Chapter 14

SERMON XIV. THE COMFORTER

Eversley. Sunday after Ascension Day. 1868.

St John xv. 26. "When the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me."

Some writers, especially when they are writing hymns, have fallen now-a- days into a habit of writing of the Holy Spirit of God, in a tone of which I dare not say that it is wrong or untrue; but of which I must say, that it is one-sided. And if there are two sides to a matter, it must do us harm to look at only one of them. And I think that it does people harm to hear the Holy Spirit of God, the Holy Ghost, the Comforter, spoken of in terms, not of reverence, but of endearment. For consider: He is the

"Creator-Spirit, by whose aid The world's foundations first were laid,"

the life-giving Spirit of whom it is written, Thou sendest forth Thy Spirit, and things live, and Thou renewest the face of the earth.

But He is the destroying Spirit too; who can, when He will, produce not merely life, but death; who can, and does send earthquakes, storm, and pestilence; of whom Isaiah writes--"All flesh is as grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; because the Spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it." I think it does people harm to hear this awful and almighty being, I say, spoken of merely as the "sweet Spirit," and "gentle dove"--words which are true, but only true, if we remember other truths, equally true of Him, concerning whom they are spoken. The Spirit of God, it seems to me, is too majestic a being to be talked of hastily as "sweet." Words may be true, and yet it may not be always quite reverent to use them. An earthly sovereign may be full of all human sweetness and tenderness, yet we should not dare to address him as "sweet."

But, indeed, some of this talk about the Holy Spirit is not warranted by Scripture at all. In one of the hymns, for instance, in our hymn-book-- an excellent hymn in other respects, there is a line which speaks of the Holy Spirit as possessing "The brooding of the gentle dove."

Now, this line is really little but pretty sentiment, made up of false uses of Scripture. The Scripture speaks once of the Holy Spirit of God brooding like a bird over its nest. But where? In one of the most mysterious, awful, and important of all texts. "And the earth was without form and void. And the Spirit of God moved (brooded) over the face of the deep." What has this--the magnificent picture of the Life- giving Spirit brooding over the dead world, to bring it into life again, and create from it sea and land, heat and fire, and cattle and creeping things after their kind, and at last man himself, the flower and crown of things;--what has that to do with the brooding of a