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THE
POWER OF THE SPIRIT
By the Same Author
BODY AND SOUL: An Enquiry into the effect of
Religion upon Health. Tenth impression. SIR I. PITMAN
AND SONS.
FALSE GODS: Chapters on the Object of Religion.
MOWBRAYS.
PATRIOTISM AND FELLOWSHIP. Essays.
JOHN MURRAY.
*
POWER OTXTHE -SEW
. 3 * * \* ' * * * a * *"* >
BY
PERCY DEARMER, M.A., D.D.
u
PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL ART, KING'S COLLEGE, LONDON
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK
TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY
1919
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t * 4 t C
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PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
60850
PREFACE
IN one of the chief text-books of theology used in
our theological seminaries, the following references
are given by the index : ' Holy Ghost, addition of
Article on, 198 ; Divinity of, 199 ; distinct per-
sonality of, 201 ; history of the doctrine of, 204;
procession of, 209 ; blasphemy against; 446 seq.- -
This seemed to leave room for a little more upon
the subject; I therefore ventured to choose 'The
Power of the Spirit ' as the subject for the Page
Lectures, at Berkeley Divinity School, Middletown,
Connecticut, this year.
1919.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. MILITARY VIRTUE . . . .7
, II. THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT .!....- ,.. 27
III. THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT . . 54
JV. THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT. . . 81
MILITARY VIRTUE
BY nothing have we drawn the sinews out of
Christianity more effectually than by our common
misinterpretation and disparagement of the doctrine
of God's holy Spirit. The word Comforter is in itself
a record of the deterioration.
' If ye love me, keep my commandments/ so runs
one of the greatest of our Lord's sayings, as recorded
in the Fourth Gospel ; 1 ' And I will pray the
Father, and he shall give you another Comforter,
that he may abide with you for ever ; even the
Spirit of truth ; ' and then, ' I will not leave you
comfortless : I will come to you/ ' If you love me,
you will keep my commands ' is the rendering in
modern English by Dr. Moffat ; ' And I will ask the
Father to give you another Helper to be with you
for ever, even the Spirit of truth ; ' and, ' I will not
leave you forlorn; I am coming to you/ In the
original Greek, the word for ' Comforter ' is that
which we have anglicized as ' Paraclete ', and which
has the same etymological meaning as the Latin
' Advocate ' one who is called to one's side to
1 John i4 15 , A.V.
8 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
help; one, that is, who in some great struggle
comes in, to strengthen on the one hand, to defend
on the other, 'meeting formidable attacks ' : this
meaning, says Dr. Westcott, is alone adequate.
The most striking example in recent human history
of such a ' paraclete ' was the intervention on the
side of the Allies, in 1917, of the tremendous moral
power and physical force of America. And in that
great spiritual movement of succour, there was,
may we not say ? yet another advent or coming
of Christ to judge the world, and to convict it to
bring demonstration to it as the Paraclete was to
do, of sin, of righteousness, and of judgement.
The meaning, then, could not be more beautifully
clear. Jesus was to leave his followers, but he would
come again as that other divine manifestation, the
Spirit of God or Paraclete, who is the mighty ally
of those who struggle for the right, who is indeed
with them always, but will now be in then* very
hearts ; who is the Spirit of truth, and who wili-^
not indeed make them instantaneously infallible
but lead them into all truth.
The translators of our English Bible, however,
gave us ' Comforter ' instead of Paraclete, which is
the word of the Latin version as well as the Greek :
nor did the Revisers assist us very much ; for they
retained ' Comforter ', giving us the alternative of
' Advocate ' and ' Helper ' in the margin. ' Helper '
would at least avoid misapprehension, though it is
MILITARY VIRTUE 9
weak indeed compared with the original : ' Advo-
cate ' will not do at all, because it is juristic, and
suggests a man in a wig who is paid to make special
pleading.
. The word ' Comforter * might have served once
upon a time ; for its etymological meaning is ' one
who strengthens very much*. Confortare used not
to mean anything soothing : it is recorded of a
schoolmaster in the Chronicles of the Monastery of
St. Edmund that he confortavit pueros baculo, 'he
comforted his boys with the stick.' But ' comfort '
has suffered a steady deterioration, and only retains
its original meaning in legal usage, as of those who
bring comfort to the king's enemies. It was used
in this sense by Hooker' doth not a little comfort
and confirm the same/ But already by the time
of Shakespeare and the Authorized Version the
word had come to stand generally for consolation or
relief, the sense of ' fort ', 'fortify ', and ' fortitude '
having dropped out.
* Had you such a loss as I,
I could give better comfort than you do,'
says Constance in King John. 1 It had already
acquired also its bottom meaning, as when Othello
says : 2
' I prattle out of fashion, and I dote
In mine own comforts.'
This is the only sense retained in the adjective
1 [King John, in. 4. 2 Othello, n. i.
io THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
to-day, as when we say ' a comfortable armchair ' ;
though in Shakespeare it still retains that of our
own ' Comfortable Words ' in the Prayer Book, as
in the injunction of Bertram to Helena in All 's Well
that Ends Well 1 'Be comfortable to my mother,
your mistress, and make much of her.' We can then
only conclude that the wonderful body of men who
gave us the Authorized Version did use a word
already in their time inadequate, and used it
because they had themselves come to think of the
Holy Spirit, not as a mighty Ally called in to arm
us in the eternal battle between right and wrong,
but as one who soothes and consoles us.
Such is the meaning that the word Comforter
has for us to-day ; and it has done enormous harm.
Religion is regarded as an arm-chair instead of
a fortress, and the Knights of the Holy Spirit have
become carpet-knights.
This process of decrepitude in men's idea of the
Holy Ghost had already been going on for centuries
before the Reformation eating into the stronger
conception, of which we shall speak in the next
chapter. We can read it easily in the hymns we
use; for nothing illustrates the real character of
men's religion so well as the songs they make about
it. The Golden Sequence, beautiful as it is, already
in the thirteenth century was stressing the sweet
and soothing aspect of inspiration. There is, indeed,
1 All's Well, i. i.
MILITARY VIRTUE n
a reference to the ' power to guard and guide ', but
the general tone is illustrated by the second stanza :
*
' Come, of comforters the best,
Of the soul the sweetest guest,
Come in toil refreshingly :
Thou in labour rest most sweet,
Thou art shadow in the heat,
Comfort in adversity.'
And both the tunes, the proper, and Webbe's
Veni Sancte Spiritus, fully sustain the dulcet charac-
ter of the words.
If we take the most famous hymn of all, Cosin's
paraphrase of the Veni Creator, the emasculation is
far more noticeable. 1 I have often been distressed
by the use of this version so systematically at retreats
and other religious gatherings, and of the Mechlin
tune, whose saccharine quality is quite unlike the
marching vigour of most of these modernized plain-
song melodies. The Prayer Book, incomparable
in its prose, has been attended by Cranmer's ill-luck
in the matter of verse ; and Cosin, in Supplying a
greatly superior alternative to the doggerel of the
longer version 2 in the ordinal, was not at his best.
1 Mr. H. G. Wells,, missing perhaps some of its real
merits, has criticized this hymn unkindly, but not quite
unjustifiably, in The Soul of a Bishop.
2 This C.M. version is a real disgrace to us. It should
be removed at the earliest opportunity, its place being
taken by Cosin's paraphrase, Dr. Robert Bridges' translation
being put in the first place (with ' Comforter ' altered to
Paraclete ').
12 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
What he did was to leave out the strongest parts of
the original altogether, and to give a weakened ren-
dering of the rest. 1 The original, which belongs to the
ninth century, and is therefore earlier and stronger
than the Golden Sequence, has five stanzas (not count-
ing the original Doxology) to Cosin's three. Let us
set Cosin side by side with the very fine and very
1 The original is as follows (scholars now attribute it to
Rabanus Maurus, who died in 856) :
Veni, creator Spiritus,
mentes tuorum visita :
imple superna gratia
quae tu creasti pectora.
Qui Paraclitus diceris,
donum Dei altissimi :
fons vivus, ignis, charitas,
et spiritalis unctio.
Tu septiformis munere,
dextrae Dei tu digitus :
tu rite promisso Patris,
J sermone ditas guttura.
Accende lumen sensibus,
infunde amorem cprdibus :
. . infirma nostri corporis -;
virtute jirmans perpeti.
Hostem repellas lohgius,
pacemque dones protinus :
ductore sic te praevio,
vitemus omne noxium.
Per te sciamus da Patrem,
noscamus atque Filium :
te utriusque Spiritum
credamus omni tempore.
MILITARY VIRTUE 13
accurate translation by our present Poet Laureate, 1
marking the lines omitted by Cosin and taking the
liberty of reading .' Paraclete ' with the original for
Dr. Bridges' ' Comforter ' :
DR. BRIDGES COSIN
1. COME, O Creator Spirit, come, i. COME, Holy Ghost, our.souls in-
And make within our hearts thy spire,
home ; And lighten with celestial fire ;
To us thy grace celestial give, Thou the anointing Spirit art,
Who of thy breathing move and Who dost thy 'sevenfold gifts
live. . impart :
2. O Paraclete, that name is thine, 2. Thy blessed unction from above
Of God most high the gift divine ; Is comfort, life, and fire of love ;
The well of life, the fire of love,
Our souls' anointing from above.
3. Thou dost appear in sevenfold
dower
The sign of God's almighty
power ;
The Father's promise, making
rich
With saving truth our earthly
speech.
4. Our senses with thy light inflame, Enable with perpetual light
Our hearts to heavenly love The dullness of pur blinded
reclaim; sight:
Our bodies' poor infirmity 3 . Anoint and cheer our soiled face
With strength perpetual fortify. With the abundance of thy
- grace :
5. Our mortal foe afar repel, Keep far our foes, give peace at
Grant us henceforth in peace to home ;
dwell ; Where thou art guide no ill can
And so to us, with thee for guide, come.
No ill shall come, no harm betide.
6. May we by thee the Father learn, 4. Teach us to know the Father,
And know the Son, and thee dis- Son,
cera, And thee, of Both, to be but
Who art of both; and thus adore One;
In perfect faith for evermore. That through the ages all along
This may be our endless song,
Praise to thy eternal merit,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
1 In the Y attention and the English Hymnal.
14 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
How h^s the fire and strength gone out of the
original just the* lines which .Cosin ignored are
those which speak of added mental powers, of burn-
ing love, of strength and courage ! Perhaps even
Dr. Bridges has not recovered quite all the force
of the original 'living fount, fire, love 1 , for,
example, fons vivus, ignis, charitas (we have long
damped the fire out of charity) ; nor can virtute
firmans perpeti be quite translated it might have
been written by an old general of Imperial Rome
and Cosin turns it into ' anoint and cheer our soiled
face '. Again, hostem repellas longius . . . ductore
sic te praevio, vitemus omne noxium, just suggests
the pioneers of a legion pressing their way through
some hostile forest. One might pursue the subject
with profit, noting how Dryden 1 still further con-
verted the sturdy old hymn into religious platitudes,
set in excellent verse :
' From sin and sorrow set us free,
And make thy temples worthy thee.'
or
* Make us eternal truths receive,
And practise all that we believe/
Or one might descend to the maudlin atmosphere,
' soft as the breath of even/ of mid-Victorianism.
But my object is achieved, if I have illustrated the
progressive deterioration in men's conception of the
work of the Holy Spirit during a thousand years.
1 In his paraphrase, ' Creator Spirit, by whose aid.'
MILITARY VIRTUE 15
Our next illustration must be from ecclesiastical
art the traditional representation of the Apostles,
with S. Mary in their midst, sitting with their
hands folded on their breasts, faces seraphically
upturned, each wearing his halo, and a little flame
burning peacefully 'on every sainted head'; this,
too, has been made part of our popular religion in
Keble's hymn, where the softness is no longer that
of the breath of even, but of ' morning prime ' ;
and where, in accordance with many Old Masters,
but in defiance of Holy Writ, the Dove is introduced
to complete the gentle picture.
If only our translators had ventured to trans-
late irepiffTfpd by its better rendering, ' pigeon ', we
should have escaped so much ; for ' pigeon ' does not
rhyme with ' love ' and ' above V We might in that
case never have missed the force of the description
of Christ's baptism. ' Pigeon ' may sound less
dignified to our ears, but this is only due to the
associations of art (including the art of rhyme) : the
dove, though a soft and pretty bird, is extremely
stupid, and was never in Holy Writ meant to typify
Wisdom. I remember one of these birds in my
Indian bungalow, who beat himself nearly to death
against a window just over the door of the bath-room,
though I left the door open for him throughout the
day. The dove let me hasten to say, lest I share
the curse of the heretic Severus, who was anathema-
tized by the second Council of Nicaea, for condemning
i6 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
this representation the dove is a beautiful and
appropriate subject of Christian art ; it is naturally,
because of the Baptism of Christ, one of the most
ancient symbols in the Catacombs of Rome and the
earliest mosaics. In the very earliest Christian art,
of the second and third centuries, the dove represents
niost generally the soul of the departed set free by
death ; sometimes also the dove, familiar to those
ancient craftsmen as the bird of Venus, becomes
the dove of Noah, and thus the messenger of peace
after the sufferings of this life ; lastly, it appears in
frescoes of the baptism of Christ, and even by analogy
in representations of the baptism of neophytes.
Later, the symbol became restricted, because of
this association, to the Holy Spirit ; but in the
sarcophagi and mosaics of the fifth and sixth centuries
the Apostles are still sometimes represented as
doves, and doves sometimes stand on the arms^ of
the cross to represent the souls of the faithful.
There is no other representation of the Holy
Spirit whatever until the Middle Ages, and hardly
any other then : we can applaud the artists of
nearly two thousand years, and rejoice they had
at hand a figure which was so obviously a mere
symbol. None the less, this symbol has really be-
come the subject of something very like idolatry
among Christians ; and we cannot wonder at the re-
mark of the hiquiring Japanese : ' I can understand
about the Father, and I can understand about the
MILITARY VIRTUE 17
Son ; but I do not understand about o hato
honourable bird/ And all this has come about
from a simile of S. Mark. (Let us use a modern
and exact translation, substituting a neutral word
for 'pigeon ') : * At that time Jesus came from
Nazareth in Galilee and was baptized by John in
the Jordan ; and forthwith on his coming up out
of the water he saw an opening in the sky, and the
Spirit like a bird coming down to him.* x
After this necessary digression, let us return to
the subject of Pentecost. In S. Luke's account the
round haloes and flaming tufts are absent, as is the
dove ; but we are told of a sound like the rushing
of a strong wind, and ' tongues parting asunder*
like as of fire ; and it sat upon each one of them ' : ?
such was the reminiscence of the people who told
S. Luke long after, a little vague as lightning is
vague and not easy to translate; there are
perhaps two accounts, woven together, of the speak-
ing in different languages, and we cannot lay much
stress .upon that incident : but the effect was remem-
bered clearly enough. The artists have given us
gentle placid scenes, which they thought edify-
1 Mark I 9 " 10 . S. Luke adds the words 'in a bodily
form Y after the mention of the Holy Spirit ; but these are
not in the original source, being only his own commentary,
which does not and is not meant to provide any new
particulars. S. John adds that the Baptist also saw the
manifestation. "'.,
2 Actsj?VR.V,
B
i8 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
ing ; but so far was this from being the case that
there was an uproar, so great that the people
outside came rushing in, and were all ' amazed and
quite at a loss ' ; and some asked what it all meant,
and others said that the disciples must be drunk.
Then S. Peter got up and made a speech of amazing
enthusiasm and audacity : ' Men of Judaea and
residents of Jerusalem, let every one of you under-
stand this attend to what I say : these men are
not drunk as you imagine. Why, it is only nine
in the morning ! No, this is what was predicted by
the prophet Joel " In the last days, saith God,
then will I pour out my spirit upon all flesh, your
sons and daughters shall prophesy, your young men
shall see visions, your old men shall dream
dreams. ..." This Jesus . . . you got wicked men
to nail to the cross and murder ; but God raised
him by checking the pangs of death. Death could
not hold him/ 1
I think it is true to say that, whenever we trace
our ideas of the work of God's Spirit back to the
origins, we find the same phenomenon. ' Out of the
strong has come forth sweetness ' : there is abundance
of honey now because the lion is dead. ' Blessed be
the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, who strengthened us
all/ says the very ancient Ethiopic Liturgy : ' And
his the gentle voice we hear,' says the modern hymn.
It is right that the Church to-day should make so
1 Acts 2 12 "-. as-*. Moffat's translation.
MILITARY VIRTUE 19
strong an appeal to ' womanly ' women though it
be so strong that Italy and France lagged behind
the rest of the world in granting woman suffrage, for
fear of clerical domination right that it should offer
consolation to the lowly and bereaved ; but once the
Church appealed equally to men even the ruffians
and swashbucklers respected her, as to-day they
respect the State, for she was ' terrible as an army
with banners '. She was beautiful, but puissant also :
* Not more fair the moon in her loveliness,
Not more bright the sun in his majesty,
Like an army splendid and terrible,
Ranged for battle.'
sang Adam of S. Victor, some eight centuries ago. 1
We have seen the appeal that strength and courage
make. Before the war, military experts doubted
whether fighting in the air would be possible ; even
the marvellous fund of human daring would, many
thought, be exhausted by such a concentration of
terrors. The question has never arisen. Boys have
crowded into the air service, as they have swarmed
to the sacrifice of the trenches and the perils of
the sea, five millions of men without compulsion. It
is proved that, though there are limits beyond which
less civilized races will not go, there is no limit to
the valour of the Christianized peoples of the West.
The bulk of mankind will not be drawn by the
1 This hymn Jerusalem et Sion filiae is ascribed to him
and dates from, the twelfth century.
B2
20 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
^
appeal of mere softness and sweetness, but they
will rise up to the call of danger ; they will not
follow the dove, but they will follow the eagles.
Why is this ? Is it a bad thing, or a good thing ?
But is it not the very spirit of the heroism of the
Cross ? Is it not the very fire of the Holy Ghost,
which drove the Apostles forth to meet prison, and
storm, and shipwreck, and the sword ? Is it not the
spirit of the missionaries to-day who lay down their
lives every year, and the spirit of those Christians
who but last year perished at the hands of the Turk
by the hundred thousand rather than renounce
their faith ?
War is most horrible. But one thing is worse
unrighteous peace, the peace of selfishness, careless-
ness, luxury, injustice, the peace of the oppressor
and of the men who grind the faces of the^poor ; and
one thing only is better the peace of God, which
is itself a war, a ceaseless spiritual war against
unrighteousness and all the lies ' that comfort cruel
men'. It is a war
* In ire and exultation,
Aflame with faith and free.'
Our fair young men crowded out to the hideous
battlefields; and their parents, agonizing, had to
let them go. They laid down their twenty years, of
life without a doubt or question. Is not this most
truly religion, whatever else it may be ? Yet human
war is unchristian, devilish, loathsome. How can
MILITARY VIRTUE 21
these things be? Why is the appeal of battle so
universal, so deep in the human heart, that nations
riven by dissension become as one man, and men the
most diverse agree in the one cause ? ;
It is not that men are unchristian, or attracted to
cruelty. They love Joan of Arc most of all because
she was a saint ; and in England they made General
Gordon almost into a legend, because with all his
faults he was a converted man. The heroes of
to-day, Foch, Haig, Beatty, Wilson, are the more
popular because they do not hide their religion.
It is that man is at heart a fighter, that men as well
as women adore the knightly spirit, and long for the
uplifting thrill of battle. And the human instinct
is right ; for each man's life is a battle, and the
progress of the race is one long struggle : foes are
ever about us, and giants that have to be slain.
Not from brutality, but for the love of chivalry, of
generous sacrifice, and the glory of championship, of
tranquil strength, of modest war-battered courage,
men sing of battle, and salute the ' Veray parfit,
gentil knight ', the Happy Warrior. So the Crusa-
ders came back, broken and futile, but went out again
and again, and gave England a new half-mythical
patron saint, in the place of that holy weakling,
Edward the Confessor. They had not got the Holy
Sepulchre, in the end, but they had got S. George
S. George, for merry England ; and his red cross
flutters still from half .the ships of the world.
22 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
Now Christianity took this instinct, and pointed
out that it was foolish to use your courage in cutting
the throats of other poor silly fellows, besides
being wrong ; and that there were other enemies
better worth fighting against, such as the ' despo-
tisms and empires, the forces that control this dark
world the spiritual hosts of evil arrayed against
us in the heavenly warfare '.*
And for some centuries all went well. The
despotisms and empires showed fight ; and Christians
found that they needed the sword and shield and
breastplate and helmet and the whole armour of
God. They died in many forms of mortal agony,
they proved then: courage to the utmost; Chris-
tianity had found the ' moral equivalent of war ',
long before William James asked for it.
Men, after all, only want to be men. They want
the strong simple things, they want comradeship ;
and they want the fire of the Spirit to burn at
white heat sometimes.
' One of the lessons I learnt/ says General Smuts,
speaking of his experiences in the Boer War, ' was
that, under the stress of great difficulties such as
we were then passing through, the only things which
survived were the simple human feelings, feelings
of loyalty to your fellows and feelings of comrade-
ship and patriotism, which carried you through
dangers and privation/ 2
1 Eph. 6 12 , Weymouth's translation.
2 Speeches, 1917, p. 27.
MILITARY VIRTUE 23
It is not hate that men seek after, but love, the
love of comrades and of country. They will seek
that noble life of ' great difficulties ', and will get
it somehow. Has Christianity then nothing to offer
them nowadays but consolation, and to use an ex-
pressive word which our soldiers have invented a
' cushy ' feeling ? Has the Church no remembered
echo of that Sursum corda, which is the oldest
phrase in the Christian liturgy ? Does she seem
to speak to them only of mothers' meetings, and
snug parsonages, and charming cathedral closes,
and big episcopal palaces, of green old churchyards,
and prim churches, and the scent and rustle of clean
clothes on Sunday morning ?
The martyrs were followed by the monks, heroic
pioneers, who fought their way among the fierce
barbarian tribes, and turned the vast wildernesses of
ancient Europe into farms and gardens : we still use
their prayers, hardly marking the constant note of
danger the assaults of our enemies in the morning,
the fear of our enemies in the evening, and the perils
and dangers of the night we who do not even lock
our front doors in the country ! For a thousand years
the struggle went on, and still Russia and Lithuania,
Prussia and Scandinavia remained to be won ; but the
romance of the struggle had already gone out in the
settled nations. Military orders arose, but they were
shadowy for want of opposition. Foes there were,
but they were far away ; and Christendom in the
24 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
Middle Ages became a walled city, her provinces
shrinking before the advancing hosts of Islam.
Then quarrels within the walls supplied the test of
manhood, and martyrs were found again, and wars
in the sixteenth century became wars of religion.
That evil was great, but with all the horror of it
there was life : the name ' ironside ' did not seem
a strange description of religious men. But there-
after the fighting spirit in Christendom sank very
low, perhaps because it had warred so long, and used
the arm of the flesh. The wearied Church sank
back into comfort, and was wellnigh fading away
a hundred years ago.
Now, a wonderful substitute for war has been
found on the physical side. Games as we know
them are a quite modern invention, and their
present almost universal extension in advanced
Christian nations has largely been made possible
by the discovery of rubber therein lies the differ-
ence between the prince's game of tennis and the
people's game of lawn-tennis. In old times men
fought for exercise, and because there was nothing
else for a gentleman to do : life in a mediaeval
keep was intolerably boring, and the pleasures of
the hunt did not suffice to relieve the tedium ;
so men forayed and fought, princes of innumerable
lands quarrelled and plotted, and dragged their
retainers into the fray with them. But now we have
the mimic warfare of many games, extending, though
MILITARY VIRTUE 25
not yet sufficiently, among all classes; and they
are a perfect substitute for the clumsy recreation of
war, in nerve and skill and muscle, and in some
moral qualities also.
Yet we cannot find a spiritual equivalent for war !
To suggest that the Church can supply that equiva-
lent seems ridiculous. Yet it is true, and the whole
truth, and the only truth. The State, which now alone
evokes the highest passions and the united loyalty of
men, has given them war upon war ; and in peace-time
the paltry substitute of party-politics, which have
owed whatever life they at any time possess to the
Christian principles which are sometimes at stake.
But the Church is at war with all things worth
fighting against, with all things hateful and strong,
with dragons and beasts and devils, with the cruel
and careless and proud, with ignorance and vice
and oppression, with the demon within and the
demon without, with Mammon and with Babylon ;
and her warfare is an Apocalypse, as it was in the
first days, of awful horsemen and hosts armoured
with fire and jacinth, of the Dragon and the Beast,
of Michael and his war, of trumpets and voices and
thunders and smoke.
But what a Church that would be ! Where is she
now ? What have we done to tear her down, to
quell the beating of that mighty heart ?
Call we upon God to give us fellowship again,
the fellowship of the Holy Ghost ! Seek we the
26 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
invigorating fount, fans vivus, ignis, charitas ; grasp
we again the one sword that will never be beaten
into ploughshares, the Sword of the Spirit !
Then, seeing the Church of the living God .as she
will be, men will find a better warfare at hand ; and
young men will then come out undoubting and
undivided, to join the fight against that ancient
triple alliance, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.
* For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their head in a foreign land,
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise ;
But our homes are under miraculous skies,
Where the yule tale was begun.
This world is wild as an old wives' tale,
And strange the plain things are,
The earth is enough and the air is enough
For our wonder and our war ;
But our rest is as far as the fire-drake swings,
And our peace is put in impossible things,
Where clashed and thundered unthinkable wings
Round an incredible star.' 1
1 G. K. Chesterton, The House of Christmas.
II
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT
CHRISTIANITY is war : it is also peace confidence
and happiness as well as onslaught and struggle ; t
meditation as well as sacrifice. The gift of the
Spirit is indeed the gift of Christ not peace, but
a sword ; but, and therein lies the paradox of his
infinite range, the gift is also the quiet flow of
wisdom. Inspiration is not only enthusiasm; it is
also critical common sense.
Now, many people have utterly departed from
spiritual Christianity. To some the work of the
Holy Ghost has meant, not science, but the opposi-
tion to science of a dogma of verbal inspiration,
which was used to protect certain writings against
that very faculty of judgement which is the working
of the Spirit. The complicated tangle of ancient
renderings, the various points of view, stages of
development, and opportunities of knowledge, which
ancient writers had, were all resolved into .a final
infallibility, and this because they were inspired.
Inspiration covered the Book of Judges, or Esther,
with consequent infallibility ; it covered equally
a passage in S. Mark and a different rendering of
the same in S. Matthew, or a letter of doubtful
28 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
canonicity and more than doubtful authenticity like
that ascribed to Jude ; but the writings of great
Christian saints were ' uninspired ' writings, and
uninspired also were Blake and Coleridge and
Wordsworth.
Possibly this, after all, is what is meant by the sin
against the Holy Ghost ; perhaps it was to guard
against it that our Lord ref rained from putting any-
thing into writing, an example which was followed
by all his disciples during the generation which
succeeded him.
To others, the work of the Holy Spirit was chiefly
manifested in the transmission of orders ; the Church
could hardly be thought of apart from the vexed
question of the ministry, and seemed to exist not
as a divine fellowship of all kindreds and peoples
and nations, appointing its ministers and offering
them to God for his blessing but as an organiza-
tion that existed for its ministers and because of
them only. The fact that the Spirit of God persisted
in working through other channels stared us in the
face, till the theory of inspiration became here also
a barren dogma not consonant* with the plain facts
of life. The magnificent belief in the universal
fellowship of the Holy Catholic Church had become
to many a belief in a particular theory about apostolic
succession, a mechanical theory which, it seems,
cannot be traced back to an earlier date than the
reign of George IV.
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 29
To others again, as we have already said, the work-
ing of the Holy Spirit meant a gentle warming
of the heart, or a gush of pious emotion. 'All
warmed by prayer', in a well-known hymn, is
an example of the depths to which religious verse
can descend, '. .
We shall do well, indeed, not to despise the work
of grace in its slenderest manifestations or among
the least of God's little ones. There must be many
to whom little more than a faint sensation is possible ;
but we need not therefore encourage as modern
religion in its prayers, hymns, and preaching has
encouraged the idea that a sentimental man is
the noblest work of God, I remember a chapter
in the record of his work by that good mission-
priest, Robert Dolling, 1 called ' Our Saints ' ; and
hardly one of those parochial saints is quite right
in the head. We have too often not asked and not
expected more from the picked members of our
churches than ambiguous religiosity and a patient
endurance of our sermons. We have been content
with negative virtues ; and we sometimes find ourr
selves not a little disturbed at the foolishness which
surrounds us, masquerading as good churchmanship
or as a state of salvation.
Now the Christian Church long ago bore her
testimony about such perversions of the doctrine
of inspiration. She did it by the strongest insist-
1 Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum.. ' . .
30 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
ence upon the mental effects of God's Spirit. We
constantly oppose spiritual to intellectual activities,
faith to reason, religion to science. The tradition of
the historic Church is that science *s religion, and
that the highest spiritual activities are intellectual ;
that if our religion does not make us more sensible,
it is a very poor religion ; that, in fact, it is not
merely futile to be silly, but that it is a sin to be
silly. For religion is the working in our hearts of
the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit
of wisdom and of knowledge.
The fact that the Spirit of the Lord is thus
described in Isaiah is for us Christians of secondary
importance. If that were all, the second verse
of the eleventh chapter of that book would rank
but as one among the many glorious utterances in
this greatest of prophetic treasuries. The significant
value of the text in Christian theology is that, from
the earliest times apparently indeed from the age
of the Apocalypse itself 1 it has been seized upon
by the Church, and given a prominence above that
of any other text in the Old Testament, and not
1 See p. 36. Justin Martyr, about the year 155, refers
to Is. ii 2 " 3 , and applies the gifts, in his argument with the
Jew, to Christ as the true Messiah. Following the Septua-
gint, he includes the first part of verse 3, and makes the
number seven, Trypho, sect. 87 : he may have had in mind
the two instances of the work of the Spirit in Christ's growth
'strong, filled with wisdom ' (Luke 2 40 ), and the quotation
from Is. 6I 1 in Luke 4 18 ' The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.'
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 31
lower than the greatest in the Christian scriptures.
The instinct of Christianity picked out this single
verse from the fifty-three Hebrew books, and set
it in the forefront of its theology, accepting as the
best description of the very Spirit of God these
words which were originally used in the picture of
the earthly rule of an inspired deli verer. The Church
has taught consistently to simple and to learned that
this expresses her faith in the Holy Spirit, that
wisdom and understanding, counsel and might,
knowledge and reverence, these noble qualities, and
nothing less, are the gifts of the Holy Ghost. And
she, in, the West, has repeated the enumeration of
these gifts at the Confirmation of every humble
little child, in the prayer which our English service
has inherited from the Sarum rite, and which is at
least as old as the Gelasian Sacramentary of the
seventh century. 1
Commentators naturally differ a little as to the
exact force of the Hebrew words ; and early
Christian exegetists added ' Godliness ', pietas.
a rather vague word in this context, to the original
six, in order to reach the sacred number, finding their
justification in the Greek and Latin rendering of
the next sentence ' and shall make him of quick
understanding in the fear of the Lord/ 2 Others,
1 Or beginning of the eighth. See p. 39, n. 2.
2 A passage which some versions omit, and which in
any case should be either ' He shall draw his breath in the
32 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
with Delitzsch, could look rather to the opening
words, 'The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon
him/ the Spirit here being taken as the communica-
tor of the whole creative fullness of the divine
powers ; but this does not after all make a seventh
gift*
The text of the Authorized Version is well known,
and it can hardly be improved,, except perhaps in
the last phrase :
'The spirit of the Lord shall be upon him, the
spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of
counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of
the fear of the Lord/
And the passage proceeds with the words in 'the
Revised Version about his delight in the fear of
the Lord, and about his not judging by hearsay, but
arbitrating with equity for the humble and helpless,
and smiting the terrible and slaying the wicked
thoughts often recalled during the war, and never
far from the mind of the social reformer.
The description is clear, and commentators have
not obscured it. Swete merely substitutes ' power '
for 'might', and follows Delitzsch in seeing six
pairs, the first pair referring to the intellectual
life, the second to the practical life, and the third
to the immediate relation with God. Delitzsch
says that Wisdom is the power of recognizing the
fear of the Lord ', or ' He shall find a sweet savour in the
fear of the Lord '. . -
1 See further, p. 37.
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 33
essence of things through the appearance, a
Understanding, the power of recognizing the distinc-
tion of things in their appearance, Sietapuris or orfoeo-is;
Counsel, the gift of forming right resolves ; and
Might, the putting them energetically into execu-
tion ; while the Knowledge is that which rests on
the fellowship of love, and the Fear is that which
passes readily into adoration.
Cheyne also brings out the meaning well in his
commentary, where he translates : ' The spirit of
Jehovah, a spirit of wisdom and discernment, a spirit
of counsel and might, a spirit of knowledge and the
fear of Jehovah ; ' and comments that the qualities
are arranged in three pairs, but all spring from one
source, ' the Spirit of the Lord ' ; and are (i) moral
and intellectual clearness of perception, (2) the
wisdom and bravery which befit a ruler, (3) a know-
ledge of the requirements of God, and the will to
act agreeably to this knowledge.
Sir George Adam Smith paraphrases the descrip-
tion as ' ripeness but also sharpness of mind ;
moral decision and heroic energy ; piety in its two
forms of knowing the will of God and feeling the
constraint to perform it. We could not have a more
concise summary of the strong elements of a ruling
mind.' Sir George goes beyond other Old Testament
commentators, and is alone in pointing out the signifi-
cant way in which the Christian Church dwelt on the
religious importance of these strong elements. He
c
34 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
is not, however, free from inaccuracies^: it is
by no means true, for instance, that Gregory of
Tours ' expressly declared ' that the Holy Spirit
is the 'God of the intellect more than of the
heart'. This sixth-cenfury writer does not seem
to have said more than that the pillar of fire
which guided the Israelites was a type of the Holy
Ghost.
We are then concerned less with the Hebrew
original than with the use which the Christian
Church has made of it. There was already a slight
improvement in the Septuagint rendering of ' the
fear of Yahwe ' by v<re/3eia, or ' reverence '.* In
the translation back to English of the Greek version
we have :
' A spirit of God, a spirit of wisdom and under-
standing, a spirit of counsel and might, a spirit of
knowledge and of reverence/ 2
Because of the last word 3 this rendering is perhaps
the best, and we will use it here.
Latin is a heavy language compared with Greek
and English ; and the Vulgate does not help us
much, but Latin is a good tongue for strength and
common sense. The Vulgate runs : ' Spiritus
1 The Septuagint version is : irvevpa TOV 6eov, irveviia (ro(f)ias
Kai (rvj/eo-ecos, nvevfia jSouX^s KG! lo^uos, 7rveC/xa -yvaxrecos KCU evcre-
2 R. R. Ottley, The Book of Isaiah according to the
Septuagint, Cambridge, 1904. 3 See p. 46.
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 35
Domini : spiritus sapimtiae, et intellectus, 1 spiritus
consilii, et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiae 2 , et pietatis.'
Pietas is here used for cvo-e/3eta, ' reverence ', for
which it is indeed the common Latin equivalent ; 3
but a seventh gift was added, because of the loose
rendering of the Vulgate, which, following the Greek
version, began the next verse with Et replebit eum
spiritus timoris Domini, ' and the spirit of the fear
of the Lord shall fill him ', ' fear of the Lord ' being
used here instead of pietas. This, as we have seen,
is inaccurate, the true rendering being that he shall
find his delight in that fear of God which is already
mentioned in the preceding sentence. There is no
new gift, but only a description of his joyful emotion
in the possession of the old : pietas and timor
Domini are but two words for the same original. 4
1 Intellectus in Latin means primarily understanding or
insight. ' Intellect ' is quite a secondary meaning.
2 Scientia, always used subjectively in'gpod Latin, and
not in pur sense of ' science '.
3 See p. 47, n. 2.
4 The full text of the Vulgate is : ' Et requiescet super
eum spiritus Domini : spiritus sapientiae, et intellectus,
spiritus consilii, et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiae, et pietatis,
et replebit eum spiritus timoris Domini.' In older versions
colons take the place of the commas, but the same stop is
used throughout, and after pietatis ; and, as there were
no verse numbers or divisions, the last sentence was
naturally taken as part of the enumeration.
The Vulgate thus follows the Septuagint, which, after
f jSet'ay, proceeds fp.TT\T)cri avrov irvevpa <o/3ou deov.
C2
36 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
Doubtless this intruding of a seventh gift which is
but a doublet of the sixth was influenced by the
sacred number. Old writers derived infinite pleasure
from the reflection that there were also seven
branches on the lamp-stand of Moses, seven Churches
of Asia, seven mystic seals, seven stars, and seven
trumpets, seven heads to the dragon, seven original
deacons, seven joys of Mary and seven sorrows,
seven deadly sins (with exactly seven penitential
psalms to fit them, and seven contrary virtues), seven
sacraments, seven planets, and seven days of the
week which last, at all events, no one can deny.
How delighted they would have been to know that
the psychologists of the Twentieth Century would
one day discover that there are also seven simple
Instincts with their seven Primary Emotions.
They associated the number especially with the
Holy Ghost, because of the Book of Revelation, where
are mentioned the * seven spirits which are before his
throne V the ' seven blazing lamps burning in front of
the throne ', 2 and, especially, the ' seven eyes, which
are the seven spirits of God, sent forth into all the
earth'. 3 There is, "indeed, a little later in this vision
of the Lamb, a sevenfold ascription, which seems
to be based upon the passage in Isaiah : ' Worthy
is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and
riches, and* wisdom, and might, and honour, and
glory, and blessing.' 4 Here wisdom and might are
1 Rev. i*. 2 Rev. 4*. 3 Rev. 5*. * Rev. 5 12 .
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 37
identical with the Messianic list ; and the writer
may have intended the other words to be the divine
equivalents of the human qualities counsel becom-
ing power ; understanding, riches ; knowledge,
honour ; and the fear of God, glory and blessing.
In any case the number is seven, and this helped to
make men certain that the Spirit must give a seven-
fold dower. The Apocalypse is indeed pervaded with
the figure, which is not intended so much to have
a numerical significance as to convey the idea of
fullness and perfection, as in the seven golden lamp-
stands (not candlesticks, by the way) of the first
chapter, which are so described in contrast to the
single lamp-stand of the Temple. 1
We may conclude that the seventh gift, ' god-
liness ' or pietas in the later sense, was meant rather
as a Christian summary of the rest, inserted to
guard against any possible omission, and to give the
idea of completeness, rather than as an addition.
Since it does not really add anything to the powers
enumerated by Isaiah, we may content ourselves,
if we will, with the consideration of the six definite
gifts.
But when we have followed out this little study
of the meaning of the gifts, we find that the instinct
of Christendom has not only seized on this prophetic
verse to describe the indwelling of Christ's human
1 Ex. 25 31 ~ 37 . It had six branches and seven lamps ;
and is referred to in Heb. g z .
38 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
nature by the Holy Ghost, but has also achieved
a considerable extension of its meaning, or we may
rather say, a further insight into the truth which the
prophet had received.
Instead of being only the description of a strong
and just ruler, an exceptional man, indeed a unique
man the liberating Messiah whom the Jews longed
for the description now becomes that of the
ordinary Christian. Every one is expected to show
these ruling qualities, just because he is a Christian.
Here then is the banner of democracy unfurled, ages
before it had come into practical politics ! Demo-
cracy has as a matter of fact always followed in
the wake of Christianity, and has never existed in
any but Christian nations. Japan itself, which has
borrowed so many material advantages from
Western civilization, is not only an autocracy but
makes autocracy its religion. And the reason is,
not only that Christianity proclaims human brother-
hood under an All-Father, not only that it teaches
the infinite worth and therefore the equal worth of
every human soul in the sight of God ; but also
because it insists that the Holy Spirit is offered to
every little child in order to make him a prince,
in wisdom and counsel and might. Gradually
the Christian peoples have risen, and are still rising,
to the gift, and making its acceptance generally
possible ; so that to-day we see all the Christian
autocracies swept away, except one, the Papacy,
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 39
which is more than half destroyed, and which
curiously enough rules in the name of one who
warned us that ' the so-called rulers of the Gentiles
lord it over them, and their great men overbear
them : not so with you *. 1
In these words, our Lord himself put the new
interpretation on the words of Isaiah. The ruling
virtues are not to be used for subjection, but the
great are to be servants, in order that the servants
may be great.
Thus was the first change made, a change
of application, with illimitable results. In the
mediaeval form of the Confirmation prayer, a curious
little change was made a change of order only, but
an interesting one, since it emphasizes the intellectual
character of the Gifts. In Isaiah, knowledge and
the fear of God are coupled together, and so closely
that many commentators understand them as the
knowledge and the fear of God, which is almost
a doublet, since to know God is to revere him. But
in the Confirmation prayer the order is changed :
'Send into them the sevenfold holy spirit, the
Paraclete from the heavens. The spirit of wisdom
and understanding. The spirit of knowledge and
reverence. The spirit of counsel and might. And fill
them with the spirit of the fear of the Lord/ 2
1 Mark io 42 . Moffat's translation.
2 ' . . . immitte in eos septiformem spiritum sanctum
paraclitum de celis. Amen. Spiritum sapientiae et
40 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
Knowledge is thus definitely brought into the
intellectual category, following S. Paul, 1 as savoir
not connattre, wissen not kennen, and placed next
to wisdom and understanding. The Reformers, in'
the first English Prayer Book, 1549, rather unfor-
tunately altered the order back to that of the
original, while they did not venture so far as to
revert to the original six gifts : they also translated
paraclitus by the weaker word ' Comforter ', 2
and rather unnecessarily prefixed ' ghostly ' to
' strength ' ; but they reinforced the prayer in
1552 with the words * strengthen ', and with the
substitution also of ' daily increase in them ' for
' send into them ', thus securing the grace of Con-
firmation from being regarded as an act of instan-
taneous magic :
intellectus. Amen. Spiritum scientiae et pietatis. Amen.
Spiritum consilii et fortitudinis. Amen. Et imple eos vel
eas spiritu timoris domini. Amen.' This is altered from
the original prayer as it stands in the Gelasian Sacramenta/ry
(ed. H. A. Wilson, Oxford, 1894), which has scientia and
pietas, in the order of the Vulgate, immediately before
timor domini, and is without septiformem.
1 ' To one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom,
and to another the word of knowledge ' : I COT. I2 8 .
2 The force of the prayer would be improved if it were
brought nearer to the true meaning, thus : ' Strengthen
them with the holy Spirit, thy Paraclete ; and daily
increase in them the manifold gifts of grace : the spirit
of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of knowledge and
reverence, the spirit of counsel and might ; and make their
delight to be in thee, O Lord, now and for ever.'
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 41
' Strengthen them, we beseech thee, O Lord, with
the Holy Ghost the Comforter ; and daily increase
in them thy manifold gifts of grace ; the spirit of
wisdom and understanding ; the spirit of counsel
and ghostly strength ; the spirit of knowledge, and
true godliness ; and fill them, O Lord, with the
spirit of thy holy fear, now and for ever/
In all versions, the fear of God is, by the use of
the special verb ' fill tl^em ', taken as a general
quality pervading all the rest, and thus the con-
struction of the original text in Isaiah is never quite
lost sight of. It is understood as the final grace to
secure, it would seem, against pride the possessor of
six such princely virtues.
Thus are the mental gifts exalted in the strongest
possible contrast to our modern custom of opposing
' mental ' to ' spiritual '. The mental qualities are
spiritual : art is as spiritual as holiness, and science
is as spiritual as worship. Yet how people speak of
' a really spiritual ' man, sometimes meaning nothing
more than a very crass person just saved by a pious
disposition ; and how in certain circles do they
argue about the profound distinction between
mental healing and spiritual healing. There is
no such distinction; but there is a distinction
between good and bad ; and spiritual evil is the
worst of all because it is a corruption of the best.
This exaltation of the intellect and will was
deliberate in the Church, and was well understood
in the Middle Ages not only in the progressive
42 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
and major part of the Church, the West, but also
in the Eastern Churches ; though unfortunately
less indeed from any fault of their own than from the
exigencies of their stubborn and heroic struggle with
the tyrants of Islam, a struggle now at last trium-
phantly concluded they came to forget their central
dedication to S. Sofia, and to take their stand
upon unchanging conservatism. 1 Perhaps the time
is coming when the East will dedicate itself again
to the Holy Wisdom. But we must never forget
that it was Constantinople which preserved all the
learning of Europe during the Dark Ages, and was
the storehouse from which art and knowledge
filtered, principally through Arabic carriers (who
have got the credit, and have it still in words
like ' algebra ' and ' alchemy '), though their science
was Greek, their medicine Greek, and their philo-
sophy Greek ; through the Crusades also ; and lastly
through her fall, after a thousand years of struggle,
in 1453, which finally distributed Greek learning
throughout the world, and gave us a new science,
a new philosophy, and a new theology. 2 We should
1 It must be remembered that Russia herself, also owing
her Christianity to S. Sofia, was for long under Tatar
domination. Indeed at the time when Constantinople fell,
every Eastern Church was under the heel of Islam, and this
not for any fault, but because of the geographical position
of Eastern Christianity.
2 See for a fuller statement W. Cunningham, Western
Civilization, Cambridge, 1902, Cap. IV.
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 43
be ungrateful indeed if we forgot that we owe the
civilization of to-day to the scholars who were so
long gathered round the church of the Holy Wisdom
in Constantinople, before she fell into the hands of
the barbarian, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque.
In the Middle Ages, then, it was well understood
that the Holy Spirit was the giver of intelligence.
Judges opened their tribunals, professors then-
courses, and councils their deliberations, with
a Red Mass, the service of the Holy Ghost. In
East and West alike, the symbolic dove is repre-
sented hovering over, or whispering into the ears
only of those saints who were distinguished for their
learning or their literary gifts. 1 But perhaps the
most remarkable as well as the most famous instance
is Taddeo Gaddi's fresco, at Santa Maria Novella
in Florence, of the Descent of the Holy Ghost, where
are represented on the one side the seven theological
sciences, and on the other the seven sciences proper
Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Music,
Geometry, Astronomy. Well might an old writer
a hundred and fifty years before Taddeo write
' Spiritus sanctus inventor est septem liberalium
artium ', ' the Holy Ghost is the inventor of the
seven liberal arts, which are, Grammar, Rhetoric,
Dialectics, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astro-
nomy ' : for this was bound up with the philosophy
1 For instance, in a tenth-century Greek Psalter (repro-
duced in M. A. N. Didron, Christian Iconography, Eng.
44 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
of the age from which our modern civilization is
sprung, and in nothing is it illustrated more con-
vincingly than in the unwitting testimony of art.
This conviction was not only grounded on the
words of Isaiah : it was accepted because Christ
had said the Spirit would guide men into all truth ; x
because at Pentecost the Spirit had brought strangely
enhanced knowledge and power of expression ; 2
because the seven deacons were chosen for their
being ' full of the Spirit and of wisdom ' ; 3 because
S. Stephen overcame his adversaries through
' the wisdom and the Spirit by which he spake ' ; 4
because S. Paul also had identified wisdom and
knowledge as gifts of the Spirit, 5 and had said
that the Spirit searches the deep things of God ; 6
because S. Peter had said that God spoke by
the mouth of the prophets, 7 and that the Spirit
would make people see visions and prophesy ; 8
and was it not in the Creed at Mass that the Holy
Ghost spake by the prophets ? and for many
trans. 1851, p. 432) where the dove hovers over David,
who is supported by two figures labelled sophia and pro-
phetia, and underneath is written in Greek ' O God, give
wisdom to the king, and justice to the son of the king *
(Ps. 74 1 ). S. Ephraim of Syria declared that he had seen
a shining dove alight upon the shoulder of S. Basil. The
ancient pictures of S. Jerome and S. Gregory the Great,
with the dove whispering to them, are well known.
1 John i6 13 . 2 Acts 2 4 , 8 . 3 Acts 6 3 .
4 Acts 6 10 . 5 i Cor. i2 8 . 6 i Cor. 2 10 .
7 Acts 3 18 . 8 Acts 2 17 ~ 18 .
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 45
other good reasons ; but chiefly perhaps because,
every school-boy knew the Seven Gifts by heart.
But, before we go on, it may be worth while to
contrast this ancient teaching of the Church with
a representative modern statement ; and to notice
how all the strong distinctive virtues are merged
into one vague mass of sickly pietism which has
nothing definite about it except the determination
to get to heaven. Let us take an instance from
a careful and responsible contemporary source, the
article on the Holy Ghost by Professor Jacques
Forget in the great Catholic Encyclopaedia for
modern Roman Catholicism is quite as sentimental
as modern Protestantism u
' The gift of wisdom, by detaching us from the
world, makes us relish and love only the things of
heaven. The gift of understanding helps us to grasp
the truths of religion as far as is necessary. The gift
of counsel springs from supernatural prudence, and
enables us to see and choose correctly what will
help most to the glory of God and our own salvation.
By the gift of fortitude we receive courage to over-
come the obstacles and difficulties that arise in the
practice of our religious duties. The gift of know-
ledge points out to us the path to follow and the
dangers to avoid in order to reach heaven. The gift
of piety, by inspiring us with a tender and filial
confidence in God, makes us joyfully embrace all
that pertains to His service. Lastly, the gift of
fear fills us with a sovereign respect for God, and
makes us dread, above all things, to offend
Him/
46 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
Can we not understand what the ordinary man
means when he rails against cant ?
In conclusion, let us take this final list of the
Seven Gifts, which sums up the faith of Christendom,
and consider it again for psychological reasons
beginning with the last :
WISDOM, UNDERSTANDING, KNOWLEDGE
COUNSEL AND MIGHT
REVERENCE
(Godliness)
The Fear of God is better expressed by Christians
as Reverence. Ancient faiths were, and primitive
idolatries still are, largely religions of fear ; but
there is no fear in love, and perfect love casteth
out fear, as S. John says. 1 Nothing is v more striking
than to study a Concordance, and see with what
enormous frequency the fear of God occurs in the
Old Testament, and how it has dropped out in the
New. 2 The phrase remains with us, when we think
of the wicked who do horrible things and have no
fear of God before their eyes : ' You may have no
compassion, but are you not afraid to do such
1 i John 4 18 .
2 In the Gospels, it occurs in Luke i8 2 in the story of
the Judge who feared not God neither regarded man : the
penitent thief, in Luke 23*, asks,. ' Dost thou not fear
God ? ' In the Acts and Epistles it is echoed but rarely,
and the ' spirit of bondage again unto fear ' is especially
repudiated by S. Paul on the ground of our jsonship to
God, in Rom. 8 15 .
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 47
things ? ' must have been the thought of many
people when Belgium and Serbia were ravaged.
But to the Christian the idea can only be that of
reverence for God's almighty love in every moment
and aspect of life, the humble reverence that
passes into worship, and prevents the strong virtues
from being tainted with pride. Reverence, says
Dr. McDougall, is a highly compound emotion :
it is ' the religious emotion par excellence ; few mere
human powers are capable of exciting reverence,
this blend of wonder, fear, gratitude, and negative
self-feeling *. 1
So the pietas 2 of reverence, the eusebeia? is close
akin to pietas in the secondary sense of Godliness.
The man who reverences God in all things, and fears
to thwart his will, is also the man who sees God
in all things and in all the happenings of life. He
is the godly man, whose whole existence is dependent
on God, whose every act is shaped according to
the divine purpose, whose work itself is an increasing
prayer, and worship his happiest recreation.
1 William McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psycho-
logy, 1915, p. 132.
2 Pietas, ' conduct conformable with duty, in particular
the performance of duty to gods, Gr. euo-e/Sem.' ; also
* piety, religiousness V
3 Evo-e/Seta, ' reverence ;' especially reverential love and
behaviour towards the gods, Lat. pietas.' But there is
a slight difference, characteristic of the two races, between
reverential behaviour and the performance of duty.
48 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
Such Godliness, though rooted in the heart, is by
no means unconnected with the mind, and depends
for its activity upon a very firm strength of will.
The remaining five gifts all originate in the reason,
except the fifth, Might or Power, which lies in the
will. It is closely connected with the mental
gift of Counsel /3ovArj KCH to^vs since ill-directed
force is worse than useless. Just now we call it
Bolshevism power that proceeds from unchris-
tianized wills. In the individual, obstinacy is the
defence of weak men, and is but the simulacrum of
triumphant strength of will. And as Might is not
the headlong dashing into obstacles, or the ferocious
determination to have one's own way, so it is not
mere fortitude either it is more than the power
of patient resistance, and to render it only as forti-
tude under adversity is to rob it of its highest
quality. To weigh and then to act, to balance with
perfect judgement and then to perform with resist-
less energy and courage that is Counsel and Might.
It is the quality of the great ruler, the great general,
and also of the perfect subordinate, in peace or war.
We all must, during the years of struggle for freedom,
have imagined sometimes the horrible difficulty of
our marshals, admirals, presidents, and prime
ministers, the agonizing process of making some
irrevocable decision ; and, as we watched the
gradual unfolding of the plans of Marshal Foch,
we must have realized the quality of real power,
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 49
how courage is needed for right counsel, not less than
for right action, how the highest form of power is
after all intellectual as well as moral, and how
inseparable in all right undertaking are Counsel
and Might. It is really the same with every activity
of life, with the decisions that put us on our way,
with every direction we pursue, with every result
we accomplish.
There remain the three related gifts, which we
often think of simply as wisdom, but which are
analysed for us as Wisdom, Understanding, and
Knowledge. Many people must have asked why
so much of the six divisions is devoted to the
intellect, and whether after all they are not but
different words for the same thing, or at most
different aspects of the same quality. And I think
that religious teachers have been apt to fall into
vagueness when they expounded these three gifts.
They are really entirely distinct, and have nothing
in common but their intellectual nature.
The Jews were not a metaphysical race, and the
prophets spoke by intuition rather than by ratio-
cination ; the genius of Christendom has also been
intuitive, like all genius. But intuition is nothing
unless it corresponds with what is ; and this is
what philosophy can explain to us. Philosophy
tells us that there are three human desires, three
things that can each be rightly sought only for
its own sake Goodness, Beauty, and Truth ; and
D
50 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
thus that there are three spiritual activities, and
three only the Moral, the Aesthetic, and the
Intellectual activity. 1 If then these three mental
Gifts of the Spirit have a true and definite meaning,
they ought to correspond with the three absolute
values of the human spirit. This is the philosophy
of the spirit ; and theology would add that since men
desire these three spiritual qualities and no other,
intuitively, it must be because they are the nature of
God ; and that the desire for them is in man, because
he is himself made in the image of God. And
therein, we may conjecture, lies an explanation of
those three personal manifestations of God, which
we call the Holy Trinity Beauty in the Creator
who is power, and is the artist of the world, Truth
in the Word who is the wisdom of the Father, and
Goodness in the Spirit who is the will, and because
the will is divine is the will to Good. There are
not three Gods in orthodox theology ; but God is .
one, and is at one and the same time Power or
Cause (the Father), Wisdom (the Son), and Will
(the Holy Ghost). 2 In scholastic. theology the Holy
Spirit or Will was thought of especially in terms of
Love ; 3 but at the same time the Power of the Spirit
1 This has been most lucidly set forth by Mr. A. Glutton-
Brock in The Ultimate Belief, London, 1916.
2 H. Rashdall, Philosophy of Religion, London, 1914,
p. 183.
3 According to S. Augustine the love of the Father to
the Son is the Holy Spirit. S. Thomas Aquinas speaks of
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 51
was, as we have seen, conceived as mainly intellec-
tual. The reason for this is because the Holy Spirit
brings the gift of Christ, and is his Spirit ; * ' he shall
bear witness of me ' and ' he shall take of mine and
shall declare it unto you '. 2 In this way also
Christianity gives a new meaning to the words of
Isaiah.
Wisdom then, 2o0fa, Sapientia, I would suggest,
is the moral aspect of the mind, akin to the holy
and exalted personifications in the Wisdom books
of the later Hebrew scriptures. We always instinc-
tively associate goodness with the word. ' He is
so wise ' could not be well said of an intellectual
rascal. Wisdom, then, is the power of appreciating
Goodness.
Understanding in the Septuagint is Sviwro,
' comprehension, understanding, judgement, per-
the Third Person as Will and, since the Will of God is always
a loving will, therefore as Love, ' duae processiones : una
per modum intellectus, quae est processio Verbi ; alia per
modum voluntatis, quae est processio Amoris ' (Summa
Theologica, Pars I, Q. xxxvii, Art. i). The ires personae are
tres proprietates, ' three essential and eternally distinct
attributes/ as Dr. Rashdall paraphrases it three subsist-
ences (Swna,ibid.xxix. 2) Power, Wisdom, and Will ; just
as there are three elements in human personality, since all
personality must be power having both reason and will.
1 So S. Paul : ' The Spirit of God,' i Cor. 2 11 ; ' The
Spirit of Christ/ Rom. 8 9 ; ' The Spirit of Jesus Christ/
Phil, i 19 ; ' The Spirit of God's Son/ Gal. 4 .
2 John I5 2 , i6 15 . -
D 2
52 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
ception/ or according to Delitzsch, ' the power of
recognizing the distinction of things in their appear-
ance, SiaKpio-is.' We. generally talk as if there
were only one activity of the spirit, the moral,
and as if the aesthetic and intellectual activities
were not spiritual at all especially the aesthetic ;
and it was against this fallacy that Keats struggled
as the prophet of beauty, of ' feeling and perception ',
and for ' intuition as against intellect ', as we can read
in Sir Sidney Colvin's Life. Consequently we have
no word, except the utterly unworthy metaphor of
taste, to describe the aesthetic faculty the faculty,
as the word means, of ' perceiving '. Let us call it
understanding we could have no better word this
power of vision, of comprehension, which makes
poetry real to us, which makes pictures something
more than paint, and music something more than
noise, which is the secret of all the arts. God has
cast his beauty over all the face of nature ; and yet
we have no word to describe our reception of that
manifestation. Let us include it in the second gift.
Understanding is the power of appreciating Beauty.
Knowledge, Tv&o-is, Scientia, needs no comment.
To class it with reverence as the knowledge of God
would make no ultimate difference to its meaning ;
for to know God is to know truth. The scientist,
as well as the artist and the saint, owes his gift
to the Spirit of God. All truth is sacred and only
falsehood is secular. The obscurantist divine is
THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT 53
an adversary of the Holy Ghost, and the open-
minded scholar a servant of the Holy Ghost. Know-
ledge is the power of appreciating Truth.
But the saint, the artist, the scholar, like the
statesman or the general, represent only the highest
examples of common human activity. The gifts
are given to every man in his degree, and the Holy
Spirit is in each one of us. Each of us has some
desire for truth, for goodness, for beauty, and some
appreciation of them, some instinct that they are the
more excellent things which cannot be explained
because they are themselves the explanation.
Each, of us in some degree has counsel, and in some
measure puts forth power. Each of us is inspired.
Wisdom, understanding, and knowledge are our
life, and the Spirit comes to give it us more abun-
dantly. Counsel and might are the way in which
we use this life, and godliness is the purpose for
which we use it.
Are we saved ? Yes, but the test is, Are we
sensible ? For the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of
truth, and comes to guide us into all truth. He
is come, not to make a few men infallible, but to
make many wise.
Ill
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT
THAT the Six Gifts which we last considered were
regarded as the normal dower of the ordinary
Christian, is made certain by the remarkable fact
that S. Paul describes nine other gifts as the special
and extraordinary energizing of God's Spirit among
certain exceptional individuals. The Nature of the
Spirit in ordinary life may be summed up in the
five names given him in different parts of the New
Testament The Spirit of Truth, of Wisdom, of
Grace, the Spirit of Life, and Sonship, the last two
being emphasized in the eighth chapter of the
Epistle to the Romans to show that he is the Spirit
of Liberty. 1 Indeed, in another epistle S. Paul
says that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
Liberty. 2 We may summarize them in a little table :
The Spirit of God is the Spirit of
Truth Life
Wisdom Sonship
Grace Liberty
Love
S. Paul certainly thought that the ordinary
Christian is inspired, and that his whole life is
the expression of the Spirit's activities because
1 Truth, John 14", I5 26 , i6 13 ; Wisdom, Acts 6 3 , 10 ;
Grace, Heb. io 29 ; Life and Sonship, Rom. 8 2 , 16 .
2 t 2 Cor. 3".
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 55
the Spirit dwells in him. 1 But he also thought that
some people had an exalted degree of inspiration.
We may pass over with little more than a bare
mention those Seven Gifts of Service (as we may call
them) which are mentioned in the Epistle to the
Romans 2 : Prophecy, Administration (' ministry ',
or ' deaconship '), Teaching, Exhorting, Giving,
Ruling (superintending), Succouring the afflicted
(' showing mercy ') summed up, perhaps, in the
next sentence as Charity (' love '). We must content
ourselves also with the bare enumeration of what
we may call the Nine Gifts of Office, which are
mentioned in the chapter we are now coming to : 3
Apostles, Prophets, Teachers, Powers, Gifts of Healing,
Helps (' ability to render loving service '), Govern-
ments (' wise counsels ', ' powers of organization '),
different kinds of Tongues, and their Interpretation. 4
It is interesting to place side by side with these the
sevenfold list of special endowments set out by Justin
Martyr some hundred years later, which are a curious
mixture of the Gifts of Office and the ordinary Gifts
of the Spirit Understanding, Counsel, Might, Heal-
ing, Foreknowledge, Teaching, the Fear of God. 5
Now these Gifts of Service and Office are clearly
1 See, for instance, Rom. 5 5 , 8 4 " 17 ; i Cor. i2 3 ; Gal. s 2 , 5 , 14 ;
5 5^ 16-25. 2 R om> I2 7. 3 j Qor. I2 28 . 4 Ibid. 30.
5 Trypho, sect. 39. The substitution of Foreknowledge
(irpdyvanris) for Knowledge is specially curious. (Most
scholars would agree to the date c. 55 for the Epistles to
the Corinthians, and c. 155 for S. Justin's Dialogue.)
THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
not universal, but are qualities of special excellence
possessed by different people. They are secondary,
however, to the greatest class of all, the Nine Talents
of the Spirit *, to which they form on the whole a
fringe of useful and benevolent activities, though iden-
tical with them at one point in the case of the Gifts
of Service, and at four in that of the Gifts of Office.
Let us then place the Nine Talents, as they were
noted in the Church of Corinth, in the order given
by S. Paul, 2 side by side with the other lists at the
points where these wholly or partly coincide :
THE NINE
TALENTS.
1. Wisdom
2. Knowledge
3. Faith
4. Healing
5. Powers
6. Prophecy
7. Discerning of
Spirits
8. Tongues
9. Interpretation
of Tongues
GIFTS OF
SERVICE.
GIFTS OF
OFFICE.
Administration Governments
Teaching
Prophecy
Exhorting
Giving
Superintending
Succouring
[Charity]
Teachers
Healing
Powers
Prophets
Tongues
Interpretation
Apostles
Helps
JUSTIN'S
GIFTS.
Counsel
Teaching
Healing
(Might)
Understanding
Foreknowledge
Reverence
It is certain that all S. Paul's three lists refer to
1 I have ventured to call them ' talents '. The word
xdpia-fjia, i. e. manifestation of grace (xapis), well rendered
by Dr. Armitage Robinson ' grace-gift ' (H. B. Swete,
Essays on the Early History of the Church Ministry, 1918,
p. 73) was not confined by S. Paul to these special nine gifts.
2 i Cor. i2 8 - 10 .
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 57
special, and the 'Talents' list to extraordinary
qualities ; wisdom, knowledge, and faith, therefore,
mean wisdom, knowledge, and faith far above the
ordinary degree : they do not occur in the secondary
lists, but are represented by powers of administra-
tion and by the humbler (though none too common)
gift of teaching. Healing and Powers and Tongues
are apparently more common, since they occur also
in the Gifts of Office, and healing is reinforced in the
next century, as teaching is also, by S. Justin.
Prophecy is the commonest of all, being mentioned
in all S. Paul's lists, while the discerning of spirits
occurs only among the Talents.
That is the first characteristic of all the special
gifts. They are above the capacity of the ordinary
Christian, though in varying degree. The second
is that they are of social utility, ' to profit withal ',
as is made quite clear by S. Paul. 1 A Simeon
Stylites may owe his ability to live on the top of
a pillar to some special gift of the spirit, and so may
any other ascetic ; but, like the asceticisms of India,
such acts are individualistic they are not directly
for the benefit of the Church ; and therefore they
are neither Gifts of Service, nor Gifts of Office, nor
are they Talents of the Spirit in the meaning of
S. Paul, who by thus moralizing these phenomena
saves them from being merely 'miraculous' or
wonder-provoking. He indeed only mentions them
1 i Cor. i2 7 , I4 8 - 33 ; Rom. i2 6 - 14 .
58 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
as it were incidentally (since they were very familiar
to his hearers) in connexion with that fraternal
spirit which is the main subject of his discourse in
both letters. The Seven Gifts of Service are
mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans so that
men may acquire community of spirit, may desire
to serve rather than to shine : r the Nine Gifts of
Office and the Nine Talents are mentioned in order
to prevent the vice of rivalry in the exercise of these
'grace-gifts ' ; for, he says, if one member is
honoured, all the members are honoured with it,
and all the members of the body, being many, are
one body. The whole passage in the First Epistle
to the Corinthians is in fact devoted to the great
social thesis of the body and its members, and
culminates in the panegyric on Charity.
You will notice also that the power of writing
infallible books is not included in any of the gifts
or works of inspiration, nor is the power of issuing
infallible bulls. We need not then be worried because
the First Gospel is less accurate than S. Mark,
or because S. Luke sometimes accepted accounts
of events at which he was not present, which had
1 Bishop Gore, St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, II, 112.
' We linger lovingly, wistfully,' he says, ' on the picture
of the corporate life of a Christian community. Has it
vanished from the earth, this real fraternal living . . . ? '
and he goes on to point out what a ' really fraternal,
self-governing, and mutually co-operative community the
Mediaeval English parish was.'
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 59
become a little vague with the lapse of years, as
seems to have been the case with the tradition of
Pentecost itself. There is an inveterate human
craving for inerrant guidance ; but such guidance is
not in God's plan for the world, since all is life and
growth ; and knowledge must grow like the rest.
God helps us through our fellow men : he speaks by
the prophets, but he does not speak into gramo-
phones. Some men are inspired ; and their inspira-
tion includes wisdofa and knowledge as well as
faith and prophecy, but it does not include the power
of never making a mistake.
As -for the classification of the Talents, I do
not suppose that S. Paul foresaw the ingenious
activities of hermeneutics. Even apostolic vision
could hardly have imagined what the exegete would
accomplish through the centuries of his sermons
and commentaries ; and certainly no amount of
apostolic inspiration could have guarded itself
against that terrible ingenuity. S. Paul, happily
for his peace of mind, did not know that he was
destined to be infallible, and to provide proof-texts
for the theology of nearly two thousand years.
He wrote, like other men, though with a greater
sense of responsibility and authority, for the people
to whom he sent his letters ; and he sometimes
dashed passages off in a great fervour of passion.
It would, therefore, be justifiable to classify the list
of his gifts in an order" different from that in which
60 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
he set them down. None the less, the Talents
probably presented themselves to his mind in a
logical sequence ; nor do I think that we shall err in
classifying them as they stand.
There seem to be three Mental gifts, and six
which we should now call Psychic ; and the list
seems to move gradually away from the more
ordinary and constant of these special gifts to the
three last, which we may class as supernormal.
Thus, keeping to the original order :
MENTAL. PSYCHIC.
Normal. Supernormal.
Special Wisdom Healing Discerning of Spirits
Special Knowledge Powers Glossolaly (' Tongues ')
Special Faith Prophecy Interpretation of Tongues
We need not dwell again on the word of Wisdom
and of Knowledge. It is only necessary to repeat
that the whole context shows a more than usual
endowment of these qualities to be meant. The
stress, moreover, is laid, not on the possession but
the utterance of Wisdom and Knowledge ' the
word of wisdom ', ' the word of knowledge '. It is
one thing to possess these qualities, but another to
use them, and to use them in the service of the
community. The same is true of Faith : it is surely
mistaken of some commentators to maintain that
S. Paul only means the ' faith, so as to remove
mountains ' of the great passage on Charity in the
next chapter, since the worlds there are obviously
rhetorical ; and the writer no more means thus to
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 61
characterize this faith, than he means to say that
the gift of Tongues was always that ' of men and
of angels '.- Faith is the receptive organ of the
human spirit ; it is to the spirit what eyes and ears,
and other organs of sense, are to the body ; it sees,
hears, tastes, and touches the invisible things. All
religious^ people have this in some degree -no one
can be entirely without it ; but the charism of faith
is to possess the receptive power in a special degree.
We next come to the Normal Psychic Gifts.
Gifts of Healing were extremely common, not only in
S. Paul's time, but, as is illustrated in Justin Martyr's
list, in the next century also, and indeed throughout
Christian history, down to our own day, as I have
shown elsewhere. It is the power of curing diseases
of the body through the spiritual agency of the
mind. Common as it is, we may class it among the
psychic gifts, using the word ' psychic ' in its modern
signification, 'pertaining to the class of extra-
ordinary and obscure phenomena not ordinarily
treated of by psychologists.'
The next, Powers, ' works of powers,' * has been
obscured by the persistent determination of trans-
lators, and of commentators and theologians also,
to use the question-begging word ' miracles ' instead
of the simple terms used in the New Testament
' powers ', or ' signs ', or ' works ', or ' mighty
works ', or ' wonders '. Even the Revised Version
62 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
gives us here the word ' powers ' only in the margin.
Now ' powers ' never means in the New Testament
a work not brought about by natural agency,
which is the meaning of a miracle : the word is
sometimes used vaguely, but generally of faith-
healing or the casting out of daemons ; * indeed,
in no case does it in the New Testament necessarily
connote more than this. But occurring, as it does,
in S. Paul's list, between healing and prophecy, the
word must mean more than mere healing. It may
therefore be meant to include exorcism and such-like
powers of quelling psychic disturbance ; or more
probably, one would think it includes a wider
exercise of spiritual mastery. As for exorcism, we
are only at the beginning of our knowledge : dual
personality is an established fact ; ' possession '
we do not hear much about in Christian countries,
but most people who have lived close to life in
Asia or Africa are full of queer stories, some of which
have been carefully recorded. If, as seems probable,
s, in the sense of ' miracles ', occurs in the New
Testament as follows : In Mark 6 2 , 14 healing ; 9 39 exorcism ;
Matt. 7 22 classed with prophecy and exorcism ; n 20 again
vaguely used (of Chorazin and Bethsaida) as in the parallel
Luke io 13 . In Luke ig 37 the crowd on Palm Sunday praise
God for the ' powers ' they had seen. In Acts 2 22 S. Peter
speaks of the ' powers and wonders and signs ' of Jesus ;
in Acts 8 7 Philip heals and exorcises, and this is referred to
in verse 13 as ' signs and great powers ' ; and in Acts ig 11 the
faith-healing by contact with handkerchiefs, &c., is referred
to as ' special powers '.
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 63
the evil spirit is merely a fraction of the sufferer
himself, it still remains a very evil fraction, which
needs removal. Many such cases have been cured
by hypnotism ; and very likely the genuine exorcist
was a hypnotizer. Such exorcisms as we find in
unreformed service books sometimes excite our
repulsion and contempt, especially those of the
Eastern Churches ; but there may be something
more rational behind the notions that water or
salt are inhabited by evil spirits.
' Powers ' in general are certainly found in the
biographies of many famous persons; exaggerated
in ancient times, they have been shirked in modern,
but they occur not least in the best attested bio-
graphies down to the present year. There is,
indeed, a much larger mass of carefully verified
contemporary evidence of such faculties as second
sight than is still generally realized. Of historic
examples perhaps the most famous is Joan of Arc :
there are few events in the past for which there is
such thorough evidence much of it in the careful
records of a hostile board of judges as her visions,
her premonitions, her second sight ; but, after all,
these are really less remarkable exhibitions of
' supernatural powers ' than the miracle of her
achievement. Her life, from the beginning of her
ministry to the end, was one beyond the powers
not only of a peasant girl but of the ablest princes,
and justifies her claim to be the agent of intelligences
64 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
outside herself. She is famous, because she happened
to turn the tide of history ; but many others had, and
have, that charism of the ' workings of powers '."
But, it may be asked, are not such Powers clearly
supernormal ? If then S. Paul's list forms an
ascending scale, why are they not put last of all,
instead of between healing and prophecy ? I think
the answer is that Powers are very common, and in
their common form are not far removed from
ordinary shrewdness and insight. We have all
known people whose gifts of penetration are what
we call ' uncanny ' ; it is not easy, for instance, to
deceive a saint. Of this we have ample historic
evidence : the power of divining people's thoughts
was, for instance, almost constant in the lives
exceptionally well attested of S. Catharine of
Siena and S. Teresa.
The Powers in the Church of Corinth consisted,
we may then suppose, partly in exorcism and partly
in the extension of human faculties beyond the
capacity of mere mental quickness or ability. Such
psychic power S. Paul evidently regarded as part
of his own ordinary life.
Prophecy is the third of the Normal Psychic Gifts-,
each of which is reinforced by inclusion also in the
Gifts of Office. It does not of course mean fore-
knowledge, except in so far as intuition into the
present may guide a man's natural forecast of the
future ; nor does it mean preaching or, shall we
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 65
say? the habit of delivering sermons. It means
rather the power of public speaking which is depen-
dent on the inspiration of the moment if one may
use in a very definite sense a phrase which is generally
misused ; a form of inspired or, in the old Quaker
sense, '* enthusiastic ' preaching, which is the result
of internal revelation rather than of the deliberate
wisdom and acquired knowledge that head
S. Paul's list. ' God takes away the minds of
poets, and uses them as his ministers/ said Plato ; 1
and most poets know the experience sometimes in
an extreme form, as when Coleridge dreamt ' Kubla
Khan ' ; some orators also have it in speaking.
It is a common experience also among those who
' wait upon the Spirit ' : and the extraordinary
wisdom and foresight of the Quakers the modernity
of men and women like the Emancipators and Eliza-
beth Fry, who were generations ahead of their
time were due to the spirit of prophecy which came
to them in the silence. This intuition was the
experience also of the Jewish prophets, whose
testimony is well summarized by Dr. Sanday :
' Scattered all through the prophetic writings
are expressions which speak of some strong and
irresistible impulse coming down upon the prophet,
determining his attitude to the events of his time,
constraining his utterance, making his words the
vehicle of a higher. meaning than their own. . . .
The personality of the prophet sinks entirely into
1 Plato, Ion, 534. Jowett's trans., i, p. 238.
E
66 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
the background ; he feels himself for the time being
the mouthpiece of the Almighty.' x
And it was from one of these prophets that our
Lord took the words of his first public utterance, 2
'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because he has anointed me to proclaim good news
to the poor/
But not all inspiration was supposed to be the work
of God, as we shall now see.
In the group of six Psychic Charismata, we arrive
then at the last three, which we are calling Super-
normal, to distinguish them from Healing, Powers,
and Prophecy.
The first of these is the Discerning of Spirits,
or ' discriminating between spirits \ 3 Commentators
in the past have generally shirked this also, and
have interpreted it as meaning ' to discern between
distributions of the Holy Spirit '. But this has no
meaning, since, if all manifestations came from the
Spirit of God, there would be no cause to sift them.
S. Paul also says quite distinctly, not the Spirit,
but ' spirits ' in the plural ; and I think that un-
biassed scholars to-day would agree with Schmiedel 4
that the apostle meant just what he said. Most
people are still at the present day strongly prejudiced
1 The Oracles of God, 1891, pp. 54, 55.
2 Is. 6I 1 - 2 ; Luke 4 18 ~ 19 .
3 Stafcpureis 7rvevjidra'. Weymouth translates this, un-
fairly enough, by ' discriminating between prophetic
utterances '. * Paul W. Schmiedel, Enc. Bib. iv. 4773.
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 67
against spiritualism ; but there was a particular
kind of spiritualism in the Apostolic Church which
we have honestly to face.
Christians at that time believed in the existence
of spirits, personal and very active, ' angels ' they
might be, or ' daemons ', good, bad, or neutral.
It is curious that, side by side with the horror of
spiritualism, largely fostered by the Roman Church,
which had dogmatized so freely about the next
world as to have the strongest reasons for discourag-
ing investigation of it side by side with this has
continued the belief in spirits, under the name of
angels. Christian people forget that angels are
spirit s,because art has so long materialized them with
armour and vestments, and with wings constructed in
defiance of the laws both of flight and of anatomy.
Now, angels must be spirits ; and a guardian angel
would really be, not like the beautifully draped
lady of nineteenth-century art, but much more like
the daemon, the &aip6vioi>, of Socrates, which,
although according to Xenophon and Plato it was
neither a divinity nor a genius, appeared to the
philosopher as a warning voice, which he heard
frequently with his outward ear, and never disobeyed.
The whole matter has not been adequately dealt
with by theologians, because their methods are still
so predominantly scholastic, and at the very men-
tion of an angel or a daemon, they fly to the rummag-
ing of Hebrew texts. Such research into ancient
E2
68 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
demonologies can add little or nothing to our know-
ledge ; but modern psychology and psychic research
have already helped us a great deal. Whereas
primitive races have peopled their world with
horror, and have believed mostly in cruel gods and
malevolent spirits, we are coming not only to
believe in the complete love of God, but also, it may
be, to disbelieve in the existence of wicked spirits,
or of anything naughtier perhaps than a poltergeist.
' There may be often cause for perplexity/ wrote
Frederic Myers, 1 'but I have never seen cause for
fear ' ; after persistent investigation, he, and many
others, came to the conclusion that temporary
control of the organism by a widely divergent
fragment of the personality is the formula to which
we can reduce probably the great majority of cases
of supposed spirit-possession. But he at least
thought, and an increasing 1 number of cautious
investigators think with him, that there may be,
and are, some cases of possession by spirits, though
only the spirits of those who once were men like
ourselves. Evidence has indeed accumulated,
sufficiently strong to convince many hard-headed
and sceptical inquirers, of such departed spirits
speaking through the medium of living persons.
We are not in a position to dogmatize ; and here
we have only to note the existence of the phenomenon
of possession, without trying to explain it.
1 Human Personality, 1903, ii. 200, 201.
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 69
The strange phenomena observed in non-Christian
countries may be attributed to some form of dual
personality or telepathy : it is at least remarkable
that the New Testament contains so much evidence
of possession, also among non-Christians, and that
the power of Christ is always represented as destroy-
ing it ; and it would be unhistorical to shut our
eyes to incidents like these, which were certainly
not invented. As for credibility, they are less
strange than some modern cases of complex person-
ality such as the authenticated one of Sally Beau-
champ x a case so extraordinary that some of its
most careful observers have been compelled to the
hypothesis of possession.
Christian belief, both Protestant and Catholic,
accepts the existence of certain good spirits who are
called angels. This belief, together with that in
evil spirits, was shared by the whole ancient world,
including the Christians of the first century. The
influence of the spirits of the departed had, however,
occupied men's minds very little, if at all ; because
the belief in human immortality had been of a
hazy nature. But with the growth of that belief
through Christianity, the spirit world came to be
associated more and more with the departed, and
the cultus of the saints very naturally grew up.
The Christian Church had an entirely different
1 Abridged in F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1903,
70 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
orientation in this regard : the next world was very
definitely conceived, belief in the immortality of the
soul was intense ; and Christians had the word of
the Master that, going to the next world, he would
still be with them, and would teach and strengthen
them through his Spirit.
It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that
Christians not only believed angelic or other spirits
to speak into their hearts that is, into the under-
mind or subliminal consciousness ; but that the
Church soon came to believe also that the heavenly
visitants were often the spirits of departed and
canonized saints, who appeared and spoke to the
senses of the conscious mind, as in the case of Joan
of Arc, and of countless other persons, who saw
visions. Very likely they were right too : if the
souls of the dead are immortal and dwell in another
plane, the strange thing would be not that we
should have glimpses of them now and then but
that they should never show any sign of their
existence, that the veil, as we say, should never be
lifted ; since this ' veil ' is probably only a defect
of our present rather gross existence, and the object
of religious people is, hi Browning's words, ' to wear
the thickness thin, and let men see '. Thus very
curiously there have gone side by side the belief
in communication with departed saints and the
horror of communication with departed Christians
in general. This aversion has been strengthened by
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 71
much Roman Catholic teaching about such com-
munication being the work of evil spirits ; but for
that there is rather less to be said than for the old-
fashioned Christmas ghost-story. The difference
between the mediaeval visionaries and modern re-
ligious-minded spiritualists is partly one of method ;
but fundamentally it is that while both practised
the communion of saints, the former meant by a saint
one who had been canonized by the Church, and the
latter use the word in the Pauline sense to include
their relations and friends.
After this digression, which our still prevalent
rabbinism has rendered necessary, we are able to
suggest that S. John meant just what he said when
he wrote : x ' Beloved, believe not every spirit, but
prove the spirits, whether they are' of God : because
many false prophets are gone out into the world.
Hereby know ye the Spirit of God : every spirit
which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the
flesh is of God.' Some prophets, that is to say,
refused to recognize the real humanity of Christ :
they were inspired by spirits who were at best
ignorant ; other prophets could be judged by their
doctrine to teach rightly, and these were the mouth-
pieces of spirits that were ' of God ' , and thus the
true prophets (and presumably their familiar spirits
also) had the Spirit of God.
S. Paul also meant what he said when he besought
1 i John 4 1 " 3 .
72 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
the Church of Thessalonica not to be shaken or
troubled, * either by spirit, or by word, or by
epistle as from us, as that the day of the Lord is
now present/ * Nor did he mean ' spiritual gifts ',
as both the Revised and Authorized Versions
mistranslate him ; but he meant what he said
when he wrote a little further on in this same letter
to the Church of Corinth : z 'So also ye, since ye are
zealous of the spirits, seek that ye may abound unto
the edifying of the Church.' He probably also meant
in the same personal sense the words two verses
further on : ' For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit
prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful.'
The Discerning of Spirits is then placed after
Prophecy, both in this List of the Talents, and
when he says, ' Let the prophets speak by two or
three, and let the others discern/ 3 because S. Paul
believed with S. John that discarnate spirits spoke
by the prophets. For us to-day the significance
of this charisma lies in the fact that so far from
discouraging any form of spiritualist investigation,
as modern preachers usually do, he counts it among
the special gifts of the Holy Ghost.
The greatest achievements of the nineteenth
century lay in the field of physical discovery ; and
1 2 Thess. 2 2 .
2 i Cor. I4 12 rj\tTai core irixvpaTcov. Weymouth also
translates this quite wrongly, ' ambitious for spiritual gifts.'
3 i Cor. I4 29 . Cf. i Thess. 5**.
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 73
the Church nearly destroyed herself among intelligent
people by her opposition to science in the interest
of Moses. The twentieth century bids fair to be the
age of psychical discovery ; and yet many are
anxious that the Church should once again throw
herself in opposition to the new knowledge which is
coming in a science which shows promise already
of working an even greater and better revolution in
thought than that of Darwin. S. Paul's advice,
and that of S. John, to test the spirits and to
discriminate, would, I conclude, be best followed
to-day by our becoming active members of the
Society for Psychical Research. 1
The next in the list is ' Kinds of Tongues ' which
is perhaps best called by the distinctive name of
Glossolaly. This was a psychic manifestation, quite
common and familiar among the ancients. It died
out rapidly in the Early Church ; but it has appeared
since in movements of great spiritual vigour, such
as that of the Friars in the thirteenth century,
the Jansenists at one period, the early Quakers, the
persecuted Protestants of the Cevennes, the con-
verts of Wesley and Whitfield, and the Irvingites,
among which last it was perhaps artificially stimu-
lated by the study of this Epistle. S. Paul spoke
1 Those who wish to give that serious study to psychical
research which has hitherto been so little given in the
Churches could not do better than begin by reading
Professor Bergson's address to the Society.
74 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
with tongues ' more than you all.' ; but none the
less the practice seems to have somewhat worried
him because of its disorderly consequences, and
on the whole he discouraged it, and himself pre-
ferred to speak five words with his understanding
rather than ten thousand in a tongue. 1 The theory
was that the mind slept while God played over
a man ' like a lyre ' so at least Montanus described
it at the end of the next century, when it seemed
only to survive in his sect. The conscious mind of
the speaker was certainly asleep ; his words were
unintelligible, but not meaningless like the sounds
of a musical instrument though there were some in
whom the trumpet gave an uncertain sound 2 ) ; when
the speaker recovered consciousness, his memory was
a blank, yet sometimes he could interpret for himself. 3
Glossolaly was evidently much sought after
among the Christians of Corinth. It was of less
social value than the other Talents of the Spirit,
since it could not be shared in the same way ; and,
as the first enthusiasm died down, it may have
become tiresome. None the less, it must have been
popular with the congregation at first, and it may
well have been impressive. We need not imagine
it to have consisted in mere ugly gabble : even
baby-talk is pretty and full of meaning, and glossolaly
we may suppose to have included not only cries and
1 i Cor. i4 4 ~ 37 , esp. verses 18-19.
2 i Cor. I4 7 ~ 9 . 3 Ibid., verse 13.
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 75
laughter, sounds and syllables, but also of discon-
nected words, and new words, and perhaps short
sentences", the whole delivered with rapt expres-
sion, and lofty gesture, and given significance by
dramatic action arid tone. It was evidently regarded
as like prophecy, in that the speaker was the mouth-
piece of God or of lesser spiritual personalities, but
unlike prophecy in its not being immediately
intelligible. A rare psychic phenomenon at the
present day, glossolaly would seem to be a natural
accompaniment of periods of intense religious
excitement.
The interpretation of Tongues, the last of the
Talents, shows that glossolaly was not without
some coherence and meaning, and like music could
be interpreted by the initiate. Some had the power
of interpretation : and S. Paul is against the exercise
of glossolaly at all, except when it can be put to good
use for edification by the presence of an interpreter ;
since otherwise it has no social value, and therefore
does not come into the category of these charismata
at all. ' But if there be no interpreter, let him keep
silence in the church ; and let him speak to himself
and to God/ x The need of an interpreter had been
mentioned long before by Plato, when in the
Timaem he says that the mantis ' cannot judge of
the visions which he sees or the words which he
utters ', and ' for this reason it is customary to
1 i Cor. i4 28 .
76 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
appoint diviners or interpreters as discerners of the
oracles of the gods '.*
We cannot imagine what going to church was
like in the first century unless we try to realize that
the Sunday service was not the Eucharist alone,
but the Eucharist preceded by a fraternal love-
feast, the Agape or Lord's Supper, and followed by
an amazing ' Liturgy of the Spirit '. There were
in fact three services. The last is thus described
by Mgr. Duchesne. These spiritual exercises, he
says, held a very large place in the Christian
service, as it is shown to us in the most ancient
documents :
' After the Eucharist, inspired persons begin to
speak and manifest before the assembly the presence
of the Spirit that animates them. The prophets,
the ecstatics, the glossolalists, the interpreters, the
faith-healers (medecins surnaturels) now take posses-
sion of the attention of the faithful. There is
a liturgy, as it were, of the Holy Spirit (il jy a coinme
une liturgie du Saint-Esprit) after the liturgy of
the Christ, a real liturgy, with a real presence and
a communion. The inspiration can be felt : it
vibrates the organs of certain privileged ones
among the faithful ; but all the congregation is
moved, edified, and even more or less ravished and
transported in the divine spheres of the Paraclete/ 2
Modern writers generally dwell on the difference
between what they call the ' miraculous ' and the
1 Timaeus, 72. Jowett's trans., ii, p. 565.
2 L. Duchesne, Origines du culte Chretien, 5 me ed., 1909,
P-34-
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 77
' moral ' gifts among these charismata, and point out
that the former degenerated whereas the letter have
remained of abiding value. This is surely rather
unscientific : none of the gifts are miraculous,
though some are psychic, and some of these rarer
than others ; while all the nine are moral in so far
as they are well used. Is not the suggestion also
rather complacent ? We seem to congratulate our-
selves that, because we leave almost dormant the
great boon of mental healing, and because our
tame lives show hardly any signs of psychic power;
and because our plethora of Sunday sermons is
fatal to the very spirit of prophecy, therefore we
have made some indefinable growth in moral
excellence since the time of S. Paul. He shared
these gifts and believed in them, and found value
even in the last three, supernormal though they were ;
and those primitive disciples of his, whom we con-
template from the altitude of our libraries, proved
their mettle when the time came. May it not be
that God intends specially religious people to have
more than normal capacities, that the law of spiritual
increment naturally produces psychic results ; and
that it is no virtue of ours to have sacrificed these
capacities to a rather dusty intellectualism which is
already sinking into obsolescence ? Perhaps S. Paul
was right after all." He had excellent opportunities
for knowing, and he seems to have had no doubt of
the permanent value of any of the charismata
78 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
except that of Tongues ; and even this, one would
suppose, he expected to increase in value as it
came to be more regulated in a maturer and more
settled Church.
Perhaps he would be really disappointed, if he
looked around to-day (as mayhap he does), and
saw what a mature and settled Church is like.
Conceivably he might find us a little dull. Certainly
he would be surprised at the flatness of our abilities.
He might indeed turn to us very gently, and say,
' Concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not
have you ignorant.'
Did the psychic gifts, after all, ' degenerate ', any
more than the mental ? Are they not all permanent,
because all are real ? As the Church grew in numbers
and added a larger proportion of tame people to
the fold, her enthusiasm was doubtless diluted
and spiritual fervour grew less intense; but is it
not probable that the mental talents of special
wisdom, understanding, and faith (especially faith)
grew weaker also, and that the psychic talents
merely followed in the general and inevitable
process ? In all the great revivals of history, the
enhanced mental powers came back, but the psychic
powers came back also. The saints of whom the
Church is proudest had both ; and their wisdom is
proved by their works. S. Francis changed the
face of Mediaeval Europe ; John Wesley changed
the heart of Hanoverian England. .We are not
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT 79
changing anything, not even ourselves very much ;
we bark at the heels of progress, and leave statesmen,
and scientists, and labour leaders, sociologists, poets,
novelists, and psychologists, to convert the world
and lead it in the ways of peace and goodwill. A
Church, half paralysed in the higher centres, is not
in a position to look down upon the talents of
the great enthusiasts ; nor have the leaden hands
of German theologians, or the timid fingers of our
own, as yet brought that old garden of the soul into
growth and productivity again.
We have not lived dangerously, but academically :
almost apart from real science, and blind to the reve-
lations of art, we have trifled with old books, and
have f ocussed our religion to the furbishing of old
formulas.- At best, we have been purely intellectual ;
and for a large part we have not been so much as
that, but scholastic, sentimental, and sordid. We
complained of nineteenth-century materialism, but
it may be we were materialized ourselves, and
fought materialism with the weapons of materialism.
And now that the world is emerging from this
nightmare, it is not because of any achievements of
the official Church, but simply because the Spirit
will not be bound by the wrappings we have
made.
The ' miraculous ' gifts have disappeared ? May
it not be that many years of concentration upon
material things, and upon the material aspects of
8o THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
religion, have deadened our spiritual faculties ?
They are indeed atrophied now ; but we can at
least record their existence, and look forward to the
time when the Church will gird up her loins again,
and go forth in the power of the Spirit.
IV
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT
STRENGTH, wisdom, firmness of action, toned by
reverence and heightened here and there with the
rare colours of enthusiasm such are the gifts of
God's Spirit, as they are recorded in the Church ;
and they leave us still with a feeling of dissatis-
faction. We seem to see the fathers of the stern
republic, wrapped in their togas, striding across the
forum to the senate house, their brows knitted in
some grim decision rto see glimpses also of ecstatic
prophets speaking wildly in their temples and
caverns, or riotous bacchanals in social frenzy.
Wisdom, knowledge, understanding, counsel, might
are they not all pagan, and the enthusiastic
energies pagan too, or worse, savouring of the dim
halls of eastern mysteries ? Where are the distinc-
tive Christian virtues ? Where, for instance, are
' mercy, pity, peace, and love ' ? '
They are here too, of course. Without them the
inspired saint would be stern indeed, a man to be
respected rather than beloved. Such a man, it
must be admitted, is suggested in Isaiah's first
picture of the inspired Deliverer, though the picture
is just a little softened later on, when he is described
F
82 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
as a hiding-place from the wind, like the shadow
of a great rock in a weary land. 1 There are virtues
which are distinctively Christian, virtues like
charity and meekness, which were undefined, or
scorned, or condemned outright by the pagan world ;
and we naturally think of Christ mostly for those
qualities wherein he differed from Cato. But this
has led us to import a tone of softness into the very
sound of the word Jesus. In the first thousand
years of Christian history the bias must have been
the other way, to judge from the Fathers, and from
the pictured majesty of basilican apses ; but the
hymns of S. Bernard are not the first examples
of the melting of severity into sweetness ; if the
cultus of S. Mary tended again to harden the
features of Christ in the popular mind, nineteenth-
century sentimentalism has certainly undone any
evil of that kind, while the Catholic tendency has
for long been to worship Christ only in the cradle
and on the cross. No doubt it will always be
difficult for us to remember the two sides at once, as
it is to think of strength without sternness and of
love without infirmity.
There are virtues distinctively Christian, as there
are qualities in the character of our Lord which were
lacking in the great men before him ; but the so-called
pagan virtues are none the less Christian because
they are a necessary part of all lofty natures.
1 IS. 32 2 .
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 83
Christianity agrees with the best ancient thought
in the importance attached to the fundamental
great qualities ; but it adds something else. It
even recognizes through S. Paul the existence of
important gifts of enthusiasm ; though these gifts,
as we have seen, it prizes only in proportion to their
social utility. But it declares further that, in addi-
tion to being like Aristides or Marcus Aurelius, a good
Christian must also have the grace of an intense
and burning charity.
Now we are in constant danger of supposing that
love, with its kindred attributes, is something that
can be put in the place of the ' pagan ' virtues. To
use another question-begging and untrue epithet,
we think of it as ' feminine ', in contradistinction
to the masculine gifts ; and, regarding the two as
mutually exclusive, we have come to think of the
feminine quality as peculiarly the gift of the Spirit.
A man is accounted religious for being affectionate
rather than forcible ; and, in reaction partly against
the harshness of Puritanism, we tolerate an in-
ordinate amount of imbecility in our tender little
saints, and prefer what is amiable to what is
admirable. The favourite images in popular
hagiology abroad display their hearts, or carry
bouquets ; and the air is heavy with the scent of
their lilies. In all this, popular Christianity has
drifted behind Muhammedanism, which with all its
faults has seldom ceased to be virile.
F2
84 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
4
The truth is that love is the greatest thing in the
world, and the pre-eminently Christian virtue, but
that love to be the real Christian agape must spring
from the strongest possible roots. S. Paul who first
proclaimed charity as greater than all the wonder-
ful talents of the Spirit, greater even than faith
or hope, and saw quite clearly that without it he
would be nothing was certain also as to the
fundamental importance of wisdom, knowledge, and
might ; and he gave us the true view of the whole
matter when he told the Galatian Church that
love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gracidusness, good-
ness, faithfulness, meekness, self-restraint, are not
the roots but the fruits of the Spirit. There is a sense,
of course, in which love is at once the first cause and
the crowning effect of our spiritual life, because
God is love ; but this does not affect our point of
view, since all is from Love, and in Love, and to
Love.
We have only to think of these Nine Fruits of the
Spirit to realize that they are of quite a different
quality when exhibited by a strong or passionate
nature. They can all exist in a kindly weak person,
but they are then as different as a crab-apple is
from a pippin.
If we compare the Fruits of the Spirit with the
Gifts of the Spirit, the Talents, and the Gifts
of Office and Service, we find no correspondence
except the purely verbal TTIOTIS, used here with
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT
a different meaning, ' f aithfulness ' x . But it may be
interesting also to compare S. Paul's list with that
given some ninety years later in the Shepherd of
Hennas, where four ' strong maidens, who stand' at
the corners of the Tower ', are described, and eight
' others who stand between them ' : the four are Faith,
Temperance (Self-control), Power, Long-suffering ;
the eight, Simplicity, Guilelessness, Holiness, Hilarity
(iXaporris), Truth, Understanding, Concord, Love 2
some corresponding with qualities in our other lists
while some are new :
FRUITS OF MAIDENS OF GIFTS OF
THE SPIRIT (R.V.) HERMAS. THE SPIRIT.
TALENTS OF
THE SPIRIT.
Love
Joy
Peace
Long-suffering
Kindness
Goodness
Faithfulness
Meekness
Temperance
Love
Hilarity
Long-suffering
Concord
Temperance
Truth Knowledge Knowledge
Understanding Understanding Wisdom
Power Power Powers
Faith Faith
Simplicity
Guilelessness
Holiness
1 S. Paul's Fruits of the Spirit in Gal. 5 22 - 3 are thus
described : 6 fie Kaprros rov irvevparos ftrrtv aydirrj, X a P<*> P9 VI 7
paKpodvuia, XP r l a " r TI ] s y ayadoMrvvrj, Trpavrijs, eyKparein' Kara TO>V
TOIOVTOV OVK fffTtV VOflOS.
2 Hermas, who was said to be brother to Pius, who was
bishop of Rome c. 148, described his Maidens (Shepherd of
, Sim. ix. 15, ed. Kirsopp Lake, p. 259) :
86 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
Thus, in the next century, Hermas adds to
S. Paul's list the kindred virtues of Simplicity and
Guilelessness, which are of singular beauty when
combined as they rarely are with wisdom and
power. We get pictures of such a combination in
some of Charles Dickens's finest characters, in
Mr. Jarndyce for instance and in the Cheeryble
brothers, the last drawn, as Dickens specifically
tells us, from life : there is always some simplicity
in real greatness, and a certain aK.aK.La, a certain
' guilelessness ' or ' innocence ' was beautifully
mingled with the remarkable political dexterity of
statesmen who were good as well as great like Glad-
stone or Lincoln. These two qualities roughly
correspond with S. Paul's middle group patience,
benevolence, and beneficence. The other addition of
Hermas, ' Holiness ', is vague, but inclusive of all in
S. Paul's list ; we may, indeed, define Holiness as
the possession of the Nine Fruits of the Spirit.
Hermas, it will be noticed, adds some of the
strong gifts truth, understanding, power, as well
as faith ; and so, in this fundamental matter, all
our primitive authors and sources are at one, in-
cluding Justin Martyr, who also gives Understanding
and Might. Hermas does not, however, include any
of the Gifts of Office or of Service, or any of the
IIiOTis, TI 8e 8fvrepa 'Eyjcpara, f} 8e rplrT) Aura/its, ^ 8e rtrapri]
MaKpodvpia' at 8e erepai dva p.e<rov rovrtav (rra&icrat ravra f \ovcrt
ra ovofiara' 'An-Xorj/y, 'A/caKta, 'A-yvei'a, 'iXapoTijr, 'AXq&i,
, 'Ayairij.
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 87
Talents of the Spirit, except Faith, and that not in
the intenser sense of the charismata. 1
Unfortunately the words of S. Paul were not well
rendered in the Authorized Version, and the Revisers,
after their wont, did singularly little to improve
matters. The meaning will perhaps be best brought
out in a table on the next page. We will give
Dr. Moff at the central position, which is well deserved,
only venturing on two additional epithets to his
' Good Temper ' and ' Generosity ', which, excellent as
they are, seem to need a little strengthening. Wey-
mouth's renderings suffer, like the Authorized
Version, from indistinctness ' Good Faith ' is his
best. Lightfoot is helpful ; though I cannot think
that his classification into three general habits of
mind, three qualities affecting intercourse with
neighbours, and three general principles of a Chris-
tian's conduct, quite exhausts the possibilities.
In the rendering of the first three, it will be
noticed, all our translators are agreed.
It is interesting to notice how William James,
approaching the subject of Saintliness from a psycho-
logical point of view, arrives at a definition which
closely corresponds with S. Paul's connotation,
although he clearly has not noticed the resemblance.
There is, he says, 2 ' a certain composite photograph
of universal saintliness, the same in all religions, of
1 See p. 61.
2 Varieties of Religious Experience, 1904, pp. 271-4.
THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
O
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THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 89
which the features can be easily traced. They are
these :
' i. A feeling of being in a wider life than that of
this world's selfish little interests ; and a conviction,
not "merely intellectual, but as it were sensible,
of the existence of an Ideal Power. . . . [Love.]
1 2. A sense of the friendly continuity of the ideal
power with our own life, and a willing self-surrender
to its control. [Peace.]
'3. An immense elation and freedom, as the out-
lines of the containing selfhood melt down. [Joy.]
'4. A shifting of the emotional centre towards
loving and harmonious affections, towards " yes,
yes ", and away from " no ", where the claims of the
non-ego are concerned. [The five Social Qualities.] '
He adds that these fundamental inner conditions
have characteristic practical consequences, viz.
(a) Asceticism, (b) Strength of Soul, (c) Purity, and
(d) Charity. These all come under the one individual
Constraining Quality Self-control, except Charity,
which is implicit in the whole of S. Paul's list, and
which he analyses in the most famous of his
panegyrics.
That analysis is so well done by James that it
leaves comparatively little to be said about the
meaning of the harvest of the Spirit.
Love, I take it, does begin with that ' feeling of
being in a wider life ', love both to God and to Man ;
and for the rest love cannot be denned it can only
be sung about. The general character of S. Paul's
90 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
list suggests that it is not so much love to God that
is here meant, as a state of Charity, springing from
love to God, dwelling in it, and extending itself to all
living creatures. The heart is melted and the heart
is on fire. The barriers of self are broken down, and
we have an absorbing interest in, and an intense
affection for, all that is outside self supremely for
God. The emotional aspects of love vary much, but
sacrifice is the test of its reality : where a mother
will die for her child, a man for his friend, a martyr
for his faith, or a boy for his country, there at least
is love, since there is death. Love is the nature of
God, and his very Being, the explanation of his
Person, the cause of creation, the key to all mysteries,
and the test of all action. Love is the beginning,
and love is the end, the source of all life, and the
meaning of life. Love is energy, as love is the
supreme personality, but love is before everything
a condition ; and we can only enter into it by loving
our fellow men, for till we love the divine in them
we cannot love the God whom we have not seen, but
when we dwell in love, we dwell in God.
As for Joy, one could almost wish S. Paul had
used Hermas's word ' hilarity ', so much has
common religious usage spoilt the ' immense elation '
of real joy : long afterwards, indeed, S. Bernard
told his monks to be ' semper Hilares, gaudentes in
Domino '. Joy has sometimes come to be a cant
term from which the suggestion of cheerfulness has
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 91
withdrawn; and I am afraid that most people
associate ' joy ' in religious language with something
rather wry-mouthed, or at best with the ecstatic,
melancholy smile of the cheap prints. There is
also a long tradition of gloom and harshness, which
predominated in many religious circles not so long
ago, and of which the memory is bitter and hateful
in men's minds to-day : what sensible men thought
of it can be readily seen in the novelists of the last
century in Butler's Way of All Flesh, in Thackeray,
and George Eliot, and in some of Dickens's blackest
characters Mrs. Clennam in Little Dorrit, Murd-
stone in David Copperfield, or Esther's godmother
in Bleak House, where the gloom is as many can
remember that it once was associated with a grim
heartlessness and with much positive cruelty. In
the home of the Pilgrim Fathers I rieed not dwell
upon this, except to say that the unpopularity of
professional religious folk, which still exists, is not
without well-remembered justification. Joyousness
has not been a special characteristic of the ' black-
coated gentry ', nor indeed have the Social Qualities
which we shall touch on again in a moment. Now
joy carries with it good temper, generosity, and
kindliness of heart : it also is greater than mere
cheerfulness, arid includes it; therefore where we
do not find cheerfulness, hilarity, gaiety, we may
suspect that joy is absent too. Joy includes them
all, being itself the highest; and it is the source,
92 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
Coleridge says, of the poet's and artist's Under-
standing :
'Joy is the sweet voice, Joy the luminous cloud
We in ourselves rejoice !
And thence flows all that charms or ear or sight,
All melodies the echoes of that voice,
All colours a suffusion from that light/
Peace, the sense of friendly continuity between
our own life and the Power beyond, has also been
lamentably missing among many who professed to
have found it. A good Christian is never disturbed
or fearful, he does not fret or worry. (Oddly enough,
as I wrote the last word a telegram arrived which
announced that a registered manuscript had taken
six days instead of twelve hours to arrive at the
publisher's, thus effectually destroying my plans
and breaking up my morning's work.) Well,
a Christian must never worry, and the gentle
' Bother ! ' is just as much out of place on his lips
as the other more pronounced and more theological
expletive. We owe a great debt to the ' Don't-
worry Movement ', which has changed the ways
of whole sections of people in America, and is
spreading beneficently to the more highly-strung
citizens of the Old World. This does not mean that
we have merely to go through life with a ' higher-
thought smile ' ; but it does mean that much of
our unhappiness, and the unhappiness we make
around us, is caused by our exaggeration and our
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 93
i
manufacture of small troubles and small anxieties :
the good Christian does not worry, because he sees
things in their right proportion, relating them to the
greatness of God and not to his own self. Nor does
the inner peace mean that we are to take no thought
for the morrow, as the unfortunate translation of
the Authorized Version suggests, but only that we
are not to be anxious not to be troubled about
the morrow ; for the Fruits of the Spirit are not
cheap substitutes for the Gifts : the man who does
not worry must at the same time practise forethought,
since underneath the grace of Peace lie the gifts
of Counsel and Might. And all this because we have
at once to trust in God, and to help him to be fellow
workers with him in whom our whole life is hidden
and held. La sua volontade, say Dante's angels
and Gladstone thought the saying was the finest
line in all literature la sua volontade e nostra pace t
Peace, like love and joy, branches out inevitably in
social directions, and so we come to the five Social
Qualities Good Temper, Kindliness, Generosity,
Fidelity, Gentleness. Of these we need say little :
every one understands them and loves them; and
all that is needed is to replace the terms in the
Authorized Version none too exact, and worn
down a little by cant usage with the fresh rendering
we have taken from Dr. Moffat.
First the passive quality of Good Temper, in the
sense of forbearance, 'patient endurance under
94 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
injuries inflicted by others/ Next the inert or at
least not necessarily active quality of Kindliness,
' a kindly disposition towards one's neighbours '
benignity, or benevolence. Then, in the ascending
scale, the active, practical quality more than mere
Generosity ' goodness, Beneficence as an energetic
principle/ rather than the bonitas of the Vulgate.
These three are stiffened by Fidelity the context
showing that by irfons is here meant good faith
that a man's amiability is not the mere result of
.an easy-going disposition, that he can be depended
on to keep his word and be loyal, that he is just
as well as generous. ' Trustworthiness, fidelity,
honesty/ explains Lightfoot, 1 with a suggestion
that the idea of ' trustfulness ' is there too which
may well be, since those w)io win trust are also
prone to give it.
The last of the Social Qualities is Gentleness,
which seems placed here to show the manner in
which the social acts are to be exercised : a man
should preach social reform, for instance, or vindicate
international honesty, or help his unfortunate
neighbour, or organize poor relief, with gentleness.
He should show charity even when he is charitable.
A feminine virtue perhaps ! Christ had all the
feminine virtues as well as the masculine, because
he was perfect man ; and the saint is like him :
1 Commentary on the Epistle. The words in quotation
marks in this paragraph are from Lightfoot.
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 95
so the qualities, which we in a very haphazard and
mistaken way are apt to differentiate between the
sexes, are blended in the harvest of the Spirit.
The Christian character is a marriage of the male
and female virtues.
Common, too, to the best women and the best
men is the Constraining Quality, which governs
them all, Self-control. I need not remind you of
how the meaning of ' temperance ' has been narrowed
till in popular usage it means only one form of this
many-sided virtue.
Such is Holiness, the harvest of the Spirit. If
a man is not amiable and cheerful, and good-
tempered, and equable and strong, he falls very far
short of holiness. Yet the so-called religious world
has not on the whole made this kind of impression
on the world at large. People are not in the habit
of saying, ' I'm sure that man must be a very
holy man, because he 's so jolly ! ' There is, and has
been for centuries, a widespread impression that
religious people are negative ; rather depressed, very
easily shocked, much given to faction and intoler-
ance ; combining a somewhat abject profession of
self-abasement towards God with a pretension to
superiority over their secular fellow man, and a still
greater contempt and exclusiveness towards the
members of other Churches ; showing also a marked
tendency to tabu, and tending to mark themselves
off, sometimes by inhuman asceticism, sometimes by
96 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
forbidding to marry, sometimes by the condemnation
of wine or of tobacco, or of the drama ; interested
almost exclusively in individual salvation, often from
the purely selfish point of view, and curiously in-
different to the salvation of the poor and the oppressed
from misery and vice f or the desire of social service
is only now becoming a characteristic of strictly
religious circles, an encouraging sign that religious
people are becoming more Christian.
Has not some such impression as this been fairly
universal in Christendom ? And has it been without
justification ? Public opinion has been just enough
in giving religious folk credit for avoiding the grosser
sins. Has it not been just here also in its criticism ?
Yet if religious people showed the characteristic
fruits of the Spirit, how popular they would be !
The truth is that Christianity is very difficult for
us all. ' How very hard it is ', wrote Browning in
a burst of simplicity, ' to be a Christian ! ' So far
from being an old-fashioned religion, it is so blazingly
modern that we have only begun to touch it here and
there. We are still the Primitive Church ; we have
not even as yet arrived at the simplest system of
organization which can hold us all together. We
have not yet formed a society ; but are still tearing
through history like robber-bands, intent on capture,
and firing at one another. The world takes up
arms occasionally ; the Church fights all the time.
Still less have we arrived at the practice of the
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 97
Christian virtues. The Sermon on the Mount is,
as an English bishop once frankly proclaimed, im-
practicable in Christendom, if not undesirable. Not
many years later, the best representative of the
dominant German theology, Dr. Harnack, in his
famous lectures on Christianity, 1 while definitely
asserting that 'the Gospel is a social message,
the proclamation of solidarity and brotherli-
ness ', denied that it could be incorporated into
the laws and ordered customs of nations ; . because
' Jesus was no social reformer ', and forbade ' all
direct and formal interference of religion in worldly
affairs '. Let us struggle, Harnack says, to get
justice for the oppressed, ' but do not let us
expect the Gospel to afford us any direct help/ for
' the Gospel is above all questions of mundane
development '. So he leaves the State to go its
own way ; and can suggest no more practicable
ideal than a nationalist anarchism ' a nation of
\
brothers, in which justice is done, no longer by the
aid of force, but by free obedience to the good, and
which is united not by legal regulations but by the
ministry of love/ And this he bases on two texts,
' My kingdom is not of this world/ which was,
after all, only directed against militarism ; 2 and
1 What is Christianity?, English translation, pp. 106,
no, 121, 124, 125.
2 ' My kingdom is not derived from this world (eie row
Kovpov TOVTOV) ; if my kingdom were from this world, then
would my officers fight ' : John i8 36 .
G
THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
' The poor ye have always with you ' words
which he misconceives only because he misses their
sad irony. Why had our learned exegetes so rarely
a sense of humour ?
We have revered the Christian virtues in the
letter, but humanity is still so unregenerate that we
have consistently debased them. Nothing shows
this more clearly than our inability to keep any
definite nomenclature for manifestations of Christian
love. We can only get people to realize the love of
God by using a fresher but much weaker word like
' friendliness '. ' Is God friendly to me ? ' they say,
' what a beautiful idea ! ' It seems a new idea,
because ' the love of God ' has become to us some-
thing cold and austere, or even cruel. In the same
way, if we tell people that they ought to try and
like their neighbours, they are surprised at the
novelty of the idea, and often are delighted with it.
' Charity ' was invented by S. Jerome, as a rendering
of the Greek agape, which had been coined, it is sup-
posed, by the translators of the Septuagint it is not
found in any pagan writer because there was no
Greek word pure enough or intense enough 2/ocos
meant the sexual passion. Greeks and Romans had
no word, because they had not the thing. Christians
were given the thing, found new words, and then lost
them. Charity, instead of meaning the love of God
and man, came to mean mere kindly disposition and
tolerance, then to be a synonym for almsgiving.
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 99
So we begin with Wyclif, writing * God is charite ',
and end with the ' Charity Organization Society ',
and the unemployed carrying banners with the
words ' We want Justice, and not Charity '. And
the Revised Version completes the process by
taking the word clean out of the Bible.
So the special word agape, coined because the
existing Greek words were sensual or inadequate^
and used one hundred and seventeen times in the
New Testament, has now no English equivalent,
except the word which we use also of the passion
of a man lor his mistress. We have worked back to
paganism : the very word Caritas which the Vulgate
uses (with dilectio) , because of the erotic associations
of amor, has been deprived of its meaning during
the last few centuries. Our only consolation is that
the meaning of the word ' love ' has certainly been
greatly extended and heightened in the process.
N
But we have no proper word for the love between
God and man, and no word for the love of humanity
unless we can agree to recover ' charity ' by a rigid
refusal to use it of ' almsgiving ' except ' philan-
thropy ', a word the mere savour of which shows
what we have made of it. And neither of these has
a verb ! A Christian has two duties to love God
and to love his neighbour but he has not yet
invented a proper verb to describe either action.
Now S. Paul has the reputation of being less
the Apostle of Love than S. John, mainly because
G2
ioo THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
Agape was translated one way for the Evangelist
and another when S. Paul wrote about love. The
famous thirteenth chapter comes in the closest
connexion with the Talents and the Gifts of
Office; and is itself the finest exposition of the
Fruits of the Spirit. Let us then read it, so as to
get a fresh impression, in Dr. Moffat's modern
English vowing nevertheless that this is the last
time we will use ' charity ' to mean ' almsgiving "' !
S. Paul has been saying that it is better to be
an apostle than to heal (a point in which our modern
postulants for the episcopate have very generally
agreed with him), better to be a teacher than to
work ' powers ', better to be a useful helper than to
speak with ' tongues ', and so on. ' Set your hearts
earnestly on the greater gifts. And yet show I unto
you a more excellent way/ he says, and continues :
* I may speak with the tongues of men and of angels,
but if I have no love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging
cymbal ; I may prophesy, fathom all mysteries
and secret lore, I may have such absolute faith that
I can move hills from their place, but if I have no
love, I count for nothing ; I may distribute all
I possess in charity, I may give up my body to be
burnt, but if I have no love, I make nothing of it.
Love is very patient, very kind. Love knows no
jealousy ; love makes no parade, gives itself no
airs, is never rude, never selfish, never irritated,
never resentful ; love is never glad when others go
wrong, love is gladdened by goodness, always slow
to expose, always eager to believe the best, always
hopeful, always patient.'
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 101
Then he goes on to say that prophesying, and
glossolaly, and knowledge will be superseded when
that which is perfect comes ; for we are still but as
children, but one day we shall understand. So
faith and hope and love endure, these three, but the
greatest of these is love. Therefore, he concludes,
make love your aim, and then set your heart on the
Talents of the Spirit.
The effect of God's Spirit upon man, then, is
not only to produce power intellectual breadth,
scientific acuteness, aesthetic insight, firmness and
decision, reverence, nor merely to elicit those
enhanced mental and psychic faculties due to
intense enthusiasm, some of which appear to be in
strange contrast to the six princely gifts, though
they all fall under natural laws and spring from the
same source. Without charity they are nothing
worth.
The Fruits of the Spirit, the plenitude of Charity,
are the test of the Christian ; for a strong man may
have the princely virtues in an exceptional degree,
and be a pagan ; he may have most of them, as
f-
Muhammed had, and be an Antichrist, or many of
the most remarkable as Napoleon or Bismarck had,
and carry on the work of Antichrist.
Yet the gentle fruits themselves include the
masterful quality of self-control ; and they are not
genuine unless they are begotten in wisdom and
developed in strength. Only, do they modify all
102 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
the strong virtues of which we have already said so
much. Wisdom cannot be cold, knowledge cannot
be hard, understanding cannot be sharp, counsel
cannot be cruel, nor might relentless, neither can
reverence be infected with any breath of terror, in
the man who has the charity of the Spirit.
I think William James may be brought in again
to help us in his useful dispassionate way: 1 The
saint, he is saying, is a success, no matter what his
immediate bad fortune may be ; and, after men-
tioning a dozen examples of saints, which show that
with all his impartiality he was at heart not far
from New England, he proceeds :
' They show themselves, and there is no question ;
every one perceives their strength and stature.
Their sense of mystery in things, their passion,
their goodness, irradiate about them and enlarge
their outlines while they soften them. They are
like pictures with an atmosphere and background ;
and, placed alongside of them, the strong men of
this world and no other seem as dry as sticks, as
hard and crude as blocks of stone or brickbats/
The genial Fruits of the Spirit, then, in their
totality form the distinctively Christian character,
and are then rightly called by the high name of
Charity. When religious circles are not unmistakably
marked by them, those circles may be devoted to,
religion and show fruits of religion, but it is not
the Christian religion that they are devoted to, for
1 Varieties of Religious Experience, 1904, p. 376.
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 103
the fruits are not the Christian fruits. There are
many other religions in the world which do good
work, keeping men out of savagery and leading them
to think of God, and these also produce characteristic
results, such as the virile pugnacity of Islam or the
patient pessimism of Hinduism and Buddhism, or
the heroic loyalty of Shinto : such religions produce
saints, for the saints are all orthodox, and are all
near together, whatever their starting-place, because
they have come near to God. There have been also,
and still are, many phases and fashions of Chris-
tianity which are harsh and ugly, and cruel, narrow,
arid anxious, and therefore are not really Christian
at all : from them also saints move out towards
Heaven, and become Christian. But the object
of Christ is not merely to produce saints, since his
love is to all men, and not only to exceptional men.
The exceptional men can take care of themselves ;
they will become saints in spite of what the ministers
of their religions may have taught them : but the
interest of Christ is chiefly in the ordinary people,
even most of all, and most actively, in those who are
lost, who have dropped out and been forgotten, and
have missed their way. We often say that Chris-
tianity can be proved to be the best religion by the
exceptional saints it produces. But this is not true.
Christianity can only be proved to be the best
religion by its sinners.
It is by what Christianity does for the ordinary
104 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
man that it must be tested nay, by its impress
also upon the customs of ordinary society, by
the extent to which it gets its principles of brother-
hood and charity incorporated into laws and methods
of government, and compulsory social practice, into
international practice and the law of nations. So
Harnack was wrong ; and with him all Germany
was wrong. For all law and all world-policy, how-
ever wide, are concerned in the end with the fate
of individual men, women, and children; and
settle for the peasants who live in the hills and
valleys and plains of each spot upon the map
be it South Slavia or Armenia, India, or Russia
or Germany whether their lives shall be happy
or base ; and all law and all world-policy will be
good or bad in so far as the people who make the
social laws, or treaties, or leagues of nations are
inspired with charity or with cynicism.
For the Christian religion is catholic. It is a fellow-
ship, and because it is a real fellowship it is not
afraid to desire the perfect organization of fellowship
in all departments of life, because fellowship without
organization is a mockery which cannot endure.
As yet it has not succeeded in organizing itself,
except in disunited fragments ; but the Christian
spirit has set itself from the beginning against the
anarchic principle of mere individual salvation and
self-culture ; it has always struggled hard for the
ideal, and has made magnificent experiments,
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 105
i
which have almost succeeded, and the fruit of which
is not lost. At- this moment it is with the organiza-
tion of the world that ^we are all concerned
intensely concerned, and not unhopefully, to achieve
what has hitherto-been considered impossible ; and
it may be that the Spirit of Christ will order the
world in the ways of peace and co-operation, before
it achieves the ordering of the Church universal.
But in any case, whether it be through Christendom
or through a union of the Churches of Christendom,
the Holy Ghost will work through fellowship, for
he is the Love of God the Father, and he is the Spirit
of Liberty, and men are inspired corporately as well
as individually. We have seen men go mad in
crowds : we shall also see men go wise in crowds.
For there is such a thing and this was the supreme
truth which Protestantism missed as corporate
inspiration. Christianity is indeed intensely indi-
vidualistic; every man is infinitely precious, and
every body is the temple of the Holy Ghost. But it
is not less intensely social : the Spirit was promised
to the church, given to the cjiurch on her birth-
day at Pentecost, working through the church, and
dividing to every man severally as he will.
The conviction of the Church in every age has been
that it is inspired : as soon as Christianity is con-
tent to save the individual, it fails, because it ceases,
so far, to be Christian ; and the individual is the
first to suffer. ' I believe in the Church ' follows the
io6 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
profession of belief in the Spirit, because the inspira-
tion of the Church is the highest work of the Spirit,
as it is the most difficult of accomplishment. We
need not be afraid of becoming too ecclesiastical ;
our fault is that we are never ecclesiastical enough,
but are content to say in our hearts that we believe
in our own church, and some cognate organizations,
instead of in that universal brotherhood and kingdom
which is the mother of us all.
The Holy Ghost is the Spirit of holy individualism,
the Spirit of Liberty, moving men to struggle against
both secular and ecclesiastical domination,, whether
\ - *
it works by persecution or by bribery. The Holy
Ghost is also the Spirit of holy fellowship, the Spirit
of Charity, which moves men to love one another
and for that end, to get to know one another not
only within their own fragments of the broken body
of Christ, but among those also which are alien to
them. Our modern era has seen the Liberty of the
Spirit spreading over the world ; and now, after
four centuries of struggle, we know ourselves to be at
the beginning of a movement towards a new Fellow-
ship of the Spirit. Only on these spiritual bases
can an order arise that is in truth such a 'holy order*
as the Church has proclaimed and tried for ages
to establish throughout the world.
This corporate inspiration of the community^
that was destined to battle its way through the
centuries, seems to have been S. Paul's crowning
THE FRUITS OF THE SPIRIT 107
belief in the work of the Spirit. Every member of
the society has his own gift and his own function,
but all are organically united in the Church which
is the body of Christ, * the fullness of him who is
being fulfilled, all things in all 1 / All are brought,
however far they may have come, to be fellow-
citizens with the saints, and are built together for
a habitation of God in the Spirit.
The Church does not exist to be in opposition,
or even in contrast to the world, which already is
half with her ; she is the core of the world, or to
use the better because dynamic image of our Lord,
the leaven. She exists not only to realize brother-
hood within her own borders, which she has yet
to do ; but to promote the brotherhood of all man-
kind, which she has done from the beginning, and
is still doing till to-day we dream, and hardly
dare to dream, that the first stage of her task is
being accomplished. So the Spirit of God, with
sighs that cannot be uttered, will not rest till the
World is the Church, and all the kingdoms of the
world are become the kingdom of Christ, and the
whole world is mighty and wise, and tender with
charity.
We used to be much exercised with little Scripture
proofs about the personality of the Holy Spirit.
1 Eph. i 23 ra iravra ev ira<n TrXi/pov/ievou. The next sentence
is from the second chapter, but the whole Epistle, of course,
is full of the thought.
io8 THE POWER OF THE SPIRIT
We do not need theni : he is God. What concerns
us men always is his work in our midst, and how
we use the gift that is in us. ..-.-.
And to-day what concerns us, most vitally,
beyond words, is that after so many centuries of
tragic and shameful failure, both in Church and
State, we should .now begin to realize the Unity of
the Spirit.
ViiKSP s !ir.ar CHICAGO
