_Eccles. Pol._ V. li. 3, 'It seemeth a thing unconsonant that the
world should honour any other as the Saviour but Him Whom it honoureth
as the Creator of the world.'
[243] Cf. the true reading of S. Mark iii. 29, R.V.
[244] W. R. Greg.
[245] It should be noticed that the Greek Fathers and the English
divines for the most part confine themselves to shewing this moral
fitness and consonance with God's moral nature in the Atonement, and
do not attempt to prove its absolute necessity. Cf. Athanasius, _de
Incarn. Verbi_, ch. 6; Hooker, _Eccles. Pol._ V. li. 3; Butler,
_Analogy_, pt. ii. c. 5.
[246] Cf. _De Incarn. Verbi_, chs. 27, 28, 29.
[247] Cf. Carlyle's apostrophe to Marie Antoinette on her way to the
scaffold: 'Think of _Him_ Whom thou worshippest, the Crucified,--Who
also treading the winepress _alone_, fronted sorrow still deeper; and
triumphed over it, and made it Holy, and built of it a "Sanctuary of
Sorrow" for thee and all the wretched.' _Miscellaneous Essays_, vol.
v. p. 165 (ed. 1872).
VIII.
_THE HOLY SPIRIT AND INSPIRATION._
CHARLES GORE.
I. The appeal to 'experience' in religion, whether personal or
general, brings before the mind so many associations of ungoverned
enthusiasm and untrustworthy fanaticism, that it does not easily
commend itself to those of us who are most concerned to be reasonable.
And yet, in one form, or another, it is an essential part of the
appeal which Christianity makes on its own behalf since the day when
Jesus Christ met the question 'Art thou He that should come, or do we
look for another?' by pointing to the transforming effect of His work;
'The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk; the lepers are
cleansed, and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up, and the poor have
the Gospel preached to them.'
The fact is that in current appeals to experience the fault, where
there is a fault, lies not in the appeal but in the nature of the
experience appealed to. What is meant by the term is often an excited
state of feeling, rather than a permanent transformation of the whole
moral, intellectual, and physical being of man. Or it is something
which seems individual and eccentric, or something confined to a
particular class of persons under special conditions of education or
of ignorance, or something which other religions besides Christianity
have been conspicuous for producing. When a meaning broad and full,
and at the same time exact enough, has been given to experience the
appeal is essential to Christianity, because Christianity professes to
be not a mere record of the past, but a present life, and there is no
life where there is no experience.
It will be worth while, then, to bear in mind how freely the original
defenders of the Christian Church appealed, like their Master, to
facts of experience. Thus we find an individual, like S. Cyprian,
recalling the time of his baptism, and the personal experience of
illumination and power which it brought with it:--
'Such were my frequent musings: for whereas I was encumbered with the
many sins of my past life, which it seemed impossible to be rid of, so
I had used myself to give way to my clinging infirmities, and, from
despair of better things, to humour the evils of my heart, as slaves
born in my house, and my proper offspring. But after that life-giving
water succoured me, washing away the stain of former years, and
pouring into my cleansed and hallowed breast the light which comes
from heaven, after that I drank in the Heavenly Spirit, and was
created into a new man by a second birth,--then marvellously what
before was doubtful became plain to me, what was hidden was revealed,
what was dark began to shine, what was before difficult, now had a way
and a means, what had seemed impossible, now could be achieved, what
was in me of the guilty flesh, now confessed that it was earthy, what
was quickened in me by the Holy Ghost, now had a growth according to
God[248].
Again, we find an apologist like S. Athanasius, resting the stress of
his argument on behalf of Christ upon what He has done in the world,
and specially on the spiritual force He exercises on masses of men,
'drawing them to religion, persuading them to virtue, teaching them
immortality, leading them to the desire of heavenly things, revealing
the knowledge of the Father, inspiring power over death, shewing each
man to himself, abolishing the godlessness of idolatry[249].'
The Fathers of the Christian Church appealed in this way to
experience, because Christianity, as they knew, is essentially not a
past event, but a present life, a life first manifested in Christ and
then perpetuated in His Church. Christianity is a manifested life,--a
thing, therefore, like all other forms of life, known not in itself
but in its effects, its fruits, its results. Christianity is a
manifested life, and it is this because it is the sphere in which the
Spirit, the Life-giver, finds His freest and most unhindered activity.
The Christian Church is the scene of the intensest, the most vigorous,
the richest, the most 'abundant' life that the universe knows, because
in a preeminent sense it is the 'Spirit-bearing body.' The Spirit is
life; that is His chief characteristic. We may indeed elucidate the
idea of spirit by negations; by negation of materiality, of
circumscription, of limitation; but the positive conception we are to
attach to spirit is the conception of life; and where life is most
penetrating, profound, invincible, rational, conscious of God, there
in fullest freedom of operation is the Holy Spirit[250].
Thus, obviously enough, the doctrine of the Spirit is no remote or
esoteric thing; it is no mere ultimate object of the rapt
contemplation of the mystic; it is the doctrine of that wherein God
touches man most nearly, most familiarly, in common life. Last in the
eternal order of the Divine Being, 'proceeding from the Father and the
Son,' the Holy Spirit is the first point of contact with God in the
order of human experience[251].
'I believe in the Holy Ghost, the giver of life.' All life is His
operation. 'Wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is also life; and
wherever life is, there is also the Holy Spirit[252].' Thus if
creation takes its rise in the will of the Father, if it finds its law
in the being of the Word or Son, yet the effective instrument of
creation, the 'finger of God,' the moving principle of vitalization is
the Holy Spirit, 'the divider and distributor of the gifts of
life[253].'
Nature is one great body, and there is breath in the body; but this
breath is not self-originated life, it is the influence of the Divine
Spirit. 'By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the
host of them by the breath of His mouth.' The Spirit, the breath of
God, was brooding upon the face of the waters of chaos ere life and
order were. It is the sending forth of the breath of God, which is the
giving to things of the gift of life; it is the withdrawal of that
breath which is their annihilation[254]. So keenly indeed were the
Christians of the early period conscious of the one life of nature as
the universal evidence of the one Spirit, that it was a point of the
charge against Origen that his language seemed to involve an exclusion
of the Holy Spirit from nature, and a limitation of His activity to
the Church[255]. The whole of life is certainly His. And yet, because
His special attribute is holiness, it is in rational natures, which
alone are capable of holiness, that He exerts His special influence. A
special in-breathing of the Divine Spirit gave to man his proper
being[256]. In humanity, made after the Divine Image, it was the
original intention of God that the Spirit should find His chiefest
joy, building the edifice of a social life in which nature was to find
its crown and justification: a life of conscious and free sonship, in
which the gifts of God should be not only received, but recognised as
His, and consciously used in willing and glad homage to the Divine
Giver, in reverent execution of the law of development impressed by
the Divine Reason, in the realized fellowship of the Blessed Spirit of
knowledge and love. The history of humanity has in fact been a
development, but a development the continuity of which is most
apparent in that department in which man appears simply as the child
of nature, the most perfect and interesting of her products,
consciously adapting himself to his environment and moulded by it.
This indeed has been so much the case that the facts of the history of
civilization have been used, at least plausibly, as an argument
against our race really possessing moral freedom at all. Such a use of
the facts is, we recognise, not justifiable. It leaves out of
consideration some of the most striking elements in human history, and
some of the most certain facts of human consciousness. But the very
plausibleness of the argument is suggestive. It means that
comparatively very few men have been at pains to realize their true
freedom; that men in masses have been dominated by the mere forces of
nature; or, in other words, that human history presents broadly the
record of a one-sided, a distorted development. For man was not meant
for merely natural evolution, mere self-adaptation to the 'things that
are seen.' The consciousness that he was meant for something higher
has tinged his most brilliant physical successes, his greatest
triumphs of civilization and art, with the bitterness of remorse, the
misery of conscious lawlessness.
Our race was created for conscious fellowship with God, for sonship,
for the life of spirit. And it is just in this department that its
failure has been most conspicuous. It is here that the Divine Spirit
has found His chiefest disappointment. Everywhere He has found
rebellion--not everywhere without exception, for 'in every age
entering into holy souls, He has made them sons of God and prophets':
but everywhere in such a general sense that sin in fact and in its
consequences covers the whole region of humanity. In the highest
department of created life, where alone lawlessness was possible,
because what was asked for was the co-operation of free service to
carry out a freely accepted ideal[257],--there alone is the record of
lawlessness, the record of the Spirit striving with man, but resisted,
rejected, ignored, quenched. Thus the word, which in fact most
forcibly characterizes man's spiritual history, so far as it has been
according to the mind of God, is not progress, but recovery, or
redemption. It is not natural but supernatural--supernatural, that is,
in view of the false nature which man made for himself by excluding
God. Otherwise the work of redemption is only the reconstitution of
the nature which God designed. It is the recovery within the limits of
a chosen race and by a deliberate process of limitation, of a state of
things which had been intended to be universal[258]. The 'elect'
represent not the special purpose of God for a few, but the universal
purpose which under the circumstances can only be realized through a
few. The hedging in of the few, the drawing of the lines so close, the
method of exclusion again and again renewed all down the history of
redemption, represents the love of the Divine Spirit ever baffled in
the mass, preserving the truth of God in a 'remnant,' an elect body;
who themselves escaping the corruption which is in the world, become
in their turn a fresh centre from which the restorative influence can
flow out upon mankind. Rejected in the world, He secures for Himself a
sphere of operations in the Jews, isolating Abraham, giving the law
for a hedge, keeping alive in the nation the sense of its vocation by
the inspiration of prophets. Again and again baffled in the body of
the Jewish nation, He falls back upon the faithful remnant, and keeps
alive in _them_ that prospective sonship which was meant to be the
vocation of the whole nation: sometimes in narrower, sometimes in
broader channels, the purpose of love moves on till the Spirit finds
in the Son of Man, the Anointed One, the perfect realization of the
destiny of man, the manhood in which He can freely and fully work: 'He
came down upon the Son of God, made son of man, accustoming Himself in
His case to dwell in the human race, and to repose in man, and to
dwell in God's creatures, working out in them the will of the Father,
and recovering them from their old nature into the newness of
Christ[259].' In Christ humanity is perfect, because in Him it retains
no part of that false independence which, in all its manifold forms,
is the secret of sin. In Christ humanity is perfect and complete, in
ungrudging and unimpaired obedience to the movement of the Divine
Spirit, Whose creation it was, Whose organ it gave itself to be. The
Spirit anoints Him; the Spirit drives Him into the wilderness; the
Spirit gives Him the law of His mission; in the power of the Spirit He
works His miracles; in the Holy Spirit He lifts up the voice of human
thankfulness to the Divine Father; in the Spirit He offers Himself
without spot to God; in the power of the Spirit He is raised from the
dead[260]. All that perfect human life had been a life of obedience,
of progressive obedience, a gradual learning in each stage of
experience what obedience meant[261]; it had been a life of obedience
which became propitiatory as it bore loyally, submissively, lovingly,
all the heritage of pain and misery in which sin in its long history
had involved our manhood, all the agony of that insult and rejection
in which sin revealed itself by antagonism to Him--bore it, and by
bearing it turned it into the material of His accepted sacrifice. He
was obedient unto death. And because He thus made our human nature the
organ of a life of perfect obedience, therefore He can go on to make
that same humanity, freed from all the limitations of this lower world
and glorified in the Spirit at the right hand of God, at once the
organ of Divine supremacy over the universe of created things, and
(itself become quickening Spirit[262]) the fount to all the sons of
obedience and faith of its own life. Christ is the second Adam, who
having 'recapitulated the long development of humanity into
Himself[263],' taken it up into Himself, that is, and healed its
wounds and fructified its barrenness, gives it a fresh start by a new
birth from Him. The Spirit coming forth at Pentecost out of His
uplifted manhood, as from a glorious fountain of new life[264],
perpetuates all its richness, its power, its fulness in the organized
society which He prepared and built for the Spirit's habitation. The
Church, His Spirit-bearing body, comes forth into the world, not as
the exclusive sphere of the Spirit's operations, for 'that breath
bloweth where it listeth[265];' but as the special and covenanted
sphere of His regular and uniform operation, the place where He is
pledged to dwell and to work; the centre marked out and hedged in,
whence ever and again proceeds forth anew the work of human recovery;
the home where, in spite of sin and imperfection, is ever kept alive
the picture of what the Christian life is, that is, of what common
human life is meant to be and can become.
Of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church we may note four
characteristics.
1. It is _social_. It treats man as a 'social being,' who cannot
realize himself in isolation. For no other reason than because grace
is the restoration of nature[266], the true, the redeemed humanity, is
presented to us as a society or Church. This is apparent with
reference to either of the gifts which summarize the essence of the
Church's life, grace, or truth. Sacraments are the ordained
instruments of grace, and sacraments are in one of their aspects
_social_ ceremonies--of incorporation, or restoration, or bestowal of
authority, or fraternal sharing of the bread of life. They presuppose
a social organization. Those who have attempted to explain why there
should be in the Church an apostolic succession of ministers, have
seen the grounds of such appointment in the necessity for preserving
in a catholic society, which lacks the natural links of race or
language or common habitation, a visible and obligatory bond of
association[267].
The same fact appears in reference to the truth, the knowledge of God
and of the true nature and needs of man, which constitutes one main
part of the Christian life. That too is no mere individual
illumination. It is 'a rule of faith,' an 'apostolic tradition,' 'a
pattern of sound words,' embodied in Holy Scripture and perpetuated in
a teaching Church, within the scope of which each individual is to be
brought to have his mind and conscience fashioned by it, normally from
earliest years. It would be going beyond the province of this essay to
stop to prove that from the beginnings of the Christian life, a man
was understood to become a Christian and receive the benefits of
redemption, by no other means than incorporation into the Christian
society.
2. But none the less on account of this social method _the Spirit
nourishes individuality_. The very idea of the Spirit's gift is that
of an intenser life. Intenser life is more individualized life, for
our life becomes richer and fuller only by the intensification of
personality and character. Thus Christianity has always trusted to
strongly marked character as the means by which religion is
propagated. It does not advance as an abstract doctrine, but by the
subtle, penetrating influences of personality. It is the illuminated
man who becomes a centre of illumination. 'As clear transparent bodies
if a ray of light fall on them become radiant themselves and diffuse
their splendour all around, so souls illuminated by the indwelling
Spirit are rendered spiritual themselves and impart their grace to
others[268].' Thus, from the first, Christianity has tended to
intensify individual life in a thousand ways, and has gloried in the
varieties of disposition and character which the full life of the
Spirit develops. The Church expects to see the same variety of life in
herself as she witnesses in Nature.
'One and the same rain,' says S. Cyril of Jerusalem to his
catechumens, 'comes down upon all the world, yet it becomes white in
the lily, and red in the rose, and purple in the violets and pansies,
and different and various in all the several kinds; it is one thing in
the palm tree and another in the vine, and all in all things. In
itself, indeed, it is uniform and changes not, but by adapting itself
to the nature of each thing that receives it, it becomes what is
appropriate to each. Thus also the Holy Ghost, one and uniform and
undivided in Himself, distributes His grace to every man as He wills.
He employs the tongue of one man for wisdom; the soul of another He
enlightens by prophecy; to another He gives power to drive away
devils; to another He gives to interpret the Divine Scriptures; He
invigorates one man's self-command; He teaches another the way to give
alms: another He teaches to fast and train himself; another He trains
for martyrdom; diverse to different men, yet not diverse from
Himself[269].'
Nor was this belief in the differences of the Spirit's work a mere
abstract theory. In fact the Church life of the early centuries did
present an aspect of great variety: not only in the dispositions of
individuals, for that will always be observable where human nature is
allowed to subsist, but in the types of life and thought cultivated in
different parts of the Church. Early in the life of Christianity did
something like the Roman type of Catholicism shew itself, but it
shewed itself as one among several types of ecclesiasticism, easily
distinguishable from what Alexandria or Africa or Antioch nourished
and produced.
And what is true in the life of religion as a whole is true in the
department of the intellect. Here again the authority of the
collective society, the 'rule of faith,' is meant to nourish and
quicken, not to crush, individuality. Each individual Christian owes
the profoundest deference to the common tradition. Thus to 'keep the
traditions' is at all times, and not least in Scripture, a common
Christian exhortation. But this common tradition is not meant to be a
merely external law. It is meant to pass by the ordinary processes of
education into the individual consciousness, and there, because it
represents truth, to impart freedom. Thus S. Paul speaks of the
developed Christian, 'the man who is spiritual,' as 'judging all
things and himself judged of none.' And S. John makes the ground of
Christian certainty to lie not in an external authority, but in a
personal gift: 'ye have an unction from the Holy One and ye know all
things;' 'ye need not that any one teach you[270].' There is then an
individual 'inspiration[271],' as well as an inspiration of the whole
body, only this inspiration is not barely individual or separatist. As
it proceeds out of the society, so it ends in it. It ends by making
each person more individualized, more developed in personal
characteristics, but for that very reason more conscious of his own
incompleteness, more ready to recognise himself as only one member of
the perfect Manhood.
The idea of authority is in fact a perfectly simple one. It never
received better expression than by Plato when he describes it as the
function of the society by a carefully regulated education to implant
right instincts, right affections and antipathies, in the growing mind
of the child, at a time when he cannot know the reason of things: in
order that as the mind develops it may recognise the right reason of
things by a certain inner kinship, and welcome truth as a friend[272].
Authority, according to such a view of it, is a necessary schooling of
the individual temperament. Thus, we are told that in the judgment of
the philosopher Hegel, 'The basis of sound education was ... the
submission of the mind to an external lesson, which must be learnt by
every one, and even learnt by rote, with utter disregard of individual
tastes and desires; only out of this self-abnegation, and submission
to be guided and taught, could any originality spring which was worth
preserving[273].' In fact, we all recognise the necessity for such
external discipline in all departments. Few people like good art, for
instance, at first. Probably they are attracted by what is weak but
arrests attention by obvious and superficial merits. The standards
which artistic authority has erected, the accepted canons of good
taste and judgment, do not commend themselves at first as right or
natural. But modest and well-disposed people take it for granted at
starting that the orthodox judgment will turn out to be right; and
they set themselves to school to learn why the artists and poets of
great name are great, till their own judgment becomes enlightened, and
they understand what at first they took on trust. It was the
instinctive perception of this function of authority which made the
Church insist so much on the principle 'credo ut intelligam.' The
Creed represents the catholic judgment, the highest knowledge of God
and the spiritual life granted to man by the Divine Revelation. Let a
man put himself to school in the Church with reverence and godly fear,
and his own judgment will become enlightened. He will come to say with
S. Anselm, 'I give thee thanks, good Lord; because what first I
believed by Thy gift, I now understand by Thy illumination[274].'