Stockwell Orphanage. Statement of Receipts from April 19th, to May 19th, 1871. Presents for the Orphanage.-One Sack of Flour, Mr. Russell; One Load of Firewood, J. K.; One Hundred Pairs of Socks, Miss Sanderson; One Box of Eggs, Mr. Potier; A Quantity of Rhubarb, Mr. Murrell, THE SWORD AND THE TROWEL. JULY 1, 1871. The Personality, Deity, and Proper Honour of the Holy Ghost. A PAPER READ AT THE COLLEGE CONFERENCE, 1871. BY PASTOR W. ANDERSON, OF WARKWORTH, NORTHUMBERLAND. T is with diffidence I attempt the treatment of a subject so recondite and vast in an assembly like the present. Perhaps the proper place for ministerial youth with regard to this theme would be, the feet of "such an one as Paul the aged." The temerity and superficiality inseparable from the thinkings of the immature, are far from being helps in dispelling the darkness which envelops the constitution of the Deity. Whilst candidly confessing this, allow us to remind you that, were we to delay the discussion of the Deity until we could adequately do so, our pen would remain for ever still and our lips for ever silent. Nor need the attempt of the inexperienced to gain and systematise a knowledge of God provoke censure; for as naturally as the flower bursts its bud to look upon the sun, the stream gushes to its ocean home, and the child turns his first filial feeling parent ward, so natural is it for the renewed heart to seek after God; and provided it pursues its investigation reverently and inductively, the blessing of the pure in heart shall rest upon it. On the threshold of this theme we are met by the enquiry, What are the means and light placed within our reach for understanding the Godhead? To this we know of many, but can give only one satisfactory answer-the inspired Word of God. We are not, we hope, entirely unacquainted with the broken tones which rise from the deep of our sublime, though fallen nature, and which rightly interpreted are cries after the Infinite. We have marked the efforts of Reason, in what is commonly called the field of natural theology, endeavouring, by a priori and a posteriori processes, to build an intellectual Babel, and thus form a view-point of God. We have pondered heart intuition, dwarfed and deadened by sin, or fostered and cultured by virtue, in its earnest but blind strivings after its Fount and Author; or, to pass from the abstract to the concrete, we have seen men receiving earth's dainties only to find them unsatisfying husks, pursuing pleasures only to meet bitter disappointment, as the hot hand grasps these sparkling dew-drops; and we have thought that from needs too vast for the universe to satisfy, we could form a faint guess of God. We have looked upon those whose ear has heard the calls of Conscience, and whose feet have tremblingly trodden the dimly-lighted path of virtue, and as we have listened to their plaintive prayer, "Give us light, and let us die," we have said, "Faint these sparks, but born to die; yet in their effort to fly upward, do they not tell of a central and undying sun?" Thus Reason, Intuition, the needs of the sinning, and the ideals of the virtuous for ages in classic heathendom, sought after God, finally resulting in the practical polytheism of the masses, the satiric scepticism of the many, and the vague theorisings of the noble few. Turning from these nearly effaced heart-hieroglyphics, to a land some three hundred by two hundred miles, we find God for fifteen centuries giving a gradual apocalypse of himself. As in the Mosaic account of the creation, we are told, the work of the fourth day was, to centre in two ruling orbs the formerly existing light so the sixty-six revelation fragments are now centred in the Old and New Testaments-the concentrated light of a thus completed Bible falling full upon the Deity. If, however, we conclude that therefore doubt and difficulty must end, we egregiously err. "Mystery," says Vinet, of Lausanne, "is the cup which holds the wine of truth; break the cup, and the wine is spilt." The Scripture revelation of the Godhead brings to us a mystery all its own-the doctrine of the Trinity-break, deny it, and you lose the soft aspect of Fatherhood, the tender relationship of Brotherhood, and the potently peaceful feeling of indwelling Deity. We have alluded to the doctrine of the Trinity here, lest in a close and separate study of its persons we should make over-prominent the Spirit, to the marring our views of the Father and the Son. Indeed, it appears to us impossible rightly to treat of one person unless we have clear and orthodox views of the Trinity. On this, time forbids that we should dwell, yet ere passing, let us hint at three heresies that beset the ponderer of any of the persons of the Godhead. We need hardly say we refer to the opotóvoor, which degrades the second and third persons to the first rank of creatureship; to Sabellianism, which would give us unity in three phases, as the moon now seems a horn, then forms the arc of a circle, ultimately appearing globular; to Tritheism, which would give us the absurdity of three infinite and distinct Gods. In opposition to the first, we hold the oμoovetov; in opposition to the second, we believe in the personality of the Father, Son, and Spirit; and in opposition to the last, we receive the unity of the essence. : Having looked at the faint Godward pointings of the human heart, taken the Scriptures as our infallible guide, and expressed our belief in the Trinity, we now find our way disencumbered, and may at once advance to a separate study of God the Holy Ghost. I. We shall first attempt to prove his personality. Let us preface our proof by showing the necessity for such a demonstration from bygone ecclesiastical history. According to Neander, the ancient church generally agreed in holding the personality of the Holy Ghost; it has also continued the common Christian belief of succeeding times. Yet there never have been wanting some to discard and deny it. In the Patristic period, Lactantius and the Monarchians explained the Holy Ghost as the sanctifying energy of the Father and the Son. The uncle and nephew, Socinus, in the sixteenth century, of course endorsed the same tenet, differing only in holding that the energy came from the One God. Dr. John Owen, in his work on the Spirit, tells of some whom he calls Quakers (whether he always means by that appellation the definite sect, or whether he uses it often as a term of opprobrium, to designate those whom he deemed grievously heterodox, we are unable to determine), who, though receiving the divinity of the Son, believed not in the personality of the Spirit. And, strange as it may appear, that giant of evangelical Nonconformity, Robert Hall, was, we are told in his memoir by Dr. Gregory, a dualist up till about the year 1800, calling the third person of the Trinity in guarded words, "the influence of the Spirit of God." In view of such a past of doubt and opposition to what we believe Scriptural and important, it becomes us to have clear, and as far as may be, thorough convictions of the Spirit's personality. In explaining personality as subsistence, or mode of subsistence, we are apt to make it darker than before. In preference to any such definition, we shall consider it as possessing three constituents-consciousness, character, and will. If these can be affirmed of the Spirit, then most irrefragably can it be demonstrated that he is a person. 1. Let us attend, first, to the lowest part of personality, consciousness. Here at once the Scripture claims of the Holy Ghost join issue with the theory of his being an attribute or influence. It may be well at the outset of our reasoning to make a frank confession, and guard against a false canon. We feel no hesitancy in allowing that many times in the Old Testament the words "Spirit of God" do not mean the third person of the Trinity. One would scarcely like to hazard his consciousness on Job xxvii. 3: "The Spirit of God is in my nostrils." But this concession is by no means to be cooled down into the dogmatic canon, that we are to see no more meaning in the Scriptures than they to whom they were at first given-that because they thought the breath which moved upon chaos was only an influence from God, that we are to arrive at the same conclusion; that because they looked upon prophetic inspiration as being a divine afflatus, we are wrong in looking upon it as the especial work of the Spirit. Those who would have us believe so, forget that God has sown his revelation field with acorn principles; that as seeds have been found in the cerements of Egyptian mummies, and have germinated and grown thousands of years after, so in the Old Testament Scriptures do we find germs of the doctrine and many works of the Spirit-largely unperceived, we doubt not, by the most pious and enlightened Jews, yet ready to rise into prominence under the revealings of Christianity. We own that sometimes spirit may simply mean breath, and sometimes influence: yet we leave ourselves uncommitted and unbound, ready to claim all passages whose pointings, from contextual and New Testament allusion, are clear. From the feelings attributed to the Spirit," being vexed and grieved," from the acts performed by him, convincing and sanctifying the soul, we are irresistibly compelled to acknowledge and receive the consciousness of the Spirit. We neither, we hope, overlook nor dispute the vast, almost boundless power of influence. We are ready to admit that even the indirect influence of a praying Redeemer prompted the request, "Teach us also to pray," that even the indirect influence of a peerless sufferer pierced the criminal darkness of the heart of the dying thief. We allow the potency.of the brave Captain's influence on his fainting, despairing warriors; we glory in the influence of thoughts incarnate, sometimes coffined in words and buried in boards, asserting ages after the prerogative of all original thinking to reproduce itself in other minds; we concede to influence an eternal power. That God might have accomplished by it all we believe is performed by the third person of the Trinity we do not deny, but content ourselves with reiterating our previously proven averment, that the Spirit is conscious, and consequently cannot be an influence. "Yet," it might be asked, "Do not the phrases, baptised with the Holy Ghost,' 'filled with the Holy Ghost,' the Holy Ghost fell on them,' indicate and imply simply a divine influence?" To this a common reply would be, Christ is represented as a Sun, Star, and Branch. Does the appositeness of these figures endanger the consciousness of the Son? By such an answer the questioner may be silenced, but hardly enlightened. The true way, we think, in dealing with passages which seem to indicate that the Spirit is an influence, is, not evasively to lessen their force by an appeal to their figurative form, but fearlessly to seek in their application and operation a solution of the difficulty. Can spirits directly and consciously, without any medium, act upon each other? We think not. Were a rose and the sun unseen, how could we judge of their existence, but by the fragrance of the one and the beams of the other? Were an unseen musician to enchain our souls, while with ductile and skilful fingers he sweeps the cords or keys, how could we judge of his presence but by what we heard? To rise to ourselves. We really see not our friends; their spirits act upon us by the looks of their eyes, the words of their lips, or the grasp of their hands; so that we act and are acted upon mediately. If this be a general law of the intelligent universe-and we cannot conceive of its being otherwise-then the descent of the Holy Ghost was experienced as the rain falling on the parched ground, as the body being enclosed in the waters of the pool, or as a cistern and reservoir being filled. 66 2. The second constituent of personality is character. The word χαρατηρ, from which character is derived, is translated in Heb. i. 3, express image." You know it comes from raparra, to engrave, so that the image on a coin is a character. Those mental and moral powers which we possess are God's image or character upon us, although sadly defaced and marred by sin. We cannot say that we are great admirers of the common division made of the character of man, for like all arbitrary divisions, it is faulty and apt to mislead, yet it forms |