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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 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
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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
Pe
