great experiences of His power and grace which I have described
is not shaken by any assaults on the historical trustworthiness
of the story of His earthly ministry. Much less can it be shaken
by discussions concerning the nature and origin of the ancient
Scriptures of the Jewish people. Their confidence in the books,
both of the Old Testament and the New, may perhaps have to be
suspended until the controversies of scholars are closed, or until,
on historical and critical grounds, they can see their own way to
firm and definite conclusions about the main questions at issue;
but not their confidence in Christ. They may be uncertain about
the books; they are sure about Him. Both Christian scholars and
the commonalty of Christian people approach the controversies on
these ancient records with a settled faith in the power and grace
and glory of Christ. Their faith in Him rests on foundations which
lie far beyond the reach of scientific and historical criticism.
They know for themselves that Christ is the Savior of men: for they
have received through Him the remission of their own sins; He has
translated them into the divine kingdom; He has given them strength
for righteousness, and through Him they have found God.
LIDDON
INFLUENCES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Henry Parry Liddon was born at North Stoneham, Hampshire, in 1829.
His intellectual power and fearless and earnest preaching attracted
immense congregations to St. Paul's Cathedral, London. He sought
to meet the speculative fallacies of his day by truth clearly and
boldly proclaimed. Probably his greatest fault in delivery was that
he tied himself slavishly to a manuscript in all his preaching.
There was a force and intensity to his delivery, however, that often
projected his words towards his hearers like great projectiles
across a battlefield. Dr. Arthur S. Hoyt recommends him for study
in these words: "Canon Liddon brings the riches of exegesis and
theology and philosophy to the pulpit, and gives to the sermon the
distinction of his refined and spiritual personality." He died in
1890.
LIDDON
1829-1890
INFLUENCES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
_The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound
thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it
goeth._--John iii., 8.
Who has not felt the contrast, the almost tragic contrast, between
the high station of the Jewish doctor, member of the Sanhedrin,
master in Israel, and the ignorance of elementary religious truth,
as we Christians must deem it, which he displayed in this interview
with our blest Lord? At first sight it seems difficult to understand
how our Lord could have used the simile in the text when conversing
with an educated and thoughtful man, well conversed in the history
and literature of God's ancient people; and, indeed, a negative
criticism has availed itself of this and of some other features in
the narrative, in the interest of the theory that Nicodemus was
only a fictitious type of the higher classes in Jewish society,
as they were pictured to itself by the imagination of the fourth
Evangelist. Such a supposition, opposed to external facts and to all
internal probabilities, would hardly have been entertained, if the
critical ingenuity of its author had been seconded by any spiritual
experience. Nicodemus is very far from being a caricature; and
our Lord's method here, as elsewhere, is to lead on from familiar
phrases and the well-remembered letter to the spirit and realities
of religion. The Jewish schools were acquainted with the expression
"a new creature"; but it had long since become a mere shred of
official rhetoric. As applied to a Jewish proselyte, it scarcely
meant more than a change in the outward relations of religious
life. Our Lord told Nicodemus that every man who would see the
kingdom of God which He was founding must undergo a second birth;
and Nicodemus, who had been accustomed to the phrase all his life,
could not understand it if it was to be supposed to mean anything
real. "How," he asks, "can a man be born when he is old? Can he
enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be born?" Our Lord
does not extricate him from this blundering literalism; He repeats
His own original assertion, but in terms which more fully express
His meaning: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born
of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of
God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is
born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye
must be born again." Our Lord's reference to water would not have
been unintelligible to Nicodemus; every one in Judæa knew that
the Baptist had insisted on immersion in water as a symbol of the
purification of the soul of man. Certainly, in connecting "water"
with the Spirit and the new birth, our Lord's language, glancing
at that of the prophet, went very far beyond this. He could only
be fully understood at a later time, when the sacrament of baptism
had been instituted, just as the true sense of His early allusions
to His death could not have been apprehended until after the
crucifixion. But Nicodemus, it is plain, had not yet advanced beyond
his original difficulty; he could not conceive how any second birth
was possible, without altogether violating the course of nature.
And our Lord penetrates His thoughts and answers them. He answers
them by pointing to that invisible agent who could achieve, in the
sphere of spiritual and mental life, what the Jewish doctor deemed
so impossible a feat as a second birth. Nature, indeed, contained no
force that could compass such a result; but nature in this, as in
other matters, was a shadow of something beyond itself.
It was late at night when our Lord had this interview with the
Jewish teacher. At the pauses in conversation, we may conjecture,
they heard the wind without as it moaned along the narrow streets
of Jerusalem; and our Lord, as was His wont, took His creature into
His service--the service of spiritual truth. The wind was a figure
of the Spirit. Our Lord would not have used the same word for both.
The wind might teach Nicodemus something of the action of Him who is
the real Author of the new birth of man. And it would do this in two
ways more especially.
On a first survey of nature, the wind arrests man's attention, as
an unseen agent which seems to be moving with entire freedom. "The
wind bloweth where it listeth." It is fettered by none of those
conditions which confine the swiftest bodies that traverse the
surface of the earth; it sweeps on as if independent of law, rushing
hither and thither, as tho obeying its own wayward and momentary
impulse. Thus it is an apt figure of a self-determining invisible
force; and of a force which is at times of overmastering power.
Sometimes, indeed, its breath is so gentle, that only a single
leaf or blade of grass will at distant intervals seem to give the
faintest token of its action; yet, even thus, it "bloweth where
it listeth." Sometimes it bursts upon the earth with destructive
violence; nothing can resist its onslaught; the most solid buildings
give way; the stoutest trees bend before it; whatever is frail and
delicate can only escape by the completeness of its submission.
Thus, too, it "bloweth where it listeth." Beyond anything else
that strikes upon the senses of man, it is suggestive of free
supersensuous power; it is an appropriate symbol of an irruption of
the invisible into the world of sense, of the action, so tender or
so imperious, of the divine and eternal Spirit upon the human soul.
But the wind is also an agent about whose proceedings we really
know almost nothing. "Thou hearest the sound thereof"; such is our
Lord's concession to man's claim to knowledge. "Thou canst not tell
whence it cometh, and whither it goeth"; such is the reserve which
He makes in respect of human ignorance. Certainly we do more than
hear the sound of the wind; its presence is obvious to three of
the senses. We feel the chill or the fury of the blast; and, as it
sweeps across the ocean, or the forest, or the field of corn, we see
how the blades rise and fall in graceful curves, and the trees bend,
and the waters sink and swell into waves which are the measure of
its strength. But our Lord says, "Thou hearest the sound thereof."
He would have us test it by the most spiritual of the senses. It
whispers, or it moans, or it roars as it passes us; it has a pathos
all its own. Yet what do we really know about it? "Thou canst not
tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth." Does the wind then
obey no rule; is it a mere symbol of unfettered caprice? Surely
not. If, as the psalmist sings, "God bringeth the winds out of his
treasuries," He acts, we may be sure, here as always, whether in
nature or in grace, by some law, which his own perfections impose
upon His action. He may have given to us of these later times to
see a very little deeper beneath the surface of the natural world
than was the case with our fathers. Perchance we explain the
immediate antecedents of the phenomenon; but can we explain our own
explanation? The frontier of our ignorance is removed one stage
farther back; but "the way of the wind" is as fitting an expression
for the mysteries now as it was in the days of Solomon. We know that
there is no cave of Æolus. We know that the wind is the creature
of that great Master who works everywhere and incessantly by rule.
But, as the wind still sweeps by us who call ourselves the children
of an age of knowledge, and we endeavor to give our fullest answer
to the question, "Whence it cometh, and whither it goeth?" we
discover that, as the symbol of a spiritual force, of whose presence
we are conscious, while we are unable to determine, with moderate
confidence, either the secret principle or the range of its action,
the wind is as full of meaning still as in the days of Nicodemus.
When our Lord has thus pointed to the freedom and the mysteriousness
of the wind, He adds, "So is every one that is born of the Spirit."
The simile itself would have led us to expect--"So is the Spirit
of God." The man born of the Spirit would answer not to the wind
itself, but to the sensible effect of the wind. There is a break of
correspondence between the simile and its application. The simile
directs attention to the divine Author of the new birth in man. The
words which follow direct attention to the human subject upon whom
the divine agent works. Something similar is observable when our
Lord compares the kingdom of heaven to a merchantman seeking goodly
pearls; the kingdom really corresponds not to the merchantman,
but to the pearl of great price which the merchantman buys. In
such cases, we may be sure, the natural correspondence between a
simile and its application is not disturbed without a motive. And
the reason for this disturbance is presumably that the simile is
not adequate to the full purpose of the speaker, who is anxious to
teach some larger truth than its obvious application would suggest.
In the case before us, we may be allowed to suppose, that by His
reference to the wind our Lord desired to convey something more
than the real but mysterious agency of the Holy Spirit in the new
birth of man. His language seems designed, not merely to correct
the materialistic narrowness of the Jewish doctor, not merely to
answer by anticipation the doubts of later days as to the spiritual
efficacy of His own sacrament of regeneration, but to picture, in
words which should be read to the end of time, the general work of
that divine person whose mission of mercy to our race was at once
the consequence and the completion of His own.
It may be useful to trace the import of our Lord's simile in three
fields of the action of the holy and eternal Spirit; His creation of
a sacred literature, His guidance of a divine society, and His work
upon individual souls.
I. As, then, we turn over the pages of the Bible, must we not
say, "The wind of heaven bloweth where it listeth"? If we might
reverently imagine ourselves scheming beforehand what kind of a
book the Book of God ought to be, how different would it be from
the actual Bible. There would be as many bibles as there are souls,
and they would differ as widely. But in one thing, amid all their
differences, they would probably agree; they would lack the variety,
both in form and substance, of the holy Book which the Church of
God places in the hands of her children. The self-assertion, the
scepticism, and the fastidiousness of our day would meet like the
men of the second Roman triumvirate on that island in the Reno,
and would draw up their lists of proscription. One would condemn
the poetry of Scripture as too inexact; another its history as too
largely secular; another its metaphysics as too transcendental, or
as hostile to some fanciful ideal of "simplicity," or as likely
to quench a purely moral enthusiasm. The archaic history of the
Pentateuch, or the sterner side of the ethics of the psalter, or
the supernaturalism of the histories of Elijah or of Daniel, or
the so-called pessimism of Ecclesiastes, or the alleged secularism
of Esther, or the literal import of the Song of Solomon, would be
in turn condemned. Nor could the apostles hope to escape: St. John
would be too mystical in this estimate; St. James too legal in
that; St. Paul too dialectical, or too metaphysical, or too easily
capable of an antinomian interpretation; St. Peter too undecided,
as if balancing between St. Paul and St. James. Our new Bible would
probably be uniform, narrow, symmetrical; it would be entirely
made up of poetry, or of history, or of formal propositions, or of
philosophical speculation, or of lists of moral maxims; it would be
modeled after the type of some current writer on English history,
or some popular poet or metaphysician, or some sentimentalist who
abjures history and philosophy alike on principle, or some composer
of well-intentioned religious tracts for general circulation. The
inspirations of heaven would be taken in hand, and instead of a wind
blowing where it listeth, we should have a wind, no doubt, of some
kind, rustling earnestly enough along some very narrow crevices or
channels, in obedience to the directions of some one form of human
prejudice, or passion, or fear, or hope.
The Bible is like nature in its immense, its exhaustless variety;
like nature, it reflects all the higher moods of the human soul,
because it does much more; because it brings us face to face with
the infinity of the divine life. In the Bible the wind of heaven
pays scant heed to our anticipations or our prejudices; it "bloweth
where it listeth." It breathes not only in the divine charities of
the gospels, not only in the lyrical sallies of the epistles, not
only in the great announcements scattered here and there in Holy
Scripture of the magnificence, or the compassion, or the benevolence
of God; but also in the stern language of the prophets, in the
warnings and lessons of the historical books, in the revelations of
divine justice and of human responsibility which abound in either
Testament. "Where it listeth." Not only where our sense of literary
beauty is stimulated, as in St. Paul's picture of charity, by lines
which have taken captive the imagination of the world, not only
where feeling and conscience echo the verdict of authority and the
promptings of reverence, but also where this is not the case; where
neither precept nor example stimulates us, and we are left face to
face with historical or ethical material, which appears to us to
inspire no spiritual enthusiasm, or which is highly suggestive of
critical difficulty. Let us be patient; we shall understand, if we
will only wait, how these features of the Bible too are integral
parts of a living whole; here, as elsewhere, the Spirit breathes;
in the genealogies of the Chronicles as in the last discourse in
St. John, though with an admitted difference of manner and degree.
He "bloweth where He listeth." The apostle's words respecting the
Old Testament are true of the New: "All Scripture is given by
inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof,
for correction, for instruction in righteousness." And, "Whatsoever
things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we
through patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have hope."
"But thou hearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell whence
it cometh, and whither it goeth." The majesty of Scripture is
recognized by man, wherever there is, I will not say a spiritual
faculty, but a natural sense of beauty. The "sound" of the wind
is perceived by the trained ear, by the literary taste, by the
refinement, by the humanity of every generation of educated men. But
what beyond? What of its spiritual source, its spiritual drift and
purpose, its half-concealed but profound unities, its subtle but
imperious relations to conscience? Of these things, so precious to
Christians, a purely literary appreciation of Scripture is generally
ignorant; the sacred Book, like the prophet of the Chebar, is only
"as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can
play well on an instrument." Or again, the "sound thereof" is
heard in the admitted empire of the Bible over millions of hearts
and consciences; an empire the evidences of which strike upon the
ear in countless ways, and which is far too wide and too secure
to be affected by the criticisms that might occasionally seem to
threaten it. What is the secret of this influence of Scripture? Not
simply that it is the Book of Revelation; since it contains a great
deal of matter which lay fairly within the reach of man's natural
faculties. The Word or eternal Reason of God is the Revealer; but
Scripture, whether it is a record of divine revelations or of
naturally observed facts, is, in the belief of the Christian Church,
throughout "inspired" by the Spirit. Inspiration is the word which
describes the presence and action of the Holy Spirit everywhere in
Scripture. We know not how our own spirits, hour by hour, are acted
upon by the eternal Spirit, though we do not question the fact; we
content ourselves with recognizing what we can not explain. If we
believe that Scripture is inspired, we know that it is instinct with
the presence of Him whose voice we might hear in every utterance,
but of whom we cannot tell whence He cometh or whither He goeth.
II. The history of the Church of Christ from the days of the
apostles has been a history of spiritual movements. Doubtless it has
been a history of much else; the Church has been the scene of human
passions, human speculations, human errors. But traversing these,
He by whom the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified,
has made His presence felt, not only in the perpetual proclamation
and elucidation of truth, not only in the silent, never-ceasing
sanctification of souls, but also in great upheavals of spiritual
life, by which the conscience of Christians has been quickened,
or their hold upon the truths of redemption and grace made more
intelligent and serious, or their lives and practise restored to
something like the ideal of the Gospels. Even in the apostolic age
it was necessary to warn Christians that it was high time to awake
out of sleep; that the night of life was far spent, and the day of
eternity was at hand. And ever since, from generation to generation,
there has been a succession of efforts within the Church to realize
more worthily the truth of the Christian creed, or the ideal of the
Christian life. These revivals have been inspired or led by devoted
men who have represented the highest conscience of Christendom in
their day. They may be traced along the line of Christian history;
the Spirit living in the Church has by them attested His presence
and His will; and has recalled lukewarm generations, paralyzed by
indifference or degraded by indulgence, to the true spirit and level
of Christian faith and life.
In such movements there is often what seems, at first sight, an
element of caprice. They appear to contemporaries to be onesided,
exaggerated, narrow, fanatical. They are often denounced with a
passionate fervor which is so out of proportion to the reality as to
border on the grotesque. They are said to exact too much of us, or
to concede too much. They are too contemplative in their tendency
to be sufficiently practical, or too energetically practical to do
justice to religious thought. They are too exclusively literary
and academical, as being the work of men of books; or they are too
popular and insensible to philosophical considerations, as being
the work of men of the people. Or, again, they are so occupied with
controversy as to forget the claims of devotion, or so engaged
in leading souls to a devout life as to forget the unwelcome but
real necessities of controversy. They are intent on particular
moral improvements so exclusively as to forget what is due to
reverence and order; or they are so bent upon rescuing the Church
from chronic slovenliness and indecency in public worship as to
do less than justice to the paramount interests of moral truth.
Sometimes these movements are all feeling; sometimes they are all
thought; sometimes they are, as it seems, all outward energy. In
one age they produce a literature like that of the fourth and fifth
centuries; in another they found orders of men devoted to preaching
or to works of mercy, as in the twelfth; in another they enter the
lists, as in the thirteenth century, with a hostile philosophy;
in another they attempt a much-needed reformation of the Church;
in another they pour upon the heathen world a flood of light and
warmth from the heart of Christendom. It is easy, as we survey
them, to say that something else was needed; or that what was done
could have been done better or more completely; or that, had we
been there, we should not have been guilty of this onesidedness,
or of that exaggeration. We forget, perhaps, who really was there,
and whose work it is, though often overlaid and thwarted by human
weakness and human passion, that we are really criticizing. If
it was seemingly onesided, excessive or defective, impulsive or
sluggish, speculative or practical, esthetic or experimental, may
not this have been so because in His judgment, who breatheth where
He listeth, this particular characteristic was needed for the Church
of that day? All that contemporaries know of such movements is
"the sound thereof"; the names with which they are associated, the
controversies which they precipitate, the hostilities which they
rouse or allay, as the case may be. Such knowledge is superficial
enough; of the profound spiritual causes which really engender
them, of the direction in which they are really moving, of the
influence which they are destined permanently to exert upon souls,
men know little or nothing. The accidental symptom is mistaken for
the essential characteristic; the momentary expression of feeling
for the inalienable conviction of certain truth. The day may come,
perhaps, when more will be known; when practise and motive, accident
and substance, the lasting and the transient, will be seen in their
true relative proportions; but for the time this can hardly be. He
is passing by, whose way is in the sea, and His paths in the deep
waters, and His footsteps unknown. The Eternal Spirit is passing;
and men can only say, "He bloweth where He listeth."