in the
Spirit, their boast is in Him and their glory is in
the cross. Remembering the hole of the pit from which
they were digged, they are filled with tender pity
for all who are out of the way; and, while they do
not excuse or belittle sin, yet they are slow to believe
evil, and their judgments are full of charity.</p>
<p> “Judge not; the workings of his
brain<br>
And of his heart thou canst not
see:<br>
What looks to thy dim eyes a stain,<br>
In God’s pure light may only
be<br>
A scar, brought from some well-won field,<br>
Where thou wouldst only faint and yield.”</p>
<p>But the man who has been thus snared by Satan forgets
his own past miserable state, and boasts of his righteousness,
and thanks God that he was never as other men, and
he begins to beat his fellow-servants with heavy denunciations,
and thrust them through with sharp criticisms, and
pelt them with hard words. He ceases to pity, and
begins to condemn; he no longer warns and entreats
men in tender love, but is quick to believe evil, and
swift to pass judgment, not only upon their actions,
but upon their motives as well.</p>
<p>True charity has no fellowship with deeds of darkness.
It never calls evil good, it does not wink at iniquity,
but it is as far removed from this sharp, condemning
spirit as light is from darkness, as honey is from
vinegar. It is quick to condemn sin, but is full of
saving, long-suffering compassion for the sinner.</p>
<p>2. A humble, teachable mind marks those in whom the
Holy Spirit dwells. They esteem very highly in love
those who are over them in the Lord, and are glad
to be admonished by them. They submit themselves one
to the other in the fear of the Lord, welcome instruction
and correction, and esteem “open rebuke better
than secret love” (Proverbs xxvii. 5). They
believe that the Lord has yet many things to say unto
them, and they are willing and glad for Him to say
them by whom He will, but especially by their leaders
and their brethren. While they do not fawn and cringe
before men, nor believe everything that is said to
them, without proving it by the word and Spirit of
God, they believe that God “gave some, apostles;
and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some,
pastors and teachers; for the perfecting of the saints,
for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the
body of Christ”; and, like Cornelius, they are
ready to hear these appointed ministers, and receive
the word of the Lord from them.</p>
<p>But Satan seeks to destroy all this lowliness of spirit
and humbleness of mind. Those in whom his deadly work
has begun are “wiser in their own conceit than
seven men that can render a reason.” They are
wiser than all their teachers, and no man can instruct
them. One of these deluded souls, who had previously
been marked by modesty and humility, declared of certain
of God’s chosen leaders whose spiritual knowledge
and wisdom were everywhere recognised, that “the
whole of them knew no more about the Holy Ghost than
an old goose.” Paul, Luther, and Wesley were
much troubled, and their work greatly hurt, by some
of these misguided souls, and every great spiritual
awakening is likely to be marred more or less by such
people; so that we cannot be too much on our guard
against false spirits who would counterfeit the work
and leadings of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>It is this huge conceit that has led some men to announce
themselves as apostles and prophets to whom all men
must listen, or fall under the wrath of God; while
others have declared that they were living in resurrection
bodies and should not die; and yet others have reached
that pitch of fanaticism where they could calmly proclaim
themselves to be the Messiah, or the Holy Ghost in
bodily form. Such people will be quick to deny the
infallibility of the Pope, while they assume their
own infallibility, and denounce all who dispute it.</p>
<p>The Holy Spirit may lead to a holy rivalry in love
and humility and brotherly kindness and self-denial
and good works, but He never leads men into the swelling
conceit of such exclusive knowledge and superior wisdom
that they can no longer be taught by their fellow-men.</p>
<p>3. Again, the man who is filled with the Spirit is
tolerant of those who differ from him in opinion,
in doctrine. He is firm in his own convictions, and
ready at all times with meekness and fear to explain
and defend the doctrines which he holds and is convinced
are according to God’s word, but he does not
condemn and consign to damnation all those who differ
from him. He is glad to believe that men are often
better than their creed, and may be saved in spite
of it; that, like mountains whose bases are bathed
with sunshine and clothed with fruitful fields and
vineyards, while their tops are covered with dark clouds,
so men’s hearts are often fruitful in the graces
of charity, while their heads are yet darkened by
doctrinal error.</p>
<p>Anyway, as “the servant of the Lord,”
he will “not strive; but be gentle unto all
men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing
those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure
will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the
truth; and that they may recover themselves out of
the snare of the Devil” (2 Timothy ii. 24-26).</p>
<p>But when Satan comes as an angel of light he will,
under guise of love for and loyalty to the truth,
introduce the spirit of intolerance. It was this spirit
that crucified Jesus; that burned Huss and Cranmer
at the stake; that strangled Savonarola; that inspired
the massacre of St. Bartholomew and the horrors of
the Inquisition; and it is the same spirit, in a milder
but possibly more subtle form, that blinds the eyes
of many professing Christians to any good in those
who differ from them in doctrine, forms of worship
or methods of government. They murder love to protect
what they often blindly call truth. What is truth without
love? A dead thing, an encumbrance, the letter that
killeth!</p>
<p>The body is necessary to our life in this world, but
life can exist in a deformed and even mutilated body;
and such a body with life in it is better than the
most perfect body that is only a corpse. So, while
truth is most precious, and sound doctrine to be esteemed
more than silver and gold, yet love can exist where
truth is not held in its most perfect and complete
forms, and love is the one thing needful.</p>
<p> “The love of God is broader<br>
Than the measure of man’s
mind:<br>
And the heart of the Eternal<br>
Is most wonderfully kind.”</p>
<p>4. The Holy Ghost begets a spirit of unity among Christians.
People who have been sitting behind their sectarian
fences in self-complacent ease, or proud indifference,
or proselytising zeal, or grim defiance, are suddenly
lifted above the fence, and find sweet fellowship
with each other, when He comes into their hearts.</p>
<p>They delight in each other’s society; they each
esteem others better than themselves, and in honour
they prefer one another before themselves. They fulfil
the Psalmist’s ideal: “Behold, how good
and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together
in unity.” Here is a picture of the unity of
Christians in the beginning in Jerusalem: “And
they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and they
spake the word of God with boldness. And the multitude
of them that believed were of one heart and of one
soul; neither said any of them that aught of the things
which he possessed was his own; but they had all things
common.” What an ideal is this! And since it
has been attained once, it can be attained again and
retained, but only by the indwelling of the Holy Ghost.
It was for this that Jesus poured out His heart in
His great intercessory prayer, recorded in John xvii.,
just before His arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.
He says, “I pray for them.... Neither pray I
for these alone, but for them also which shall believe
on Me through their word; that they all may be one.”
And what was the standard of unity to which He would
have us come? Listen!</p>
<p>“As Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee;
that they also may be one in Us; that the world may
believe that Thou hast sent Me.” Such unity
has a wondrous power to compel the belief of worldly
men. “And the glory which Thou gavest Me I have
given them; that they may be one, even as We are one;
I in them, and Thou in Me, that they may be perfect
in one; and that the world may <i>know</i> that Thou
hast sent Me, and hast loved them, as Thou hast loved
Me.” Wondrous unity! Wondrous love!</p>
<p>It is for this His blessed heart eternally yearns,
and it is for this that the Holy Spirit works in the
hearts of those who receive Him. But Satan ever seeks
to destroy this holy love and divine unity. When he
comes, he arouses suspicions, he stirs up strife,
he quenches the spirit of intercessory prayer, he
engenders backbitings, and causes separations.</p>
<p>After enumerating various Christian graces, and urging
the Colossians to put them on, Paul adds: “And
above all these things, put on charity,” or
love, “which is the bond of perfectness”
(Col. iii. 14). These graces were garments, and love
was the girdle which bound and held them together;
and so love is the bond that holds true Christians
together.</p>
<p>Divine love is the great test by which we are to try
ourselves and all teachers and spirits.</p>
<p>Love is not puffed up. Love is not bigoted. Love is
not intolerant. Love is not schismatic. Love is loyal
to Jesus and to all His people. If we have this love
shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost, we shall
discern the voice of our Good Shepherd, and we shall
not be deceived by the voice of the stranger; and so
we shall be saved from both formalism and fanaticism.</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter8"></a>
<h1>VIII.</h1>
<h2>Guidance</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>It is the work of the Holy Spirit to guide the people
of God through the uncertainties and dangers and duties
of this life to their home in Heaven. When He led
the children of Israel out of Egypt, by the hand of
Moses, He guided them through the waste, mountainous
wilderness, in a pillar of cloud by day and of fire
by night, thus assuring their comfort and safety. And
this was but a type of His perpetual spiritual guidance
of His people.</p>
<p>“But how may I certainly know what God wants
of me?” is sure to become the earnest and, oftentimes,
the agonising cry of every humble and devoutly zealous
young Christian. “How may I know the guidance
of the Holy Spirit?” is asked again and again.</p>
<p>1. It is well for us to get it fixed in our minds
that we need to be guided always by Him. A ship was
wrecked on a rocky coast far out of the course that
the captain thought he was taking. On examination,
it was found that the compass had been slightly deflected
by a bit of metal that had lodged in the box.</p>
<p>But the voyage of life on which we each one sail is
beset by as many dangers as the ship at sea, and how
shall we surely steer our course to our heavenly harbour
without Divine guidance? There is a wellnigh infinite
number of influences to deflect us from the safe and
certain course. We start out in the morning, and we
know not what person we may meet, what paragraph we
may read, what word may be spoken, what letter we
may receive, what subtle temptation may assail or
allure us, what immediate decisions we may have to
make during the day, that may turn us almost imperceptibly,
but none the less surely, from the right way. We need
the guidance of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>2. We not only need Divine guidance, but we may have
it. God’s word assures us of this. Oh! how my
heart was comforted and assured one morning by these
words: “And the Lord shall guide thee continually”
(Isaiah lviii. 11). Not occasionally, not spasmodically,
but “continually.” Hallelujah! The Psalmist
says: “This God is our God for ever and ever:
He will be our Guide even unto death” (Psalm
xlviii. 14). Again, he says: “The meek will
He guide in judgment: and the meek will He teach His
way” (Psalm xxv. 9). And again, “I will
instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou
shalt go: I will guide thee with Mine eye” (Psalm
xxxii. 8). And again, “Thou shalt guide me with
Thy counsel” (Psalm Ixxiii. 24). Jesus said
of the Holy Spirit: “Howbeit when He, the Spirit
of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth”
(John xvi. 13). And Paul wrote: “As many as are
led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God”
(Romans viii. 14).</p>
<p>These Scriptures establish the fact that the children
of God may be guided always by the Spirit of God.</p>
<p> “Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,<br>
Pilgrim through this barren land!<br>
I am weak, but Thou art mighty:<br>
Hold me with Thy powerful hand.”</p>
<p>3. How does God guide us?</p>
<p>Paul says: “We walk by faith, not by sight,”
and, “The just shall live by faith,” so
we may conclude:—­</p>
<p>(a) That the guidance of the Holy Spirit is such as
still to demand the exercise of faith. God never leads
us in such a way as to do away with the necessity
of faith. When God warned Noah, we read that it was
by faith that Noah was led to build the ark. When
God told Abraham to go to a land which He would show
him, it was by faith that Abraham went (Hebrews xi.
7, 8). If we believe, we shall surely be guided; but
if we do not believe, we shall be left to ourselves.
Without faith it is impossible to please God, or to
follow where He leads. Again, the Psalmist says, “The
meek will He guide in judgment,” from which
we gather:—­</p>
<p>(b) That the Spirit guides us in such manner as to
demand the exercise of our best judgment. He enlightens
our understanding and directs our judgment by sound
reason and sense.</p>
<p>I knew a man who was eager to obey God, and to be
led by the Spirit, but who had the mistaken idea that
the Holy Spirit sets aside human judgment and common
sense, and speaks directly upon the most minute and
commonplace matters. He wanted the Holy Spirit to
direct him just how much to eat at each meal, and he
has been known to take food out of his mouth at what
he supposed to be the Holy Spirit’s notification
that he had eaten enough, and that if he swallowed
that mouthful, it would be in violation of the leadings
of the Spirit.</p>
<p>No doubt, the Spirit will help an honest man to arrive
at a safe judgment even in matters of this kind, but
it will doubtless be through the use of his sanctified
common sense. Otherwise, he is reduced to a state
of mental infancy, and kept in intellectual swaddling
clothes. He will guide us in judgment; but it is only
as we resolutely, and in the best light we have, exercise
judgment.</p>
<p>John Wesley said that God usually guided him by presenting
reasons to his mind for any given course of action.</p>
<p>(c) The Psalmist says, “Thou shalt guide me
with Thy counsel,” and “I will instruct
thee and teach thee in the way that thou shalt go.”
Now, counsel, instruction, and teaching not only imply
effort upon the part of the teacher, but also study
and close attention on the part of the one being taught.
So this guidance of the Holy Spirit is such as will
require us to attentively listen, diligently study,
and patiently learn the lessons He would teach us.
And so we see that the Holy Spirit does not set aside
our powers and faculties, but seeks to awaken and
stir them into full activity, and develop them into
well-rounded perfection, and thus make them channels
through which He can intelligently influence and direct
us.</p>
<p>What He seeks to do is to illuminate our whole spiritual
being, as the sun illuminates our physical being,
and bring us into such union and sympathy, such oneness
of thought, desire, affection, and purpose with God,
that we shall, by a kind of spiritual instinct, know
at all times the mind of God concerning us, and never
be in doubt about His will.</p>
<p>4. The Holy Spirit guides us—­</p>
<p>(a) By opening up to our minds the deep, sanctifying
truths of the Bible, and especially by revealing to
us the character and spirit of Jesus and His Apostles,
and leading us to follow in their footsteps—­the
footsteps of their faith and love and unselfish devotion
to God and man, even unto the laying down of their
lives.</p>
<p>(b) By the circumstances and surroundings of our daily
life.</p>
<p>(c) By the counsel of others, especially of devout,
and wise, and experienced men and women of God.</p>
<p>(d) By deep inward conviction, which increases as
we wait upon Him in prayer and readiness to obey.
It is by this sovereign conviction that men are called
to preach, to go to foreign fields as missionaries,
to devote their time, talents, money, and lives to
God’s work for the bodies and souls of men.</p>
<p>5. Why do people seek for guidance and not find it?</p>
<p>(a) Because they do not diligently study God’s
word, and seek to be filled with its truths and principles.
They neglect the cultivation of their minds and hearts
in the school of Christ, and so miss Divine guidance.
One of the mightiest men of God now living used to
carry his Bible with him into the coal mine when only
a boy, and spent his spare time filling his mind and
heart with its heavenly truths, and so prepared himself
to be divinely led in mighty labours for God.</p>
<p>(b) They do not humbly accept the daily providences,
the circumstances, and conditions of their everyday
life as a part of God’s present plan for them;
as His school in which He would train them for greater
things; as His vineyard in which He would have them
diligently labour.</p>
<p>A young woman imagined she was called to devote herself
entirely to saving souls; but under the searching
training through which she had to pass saw her selfishness,
and she said she would have to return home, and live
a holy life there, and seek to get her family saved—­something
which she had utterly neglected—­before
she could go into the work. If we are not faithful
at home, or in the shop, or mill, or store where we
work, we shall miss God’s way for us.</p>
<p>(c) Because they are not teachable, and are unwilling
to receive instruction from other Christians. They
are not humble-minded.</p>
<p>(d) Because they do not wait on God, and listen and
heed the inner leadings of the Holy Spirit. They are
self-willed; they want their own way. Some one has
said, “That which is often asked of God is not
so much His will and way, as His approval of our way.”
And another has said: “God’s guidance is
plain, when we are true.” If we promptly and
gladly obey, we shall not miss the way. Paul said
of himself, “I was not disobedient to the heavenly
vision.” He obeyed God at all costs, and so the
Holy Spirit could guide him.</p>
<p>(e) Because of fear and unbelief. It was this fearfulness
of unbelief that caused the Israelites to turn back,
and not go into Canaan when Caleb and Joshua assured
them that God would help them to possess the land.
They lost sight of God, and feared the giants and
walled cities, and so missed God’s way for them
and perished in the wilderness.</p>
<p>(f) Because they do not take everything promptly and
confidently to God in prayer.</p>
<p>Paul tells us to be “instant in prayer”;
and I am persuaded that it is slowness and delay to
pray, and sloth and sleepiness in prayer, that rob
God’s children of the glad assurance of His
guidance in all things.</p>
<p>(g) Because of impatience and haste. Some of God’s
plans for us unfold slowly, and we must patiently
and calmly wait on Him in faith and faithfulness,
assured that in due time He will make plain His way
for us, if our faith fail not. It is never God’s
will that we should get into a headlong hurry; but
that, with patient steadfastness, we should learn
to stand still when the pillar of cloud and fire does
not move, and that with loving confidence and glad
promptness we should strike our tents and march forward
when He leads.</p>
<p> “When we cannot see our way,<br>
Let us trust and still obey;<br>
He who bids us forward go,<br>
Cannot fail the way to show.<br>
Though the sea be deep and wide,<br>
Though a passage seem denied;<br>
Fearless, let us still proceed,<br>
Since the Lord vouchsafes to lead.”</p>
<p>Finally, we may rest assured that the Holy Spirit
never leads His people to do anything that is wrong,
or that is contrary to the will of God as revealed
in the Bible. He never leads anyone to be impolite
and discourteous. “Be courteous” is a Divine
command. He would have us respect the minor graces
of gentle, kindly manners, as well as the great laws
of holiness and righteousness.</p>
<p>He may sometimes lead us in ways that are hard for
flesh and blood, and that bring to us sorrow and loss
in this life. He led Jesus into the wilderness to
be sore tried by the Devil, and to Pilate’s
judgment hall, and to the cross. He led Paul in ways
that meant imprisonment, stonings, whippings, hunger
and cold, and bitter persecution and death. But He
upheld Paul until he cried out: “I take pleasure
in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in
persecutions, in distresses for Christ’s sake.”
“Yea,” said he, “I glory in my infirmities,
that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
Hallelujah! Oh, to be thus led by our Heavenly Guide!</p>
<p> “He leadeth me! Oh, blessed
thought!<br>
Oh, words with heavenly comfort
fraught!<br>
Whate’er I do, where’er
I be,<br>
Still ’tis God’s
hand that leadeth me.</p>
<p> “Sometimes ’mid scenes
of deepest gloom,<br>
Sometimes where Eden’s
bowers bloom,<br>
By waters still, o’er
troubled sea,<br>
Still ’tis God’s
hand that leadeth me.</p>
<p> “Lord, I will clasp Thy hand
in mine,<br>
Nor ever murmur nor repine,<br>
Content, whatever lot I see,<br>
Since ’tis my God that
leadeth me.</p>
<p> “And when my task on earth
is done,<br>
When by Thy grace the victory’s
won,<br>
E’en death’s cold
wave I will not flee,<br>
Since God through Jordan leadeth
me.”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter9"></a>
<h1>IX.</h1>
<h2>The Meek and the Lowly Heart</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>I know a man whose daily prayer for years was that
he might be meek and lowly in heart as was his Master.
“Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me,”
said Jesus; “for I am meek and lowly in heart.”</p>
<p>How lowly Jesus was! He was the Lord of life and glory.
He made the worlds, and upholds them by His word of
power (John i., Hebrews i.). But He humbled Himself,
and became man, and was born of the Virgin in a manger
among the cattle. He lived among the common people,
and worked at the carpenter’s bench. And then,
anointed with the Holy Spirit, He went about doing
good, preaching the Gospel to the poor, and ministering
to the manifold needs of the sick and sinful and sorrowing.
He touched the lepers; He was the Friend of publicans
and sinners. His whole life was a ministry of mercy
to those who most needed Him. He humbled Himself to
our low estate. He was a King who came “lowly,
and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt, the foal of
an ass” (Zech. ix. 9). He was a King, but His
crown was of thorns, and a cross was His throne.</p>
<p>What a picture Paul gives us of the mind and heart
of Jesus! He exhorts the Philippians, saying, “Let
nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in
lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than
themselves”; and then he adds, “Let this
mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who,
being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to
be equal with God; but made Himself of no reputation,
and took upon Him the form of a servant, and was made
in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion
as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto
death, even the death of the cross.”</p>
<p>Now, when the Holy Spirit finds His way into the heart
of a man, the Spirit of Jesus has come to that man,
and leads him to the same meekness of heart and lowly
service that were seen in the Master.</p>
<p>Ambition for place and power and money and fame vanishes,
and in its place is a consuming desire to be good
and do good, to accomplish in full the blessed, the
beneficent will of God.</p>
<p>Some time ago I met a woman who, as a trained nurse
in Paris, nursing rich, English-speaking foreigners,
received pay that in a few years would have made her
independently wealthy; but the spirit of Jesus came
into her heart, and she is now nursing the poor, and
giving her life to them, and doing for them service
the most loathsome and exacting, and doing it with
a smiling face, for her food and clothes.</p>
<p>Some able men in one of our largest American cities
lost their spiritual balance, cut themselves loose
from all other Christians, and made for a time quite
a religious stir among many good people. They were
very clear and powerful in their presentation of certain
phases of truth, but they were also very strong, if
not bitter, in their denunciations of all existing
religious organisations. They attacked the churches
and The Salvation Army, pointing out what they considered
wrong so skilfully, and with such professions of sanctity,
that many people were made most dissatisfied with the
churches and with The Army.</p>
<p>An Army Captain listened to them, and was greatly
moved by their fervour, their burning appeals, their
religious ecstasy, and their denunciations of the
lukewarmness of other Christians, including The Army.
She began to wonder if after all they were not right,
and whether or not the Holy Spirit was amongst us.
Her heart was full of distress, and she cried to God.
And then the vision of our Slum Officers rose before
her eyes. She saw their devotion, their sacrifice,
their lowly, hidden service, year after year, among
the poor and ignorant and vicious, and she said to
herself, “Is not this the Spirit of Jesus? Would
these men, who denounce us so, be willing to forgo
their religious ecstasies and spend their lives in
such lowly, unheralded service?” And the mists
that had begun to blind her eyes were swept away, and
she saw Jesus still amongst us going about doing good
in the person of our Slum Officers and of all who
for His name’s sake sacrifice their time and
money and strength to bless and save their fellow-men.</p>
<p>You who have visions of glory and rapturous delight,
and so count yourselves filled with the Spirit, do
these visions lead you to virtue and to lowly, loving
service? If not, take heed to yourselves, lest, exalted
like Capernaum to Heaven, you are at last cast down
to Hell. Thank God for the mounts of transfiguration
where we behold His glory! but down below in the valley
are children possessed of devils, and to them He would
have us go with the glory of the mount on our faces,
and lowly love and vigorous faith in our hearts, and
clean hands ready for any service. He would have us
give ourselves to them; and if we love Him, if we
follow Him, if we are truly filled with the Holy Spirit,
we will.</p>
<p>A Captain used to slip out of bed early in the morning
to pray, and then black his own and his Lieutenant’s
boots, and God mightily blessed him. Recently I saw
him, now a Commissioner, with thousands of Officers
and Soldiers under his command, at an outing in the
woods by the lake shore, looking after poor and forgotten
Soldiers, and giving them food with his own hand. Like
the Lord, his eyes seemed to be in every place beholding
opportunities to do good, and his feet and hands always
followed his eyes; and this is the fruit of the indwelling
Holy Spirit.</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter10"></a>
<h1>X.</h1>
<h2>Hope</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>Are you ever cast down and depressed in spirit? Listen
to Paul: “Now, the God of hope fill you with
all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound
in hope, through the power of the Holy Ghost”
(Romans xv. 13). What cheer is in those words! They
ring like the shout of a triumph.</p>
<p>1. God Himself is “the God of hope.” There
is no gloom, no depression, no wasting sickness of
deferred hope in Him. He is a brimming fountain and
ocean of hope eternally, and He is our God. He is
our Hope.</p>
<p>2. Out of His infinite fullness He is to fill us;
not half fill us, but fill us with joy, “all
joy,” hallelujah! “and peace.”</p>
<p>3. And this is not by some condition or means that
is so high and difficult that we cannot perform our
part, but it is simply “in believing “—­something
which the little child or the aged philosopher, the
poor man and the rich man, the ignorant and the learned
can do. And the result will be:—­</p>
<p>4. Abounding “hope through the power of the
Holy Ghost.” And what power is that? If it is
physical power, then the power of a million Niagaras
and flowing oceans and rushing worlds is as nothing
compared to it. If it is mental power, then the power
of Plato and Bacon and Milton and Shakespeare and
Newton is as the light of a fire-fly to the sun when
compared to it. If it is spiritual power, then there
is nothing with which it can be compared. But suppose
it is all three in one, infinite and eternal! This
is the power, throbbing with love and mercy, to which
we are to bring our little hearts by living faith,
and God will fill us with joy and peace and hope by
the incoming of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>God’s people are a hopeful people. They hope
in God, with whom there is no change, no weakness,
no decay. In the darkest night and the fiercest storm
they still hope in Him, though it may be feebly. But
He would have His people “abound in hope”
so that they should always be buoyant, triumphant.</p>
<p>But how can this be in a world such as this? We are
surrounded by awful, mysterious, and merciless forces,
that at any moment may overwhelm us. The fire may
burn us, the water may drown us, the hurricane may
sweep us away, friends may desert us, foes may master
us. There is the depression that comes from failing
health, from poverty, from overwork and sleepless nights
and constant care, from thwarted plans, disappointed
ambitions, slighted love, and base ingratitude. Old
age comes on with its grey hairs, failing strength,
dimness of sight, dullness of hearing, tottering step,
shortness of breath, and general weakness and decay.
The friends of youth die, and a new, strange, pushing
generation that knows not the old man, comes elbowing
him aside and taking his place. Under some blessed
outpouring of the Spirit the work of God revives,
vile sinners are saved, Zion puts on her beautiful
garments, reforms of all kind advance, the desert
blossoms as the rose, the waste place becomes a fruitful
field, and the millennium seems just at hand; and then
the spiritual tide recedes, the forces of evil are
emboldened, they mass themselves and again sweep over
the heritage of the Lord, leaving it waste and desolate,
and the battle must be fought over again.</p>
<p>How can one be always hopeful, always abounding in
hope, in such a world? Well, hallelujah! it is possible
“through the power of the Holy Ghost,”
but only through His power; and this power will not
fail so long as we fix our eyes on eternal things and
believe.</p>
<p>The Holy Spirit, dwelling within, turns our eyes from
that which is temporal to that which is eternal; from
the trial itself to God’s purpose in the trial;
from the present pain to the precious promise.</p>
<p>I am now writing in a little city made rich by vast
potteries. If the dull, heavy clay on the potter’s
wheel and in the fiery oven could think and speak,
it would doubtless cry out against the fierce agony;
but if it could foresee the purpose of the potter,
and the thing of use and beauty he meant to make it,
it would nestle low under his hand and rejoice in
hope.</p>
<p>We are clay in the hand of the Divine Potter, but
we can think and speak, and in some measure understand
His high purpose in us. It is the work of the Holy
Spirit to make us understand. And if we will not be
dull and senseless and unbelieving, He will illuminate
us and fill us with peaceful, joyous hope.</p>
<p>1. He would reveal to us that our Heavenly Potter
has Himself been on the wheel and in the fiery furnace,
learning obedience and being fashioned into “the
Captain of our salvation” by the things which
He suffered. When we are tempted and tried, and tempest-tossed,
He raises our hope by showing us Jesus suffering and
sympathising with us, tempted in all points as we are,
and so able and wise and willing to help us in our
struggle and conflict (Hebrews ii. 9-18). He assures
us that Jesus, into whose hands is committed all power
in Heaven and earth, is our elder Brother, “touched
with the feeling of our infirmities” (Hebrews
iv. 15), and He encourages us to rest in Him and not
be afraid; and so we abound in hope, through His power
as we believe.</p>
<p>2. He reveals to us the eternal purpose of God in
our trials and difficulties. Listen to Paul: “All
things work together for good to them that love God.”
“We know <i>this</i>,” says Paul (Romans
viii. 28). But how can this be? Ah! there is where
faith must be exercised. It is “in believing”
that we “abound in hope through the power of
the Holy Ghost.”</p>
<p>God’s wisdom and ability to make all things
work together for our good are not to be measured
by our understanding, but to be firmly held by our
faith. My child is in serious difficulty and does
not know how to help himself; but I say, “Leave
it to me.” He may not understand how I am to
help him, but he trusts me, and rejoices in hope.
We are God’s dear children, and He knows how
to help us, and make all things work together for
our good, if we will only commit ourselves to Him
in faith.</p>
<p> “Thou art as much His care as if
beside<br>
Nor man nor angel lived in Heaven
or earth;<br>
Thus sunbeams pour alike their glorious
tide,<br>
To light up worlds, or wake an insect’s
mirth.”</p>
<p>Again, afflictions overtake us, and now the Holy Spirit
encourages our hope and makes it to abound by such
promises as these: “Our light affliction, which
is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding
and eternal weight of glory; while we look not at
the things which are seen, but at the things which
are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal,
but the things which are not seen are eternal”
(2 Cor. iv. 17, 18). But such a promise as that only
mocks us if we do not believe. “In all their
affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of His
presence saved them: in His love and in His pity He
redeemed them; and He bare them, and He carried them
all the days of old” (Isaiah lxiii. 9). And
He is just the same to-day. To some He says: “I
have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction”
(Isaiah xlviii 10), and nestling down into His will
and “believing,” they “abound in
hope through the power of the Holy Ghost.”</p>
<p>He turns our eyes back upon Job in his loss and pain;
upon Joseph sold into Egyptian slavery; Daniel in
the lions’ den; the three Hebrews in the burning
fiery furnace, and Paul in prison and shipwreck and
manifold perils; and, showing us their steadfastness
and their final triumph, He prompts us to hope in God.</p>
<p>When weakness of body overtakes us, He encourages
us with such assurances as these: “My flesh
and my heart faileth; but God is the strength of my
heart, and my portion for ever” (Psalm lxxiii.
26), and the words of Paul: “Though our outward
man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day”
(2 Cor. iv. 16).</p>
<p>When old age comes creeping on apace, He has promised
to meet the need that our hope fail not. Listen to
David! He prays: “Cast me not off in the time
of old age; forsake me not when my strength faileth....
Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake
me not; until I have showed Thy strength unto this
generation, and Thy power to every one that is to
come” (Psalm lxxi. 9, 18). And through Isaiah
the Lord replies: “Even to your old age I am
He; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have
made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will
deliver you” (Isaiah xlvi. 4). And David cries
out, “The righteous shall flourish like the
palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. Those
that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish
in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth
fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing,
to show that the Lord is upright” (Psalm xcii.
12-15).</p>
<p>These are sample promises of which the Bible is full,
and which have been adapted by infinite wisdom and
love to meet us at every point of doubt and fear and
need, that, in believing them, we may have a steadfast
and glad hope in God. He is pledged to help us. He
says: “Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be
not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen
thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee
with the right hand of My righteousness” (Isaiah
xli. 10).</p>
<p>When all God’s waves and billows seemed to sweep
over David, and his soul was bowed within him, three
times he cried out: “Why art thou cast down,
O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? Hope
thou in God: for I shall yet praise Him for the help
of His countenance” (Psalm xlii. 5). And Jeremiah,
remembering the wormwood and the gall, and the deep
mire of the dungeon into which they had plunged him,
and from which he had scarcely been delivered, said:
“It is good that a man should both hope and
quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord” (Lam.
iii. 26).</p>
<p>When the Holy Spirit is come, He brings to remembrance
these precious promises, and makes them living words;
and, if we believe, the whole heaven of our soul shall
be lighted up with abounding hope. Hallelujah! It
is only through ignorance of God’s promises,
or through weak and wavering faith, that hope is dimmed.
Oh, that we may heed the still small voice of the
Heavenly Comforter, and steadfastly, joyously believe!</p>
<p> “My hope is built on nothing less<br>
Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness;<br>
When all around my soul gives way,<br>
He then is all my Hope and Stay.”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter11"></a>
<h1>XI.</h1>
<h2>The Holy Spirit’s Substitute for Gossip and Evil-Speaking</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>The other day I heard a man of God say: “We
cannot bridle the tongues of the people among whom
we live: they will talk”; and by talk he meant
gossip and criticism and fault-finding.</p>
<p> “You never can tell when you send
a word—­<br>
Like an arrow shot from a bow<br>
By an archer blind—­be it cruel
or kind,<br>
Just where it will chance to go.<br>
It may pierce the breast of your dearest
friend,<br>
Tipped with its poison or balm:<br>
To a stranger’s heart in life’s
great mart<br>
It may carry its pain or its calm.”</p>
<p>The wise mother, when she finds her little boy playing
with a sharp knife, or the looking-glass, or some
dainty dish, does not snatch it away with a slap on
his cheek or harsh words, but quietly and gently substitutes
a safer and more interesting toy, and so avoids a
storm.</p>
<p>A sensible father who finds his boy reading a book
of dangerous tendency, will kindly point out its character
and substitute a better book that is equally interesting.</p>
<p>When children want to spend their evenings on the
street, thoughtful and intelligent parents will seek
to make their evenings at home more healthfully attractive.</p>
<p>When a man seeks to rid his mind of evil and hurtful
thoughts, he will find it wise to follow Paul’s
exhortation to the Philippians: “Brethren, whatsoever
things are true,... honest,... just,... pure,... lovely,...
of good report;... if there be any praise, think on
these things” (Phil. iv. 8).</p>
<p>Any man who faithfully, patiently, and persistently
accepts this programme of Paul’s will find his
evil thoughts vanishing away.</p>
<p>And this is the Holy Spirit’s method: He has
a pleasant and safe substitute for gossip and fault-finding
and slander.</p>
<p>Here it is: “Be filled with the Spirit: speaking
to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs,
singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;
giving thanks always for all things unto God and the
Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”
(Eph. v. 18-20). This is certainly a fruit of being
filled with the Spirit.</p>
<p>Many years ago the Lord gave me a blessed revival
in a little village in which nearly every soul in
the place, as well as farmers from the surrounding
country, were converted. One result was that they
now had no time for gossip and doubtful talk about
their neighbours. They were all talking about religion
and rejoicing in the things of the Lord. If they met
each other on the street, or in some shop or store,
they praised the Lord, and encouraged each other to
press on in the heavenly way. If they met a sinner,
they tenderly besought him to be reconciled to God,
to give up his sins, “flee from the wrath to
come,” and start at once for Heaven. If they
met in each other’s houses, they gathered around
the organ or the piano and sang hymns and songs, and
did not part till they had united in prayer.</p>
<p>There was no criticising of their neighbours, no grumbling
and complaining about the weather, no fault-finding
with their lot in life, or their daily surroundings
and circumstances. Their conversation was joyous,
cheerful, and helpful to one another. Nor was it forced
and out of place, but rather it was the natural, spontaneous
outflow of loving, humble, glad hearts filled with
the Spirit, in union with Jesus, and in love and sympathy
with their fellow-men.</p>
<p>And this is, I think, our Heavenly Father’s
ideal of social and spiritual intercourse for His
children on earth. He would not have us separate ourselves
from each other and shut ourselves up in convents
and monasteries in austere asceticism on the one hand,
nor would He have us light and foolish, or fault-finding
and censorious on the other hand, but sociable, cheerful,
and full of tender, considerate love.</p>
<p>On the day of Pentecost, when they were all filled
with the Holy Ghost and a multitude were converted,
we read that “they, continuing daily with one
accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house
to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness
of heart, praising God, and having favour with all
the people” (Acts ii. 46, 47). This is a sample
of the brotherly love and unity which our Heavenly
Father would have throughout the whole earth; but
how the breath of gossip and evil-speaking would have
marred this heavenly fellowship and separated these
“chief friends”!</p>
<p> “Lord! subdue our selfish will;<br>
Each to each our tempers suit<br>
By Thy modulating skill,<br>
Heart to heart, as lute to lute.”</p>
<p>Let no one suppose, however, that the Holy Spirit
accomplishes this heavenly work by some overwhelming
baptism which does away with the need of our co-operation.
He does not override us, but works with us; and we
must intelligently and determinedly work with Him
in this matter.</p>
<p>People often fall into idle and hurtful gossip and
evil-speaking, not so much from ill-will, as from
old habit, as a wagon falls into a rut. Or they drift
into it with the current of conversation about them.
Or they are beguiled into it by a desire to say something,
and be pleasant and entertaining.</p>
<p>But when the Holy Spirit comes, He lifts us out of
the old ruts, and we must follow Him with care lest
we fall into them again, possibly never more to escape.
He gives us life and power to stem the adverse currents
about us, but we must exercise ourselves not to be
swept downward by them. He does not destroy the desire
to please, but He subordinates it to the desire to
help and bless, and we must stir ourselves up to do
this.</p>
<p>When Miss Havergal was asked to sing and play before
a worldly company, she sang a sweet song about Jesus,
and, without displeasing anybody, greatly blessed
the company.</p>
<p>At a breakfast party John Fletcher told his experience
so sweetly and naturally that all hearts were stirred,
the Holy Ghost fell upon the company, and they ended
with a glorious prayer meeting.</p>
<p>William Bramwell used at meals to steadily and persistently
turn the conversation into spiritual channels to the
blessing of all who were present, so that they had
two meals—­one for the body and one for
the soul.</p>
<p>To do this wisely and helpfully requires thought and
prayer and a fixed purpose, and a tender, loving heart
filled with the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>I know a mother who seeks to have a brief season of
prayer and a text of Scripture just before going to
dinner to prepare her heart to guide the conversation
along spiritual highways.</p>
<p>Are you careful and have you victory in this matter,
my comrade? If not, seek it just now in simple, trustful
prayer, and the Lord who loves you will surely answer,
and will be your helper from this time forth. He surely
will. Believe just now, and henceforth “let
your conversation be as becometh the gospel of Christ.”</p>
<p> “I ask Thee, ever blessed Lord,<br>
That I may never speak a word,<br>
Of envy born, or passion stirred.</p>
<p> “First, true to Thee in heart and
mind,<br>
Then always to my neighbour kind,<br>
By Thy good hand to good inclined.</p>
<p> “Oh, save from words that bear a
sting,<br>
That pain to any brother bring:<br>
Inbreathe Thy calm in everything.</p>
<p> “Let love within my heart prevail,<br>
To rule my words when thoughts assail,<br>
That, hid in Thee, I may not fail.</p>
<p> “I know, my Lord, Thy power within<br>
Can save from all the power of sin;<br>
In Thee let every word begin.</p>
<p> “Should I be silent? Keep me still,<br>
Glad waiting on my Master’s will:<br>
Thy message through my lips fulfil.</p>
<p> “Give me Thy words when I should
speak,<br>
For words of Thine are never weak,<br>
But break the proud, but raise the meek.</p>
<p> “Into Thy lips all grace is poured,<br>
Speak Thou through me, Eternal Word,<br>
Of thought, of heart, of lips the Lord.”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter12"></a>
<h1>XII.</h1>
<h2>The Sin Against the Holy Ghost</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>God is love, and the Holy Spirit is ceaselessly striving
to make this love known in our hearts, work out God’s
purposes of love in our lives, and transform and transfigure
our character by love. And so we are solemnly warned
against resisting the Spirit, and almost tearfully
and always tenderly exhorted to “quench not the
Spirit,” and to “grieve not the Holy Spirit
of God, whereby,” says the Apostle, “ye
are sealed unto the day of redemption.”</p>
<p>There is one great sin against which Jesus warned
the Jews, as a sin never to be forgiven in this world
nor in that which is to come. That was blasphemy against
the Holy Ghost.</p>
<p>That there is such a sin, Jesus teaches in Matthew
xii. 31, 32, Mark iii. 28-30, and Luke xii. 10. And
it may be that this is the sin referred to in Hebrews
vi. 4-6; x. 29.</p>
<p>Since many of God’s dear children have fallen
into dreadful distress through fear that they had
committed this sin, it may be helpful for us to study
carefully as to what constitutes it.</p>
<p>Jesus was casting out devils, and Mark tells us that
“the scribes which came down from Jerusalem
said, He hath Beelzebub, and by the prince of the
devils casteth He out devils.” To this Jesus
replied with gracious kindness and searching logic:
“How can Satan cast out Satan? And if a kingdom
be divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
And if a house be divided against itself, it cannot
stand. And if Satan rise up against himself and be
divided, he cannot stand, but hath an end. No man can
enter into a strong man’s house and spoil his
goods, except he will first bind the strong man; and
then he will spoil his house.”</p>
<p>In this quiet reply we see that Jesus does not rail
against them, nor flatly deny their base assertion
that He does His miracles by the power of the Devil,
but shows how logically false must be their statement.
And then, with grave authority, and, I think, with
solemn tenderness in His voice and in His eyes, He
adds, “Verily I say unto you, All sins shall
be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies
wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: but he that
shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never
forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation”;
or, as the Revised Version puts it, “is guilty
of an eternal sin”; and then Mark adds, “because
they said, He hath an unclean spirit” (Mark
iii. 22-30).</p>
<p>Jesus came into the world to reveal God’s truth
and love to men, and to save them, and men are saved
by believing in Him. But how could the men of His
day, who saw Him working at the carpenter’s
bench, and living the life of an ordinary man of humble
toil and daily temptation and trial, believe His stupendous
claim to be the only-begotten Son of God, the Saviour
of the world, and the final Judge of all men? Any
wilful and proud impostor could make such a claim.
But men <i>could</i> not and <i>ought</i> not to believe
such an assertion unless the claim were supported by
ungainsayable evidence. This evidence Jesus began
to give, not only in the holy life which He lived
and the pure Gospel He preached, but in the miracles
He wrought, the blind eyes He opened, the sick He healed,
the hungry thousands He fed, the seas He stilled, the
dead He raised to life again, and the devils He cast
out of bound and harassed souls.</p>
<p>The Scribes and Pharisees witnessed these miracles,
and were compelled to admit these signs and wonders.
Nicodemus, one of their number, said to Jesus, “Rabbi,
we know that Thou art a teacher come from God: for
no man can do these miracles that Thou doest, except
God be with him” (John iii. 2). Would they now
admit His claim to be the Son of God, their promised
and long-looked-for Messiah? They were thoughtful
men and very religious, but not spiritual. The Gospel
He preached was Spirit and life; it appealed to their
conscience and revealed their sin, and to acknowledge
Him was to admit that they themselves were wrong. It
meant submission to His authority, the surrender of
their wills, and a change of front in their whole
inner and outer life. This meant moral and spiritual
revolution in each man’s heart and life, and
to this they would not submit. And so to avoid such
plain inconsistency, they must discredit His miracles;
and since they could not deny them, they declared
that He wrought them by the power of the Devil.</p>
<p>Jesus worked these signs and wonders by the power
of the Holy Spirit, that he might win their confidence,
and that they might reasonably believe and be saved.
But they refused to believe, and in their malignant
obstinacy heaped scorn upon Him, accusing Him of being
in league with the Devil; and how could they be saved?
This was the sin against the Holy Spirit against which
Jesus warned them. It was not so much one act of sin,
as a deep-seated, stubborn rebellion against God that
led them to choose darkness rather than light, and
so to blaspheme against the Spirit of truth and light.
It was sin full and ripe and ready for the harvest.</p>
<p>Some one has said that “this sin cannot be forgiven,
not because God is unwilling to forgive, but because
one who thus sins against the Holy Spirit has put
himself where no power can soften his heart or change
his nature. A man may misuse his eyes and yet see;
but whosoever puts them out can never see again. One
may misdirect his compass, and turn it aside from
the North Pole by a magnet or piece of iron, and it
may recover and point right again; but whosoever destroys
the compass itself has lost his guide at sea.”</p>
<p>Many of God’s dear children, honest souls, have
been persuaded that they have committed this awful
sin. Indeed, I once thought that I myself had done
so, and for twenty-eight days I felt that, like Jonah,
I was “in the belly of hell.” But God,
in love and tender mercy, drew me out of the horrible
pit of doubt and fear, and showed me that this is
a sin committed only by those who, in spite of all
evidence, harden their hearts in unbelief, and to
shield themselves in their sins deny and blaspheme
the Lord.</p>
<p>Dr. Daniel Steele tells of a Jew who was asked, “Is
it that you <i>cannot</i>, or that you <i>will not</i>
believe?” The Jew passionately replied, “We
<i>will</i> not, we <i>will</i> not believe.”</p>
<p>This was wilful refusal and rejection of light, and
in that direction lies hardness of heart beyond recovery,
fullness of sin, and final impenitence, which are
unpardonable.</p>
<p>Doubtless many through resistance to the Holy Spirit
come to this awful state of heart; but those troubled,
anxious souls who think they have committed this sin
are not usually among the number.</p>
<p>An Army Officer in Canada was in the midst of a glorious
revival, when one night a gentleman arose and with
deep emotion urged the young people present to yield
themselves to God, accept Jesus as their Saviour,
and receive the Holy Spirit. He told them that he
had once been a Christian, but that he had not walked
in the light, and, consequently, had sinned against
the Holy Spirit, and could never more be pardoned.
Then, with all earnest tenderness, he exhorted them
to be warned by his sad state, and not to harden their
hearts against the gracious influences, and entreated
them to yield to the Saviour. Suddenly the scales
of doubt dropped from his eyes, and he saw that he
had not in his inmost heart rejected Jesus; that he
had not committed the unpardonable sin; that</p>
<p> “The love of God is broader<br>
Than the measure of man’s
mind:<br>
And the heart of the Eternal<br>
Is most wonderfully kind.”</p>
<p>And in an instant his heart was filled with light
and love and peace, and sweet assurance that Christ
Jesus was his Saviour, even his.</p>
<p>In one meeting, I have known three people who thought
they had committed this sin, and were bowed with grief
and fear, to come to the penitent-form and find deliverance.</p>
<p>The poet Cowper was plunged into unutterable gloom
by the conviction that he had committed this awful
sin; but God tenderly brought him into the light and
sweet comforts of the Holy Spirit again, and doubtless
it was in the sense of such lovingkindness that he
wrote:</p>
<p> “There is a fountain filled with
blood,<br>
Drawn from Emanuel’s veins;<br>
And sinners plunged beneath that flood<br>
Lose all their guilty stains.”</p>
<p>John Bunyan was also afflicted with horrible fears
that he had committed the unpardonable sin, and in
his little book entitled, “Grace Abounding to
the Chief of Sinners” (a book which I would
earnestly recommend to all soul-winners), he tells
how he was delivered from his doubts and fears and
was filled once more with the joy of the Lord. There
are portions of his “Pilgrim’s Progress”
which are to be interpreted in the light of this grievous
experience.</p>
<p>Those who think they have committed this sin may generally
be assured that they have not.</p>
<p>1. Their hearts are usually very tender, while this
sin must harden the heart past all feeling.</p>
<p>2. They are full of sorrow and shame for having neglected
God’s grace and trifled with the Saviour’s
dying words, but such sorrow could not exist in a
heart so fully given over to sin that pardon was impossible.</p>
<p>3. God says, “Whosoever will may come”;
and if they find it in their hearts to come, they
will not be cast out, but freely pardoned and received
with loving kindness through the merits of Jesus’
blood. God’s promise will not fail, His faithfulness
is established in the heavens. Bless His holy name!
Those who have committed this sin are full of evil,
and do not care to come, and will not, and, therefore,
are never pardoned. Their sin is eternal.</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter13"></a>
<h1>XIII.</h1>
<h2>Offences Against the Holy Ghost</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>One day, in a fit of boyish temper, I spoke hot words
of anger, somewhat unjustly, against another person,
and this deeply grieved my mother. She said but little,
and though her sweet face has mouldered many years
beneath the Southern daisies, her look of grief I
can still see across the years of a third of a century.
And that is the one sad memory of my childhood. A
stranger might have been amused or incensed at my words,
but mother was grieved—­grieved to her heart
by my lack of generous, self-forgetful, thoughtful
love.</p>
<p>We can anger a stranger or an enemy, but it is only
a friend we grieve. The Holy Spirit is such a Friend,
more tender and faithful than a mother; and shall
we carelessly offend Him, and estrange ourselves from
Him in spite of His love?</p>
<p>There is a sense in which every sin is against the
Holy Ghost. Of course, not every such sin is unpardonable,
but the tendency of all sin is in that direction,
and we are only safe as we avoid the very beginnings
of sin. Only as we “walk in the Spirit”
are we “free from the law of sin and death”
(Romans viii. 2). Therefore, it is infinitely important
that we beware of offences against the Spirit, “lest
any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of
sin” (Hebrews iii. 13).</p>
<p>Grieving the Holy Spirit is a very common and a very
sad offence of professing Christians, and it is to
this that must be attributed much of the weakness
and ignorance and joylessness of so many followers
of Christ.</p>
<p>And He is grieved, as was my mother, by the unloving
speech and spirit of God’s children.</p>
<p>In his letters to the Ephesians, Paul says, “Let
no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth,
but that which is good to the use of edifying, that
it may minister grace unto the hearers.” And
then he adds: “And grieve not the Holy Spirit
of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.
Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour,
and evil-speaking, be put away from you, with all
malice. And be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted,
forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s
sake hath forgiven you. Be ye therefore followers of
God, as dear children; and walk in love, as Christ
also hath loved us, and hath given Himself for us”
(Eph. iv. 29-v. 2).</p>
<p>What does Paul teach us here? That it is not by some
huge wickedness, some Judas-like betrayal, some tempting
and lying to the Holy Ghost, as did Ananias and Sapphira
(Acts v. 1-9), that we grieve Him, but by that which
most people count little and unimportant; by talk
that corrupts instead of blessing and building up
those that hear, by gossip, by bitterness, and uncharitable
criticisms and fault-findings. This was the sin of
the elder son when the prodigal returned, and it was
by this he pierced with grief the kind old father’s
heart.</p>
<p>By getting in a rage, by loud, angry talking and evil-speaking
and petty malice, by unkindness and hard-heartedness
and an unforgiving spirit, we grieve Him. In a word,
by not walking through the world as in our Father’s
house, and among our neighbours and friends as among
His dear children; by not loving tenderly and making
kindly sacrifices for one another, He is grieved.
And this is not a matter of little importance. It may
have sadly momentous consequences.</p>
<p>It is a bitter, cruel, and often an irreparable thing
to trifle with a valuable earthly friendship. How
much more when the friendship is heavenly? when the
Friend is our Lord and Saviour, our Creator and Redeemer,
our Governor and Judge, our Teacher, Guide, and God?
When we trifle with a friend’s wishes—­especially
when such wishes are all in perfect harmony with and
for our highest possible good—­we may not
estrange the friend from us, but we estrange ourselves
from our friend. Our hearts grow cold toward him,
though his heart may be breaking with longing toward
us.</p>
<p>The more Saul ill-treated David, the more he hated
David.</p>
<p>Such estrangement may lead, little by little, to yet
greater sin, to strange hardness of heart, to doubts
and unbelief, and backslidings and denial of the Lord.</p>
<p>The cure for all this is a clean heart full of sweet
and gentle, self-forgetful, generous love. Then we
shall be “followers of God as dear children,”
then we shall “walk in love as Christ loved
us, and gave Himself for us.”</p>
<p>But there is another offence, that of quenching the
Spirit, which accounts for the comparative darkness
and deadness of many of God’s children.</p>
<p>In I Thess. v. 16-19 the Apostle says: “Rejoice
evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give
thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus
concerning you. Quench not the Spirit.”</p>
<p>When will the Lord’s dear children learn that
the religion of Jesus is a lowly thing, and that it
is the little foxes that spoil the vines? Does not
the Apostle here teach that it is not by some desperate,
dastardly deed that we quench the Spirit, but simply
by neglecting to rejoice and pray, and give thanks
at all times and for all things?</p>
<p>It is not necessary to blot the sun out of the heavens
to keep the sunlight out of your house—­just
close the blinds and draw the curtains; nor do you
pour barrels of water on the flames to quench the
fire—­just shut off the draught; nor do you
dynamite the city reservoir and destroy all the mains
and pipes to cut off your supply of sparkling water,
but just refrain from turning on the main.</p>
<p>So you do not need to do some great evil, some deadly
sin, to quench the Spirit. Just cease to rejoice,
through fear of man and of being peculiar; be prim
and proper as a white and polished gravestone; let
gushing joy be curbed; neglect to pray when you feel
a gentle pull in your heart to get alone with the Lord;
omit giving hearty thanks for all God’s tender
mercies, faithful discipline and loving chastenings,
and soon you will find the Spirit quenched. He will
no longer spring up joyously like a well of living
water within you.</p>
<p>But give the Spirit a vent, an opening, a chance,
and He will rise within you and flood your soul with
light and love and joy.</p>
<p>Some years ago a sanctified woman of clear experience
went alone to keep her daily hour with God; but, to
her surprise, it seemed that she could not find Him,
either in prayer or in His word. She searched her
heart for evidence of sin, but the Spirit showed her
nothing contrary to God in her mind, heart, or will.
She searched her memory for any breach of covenant,
any broken vows, any neglect, any omission, but could
find none.</p>
<p>Then she asked the Lord to show her if there were
any duty unfulfilled, any command unnoticed, which
she might perform, and quick as thought came the often-read
words, “Rejoice evermore.” “Have
you done that this morning?”</p>
<p>She had not. It had been a busy morning, and a well-spent
one, but so far there had been no definite rejoicing
in her heart, though the manifold riches and ground
for joy of all Christians were hers.</p>
<p>At once she began to count her blessings and thank
the Lord for each one, and rejoice in Him for all
the way He had led her, and the gifts He had bestowed,
and in a very few minutes the Lord stood revealed
to her spiritual consciousness.</p>
<p>She had not committed sin, nor resisted the Spirit,
but a failure to rejoice in Him who had daily loaded
her with benefits (Psalm lxviii. 19) had in a measure
quenched the Spirit. She had not turned the main,
and so her soul was not flooded with living waters.
She had not remembered the command: “Thou shalt
rejoice before the Lord thy God in all that thou puttest
thine hand unto.” But that morning she learned
a lifelong lesson, and she has ever since safeguarded
her soul by obeying the many commands to “Rejoice
in the Lord.”</p>
<p>Grieving and quenching the Spirit will not only leave
barren and desolate an individual soul, but it will
do so for a Corps, a church, a community, a whole
nation or continent. We see this illustrated on a
large scale by the long and weary Dark Ages, when
the light of the Gospel was almost extinguished, and
only here and there was the darkness broken by the
torch of truth held aloft by some humble, suffering
soul that had wept and prayed, and through painful
struggles had found the light.</p>
<p>We see it also in those Corps, churches, communities,
and countries where revivals are unknown, or are a
thing of the past, where souls are not born into the
Kingdom, and where there is no joyous shout of victory
among the people of God.</p>
<p>Grieving and quenching the Spirit may be done unintentionally
by lack of thought and prayer and hearty devotion
to the Lord Jesus; but they prepare the way and lead
to intentional and positive resistance to the Spirit.</p>
<p>To resist the Spirit is to fight against Him.</p>
<p>The sinner who, listening to the Gospel invitation,
and convicted of sin, refuses to submit to God in
true repentance and faith in Jesus, is resisting the
Holy Spirit. We have bold and striking historical
illustrations of the danger of resisting the Holy
Spirit in the disasters which befell Pharaoh, and the
terrible calamities which came upon Jerusalem, and
have for twenty centuries followed the Jews.</p>
<p>The ten plagues that came upon Pharaoh and his people
were ten opportunities and open doors into God’s
favour and fellowship, which they themselves shut
by their stubborn resistance, only to be overtaken
by dreadful catastrophe.</p>
<p>To the Jews, Stephen said: “Ye do always resist
the Holy Ghost” (Acts vii. 51); and the siege
and fall of Jerusalem, and the butchery and banishment
and enslavement of its inhabitants, and all the woes
that came upon the Jews, followed their rejection of
Jesus and the hardness of heart and spiritual blindness
which swiftly overtook them when they resisted all
the loving efforts and entreaties of His disciples
baptised with the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>And what on a large scale befalls nations and people,
on a small scale also befalls individuals. Those that
receive and obey the Lord are enlightened and blessed
and saved; those that resist and reject Him are sadly
left to themselves and surely swallowed up in destruction.</p>
<p>Likewise the professing Christian who hears of heart-holiness
and cleansing from all sin as a blessing he may now
have by faith, and, convicted of his need of the blessing
and of God’s desire and willingness to bestow
it upon him now, refuses to seek it in whole-hearted
affectionate consecration and faith, is resisting
the Holy Spirit. And such resistance imperils the soul
beyond all possible computation.</p>
<p>We see an example of this in the Israelites who were
brought out of Egypt with signs and wonders, and led
through the Red Sea and the wilderness to the borders
of Canaan, but, forgetting, refused to go over into
the land. In this they resisted the Holy Spirit in
His leadings as surely as did Pharaoh, and with quite
as disastrous results to themselves, perishing in their
evil way.</p>
<p>For their sin was as much greater than his as their
light exceeded his.</p>
<p>Hundreds of years later, Isaiah, writing of this time,
says: “In all their affliction He was afflicted,
and the angel of His presence saved them; in His love
and in His pity He redeemed them; and He bare them,
and carried them all the days of old. But they rebelled,
and vexed His Holy Spirit; therefore He was turned
to be their enemy, and He fought against them”
(Isaiah lxiii. 9, 10).</p>
<p>We see from this that Christians must beware and watch
and pray and walk softly with the Lord in glad obedience
and childlike faith, if they would escape the darkness
and dryness that result from grieving and quenching
the Spirit, and the dangers that surely come from
resisting Him.</p>
<p> “Arm me with jealous care,<br>
As in Thy sight to live;<br>
And, Oh, Thy servant, Lord, prepare,<br>
A strict account to give.</p>
<p> “Help me to watch and pray,<br>
And on Thyself rely,<br>
Assured if I my trust betray,<br>
I shall for ever die.”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter14"></a>
<h1>XIV.</h1>
<h2>The Holy Spirit and Sound Doctrine</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>Is Jesus Christ divine? Is the Bible an inspired Book?
Is man a fallen creature who can be saved only through
the suffering and sacrifice of the Creator? Will there
be a resurrection of the dead, and a day in which
God will judge all the world by the Man Christ Jesus?
Is Satan a personal being, and is there a Hell in
which the wicked will be for ever punished?</p>
<p>These are great doctrines which have been held and
taught by His followers since the days of Jesus and
His Apostles, and yet they are ever being attacked
and denied.</p>
<p>Are they true? Or are they only fancies and falsehoods,
or figures of speech and distortions of truth? How
can we find truth and know it?</p>
<p>Jesus said, “When He, the Spirit of Truth, is
come, He will guide you into all truth” (John
xvi. 13).</p>
<p>What truth? Not the truth of the multiplication table,
or of physical science, or art, or secular history,
but spiritual truth—­the truth about God
and His will and character, and our relations to Him
in Christ—­that truth which is necessary
to salvation and holiness—­into all this
truth the Holy Spirit will guide us. “He shall
teach you all things,” said Jesus (John xiv.
26).</p>
<p>How, then, shall we escape error and be “sound
in doctrine”? Only by the help of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>How do we know Jesus Christ is divine? Because the
Bible tells us so? Infinitely precious and important
is this revelation in the Bible; but not by this do
we know it. Because the Church teaches it in her creed,
and we have heard it from the catechism? Nothing taught
in any creed or catechism is of more vital importance;
but neither by this do we know it.</p>
<p>How then? Listen to Paul: “No man can say that
Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (I
Cor. xii. 3). “No man,” says Paul. Then
learning it from the Bible or catechism is not to know
it except as the parrot might know it; but every man
is to be taught this by the Holy Spirit, if he is
to really know it.</p>
<p>Then it is not a revelation made once for all, and
only to the men who walked and talked with Jesus,
but it is a spiritual revelation made anew to each
believing heart that in penitence seeks Him and so
meets the conditions of such a revelation.</p>
<p>Then the poor, degraded, ignorant outcast at The Army
penitent-form in the slums of London or Chicago,
who never heard of a creed, and the ebony African
and dusky Indian, who never saw the inside of a Bible,
may have Christ revealed in him, and know by the revelation
of the Holy Spirit that Jesus is Lord.</p>
<p>“It pleased God... to reveal His Son in me,”
wrote Paul (Gal. i. 15, 16); and again, “Christ
liveth in me” (Gal. ii. 20); and again, “My
little children, of whom I travail in birth again
until Christ be formed in you” (Gal. iv. 19);
as though Christ is to be spiritually formed in the
heart of each believer by the operation of the Holy
Spirit, as He was physically formed in the womb of
Mary by the same Spirit (Luke i. 35); and again, “The
mystery which hath been hid from ages and from generations,
but now is made manifest to His saints,... which is
Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col. i. 26,
27); “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by
faith” (Eph. iii. 17); “Examine yourselves,
whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves.
Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ
is in you, except ye be reprobates” (2 Cor.
xiii. 5)?</p>
<p>“At that day,” said Jesus, when making
His great promise of the Comforter to His disciples,
“At that day ye shall know that I am in My Father,
and ye in Me, and I in you” (John xiv. 20); and
again, in His great prayer, He said: “I have
declared unto them Thy name, and will declare it:
that the love wherewith Thou hast loved Me may be
in them, and I in them.”</p>
<p>It is this ever-recurring revelation to penitent,
believing hearts, by the agency of the ever-present
Holy Spirit, that makes faith in Jesus Christ living
and invincible. “I know He is Lord, for He saves
my soul from sin, and He saves me now,” is an
argument that rationalism and unbelief cannot answer
nor overthrow, and so long as there are men in the
world who can say this, faith in the divinity of Jesus
Christ is secure; and this experience and witness
come by the Holy Ghost.</p>
<p> “I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost,<br>
I love to worship Thee;<br>
My risen Lord for aye were lost<br>
But for Thy company.”</p>
<p>And so it is by the guidance and teaching of the Holy
Spirit that all saving truth becomes vital to us.</p>
<p>It is He that makes the Bible a living Book; it is
He that convinces the world of judgment (John xvi.
8-11); it is He that makes men certain that there
is a Heaven of surpassing and enduring glory and joy,
and a Hell of endless sorrow and woe for those who
sin away their day of grace and die in impenitence.</p>
<p>Who have been the mightiest and most faithful preachers
of the gloom and terror and pain of a perpetual Hell?
those who have been the mightiest and most effective
preachers of God’s compassionate love.</p>
<p>In all periods of great revival, when men seemed to
live on the borderland, and in the vision of eternity,
Hell has been preached. The leaders in these revivals
have been men of prayer and faith and consuming love,
but they have been men who knew “the terrors
of the Lord,” and, therefore, they preached
the judgments of God, and they proved that the law
with its penalties is a schoolmaster to bring men
to Christ (Gal. iii. 24). Fox, the Quaker; Bunyan,
the Baptist; Baxter, the Puritan; Wesley and Fletcher,
and Whitefield and Caughey, the Methodists; Finney,
the Presbyterian; Edwards and Moody, the Congregationalists;
and General Booth, the Salvationist, have preached
it, not savagely, but tenderly and faithfully, as
a mother might warn her child against some great danger
that would surely follow careless and selfish wrong-doing.</p>
<p>What men have loved and laboured and sacrificed as
these men? Their hearts have been a flaming furnace
of love and devotion to God, and an over-flowing fountain
of love and compassion for men; but just in proportion
as they have discovered God’s love and pity
for the sinner, so have they discovered His wrath against
sin and all obstinate wrong-doing; and as they have
caught glimpses of Heaven and declared its joys and
everlasting glories to men, so they have seen Hell,
with its endless punishment, and with trembling voice
and overflowing eyes have they warned men to “flee
from the wrath to come.”</p>
<p>Were these men, throbbing with spiritual life and
consumed with devotion to the Kingdom of God and the
everlasting well-being of their fellowmen, led to
this belief by the Spirit of Truth, or were they misled?
Is it the prophet, weeping and praying and preaching
and fighting for God and men, to whom the Spirit has
always first spoken and revealed the things of God?
Or is it the philosopher, or dry-as-dust theologian,
or the popular preacher of smooth things, sitting
in his study and among his books, spinning out of
his own mind his conceits concerning God’s plan
and purpose in the universe?</p>
<p>Does Seneca or the Psalmist, Plato or Paul, Rousseau
or Wesley, the idolised, high-salaried, soft-raimented
preacher of a wide gate and broad way to life and
Heaven, or the veteran soul-winner, General Booth,
more clearly make known the mind of God in matters
that are spiritual?</p>
<p>“The things of the Spirit... are spiritually
discerned” (I Cor. ii. 14), says Paul. It is
not by searching and philosophising that these things
are found out, but by revelation. “Flesh and
blood hath not revealed it unto thee,” said Jesus
to Peter, “but My Father which is in Heaven”
(Matthew xvi. 17). The great teacher of truth is the
Spirit of Truth, and the only safe expounders and
guardians of sound doctrine are men filled with the
Holy Ghost.</p>
<p>Study and research have their place, and an important
place; but in spiritual things they will be no avail
unless prosecuted by spiritual men. As well might
men blind from birth attempt to study the starry heavens,
and men born deaf undertake to expound and criticise
the harmonies of Bach and Beethoven. Men must see
and hear to speak and write intelligently on such subjects.
And so men must be spiritually enlightened to understand
spiritual truth.</p>
<p>The greatest danger to any religious organisation
is that a body of men should arise in its ranks, and
hold its positions of trust, who have learned its
great fundamental doctrines by rote out of the catechism,
but have no experimental knowledge of their truth
inwrought by the mighty anointing of the Holy Ghost,
and who are destitute of “an unction from the
Holy One,” by which, says John, “ye know
all things” (1 John ii. 20, 27).</p>
<p>Why do men deny the divinity of Jesus Christ? Because
they have never placed themselves in that relation
to the Spirit, and met those unchanging conditions
that would enable Him to reveal Jesus to them as Saviour
and Lord.</p>
<p>Why do men dispute the inspiration of the Scriptures?
Because the Holy Ghost, who inspired “holy men
of God” to write the Book (2 Peter i. 21), hides
its spiritual sense from unspiritual and unholy men.</p>
<p>Why do men doubt a Day of Judgment, and a state of
everlasting doom? Because they have never been bowed
and broken and crushed beneath the weight of their
sin, and by a sense of guilt and separation from a
holy God that can only be removed by faith in His
dying Son.</p>
<p>A sportsman lost his way in a pitiless storm on a
black and starless night. Suddenly his horse drew
back and refused to take another step. He urged it
forward, but it only threw itself back upon its haunches.
Just then a vivid flash of lightning revealed a great
precipice upon the brink of which he stood. It was
but an instant, and then the pitchy blackness hid
it again from view. But he turned his horse and anxiously
rode away from the terrible danger.</p>
<p>A distinguished professor of religion said to me some
time ago, “I dislike, I abhor, the doctrine
of Hell”; and then after a while added, “But
three times in my life I have seen that there was
eternal separation from God and an everlasting Hell
for me, if I walked not in the way God was calling
me to go.”</p>
<p>Into the blackness of the sinner’s night the
Holy Spirit, who is patiently and compassionately
seeking the salvation of all men, flashes a light
that gives him a glimpse of eternal things which,
heeded, would lead to the sweet peace and security
of eternal day. For when the Holy Spirit is heeded
and honoured, the night passes, the shadows flee away,
the day dawns, “the Sun of Righteousness arises
with healing in His wings,” and, saved and sanctified,
men walk in His light in safety and joy. Doctrines
which before were repellent to the carnal mind, and
but foolishness, or a stumbling-block to the heart
of unbelief, now become precious and satisfying to
the soul; and truths which before were hid in impenetrable
darkness, or seen only as through dense gloom and
fog, are now seen clearly as in the light of broad
day.</p>
<p> “Hold thou the faith that Christ
is Lord,<br>
God over all, who died and rose;<br>
And everlasting life bestows<br>
On all who hear the living word.<br>
For thee His life-blood He out-poured,<br>
His Spirit sets thy spirit free;<br>
Hold thou the faith—­He
dwells in thee,<br>
And thou in Him, and Christ is Lord!”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter15"></a>
<h1>XV.</h1>
<h2>Praying in the Spirit</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>An important work of the Holy Spirit is to teach us
how to pray, instruct us what to pray for, and inspire
us to pray earnestly, without ceasing, and in faith,
for the things we desire and the things that are dear
to the heart of the Lord.</p>
<p>In a familiar verse, the poet Montgomery says:</p>
<p> “Prayer is the burden of a sigh,<br>
The falling of a tear,<br>
The upward glancing of the eye,<br>
When none but God is near.”</p>
<p>And no doubt he is right. Prayer is exceedingly simple.
The faintest cry for help, a whisper for mercy, is
prayer. But when the Holy Spirit comes and fills the
soul with His blessed presence, prayer becomes more
than a cry; it ceases to be a feeble request, and
often becomes a strife (Romans xv. 30; Col. iv. 12)
for greater things, a conflict, an invincible argument,
a wrestling with God, and through it men enter into
the Divine councils and rise into a blessed and responsible
fellowship in some important sense with the Father
and the Son in the moral government of the world.</p>
<p>It was in this spirit and fellowship that Abraham
prayed for Sodom (Genesis xviii. 23-32); that Moses
interceded for Israel, and stood between them and
God’s hot displeasure (Exodus xxxii. 7-14);
and that Elijah prevailed to shut up the heavens for
three years and six months, and then again prevailed
in his prayer for rain.</p>
<p>God would have us come to Him not only as a foolish
and ignorant child comes, but as an ambassador to
his home government; as a full-grown son who has become
of age and entered into partnership with his father;
as a bride who is one in all interests and affections
with the bridegroom.</p>
<p>He would have us “come boldly to the throne
of grace” with a well-reasoned and Scriptural
understanding of what we desire, and with a purpose
to “ask,” “seek,” and “knock”
till we get the thing we wish, being assured that
it is according to His will; and this boldness is
not inconsistent with the profoundest humility and
a sense of utter dependence; indeed, it is always
accompanied by self-distrust and humble reliance upon
the merits of Jesus, else it is but presumption and
unsanctified conceit. This union of assurance and
humility, of boldness and dependence, can be secured
only by the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and only
so can one be prepared and fitted for such prayer.</p>
<p>Three great obstacles hinder mighty prayer:</p>
<p>1. selfishness; 2, unbelief; 3, the darkness of ignorance
and foolishness. The baptism with the Spirit sweeps
away these obstacles and brings in the three great
essentials to prayer—­1, faith; 2, love,
Divine love; 3, the light of heavenly knowledge and
wisdom.</p>
<p>1. Selfishness must be cast out by the incoming of
love. The ambassador must not be seeking personal
ends, but the interests of his government and the
people he represents; the son must not be seeking
private gain, but the common prosperity of the partnership
in which he will fully and lawfully share; the bride
must not forget him to whom she belongs, and seek separate
ends, but in all ways identify herself with her husband
and his interests.</p>
<p>So the child of God must come in prayer, unselfishly.</p>
<p>It is the work of the Holy Spirit, with our co-operation
and glad consent, to search and destroy selfishness
out of our hearts, and fill them with pure love to
God and man. And when this is done we shall not then
be asking for things amiss to consume them upon our
lusts, to gratify our appetites, or pride, or ambition,
or ease, or vain-glory. We shall seek only the glory
of our Lord and the common good of our fellow-men,
in which, as co-workers and partners, we shall have
a common share. If we ask for success, it is not that
we may be exalted, but that God may be glorified;
that Jesus may secure the purchase of His blood; that
men may be saved, and the Kingdom of Heaven be established
upon earth.</p>
<p>If we ask for daily bread, it is not that we may be
full, but that we may be fitted for daily duty. If
we ask for health, it is not alone that we may be
free from pain and filled with physical comfort, but
that we may be spent “in publishing the sinner’s
Friend,” in fulfilling the work for which God
has placed us here.</p>
<p>2. Unbelief must be destroyed. Doubt paralyzes prayer.
Unbelief quenches the spirit of intercession. Only
as the eye of faith sees our Father God upon the Throne
guaranteeing to us rights and privileges by the blood
of His Son, and inviting us to come without fear,
and make our wants known, does prayer rise from the
commonplace to the sublime; does it cease to be a feeble,
timid cry, and become a mighty spiritual force, moving
God Himself in the interests which it seeks.</p>
<p>Men, wise with the wisdom of this world, but poor
and naked and blind and foolish in matters of faith,
ask: “Will God change His plans at the request
of man?” And we answer, “Yes,” since
many of God’s plans are made contingent upon
the prayers of His people, and He has ordered that
prayer offered in faith, according to His will, revealed
in His word, shall be one of the controlling factors
in His government of men.</p>
<p>Is it God’s will that the tides of the Atlantic
and Pacific should sweep across the Isthmus of Panama?
That men should run under the Alps? That thoughts
and words should be winged across the ocean without
any visible or tangible medium? Yes; it is His will,
if men will it, and work to these ends in harmony with
His great physical laws. So in the spiritual world
there are wonders wrought by prayer, and God wills
the will of His people when they come to Him in faith
and love.</p>
<p>What else is meant by such promises and assurances
as these: “Therefore I say unto you, What things
soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive
them, and ye shall have them” (Mark xi. 24);
“The supplication of a righteous man availeth
much in its working. Elijah was a man of like passions
with us, and he prayed fervently that it might not
rain; and it rained not on the earth for three years
and six months. And he prayed again, and the heavens
gave rain and the earth brought forth her fruit”
(James v. 16-18. American Revision).</p>
<p>The Holy Spirit dwelling within the heart helps us
to understand the things we may pray for, and the
heart that is full of love and loyalty to God only
wants what is lawful. This is mystery to people who
are under the dominion of selfishness and the darkness
of unbelief, but it is a soul-thrilling fact to those
who are filled with the Holy Ghost.</p>
<p>“What wilt thou that I shall do unto thee?”
asked Jesus of the blind man (Luke xviii. 41).</p>
<p>He had respect to the will of the blind man, and granted
his request, seeing he had faith. And He still has
respect to the vigorous, sanctified will of His people—­the
will that has been subdued by consecration and faith
into loving union with His will.</p>
<p>The Lord answered Abraham on behalf of Sodom till
he ceased to ask.</p>
<p>“The Lord has had His way so long with Hudson
Taylor,” said a friend, “that now, Hudson
Taylor can have his way with the Lord.”</p>
<p>Adoniram Judson lay sick with a fatal illness in far-away
Burmah. His wife read to him an account of the conversion
of a number of Jews in Constantinople through some
of his writings. For a while the sick man was silent,
and then he spoke with awe, telling his wife that
for years he had prayed that he might be used in some
way to bless the Jews, yet never having seen any evidence
that his prayers were answered; but now, after many
years and from far away, the evidence of answer had
come. And then, after further silence, he spoke with
deep emotion, saying that he had never prayed a prayer
for the glory of God and the good of men but that,
sooner or later, even though for the time being he
had forgotten, he found that God had not forgotten,
but had remembered and patiently worked to answer
his prayer.</p>
<p>Oh, the faithfulness of God! He means it when He makes
promises and exhorts and urges and commands us to
pray. It is not His purpose to mock us, but to answer
and “to do exceeding abundantly above all that
we ask or think.” Bless His holy Name!</p>
<p>3. Knowledge and wisdom must take the place of foolish
ignorance. Paul says, “We know not what we should
pray for as we ought,” and then adds, “But
the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with
groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans viii.
26). If my little child asks for a glittering razor,
I refuse its request; but when my full-grown son asks
for one I grant it. So God cannot wisely answer some
prayers, for they are foolish or untimely. Hence,
we need not love and faith only, but wisdom and knowledge,
that we may ask according to the will of God.</p>
<p>It is this that Paul has in mind when he says that
he will not only pray with the Spirit, but “I
will pray with the understanding also” (I Cor.
xiv. 15). Men should think before they pray, and study
that they may pray wisely.</p>
<p>Now, when the Holy Spirit comes there pours into the
soul not only a tide of love and simple faith, but
a flood of light as well, and prayer becomes not only
earnest, but intelligent also. And this intelligence
increases, as, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit,
the word of God is studied, and its heavenly truths
and principles are grasped and assimilated.</p>
<p>It is thus men come to know God and become His friends,
whose prayers He will assist and will not deny.</p>
<p>Such men talk with God as friend with friend, and
the Holy Spirit helps their infirmities; encourages
them to urge their prayer in faith; teaches them to
reason with God; enables them to come boldly in the
name of Jesus, when oppressed with a sense of their
own insignificance and unworthiness; and, when words
fail them and they scarcely know how to voice their
desires, He intercedes within them with unutterable
groanings, according to the will of God (Romans viii.
26, 27; 1 Cor. ii. 11).</p>
<p>A young man felt called to mission work in China,
but his mother offered strong opposition to his going.
An agent of the mission, knowing the need of the work,
and vexed with the mother, one day laid the case before
Hudson Taylor.</p>
<p>“Mr. Taylor,” said he, “listened
patiently and lovingly to all I had to say, and then
gently suggested our praying about it. Such a prayer
I have never heard before! It seemed to me more like
a conversation with a trusted friend whose advice
he was seeking. He talked the matter over with the
Friend from every point of view—­from the
side of the young man, from the side of China’s
needs, from the side of the mother, and her natural
feelings, and also from my side. It was a revelation
to me. I saw that prayer did not mean merely asking
for things, much less asking for things to be carried
out by God according to our ideas; but that it means
<i>communion</i>, fellowship, partnership, with our
Heavenly Father. And when our will is really blended
with His, what liberty we may have in asking for what
we want!”</p>
<p>Hallelujah!</p>
<p> “My soul, ask what thou wilt,<br>
Thou canst not be too bold;<br>
Since His own blood for thee He spilt,<br>
What else can He withhold?”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter16"></a>
<h1>XVI.</h1>
<h2>Characteristics of the Anointed Preacher</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>Since God saves men by “the foolishness of preaching,”
the preacher has an infinitely important work, and
he must be fitted for it. But what can fit a man for
such sacred work? Not education alone, not knowledge
of books, not gifts of speech, not winsome manners,
nor a magnetic voice, nor a commanding presence, but
only God. The preacher must be more than a man—­he
must be a man plus the Holy Ghost.</p>
<p>Paul was such a man. He was full of the Holy Spirit,
and in studying his life and ministry we get a life-sized
portrait of an anointed preacher living, fighting,
preaching, praying, suffering, triumphing, and dying
in the power and light and glory of the indwelling
Spirit.</p>
<p>In the second chapter of the First of Thessalonians
he gives us a picture of his character and ministry
which were formed and inspired by the Holy Spirit,
a sample of His workmanship, and an example for all
Gospel preachers.</p>
<p>At Philippi he had been terribly beaten with stripes
on his bare back, and roughly thrust into the inner
dungeon, and his feet were made fast in the stocks;
but that did not break nor quench his spirit. Love
burned in his heart, and his joy in the Lord brimmed
full and bubbled over, and at midnight, in the damp,
dark, loathsome dungeon, he and Silas, his comrade
in service and suffering, “prayed and sang praises
unto God.” God answered with an earthquake,
and the jailer and his household got gloriously converted.
Paul was set free and went at once to Thessalonica,
where, regardless of the shameful way he had been treated
at Philippi, he preached the Gospel boldly, and a
blessed revival followed with many converts; but persecution
arose, and Paul had again to flee. His heart, however,
was continually turning back to these converts, and
at last he sat down and wrote them this letter. From
this we learn that—­</p>
<p>1. He was a <i>joyful</i> preacher. He was no pessimist,
croaking out doleful prophecies and lamentations and
bitter criticisms. He was full of the joy of the Lord.
It was not the joy that comes from good health, a
pleasant home, plenty of money, wholesome food, numerous
and smiling friends, and sunny, favouring skies; but
a deep, springing fountain of solemn, gladdening joy
that abounded and overflowed in pain and weariness,
in filthy, noisome surroundings, in loneliness and
poverty, and danger and bitter persecutions. No earth-born
trial could quench it, for it was Heaven-born; it
was “the joy of the Lord” poured into his
heart with the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>2. He was a <i>bold</i> preacher. Worldly prudence
would have constrained him to go softly at Thessalonica,
after his experience at Philippi, lest he arouse opposition
and meet again with personal violence; but, instead,
he says: “We were bold in our God to speak unto
you the Gospel of God with much contention.”
Personal considerations were all forgotten, or cast
to the winds, in his impetuous desire to declare the
Gospel and save their souls. He lived in the will
of God, and conquered his fears. “The wicked”
are fearful, and “flee when no man pursueth;
but the righteous are as bold as a lion.”</p>
<p>This boldness is a fruit of righteousness, and is
always found in those who are full of the Holy Ghost.
They forget themselves, and so lose all fear. This
was the secret of the martyrs when burned at the stake
or thrown to the wild beasts.</p>
<p>Fear is a fruit of selfishness. Boldness thrives when
selfishness is destroyed. God esteems it, commands
His people to be courageous, and makes spiritual leaders
only of those who possess courage (Joshua i. 9).</p>
<p>Moses feared not the wrath of the king, refused to
be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter, and
boldly espoused the cause of his despised and enslaved
people.</p>
<p>Joshua was full of courage. Gideon fearlessly attacked
one hundred and twenty thousand Midianites, with but
three hundred unarmed men.</p>
<p>Jonathan and his armour-bearer charged the Philistine
garrison and routed hundreds singlehanded.</p>
<p>David faced the lion and the bear, and inspired all
Israel by battling with and killing Goliath.</p>
<p>The prophets were men of the highest courage, who
fearlessly rebuked kings, and at the risk of life,
and often at the cost of life, denounced popular sins,
and called the people back to righteousness and the
faithful service of God. These men feared God, and
so lost the fear of man. They believed God, and so
obeyed Him, and found His favour, and were entrusted
with His high missions and everlasting employments.</p>
<p>“Fear thou not, for I am with thee,” saith
the Lord; and this Paul believed, and so says, “We
were bold in our God.” God was his high tower,
his strength and unfailing defence, and so he was
not afraid.</p>
<p>His boldness toward man was a fruit of his boldness
toward God, and that, in turn, was a fruit of his
faith in Jesus as his High Priest, who had been touched
with the feeling of his infirmities, and through whom
he could “come boldly to the Throne of Grace,
and obtain mercy, and find grace to help in every time
of need.”</p>
<p>It is the timidity and delicacy with which men attempt
God’s work that often accounts for their failure.
Let them speak out boldly like men, as ambassadors
of Heaven, who are not afraid to represent their King,
and they will command attention and respect, and reach
the hearts and consciences of men.</p>
<p>I have read that quaint old Bishop Latimer, who was
afterwards burned at the stake, “having preached
a sermon before King Henry VIII, which greatly displeased
the monarch, was ordered to preach again on the next
Sunday, and make apology for the offence given. The
day came, and with it a crowded assembly anxious to
hear the bishop’s apology. Reading his text,
he commenced thus: ’Hugh Latimer, dost thou
know before whom thou art this day to speak? To the
high and mighty monarch, the king’s most excellent
majesty, who can take away thy life if thou offendest.
Therefore, take heed that thou speakest not a word
that may displease. But, then, consider well, Hugh,
dost thou not know from whence thou comest? Upon whose
message thou art sent? Even by the great and mighty
God, who is all-present, and who beholdeth all thy
ways, and who is able to cast thy soul into Hell!
Therefore, take care that thou deliver thy message
faithfully.’”</p>
<p>He then repeated the sermon of the previous Sunday,
word for word, but with double its former energy and
emphasis. The Court was full of excitement to learn
what would be the fate of this plain-dealing and fearless
bishop. He was ordered into the king’s presence,
who, with a stern voice, asked: “How dared you
thus offend me?” “I merely discharged
my duty,” was Latimer’s reply. The king
arose from his seat, embraced the good man, saying,
“Blessed be God I have so honest a servant.”</p>
<p>He was a worthy successor of Nathan, who confronted
King David with his sin, and said, “Thou art
the man.”</p>
<p>This Divine courage will surely accompany the fiery
baptism of the Spirit.</p>
<p>What is it but the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that
gives courage to Salvation Army Officers and Soldiers,
enabling them to face danger and difficulty and loneliness
with joy, and attack sin in its worst forms as fearlessly
as David attacked Goliath?</p>
<p>“Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit,
saith the Lord.”</p>
<p> “Shall I, for fear of feeble man,<br>
The Spirit’s course in me restrain?<br>
Awed by a mortal’s frown, shall
I<br>
Conceal the word of God most high?<br>
Shall I, to soothe the unholy throng,<br>
Soften Thy truth, or smooth my tongue?</p>
<p> “How then before Thee shall I dare<br>
To stand, or how Thine anger bear?<br>
Yea, let men rage; since Thou wilt spread<br>
Thy shadowing wings around my head;<br>
Since in all pain Thy tender love<br>
Will still my sure refreshment prove.”</p>
<p>3. He was <i>without guile</i>. “For our exhortation
was not of deceit, nor of uncleanness, nor in guile;
but as we were allowed of God to be put in trust with
the Gospel, even so we speak; not as pleasing men,
but God, which trieth our hearts.”</p>
<p>He was frank and open. He spoke right out of his heart.
He was transparently simple and straightforward. Since
God had honoured him with this infinite trust of preaching
the Gospel, he sought to so preach it that he should
please God regardless of men. And yet that is the
surest way to please men. People who listen to such
a man feel his honesty, and realise that he is seeking
to do them good, to save them rather than to tickle
their ears and win their applause, and in their hearts
they are pleased.</p>
<p>But, anyway, whether or not they are pleased, he is
to deliver his message as an ambassador, and look
to his home government for his reward. He gets his
commission from God, and it is God who will try his
heart and prove his ministry. Oh, to please Jesus!
Oh, to stand perfect before God after preaching His
Gospel!</p>
<p>4. He was <i>not a time-server nor a covetous man.</i>
“Neither at any time used we flattering words,
as ye know, nor a cloak of covetousness; God is witness,”
he adds.</p>
<p>There are three ways of reaching a man’s purse:
(1) Directly. (2) By way of his head with flattering
words. (3) By way of his heart with manly, honest,
saving words. The first way is robbery. The second
way is robbery, with the poison of a deadly, but pleasing,
opiate added, which may damn his soul. The third reaches
his purse by saving his soul and opening in his heart
an unfailing fountain of benevolence to bless himself
and the world.</p>
<p>It were better for a preacher to turn highwayman,
and rob men with a club and a strong hand, than, with
smiles and smooth words and feigned and fawning affection,
to rob them with flattery, while their poor souls,
neglected and deceived, go down to Hell. How will
he meet them in the Day of Judgment, and look into
their horrorstricken faces, realising that he played
and toyed with their fancies and affections and pride
to get money, and, instead of faithfully warning them
and seeking to save them, with flattering words fattened
their souls for destruction!</p>
<p>Not so did Paul. “I seek not yours, but you,”
he wrote the Corinthians. It was not their money,
but their souls he wanted.</p>
<p>But such faithful love will be able to command all
men have to give. Why, to some of his converts he
wrote: “I bear you record, that if it had been
possible, ye would have plucked out your own eyes,
and have given them to me” (Gal. iv. 15). But
he sought not to please them with flattering words,
only to save them.</p>
<p>So faithful was he in this matter, and so conscious
of his integrity, that he called God Himself into
the witness-box. “God is witness,” says
he.</p>
<p>Blessed is the man who can call on God to witness
for him; and that man in whom the Holy Spirit dwells
in fullness can do this. Can you, my brother?</p>
<p>5. He was <i>not vain-glorious, nor dictatorial, nor
oppressive</i>. Some men care nothing for money, but
they care mightily for power and place and the glory
that men give. But Paul was free from this spiritual
itching. Listen to him: “Nor of men sought we
glory, neither of you, nor yet of others, when we might
have been burdensome” (or “used authority”)
“as the Apostles of Christ.”</p>
<p>Said Solomon, “For men to seek their own glory
is not glory,” it is only vain-glory. “How
can ye believe, which receive honour one of another,
and seek not the honour that cometh from God only?”
asked Jesus.</p>
<p>From all this Paul was free, and so is every man who
is full of the Holy Ghost. And it is only as we are
thus free that with the whole heart and with a single
eye we can devote ourselves to the work of saving
men.</p>
<p>6. With all his boldness and faithfulness he was <i>gentle</i>.
“We were gentle among you,” he says, “as
a nurse cherisheth her children.”</p>
<p>The fierce hurricane which casts down the giant trees
of the forest is not so mighty as the gentle sunshine,
which, from tiny seeds and acorns, lifts aloft the
towering spires of oak and fir on a thousand hills
and mountains.</p>
<p>The wild storm that lashes the sea into foam and fury
is feeble compared to the gentle, yet immeasurably
powerful influence, which twice a day swings the oceans
in resistless tides from shore to shore.</p>
<p>And as in the physical world the mighty powers are
gentle in their vast workings, so it is in the spiritual
world. The light that falls on the lids of the sleeping
infant and wakes it from its slumber, is not more
gentle than the “still small voice” that
brings assurance of forgiveness or cleansing to them
that look unto Jesus.</p>
<p>Oh, the gentleness of God! “Thy gentleness hath
made me great,” said David. “I beseech
you by the meekness and gentleness of Christ”
(2 Cor. x. 1), wrote Paul. And again, “The fruit
of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
gentleness” (Gal. v. 22). And as the Father,
Son, and Holy Ghost are gentle, so will be the servant
of the Lord who is filled with the Spirit.</p>
<p>I shall never forget the gentleness of a mighty man
of God whom I well knew, who on the platform was clothed
with zeal as with a garment, and in his overwhelming
earnestness was like a lion or a consuming fire; but
when dealing with a wounded or broken heart, or with
a seeking soul, no nurse with a little babe could be
more tender than he.</p>
<p>7. Finally, Paul was full of <i>self-forgetful, self-sacrificing
love.</i> “So being affectionately desirous of
you, we were willing to have imparted unto you, not
the Gospel of God only, but also our own souls, because
ye were dear unto us.”</p>
<p>No wonder he shook those heathen cities, overthrew
their idols, had great revivals, that his jailer was
converted, and that his converts would have gladly
plucked out their eyes for him! Such tender, self-sacrificing
love compels attention, begets confidence, enkindles
love, and surely wins its object.</p>
<p>This burning love led him to labour and sacrifice,
and so live and walk before them that he was not only
a teacher, but an example of all he taught, and could
safely say, “Follow me.”</p>
<p>This love led him to preach the whole truth, that
he might by all means save them. He kept back no truth
because it was unpopular, for it was their salvation
and not his own reputation and popularity he sought.</p>
<p>He preached not himself, but a crucified Christ, without
the shedding of whose blood there is no remission
of sins; and through that precious blood he preached
present cleansing from all sin, and the gift of the
Holy Spirit for all who obediently believe.</p>
<p>And this love kept him faithful and humble and true
to the end, so that at last in sight of the martyr’s
death, he saw the martyr’s crown, and cried
out: “I am now ready to be offered,... I have
fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have
kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me
a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous
Judge, shall give me at that day.”</p>
<p>He had been faithful, and now at the end he was oppressed
with no doubts and harassed with no bitter regrets,
but looked forward with eager joy to meeting his Lord
and beholding the blessed face of Him he loved. Hallelujah!</p>
<p> “Have you received the Holy Ghost?<br>
’Twill fit you for the fight,<br>
’Twill make of you a mighty host,<br>
To put your foes to flight.</p>
<p> “Have you received the Holy Power?<br>
’Twill fall from Heaven on
you,<br>
From Jesus’ throne this very hour,<br>
’Twill make you brave and
true.</p>
<p> “Oh, now receive the Holy Fire!<br>
’Twill burn away all dross,<br>
All earthly, selfish, vain desire,<br>
’Twill make you love the Cross.”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter17"></a>
<h1>XVII.</h1>
<h2>Preaching</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>“Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where
is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish
the wisdom of this world?” asks Paul. And then
he declares: “After that in the wisdom of God
the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by
the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe.”</p>
<p>What kind of preaching is this? He does not say, “foolish
preaching,” but the foolishness of such a way
as that of preaching. Certainly, it is not the moral
essay, or the intellectual, or semi-intellectual,
kind of preaching that is most generally heard throughout
the world to-day, that is to save men; for thousands
of such sermons move and convert no one: nor is it
a mere noisy declamation called a sermon—­noisy
because empty of all earnest thought and true feeling;
but it must be the kind of which Peter speaks when
he writes of “them that preached the Gospel
... with the Holy Ghost sent down from Heaven”
(1 Peter i. 12).</p>
<p>No man is equipped to rightly preach the Gospel, and
undertake the spiritual oversight and instruction
of souls, till he has been anointed with the Holy
Ghost.</p>
<p>The disciples had been led to Jesus by John the Baptist,
whose mighty preaching laid a deep and broad foundation
for their spiritual education, and then for three
years they had listened to both the public and private
teachings of Jesus; they had been “eye-witnesses
of His glory,” of His life and death and resurrection,
and yet He commanded them to tarry in Jerusalem, and
wait for the Holy Spirit. He was to fit them for their
ministry. And if they, trained and taught by the Master
Himself, had need of the Holy Spirit to enable them
to preach and testify with wisdom and power, how much
more do you and I need His presence!</p>
<p>Without Him they could do nothing. With Him they were
invincible, and could continue the work of Jesus.
The mighty energy of His working is seen in the preaching
of Peter on the day of Pentecost. The sermon itself
does not seem to have been very remarkable; indeed,
it is principally composed of testimony backed up
and fortified by Scripture quotations, followed by
exhortation, just as are the sermons that are most
effective to-day in the immediate conversion and
sanctification of men. “True preaching,”
said Horace Bushnell, “is a testimony.”</p>
<p>Peter’s Scripture quotations were apt, fitting
the occasion and the people to whom they were addressed.
The testimony was bold and joyous, the rushing outflow
of a warm, fresh throbbing experience; and the exhortation
was burning, uncompromising in its demands, and yet
tender and full of sympathy and love. But a Divine
Presence was at work in that vast, mocking, wondering
throng, and it was He who made Peter’s simple
words search like fire, and carry such overwhelming
conviction to the hearts of the people.</p>
<p>And it is still so that whenever and wherever a man
preaches “with the Holy Ghost sent down from
Heaven,” there will be conviction.</p>
<p>Under Peter’s sermon “they were pricked
in their hearts.” The truth pierced them as
a sword until they said, “What shall we do?”
They had been doubting and mocking a short time before,
but now they were earnestly inquiring the way to be
saved.</p>
<p>The speech may be without polish, the manner uncouth,
and the matter simple and plain; but conviction will
surely follow any preaching in the burning love and
power and contagious joy of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>A few years ago a poor black boy in Africa, who had
been stolen for a slave, and most cruelly treated,
heard a missionary talking of the indwelling of the
Holy Spirit, and his heart hungered and thirsted for
Him. In a strange manner he worked his way to New
York to find out more about the Holy Spirit, getting
the captain of the ship and several of the crew converted
on the way. The brother in New York to whom he came
took him to a meeting the first night he was in the
city, and left him there, while he went to fulfil
another engagement. When he returned at a late hour,
he found a crowd of men at the penitent-form, led
there by the simple words of this poor black fellow.
He took him to his Sunday-school, and put him up to
speak, while he attended to some other matters. When
he turned from these affairs that had occupied his
attention for only a little while, he found the penitent-form
full of teachers and scholars, weeping before the
Lord. What the black boy had said he did not know;
but he was bowed with wonder and filled with joy,
for it was the power of the Holy Spirit.</p>
<p>Men used to fall as though cut down in battle under
the preaching of Wesley, Whitefield, Finney, and others.
And while there may not be the same physical manifestation
at all times, there will surely be the same opening
of eyes to spiritual things, breaking of hearts, and
piercing of consciences. The Spirit under the preaching
of a man filled with the Holy Ghost will often come
upon a congregation like a wind, and heads will droop,
eyes will brim with tears, and hearts will break under
His convicting power. I remember a proud young woman
who had been mercilessly criticising us for several
nights smitten in this way. She was smiling when suddenly
the Holy Spirit winged a word to her heart, and instantly
her countenance changed, her head drooped, and for
an hour or more she sobbed and struggled while her
proud heart broke, and she found her way with true
repentance and faith to the feet of Jesus, and her
Heavenly Father’s favour. How often have we
seen such sights as this under the preaching of The
General! And it ought to be a common sight under the
preaching of all servants of God, for what are we
sent for but to convict men of their sin and their
need, and by the power of the Spirit to lead them
to the Saviour?</p>
<p>And not only will there be conviction under such preaching,
but generally, if not always, there will be conversion
and sanctification.</p>
<p>Three thousand people accepted Christ under Peter’s
Pentecostal sermon, and later five thousand were converted,
and a multitude of the priests were obedient to the
faith. And it was so under the preaching of Philip
in Samaria, of Peter in Lydda and Saron and in Cæsarea,
and of Paul in Ephesus and other cities.</p>
<p>To be sure, the preaching of Stephen in its immediate
effect only resulted in enraging his hearers until
they stoned him to death; but it is highly probable
that the ultimate result was the conversion of Paul,
who kept the clothes of those who stoned him, and
through Paul the evangelisation of the Gentiles.</p>
<p>One of the greatest of American evangelists sought
with agonising prayers and tears the baptism with
the Holy Spirit, and received it; and then he said
he preached the same sermons; but where before it
had been as one beating the air, now hundreds were
saved.</p>
<p>It is this that has made Salvation Army Officers successful.
Young, inexperienced, without special gifts, and without
learning, but with the baptism, they have been mighty
to win souls. The hardest hearts have been broken,
the darkest minds illuminated, the most stubborn wills
subdued, and the wildest natures tamed by them. Their
words have been with power, and have convicted and
converted and sanctified men, and whole communities
have been transformed by their labours.</p>
<p>But without this Presence great gifts and profound
and accurate learning are without avail in the salvation
of men. We often see men with great natural powers,
splendidly trained, and equipped with everything save
this fiery baptism, and they labour and preach year
after year without seeing a soul saved. They have
spent years in study; but they have not spent a day,
much less ten days, fasting and praying and waiting
upon God for His anointing that should fill them with
heavenly wisdom and power for their work. They are
like a great gun loaded and primed, but without a
spark of fire to turn the powder and ball into a resistless
lightning bolt.</p>
<p>It is fire men need, and that they get from God in
agonising, wrestling, listening prayer that will not
be denied; and when they get it, and not till then,
will they preach with the Holy Ghost sent down from
Heaven, and surely men shall be saved. Such preaching
is not foolish. The Holy Spirit makes the word alive.
He brings it to the remembrance of the preachers in
whom He abides, and He applies it to the heart of
the hearers, lightening up the soul as with a sun
until sin is seen in all its hideousness, or cutting
as a sharp sword, piercing the heart with resistless
conviction of the guilt and shame of sin.</p>
<p>Peter had no time to consult the Scriptures and prepare
a sermon on the morning of Pentecost; but the Holy
Spirit quickened his memory, and brought to his mind
the Scriptures appropriate to the occasion.</p>
<p>Hundreds of years before, the Holy Spirit, by the
mouth of the prophet Joel, had foretold that in the
last days the Spirit should be poured out upon all
flesh, and that their sons and daughters should prophesy.
And the same Spirit that spoke through Joel now made
Peter to see and declare that this Pentecostal baptism
was that of which Joel spoke.</p>
<p>By the mouth of David He had said: “Thou wilt
not leave My soul in hell, neither wilt Thou suffer
Thy Holy One to see corruption”; and now Peter,
by the inspiration of the same Spirit, applies this
Scripture to the resurrection of Jesus, and so proves
to the Jews that the One they had condemned and killed
was the Holy One foretold in prophecy and psalm.</p>
<p>And so to-day the Holy Spirit inspires men who receive
Him to use the Scriptures to awaken, convict, and
save men.</p>
<p>When Finney was a young preacher, he was invited to
a country school-house to preach. On the way there
he became much distressed in soul, and his mind seemed
blank and dark, when all at once this text, spoken
to Lot in Sodom by the angels, came to his mind: “Up,
get you out of this place; for the Lord will destroy
this city.” He explained the text, told the people
about Lot, and the wickedness of Sodom, and applied
it to them. While he spoke they began to look exceedingly
angry, and then, as he earnestly exhorted them to
give up their sins and seek the Lord, they began to
fall from their seats as though stricken down in battle,
and to cry to God for mercy. A great revival followed;
many were converted, and a number of the converts became
ministers of the Gospel.</p>
<p>To Finney’s amazement, he learned afterwards
that the place was called Sodom, because of its extreme
wickedness, and the old man who had invited him to
preach was called Lot, because he was the only God-fearing
man in the place. Evidently the Holy Spirit worked
through Finney to accomplish these results. And such
inspiration is not uncommon with those who are filled
with the Spirit.</p>
<p>But this reinforcement of the mind and memory by the
Holy Spirit does not do away with the need of study.
The Spirit quickens that which is already in the mind
and memory, as the warm sun and rains of spring quicken
the sleeping seeds that are in the ground, and only
those.</p>
<p>The sun does not put the seed in the soil, nor does
the Holy Spirit without our attention and study put
the word of God in our minds. For that we should prayerfully
and patiently study.</p>
<p>“We will give ourselves continually to prayer,
and to the ministry of the word,” said the Apostles.</p>
<p>“Study to show thyself approved of God, a workman
that needeth not to be ashamed; rightly dividing the
word of truth,” wrote Paul to Timothy.</p>
<p>Those men have been best able to rightly divide the
word, and have been most mightily used by the Holy
Spirit, who have most carefully and prayerfully studied
the word of God, and most constantly and lovingly
meditated upon it.</p>
<p>4. This preaching is <i>healing and comforting.</i>
Preaching “with the Holy Ghost sent down from
Heaven” is indescribably searching in its effects.
But it is also edifying, strengthening, comforting
to those who are wholly the Lord’s. It cuts,
but only to cure. It searches, but only to save. It
is constructive, as well as destructive. It tears
down sin and pride and unbelief, but it builds up
faith and righteousness and holiness and all the graces
of a Christian character. It warms the heart with love,
strengthens faith, and confirms the will in all holy
purposes.</p>
<p>Every preacher baptised with the Holy Ghost can say
with Jesus: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon
Me; because the Lord hath anointed Me to preach good
tidings unto the meek; He hath sent Me to bind up
the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and the
day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn.”</p>
<p>Seldom is there a congregation in which there are
only those who need to be convicted. There will also
be meek and gentle ones to whom should be brought
a message of joy and good tidings; broken-hearted
ones to be bound up; wounded ones to heal; tempted
ones to be delivered; and those whom Satan has bound
by some fear or habit to be set free; and the Holy
Spirit who knows all hearts will inspire the word
that shall bless these needy ones.</p>
<p>The preacher filled with the Holy Spirit, who is instant
in prayer, constant in the study of God’s word,
and steadfast and active in faith, will surely be
so helped that he can say with Isaiah: “The
Lord God hath given me the tongue of the learned,
that I should know how to speak a word in season to
him that is weary” (Isaiah i. 4). And as with
little Samuel, the Lord will “let none of his
words fall to the ground” (1 Samuel iii. 19).</p>
<p>He will expect results, and God will make them follow
his preaching as surely as corn follows the planting
and cultivating of the farmer.</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter13"></a>
<h1>XVIII.</h1>
<h2>The Holy Spirit’s Call to the Work</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>“THE Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me; because
the Lord hath anointed Me to preach good tidings unto
the meek; He hath sent Me” (Isaiah lxi. 1),
is the testimony of the workman God sends.</p>
<p>God chooses His own workmen, and it is the office
of the Holy Spirit to call whom He will to preach
the Gospel. I doubt not He calls men to other employments
for His glory, and would still more often do so, if
men would but listen and wait upon Him to know His
will.</p>
<p>He called Bezaleel and Aholiab to build the tabernacle.
He called and commissioned the Gentile king, Cyrus,
to rebuild Jerusalem and restore His chastised and
humbled people to their own land. And did He not call
Joan of Arc to her strange and wonderful mission?
And Washington and Lincoln?</p>
<p>And, no doubt, He <i>leads</i> most men by His providence
to their life-work; but the call to preach the Gospel
is more than a providential leading; it is a distinct
and imperative conviction. Bishop Simpson, in his
“Lectures on Preaching,” says:—­</p>
<p>“Even in its faintest form there is this distinction
between a call to the ministry and a choice of other
professions: a young man may <i>wish</i> to be a physician;
he may <i>desire</i> to enter the navy; he would <i>like</i>
to be a farmer; but he feels he <i>ought</i> to be
a minister. It is this feeling of <i>ought</i>, or
obligation, which in its feeblest form indicates the
Divine call. It is not in the aptitude, taste, or
desire, but in the conscience, that its root is found.
It is the voice of God to the human conscience, saying,
‘You ought to preach.’”</p>
<p>Sometimes the call comes as distinctly as though a
voice had spoken from the skies into the depths of
the heart.</p>
<p>A young man who was studying law was converted. After
a while he was convicted for sanctification, and while
seeking he heard, as it were, a voice, saying, “Will
you devote all your time to the Lord?” He replied:
“I am to be a lawyer, not a preacher, Lord.”
But not until he had said, “Yes, Lord,”
could he find the blessing.</p>
<p>A thoughtless, godless young fellow was working in
the corn-field when a telegram was handed him announcing
the death of his brother, a brilliant and devoted
Salvation Army Field Officer; and there and then,
unsaved as he was, God called him, showed him a vast
Army with ranks broken, where his brother had fallen,
and made him to feel that he should fill the breach
in the ranks. Fourteen months later he took up the
sword, and entered the Fight from the same platform
from which his brother fell, and is to-day one of
our most successful and promising Field Officers.</p>
<p>Again, the call may come as a quiet suggestion, a
gentle conviction, as though a gossamer bridle were
placed upon the heart and conscience to guide the
man into the work of the Lord. The suggestion gradually
becomes clearer, the conviction strengthens until
it masters the man, and if he seeks to escape it,
he finds the silken bridle to be one of stoutest thongs
and firmest steel.</p>
<p>It was so with me. When but a boy of eleven, I heard
a man preaching, and I said to myself, “Oh,
how beautiful to preach!” Two years later I
was converted, and soon the conviction came upon me
that I should preach. Later, I decided to follow another
profession; but the conviction increased in strength,
while I struggled against it, and turned away my ears
and went on with my studies. Yet in every crisis,
or hour of stillness, when my soul faced God, the
conviction that I must preach burned itself deeper
into my conscience. I rebelled against it. I felt I
would almost rather (but not quite) go to Hell than
to submit. Then at last a great “Woe is me,
if I preach not the Gospel,” took possession
of me, and I yielded, and God won. Hallelujah!</p>
<p>The first year He gave me three revivals, with many
souls; and now I would rather preach Jesus to poor
sinners and feed His lambs than to be an archangel
before the Throne. Some day, some day, He will call
me into His blessed presence, and I shall stand before
His face, and praise Him for ever for counting me worthy,
and calling me to preach His glad Gospel, and share
in His joy of saving the lost. The “woe”
is lost in love and delight through the baptism of
the Spirit and the sweet assurance that Jesus is pleased.</p>
<p>Occasionally, the call comes to a man who is ready
and responds promptly and gladly. When Isaiah received
the fiery touch that purged his life and purified
his heart, he “heard the voice of the Lord,
saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?”
And in the joy and power of his new experience, he
cried out, “Here am I; send me!” (Isaiah
vi. 5-8).</p>
<p>When Paul received his call, he says, “Immediately
I conferred not with flesh and blood” (Gal.
i. 16), and he got up and went as the Lord led him.</p>
<p>But more often it seems the Lord finds men preoccupied
with other plans and ambitions, or encompassed with
obstacles and difficulties, or oppressed with a deep
sense of unworthiness or unfitness. Moses argued that
he could not talk. “O Lord!” he said, “I
am not eloquent, neither heretofore nor since Thou
hast spoken unto Thy servant; but I am slow of speech,
and of a slow tongue.”</p>
<p>And then the Lord condescended, as He always does,
to reason with the backward man. “Who hath made
man’s mouth?” He asks, “or who maketh
the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have
not I the Lord? Now, therefore, go, and I will be
with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say”
(Exodus iv. 10-12).</p>
<p>When the call of God came to Jeremiah, he shrank back,
and said, “Ah, Lord God! behold, I cannot speak:
for I am a child.” But the Lord replied, “Say
not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I
shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou
shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces, for I am
with thee to deliver thee” (Jeremiah i. 6-8).</p>
<p>And so the call of God comes to-day to those who shrink
and feel that they are the most unfit, or most hedged
in by insuperable difficulties.</p>
<p>I know a man, who, when converted, could not tell
A from B. He knew nothing whatever about the Bible,
and stammered so badly that, when asked his own name,
it would usually take him a minute or so to tell it;
added to this, he lisped badly, and was subject to
a nervous affliction which seemed likely to unfit him
for any kind of work whatever. But God poured light
and love into his heart, called him to preach, and
to-day he is one of the mightiest soul-winners in
the whole round of my acquaintance. When he speaks
the house is always packed to the doors, and the people
hang on his words with wonder and joy.</p>
<p>He was converted at a Camp meeting, and sanctified
wholly in a cornfield. He learned to read; but, being
too poor to afford a light in the evening, he studied
a large-print Bible by the light of the full moon.
To-day, he has the Bible almost committed to memory,
and when he speaks he does not open the Book, but reads
his lesson from memory, and quotes proof texts from
Genesis to Revelation without mistake, and gives chapter
and verse for every quotation. When he talks his face
shines, and his speech is like honey for sweetness,
and like bullets fired from a gun for power. He is
one of the weak and foolish ones God has chosen to
confound the wise and mighty (1 Cor. i. 27).</p>
<p>If God calls a man, He will so corroborate the call
in some way, that men may know that there is a prophet
among them. It will be with him as it was with Samuel.
“And Samuel grew, and the Lord was with him,
and did let none of His words fall to the ground.
And all Israel, from Dan even to Beersheba, knew that
Samuel was established to be a prophet of the Lord”
(1 Samuel iii. 19, 20).</p>
<p>If the man himself is uncertain about the call, God
will deal patiently with him, as He did with Gideon,
to make him certain. His fleece will be wet with dew
when the earth is dry, or dry when the earth is wet;
or he will hear of some tumbling barley cake smiting
the tents of Midian, that will strengthen his faith,
and make him to know that God is with him (Judges vi.
36-40; vii. 9-15).</p>
<p>If the door is shut and difficulties hedge the way,
God will go before the man He calls, and open the
door and sweep away the difficulties (Isaiah xlv.
2, 3).</p>
<p>If others think the man so ignorant and unfit that
they doubt his call, God will give him such grace
or such power to win souls that they shall have to
acknowledge that God has chosen him. It was in this
way that God made a whole National Headquarters, from
the Commissioner downwards, to know that He had chosen
the elevator boy for His work. The boy got scores
of his passengers on the elevator saved, and then
he was commissioned and sent into the Field to devote
all his time to saving men.</p>
<p>The Lord will surely let the man’s comrades
and brethren know, as surely as He did the Church
at Antioch, when “the Holy Ghost said, Separate
Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have
called them” (Acts xiii. 2).</p>
<p>Sometimes the one who is called will try to hide it
in his heart, and then God stirs up some Officer or
minister, some Soldier or mother in Israel, to lay
a hand on his shoulders, and ask, “Are you not
called to the work?” and he finds he cannot hide
himself nor escape from the call, any more than could
Adam hide himself from God behind the trees of the
garden, or Jonah escape God’s call by taking
ship for Tarshish.</p>
<p>Happy is the man who does not try to escape, but,
though trembling at the mighty responsibility, assumes
it, and, with all humility and faithfulness, sets
to work by prayer and patient, continuous study of
God’s word, to fit himself for God’s work.
He will need to prepare himself, for the call to the
work is also a call to preparation, continuous preparation
of the fullest possible kind.</p>
<p>The man whom God calls cannot safely neglect or despise
the call. He will find his mission on earth, his happiness
and peace, his power and prosperity, his reward in
Heaven, and probably Heaven itself, bound up with
that call and dependent upon it. He may run away from
it, as did Jonah, and find a waiting ship to favour
his flight; but he will also find fierce storms and
bellowing seas overtaking him, and big-mouthed fishes
of trouble and disaster ready to swallow him.</p>
<p>But if he heeds the call, and cheerfully goes where
God appoints, God will go with him; he shall nevermore
be left alone. The Holy Spirit will surely accompany
him, and he may be one of the happiest men on earth,
one of the gladdest creatures in God’s universe.</p>
<p>“Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end
of the world,” said Jesus, as He commissioned
His disciples to go to all nations and preach the
Gospel. “My presence shall go with thee,”
said Jehovah to Moses, when sending him to face Pharaoh
and free Israel, and lead them to the Promised Land.</p>
<p>And to the boy Jeremiah, He said, “Be not afraid
of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee....
And they shall fight against thee; but they shall
not prevail against thee; for I am with thee”
(Jeremiah i. 8, 19).</p>
<p>I used to read these words with a great and rapturous
joy, as I realised by faith that they were also meant
for me, and for every man sent of God, and that His
blessed presence was with me every time I spoke to
the people or dealt with an individual soul, or knelt
in prayer with a penitent seeker after God; and I still
read them so.</p>
<p>Has He called you into the work, my brother? And are
you conscious of His helpful, sympathising, loving
presence with you? If so, let no petty offence, no
hardship, nor danger, nor dread of the future, cause
you to turn aside or draw back. Stick to the work
till He calls you out, and when He so calls you can
go with open face and a heart abounding with love,
joy, and peace, and He will still go with you.</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter19"></a>
<h1>XIX.</h1>
<h2>The Sheathed Sword: A Law of the Spirit</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>Just as the moss and the oak are higher in the order
of creation than the clod of clay and the rock, the
bird and beast than the moss and the oak, the man
than the bird and the beast, so the spiritual man
is a higher being than the natural man. The sons of
God are a new order of being. The Christian is a “new
creation.” Just as there are laws governing
the life of the plant, and other and higher laws that
of the bird and beast, so there are higher laws for
man, and still higher for the Christian. It was with
regard to one of these higher laws that govern the
heavenly life of the Christian that Jesus said to
Peter, “Put up thy sword.”</p>
<p>Jesus said to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of
this world; if My kingdom were of this world, then
would My servants fight.” The natural man is
a fighter. It is the law of his carnal nature. He
fights with fist and sword, tongue and wit. His kingdom
is of this world, and he fights for it with such weapons
as this world furnishes. The Christian is a citizen
of Heaven, and is subject to its law, which is universal,
wholehearted love. In his kingdom he conquers not
by fighting, but by submitting. When an enemy takes
his coat, he overcomes him, not by going to law, but
by generously giving him his cloak also. When his
enemy compels him to go a mile with him, he vanquishes
the enemy by cheerfully going two miles with him.
When he is smitten on one cheek, he wins his foe by
meekly turning the other cheek. This is the law of
the new life from Heaven, and only by recognising and
obeying it can that new life be sustained and passed
on to others. This is the narrow way which leads to
life eternal, “and few there be that find it,”
or, finding it, are willing to walk in it.</p>
<p>A Russian peasant, Sutajeff, could get no help from
the religious teachers of his village, so he learned
to read, and while studying the Bible he found this
narrow way, and walked gladly in it. One night neighbours
of his stole some of his grain, but in their haste
or carelessness they left a bag. He found it, and ran
after them to restore it, “for,” said he,
“fellows who have to steal must be hard up.”
And by this Christlike spirit he saved both himself
and them, for he kept the spirit of love in his own
heart, and they were converted and became his most
ardent disciples.</p>
<p>A beggar woman, to whom he gave lodging, stole the
bedding and ran away with it. She was pursued by the
neighbours, and was just about to be put in prison
when Sutajeff appeared, became her advocate, secured
her acquittal, and gave her food and money for her
journey.</p>
<p>He recognised the law of his new life and gladly obeyed
it, and so was not overcome of evil, but persistently
and triumphantly overcame evil with good (Romans xii.
21).</p>
<p>This is the spirit and method of Jesus; and by men
filled with this spirit and following this method
He will yet win the world.</p>
<p>He came not to be ministered unto, but to minister,
and to give His life a ransom for many. His spirit
is not one of self-seeking, but of self-sacrifice.
Some mysterious majesty of His presence or voice so
awed and overcame His foes that they went back and
fell to the ground before Him in the Garden of His
agony, but He meekly submitted Himself to them; and
when Peter laid to with his sword, and cut off the
ear of the high priest’s servant, Jesus said
to him, “Put up thy sword into the sheath; the
cup which My Father hath given Me, shall I not drink
it?”</p>
<p>This was the spirit of Isaac. When he digged a well,
the Philistines strove with his servants for it; so
he digged another; and when they strove for that,
he removed and digged yet another, “and for
that they strove not: and he called the name of it
Rehoboth” (margin, <i>room</i>): “and he
said, For now the Lord hath made room for us, and
we shall be fruitful in the land.... And the Lord
appeared unto him the same night, and said, I am the
God of Abraham, thy father: fear not, for I am with
thee, and will bless thee, and multiply thy seed”
(Genesis xxvi. 22, 24).</p>
<p>This was the spirit of David, when Saul was hunting
for his life; twice David could have slain him, and
when urged to do so, he said, “As the Lord liveth,
the Lord shall smite him; or his day shall come to
die; or he shall descend into battle and perish. The
Lord forbid that I should stretch forth my hand against
the Lord’s anointed” (1 Samuel xxvi. 10,
11).</p>
<p>This was the spirit of Paul. He says, “Being
reviled, we bless; being persecuted, we suffer it;
being defamed, we intreat” (1 Cor. iv. 12, 13).
“The servant of the Lord must not strive,”
wrote Paul to Timothy, “but be gentle unto all
men.” This is the spirit of our King, this is
the law of His Kingdom.</p>
<p>Is this your spirit? When you are reviled, bemeaned
and slandered, and are tempted to retort, He says
to you, “Put up thy sword into the sheath.”
When you are wronged and illtreated, and men ride
rough-shod over you, and you feel it but just to smite
back, He says, “Put up thy sword into the sheath.”
“Live peaceably with all men.” Your weapons
are not carnal, but spiritual, now that you belong
to Him, and have your citizenship in Heaven. If you
fight with the sword; if you retort and smite back
when you are wronged, you quench the Spirit; you get
out of the narrow way, and your new life from Heaven
will perish.</p>
<p>An Officer went to a hard Corps, and after a while
found that his predecessor was sending back to friends
for money which his own Corps much needed. He felt
it to be an injustice, and, losing sight of the Spirit
of Jesus, he made a complaint about it, and the money
was returned. But he got lean in his soul. He had
quenched the Spirit. He had broken the law of the Kingdom.
He had not only refused to give his cloak, but had
fought for and secured the return of the coat. He
had lost the smile of Jesus, and his poor heart was
sad and heavy within him. He came to me with anxious
inquiry as to what I thought of his action. I had to
admit that the other man had transgressed, and that
the money ought to be returned, but that he should
have been more grieved over the unchristlike spirit
of his brother than over the loss of the five dollars,
and that like Sutajeff he should have said, “Poor
fellow! he must be hard up; I will send him five dollars
myself. He has taken my coat, he shall have my cloak
too.” When I told him that story, he came to
himself very quickly, and was soon back in the narrow
way and rejoicing in the smile of Jesus once again.</p>
<p>“But will not people walk over us, if we do
not stand up for our rights?” you ask. I do
not argue that you are not to stand up for your rights;
but that you are to stand up for your higher rather
than your lower rights, the rights of your heavenly
life rather than your earthly life, and that you are
to stand up for your rights in the way and spirit
of Jesus rather than in the way and spirit of the
world.</p>
<p>If men wrong you intentionally, they wrong themselves
far worse than they wrong you; and if you have the
spirit of Jesus in your heart you will pity them more
than you pity yourself. They nailed Jesus to the cross
and hung Him up to die; they gave Him gall and vinegar
to drink; they cast votes for His seamless robe, and
divided His garments between them, while the crowd
wagged their heads at Him and mocked Him. Great was
the injustice and wrong they were inflicting upon
Him, but He was not filled with anger, only pity.
He thought not of the wrong done Him, but of the wrong
they did themselves, and their sin against His Heavenly
Father, and He prayed not for judgment upon them,
but that they might be forgiven, and He won them,
and is winning and will win the world. Bless God!</p>
<p>“By mercy and truth iniquity is purged,”
wrote Solomon. “Put up thy sword into the sheath,
“and take mercy and truth for your weapons,
and God will be with you and for you, and great shall
be your victory and joy. Hallelujah!</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter20"></a>
<h1>XX.</h1>
<h2>Victory Through the Holy Spirit Over Suffering</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>Had there been no sin our Heavenly Father would have
found other means by which to develop in us passive
virtues, and train us in the graces of meekness, patience,
long-suffering, and forbearance, which so beautify
and display the Christian character. But since sin
is here, with its contradictions and falsehoods, its
darkness, its wars, brutalities and injustices, producing
awful harvests of pain and sorrow, God, in wonderful
wisdom and lovingkindness, turns even these into instruments
by which to fashion in us beautiful graces. Storm
succeeds sunshine, and darkness the light; pain follows
hard on the heels of pleasure, while sorrow peers
over the shoulder of joy; gladness and grief, rest
and toil, peace and war, interminably intermingled,
follow each other in ceaseless succession in this
world. We cannot escape suffering while in the body.
But we can receive it with a faith that robs it of
its terror, and extracts from it richest blessing;
from the flinty rock will gush forth living waters,
and the carcase of the lion will furnish the sweetest
honey.</p>
<p>This is so even when the suffering is a result of
our own folly or sin. It is intended not only in some
measure as a punishment, but also as a teacher, a
corrective, a remedy, a warning; and it will surely
work for good, if, instead of repining and vainly
regretting the past, we steadily look unto Jesus and
learn our lesson in patience and thankfulness.</p>
<p> “If all the skies were sunshine,<br>
Our faces would be fain<br>
To feel once more upon them<br>
The cooling plash of rain.</p>
<p> “If all the world were music,<br>
Our hearts would often long<br>
For one sweet strain of silence<br>
To break the endless song.</p>
<p> “If life were always merry,<br>
Our souls would seek relief<br>
And rest from weary laughter<br>
In the quiet arms of grief.”</p>
<p>Doubtless all our suffering is a result of sin, but
not necessarily the sin of the sufferer. Jesus was
the sinless One, but He was also the Chief of sufferers.
Paul’s great and lifelong sufferings came upon
him, not because of his sins, but rather because he
had forsaken sin, and was following Jesus in a world
of sin, and seeking the salvation of his fellows. In
this path there is no escape from suffering, though
there are hidden and unspeakable consolations. “In
the world ye shall have tribulation,” said Jesus.
“All that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall
suffer persecution,” wrote Paul.</p>
<p>Sooner or later, suffering in some form comes to each
of us. It may come through broken health, or pain
and weariness of body; or through mental anguish,
moral distress, spiritual darkness and uncertainty.
It may come through the loss of loved ones, through
betrayal by trusted friends; or through deferred or
ruined hopes, or base ingratitude; or perhaps in unrequited
toil and sacrifice and ambitions all unfulfilled.
Nothing more clearly distinguishes the man filled
with the Spirit from the man who is not than the way
each receives suffering.</p>
<p>One with triumphant faith and shining face and strong
heart glories in tribulation, and counts it all joy.
To this class belong the Apostles, who, beaten and
threatened, “departed from the council, rejoicing
that they were counted worthy to suffer shame for
His Name” (Acts v. 41).</p>
<p>The other with doubts and fears, murmurs and complains,
and to his other miseries adds that of a rebellious
heart and discontented mind. One sees the enemy’s
armed host, and unmixed distress and danger; the other
sees the angel of the Lord, with abundant succour
and safety (2 Kings vi. 15-17).</p>
<p>An evangelist of my acquaintance told a story that
illustrates this. When a pastor he went one morning
to visit two sisters who were greatly afflicted. They
were about the same age, and had long been professing
Christians and members of the Church. He asked the
first one upon whom he called, “How is it with
you this morning?” “Oh, I have not slept
all night,” she replied. “I have so much
pain. It is so hard to have to lie here. I cannot see
why God deals so with me.” Evidently, she was
not filled with the Spirit, but was in a controversy
with the Lord about her sufferings, and would not
be comforted.</p>
<p>Leaving her he called immediately upon the other sister,
and asked, “How are you to-day?” “Oh,
I had such a night of suffering!” she replied.
“Then,” said he, “there came out
upon her worn face, furrowed and pale, a beautiful
radiance, and she added, “but Jesus was so near
and helped me so, that I could suffer this way and
more, if my Father thinks best”; and on she
went with like words of cheer and triumph that made
the sick room a vestibule of glory. No lack of comfort
in her heart, for the Comforter Himself, the Holy
Spirit, had been invited and had come in. One had
the Comforter in fullness, the other had not.</p>
<p>Probably, no man ever suffered more than Paul, but
with soldier-like fortitude he bore his heavy burdens,
faced his constant and exacting labours, endured his
sore trials, disappointments, and bitter persecutions
by fierce and relentless enemies; he stood unmoved
amid shipwrecks, stripes and imprisonments, cold, hunger,
and homelessness without a whimper that might suggest
repining or discouragement, or an appeal for pity.
Indeed, he went beyond simple uncomplaining fortitude,
and said, “we glory in tribulation” (Romans
v. 3); “I am exceeding joyful in all our tribulation”
(2 Cor. vii. 4); “I take pleasure in infirmities,
in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in
distresses for Christ’s sake” (2 Cor.
xii. 10). After a terrible scourging upon his bare
back, he was thrust into a loathsome inner dungeon,
his feet fast in the stocks, with worse things probably
awaiting him on the morrow. Nevertheless, we find
him and Silas, his companion in suffering, at midnight
praying and singing praises unto God (Acts xvi. 25).</p>
<p>What is his secret? Listen to him: “Because
the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the
Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans v.
5). His prayer for his Ephesian brethren had been
answered in his own heart: “That He would grant
you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened
with might by His Spirit in the inner man; that Christ
may dwell in your hearts by faith.” And this
inner strength and consciousness, through faith, in
an indwelling Christ enabled him to receive suffering
and trial, not stoically as the Red Indian, nor hilariously,
in a spirit of bravado, but cheerfully and with a
thankful heart.</p>
<p>Arnold of Rugby has written something about his “most
dear and blessed sister” that illustrates the
power flowing from exhaustless fountains of inner
joy and strength through the working of the Holy Spirit.
He says:—­</p>
<p>“I never saw a more perfect instance of the
spirit and power of love, and of a sound mind. Her
life was a daily martyrdom for twenty years, during
which she adhered to her early-formed resolution of
never talking about herself; she was thoughtful about
the very pins and ribands of my wife’s dress,
about the making of a doll’s cap for a child—­but
of herself, save only as regarded her ripening in
all goodness, wholly thoughtless, enjoying everything
lovely, graceful, beautiful, high-minded, whether
in God’s works or man’s, with the keenest
relish; inheriting the earth to the very fullness
of the promise, though never leaving her crib, nor
changing her posture; and preserved, through the very
valley of the shadow of death, from all fear or impatience,
and from every cloud of impaired reason, which might
mar the beauty of Christ’s and the Spirit’s
work.”</p>
<p>It is not by hypnotising the soul, nor by blessing
it into a state of ecstatic insensibility, that the
Lord enables the man filled with the Spirit to thus
triumph over suffering. Rather it is by giving the
soul a sweet, constant, and unshaken assurance through
faith: First, that it is freely and fully accepted
in Christ. Second, that whatever suffering comes,
it is measured, weighed, and permitted by love infinitely
tender, and guided by wisdom that cannot err. Third,
that however difficult it may be to explain suffering
now, it is nevertheless <i>one</i> of the “all
things” which “work together for good to
them that love God,” and that in a “little
while” it will not only be swallowed up in the
ineffable blessedness and glory, but that in some way
it is actually helping to work out “a far more
exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor.
iv. 7). Fourth, that though the furnace has been heated
seven times hotter than was wont, yet “the Form...
like unto the Son of God” is walking with us
in the fire; though triumphant enemies have thrust
us into the lions’ den, yet the angel of the
Lord arrived first and locked the lions’ jaws;
though foes may have formed against us sharp weapons,
yet they cannot prosper, for His shield and buckler
defend us; though all things be lost, yet “Thou
remainest”; and though “my flesh and my
heart may fail, God is the strength of my heart and
my portion for ever.”</p>
<p>Not all God’s dear children thus triumph over
their difficulties and sufferings, but this is God’s
standard, and they may attain unto it, if, by faith,
they will open their hearts and “be filled with
the Spirit.”</p>
<p>Here is the testimony of a Salvation Army Officer
up to date:—­</p>
<p>“Viewed from the outside, my life as a sinner
was easy and untroubled, over which most of my friends
expressed envy; while these same friends thought my
life as a Christian full of care, toil, hardship,
and immense loss. This, however, was only an outside
view, and the real state of the case was exactly the
opposite of what they supposed. For in all the pleasure-seeking,
idleness, and freedom from responsibility of my life
apart from God, I carried an immeasurable burden of
fear, anxiety, and constantly recurring disappointment;
trifles weighed upon me, and the thought of death
haunted me with vague terrors.</p>
<p>“But when I gave myself wholly to God, though
my lot became at once one of toil, responsibility,
comparative poverty and sacrifice, yet I could not
feel pain in any storm that broke over my head, because
of the presence of God. It was not so much that I
was insensible to trouble, as sensible of His presence
and love; and the worst trials were as nothing in
my sight, nor have been for over twenty-two years.
While as for death, it appears only as a doorway into
more abundant life, and I can alter an old German
hymn, and sing with joy:</p>
<p> “‘Oh, how my heart with rapture
dances.<br>
To think my dying hour advances!<br>
Then, Lord, with Thee!<br>
My Lord, with Thee!’”</p>
<p>This is faith’s triumph over the worst the world
can offer through the blessed fullness of the indwelling
Comforter. Bless His Name!</p>
<p> “Here speaks the Comforter, Light
of the straying,<br>
Hope of the penitent, Advocate sure,<br>
Joy of the desolate, tenderly saying,<br>
‘Earth has no sorrow My grace
cannot cure.’”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter21"></a>
<h1>XXI.</h1>
<h2>The Overflowing Blessing</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>The children of Israel were instructed by Moses to
give tithes of all they had to the Lord, and in return
God promised to richly bless them, making their fields
and vineyards fruitful and causing their flocks and
herds to safely multiply. But they became covetous
and unbelieving, and began to rob God by withholding
their tithes, and then God began to withhold His blessing
from them.</p>
<p>But still God loved and pitied them, and sent to them
again and again by His prophets; and finally by the
prophet Malachi He said: “Bring ye all the tithes
into the storehouse, that there may be meat in Mine
house, and prove Me now herewith, saith the Lord of
Hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven,
and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not
be room enough to receive it” (Malachi iii.
10).</p>
<p>He promised to make their barns overflow, if they
would be faithful, if they would pay their tithes
and discharge their obligations to Him.</p>
<p>Now, this overflow of barns and granaries is a type
of overflowing hearts and lives when we give ourselves
fully to God, and the blessed Holy Ghost comes in,
and Jesus becomes all and in all to us. The blessing
is too big to contain, but just bursts out and overflows
through the life, the looks, the conversation, the
very tones of the voice, and gladdens and refreshes
and purifies wherever it goes. Jesus calls it “rivers
of living water” (John vii. 38).</p>
<p>There is an overflow of <i>love</i>. Sin brings in
an overflow of hate, so that the world is filled with
wars and murders, slanders, oppression, and selfishness.
But this blessing causes love to overflow. Schools,
colleges, and hospitals are built; shelters, rescue
homes, and orphanages are opened; even war itself
is in some measure humanised by the Red Cross Society
and Christian commissions. Sinners love their own,
but this blessing makes us to love all men—­strangers,
the heathen, and even our enemies.</p>
<p>There is an overflow of <i>peace</i>. It settles old
quarrels and grudges. It makes a different atmosphere
in the home. The children know it when father and
mother get the Comforter. Kindly words and sweet goodwill
take the place of bitterness and strife. I suspect
that even the dumb beasts realise the overflow.</p>
<p>I heard a laughable story of a man whose cow would
switch her tail in his face, and then kick over the
pail when he was milking her, after which he would
always give her a beating with the stool on which
he sat. But he got the blessing, and his heart was
overflowing with peace. The next morning he went to
milk that cow, and when the pail was nearly full,
swish! came the tail in his face, and with a vicious
kick she knocked over the pail, and then ran across
the barn-yard. The blessed man picked up the empty
pail and stool and went over to the cow, which stood
trembling, awaiting the usual kicks and beating; but
instead he patted her gently, and said, “You
may kick over that pail as often as you please, but
I am not going to beat you any more”; and the
cow seemed to understand, for she dropped her head
and quietly began to eat, and never kicked again!
That story is good enough to be true, and I doubt
not it is, for certainly when the Comforter comes
a great peace fills the heart and overflows through
all the life.</p>
<p>There is an overflow of <i>joy</i>. It makes the face
to shine; it glances from the eye, and bubbles out
in thanksgiving and praise. You never can tell when
one who has the blessing will shout out, “Glory
to God! Praise the Lord! Hallelujah! Amen!”</p>
<p>I have sometimes seen a whole congregation wakened
up and refreshed and made glad by the joyous overflow
from one clean-hearted soul. A Salvation Soldier
or Officer with an overflow of genuine joy is worth
a whole company of ordinary folks. He is a host within
himself, and is a living proof of the text, “The
joy of the Lord is your strength.”</p>
<p>There is an overflow of <i>patience</i> and <i>long-suffering.</i>
A man got this blessing, and his wicked wife was so
enraged that she left him, and went across the way
and lived as the wife of his unmarried brother. He
was terribly tempted to take his gun and go over and
kill them both. But he prayed about it, and the Lord
gave him the patience and long-suffering of Jesus,
who bears long with the backslider who leaves Him and
joins himself with the world; and he continued to treat
them with the utmost kindness, as though they had
done him no wrong. Some people might say the man was
weak, but I should say he was unusually “strong
in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and a
neighbour of his told me that all his neighbours believed
in his religion.</p>
<p>There is an overflow of <i>goodness</i> and <i>generosity</i>.
I read the other day of a poor man who supports eight
workers in the foreign mission field. When asked how
he did it, he replied that he wore celluloid collars,
did his own washing, denied himself, and managed his
affairs in order to do it.</p>
<p>Do you ask, “How can I get such a blessing?”
You will get it by bringing in all the tithes, by
giving yourself in love and obedience and wholehearted,
joyous consecration to Jesus, as a true bride gives
herself to her husband. Do not try to bargain with
the Lord and buy it of Him, but wait on Him in never-give-in
prayer and confident expectation, and He will give
it to you. And then you must not hold it selfishly
for your own gratification, but let it overflow to
the hungry, thirsty, fainting world about you. God
bless you even now, and do for you exceeding abundantly
above all you ask or think!</p>
<p>A comrade went from one of my meetings recently with
a heart greatly burdened for the blessing, and for
two or three days and nights did little else but read
the Bible, and pray and cry to God for a clean heart
filled with the Spirit. At last the Comforter came,
and with Him fullness of peace and joy and soul-rest,
and that day this comrade led a number of others into
the blessing. Hallelujah! “If ye then, being
evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more shall your Heavenly Father give the
Holy Spirit to them that ask Him” (Luke xi. 13).
“<i>Ask,... seek,... knock</i>.”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter22"></a>
<h1>XXII.</h1>
<h2>Importance of the Doctrine and Experience of Holiness to Spiritual Leaders</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>A mighty man inspires and trains other men to be mighty.
We wonder and exclaim often at the slaughter of Goliath
by David, and we forget that David was the forerunner
of a race of fearless, invincible warriors and giant-killers.</p>
<p>If we would in this light but study and remember the
story of David’s mighty men, it would be most
instructive to us.</p>
<p>Moses inspired a tribe of cowering, toiling, sweat-begrimed,
spiritless slaves to lift up their heads, straighten
their backs, and throw off the yoke; and he led them
forth with songs of victory and shouts of triumph
from under the mailed hand and iron bondage of Pharaoh.
He fired them with a national spirit, and welded and
organised them into a distinct and compact people that
could be hurled with resistless power against the walled
cities and trained warriors of Canaan.</p>
<p>But what was the secret of David and Moses? Whence
the superiority of these men? David was only a stripling
shepherd-boy when he immortalised himself. What was
his secret? To be sure, Moses was “instructed
in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” and, doubtless,
had been trained in all the civil, military, and scientific
learning of his day, but he was so weak in himself
that he feared and fled at the first word of questioning
and disparagement that he heard (Exodus ii. 14), and
spent the next forty years feeding sheep for another
man in the rugged wilderness of Sinai. What, then,
was his secret?</p>
<p>Doubtless, they were men cast in a kinglier mould
than most men; but their secret was not in themselves.</p>
<p>Joseph Parker declared that great lives are built
on great promises, and so they are. These men had
so far humbled themselves that they found God. They
got close to Him, and He spoke to them. He gave them
promises. He revealed His way and truth to them, and
trusting Him, believing His promises, and fashioning
their lives according to His truth—­His doctrine—­
everything else followed. They became “workers
together with God,” heroes of faith, leaders
of men, builders of empire, teachers of the race,
and, in an important sense, saviours of mankind.</p>
<p>Their secret is an open one; it is the secret of every
truly successful spiritual leader from then till now,
and there is no other way to success in spiritual
leadership.</p>
<p>1. They had an <i>experience</i>. They <i>knew God</i>.</p>
<p>2. This experience, this acquaintance with God, was
<i>maintained</i> and deepened and broadened in obedience
to God’s teaching, or truth, or doctrine.</p>
<p>3. They patiently yet urgently <i>taught others</i>
what they themselves had learned, and declared, so
far as they saw it, the whole counsel of God.</p>
<p>They were abreast of the deepest experiences and fullest
revelations God had yet made to men. They were leaders,
not laggards. They were not in the rear of the procession
of God’s warriors and saints; they were in the
forefront.</p>
<p>Here we discover the importance of the doctrine and
experience of holiness through the baptism of the
Holy Spirit to Salvation Army leaders. We are to know
God and glorify Him and reveal Him to men. We are
to finish the work of Jesus, and “fill up that
which is behind of the sufferings of Christ”
(Col. i. 24). We are to rescue the slaves of sin,
to make a people, to fashion them into a holy nation,
and inspire and lead them forth to save the world.
How can we do this? Only by being in the forefront
of God’s spiritual hosts; not in name and in
titles only, but in reality; by being in glad possession
of the deepest experiences God gives, and the fullest
revelations He makes to men.</p>
<p>The astonishing military and naval successes of the
Japanese are said to be due to their profound study,
clear understanding, and firm grasp of the theory,
the principles, the doctrines of war; their careful
and minute preparation of every detail of their campaigns;
the scientific accuracy and precision with which they
carry out all their plans, and their splendid and utter
personal devotion to their cause.</p>
<p>Our war is far more complex and desperate than theirs,
and its issues are infinitely more far-reaching, and
we must equip ourselves for it; and nothing is so
vital to our cause as a mastery of the doctrine and
an assured and joyous possession of the Pentecostal
experience of holiness through the indwelling Spirit.</p>
<p>I. <i>The Doctrine.</i>—­What is the teaching
of God’s word about holiness?</p>
<p>1. If we carefully study God’s word, we find
that He wants His people to be holy, and the making
of a holy people, after the pattern of Jesus, is the
crowning work of the Holy Spirit. He commands us to
“cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the
flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of
the Lord” (2 Cor. vii. 1). It is prayed that
we may “increase and abound in love one toward
another, and toward all men... to the end He may stablish
your hearts unblameable in holiness before God”
(1 Thess. iii. 12, 13). He says: “As He which
hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner
of conversation; because it is written, Be ye holy,
for I am holy” (1 Peter i. 15, 16). And in the
most earnest manner we are exhorted to “follow
peace with all men, and holiness, without which no
man shall see the Lord” (Hebrews xii. 14).</p>
<p>2. As we further study the word, we discover that
holiness is more than simple freedom from condemnation
for wrong-doing. A helpless invalid lying on his bed
of sickness, unable to do anything wrong, may be free
from the condemnation of actual wrong-doing, and yet
it may be in his heart to do all manner of evil. Holiness
on its negative side is a state of heart purity; it
is heart cleanness—­cleanness of thought
and temper and disposition, cleanness of intention
and purpose and wish; it is a state of freedom from
all sin, both inward and outward (Romans vi. 18).
On the positive side it is a state of union with God
in Christ, in which the whole man becomes a temple
of God and filled with the fruit of the Spirit, which
is “love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness,
goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.” It is
moral and spiritual sympathy and harmony with God in
the holiness of His nature.</p>
<p>We must not, however, confound purity with maturity.
Purity is a matter of the heart, and is secured by
an instantaneous act of the Holy Spirit; maturity
is largely a matter of the head and results from growth
in knowledge and experience. In one, the heart is
made clean, and is filled with love; in the other,
the head is gradually corrected and filled with light,
and so the heart is enlarged and more firmly established
in faith; consequently, the experience deepens and
becomes stronger and more robust in every way. It
is for this reason that we need teachers after we
are sanctified, and to this end we are exhorted to
humbleness of mind.</p>
<p>Importance of the Doctrine.</p>
<p>With a heart full of sympathy and love for his father
my little boy may voluntarily go into the garden to
weed the vegetables; but, being yet ignorant, lacking
light in his head, he pulls up my sweet corn with
the grass and weeds. His little heart glows with pleasure
and pride in the thought that he is “helping
papa,” and yet he is doing the very thing I
don’t want him to do. But if I am a wise and
patient father, I shall be pleased with him; for what
is the loss of my few stalks of corn compared to the
expression and development of his love and loyalty?
And I shall commend him for the love and faithful
purpose of his little heart, while I patiently set
to work to enlighten the darkness of his little head.
His heart is pure toward his father, but he is not
yet mature. In this matter of light and maturity holy
people often widely differ, and this causes much perplexity
and needless and unwise anxiety. In the fourteenth
chapter of Romans, Paul discusses and illustrates
the principle underlying this distinction between
purity and maturity.</p>
<p>3. As we continue to study the word under the illumination
of the Spirit, who is given to lead us into all truth,
we further learn that holiness is not a state which
we reach in conversion. The Apostles were converted,
they had forsaken all to follow Jesus (Matthew xix.
27-29), their names were written in Heaven (Luke x.
20), and yet they were not holy. They doubted and feared,
and again and again were they rebuked for the slowness
and littleness of their faith. They were bigoted,
and wanted to call down fire from Heaven to consume
those who would not receive Jesus (Luke ix. 51-56);
they were frequently contending among themselves as
to which should be the greatest, and when the supreme
test came they all forsook Him and fled. Certainly,
they were not only afflicted with darkness in their
heads, but, far worse, carnality in their hearts;
they were His, and they were very dear to Him, but
they were not yet holy, they were yet impure of heart.</p>
<p>Paul makes this point very clear in his Epistle to
the Corinthians. He tells them plainly that they were
yet only babes in Christ, because they were carnal
and contentious (I Cor. iii. I). They were in Christ,
they had been converted, but they were not holy.</p>
<p>It is of great importance that we keep this truth
well in mind that men may be truly converted, may
be babes in Christ, and yet not be pure in heart;
we shall then sympathise more fully with them, and
see the more clearly how to help them and guide their
feet into the way of holiness and peace.</p>
<p>Those who hold that we are sanctified wholly in conversion
will meet with much to perplex them in their converts,
and are not intelligently equipped to bless and help
God’s little children.</p>
<p>4. A continued study of God’s teaching on this
subject will clearly reveal to us that purity of heart
is obtained after we are converted. Peter makes this
very plain in his address to the Council in Jersualem,
where he recounts the outpouring of the Holy Spirit
upon Cornelius and his household. After mentioning
the gift of the Holy Ghost, he adds, “and put
no difference between us and them, purifying their
hearts by faith” (Acts xv. 9). Among other things,
then, the baptism of the Holy Ghost purifies the heart;
but the disciples were converted before they received
this Pentecostal experience, so we see that heart
purity, or holiness, is a work wrought in us after
conversion.</p>
<p>Again, we notice that Peter says, “purifying
their hearts by faith.” If it is by faith, then
it is not by growth, nor by works, nor by death, nor
by purgatory after death. It is God’s work.
He purifies the heart, and He does it for those, and
only those who, devoting all their possessions and
powers to Him, seek Him by simple, prayerful, obedient,
expectant, unwavering faith through His Son our Saviour.</p>
<p>Unless we grasp these truths, and hold them firmly,
we shall not be able to “rightly divide the
word of truth,” we shall hardly be “workmen
that need not be ashamed, approved unto God”
(2 Tim. ii. 15). Some one has written that “the
searcher in science knows that if he but stumble in
his hypothesis—­that if he but let himself
be betrayed into prejudice or undue leaning toward
a pet theory, or anything but absolute uprightness
of mind—­his whole work will be stultified
and he will fail ignominiously. To get anywhere in
science he must follow truth with absolute rectitude.”</p>
<p>THE HOLY SPIRIT.</p>
<p>And is there not a science of salvation, of holiness,
of eternal life, that requires the same absolute loyalty
to “the Spirit of Truth”? How infinitely
important, then, that we know what that truth is,
that we may understand and hold that doctrine.</p>
<p>A friend of mine who finished his course with joy,
and was called into the presence of his Lord to receive
his crown some time ago, has pointed out some mistakes
which we must carefully avoid. Here they are:—­</p>
<p>“It is a great mistake to substitute repentance
for Bible consecration. The people whom Paul exhorted
to full sanctification were those who had turned from
their idols to serve the living and true God, and
to wait for His Son sent down from Heaven (I Thess.
i. 9, 10; iii. 10-13; v. 23).</p>
<p>“Only people who are citizens of His kingdom
can claim His sanctifying power. Those who still have
idols to renounce may be candidates for conversion,
but not for the baptism with the Holy Ghost and fire.</p>
<p>“It is a mistake in consecration to suppose
that the person making it has anything of his own
to give. We are not our own, but we are bought with
a price, and consecration is simply taking our hands
off from God’s property. To wilfully withhold
anything from God is to be a God-robber.</p>
<p>“It is a mistake to substitute a mere mental
assent to God’s proprietorship and right to
all we have, while withholding complete devotion to
Him. This is theoretical consecration—­a
rock on which we fear multitudes are being wrecked.
Consecration which does not embrace the crucifixion
of self and the funeral of all false ambitions is
not the kind which will bring the Holy Fire. A consecration
is imperfect which does not embrace the speaking faculty”
(the tongue), “and the believing faculty”
(the heart), “the imagination, and every power
of mind, soul, and body, and give all absolutely and
for ever into the hands of Jesus, turning a deaf ear
to every opposing voice.</p>
<p>“Reader, have you made such a consecration as
this? It must embrace all this, or it will prove a
bed of quicksand to sink your soul, instead of a full
salvation balloon, which will safely bear you above
the fog and malaria and turmoil of the world, where
you can triumphantly sing:</p>
<p> “’I rise to float in realms
of light,<br>
Above the world and
sin.<br>
With heart made pure and garments
white,<br>
And Christ enthroned
within.’</p>
<p>“It is a mistake to teach seekers to ‘only
believe,’ without complete abandonment to God
at every point, for they can no more do it than an
anchored ship can sail.</p>
<p>“It is a mistake to substitute mere verbal assent
for obedient trust. ‘Only believe’ is
a fatal snare to all who fall into these traps.</p>
<p>“It is a mistake to believe that the altar sanctifies
the gift without the assurance that all is on the
altar. If even the end of your tongue, or one cent
of your money, or a straw’s weight of false
ambition, or spirit of dictation, or one ounce of your
reputation, or will, or believing powers be left off
the altar, you can no more believe than a bird without
wings can fly.</p>
<p>“‘Only believe’ is only for those
seekers of holiness who are truly converted, fully
consecrated, and crucified to everything but the whole
will of God. Teachers who apply this to people who
have not yet reached these stations need themselves
to be taught. All who have reached them may believe,
and if they do believe, may look God in the face,
and triumphantly sing:</p>
<p> “’The blood, the blood is
all my plea,<br>
Hallelujah, for it cleanseth me.’”</p>
<p>II. <i>The Experience</i>.—­Simply to be
skilled in the doctrine is not sufficient for us as
leaders. We may be as orthodox as St. Paul himself,
and yet be only as “sounding brass and clanging
cymbals,” unless we are rooted in the blessed
experience of holiness. If we would save ourselves
and them that follow us, if we would make havoc of
the Devil’s kingdom and build up God’s
kingdom, we must not only know and preach the truth,
but we must be living examples of the saving and sanctifying
power of the truth. We are to be “living epistles,
known and read of all men”; we must be able
to say with Paul, “follow me as I follow Christ”;
and “those things which ye learned and received
and heard and saw in me, do; and the God of peace
shall be with you.”</p>
<p>We must not forget that—­</p>
<p>1. We are ourselves simple Christians, individual
souls struggling for eternal life and liberty, and
we must by all means save ourselves. To this end we
must be holy, else we shall at last experience the
awful woe of those who, having preached to others,
are yet themselves castaways.</p>
<p>2. We are leaders upon whom multitudes depend. It
is a joy and an honour to be a leader, but it is also
a grave responsibility. James says: “We shall
receive the heavier judgment” (James iii. i,
R.V.). How unspeakable shall be our blessedness, and
how vast our reward, if, wise in the doctrine, and
rich and strong and clean in the experience of holiness,
we lead our people into their full heritage in Jesus!
But how terrible shall be our condemnation, and how
great our loss, if, in spiritual slothfulness and
unbelief, we stop short of the experience ourselves
and leave them to perish for want of the gushing waters
and heavenly food and Divine direction we should have
brought them! We need the experience for ourselves,
and we need it for our work and for our people.</p>
<p>What the roof is to a house, that the doctrine is
to our system of truth. It completes it. What sound
and robust health is to our bodies, that the experience
is to our souls. It makes us every whit whole, and
fits us for all duty. Sweep away the doctrine, and
the experience will soon be lost. Lose the experience,
and the doctrine will surely be neglected, if not
attacked and denied. No man can have the heart, even
if he has the head, to fully and faithfully and constantly
preach the doctrine unless he has the experience.</p>
<p>Spiritual things are spiritually discerned, and as
this doctrine deals with the deepest things of the
Spirit, it is only clearly understood and is best
recommended, explained, defended, and enforced by
those who have the experience.</p>
<p>Without the experience, the presentation of the doctrine
will be faulty and cold and lifeless, or weak and
vacillating, or harsh and sharp and severe. With the
experience, the preaching of the doctrine will be
with great joy and assurance, and will be strong and
searching, but at the same time warm and persuasive
and tender.</p>
<p>I shall never forget the shock of mingled surprise
and amusement and grief with which I heard a Captain
loudly announce in one of my meetings many years ago
that he was “going to preach holiness now,”
and his people “have to get it,” if he
had to “ram it down their throats.” Poor
fellow! He did not possess the experience himself,
and never pressed into it and soon forsook his people.</p>
<p>A man in the clear experience of the blessing will
never think of “ramming” it down people;
but will, with much secret prayer, constant meditation
and study, patient instruction, faithful warning,
loving persuasion, and burning, joyful testimony, seek
to lead them into that entire and glad consecration
and that fullness of faith that never fail to receive
the blessing.</p>
<p>Again, the most accurate and complete knowledge of
the doctrine, and the fullest possession of the experience,
will fail us at last unless we carefully guard ourselves
at several points, and unless we watch and pray.</p>
<p>3. We must not judge ourselves so much by our feelings
as by our volitions. It is not my feelings, but the
purpose of my heart, the attitude of my will, that
God looks at, and it is that to which I must look.
“If our heart condemns us not, then have we
confidence toward God.” A friend of mine who
had firmly grasped this thought, and walked continually
with God, used to testify: “I am just as good
when I don’t feel good as when I do feel good.”
Another mighty man of God said that all the feeling
he needed to enable him to trust God was the consciousness
that he was fully submitted to all the known will
of God.</p>
<p>We must not forget that the Devil is “the accuser
of the brethren” (Rev. xii. 10), and that he
seeks to turn our eyes away from Jesus, who is our
Surety and our Advocate, to ourselves, our feelings,
our infirmities, our failures; and if he succeeds in
this, gloom will fill us, doubts and fears will spring
up within us, and we shall soon fail and fall. We
must be wise as the conies, and build our nest in
the cleft of the Rock of Ages. Hallelujah!</p>
<p>4. We must not divorce conduct from character, or
works from faith. Our lives must square with our teaching.
We must live what we preach. We must not suppose that
faith in Jesus excuses us from patient, faithful,
laborious service. We must “live by every word
that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”; that
is, we must fashion our lives, our conduct, our conversation
by the principles laid down in His word, remembering
His searching saying, “Not every one that saith
unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom
of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of My Father
which is in Heaven.”</p>
<p>This subject of faith and works is very fully discussed
by James (chap. ii. 14-26), and Paul is very clear
in his teaching that, while God saves us not by our
works, but by His mercy through faith, yet it is that
we may “maintain good work” (Titus iii.
14); and “we are His workmanship, created in
Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before
ordained that we should walk in them” (Eph.
ii. 8-10).</p>
<p>Faith must “work by love,” and emotion
must be transmitted into action, and joy must lead
to work, and love to faithful, self-sacrificing service,
else they become a kind of pleasant and respectable,
but none the less deadly, debauchery, and at last
ruin us.</p>
<p>5. However blessed and satisfactory our present experience
may be, we must not rest in it, but remember that
our Lord has yet many things to say unto us, as we
are able to receive them. We must stir up the gift
of God that is in us, and say with Paul, “One
thing I do, forgetting the things which are behind,
and stretching forward” (as a racer) “to
the things which are before, I press on toward the
goal unto the prize of the high calling of God in
Christ Jesus” (Phil. iii. 13, 14, R.V.). It is
at this point that many fail. They seek the Lord,
they weep and struggle and pray, and then they believe;
but, instead of pressing on, they sit down to enjoy
the blessing, and, lo! it is not. The children of
Israel must needs follow the pillar of cloud and fire.
It made no difference when it moved—­by day
or by night, they followed; and when the Comforter
comes we must follow, if we would abide in Him and
be filled with all the fullness of God. And, Oh, the
joy of following Him!</p>
<p>Finally, if we have the blessing—­not the
harsh, narrow, unprogressive exclusiveness which often
calls itself by the sweet, heavenly term of holiness,
but the vigorous, courageous, self-sacrificing, tender,
Pentecostal experience of perfect love —­we
shall both save ourselves and enlighten the world,
our converts will be strong, our Candidates for the
work will multiply, and will be able, dare-devil men
and women, and our people will come to be like the
brethren of Gideon, of whom it was said, “Each
one resembled the children of a king.”</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?”</p>
<a name="chapter23"></a>
<h1>XXIII.</h1>
<h2>Victory Over Evil Temper by the Power of the Holy Spirit</h2>
<p align="center">“Ye shall receive power after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you.”</p>
<p>Two letters recently reached me, one from Oregon,
and one from Massachusetts, inquiring if I thought
it possible to have temper destroyed. The comrade
from Oregon wrote: “I have been wondering if
the statement is correct when one says, ’My temper
is all taken away.’ Do you think the temper
is destroyed or sanctified? It seems to me that if
one’s temper were actually gone he would not
be good for anything.”</p>
<p>The comrade from Massachusetts wrote: “Two of
our Corps Cadets have had the question put to them:
’Is it possible to have all temper taken out
of our hearts?’ One claims it is possible. The
other holds that the temper is not taken out, but God
gives power to overcome it.”</p>
<p>Evidently these are questions that perplex many people,
and yet the answer seems to me simple.</p>
<p>Temper, <i>as usually spoken of</i>, is not a faculty
or power of the soul, but is rather an irregular,
passionate, violent expression of selfishness. When
selfishness is destroyed by love, by the incoming
of the Holy Spirit, revealing Jesus to us as an uttermost
Saviour, and creating within us a clean heart, of
course such evil temper is gone, just as the friction
and consequent wear and heat of two wheels is gone
when the cogs are perfectly adjusted to each other.
The wheels are far better off without friction, and
just so man is far better off without such temper.</p>
<p>We do not destroy the wheels to get rid of the friction,
but we readjust them; that is, we put them into just
or right relations to each other, and then noiselessly
and perfectly they do their work. So, strictly speaking,
sanctification does not destroy self, but it destroys
selfishness—­the abnormal and mean and dis-ordered
manifestation and assertion of self. I myself am to
be sanctified, rectified, purified, brought into harmony
with God’s will as revealed in His word, and
united to Him in Jesus, so that His life of holiness
and love flows continually through all the avenues
of my being, as the sap of the vine flows through all
parts of the branch. “I am the Vine, ye are the
branches,” said Jesus.</p>
<p>When a man is thus filled with the Holy Spirit he
is not made into a putty man, a jelly fish, with all
powers of resistance taken out of him; he does not
have any less force and “push” and “go”
than before, but rather more, for all his natural energy
is now reinforced by the Holy Spirit, and turned into
channels of love and peace instead of hate and strife.</p>
<p>He may still feel indignation in the presence of wrong,
but it will not be rash, violent, explosive, and selfish,
as before he was sanctified, but calm and orderly,
and holy, and determined, like that of God. It will
be the wholesome, natural antagonism of holiness and
righteousness to all unrighteousness and evil.</p>
<p>Such a man will feel it when he is wronged, but it
will be much in the same way that he feels when others
are wronged. The personal, selfish element will be
absent. At the same time there will be pity and compassion
and yearning love for the wrong-doer and a greater
desire to see him saved than to see him punished.</p>
<p>A sanctified man was walking down the street the other
day with his wife, when a filthy fellow on a passing
wagon insulted her with foul words. Instantly the
temptation came to the man to want to get hold of
him and punish him, but as instantly the indwelling
Comforter whispered, “If ye will forgive men
their trespasses;” and instantly the clean heart
of the man responded, “I will, I do forgive
him, Lord;” and instead of anger a great love
filled his soul, and instead of hurling a brick or
hot words at the poor Devil-deceived sinner, he sent
a prayer to God in Heaven for him. There was no friction
in his soul. He was perfectly adjusted to his Lord;
his heart was perfectly responsive to his Master’s
word, and he could rightly say, “My temper is
gone.”</p>
<p>A man must have his spiritual eyes wide open to discern
the difference between sinful temper and righteous
indignation.</p>
<p>Many a man wrongs and robs himself by calling his
fits of temper “righteous indignation;”
while, on the other hand, there is here and there
a timid soul who is so afraid of sinning through temper
as to suppress the wholesome antagonism that righteousness,
to be healthy and perfect, must express towards all
unrighteousness and sin.</p>
<p>It takes the keen-edged word of God, applied by the
Holy Spirit, to cut away unholy temper without destroying
righteous antagonism; to enable a man to hate and
fight sin with spiritual weapons (2 Cor. x. 3-5),
while pitying and loving the sinner; to so fill him
with the mind of Jesus that he will feel as badly over
a wrong done to a stranger as though it were done
to himself; to help him to put away the personal feeling
and be as calm and unselfish and judicial in opposing
wrong as is the judge upon the bench. Into this state
of heart and mind is one brought who is entirely sanctified
by the indwelling Holy Spirit. Hallelujah!</p>
<p>Dr. Asa Mahan, the friend and co-worker of Finney,
had a quick and violent temper in his youth and young
manhood; but one day he believed, and God sanctified
him, and for fifty years he said he never felt but
one uprising of temper, and that was but for an instant,
about five years after he received the blessing. For
the following forty-five years, though subjected to
many trials and provocations, he felt only love and
peace and patience and good-will in his heart.</p>
<p>A Christian woman was confined to her bed for years
with nervous and other troubles, and was very cross
and touchy and petulant. At last she became convinced
that the Lord had a better experience for her, and
she began to pray for a clean heart full of patient,
holy, humble love; and she prayed so earnestly, so
violently, that her family became alarmed lest she
should wear her poor, frail body out in her struggle
for spiritual freedom. But she told them she was determined
to have the blessing, if it cost her her life, and
so she continued to pray, until one glad, sweet day
the Comforter came; her heart was purified, and from
that day forth, in spite of the fact that she was still
a nervous invalid, suffering constant pain, she never
showed the least sign of temper or impatience, but
was full of meekness, and patient, joyous thankfulness.</p>
<p> “Love took up the harp of life,
and smote on all<br>
the chords with might—­<br>
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling,
passed in<br>
music out of sight.”</p>
<p>Such is the experience of one in whom Jesus lives
without a rival, and in whom grace has wrought its
perfect work.</p>
<p>“No form of vice, not worldliness, not greed
of gold, not drunkenness itself, does more to un-Christianise
society than evil temper,” says a distinguished
and thoughtful writer.</p>
<p>If this be true, it must be God’s will that
we be saved from it. And it is provided for in the
uttermost salvation that Jesus offers.</p>
<p>Do you want this blessing, my brother, my sister?
If so, be sure of this: God has not begotten such
a desire in your heart to mock you; you may have it.
God is able to do even this for you. With man it is
impossible, but not with God. Look at Him just now
for it. It is His work, His gift. Look at your past
failures, and acknowledge them; look at your present
and future difficulties, count them up and face them
every one, and admit that they are more than you can
hope to conquer; but then look at the dying Son of
God, your Saviour—­the Man with the seamless
robe, the crown of thorns, and the nail-prints; look
at the fountain of His Blood; look at His word; look
at the Almighty Holy Ghost, who will dwell within
you, if you but trust and obey, and cry out: “It
shall be done! The mountain shall become a plain; the
impossible shall become possible. Hallelujah!”
Quietly, intelligently, abandon yourself to the Holy
Spirit just now in simple, glad, obedient faith, and
the blessing shall be yours. Glory to God!</p>
<p class="smallcaps">“Have ye received the Holy Ghost since ye believed?</p>
<pre>
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