weakness of human nature and the conditions of his time.' But he clearly taught that the mission of the Comforter would introduce greater things and nobler examples of power from on high.

(3) Lesson from Elijah. The comparative worthlessness of external signs and wonders as a power to change the spiritual life is strikingly shown in the story of Elijah the prophet. He challenged all Israel and the prophets of Baal to meet him on mount Carmel, and to test by prayer and sacrifice whether Jehovah or Baal were the true God. The details of Elijah's marvelous triumph are written in 1 Kings xviii, and depicted with dramatic impressiveness. The prophets of Baal, four hundred and fifty in number, prepared their victim and called on the name of their god from morning until noon, but without any sign of answer. Then Elijah mocked them with words of stinging irony, "and they cried aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and lances, till the blood gushed out upon them." But long after midday "there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded." Then Elijah prepared his altar, and made a trench about it, and piled on the wood and placed his victim thereon, and then, to make the miracle the more astounding, he poured four buckets of water over the whole place, and poured them on a second and a third time, until the water filled the trench about the altar. And when Elijah prayed, behold, "the fire of Jehovah fell, and consumed the burnt offering, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench." So overwhelming was the immediate impression that "all the people fell on their faces, and they said, Jehovah, he is the God! Jehovah, he is the God!" It would be difficult to portray a triumph in the way of miracle more decisive than this. Generations of devout readers have admired the demonstration of the transcendent greatness of Jehovah and his prophet. But how few have had the discernment to see that all this display of miracle effected no change in the faith of the people. The worship of Baal went on in the kingdom of Israel without any sign of abatement. There is no evidence that a single thorough and permanent conversion was secured by all that sublime exhibition on mount Carmel. Jezebel was enraged at the slaughter of the prophets of Baal, and threat

1 Edersheim observes: "So far from being a mere worker of miracles, as we would have expected if the history of his miracles had been of legendary origin, there is nothing more marked than the pain, we had almost said the humiliation, which their necessity seems to have carried to his heart. In truth, when, through the rift in his outward history, we catch a glimpse of Christ's inner being, these miracles, so far as not the outcome of the mystic union of the divine and the human in his person, but as part of his mission, form part of his humiliation." -The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, Vol. I, p. 489. London and New York, 1883.

ened the life of Elijah; and that great prophet, who seemed so omnipotent on Carmel, fled before the word of the idolatrous queen, and hid himself in a cave in mount Horeb. There "a word of Jehovah came to him" (xix, 9), a revelation adapted to rebuke his self-conceit and to correct his error. "What doest thou here, Elijah?" inquired a heavenly voice. "And he said, I have been very jealous for Jehovah, the God of hosts; for the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life." Then followed Jehovah's apocalypse of the still small voice, mightier than wind and earthquake and fire. Truth in the heart, faith, hope, love, are greater gifts than power over fire and earthquake and storm. Such physical forces may "break in pieces the rocks before Jehovah," but have no power to change one human heart. In the light of this suggestive revelation, we can the better appreciate the proverb,

He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty;

And he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. Prov. xvi, 32.

...

(4) Paul's Estimate of External Wonders. The language of Paul is no less suggestive and significant when he says: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal. . . . And if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing" (1 Cor. xiii, 1, 2). Elsewhere he also writes: "The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal" (2 Cor. iv, 18). The eternal things are no less real because unseen, and as the eternal is greater than that which is temporal, so the spiritual things which are not seen are greater than the things which are material. The obvious teaching of all these scriptures is to magnify the things of the spirit above all signs and wonders of the world of sense, and we must not look in the realm of physical nature for the "greater works" which Jesus declared his followers should perform as a consequence of his going unto the Father (John xiv, 12). These greater mighty works include all the spiritual operations of the kingdom of Christ until he shall have given up that kingdom to the Father, having abolished all adverse rule and authority and power (1 Cor. xv, 24). He that converts one sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death and shall cover a multitude of sins (James v, 20), and one such work is unspeakably greater than the miraculous healing of a palsied arm. Such miracles of salvation are wrought through the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus those who were dead through their trespasses and sins are made alive (Eph. ii, 1; Col.

ii, 13; comp. Eph. v, 14). This quickening and raising up into spiritual life is the continuous work of the Spirit of truth and of power, who convicts the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment.

15. Shows the Real Nature of the Kingdom of God. A proper apprehension of the essential superiority of spiritual things enables us the more clearly to discern the real nature of the kingdom of God, and the continuous mission and ministry of the Holy Spirit. We worship the holy Father, the holy Christ, and the holy Spirit; but it is the more frequent usage of the Scriptures to call the Spirit holy, and so we commonly employ the title, the Holy Spirit. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are mysteriously one, but their metaphysical interrelations in the Godhead are not matters of direct biblical revelation. We honor the Son even as we honor the Father, and we recognize in the continuous ministry of the Holy Spirit the fullness of the Godhead working in all, through all, and over all, for the perfection of the kingdom of Christ and of God.

16. Personal Presence of the Living God. From all that we have now presented touching the mission and ministry of the Holy Spirit it must be apparent that herein we become personally acquainted with the living God. All the longing of pious mysticism, and the affinity for pantheistic union with the Eternal Existence which have shown themselves in millions of the religious peoples of the earth may find deepest satisfaction in this doctrine of the Spirit. The human soul cries out for a God that is personally present, and not afar off; an abiding Comforter, whom the world cannot receive nor cast out. The Spirit of truth reveals himself with all this blessed assurance to them that worship in spirit and in truth. Herein we recognize the blessed reality which was from the beginning but has been sadly overlooked at times-the reality of the vital, everlasting IMMANENCE of God.

PART THIRD

OUR FATHER IN HEAVEN

SECTION FIRST

THE UNIVERSAL REVELATION

CHAPTER I

THE MYSTERY OF THE INVISIBLE

1. Witnessed Among All Nations. The most mysterious of all facts within us and beyond us is the presence of an unseen Power whom we call God. In the discussion of this mystery we enter, as it were, the Holy of holies in our exposition of biblical doctrine. At no point of our foregoing study have we been able to escape the pressing fact of the immanence of God; for no rational treatment of the common experiences of religion is possible without constant recognition of the invisible but all-pervasive Being who is the ultimate ground of the universe and of all that it contains. But at this point we must pause to make note of those lower forms of religious thought and practice which show, as an apostle teaches, that "a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and all that in them is, . . . left not himself without witness" among any of the nations of men in any generation of the past (Acts xiv, 15-17). It is now quite generally conceded that there are, and probably have been, no tribes of men so degraded as to be destitute of religious conceptions. Somehow the most primitive savages conceive the idea that every moving thing in nature is endowed with life. The sun and moon and stars possess an invisible force or energy by which they move regularly through the heaven. The winds and the waters are instinct with life, possessed, it may be, each with its own self-conscious spirit; the

1 See above, pp. 60-63, in our discussion of the religious element in man, and comp. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, Vol. I, pp. 416-423. Third American ed. New York, 1889.

flowering plant, the waving leaf, nay, even the very sticks and stones that are stirred before the eye, have been conceived as having an invisible life and power within themselves. The superstitions of fetishism, the practices of divination, the belief in ghosts and goblins, and the manifold conceptions of another world, invisible to mortals on the earth, witness in almost countless forms the universal fact that man possesses a sort of instinctive, intuitive, and necessary sense of dependence upon some Higher Power whom he cannot find out to perfection. Nor should we overlook the fact that the concepts of animism, fetishism, and magic survive in numerous religious rites of our own time, and in the midst of prevailing enlightenment and scientific culture. How many among us can rid ourselves of the superstition of haunted houses, and haunted wells, and haunted caves? What reverence is felt by thousands for the crucifix, or the mere sign of the cross made with the hand, or for the uplifted host, or for sacred relics, amulets, rings, lucky coins, talismans, charms, incantations of wizards, or the touch of "holy water"? These all, wherever found, bear witness to man's universal belief in the existence of a Power or of powers invisible.

2. The Divers Interpretations. It was but natural that there should arise among men divers interpretations of this universal consciousness of the influence of Powers unseen. The various religious cults and the poetic creations of mythology are but so many different attempts to explain the nature and operations of the Eternal Energy which is the real basis of all phenomena. It is to be expected that these divers attempts at explaining the Invisible should be fraught with more or less error, but the allcommanding and impressive fact remains in spite of every failure to resolve its mystery. It may be that the phenomena of sleep and dreams, of swoons and ecstasy, of life and death, developed the notions of ghosts and of good and evil angels. These all suggest a preternatural, if not a supernatural world of beings. But inferences from these phenomena do not explain the higher concepts of God and the facts of religion. The most noteworthy nature-myths, which purport to explain the regular recurrence of night and day, sunset and dawn, winter and summer, are obviously based upon those manifestations of the forces of nature which evince the existence of an unseen law and order of the world. The myth itself is the poetic or imaginative creation of a story out of an idea. It arises from a natural impulse of the mind to account for some striking fact or some existing custom. A solar myth is a story about some doings of the sun conceived in a realistic way, as if the sun were a real person endowed with life and thought.