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 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
BOHLEN LECTURES, INAUGURAL SERIES. \V 
 
 FOUR LECTURES 
 
 Delivered in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Phila- 
 delphia, in the Year 1877, 
 
 FOUNDATION OF THE LATE JOHN BOHLEN, Esq. 
 
 ALEXANDER H. VINTON, D.D. 
 
 SECOND EDITION. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 THOMAS WHITTAKER, 
 
 2 and 3 Bible House, 
 1887. 
 
St i s 
 
 !S€7 
 
 Printed for the Rector, Churchwardens, 
 and Vestrymen of the Church of 
 the Holy Trinity, Philadel- 
 phia, Trustees of the 
 John Bohlen Lect- 
 ureship. 
 
THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP. 
 
 John Bohlen, who died in this city on the twenty- 
 sixth day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund 
 of $100,000, to be distributed to religious and chari- 
 table objects in accordance with the well-known wishes 
 of the testator. 
 
 By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, the 
 trustees under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred and 
 paid over to " The Rector, Church-wardens, and 
 Vestrymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Phila- 
 delphia," in trust, a sum of money for certain 
 designated purposes, out of which fund the sum of 
 $10,000 was set apart for the endowment of The John 
 Bohlen Lectureship, upon the following terms and 
 conditions : — 
 
 "The money shall be invested in good, substantial, and safe 
 securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called • The John 
 Bohlen Lectureship, ' and the income shall be applied annually 
 to the payment of a qualified person, whether clergyman or 
 layman, for the delivery and publication of at least one hundred 
 copies of two or more lecture sermons. These lectures shall be 
 
The John Bohlen Lectureship. 
 
 delivered at such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as 
 the persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from time 
 to time determine, giving at least six months' notice to the 
 person appointed to deliver the same, when the same may con- 
 veniently be done, and in no case selecting the same person as 
 lecturer a second time within a period of five years. The pay- 
 ment shall be made to said lecturer, after the lectures have been 
 printed and received by the trustees, of all the income for the 
 year derived from said fund, after defraying the expense of 
 printing the lectures and the other incidental expenses attending 
 the same. 
 
 "The subject of such lectures shall be such as is within the 
 terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John Bampton for the 
 delivery of what are known as the 'Bampton Lectures,' at 
 Oxford, or any other subject distinctively connected with or 
 relating to the Christian religion. 
 
 " The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month of 
 May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be done, by the 
 persons who for the time being shall hold the offices of Bishop 
 of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Diocese in which is 
 the Church of the Holy Trinity; the Rector of said church; the 
 Professor of Biblical Learning, the Professor of Systematic 
 Divinity, and the Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the 
 Divinity School of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Phil- 
 adelphia. 
 
 "In case either of said offices are vacant, the others may 
 nominate the lecturer." 
 
 Under this trust the Kev. Alexander H. Vinton, 
 D.D., of Boston, was appointed to deliver the lectures 
 for the year 1877. 
 
 Philadelphia., Easter, 1877. 
 
LECTURE I. 
 
 THE PERSONALITY OF GOD. 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 The Personality of God * 9 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 The Tri-persoxality of God 39 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 The Atonement 73 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 The Holy Ghost 105 
 
LECTUKE I. 
 
 THE PERSONALITY OP GOD. 
 
 IN accepting the invitation to inaugurate this 
 series of the Bohlen Lectures, I enjoyed a 
 peculiar pleasure, a pleasure tinged with the 
 sweetness of a certain sadness. 
 
 The title is a memorial of him with whom I 
 was once connected by official ties, for whom I 
 cherished an affectionate personal regard, and 
 whose character I held in most respectful esteem. 
 I remembered the kindness of his temper, the 
 readiness of his heart, the fixedness of his con- 
 science, his unfailing labors of beneficence; in a 
 word, I remembered the supremacy of the piety 
 that suggested his motives, controlled his life, 
 shaped his character, and inspired him with such 
 loving consecration of self to his Saviour and 
 (9) 
 
io Lecture First. 
 
 Lord as branched out spontaneously and gladly 
 into all good words and works. His religion was 
 his life, whose sovereign impulse, the glory of 
 Christ, directed itself into all the channels of 
 beneficence and subsidized his culture and his 
 wealth for the good of his fellow-men. It was in 
 perfect keepiug with his character, therefore, that 
 his dying wish should be for the holy faith which 
 he had loved and lived for and had taught for 
 many years to successive classes of young men; 
 that his teaching might survive in other utterances 
 than his, and still be his ; that in a larger way and 
 with a certain perpetuity he might still speak, 
 though dead. Hence the institution of this lecture- 
 ship, his apt memorial, — better than wreathed 
 flowers cast upon his coffin and smothered in his 
 grave : living plants, rather, whose fresh fragrance 
 is restored as the seasons return; better than mar- 
 ble effigy, coldly glittering in its solitariness; a 
 memorial, rather, that lives and speaks to passing 
 men, and speaks, as he himself would speak, of the 
 great salvation. So may these lectures always 
 speak, just as he would have them do, of the truth 
 as ' t is in Jesus ! 
 
The Personality of God. Ii 
 
 To this loving recognition, which my heart could 
 not refuse, of my former associate and friend, may 
 I not add a word, congratulating myself that I 
 stand once more before you, the congregation to 
 whom fifteen years ago I ministered in the things 
 of the gospel ? I do so with the more assurance 
 because I know that whatever of superseding in- 
 fluences may have come between your hearts and 
 me in that long interval, yet the occasion and the 
 name it bears will at least gain for me a welcome. 
 
 In suggesting this course of lectures, our friend 
 left ample range in the choice of topics. They 
 might be gathered from the whole fertile field of 
 theology, and grouped at the discretion of the lec- 
 turer. As I scanned this field, it was plain that 
 among its crowd of theories there were some 
 subsidiary doctrines, which had once been inter- 
 esting, but had lost their freshness with the ex- 
 igency that begat them. 
 
 There were other topics, however, whose im- 
 portance is as rich and constant as the relation 
 between God and the soul, that are now encoun- 
 tering the antagonism of our sceptical and aggres- 
 sive age. Of these truths I have made choice of 
 
12 Lecture First. 
 
 four to be the subjects of as many lectures. The 
 first, " The Personality of God " ; the second, " His 
 Triune Subsistence" ; the third, " His Redemptive 
 Work for Man, the Atonement of Christ" ; and 
 the fourth, " His Curative and Sanctifying Agency 
 in Man, the Power and Work of the Holy Ghost." 
 Whenever unbelief would make its fiercest on- 
 slaught upon the faith of Christians, it aims at the 
 first of these truths; and whenever the spirit of 
 error in the church becomes pronounced, it has 
 always selected one or another or all of the other 
 three. 
 
 These four truths embody themselves in the 
 most prominent statements of our creed, and in 
 treating them I will make those statements my 
 starting- points. 
 
 In discussing, therefore, the first of these topics, 
 the personality of God, I denote its import in these 
 words : " I believe in one God, the Father Al- 
 mighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all 
 things visible and invisible." This general state- 
 ment involves these derivative statements, viz. : The 
 universe has a personal Creator, whose nature and 
 attributes are infinite, and in virtue of that per- 
 
The Personality of God. 13 
 
 sonality he is capable of coming into personal 
 relations with us, so that he can be to us a Father 
 and we can be to him as children. 
 
 Ever since men began to think, they have 
 thought about God, that is, they have thought 
 about the origin of the world, and how anything 
 came to exist. The Oriental philosophies, older, 
 perhaps, by thousands of years than our Chris- 
 tianity, busied themselves with this chief thought, 
 and so did the schools of the Grecian philosophy. 
 The cosmogony, the theory of the universe, was 
 the one burden of their speculations. In the Mid- 
 dle Ages philosophy dealt more with ideas that 
 lie this side of those primary ones. Assuming 
 the existence of God, they discussed his counsels 
 and his plans, and his relations to mankind, and 
 might rather be called theologies. At a still more 
 recent date there started up again a philoso- 
 phy that engrossed almost the whole of German 
 thought. It was a speculative system throughout. 
 It began its thinking outside of the visible world, 
 and its reasoning, drawn from a priori assump- 
 tions, was directed not so much to show what is 
 the constitution of the universe as to prove what 
 
14 Lecture First. 
 
 it must be. This, which was called the spiritual 
 philosophy, was by a return of the pendulum 
 of thought replaced by the materialistic sys- 
 tem of our day, which confines itself to the in- 
 vestigation of the structure and forces of the 
 world about us. 
 
 With this system we have been made sufficiently 
 familiar from the presence among us of Huxley 
 and Tyndall and Proctor as its spokesmen and 
 apostles, and from the writings that occupy the 
 counters of the book-stores, the pages of the re- 
 views, the columns of the newspapers. It forms 
 the staple of our common talk in the parlors and 
 the railroad-cars, so that not to know something 
 of this system is to betray the lack of finished 
 culture. 
 
 The whole long category of philosophical sys- 
 tems, comprehending all the great and various 
 thinking of the world, may be resolved into two 
 systems, one of them pantheism and the other 
 materialism, — pantheism beginning with the ab- 
 stract and the possible and reasoning forward to 
 explain the actual; and the other beginning with 
 the actual and tracing it back towards the abstract 
 
The Personality of God. 15 
 
 and the invisible, but stopping short at both. If 
 men think at all on philosophical themes they 
 must think from one or the other of these two 
 standing-points, so that there can be but two 
 essential philosophies. Moreover, among the whole 
 long list of philosophical thinkers from seven hun- 
 dred years before Christ down to the present hour, 
 almost none have been led by their thinking to 
 recognize a personal God. Among the ancients 
 Anaxagoras was the first to maintain that the 
 universe was governed by a personal mind; yet 
 he made but little use of the idea in his system 
 and he had no important following. 
 
 There was no school of believers in a personal 
 Deity. Hippocrates, the father of medicine, did 
 indeed so far accept the opinion as to maintain 
 that the Deity might be invoked to help the good 
 effect of his prescriptions. Besides this I know of 
 no other instance in which the pagan philosophy 
 came near touching with one of its fingers the re- 
 vealed truth of a personal and parental God. The 
 two great philosophies were essentially atheistic. 
 
 The system of pantheism is most clearly ex- 
 pounded by Spinoza, its modern reviver. Spinoza 
 
1 6 Lecture First. 
 
 held that there was one eternal something which 
 he called " substance." He did not mean material 
 substance, nor perhaps anything that we call spirit- 
 ual, but it was an existence of some sort, without 
 intelligence and without voluntary powers or any 
 attributes that could betoken personality. 
 
 It was the nature of this eternal substance to radi- 
 ate and evolve itself continually, and in doing so 
 it took on visible and tangible shapes and efflor- 
 esced into a material universe. This universe, pass- 
 ing on through the stages of life and decay, was 
 resolved back again to its original matrix to be 
 again evolved and decay, and so to chase its own 
 life round and round in a never-ending circuit. 
 
 Thus the visible world was only the necessary 
 form of this eternal substance, spinning itself out 
 from itself and winding itself back into itself. If 
 we call that eternal substance God, then God was 
 the world itself, and the world itself was God. 
 
 Now Spinoza did call this substance God, and 
 since he made that substance to be the all in all of 
 everything, his contemporaries called him a " God- 
 intoxicated man. " 
 
 This is essential pantheisn according to its ablest 
 
The Personality of God. IJ 
 
 expositor. We see that it must be godless from 
 its want of personality. We can hold no com- 
 munion with that eternal substance, because it is 
 unintelligent ; we cannot supplicate nor deprecate 
 it, for it has no feeling and no will ; we cannot 
 worship it, for it has no character. There can be 
 no moral distinction, no right, no wrong, because 
 everything that happens is but the evolution of 
 God. 
 
 As it has no connection with us but in material 
 forms, so our nearest approach to it is in the ad- 
 miration of nature and in the indulgence of our 
 natural desires. I said just now that so much of 
 the philosophy as has ever been in the world that 
 was not pantheistic was materialistic, and this, 
 like the other, denied the personality of God. Al- 
 most all the earlier philosophers were of this 
 school, and ever since then the fashion of thinking 
 has vibrated between pantheism and materialism, 
 and each has held an alternate and royal sway in 
 the realm of philosophy. 
 
 Materialism teaches that the world is made up 
 of two principles of matter and motion, and that 
 when the action of motion upon matter is begun, 
 
1 8 Lecture First. 
 
 matter is evolved, by necessary laws of its being, 
 into a universe of varied forms and lives. 
 
 The old materialism did not differ from the 
 modern in these fundamental principles. Its phil- 
 osophy was the same, although it was far less rich 
 in its knowledge of the facts of Nature and of the 
 affinities that work out her changes. In this 
 knowledge our modern materialistic science is 
 affluent beyond all precedent. I remind you only 
 of a truism when I say that the rise of our modern 
 science has been like a dayspring to the intel- 
 lectual and physical life of our century. At her 
 word of command our civilization has sprung for- 
 ward, at a single bound, farther than in many 
 weary generations of the ages gone. By develop- 
 ing and utilizing the forces of nature, she has ren- 
 dered labor and its products so facile and sure 
 that in convenience, comfort, and physical enjoy- 
 ment life seems to be concentrated to a focus ; 
 and the processes by which her achievements 
 have been won are some of them amazing feats of 
 intellectual vigor. The nebular hypothesis of the 
 formation of the world, that glorious guess of La- 
 place, reaching into the realms of conjecture, and 
 
The Personality of God. 19 
 
 bringing back its far-off conceptions, verified by 
 all the known phenomena of the universe, has al- 
 most a supernatural look. The suggestion of an 
 imponderable ether surrounding and penetrating 
 the fabric of the world — a suggestion outside of 
 experiment, yet explaining the theory of light and 
 perhaps of sound more satisfactorily than any 
 former endeavor — is another of the brilliant, pro- 
 phetic flashes of scientific thought that almost urge 
 the common mind to cry, "What is man? Thou 
 hast made him a little, only a little, lower than 
 the angels ! " 
 
 Yet these discoveries, being the fruits of hy- 
 pothesis and not of strict analysis, may be regarded 
 as happy strokes of mental ingenuity rather than 
 as legitimate products of science; for it is the sin- 
 gular quality and boast of modern science that it 
 is purely inductive. Its processes consist in ob- 
 serving and analyzing particular phenomena, 
 arranging them according to their essential 
 likenesses, until the whole of the material world 
 is resolved into its elementary forms. In this, the 
 legitimate sphere of Science, her processes of gen- 
 eralization have developed admirable results. She 
 
20 Lecture First. 
 
 has assorted all the facts and forces of matter into 
 groups, and learned the laws by which the primal 
 forms of things are organized into a Kosmos, a 
 whole, harmonious world; she has demonstrated 
 that all the forms of matter are only one matter, 
 that the universal variety of things sprang from one 
 primordial germ: but her chief and happiest gen- 
 eralization has been in resolving the various ma- 
 terial forces into one primal force, of which the rest, 
 are, by a high probability, simply derivations or 
 modifications. These derived forces are therefore 
 congeners, — a sisterhood with one mother, so joined 
 in functions that any one of them may replace and 
 do the work of either of the others. 
 
 Although the experiments have not yet been 
 full enough to demonstrate this fact in its entire 
 breadth, yet enough is known to supply a founda- 
 tion of what is called " the doctrine of the correla- 
 tion of forces." 
 
 That doctrine is described by Prof. Grove, one 
 of its earliest expounders, in these words: "The 
 various affections of matter which constitute the 
 main objects of experimental physics, viz., heat, 
 light, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, and 
 
The Personality of God. 21 
 
 motion, are all correlative or have a reciprocal de- 
 pendence, so that neither, taken abstractedly, can 
 be said to be the essential cause of the others, but 
 either may produce or be convertible into any of 
 the others. Thus heat may mediately or imme- 
 diately produce electricity, electricity may produce 
 heat, and so of the rest, each merging itself as the 
 force it produces becomes developed; and the same 
 must hold good of the other forces." 
 
 The parent force of this united family of forces 
 would seem, in the opinion of Prof. Grove, to be 
 the principle or power of motion ; and so the con- 
 clusion is that even as the forms of matter are 
 resolvable into one homogeneous matter, so the 
 forces of the world are reducible to one unit of 
 force. Science has taught us, moreover, that this 
 many-sided force operates in all its modifications 
 by fixed and ascertainable methods, which she 
 calls the laws of the material world. 
 
 This theory seems, indeed, to encounter among 
 the phenomena of the world at least one exception 
 which refuses to enter into this category of the 
 forces. There is another force, unique in charac- 
 ter, which stands outside, as a stranger to the fam< 
 
22 Lecture First. 
 
 ily, if not indeed an antagonist. It is the vital 
 force, the principle of organic life throughout the 
 world, pervading every organism and maintaining 
 each individual existence. It has been attempted, 
 but in the opinion of some scientific men hitherto 
 unsuccessfully, to bring the vital force into corre- 
 lation with the rest. 
 
 There are obvious conditions in which the re- 
 lationship fails, or if there be relationship it is not 
 that of equality, but rather that of the mastership 
 of the vital force; for it has a sort of formative 
 power that in its normal state controls the work- 
 ing of the other forces, and utilizes them for its 
 own purposes, even neutralizing the action, if 
 need be, of heat and elasticity and chemical affin- 
 ity, so that itself shall be supreme, as it is sin- 
 gular, in every organism. And when once the vi- 
 tal force has become extinct, it gets no restoring 
 or supplementing help from the rest, but rather 
 they seize upon the lifeless form and rush it into 
 speedy decay, until the once vitalized structure 
 is dissolved into its atoms, which can never be re- 
 organized until the banished force shall come again 
 from its unascertained home and pronounce the 
 
The Personality of God. 23 
 
 vitalizing word " Live ! " Yet, notwithstanding 
 the exceptional character of the vital force, the 
 theory of the correlation of forces stands out as a 
 masterly demonstration, and all that is necessary 
 for the purpose to which I would apply it. 
 
 There is a wondrous satisfaction to the mind, 
 looking at the complicated machinery of the ma- 
 terial world and the promiscuous movements of its 
 seemingly discordant forces, to learn that the dis- 
 cord is truly the most beautiful order, and the pro- 
 miscuous methods the working of a perfect unity 
 of plan. 
 
 These two demonstrations constitute the main 
 theoretic results of modern science. They might 
 seem at first view to be but insignificant results 
 of all the searching thought and labor they have 
 cost; but they are elementary facts of the material 
 world, and, like other elementary things, they 
 contain the possibilities of all things. 
 
 Science, therefore, erects her imposing figure be- 
 fore the age, and holds in her lifted hands these 
 two demonstrations as her vouchers of authority. 
 If this were all she did, not one of us would do 
 aught but bow down his mind and do her rever- 
 
24 Lecture First. 
 
 ence; but in the pride of her great prowess, she 
 has sometimes advanced the claim that in ex- 
 plaining the system of the material world she has 
 disclosed the whole truth of the universe, and has 
 declared that there is no knowledge besides that 
 which comes from induction, and so Science is 
 understood to be at war with that whole class of 
 conceptions that lie outside of the material world 
 and which are necessarily included in every form 
 of religion. This is the reason why science and 
 religion are nowadays understood to be in antago- 
 nism to one another, specially in the fundamental 
 idea of a personal God. I would like to show that 
 so far is this from being true, the actual and ad- 
 mitted results of scientific research are true indi- 
 cators of a personal Deity. As an inductive sys- 
 tem, science ought not to be reproached for not 
 recognizing a Deity in the world. This is not one 
 of the demonstrations that belong to induction. 
 Induction is pure observation, and all the faculties 
 required in an inductive process are the perceptive 
 faculties, and God is not an object of perception. 
 It were as great an error for Science to under- 
 take to demonstrate a Deity by her processes as it 
 
The Personality of God. 2$ 
 
 is for her to claim that the perceptive faculties are 
 the only ones we have for the discovery of truth, 
 while these faculties really belong to the lowest 
 tier of man's mental endowments. 
 
 Above the level of the perceptions there is the 
 realm of reason, which is the birthplace of all our 
 higher powers and conceptions. Our deepest ap- 
 prehensions of truth, our loftiest motives, our sub- 
 limest reach of thought, spring in a region where 
 the perceptive powers have no play and no place. 
 They all come from the intuitions of reason, cer- 
 tain first principles, which are not so much thoughts 
 as they are conditions, without which the mind 
 cannot think at all. 
 
 The axioms of mathematics are of this sort, — 
 conceptions of the pure reason not evolved by ex- 
 periment. The ideas of unity, of cause, of power, 
 of time, space, infinitude, are born of the mind it- 
 self. The mind cannot live without them. Science 
 slurs them as metaphysical and worthless, yet 
 Science cannot carry out a demonstration without 
 adopting the terminology of metaphysics. She 
 speaks of cause and effect, which are metaphysical 
 conceptions purely, for science never saw a cause, 
 
26 Lecture First. 
 
 but only sequence; and of force, yet no one ever 
 analyzed a force; and of unity, which she con- 
 stantly reaches after but never saw in nature; and 
 of space and time and infinitude, ideas which turn 
 the perceptive faculties into a mockery. Science 
 ought therefore frankly to admit both the reality 
 and the authority of reason as a faculty far out- 
 reaching the possibilities of perception, and adap- 
 ted to explore those higher truths which the per- 
 ceptive faculties were not made to learn. 
 
 When we have been brought to the last con- 
 clusions of Science, force guided by unity of method 
 and law, if we should accept her dictum, that we 
 had learned all that can be known of the truth of 
 the universe, we should be indeed left to a total 
 godlessness of mind. But man's nature refuses to 
 be defrauded of its birthright of reason, refuses to 
 have its divine prerogative of thinking ignored by 
 any system which, with all its claims to respect, 
 still denies a thousand times more knowledge than 
 it possesses; and so, when Science brings forth her 
 demonstrations, Reason at once accepts them, and 
 makes them the starting-point for a flight to higher 
 truth. 
 
The Personality of God. 27 
 
 Id this way material Science answers her true 
 character as a guide and janitor, leading the mind 
 gracefully to the doorway of a higher realm, and 
 saving, " I can teach you no more. Enter up now 
 among the sublimities of truth. Farewell ! " Rea- 
 son begins, then, with the scientific fact of the 
 unit of force. And what is force ? What is its 
 source and origin? Science has already told us 
 that the several forces of the world are not prim- 
 itive but derived forces. She tells us that when 
 the billiard player propels the ivory balls about 
 the table, each ball driving the next, the force is 
 not in the ivory. Is it in the wooden cue ? Not 
 there. In the bones and muscles of the player's 
 arm ? Still not there. These are only the con- 
 veyancers of force. Follow up the line of power 
 and you find it springing fresh-born from the will 
 of the player. This is the ultimate conception of 
 the origin of force, the product of volition verified 
 as a fact by our own intimate consciousness. No 
 proof can go behind this. It is as absolute as the 
 consciousness of life itself. The child learns it 
 when, putting forth its little arm, it encounters a 
 resisting thing, and musters an effort to push it 
 
28 Lecture First. 
 
 aside. The conscious volition and the conception 
 oi power come into birth together in the child's 
 mind, and abide together as long as his conscious 
 life. Nature teaches us, then, that force is the 
 essential product of will; and it follows hence that 
 behind the grand unit of force which actuates and 
 pervades the world there abides a mighty will 
 whose volition is the going forth of the universal 
 life. But the question springs up to the causal 
 faculty of reason, What is the character of this 
 mighty will? Is it a blind, impulsive force, rush- 
 ing forth in contortions and spasms of effort, 
 without aim or purpose? Science answers this 
 question for us in advance, for she discloses through- 
 out the universe a single great law or method by 
 which all the forces of the world are guided to 
 their destinations. Various as those methods seem, 
 they act all in perfect harmony, and are all re- 
 ducible back to a unit of law co-ordinate with the 
 unit of force. And this harmony is not the work 
 of chance. Chance is an alien in the realm of 
 science. Science shuts her doors against the crazy 
 intruder. Order, arrangement, plan, whatsoever 
 requires to be developed by mind, must itself be 
 
The Personality of God. 29 
 
 the product of mind. Whatsoever comes into 
 the intelligence must have sprung from intelli- 
 gence. To make an intelligible product there must 
 be an intelligent producer. The great will, then, is 
 not blind nor wild nor fatalistic. It is a clear-eyed 
 and wise will, giving out a force that moves 
 always by rule and destination. If the universal 
 force is the outcome of will, so the universal order 
 is the expression of intelligence. And now let us 
 remember that both intelligence and will are the 
 distinctive attributes of personality. We can think 
 of them in no other than a personal relation. If 
 this be so, we have been guided by the teachings 
 of Science herself to the magnificent conclusion of 
 a personal being, super-material in his nature, en- 
 dowed with the intelligence and power that up- 
 holds the universe. Thus we have reached a firm 
 stand-point for fresh exploration. Does this wise 
 force comprehend all that belongs to the sovereign 
 of creation ? Let Nature respond once more : Thus 
 far we have inquired only among the laws of the 
 insensible world. Let us try the ascending scale 
 of creation, and here at the top we behold the 
 human creature, man. He sits as a king, endowed, 
 
30 Lecture First. 
 
 like the Creator himself, with intelligence and will, 
 as if he were not merely a product but rather a 
 portrait of the great Creator; not only demonstrat- 
 ing but illustrating him, — a sort of type of that 
 grand personality to which science has introduced 
 us, as the archetype. In this new subject of 
 observation we discover a property we did not 
 discover in the material world. We find in man 
 a moral element which is in truth the surpassing 
 dignity of his nature, unique as it is lofty. 
 
 The material world could not teach us of this, 
 for matter has no moral sense. As we see it in 
 man it seems to sit on his soul as on a throne, the 
 imperial faculty of his nature. True, it is imper- 
 feet, with spots upon its face and with its power 
 broken by many a hard strain, but the ideal 
 character of man's moral nature is glorious. Its 
 conceptions mount up to perfection, its regal voice 
 has the power of thunder: and yet it is remarkable 
 that, grand as it is, it always recognizes a moral 
 sovereignty above itself, to which it bows down, 
 of which it stands in awe. If man is by nature a 
 moral being, and if the Creator cannot be inferior 
 to his own work, then the Creator, too, is a moral 
 
The Personality of God. 31 
 
 being. The intuition of reason, the causative 
 faculty, grasps this fresh discovery, and transfers 
 the conception from the typical creature to the 
 archetypal Creator, and then the presence stands 
 before us in its completeness. Look at it, then, 
 as nature and reason have revealed him, — a super- 
 natural personage, mighty, wise, and good, worthy 
 to be God. Induction has guided us to the limits 
 of her demonstrations, the intuitive reason has led 
 those demonstrations to the point of assurance. 
 But, still with this assurance of the personal Crea- 
 tor, a question arises, How great is he ? Is he 
 great enough to be the finality of my peace and 
 
 In other words, although we have found a being 
 with power enough to create the world, with 
 wisdom enough to order it, and with enough of 
 moral goodness to govern it justly and kindly, yet 
 how far do these qualities reach ? I may be satis- 
 fied to say with the creed, " I believe in the 
 Creator of heaven and earth''; but can I believe 
 that his power is unlimited so that I can say, 
 "Almighty"? I may say I believe in God, but 
 can I say that his moral goodness is without possi- 
 
32 Lecture First. 
 
 ble deduction, so that I can call him the only God? 
 And Reason answers her own question. Her in- 
 tuitions disclose the transcendental truths of time 
 and space and infinitude and unity as the proper- 
 ties of existence, and as soon as the intuition of 
 causality has revealed the personal first cause, the 
 other intuitions combine to clothe the conception 
 with the necessary attributes of infinity. The 
 first cause must be eternal. If his is a necessary 
 existence he must exist alone, since there cannot 
 be two necessary existences; and for the same 
 reason he must exist everywhere; and since his 
 attributes must be as necessary as his existence, 
 they, too, must be infinite, his power absolute, his 
 knowledge taking in the past, the present, and 
 the possible, his moral goodness utterly perfect. 
 But some may say, " How does reason teach us 
 all this of the Creator, since reason cannot con- 
 ceive of infinitude in any form ? " If it is meant 
 that we cannot comprehend the infinite as to its 
 modes, it is most true; but if it means that we 
 cannot conceive of it as a fact, it is most fallacious, 
 for it is impossible to conceive of the opposite. 
 We cannot conceive of space and duration as 
 
The Personality of God. 33 
 
 necessarily limited. Assign any boundary you 
 please, count the miles by millions, billions, and tril- 
 lions, at each step, and count for years, and when 
 you reach the boundary, and look out beyond, 
 what do you see ? Either space or nothing, infin- 
 ite space or infinite nothing, but still the infinite. 
 And so with duration as with space. Reason will 
 admit of no terminus. She conceives of the infin- 
 ite and goes out after it forever. Her home is 
 infinitude, and when she finds her God and shows 
 him to us, He is the embodiment of it; He is 
 clothed with it as with a garment, and all his 
 attributes are only different expressions of infini- 
 tude. So far then our best-taught reason accepts 
 the creed of God almighty, maker of all things 
 visible and invisible, — accepts this creed so com- 
 pletely that if we admit a personal deity at all we 
 cannot conceive of him as anything less than 
 infinite. But the Christian creed has added an- 
 other title, — " Father." Do the conclusions we 
 have reached justify the addition ? I think so. 
 
 If God is indeed the moral archetype of his 
 creature man, a moral personality with infinitude 
 added, then every moral and affectionate perfec- 
 
34 Lecture First. 
 
 tion may be affirmed of him. If he is infinitely 
 righteous, he will not be unjust to his moral crea- 
 ture; if he is good in the same measure, he will 
 do whatsoever is kind and gracious, strong to help 
 man's weakness, wise to correct and remedy his 
 foolishness, kind and compassionate, not only to 
 relieve his wants, but to forecast the human need, 
 both of body and soul, and to establish a prov- 
 idence that shall run parallel with both. In a 
 word, the idea of the divine fatherhood acknowl 
 edges a revelation to man as a necessary outcome 
 of his justice and his goodness. It admits the per- 
 fect reasonableness of miracles; it enforces the 
 power and worth of prayer. All the needs of the 
 conscience, the heart, the soul of man are so many 
 specific conclusions that God's fatherhood will 
 prove itself true. In contemplating these needs 
 we get a better view of that fatherhood than we 
 could in the clear, cool heights where our thoughts 
 have been just now ranging. 
 
 Our souls grasp it more closely when we bring 
 it down from that high light which is the life of 
 reason, and let it in among the murky things of 
 life, to walk with us over the uneven earth, and 
 
The Personality of God. 35 
 
 enter our homes, where there are cares and trials 
 and fears and sorrows. For the soul must have 
 her creed. Our reason may rejoice to claim the 
 personality of God as a demonstrated truth, but 
 the soul craves the fatherhood; she is not satisfied 
 to say, I believe in an Almighty Creator of heaven 
 and earth. She marks the missing title, " Father," 
 and she asks with anguish, Is there no love, 
 no care, no nurture with the Almighty for his 
 children ? 
 
 If this big question of the soul were not met to 
 the full, what a grim chimera would our life be, 
 what a palace of ice the demonstration of a God ! 
 
 The soul can answer her own longings by in- 
 terpreting her own consciousness. 
 
 If I am in his image he will not reject me. He 
 has given me a longing after a perfect bliss that 
 is nowhere else but with him. He teaches me by 
 my earthly loves that there must be infinite loveli- 
 ness in my God. Nay, the scientific law of adapt- 
 ation beautifully foreshows that the affinity of the 
 human with the Divine, will be a domestic one, 
 the harmony of heaven and earth, a perfect union. 
 In this let the soul rest, interpreting God by itself. 
 
36 Lecture First. 
 
 When the sense of sonship aspires after God, it is 
 because the fatherhood is bending down to lift the 
 soul to itself. When the soul glows with love and 
 trust it is the reflex of the Father's tenderness 
 beaming down upon it. 
 
 So God's Fatherhood comes into the life of man, 
 walks with him, talks with him, shines into his 
 darkness, tempers his heats, warms his coldness, 
 and shields him with his right arm, gives peace to 
 die with, triumph over the grave, and an open 
 heaven where reason, soul, and conscience shall 
 see the personal God, and say, Abba Father, I am 
 satisfied. Man's destiny blooms into bliss from 
 this root of faith, — I believe in God the Father 
 Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all 
 things visible and invisible. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 
 THE TEI-PERSONALITT OP GOD. 
 
LECTUEE II. 
 
 THE TRI-PEKSONALITY OF GOD. 
 
 MY subject to-night is " The Doctrine of the 
 Trinity." I well know the effect of such 
 an announcement upon very many ears, — a dry, 
 abstract, metaphysical theme, worn worse than 
 threadbare by the collisions of controversy through 
 all the ages ; an unpractical theme besides, and not 
 a power in the spiritual life begetting freshness 
 and fruits. Abstract it is, no doubt, and deep and 
 subtle in its suggestions, for it searches the skies 
 and beholds God. It carries the mysterious look 
 of that half-transparent haze that we sometimes 
 see in the summer firmament, tinged with the mel- 
 low glory of the midday sun and suggesting an 
 infinite depth of glory beyond : but we can hardly 
 say it is an unpractical theme; we cannot say so 
 
 39 
 
40 Lecture Second. 
 
 of any truth or point of faith which has concen- 
 tred to itself, as this has, all the other beliefs of 
 the Christian creed from the first year of grace 
 until now. 
 
 Nothing can be more striking than the supremely 
 affectionate tenacity with which the generations 
 of Christians have clung to this great doctrine as 
 a sort of " be all and end all " of the universal 
 faith. 
 
 While the many minds of the many men have 
 run into diversity on the other points of belief and 
 some into wide tangents of error, there have been 
 very few who believed in Christianity at all who 
 have broken the tether that held them heart and 
 soul to this magnetic centre of the faith. 
 
 I do not mean to say that even this doctrine has 
 not been perverted and even denied. Speculative 
 and rationalizing minds have sometimes so ex- 
 plained it as to explain it away, and once for many 
 years, in the Gothic period of the Roman empire, an 
 antagonistic doctrine did so prevail as to threaten 
 fatally this germ-power of the faith. The invading 
 barbarians, in accepting from their conquered foes 
 their religious faith, received it in the form most 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 41 
 
 nearly level with their mental crudeness, and as 
 it was said, " The church awoke one morning and 
 found itself Arian." But even this could not last. 
 The true kingdom of God, which is always within, 
 was stronger than the kingdom of the world. The 
 indwelling Christ in the hearts of believers was a 
 restorative power that by degrees purged out the 
 malaria from the blood and body of the church, 
 and brought back the vigor of her faith, till her 
 strong reclaim established once more the belief 
 of the Divine Trinity as the cardinal truth of 
 the Christian system. This great defection, there- 
 fore does not any more than the smaller ones dis- 
 credit or qualify the statement that the doctrine of 
 the Trinity has been the uniform holding of the 
 church. They have each and all been local and 
 transient, serving only as occasions to bring out 
 into fresh assertion the primitive truth, which 
 might else have lost its brightness and edge. 
 
 It may be interesting, I have thought, to track 
 the history of this doctrine, and to note the causes 
 and manner of its development. Development, 
 I say, not in the scientific sense of evolution, start- 
 ing from an indifferent atom and becoming trans- 
 
42 Lecture Second. 
 
 formed into all possible shapes; the development 
 rather of a living thing, a plant in whose seed is 
 the potential life of stalk and foliage and fruit, ma- 
 turing each in its turn as the months go by, first the 
 blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the 
 ear. 
 
 The development of Divine truth is such as 
 never changes its seminal character, but adapts 
 itself with enlargements to suit the ever-new ex- 
 igencies in the lives of men and the progress of soci- 
 ety. We see this beautifully exhibited in the faith 
 of the early church. There was no logical statement 
 of the doctrine of the Trinity. Those early be- 
 lievers were not used to scientific terms or 
 systematic ideas. Their simple faith rested in the 
 leadership and lordship of Jesus Christ. They 
 had accepted him as the all in all of their soul's 
 life and hope. They had consecrated their whole 
 selves to him, Jiving and dying. Their faith in 
 God was not transferred to, but centred in his Son. 
 God was hypostasized to their minds in the person 
 of the Christ; for in the revelation of the Gospel 
 God had so set forth his Son as the author of their 
 salvation, planted him so in the forefront of the 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 43 
 
 great redeeming work, that when they looked for 
 a redeemer they saw only him ; when their forgiven 
 souls would embrace their deliverer, they clasped 
 the knees of Christ; when they dedicated their re- 
 stored and grateful hearts to him to whom they 
 owed so much, it took the form of loyal love and 
 supreme covenanted allegiance to the personal 
 Jesus. They lived for him, they died in him, and 
 their heavenly hope terminated in an everlasting 
 union with him. Jesus Christ was the author not 
 only, but the finisher of their faith. It was not 
 idolatry, for they knew that God was in Christ, 
 reconciling them to himself; and knowing this, 
 they were jealous of any statement that might in- 
 vade his dignity or abate the assurance of their 
 own trust and hope. 
 
 So pre-eminent was this belief in the divinity of 
 Christ among the early Christians, that the first 
 error that enunciated itself was the denial of his 
 humanity, which was thought to derogate from 
 his divinity, maintaining that the person of Jesus 
 was but a phantasm, a mere form, in which God 
 disguised himself when he came down to save the 
 world. The error was repressed, not so much by 
 
44 Lecture Second. 
 
 speculative reasoning as by the Christian con- 
 sciousness of the church, the divine common-sense, 
 which having been begotten with the new life of 
 Christ in the soul, worked like an inspiration or an 
 instinct to recognize the truth and to detect in the 
 atmosphere of thought the slightest taint of error 
 upon a theme so vital and absorbing as the divinely 
 human person of their Lord. And this state of 
 things lasted through several generations. 
 
 The intellectual strength of the church, such as 
 it was, was mainly engaged in vindicating her 
 truths against the assaults of Jews and Pagans, 
 and during this, the apologetic period of her his- 
 tory, there were few speculations within the 
 church touching the doctrines of the faith. Still, 
 in all this period, although there was small occa- 
 sion for the church to formulate her doctrines in 
 scientific terms, or to define them with logical 
 accuracy, there was evidence enough of the 
 strength and constancy of her faith in the hymns 
 and liturgies brought down from the earliest 
 periods, and universally used. Hymns and litur- 
 gies they were, surcharged with the fragrance of 
 a piety that centred its devoutest worship on the 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 45 
 
 divine personality of Christ. And then again 
 there was the surpassing proof of suffering. If 
 the early church gave sometimes only an equivocal 
 testimony to Christ in the party-colored lives of 
 her members, gathered, as they were, from among 
 the various peoples of the empire, with the crust of 
 heathen habits not yet sloughed off from their 
 crude piety ; if they were not all versed in the cas- 
 uistry of a daily godliness, — they were at least 
 clear and stanch enough in their grand holding of 
 Christ to give up their lives rather than to deny him. 
 The shortcomings in little duties might throw a 
 suspicion upon their reverence for their Lord's pre- 
 cepts, but their endurance unto martyrdom left no 
 question of their surpassing love of his person and 
 their supreme trust in his divine salvation. 
 
 Martyrdom, therefore, was the voice of the 
 church's faith in the divinity of Christ. The 
 saintly blood that saturated the arena, and flowed 
 in the gutters of the amphitheatre, was a demon- 
 stration of the primitive creed that could have 
 borrowed nothing of clearness or emphasis from 
 any argument. The logic of dying carried not 
 only an assertion of the church's faith, but a proof 
 
46 Lecture Second. 
 
 of its truth and power that gained thousands of 
 converts to the divinity of Christ. But by and by, 
 as the church grew towards a settled and secure 
 condition, the minds of men turned more towards 
 the analysis of the creed. It was then only a 
 simple formula, probably like the Apostles' Creed 
 as we now have it, if it was not indeed the same, 
 containing nothing more than a recital of facts 
 from the narrative of the Bible. Yet each fact was 
 the investment of a truth ; each historic statement 
 bore within itself a divine meaning ; and the minds 
 of men set themselves to eliminate that meaning, 
 and to formulate it in some scientific statement. 
 Then began the intellectual gladiatorship, which 
 is always stirred by thinking upon deep and high 
 themes. The apologetic period passed into the 
 dogmatic. The faith that had hitherto been a 
 warm instinct, finding its sufficient reinforcement 
 in the spiritual needs of a driven and persecuted 
 church, was now called upon to justify itself at 
 the tribunal of the reasoning powers. The main 
 controversy was touching the divinity of Christ. 
 The doctrine of the Holy Ghost, his personality 
 and agency, was not as yet impugned; neither was 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 47 
 
 it necessary to defend it as a part of the doctrine 
 of the Trinity. For if it could be established that 
 the person of the Son was coequal and coeternal 
 with the person of the Father, then there would 
 be proved a dual oneness in the Godhead that 
 silenced the speculative objectors to the Trinity. 
 Because if the oneness of the Godhead admits of a 
 plurality of persons, it makes no difference in the 
 reason of things whether that plurality be two 
 or three. When the rational difficulty of any 
 plurality at all is met and answered, the question, 
 " How many does that plurality embrace ? " is a 
 question for revelation alone to determine. 
 
 The controversy gathered itself, therefore, ex- 
 clusively about the question of the proper and 
 personal divinity of Christ. It was a warfare of 
 ingenious and subtile reasoning on both sides. 
 The profoundest logic and the keenest metaphysi- 
 cal distinctions were the weapons of this ethereal 
 contest, which assumed four distinct aspects an- 
 swering to as many distinct opinions touching 
 the nature and person of Christ. The first 
 opinion denied his proper divinity; the second 
 denied his possession of a human soul, and main- 
 
48 Lecture Second. 
 
 tained that God took the place of* the soul in the 
 person of Christ; the third affirmed that there were 
 two distinct persons in Christ, divine and human; 
 and the fourth mingled the two natures of Christ 
 into one. These four errors were condemned by 
 the church, and each error was answered, as 
 Hooker says, by a single word. The first, which 
 denied that Christ was God, is answered by the 
 word " truly." The second, that denied to Christ 
 a perfect humanity from the absence of a human 
 soul, is met by the word " perfectly." The third, 
 that divided his person into two, by the adverb " in- 
 divisibly," and the fourth which confounded the two 
 natures by blending them in one, was answered by 
 another adverb, "distinctly." "Truly," "perfectly," 
 " indivisibly," " distinctly," that is, truly God, per- 
 fectly man, of one indivisible personality, and of 
 two distinct natures. These four adverbs denote, 
 therefore, the four aspects of the doctrine which, 
 as the sides of a square, enclose the great truth 
 impregnably. Every assault upon the doctrine 
 must make its approach upon one or another of 
 these four sides, which thus complete the state- 
 ment of the doctrine and exhaust the several forms 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 49 
 
 of objection. This quadrilateral intrenchment of 
 the truth was accomplished by the four General 
 Councils of the church, each pronouncing upon one 
 or another of the four chief heresies. In those 
 councils the total doctrine of the Trinity, involv- 
 ing the distinct personalities of the Father, the 
 Son, and the Holy Ghost joined together in the 
 substantive unity of the divine nature, was so for- 
 mulated by precise logical terms, sharp-lined and 
 clear, that the crystalline formation has lost no 
 fraction of its meaning to this day nor a scintilla 
 of its bright truth. Answering the speculations 
 of the best reason of man with the deductions of 
 the most rational logic, it left no careless loop for 
 ingenuity to hang a doubt on. 
 
 As we trace the light of this doctrine back 
 through the ages of faith till we come to the 
 period of its first systematic statement, it stands 
 out from the background of revelation, condensing 
 the diffusive truth into one luminous body, the 
 fixed exposition of the mind of God. 
 
 Thus far, you will observe, I have not entered 
 into the Scriptural evidence of this great doctrine. 
 The collection of texts would be too long a pro- 
 
50 Lecture Second. 
 
 cess for a single lecture. Yet I cannot help ask- 
 ing you to think a little of a single text, which 
 seems to me a sort of focal statement of the 
 doctrine. I refer to the baptismal formula drawn 
 from Christ's last commission to his apostles: "Go 
 ye, teach all nations, baptizing them in the name 
 of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy 
 Ghost." 
 
 Remembering the occasion of these words, they 
 bear a very peculiar significance. They were the 
 ministerial charter of authority and the guide-book 
 of ministerial responsibility. What Christ said to 
 his disciples in his parting words must bear a 
 weighty meaning. As baptismal words, they in- 
 stitute the sacrament of initiation into his church. 
 Chiselled on the portico of the Christian temple, their 
 meaning must be the alphabetical truth of his 
 religion. Every man or woman or child must 
 adopt these words as the confession of his faith, — 
 " Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." 
 
 Let us see what truth is garnered up into this 
 formula of words. And first examine the formula 
 itself as a simple question of grammatical con- 
 struction, " In the name of the Father and of the 
 
The Tr i- Personality of God. 51 
 
 Son and of the Holy Ghost." Here is a noun in 
 the singular number, the word, " name," and then 
 there are three different titles denoting as many- 
 distinct personalities; and the word "name" in 
 the singular is made to comprehend the three 
 several titles as if they were together summed up 
 in that one name. The unit and the triplet are 
 identical in force and value. Now this relation is 
 not changed when we turn the abstraction into a 
 personality; as the comprehensive name which 
 takes in the three titles is the name of God, so the 
 three personalities denoted by the titles are per- 
 sonalities of God, and thus the God of our baptism 
 is a triune Jehovah. But leaving the grammati- 
 cal sense of the baptismal formula, let us see what 
 light is shed upon our subject by the nature and 
 use of the baptism itself. 
 
 Baptism is the form of a covenant between the 
 two parties, God and man, in which each party 
 assumes a distinct responsibility and obligation. 
 On the part of God, it is the obligation of grace 
 and salvation. On the part of man, it is self-con- 
 secration and obedience. We may look at it both 
 on its divine and the human side. The interpre- 
 
52 Lecture Second. 
 
 tation of its divine side is this : all the blessing of 
 the covenant, forgiveness of sin, regeneration of 
 the soul, the indwelling of God, spiritual strength 
 and victory to be crowned in Heaven. These are 
 the pledged gifts of baptism to every faithful re- 
 ceiver. But we ask, " In whose name, on what 
 authority, are these matchless promises made ? " 
 In the one name, by the one authority, of the 
 Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. But 
 these gifts are all divine, the bestowment of God 
 alone. It cannot be, then, that either of the cov- 
 enanting persons is less than divine. The Son 
 cannot be a creature born in time, if he bestows 
 creative and eternal gifts. The Hoty Ghost must 
 be more than an influence, a breath, an imperson- 
 ality, if it can work the most illustrious works of 
 God. 
 
 And so I infer that since the covenant is one 
 and the authority one, and since the covenanting 
 powers must be personal, there must be a sense in 
 which the distinct personalities must be joined in 
 one substance of unity. The God of baptism must 
 be triune. 
 
 Look now at the human side of the baptismal 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 53 
 
 sacrament. The believing person is baptized in 
 the one name. To him who bears that name he 
 makes confession of his guilt, proclaims the grat- 
 itude of forgiveness. Him he avouches to be 
 henceforward the sovereign of his heart and life; 
 renouncing all other conflicting loves, all repug- 
 nant service, all other worship, he dedicates himself 
 to his acceptance. 
 
 Lost, but redeemed by Him, guilty, but by Him 
 forgiven, sinful in grain, but now by Him regen- 
 erated, he brings his whole rescued nature and 
 lays it on the altar consecrated to the one great 
 baptismal name, and that name Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost. And the same importunate question 
 comes round to the human side, Who are Father, 
 Son, and Holy Ghost ? Am I to pay a sovereign 
 and equal loyalty to the eternal Father, to a crea- 
 ture, and to a breath, an influence, the shadow of a 
 shade? Is my faith to be distributed among 
 beings of such different make and nature, and my 
 supremest love and adoration divided and degrad- 
 ed ? Is this what I mean in my baptism ? It were 
 idolatry to do so. If I must render to the three 
 persons a divine consecration, then those three 
 
54 Lecture Second. 
 
 must be alike divine. If I must bow to them alike 
 under one sacred name, there must be a sense in 
 which the three are one, and the God of my bap- 
 tism is triune. I do not see why the force of this 
 reasoning is not conclusive, and interpreting the 
 baptismal text by its grammatical structure and 
 its religious purpose, it seems to contain in itself 
 the necessary recognition of the doctrine of the 
 Trinity, — three distinct personalities joined with 
 equal power and glory in one essential nature of 
 Godhead. 
 
 This is the substance of the doctrine as it was 
 adjusted and set forth by the four General Coun- 
 cils, in refutation of all the opposing theories that 
 had come into birth during two centuries of the 
 church's life. And this declaration seems to have 
 been accepted as a finality and treasured as a 
 priceless legacy by all the Christian generations 
 since. It has entered into the creed of every con- 
 siderable organization of Christians to this day. 
 The Eastern and the Western churches, and every 
 Protestant church that has embodied its faith in a 
 symbol, have clung to the doctrine as the spinal 
 column of the whole body of Christian belief, upon 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 55 
 
 which depended the value and vigor of every other 
 tenet. In all this lapse of time none of the errors 
 that teased the early church have recovered from 
 the buffet of the four councils, except two, the 
 Arian and the Sabellian theories. These two, be- 
 ing less speculative than the rest, more level to the 
 common apprehension of men, would hold their 
 grasp the longest, and seize the first occasion of 
 religious thinking to cast aside their grave-clothes 
 and come forth in a resurrection form. 
 
 The Arian heresy consisted in the absolute de- 
 nial of the deity of Christ. And although the ut- 
 most that Arius ever affirmed was that there was 
 a period when the Son of God was not, yet the 
 sensitive perceptions of the early Christians dis- 
 cerned quickly the falsity and mischief that were 
 disguised in this gentle negation, and immediately 
 rose in conflict. The controversy was virulent and 
 widely spread. The Church was shaken by it. 
 The Arian opinion was so simple that it might 
 easily satisfy the minds of the common and uncul- 
 tured class, who were inapt and impatient at sub- 
 tile distinctions of thought, and so rational as to 
 suit that other class, always to be found in cultivated 
 
56 Lecture Second. 
 
 society, whose chief worship is paid to the sover- 
 eignty of intellect, who would bring divine truth 
 within the jurisdiction of reason, and summon even 
 the deep things of God to justify themselves at the 
 bar of common-sense. Arianism, therefore, was a 
 formidable power of error, which had to be met 
 and refuted by the gathered authority of the 
 church. 
 
 The first General Council, assembled at Nicea in 
 a. d. 325, gave such point-blank denial to the Arian 
 position as to shut it out forever from the citadel 
 of the Catholic faith. 
 
 " God of God, light of light, very God of very 
 God, begotten not made, being of one substance 
 with the Father," were words of august authority, 
 that uttered the death-warrant of Arianism within 
 the church. 
 
 And although it has reappeared again and again 
 in its own form and in the derived and cognate 
 forms of Semiarianism, Unitarianism, and human- 
 itarianism, it has always been as an assailant from 
 the outside, and has never ventured to claim the 
 sanction of Catholic approval; so that while it may 
 claim among its adherents characters as exalted 
 
The Tri-Persotiality of God. 57 
 
 and lives as pure as that of Arius himself, with 
 beliefs so reverent and trustful as to challenge our 
 highest respect, yet its extreme indulgence of 
 reason has begotten much lower forms of belief, 
 until we can count the steps in the ladder of de- 
 clension, from the highest form of Arian belief 
 down to the disbelief of any supernatural element 
 in the Bible, a total denial of its inspiration, claim- 
 ing the religion of the absolute as the ultimate 
 reach of reason and the only true faith for mankind. 
 But besides the Arian error, I mentioned the 
 Sabellian as having survived the period of the 
 councils, and reappearing in modern forms. 
 
 The error of Sabellius differed from that of Ari- 
 us by a whole diameter; for while Arius could not 
 but hold the personality of the Son of God, since 
 he believed him to be a creature, Sabellius, on the 
 other hand, maintained his divinity and denied his 
 distinct personality. He held that God subsisted 
 only in one personality, and that in his relations 
 with man he acted in three distinct lines or func- 
 tions or methods, and in each of these functions or 
 methods he assumed a distinct and descriptive 
 title. As the supreme administrator of the world 
 
58 Lecture Second. 
 
 he bore the title of Father; whenever he would 
 make manifestations of himself to man he assumed 
 the name of Son ; and whenever he would bring 
 his power to bear in the way of efficient agency 
 upon man's life and soul, he was called the Holy 
 Ghost. God the sovereign, enthroned amidst the 
 reserve of his majesty, God the manifester, coming 
 into incarnation, and God the regenerator and 
 sanctifier of the human soul, were only three dis- 
 tinct aspects of the one personality of God. There 
 were others, both before and after Sabellius, who 
 held opinions differing only slightly from his, and 
 of whom, therefore, he is a fair representative. It 
 is easy to see how widely and easily his doctrines 
 would find acceptance in the church. By recog- 
 nizing the full divinity of the Son and of the Holy 
 Ghost, he satisfied the hearts of that devout multi- 
 tude whose faith and love had centred on a Saviour 
 God, but whose reasoning powers were untrained 
 in logical distinctions. Their hearts and souls had 
 taught them by a delighted experience of his grace 
 that their Christ was divine, and they had not 
 enough of dialectic skill and acumen to trace out 
 the vicious consequence of denving his separate 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 59 
 
 personality. Yet it requires no long thought to 
 discover the sinister bearing of this view upon the 
 doctrine of Christ's atonement. 
 
 It seems plain that if the Son of God be only one 
 aspect of the Father's person, the atonement for 
 human guilt was made by the Father to himself, 
 — an incongruity that carries its own refutation. 
 There could be, then, no atonement in its sense of 
 substitution, or in any sense beyond that of 
 moral suasion or a pure example or a pathetic 
 martyrdom. There could be no high-priestly in- 
 tercession at the mercy-seat above for the strug- 
 gling souls of the redemption. 
 
 The utmost of the work of Christ would be to 
 tell mankind that he was their Father, who had 
 come down to assure them of his fatherhood, that 
 he loved them like a father, pitied their moral 
 weakness, and would by no means judge them se- 
 verely if they would try to do as he should tell 
 them. There is not enough in a doctrine like this 
 to meet the wants of a soul profoundly in earnest, 
 looking first at its own low proclivities, and then 
 looking at God in the white splendor of his holi- 
 ness, a soul possessed by a conscious guiltiness 
 
6o Lecture Second. 
 
 that condemns itself, and insists on being pun- 
 ished. 
 
 While, therefore, the doctrine of Arius evacu- 
 ated the Atonement of its value, Christ being only 
 a creature, the doctrine of Sabellius stripped it of 
 its meaning and resolved it into only a method of 
 moral influence. This theory did not die with the 
 mob of errors to which the councils gave the death- 
 blow, but its reproductive power lived along with 
 that of Arius, a seed-power, torpid for a while, like 
 the grains of wheat in the cerements of an Egyp- 
 tian mummy, waiting only for an opening occasion 
 to sprout and bear fruit. 
 
 Accordingly, in modern times, Sabellianism has 
 had a fresh birth; first, in Germany, where it met 
 the crazy rationalism of the times and grafted its 
 philosophy upon the religion of the Bible. It was 
 not difficult to do so, for the idea of some sort of 
 trinity in the Godhead was not strange to the old 
 philosophies. Both the Hindoo and the Platonic 
 trinities had entered as elements into the ancient 
 systems of thought, and were, therefore, respect- 
 able from their pedigree. Thus Sabellianism had 
 an authentic philosophical footing, which kept it 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 61 
 
 from being despised ; and inasmuch as it set forth 
 only a modal Trinity and avoided the puzzling 
 dogma of three persons joined in one substance of 
 nature, its presentment of God had a look no 
 worse than of a religious philosophy, that is, a phil- 
 osophy that had not so much of religion as to 
 spoil it. 
 
 From Germany, the system has crossed the 
 water to England and thence to America, where 
 it lives a popular and advancing life, suiting itself 
 to the class of clerical minds who sympathize with 
 the progressive spirit of the age, and whose young 
 ambition is tinged with intellectuality. The fol- 
 lowers of Sabellius do indeed maintain that their 
 doctrine is not forbidden by the church. They 
 claim that the dogmatic teaching of the Nicene 
 creed does not bar them out from the fold of the 
 Orthodox faith, because, while that creed exhausts 
 the very life-blood of Arianism in proclaiming the 
 full divinity of the Son of God, it has no clause 
 that asserts his separate personality. Hence its 
 doctrine of a modal Trinity is not a heresy. This 
 would seem to be at first view a plausible claim. 
 It is not until we refer to the Athanasian creed 
 
62 Lecture Second. 
 
 that Sabellianism meets with an explicit rebuke. 
 In that creed, the most perfect model of dogmatic 
 statement that the world has ever seen, the doc- 
 trine of the tri-personality of the Godhead is stated 
 in terms so full and with such discrimination of 
 thought as seem to render a mistake impossible. 
 Its form is not only inclusive, but exclusive as 
 well. Its declarations are antithetical, balanced 
 by an affirmation on one hand and a negation on 
 the other; not only asserting the doctrine but de- 
 nying in terms its opposite; showing both what it 
 means and what it does not mean at a single 
 glance. 
 
 That Creed, therefore, has ever been held to be 
 the best fortified bulwark of the Faith, and, in 
 every church that receives it as authority, the Sa- 
 bellian belief must be content to hold the place of 
 a tolerated error. Our own Church, by declining 
 to admit it as one of her standards, has left a some- 
 what open field for the followers of Sabellius to 
 disport their unshackled thoughts. If their theory 
 be not arrested and rebuked by other recognitions 
 of the Trinity in the devotional and liturgical ex 
 pressions of the Church, there would seem to be 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 63 
 
 nothing in the logical construction of her creeds 
 to convict the other doctrine as illegitimate. 
 
 The objections in our day to the doctrine of the 
 Trinity are somewhat different from those of the 
 early times, because they spring from psychologi- 
 cal reasoning, a species of thinking unknown to 
 their philosophies. From this source comes the 
 main objection that the doctrine of the tri-person- 
 ality of God is contradicted by the essential idea 
 of personality, and is therefore necessarily incon- 
 ceivable and false. The essence of personality, it 
 is said, is self-consciousness, the consciousness of 
 being itself and not another; its function is to cre- 
 ate the sense of separateness and individuality and 
 the exclusion of all other individualities. 
 
 Now, the doctrine of tri-personality contradicts 
 this elementary self-consciousness; it asserts that 
 the three personalities are one personality, which 
 is to declare that three units are one and the same 
 unit, which is absurd. If we reply that the doc- 
 trine does not take the shape of saying three per- 
 sons in one person, but three persons in one Divine 
 nature, then the objector asks, What is that Divine 
 nature ? Is it too a personality ? If so, there are 
 
64 Lecture Second. 
 
 four personalities, not three only ; and if it be not 
 a personality, but only a nature, an unknown 
 something, then the three persons are independent 
 beings and the system is a Tritheism. What shall 
 we say to this keen and trenchant objection, that 
 pierces to the heart of the doctrine and cuts in 
 twain the silver cord of its vitality? 
 
 As the objection is an aggressive one, the answer 
 needs be only defensive. As it makes a positive 
 charge of inconceivability and necessary absurdity, 
 the charge is sufficiently repelled and the doctrine 
 vindicated by a negative. Does the idea of three 
 distinct personal consciousnesses conflict fatally 
 with the idea of the unity of those personalities in 
 one nature ? Can any way be shown to the eye 
 of reason in which they may conceivably be joined 
 in a unity of essence without the logical crea- 
 tion of a fourth personal consciousness? In ad- 
 vance of further argument, let me say that per- 
 haps our conclusion may depend somewhat upon 
 the direction in which our minds address the 
 subject. 
 
 When the idea of the Trinity is propounded as a 
 philosophical theme, we naturally begin our think- 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 65 
 
 ing at the nearest terminus of thought, and reason 
 back to the beginning. We think first of the sev- 
 eral personalities, and then proceed to join the 
 severalities into unity, which, after all, is only an 
 aggregation of units, to which we find it difficult 
 to ascribe any subsistence of its own. The connec- 
 tion seems arbitrary and artificial, a union rather 
 than a unity. The doctrine thus takes on the 
 look of tritheism, — the three personalities joined 
 by affinity, and not by constitutional and essential 
 oneness. Supposing, however, that we begin to 
 think at the remoter terminus, and let the concep- 
 tion be of the Godhead as eternally subsisting in 
 a triple form, not compounded of three personal- 
 ities, but as being never anything else than three. 
 The unity does not then appear as a junction of 
 separate subsistences, but its very constitution and 
 essence is that of a triple subsistence, — an idea 
 which seems to me not beyond the reach of ration- 
 al conception. If there be a difficulty of think- 
 ing this, is not the difficulty one of ignorance 
 rather than of reason, the same that besets all 
 our thoughts of the Divine subsistence, or of 
 any other being or thing, which makes even a 
 
66 Lecture Second. 
 
 blade of grass an enigma, and the whole world 
 a huge, solemn mystery ? 
 
 But now let us try to meet distinctly the ob- 
 jection that if there be, besides the three per- 
 sonal consciousnesses, another consciousness of the 
 Divine nature itself, then the four consciousnesses 
 are equivalent to four Gods and not three in one. 
 As the whole objection grounds itself in our human 
 psychology, let us get our reply from the same 
 source and take our human consciousness as the 
 basis of thought. 
 
 Mankind subsists to-day as twelve hundred 
 millions of distinct personalities, each personality 
 having its distinct consciousness of being itself and 
 not another; yet all these personalities spring from 
 the one ground of nature which we call humanity, 
 binding those personalities together in a character- 
 istic unity which distinguishes them from all other 
 natures, from brute to angelic. 
 
 Each one of the personalities contains the 
 whole power and character of human nature as 
 truly and essentially as if it were the only human 
 being in existence. Human nature would not be 
 different, would not be less, if there were only one 
 
The Tri- Personality of God. 67 
 
 person to represent it. The plurality of persons, 
 therefore, does not destroy the unity of nature. 
 This will of course be easily admitted, but it will 
 probably be asked, " Is there any consciousness in 
 this nature itself? the consciousness namely among 
 the several persons of being joined together by 
 this common bond ? " " Is there mingled with the 
 personal consciousness, which is the consciousness 
 of separateness, another consciousness, which is 
 the consciousness of unity ? " I think there is. 
 Else what is the meaning of the universal sense of 
 brotherhood ? What is that touch of nature that 
 makes the whole world kin ? What is that native 
 sympathy that we feel for the trials and sorrows of 
 mankind, though far away ? Why do our hearts sink 
 at their debasement or our blood boil at their wrongs? 
 Why does any distressed man make appeal with a 
 sort of confidence to the generic feelings of human 
 nature? Why does the skilful orator address 
 himself so surely to those generic feelings to gain 
 his cause ? Why is it that companions find them- 
 selves so often interpreting each other's silent 
 feelings, anticipating each other's wishes, or utter- 
 ing at the same moment precisely the same senti- 
 
68 Lecture Second. 
 
 ments ? Does not this world-known fact imply an 
 underlying consciousness of unity perfectly com- 
 patible with the individual consciousness of per- 
 sonality ? If so, it seems to me we have analogy 
 enough to warrant the idea of a similar constitu- 
 tion of the Divine nature. 
 
 Supposing only the difference of degree between 
 man and God; supposing these facts of our life to 
 be translated into the ineffable conditions of God's 
 life; supposing, in a word, that man, made in the 
 image of God, is a type, no matter how lame and 
 feeble, of the great archetype of infinitude, may 
 we not suppose that the Divine nature may still 
 be distributed into personalities without losing its 
 deity, and at the same time may hold in itself a 
 consciousness of itself, which is incorporated with 
 the consciousness of each personality, pervading 
 each so intimately that with each consciousness 
 of separateness there will be blended the insepar- 
 able and intense consciousness of unity ? This 
 supposition seems to me perfectly conceivable and 
 answering the essential requirements of the doc- 
 trine of the Trinity; and if only conceivable, it 
 meets the objection we are dealing with of impos- 
 
The Tn- Personality of God. 6g 
 
 sibility and contradiction. If conceivable, it is not 
 irrational, and if not irrational it may be true. 
 Thus, then, I think the doctrine stands secure from 
 the assaults of human reason, even as, by the con- 
 fessions of the universal church, it is the fixed 
 truth of revelation. It justifies itself to our ac- 
 ceptance in that not only does the earnest disciple 
 cling to it with his heart, and not only the pro- 
 longed strain of Christian consciousness has made 
 this truth, with its dependent truths, the burden 
 of its teaching and its song, but in that our sov- 
 ereign reason can muster no effective weapons 
 against it, but, standing face to face with the pos- 
 sibility, can only adore the glory of its mystery in 
 the divine Three in One. And this is no skeleton 
 truth : it is clothed with the teguments and filled 
 with the vitality of a practical, spiritual power. 
 
 Perhaps it is safe to say that, as it has been the 
 stay and staff of the highest religious life, so with- 
 out it there had been no abiding Universal Church. 
 It would be an interesting work to show the 
 practical importance of this great truth in detail, 
 to trace its bearings on other revealed truths, — 
 how it works itself in essentially with the atonement 
 
70 Lecture Second. 
 
 of the God-man, how it brightens into life in the 
 agency of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, and how- 
 it thus exalts the whole Christian experience to a 
 higher plane in its faith, its comforts, its strength, 
 and its assured victory. 
 
 But the limits of our time forbid such expatia- 
 tion. I can only suggest that each Christian may 
 educe this rich development in his own personal 
 consciousness, and close with the invocation that 
 the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Eternal 
 Son, the love of God, the Father, and the fellow- 
 ship of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, may be 
 with us all, now and evermore. Amen ! 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE ATONEMENT. 
 
LECTURE III. 
 
 THE ATONEMENT. 
 
 OUR theme to-night is the doctrine of the 
 atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ. Al- 
 though we cannot, by searching, find out God, or un- 
 derstand the Almighty to perfection, yet when he 
 himself leaves hanging out from the deep sanctuary 
 where he dwells loops of suggestion to fasten our 
 thoughts upon, our minds will seize them and try to 
 climb up into the mystery of the meaning of things ; 
 and although these suggestions be only partial and 
 fragmentary, they may serve to show oftentimes 
 what that meaning is not, though they fail to 
 disclose its full interior force. That the word of 
 God ascribes to the death of Christ an efficacy and 
 importance belonging to the death of no other per- 
 son, there is of course no question. It stands out 
 
74 Lecture Third. 
 
 in history, with its associated facts, a perfectly 
 unique fact, and its spiritual significance is no less 
 sublimely singular. That significance is that the 
 immortal welkbeing of our race depends absolutely 
 upon the fact that Jesus Christ died. That the 
 human soul could be saved only through Christ, 
 was the alphabetical faith of Christianity; that 
 salvation was in consequence of Christ's dying, 
 was the next step of supplementary belief. 
 
 In this simple form it became the heritage of 
 the generations for two hundred years. The church 
 was not in a condition to deal with theological 
 reasonings. The dogmatic period had not come 
 in. The company of believers had all that they 
 could do to live: to give a reason to their pagan 
 enemies why they should live was often beyond 
 their mental competency. In multitudes of in- 
 stances they could only say, " I believe," and then 
 die. Perhaps we can measure the extent of their 
 faith in Christ's atonement from the instance of 
 Philip and the Eunuch in the Acts of the Apostles. 
 The Eunuch was reading from the Prophet Isaiah, 
 " He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as 
 the sheep before her shearer is dumb, so opened 
 
The Atonement. 75 
 
 he not his mouth." The context of these words is, 
 He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows. 
 He was wounded for our transgressions, he was 
 bruised for our iniquities ; the chastisement of our 
 peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are 
 healed. " Of whom speaketh the Prophet this," 
 said the Eunuch, " of himself or of some other 
 man ? " Then Philip began at the same place, and 
 preached unto him Jesus, — Jesus, as the fulfilment 
 of that stirring prophecy, suffering, but not for 
 himself, innocent of all wrong but bearing the sins 
 of many, wounded and bruised like a criminal, not 
 for his own transgression, but for ours. The 
 Eunuch accepted this gospel, was baptized in its 
 faith, and went on his way rejoicing. It was 
 gospel enough for the salvation of a world, and 
 the faith of the simple fact of Christ's death could 
 transform the unhappy heart of sin into a fountain 
 of peace and joy. The essential element of this 
 belief lay in the vicariousness of Christ's suffering. 
 Whatever he endured was as a substitute for sin- 
 ners. Believing this, they asked not how or why ; 
 they rested in no formula of words, but in the per- 
 sonal, divine, dying Christ, whose death was their 
 
j6 Lecture Third. 
 
 life. By this they lived and died. But when the 
 dogmatic period dawned, the Church began to 
 think out explanations and to form theories of the 
 Atonement, and in doing so they would pitch upon 
 some word of Scripture which signified the charac- 
 ter of the Atonement, and that word would be made 
 the germ point of a theory. There were many 
 such words, and each one denoted a distinct aspect 
 of the atoning work. 
 
 Kedemption, mediation, sacrifice, purchase, pro- 
 pitiation, ransom, — a theory built on either of these 
 words alone was pretty sure to run into some im- 
 practicable conclusion; and even to join them 
 together was to make the theory loose-jointed and 
 incongruous. These descriptive words all agreed, 
 however, in one essential meaning ; they all denoted 
 something done by one person for and in behalf 
 of another person; the element of vicariousness 
 was wrapped up in them all. Of these suggestive 
 words the word " ransom " seems to have seized 
 the minds of the age the earliest. They knew 
 what ransom meant, the buying back from slavery, 
 because it was the daily usage of all the peoples of 
 the earth, and they adopted the idea as the prime 
 
The Atonement. 77 
 
 element of Christ's atonement. But then the 
 question came, From whom did Christ buy back 
 the lost race of men ? Who was their master and 
 what was the slavery ? The slavery, it was 
 answered, is sin, and the enslaving power is Satan ; 
 hence the great ransom was paid to God's prime 
 enemy, the Prince of Evil. He had snatched the 
 jewel souls of men from the diadem of the Al- 
 mighty, and by the laws of conquest they were 
 his, unless their former owner and creator should 
 buy them back by some equivalent, and that 
 equivalent was his Son's life, rendered up under 
 such circumstances of agony and woe as, while 
 Heaven mourned, the arch-fiend triumphed. To 
 our ears such a statement has the sound of a shriek, 
 a discord of horror and absurdity; yet it was the 
 favorite theory for a thousand years, — not unbroken 
 by protest and denial, but with enough of continuity 
 to make a chain of great names in its support. I 
 cannot recite the objections that led to. its over- 
 throw, but they are such as rise up in our Christian 
 thoughts much more easily than in minds whose 
 thinking was done for them, and which knew 
 nothing of the Bible, — the generations of the Dark 
 
yS Lecture Third. 
 
 Ages. It might seem to have sprung from the 
 Mamchean philosophy, which held a dualism in 
 the government of the world, — good and bad powers 
 equally independent and always contending for 
 sovereignty. 
 
 The empire of this theory, which had run through 
 ages of secularism and corruption in the church, 
 was broken by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 in the early part of the twelfth century. 
 
 In his great book entitled " Why God became 
 Man," he lifted the whole conception of Christ's 
 atonement into the blended light of the essential 
 deity and the essential humanity, and showed that, 
 as man's first, last misery was personal guiltiness, 
 so his first, last, total want was the blotting out 
 of that guiltiness, the free and absolute forgiveness 
 of his sins. Christ therefore made propitiation to 
 the Father, not to Satan, and the Father, who 
 would otherwise be held back from forgiveness by 
 the sanction of his holiness, justice, and truth, 
 could now pronounce his law, which embodied all 
 the three, satisfied and vindicated. 
 
 Mercy and Truth met together, Kighteousness 
 and Peace kissed each other at the cross when 
 
The Atonement. 79 
 
 Jesus died. God could now be just and still 
 justify the ungodly. This theory of Anselm's was 
 argued with immense force of logic, and with that 
 knowledge of human nature which comes from 
 profound religious experience, holding the heart 
 up between itself and God, so that in his divine 
 light a man sees himself as in a transparency. 
 But not even the great power and piety of Anselm 
 could gain supremacy for his theory at once. It 
 lived a checkered life up to the sixteenth century, 
 — the period of the Reformation, — when it became 
 the accepted type of religious thinking among the 
 most strenuous thinkers of the most strenuous age 
 of history. The emancipation of the human mind 
 which sprang of that grand epoch, the depth of 
 spiritual insight begotten of the free reading of 
 God's word, the vigor of the whole manhood of 
 man which came up into consciousness under the 
 stimulating force of freedom, were mainly centred 
 on religious themes. 
 
 The influence of the schoolmen in sharpening 
 the thinking powers had prepared the way for the 
 handling of deep and abstract topics, and there 
 were none others to challenge their thoughts. 
 
8o Lecture Third. 
 
 The brilliant era of material science was full two 
 centuries in the future. Bacon was not yet born 
 to discover or recover the master-key of induction 
 which was to unlock the penetralia of Nature, so 
 that men could enter, and explore her open secrets. 
 Hence the accumulated thought of the age threw 
 its whole weight into theology, canvassing and 
 criticising its deep revelations, and none so much 
 as the central one of Christ's redeeming work, its 
 methods and its power, how it could obviate the 
 moral demerit of man and procure the pardon of 
 his sins. 
 
 Men saw that this was the pivot truth of revela- 
 tion; that the whole gospel was gathered into it; 
 that if there were no substitute to bear the retri- 
 bution of man's guilt, there was to human concep- 
 tions no assignable reason why there should be a 
 gospel at all, with its tremendous sacrifice of a 
 humiliated God. The gospel would be then only 
 a reduplication of the religion of nature, with the 
 addition of the Divine Person to reinforce the 
 testimony of the Divine works. 
 
 Martin Luther, with his intense soul, seized 
 upon the divinity of the atonement with such an 
 
The Atonement. 8 1 
 
 absolute embrace as seemed almost to neutralize 
 the responsibility of man. Christ was the be- 
 liever's substituted righteousness, not only by what 
 he endured, but likewise by what he did; his 
 active as well as his passive obedience were in the 
 place and in behalf of man's. His theory seemed 
 to involve the conclusion that since, because Christ 
 suffered for human sin, man need not suffer, so if 
 Christ obeyed for man, then man need not obey. 
 It was charged with unhinging the code of moral 
 sanctions, and inaugurating a saturnalia of licen- 
 tiousness. But Luther repelled the vicious con- 
 clusion by replying that although the law of 
 obedience was blotted out by the blood of Christ, 
 yet the new Christ life of the believer was its own 
 inspired and instinctive law. Obedience would 
 grow out of him instead of being forced upon him. 
 The Lutheran doctrine became essentially the 
 doctrine of all the reformed churches, though 
 modified by various theories touching the method 
 of the atonement, each theory being met by 
 specific objections. The theories all agreed, how- 
 ever, in maintaining the idea of substitution as the 
 characteristic and vital element of the atoning 
 
82 Lecture Third. 
 
 work, so that with the body of believers there was 
 a substantial unity of faith. 
 
 We can easily understand to what classes of 
 religious thinkers the fundamental idea of substi- 
 tution would be absolutely repulsive. The Arian, 
 who denied the divinity of Christ, would of course 
 refuse assent to the idea throughout, since it was 
 absurd to suppose that a created being could offer 
 a meritorious satisfaction for the sins of a world. 
 
 The Sabellian, maintaining that Christ was only 
 the Father with another name, must likewise deny 
 the substitution, because it is impossible to think 
 of the same person offering sacrifice and propitia- 
 tion to himself. 
 
 The Arian views were represented by Socinus, 
 the lineal predecessor of the Unitarians; but the 
 Sabellian theory of the Trinity had not then, so 
 far as I know, any class representative. The revi- 
 val of Sabellianism was of later date. Its reappear- 
 ance is, indeed, an event of our century, and it 
 occurred, not so much as a lapse from the true 
 belief as a recoil from the dreary, dark denial of 
 Christianity itself, which involved the churches of 
 Germany, through several generations. The Ger- 
 
The Atonement. 83 
 
 mans had translated into their own tongue the 
 writings of the English deists of the seventeenth 
 century, and had transformed their matter-of-fact 
 unbelief into the sublimated speculations that 
 characterize the Teutonic thinking. Their scepti- 
 cism took the form of a philosophy which culmi- 
 nated in pantheism, rejecting the Bible entirely, or 
 else trying to square its statements with their 
 philosophy, and torturing the sacred writings by 
 interpretations of melancholy grotesqueness. From 
 such a system of madly independent thought, a 
 doctrine like that of the atonement would of neces- 
 sity drop out ; and while the Church was dominated 
 by the Schools, and its ministers were of their 
 training, the former faith became, with few excep- 
 tions, a dead orthodoxy. Here and there was 
 heard a solitary and gentle reclaim from some 
 whose religious consciousness could not quite be 
 obscured by the philosophical fog, men of fervid 
 piety, but with such an overruling influence of 
 their academic training that it seems almost as if 
 their philosophy was their gospel after all. 
 
 Schleiermacher represents most truly this partial 
 return of faith from the wild verge to which it had 
 
84 Lecture Third. 
 
 run, and with him and his sanctified philosophy, 
 Christianity became respectable again, and Christ a 
 power; but even with him it is not Christ, the 
 sacrifice, the propitiation, the High Priest, but 
 Christ, the loving and living Son of God, coming 
 down to draw men to himself by the attractions of 
 his spiritual loveliness and by the fulness with 
 which he meets the soul's aspiration after God. 
 
 Beautiful, fascinating as this sort of faith is, it 
 fails, evidently, to reach the deep relation of Christ 
 to our moral nature, which our nature, awakened 
 to its utter need, feels even to the centre of its 
 consciousness. This system is, however, so clear 
 an advance from the dead sea of philosophical un- 
 belief towards the promised land of God's people, 
 that the Christian faith may thank God and take 
 courage, with the hope of a restored, believing 
 Germany. 
 
 The German philosophy, in its improved form, 
 was borrowed into England by Coleridge, and was 
 set forth by him to a school of thoughtful disciples, 
 numbering men of the purest character and of the 
 finest minds in the realm. His influence was that 
 of an oracle, speaking sometimes as from the glory 
 
The Atonement. 85 
 
 of an open firmament of light and sometimes from 
 the darkness of a clouded sky, but always with an 
 authority that seemed to come down from above. 
 Almost the whole school of his disciples were led 
 by him into a style of religious thinking that sank 
 the cross out of its singular eminence. The propi- 
 tiatory element of the doctrine of the atonement 
 was volatilized, and escaped. The idea of substi- 
 tution was rejected; "vicarious" became an ill- 
 sounding word ; the ground-work of atonement, as 
 laid in the moral guiltiness of man, was covered 
 up. " Guilt " seemed a word of another vocabulary. 
 Man's sinfulness was represented as very much a 
 misfortune, but as hardly more. God's love was 
 presented as the attributes which engrossed and 
 concealed the other attributes in its own bosom of 
 light; his holiness, his justice, his truth, were not 
 considered as leading powers in his administrative 
 relations with man. Judgment and the retribu- 
 tions of a life after this seemed to be practically 
 disallowed, and God, as a moral administrator, the 
 Deity of an obsolete dispensation. His character 
 was displayed as a pure fatherliness. In fact, it 
 was customary to say that the single purpose of 
 
86 Lecture Third. 
 
 the mission of the Son of God was to proclaim the 
 fatherhood of God as a truth of glory hitherto 
 unrevealed. 
 
 To the common definition of atonement the con- 
 stant reply was that atonement means reconcilia- 
 tion, and that of the two parties at variance God 
 needs no reconciliation. His fatherly heart is al- 
 ready bending itself towards the wickedest, and it 
 is man alone who needs to be influenced and 
 changed. To awaken or create the temper of rec- 
 onciliation in the human soul Christ came in 
 mighty humiliation, was incarnated, taught, en- 
 dured a life of cruel self-denial, which, by its 
 persuasive pathos, might subdue the hard unwill- 
 ingness that kept man from God. To this life of 
 sorrow and wretchedness his death was only the 
 apt and necessary conclusion. And all this, his 
 life as much as his death, was his atonement. 
 
 Next to this it follows that, to become a Chris- 
 tian, a man must tread in the footsteps of Christ, 
 obey his precepts, especially imitating the daily 
 self-denial of the Saviour, and so achieving for him- 
 self a Christly character. In all this the sacrificial 
 character of Christ's death is impatiently set aside 
 
The Atonement. 87 
 
 with the grouped thoughts that gathered to it from 
 before and behind, — man's guilt and helpless doom, 
 the life-giving power of faith in a Divine substi- 
 tute of doom, the Holy Spirit's help covenanted 
 by the atoning death, and the final acceptance of 
 the soul with God, — accepted in the beloved. I 
 have called this the Sabellian view of the atone- 
 ment, not because all who hold it must necessarily 
 be Sabellians, but because the Sabellian doctrine 
 of the Trinity will harmonize with no other doctrine 
 of the atonement except this. It is a doctrine that 
 has grown and is growing with the Century, in 
 England and in America, in the English Church 
 and in our own. It numbers among its teachers 
 and preachers bright and pure men, whose elevated 
 lives seem to vouch, as far as a life can vouch, for 
 the truth of their doctrine. As it was in the case 
 of Arius and Apollinarius, and with our early Uni- 
 tarians, so was it with the Brothers Hare, and with 
 Maurice and Robertson and Stanley and Dr. John 
 Young in England, and with Bushnell in America. 
 Before we investigate the causes that have given 
 birth and vigorous currency to this theory, let us 
 test some of its positions by the Scriptures. I 
 
88 Lecture Third. 
 
 think that its foremost assertion that Christ came 
 to proclaim the fatherhood of God, hitherto an un- 
 acknowledged truth, is an assertion that lacks the 
 warranty of the Word of God. I am not sure that 
 the Old Testament has fewer declarations of God's 
 paternal character than the New, and if it has, I 
 am sure that those declarations are so emphatic, 
 and their illustrations so subduingly tender, that 
 none can be more so. The Concordance will show 
 how often the gracious title is employed. The 
 Psalms reveal the fatherhood in such winning 
 guise that Jesus seems to have adopted it as the 
 illustration of his own loving nurture of his flock. 
 The whole twenty-third Psalm is full of the father- 
 hood. That it was not a fatherhood of the Jews 
 alone, but of all mankind, was recognized by the 
 prophet, — " Doubtless thou art our father, though 
 Abraham be ignorant of us." 
 
 The first postulate of the theory, therefore, seems 
 to be too hastily assumed. Take next the state- 
 ment that Christ's whole life was one of painful 
 self-denial, which was a chief element of the per- 
 suasive reconciling power that lay in his life's 
 suffering as much as in the pains of his death. 
 
The Atonement. 89 
 
 This statement, again, seems hardly to be borne out 
 by the narrative of the four Gospels ; for up to his 
 thirtieth year, Jesus lived the common life of his 
 family and friends, with no more than the usual 
 trials of an humble condition of life, the economy 
 of a community not rich. In that year he com- 
 menced his ministry with his baptism. Then the 
 Father's word came down from the open heaven to 
 warrant his commission of Messiahship, — " This is 
 my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." Then 
 the Holy Ghost descended upon him to endow him 
 wijih the full spirit and power of Messiahship, and 
 filling him then, for the first time, with its ripe con- 
 sciousness, leads him into the wilderness to hold 
 for forty days transcendent and delighted com- 
 munion with his Father, — communion so transcend- 
 ent that its rapture absorbed all consciousness of 
 physical want. Afterwards he was an hungered, 
 and Satan came upon his exhausted frame and 
 tortured it with temptations; but even in his ex- 
 haustion his new-born consciousness of power 
 defeated the Tempter with a word. Here is the 
 first thing that can be called a pain in Christ's life, 
 if that may be called a pain which was the occa- 
 
go Lecture Third. 
 
 sion of such easy, divine victory: it was no self- 
 denial, but the calm superiority of the spirit over 
 matter, of heaven over earth. We cannot conceive 
 of his being for an instant in doubt, or of his con- 
 science wavering for a moment from its heaven- 
 ward poise. True, he learned what the power of 
 Satan must be over us, his frail brotherhood, and 
 he taught us too that thereby he was fitted to be 
 a sympathizing intercessor with the Father, and 
 that we should conquer even as he conquered. 
 
 For three years after this he lived the life of a 
 pilgrim, with no home of his own, but not without 
 friends whose home was his, and never in all the 
 time complaining of any material hardship or trial. 
 But as the time of his death approached, there 
 came the agony of heart and soul in Gethsemane 
 that made him the very prophetic " Man of sor- 
 rows, acquainted with grief." Yet this sorrow 
 was associated, not with his life, but with the 
 atoning death he was to die, — a shadow of its 
 gloom in advance. There would seem to have 
 been no other real sorrow of Christ, none that a 
 genuine, generous manhood would not refuse to 
 call such, except those divine human griefs, in- 
 
The Atonement. 91 
 
 accessible to human conception, which made at 
 once the indescribable woe and the unutterable 
 glory of the cross. To affirm self-denial in the life 
 of Christ as a pain and a torment seems to be as 
 unworthy of him as it is untrue to Scripture. To 
 say that his life, equally with his death, made part 
 of his suffering for man, is to ignore the open pas- 
 sages where his redemption is centred in the one 
 point of his dying. "Redemption through His 
 blood, even the forgiveness of sins," is the brief 
 formula which conveys, in whatever variations, 
 the truth that the atonement was concentred at 
 the cross. It sounds out in the various language 
 of the Bible, and it sounds down from the song of 
 the redeemed. And more yet, when Christ him- 
 self would show us how he would have us hold the 
 faith, he embodied it in a memorial sacrament ex- 
 hibiting the concrete of the gospel, the unchang- 
 ing type of Christian belief, — his body and his 
 blood, his death, not his life. 
 
 Again, the theory that we are canvassing declares 
 that Christ came to illustrate the divine love, and 
 so to persuade men to repentance. Dr. Bushnell 
 explains it thus: A person who has inflicted an 
 
92 Lecture Third. 
 
 injury upon another is apt to imagine him to be 
 in a state of chronic resentment; hence he is sus- 
 picious of him and avoids him. If overtures of 
 reconciliation are made, he suspects their sincerity ; 
 if he is assured that the feelings of the injured 
 person are still kindly and complacent, he cannot 
 be made to believe it. And so, fearing a latent 
 resentment burrowing in the heart of his enemy, 
 he dares not put himself within its reach and keeps 
 off in estrangement and hostility. 
 
 So is it, says Dr. Bushnell, with man and God. 
 Man, being the offender, supposes God to be his 
 enemy ; hence he avoids him, is afraid of him. If 
 he believed that God truly loved him, it would 
 melt down the iron of his impenitence and bring 
 him into a state of reconciliation. To convince 
 him of his love, God blesses him with the good 
 things of his Providence; and as man still doubts, 
 God sends him special messages in his Word, as- 
 suring him of his abiding paternal tenderness ; and 
 when, after all, man still holds in his bosom, like 
 a demon, the infesting doubt, God comes down 
 himself, and dies on the cross, to show the supreme 
 strength of his love, proving by symbol what he 
 
The Atonement. 93 
 
 had already declared by word. The death of 
 Christ, therefore, removes no impediment in the 
 way of man's forgiveness. It makes no retributive 
 exaction upon his wilful guilt; it tells him to come 
 back to the Father he has left, and all will be well; 
 it adds no new truth, but reaffirms in a new way 
 an old one. The mighty tragedy of the cross is an 
 exhibition, arranged on purpose as an exhibition. 
 
 There is a histrionic air in the transaction as 
 thus explained that carries to the mind an im- 
 pression of unreality, and robs the dreadful death 
 of all the persuasive power that is ascribed to it. 
 It seems painstaking and artificial, an ingenious 
 expedient to produce an emotional effect; and 
 when it has done this, the whole force and mean- 
 ing of the cross is exhausted. That supreme crisis 
 in the history of God's dealings with our apostate 
 mankind, which had been the theme of agonized 
 and of joyous prophecy through the ages, which 
 was to solve the heavenly problem that angels 
 desired to look into, — " how God could be just and 
 yet justify the ungodly," — the grand event which 
 began with the humiliation of God and went od 
 controlling the course of affairs, public and private, 
 
94 Lecture Third. 
 
 and leading the whole order of Divine Providence 
 in its train, so that it became the focal point to 
 which the natural and moral attributes of God had 
 long tended, and were now centred as to a finality, 
 a consummation, beyond which there could be 
 nothing more, — this crowning crisis was after all 
 to be only a display, showing nothing that man 
 did not know before, but only asserting it in such 
 a way and with such an avowed purpose of dis- 
 play as to impair its moral influence, and to put 
 the mind into a critical mood that would of itself 
 drive the sensibilities back into inaccessibility. 
 The great experiment on human feeling would 
 thus inevitably precipitate its own failure. It is 
 most different, I think, to all this when the death 
 of the Son of God is the propitiation for the guilt 
 of the world, a penal death that bore on its broad 
 substitution the sins of mankind, meeting the 
 demands of eternal truth and righteousness, and 
 abolishing human guilt forever. That death is no 
 mere display, not a simple method of persuasion. 
 It does something; it reverses the moral condition 
 of man, changes it from dark doom to hope and 
 cheer. 
 
The Atonement. 95 
 
 It is indeed an exhibition of Divine love, but not 
 of love proposing and preparing itself for exhibi- 
 tion alone. The love is seen in its purpose and its 
 results, — Christ dying to save us from dying, dying 
 once for all, that we need not die eternally. " Here- 
 in is love, that God gave his Son to be the propiti- 
 ation for our sins." When the Divine love comes 
 out into this light it comes with a persuasive force 
 as strong as the felt value of the soul. It is not 
 what the cross seems, but what it does, that makes 
 it a power. If the soul can ever be subdued and 
 reclaimed to God by the death of Christ, it is when 
 it sees in that death the redeeming purchase of its 
 own forfeited life, the blood-bought pardon of its 
 guilt. Then it is a power of regeneration that 
 grasps the soul around, and holds it in the de- 
 lighted embrace of God and his salvation. Upon 
 this point, namely, the comparative efficacy of the 
 two theories of the atonement in meeting the wants 
 of the soul in its most awakened life, we may refer 
 even to Dr. Bushnell himself, a witness of author- 
 ity, who, in his work on Vicarious Atonement, 
 makes a concession against his own principles as 
 remarkable, perhaps, as anything in all literature. 
 
g6 Lecture Third. 
 
 After elaborating the Sabellian theory of the atone- 
 ment throughout nearly his whole volume, with 
 his accustomed vigor of argument and rhetoric, he 
 passes in one of the closing chapters to consider 
 its value and power as an experimental truth, and 
 compares it with the accepted doctrine of the atone- 
 ment, which he calls the " Altar Theory." In this 
 comparison he frankly admits that to a person op- 
 pressed with the convictions of conscience and the 
 sense of guiltiness, his theory ministers no solace. 
 It does not satisfy the instinctive perception of 
 righteousness, which is always strongest and clear- 
 est in a soul convicted of its own unrighteousness, 
 and which always joins together sin and retribu- 
 tion as necessary correlatives. The " Altar View " 
 alone will meet and satisfy the cravings of that 
 awakened and conscience-stricken person. Christ 
 must be presented to him as a sacrifice, oblation, 
 and satisfaction for his sins, and then, re- 
 nouncing all other trust, he rests upon the merit 
 of a dying Saviour, and finds the surpassing peace 
 of pardon through his blood. On reading this 
 strange admission, one can hardly help asking, " If 
 the author knew the worthlessness of his theory 
 
The Atonement. 97 
 
 before he wrote his book, why did he write it ? 
 If he did not know it till the book was written, 
 why did he publish it ? " 
 
 This theory chimes in, no doubt, with the hu- 
 manitarianism of the age, which thinks more of 
 compassion than of justice and righteousness. The 
 engrossment of our philanthropy confines our con- 
 templations so much to the earth and its wants, 
 that we fail to look up to the heavens, and to Him 
 who dwelleth therein. Man's wants and poverty 
 lead us to overlook man's crimes, till we come to 
 feel that God will overlook them too; and when 
 once the sense and appreciation of guilt goes out, 
 all the grand, grave truths of the Bible that postu- 
 late that guilt must fail of access to the conscious- 
 ness of men. 
 
 The prosperity and self-indulgence of the times, 
 the triumph of scientific thought, the skill of our 
 arts, the pride of our freedom, all conspire to make 
 man the all in all, and God the ready servitor. 
 The Bible grows into disuse, and then into disre- 
 spect; its theology is discarded as narrow, its sol- 
 emn sanctions as null. It is as if, in our self- 
 sufficiency, the general mind had been drugged with 
 
98 Lecture Third. 
 
 henbane, and through its dilated pupil saw every- 
 thing only broad and dim. 
 
 Turning from the criticism of theories, let us 
 consider a question often asked, " What is the test 
 quality by which, among all the theories of the 
 atonement, we may know the true one, — the one 
 maintained in the Christian consciousness of the 
 ages ? " I suppose the true answer to be that what- 
 ever theory recognizes the death of Christ as a 
 reason or an influence, on account of which God 
 grants us the grace of his forgiveness, such is es- 
 sentially a true doctrine of the atonement. If, on 
 the other hand, the theory represents the death of 
 Christ as having no effect Godward, but only as a 
 moral power, a divine persuasive to man's soul, 
 then, though Christ be exhibited in the fascination 
 of his living person, the beauty of his benevolence, 
 and the whole varied loveliness of his life, or be 
 presented as a martyr dying for the truth, and the 
 dying be tinged with such pathos that we pity and 
 weep, and are aroused and are indignant, all at 
 once, yet if there be no more than this, the theory 
 fails of that Scriptural accord without which it is 
 a fallacy. At this point the road forks, and while 
 
The Atonement. 99 
 
 the one theory holds the soul to Christ, and leads 
 the church to God, higher and nearer as the road 
 leads forward, the other theory has none but a de- 
 scending advance, the farther the lower, until it 
 may reach the common terrestrial level where 
 Christ is no better than Socrates, or the Gospel 
 than the Memorabilia. Although I have dis- 
 cussed our theme at such length, I am loath to let 
 it go. 
 
 Among the diverse theories which hold the es- 
 sential idea of atonement, is there any one which 
 commends itself specially as denoting the true 
 method ? To my mind, there is one grandly pe- 
 culiar and satisfying to the human consciousness 
 of guilt. I can do hardly more than suggest it. 
 It is grounded on the strange, heart-stirring cry of 
 Christ upon the cross, " My God, my God ! Why 
 hast thou forsaken me ? " These words admit of 
 no rhetorical gloss. It were monstrous to torture 
 them by a various reading. They are a live pic- 
 ture of Christ's consciousness. He was forsaken 
 of his Father. We may not analyze his condition 
 of mind, but it must have been pure woe. The 
 filial consciousness of the Divine Son towards the 
 
ioo Lecture Third. 
 
 Divine Father was broken. He was as an alien. 
 If this be so, then we can understand the only real 
 woe that ever came near to the soul and life of 
 Christ. It was the very woe he came to bear; it 
 was the culminating point of his redeeming work. 
 For this cause came he to this hour. It was the 
 cup his Father had given him, and he drank it. 
 And whence and why this woe ? the soul reverently 
 asks. Was this a penal woe ? It was either this 
 or else gratuitous cruelty. It was penal, then ; but 
 penal on whose account ? He did no sin. Look 
 at it a moment, and remember that God's deser- 
 tion is the specific doom of sin. "Depart from 
 me" is the formulated woe of eternity; and that 
 woe, the precise penalty of human guilt, was pre- 
 cisely forestalled upon the cross. He bore our sins 
 and carried our sorrows; he was our very substi- 
 tute in penal suffering. "Thou shalt make his 
 soul an offering for sin.' Can we go any further ? 
 Perhaps so. The Son of God — the eternal Logos 
 
 was the Creator and the light and life of men. 
 
 His being was incorporated with human life be- 
 fore he was born of Mary. His incarnation was 
 the symbol of a foregone and still subsisting fact 
 
The Atonement. 101 
 
 that the Son of God and humanity were life of life. 
 Everything that Christ did, he did for man in 
 man's place as man, man's representative. In the 
 agony of the garden humanity suffered with him ; 
 on the cross humanity cried out; in that penal 
 woe, to which Christ gave his consenting soul, hu- 
 manity was bearing its penalty. He acted and 
 suffered for us, and we by him. It was by no fic- 
 tion of law, by no technical relation, that he was 
 our surety and our substitute: he was our very 
 selves. In him humanity bowed itself to the in- 
 fliction, owned its perfect righteousness, and was 
 restored to a divine sonship. A soul may still re- 
 luct, resist, rebel; but when it turns to God at 
 last, it claims affiance with the dying Elder Brother 
 of the race, echoes his cry of agony as if it were 
 its own cry, consents as he consented, and feels 
 and knows that the great satisfaction has been 
 made in its divine fulness, and that henceforth 
 there is no condemnation. 
 
 This may be the true method of atonement, yet 
 whether true or not, we know it is not the method, 
 but the glorious fact itself, on which our faith 
 must rest ; and resting there, we are prepared to 
 
102 Lecture Third. 
 
 glorify our Redeemer by an ever-adoring service 
 of gratitude here on earth, and to join in the song 
 of the saved above, " Worthy the Lamb " who has 
 redeemed us to God by his blood ! 
 
LECTURE IY. 
 
 THE HOLY GHOST 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE HOLY GHOST. 
 
 FOE, this fourth lecture I take for my subject 
 11 The Holy Ghost, the Lord and Giver of 
 life." So the subject is designated in the creed. 
 
 The triple personality of the Godhead is not a 
 truth without its fruits. We are taught that in 
 the economy of the Divine administration each 
 personality has its distinct function and agency, — 
 the Father as the prime administrator, with whom 
 is authority, counsel, and direction; the Son, the 
 eternal Logos, as the expressive power the man- 
 ifester of God, whether by word or life, whether 
 before or after his incarnation ; and the Holy Ghost 
 as the practical energy of Deity, to make effectual 
 the Divine counsels by living results through all 
 the realms of creation and with all classes of cre- 
 
 (105} 
 
io6 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 ated things. When we speak of the works of God, 
 therefore, we define the specific agency and power 
 of the Holy Ghost. Whatever of omnipotence, of 
 omniscience, or of omnipresence is involved in 
 producing and maintaining the universe, is the 
 working power of Deity through the third person 
 of the Godhead. 
 
 Thus the whole amplitude of the world is opened 
 out before us Its manifold forms of subsistence 
 come into review one by one; for he is the giver 
 of life to them all, and their presiding Lord as 
 well. 
 
 We begin, therefore, with the physical creation, 
 of which the Scriptural account runs thus: " In the 
 beginning God created the heaven and the earth, 
 and the earth was without form and void, and 
 darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the 
 Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 
 And God said, Let there be light, and there was 
 light." 
 
 Of course a description like this will have to en- 
 counter what are called the discoveries of modern 
 science which claim to have exploded this whole 
 history of the creation as partly a fallacy and the 
 
The Holy Ghost. 107 
 
 rest an absurdity. The alleged absurdity lies in 
 supposing, as this account seems to suppose, that 
 God created something out of nothing, whereas 
 it is an axiom of science that nothing can ever 
 be produced from nothing. Now this axiom is 
 brought down to us from the ancient philosophies, 
 in which a personal Creator had no recognized 
 place. It is a maxim which gauges the possibilities 
 of things by a simply human standard. No skill 
 of man could ever produce something out of 
 nothing, and no wit of man, which can affirm only 
 from experience, can understand how it can be 
 done; and so it is peremptorily affirmed to be 
 impossible. 
 
 The weakness of the objection lies in its leaving 
 out the presence and power of a Creator, who is 
 infinitely greater than man, and who, for aught 
 that we know, can perform an act of pure and sim- 
 ple creation, bringing entity out of non-entity. 
 
 There is no self-contradiction in the statement. 
 
 The difficulty lies in our not being able to con- 
 ceive how it can be done, and this difficulty besets 
 all our thinking when we think about the works 
 of God. This objection, grounded in our ignorance, 
 
108 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 ought not to claim the dignity of an argument, 
 still less assume the authority of a universal denial 
 of possibility. Though founded on an accredited 
 axiom of science, it is plainly unphilosophical and 
 beyond the modesty of reason. 
 
 Moreover, to deny the possible creation of some- 
 thing out of nothing is to assert the eternity of 
 material substance, distinct from the nature and 
 substance of God, — a theory which involves several 
 rational difficulties. 
 
 For if matter be eternal, then its existence must 
 be a necessary existence, which is self-existence 
 that cannot be impaired or modified by any other 
 power. It must be endued with all the essential 
 attributes of infinitude, — a deity in and of itself, 
 a rival of God, ever at war with him, unless one 
 or the other God parts with some of his attributes, 
 which, since each exists, not of his own will, but 
 by necessity, neither can do. 
 
 It is the old Manichean notion, long since ad- 
 judged a fallacy by the consenting reason of 
 mankind. 
 
 Assuming, then, the creation of crude amorphous 
 matter, without form and void of organic life, we 
 
The Holy Ghost. 109 
 
 are told that " the Spirit of God moved upon the 
 face of the waters." 
 
 The expression beautifully denotes a hovering, 
 brooding action, as if shedding down upon the 
 fluid mass a generative power, when all at once 
 went forth the life-giving fiat, " Let there be light," 
 and the world became charged with the diffusive 
 energy, " light was." 
 
 It may be interesting to inquire how far the 
 verified statements of science can be made to 
 square with this history of creation. Accepting 
 as the last discovery of Scientific research the ex- 
 istence of a substance, protoplasm or bioplasm, 
 which forms the basis of all organic life (although 
 all scientific men do not admit its universality), 
 accepting, likewise, its wonderful microscopic de- 
 velopments, its corpuscles, monads, cells, and 
 atoms, we are all aglow with the enthusiasm of 
 discovery. We seem to be penetrating the grand 
 secret of universal existence. Yet presently we 
 are arrested by an impracticability. We have not 
 found the source of life; we have only reached the 
 microscopic limit of form. Every one of these 
 atoms of matter is itself an organized substance, 
 
no Lecture Fourth. 
 
 moulded and combined of simpler elements by- 
 virtue of that life-power which is alone the pro- 
 ducer of organism. 
 
 Whence is that life-power, the grand, universal 
 motor from which all organic life is begotten? 
 " Grant me," says a chief Priest of Science, — 
 " grant me only a particle of protoplasm and the 
 merest scintilla of force, and with time enough I 
 can evolve the universe." Most true; but we 
 cannot grant it unless science can discover it. It 
 would not be scientific to do so. And if it be not 
 granted, then how stands the problem? 
 
 Force, the power of motion, is a thing entirely 
 foreign to matter. Matter is inert and eternally 
 at rest, unless moved from without, and, we add, 
 from above, from the great personal will that, in 
 the person of the Divine Spirit, broods upon the 
 vapory chaos which Science itself teaches to have 
 been the first loose form of things, and, with one 
 stroke of force, sets the elements to work produc- 
 ing atoms, cells, monads, and diffused bioplasm, 
 until the chaos becomes a kosmos. How congru- 
 ous, then, with scientific suggestion is the Scripture 
 history of creation, — " Let there be light," and 
 
The Holy Ghost. Ill 
 
 light was. As was explained in my first lecture, 
 science has demonstrated the beautiful truth of 
 the correlation of forces, showing that light and 
 heat and electricity and magnetism, and the rest 
 are congeners and may work a common office, and 
 that any one of them, by whatever name it be 
 called, may replace the rest, and produce the 
 organic results of creation. 
 
 The parent force of this family of forces is, 
 according to the present tendency of scientific 
 opinion, simple motion, which, like a living centre, 
 radiates and evolves itself into the various forms 
 of material energy. Accepting this conclusion, we 
 see the Divine volition impinging, at a stroke, on 
 the chaotic mass, and producing what our common 
 experience proves to be the first result of volition, 
 viz., motion, the action and interaction of the 
 material elements upon each other, establishing 
 the immediate play of affinities, working instant 
 combinations of form, and, throughout the mighty 
 stir, attesting itself in a flash of universal light. 
 " Let there be light" is the word-form of the Al- 
 mighty volition ; " there was light" denotes its 
 outcome into visible effect. 
 
112 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 As the eye answers at a glance to the summons 
 received by the ear, so the flashing world responded 
 on the instant to the spoken will of God. To 
 human conception the volition, the resulting mo- 
 tion, and the attesting light would be simultaneous, 
 without gap or pause for a single interposing 
 thought. Therefore, the suddenness implied in 
 the Scripture account of creation is no objection to 
 its truth. 
 
 The entrance of force must always be instanta- 
 neous. No matter how slow and complicated the 
 antecedent conditions of life, there is a moment 
 when life is not; and there is another and next 
 moment when it is. The quickening act is a dart, 
 a thrill, a stroke of force, whose effect is not a pro- 
 duction from itself, but the presence of itself. The 
 power begotten is the simple transfer of the power 
 begetting. Hence the scientific truth, as well as 
 the rhetorical sublimity, of the creative fiat, — 
 *' Let there be light, and there was light." 
 
 " I believe in the Holy Ghost the Lord" as well 
 as "the Giver of life." That is, the material crea- 
 tion is still under the daily regulating power of 
 the Creator. 
 
The Holy Ghost. 113 
 
 The minds of men have been long divided on the 
 question whether the Divine superintendence of 
 the world is indeed a present fact. Did God, when 
 he set the universe in motion, establish for it a 
 self- regulating system of laws, and leave it to run 
 on, like a clock, to its assigned terminus of dura- 
 tion, and then withdraw himself into the seclusion 
 of his self-existence; or is he present in every 
 movement ? Is every movement of things, no 
 matter how minute, the impulse of a distinct 
 volition of Omnipotence, so that the changing play 
 of atoms, the delicate interlacing of affinities, and 
 every miscroscopic vibration shall be the products 
 of so many mental purposes of the universal 
 wisdom ? The former theory — that God has retired 
 from the immediate direction of the universe into 
 a calm self-subsistence — has the look of Buddha 
 about it; it suggests a changeless fate; it bars out 
 the fatherhood ; it forbids a miracle or a Providence ; 
 it chills the spontaneous gratitude that comes from 
 feeling God in nature and life; it makes our moral 
 pilgrimage a cheerless, dreary, dreadful way. 
 
 It is the preferred theory of Science, however; 
 and making the world everything and God nothing, 
 
114 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 establishing law as having no interfering lawgiver, 
 Science can the more courageously speculate to 
 conclusions in which the idea of a personal God is 
 as a cipher. If Science would admit the concep- 
 tion of him as the present Lord as well as the first 
 Giver of life, how would the glitter of her several 
 discoveries gather a mellow beauty, as they flashed 
 forth from amidst the great cloud of glory that 
 embodies the infinite Godhead ! 
 
 But touching the second theory that God works 
 by his immediate presence, even in the minutest 
 phenomena of nature, it is objected that it seems 
 impossible to be conceived, and that it belittles the 
 conception of him to our minds, to think of him as 
 among the atoms of things. 
 
 It is impossible to be conceived, because omni- 
 presence is inconceivable, while yet it is very true. 
 But, granting omnipresence, God's instant power 
 may be very naturally a fact: and if we try to 
 suppose the opposite, I think we find it very difficult 
 to conceive how his power can be where his 
 presence is not. Then, as to the belittling im- 
 pression it conveys of God, we should remember 
 that to the Infinite One there is no great and no 
 
The Holy Ghost. 115 
 
 small; great things are contained in small; the 
 vast telescopic universe is composed of the micros- 
 copic atoms. It seems more worthy of God that he 
 should be the Lord of life; and Science will become 
 a benefactor to the soul of man when she shall 
 admit God's presence with his power, so that not 
 a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father, 
 and that he numbers the very hairs of our heads. 
 Such is the agency and power of the Holy Spirit 
 among material things, — giver and director of the 
 life of the physical world. 
 
 But he has a higher realm than this. All an- 
 imated things come forth from him, and chiefly 
 does he hold communion with, and interpenetrate 
 with his own life the life of man, — man's intellect, 
 his conscience, his affections, and his will. Some 
 of these communications of the Spirit bear the 
 character of miracle, specially when he imparts to 
 the human mind the power of prophesying. The 
 creed distinguishes this agency thus, " the Holy 
 Ghost who spake by the prophets." 
 
 There is no exercise of the reason of man in 
 which it so soon finds the limits of its power as 
 when it undertakes to forecast the future of things. 
 
Il6 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 In the loose connections of daily life and in Politics 
 and Political Economy and Finance, where the cal- 
 culations of the closet may be disturbed and tossed 
 into confusion by any sidelong accident it was im- 
 possible to detect, this failure is not so strange; 
 but even in the exacter sciences, where material 
 laws are fixed and well understood, the failure is 
 hardly less flagrant. The wisest Medical skill will 
 fail in its predictions almost as often as the guess 
 of the empiric. The best scientist of his time pro- 
 nounced the impossibility of navigating the At- 
 lantic by steamers at the very moment when the 
 first steamship was on her bounding way to the 
 opposite continent. 
 
 Whenever Science parts with its abstractness, 
 and mixes itself with the moving concrete of prac- 
 tical life, it r jo far forfeits its certainty. Its high- 
 est, its sole achievement is to know what is. God 
 has not granted it as a normal attainment of the 
 human intellect to read the future. Hence it is that 
 the gift of prophecy has always been regarded as a 
 a miraculous endowment, attesting a divine influ- 
 ence, and to the possessor of the gift men have bowed 
 down with reverence and prayers and rich gifts. 
 
The Holy Ghost. 117 
 
 We need not touch the question of the pagan 
 oracles, with their equivocal pronouncements and 
 the clinging suspicion of collusion. We are speak- 
 ing of the Holy Ghost as he spake by the prophets 
 of the elder Scriptures. Those Scriptures are re- 
 markable for nothing so much as for their prophecy. 
 They are a chain of forecasting testimonies, uttered 
 with assurance, and in some cases depicting the 
 future with such vivid distinctness that our imag- 
 inations can sketch the scene as a transaction before 
 our eyes. 
 
 Now these prophecies were mainly concerned 
 with the character and biography of one single per- 
 son, the promised Messiah, whose history was so 
 unique, abounding in incidents so far outside the 
 usual current of events, that a single prophecy, 
 touching only a few of such events, if it should be 
 verified by a fulfilment, would be lifted far above 
 the level of a lucky guess, and might claim inspir- 
 ation for its origin. But the strangeness is al- 
 most infinitely enhanced when we consider the 
 vast variety of particulars that were to centre in 
 the life of that coming man, Jesus of Nazareth, 
 some of them almost self-contradictory and un- 
 
Ii8 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 warranted by the accepted principles of human 
 nature and the laws of probability. 
 
 To show how far towards the infinite the strange- 
 ness of fulfilment truly reached, I borrow the state- 
 ment of the eminent mathematician, Dr. Olinthus 
 Gregory. 
 
 Suppose there had been only ten men professing 
 to be prophets, and that each one of the ten should 
 fix upon only five independent criteria touching 
 place, government, events, doctrine, character, 
 sufferings, or death of one particular person; then, 
 according to the principles employed by mathe- 
 maticians in reference to the doctrine of chances, 
 the probability against the happening of these fifty 
 particulars in any way is that of the fiftieth power 
 of two to unity, that is, the probability is greater 
 than eleven hundred and twenty-five millions of 
 millions to one that all these circumstances do not 
 turn up even at distinct periods. 
 
 Now, if to this computation we add the element 
 of time, and consider that any of these predictions 
 might, on the principle of chance, take place from 
 the time of the prophecy to the end of the world, 
 then the chance of their happening at the time 
 
The Holy Ghost. 119 
 
 predicted would be so unlikely that it surpasses 
 the power of numbers to express the improbability. 
 Can we say less, then, touching the Messianic pre- 
 dictions, than that the Holy Ghost spake by the 
 Prophets ? 
 
 As we read those prophecies we cannot avoid 
 thinking that " holy men spake as they were 
 moved," not knowing always the pregnancy of 
 what they spake, sometimes with an unconsciously 
 double sense, looking along the line from the 
 typical fact before their eyes to the great anti- 
 typical event on which the prophecy terminated, 
 sometimes speaking with coolness and deliberation, 
 at other times wrapt into an abnormal state by the 
 vision and the faculty divine, yet uttering with 
 their human lips the eternal mind of God. 
 
 But the Holy Ghost has other ways besides the 
 Prophetic way of laying himself alongside the mind 
 of man, and giving form and pressure to his 
 thoughts and mental instincts. In the awakening 
 of high moral conceptions, and the stirring of the 
 motive powers of the soul to reach out for their 
 fulfilment, opening before its lifted eye a surpas- 
 sing realm of purity and love and unchecked moral 
 
120 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 power, to become its own in a life after death, — 
 such things have come into mens lives as powers, 
 not homeborn, but foreign and divine. Socrates 
 seems to have been conscious of it daily. His de- 
 mon of good, was it not the directing Holy Ghost ? 
 
 The Holy Ghost again rules in that supernal 
 region of man's nature, the region of the moral 
 sense. Conscience is indeed the throne of the Holy 
 Ghost. It is the regal faculty whose divinity no 
 man ever dared deny. Whenever he heard the 
 voice of the grand moral imperative and looked 
 within, he was sure to stand face to face with the 
 Holy Ghost. 
 
 If he thwarted his conscience, defied it, even cru- 
 cified it, he has always felt that his antagonism was 
 rebellion and that he had crucified his king. The 
 function of this Divine Spirit is to touch the cords 
 of the moral nature, and to keep its sensibility 
 awake to the issues of good and evil. It is He 
 who probes the peccant parts of the soul to make 
 us feel how deep the sinuous ulcer runs. He de- 
 tains our rambling fancies, and makes us think 
 with an inner concentration that shall beget a 
 better self-knowledge. He shows us right and 
 
The Holy Ghost. 121 
 
 wrong aloof from those mixed tints of life that 
 make sin seem attractive, and reveals to us the 
 white light of righteousness, that we can see how 
 unshadedly bright is good, and how deadly black, 
 without a ray of relieving light, is sin. It is in 
 this way, by its clear marking of moral distinctions 
 to the soul through the illuminated conscience, 
 that the Holy Ghost prepares the way for his cov- 
 enanted and commissioned agency as the repre- 
 sentative of Christ. 
 
 u He shall take of the things of mine," says the 
 Saviour, "and shall show them unto you." In 
 order to this, in order to prepare an entrance for 
 the Great Salvation, to create a loathing of unright- 
 eousness, and a longing in the soul for a perfect 
 emancipation from its power, the conscience must 
 be both enlightened and sensitive. And then, 
 when, possessed by the alternate loathing and long- 
 ing, it cries, What shall I do? the indwelling 
 Spirit reveals the cross and the Crucified, and im- 
 parts to the vague feelings definite shape and 
 quality. In the presence of the Crucified, the 
 hated unrighteousness seems to the soul like the 
 crucifixion of his Lord, and the coveted righteous- 
 
122 Lecture Fourth 
 
 ness takes on the form of affectionate desire to be 
 joined to the personal Saviour. 
 
 This wondrous transformation of a man's moral 
 sensibilities marks an epoch in his life. It is so 
 novel and unexpected that he feels he never tried 
 to produce it, he did not know how. It came to 
 him from abroad and worked within him. 
 
 Something not himself has grasped his very self, 
 and inspired him with the transcendent conscious- 
 ness; and as he traces back the steps of that con- 
 sciousness he marks the footprints, side by side 
 with his own, of Christ's blessed Paraclete, the 
 Holy Ghost, Lord of his moral life. 
 
 But there is yet one more step for the soul and 
 one more work for the Holy Ghost before the 
 gracious victory is complete. There must be the 
 glad surrender of faith that shall bring the soul 
 and Christ actually together. Thus far his con- 
 science was touched and awakened by another. 
 His affections and desires were separate from their 
 old objects almost in spite of himself. The pro- 
 cess of change was hardly a matter of conscious- 
 ness, certainly not a matter of volition. He has 
 been the passive recipient ol influence, and to this 
 
The Holy Ghost. \2% 
 
 point his active powers have been idle. These 
 active powers are gathered and represented in his 
 will. His true personality resides in it alone. It 
 is the organ of his selfhood. Shall his will bear 
 him on to the cross ? It is the pivot question of 
 his life of lives. Is the Holy Ghost the Sovereign 
 Lord of his volition ? Does God control the will ? 
 This is the great question of the ages, perhaps of 
 the eternities. It is the first puzzling problem 
 of human thought, and human thought never sees 
 its way out of it. 
 
 Two parties of thinkers stand in opposite ranks, 
 and can do nothing but flaunt their banners in 
 each other's faces and claim the victory. 
 
 Liberty and necessity, God's sovereignty and 
 Man's freedom, — the earliest philosophy took up 
 the question, and the latest philosophy has not laid 
 it down. If the Holy Ghost is lord of my will, 
 how am I responsible ? If my will is free, then 
 how am I dependent on the Holy Ghost ? The 
 answer to this question must take the form of 
 compromise, or at least must be content with dem- 
 onstrating the facts and leaving the reconciling of 
 them to rest among the mysteries. We may, for 
 
124 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 example, demonstrate the absolute sovereignty of 
 God by arguments the most conclusive, without a 
 flaw in the premises or a single hitch in the train 
 of deduction, and having done so, we may sum up 
 the conclusion, and label it " proved " and place it 
 away on some shelf of the mind. 
 
 And then we may demonstrate the freedom of 
 the human will by proof different from the other, 
 but still conclusive, — by the testimony of conscious- 
 ness, a basic proof, the ultimate source and foun- 
 dation of all conviction. And this conclusion we 
 may label " proved," and lay it on the shelves of 
 the mind. 
 
 Thus we have the two statements, each one de- 
 monstrated as an infallible truth by the only evi- 
 dence that is adapted to the case. Both are true; 
 yet when we take down these shelved conclusions, 
 and compare them with one another, they are mutu- 
 ally contradictory, and our reason cries out in de- 
 spair for a light that God has not given. In this 
 ignorance we must walk, content to know that 
 somewhere in the hidden councils of the upper 
 world the problem has a solution. 
 
 It is a remarkable fact in the study of this con- 
 
The Holy Ghost. 125 
 
 troversy that while man's speculative reason de- 
 murs at accepting this contradictory position of 
 liberty and necessity, sovereignty and freedom, his 
 experimental conviction embraces them both in one 
 fervid belief that makes the very life and joy of his 
 religion. When any soul, under the lead of the 
 awakened conscience and the heavenly longing, 
 inspired by the Holy Ghost, does actually surren- 
 der its will, with all its engrossment of heart and 
 life, to the faith and service of Jesus Christ, the 
 process seems to bear a twofold consciousness: on 
 the one hand, there is the deepest laid sense that 
 there never was an act of its life so profoundly and 
 delightedly free as that act of self-surrender, and 
 at the same moment there is a conviction, not less 
 deep, that the freedom was not an independent 
 freedom, that the will was not self-moved. And 
 when the dedicated soul stands upon its feet again, 
 full of the sense of its new, free, spiritual manhood, 
 the first breath of its freedom will utter itself in 
 the ascription, " Not unto me, not unto me, but 
 unto Thee, Holy Ghost, Sovereign Lord of my 
 moral life ! " Many speculative difficulties are 
 solved by experiment ; and as there is no difficulty 
 
126 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 so bewildering to the reason as this difficulty of 
 mans freedom and dependence, so none ever had 
 such an illustrious solution in the deepest experi- 
 mental consciousness of the soul. 
 
 But although the current of our life passes thus 
 between two rocky abutments, rising up in a per- 
 pendicular antagonism that no earthly theory can 
 reconcile, yet we know that beyond the vapory 
 height of our vision, in the bright depth of God's 
 counsels, the separation is firmly bridged over, and 
 the repugnant ideas are linked into structural unity 
 of truth. 
 
 There is another agency of the Holy Ghost, as 
 the agent and commissioner of Christ, which can- 
 not be passed by, — his agency, namely, in giving 
 efficacy to the appointed means of grace, the 
 preaching and the sacraments of the church. 
 
 It is interesting to know, if we can, in what way 
 a spiritual agency can work through material 
 means. The word of God is the Sword of the Spir- 
 it, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul 
 and spirit. Does its Divine efficacy depend upon 
 the sharpness of the instrument or on the suscep- 
 tibility of the hearer and reader of the word ? 
 
The Holy Ghost. 127 
 
 Does the Holy Ghost cause the truths of salvation 
 to be any more true at one time than at another, 
 or does he work among the moral sensibilities of 
 the heart to make an entrance for the truth ? The 
 word of God as a vehicle of the truth of God, is it 
 not just as full of truth at one time as at another ? 
 Is there an ebb and flow of meaning in his revealed 
 word ? Is it not always full of himself? If it be 
 the same revelation, then there can be no influence 
 of the Holy Ghost upon the word, to make it more 
 or less; but as God opened the heart of Lydia to 
 receive the things that were spoken by Paul, so 
 must it always be. We can conceive that he who 
 is Lord of the soul's life can, by the affinity of na- 
 ture, work among its motive powers, mellow its 
 feelings, abate its self-conceit, exalt its ambitions, 
 tone down its antagonisms, create a holy hunger 
 and thirst, so that when the oft-rejected word of 
 God comes to it again, it may find a heart already 
 prepared and opened by the Holy Ghost. 
 
 Its efficacy, therefore, lies not in any new prop- 
 erty imparted to the truth itself, but in the quick- 
 ening of the soul, touched by the kindred life of 
 the Divine Spirit. 
 
128 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 And must we not say the same of the sacra- 
 ments? Is the baptismal water imbued with a 
 quality of the Holy Ghost, so that its bathing touch 
 shall send a quickening shock to the soul of sin ? 
 Do the bread and wine take into themselves such 
 a property of positive holiness, that they carry 
 to the lips of every recipient the body and blood 
 of the Crucified ? Material substances may be 
 charged with material forces, that communicate 
 themselves to other material things. Heat and 
 electricity and magnetism are diffusible properties, 
 and spread themselves by fixed laws of material 
 affinity, but a moral force gathered into a material 
 substance is out of the analogy of things. A prop- 
 erty of unintelligent matter communicating a force 
 to the intelligent and moral soul is an idea that 
 has no resembling fact in all the world. Why 
 should we suppose such a diversity of method in 
 the working of the Holy Ghost, now influencing 
 the spirit of man by conviction, by persuasion, by 
 comforting, by awakening, by inspiring, and all 
 by a direct illapse, — the moral grasping the moral, 
 the spiritual embracing the spiritual, in perfect and 
 beautiful congruity; and then directing itself to 
 
The Holy Ghost. 129 
 
 produce the same spiritual results by outside un- 
 spiritual means, — material forces acting to- stir that 
 one thing with which in all the world material 
 things are most out of harmony, the spirit and 
 soul of man. The dispensation under which we 
 live is the dispensation of the Spirit; and must not 
 all his influence on us, and our reciprocal approaches 
 towards him, be after the nature of spirit life and 
 spirit communion ? To suppose that a material, 
 mechanical substance can be charged with the 
 property of holiness seems to wipe out all the dis- 
 tinctions of thought, requires a revision of our dic- 
 tionaries. Instead of that sublime exercise of faith 
 in which the soul holds conscious converse with 
 its unseen but not distant Lord, it substitutes a 
 simple belief of the external fact that the Holy 
 Ghost is mingled in with the matter of the sacra- 
 ment. If the one be faith worthy of the noblest 
 Christian manhood, the other would seem to be 
 the inadequate conception of the child period of 
 the spiritual life. 
 
 Let us rather believe thus, then : The Spirit bears 
 witness with our spirits, spiritually and not ma- 
 terially, and though He makes a covenanted use 
 
130 Lecture Fourth. 
 
 of those Divine occasions when God's word is taught 
 and his .sacraments are administered, to quicken 
 our affections, strengthen our faith, exalt our 
 hopes, fortify our consciences, and to stamp our 
 souls with the seal of his assurance, yet is he not 
 fettered to occasions nor incorporated with mate- 
 rial means; but with the glorious power of his om- 
 nipresence he besets us behind and before, about 
 our path and about our bed, strengthens, comforts, 
 upholds us, gives us grace to live as becomes us 
 and to die in the peace of his felt communion. In 
 a word, he takes the things of Christ and shows 
 them to us, stands to us in Christ's place, as if he 
 were Christ, making us to know all that we can 
 know of Christ on earth, and then, as the Lord of 
 our lives, presenting us, cleansed with his own 
 unction, to the adorable Saviour, whom not having 
 seen the Holy Ghost had taught us to love, and in 
 him to rejoice with a joy unspeakable and full of 
 glory. Then the vicegerent office of the Holy 
 Ghost is fulfilled, though his sweetness abides with 
 us forever in the communion of Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost, with the redeemed, who shall die no 
 more. 
 
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