the heart! And when they do, how often the heart is betrayed by the voice that comes to the ear! In the day of Israel's desolation, when her privileges were taken away, and the darkness of despair had settled upon her spirit, the cry of the prophet was for a voice from God to her heart. The answer to that prayer is the gift of the Holy Spirit speaking in your heart and mine in the hour of temptation and sorrow, when the world wearies our ear with its confusion of voices, its warring of philosophies and creeds and guesses, until one knows not what to believe. It is the Spirit who comes in such hours to witness with our spirits that we are children of God. Jesus himself draws near, and the humble, penitent soul finds himself safe in the Father's love. He first moves us to say, "I will arise and go to my Father;" then he gives to us the assurance that we are received.1 The Spirit also convinces the world that the faith of the believer is genuine. This is the great, completing work of the Spirit. He brings the sinner into acceptance with God, and then uses his testimony for the winning of the world. What more amazing, what more irrational than that a few Galilæan peasants should be set to the task of propagating a faith that was to turn the world upside down! Yet the world 1 See Note 4. flocked to baptism. Why? Because the Holy Spirit wrought in those humble men to speak the things that they knew of Christ, and to live lives like Christ's. "We do not speak great things, but we live them," was the noble boast of the early bishop. This was the testimony that could not be gainsaid. What is it that draws men to Christ to-day? Not our noble buildings, nor our beautiful music, nor the splendor of our ritual, nor the greatness of the Christian Church in its organized life, its charities or its missions. These are not what turn men from sin to righteousness. Rather it is the conviction that the men and women with whom they come in contact have a different spirit and are living a different life from themselves. "It is not your preaching nor anything you have said to me," answered a distinguished judge who, in a little New England town, offered himself as a candidate for admission to the church, "that has brought me to this, sweeping away my lifelong infidelity. It was simply the life of my neighbor. Deacon "If only such a saintly man as that can go to heaven, there is no hope for me," cried a business. man, convicted of the Spirit, after having spent an evening by chance in an inn with the saintly Archbishop Leighton. "Mamma, I know the teacher I have now in Sun day-school is a Christian," said a little girl to her mother. "Why, my dear?" "Because I see it in her face." "He shall not speak from himself," was the declaration. The Holy Spirit takes the witness of the true believer and stamps it upon the heart of the infidel, of the man of the world, of the child. We believers have covenanted with God that we will witness to Christ. We will be the open channels through which the Holy Spirit may take the things of Jesus to those about us who do not know him—the husband, the wife, the child, the friend. That means that we will be very watchful of our temper, very watchful of our faultfinding, of our captiousness, of our selfishness, of our doings in business, of our social habits, of our pride, lest all unconsciously we depart from Jesus Christ, and grieve and quench the Holy Spirit, lest all unconsciously but effectively we resist his holy impulses to bend us to his will. We have covenanted to live so that the Holy Ghost can witness to the world of the truth of the incarnation of the Son of God, of his atoning sacrifice, and of his blessed ministry to the sick and the suffering, the profligate, the outcast and the leper; that men may know that he is able to save unto the uttermost. Through us men are to know the meaning of his sacrificial death, of his opening for them the kingdom of heaven in his resurrection, of the certainty of his coming again with the blessed dead, and of his final triumph. All this is the work of the Holy Spirit, first in the heart of the believer, and then through him in the world. "I believe in the Holy Ghost." Apart from him there is no Christianity, for there is no Christ. Well may we say with the apostle: "For as many as are led by the spirit of God, these [and these only] are sons of God."1 1 See Note 5. |