The union of the Holy Spirit and the church in the conversion of the world

Front matter

GOULD LIBRARY EASTERN NAZARENE COLLEGE

•.,■> . ■ ' -3

' / ■ , 1

II

AUTHOR OF “THB BXTBNT OF THB ATONEMENT IN ITS RELATIONS TO GOD AND THE UNIVERSE.”

“The Spirit and the Bride say, come.” — John.

FIRST AMERICAN,

FROM THE SECOND REVISED LONDON EDITION.

BOSTON:

GOULD, KENDALL AND LINCOLN,

59 -WASHINGTON STREET.

Boston t

Printed by S. N. Dickinson 4 52 Washington Street.

{Brr

Dedication

TO THE

CHURCHES OF CHRIST

IX

CHAPTER IV. On the Presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church, - 33

Sect. 1. On the Personal Residence of the Holy Spirit in Christians, 38 2. On the Presence of the Influence of the Holy Spirit in the

Word, 50

X

CONTENTS,

CHAPTEK V.

On the Perpetuity of the Influences of the holy Spirit, 75

Sect. 1. The Gift of the Holy Spirit to the Church a permanent

Blessing, 77

2. On Quenching the Spirit, 92

3. On the Withdrawment of the Holy Spirit, - - _ 104

ON THE UNION BETWEEN THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH IN THE ADMINISTRATION .OF DIVINE INFLUENCES.

CHAPTER I. On the Union of Dispositions and Feelings between the

Holy Spirit and the Church, ------ 145

Sect. 1. On being filled with the Holy Spirit, - - - - 145

2. The Spirit of Holiness — Eminent Holiness essential to Use-

3. The Spirit of Love — On Travailing in Birth for the Souls of

4. The Spirit of Grace — Christians the Stewards of Grace for

§ 1. Doing- Good to Others the Test of Gracious Character, ------- - 185

§ 2. Religious Conversation Means of Grace, - - 195

5. The Spirit of Power — the Force of Christian Character to

overcome the World, ------- 204

§ 3. The Character of the Church to influence public

CHAPTER II. On the Union of Purpose and Design between the Holy

Spirit and the Church, ------- 225

Sect. 1. The Church to aim at the same Object as the Spirit, - 225

§ 1. The Prevention of Sin the Duty of the Church, 227

§ 2. The Salvation of the World the grand Object of xii

CONTENTS.

Sect. 2. The Efforts of the Church coextensive with the Design of the Spirit, - 246

§ 1. The Gospel designed for the whole World, - 246

§ 2.* The Obligation of Churches to furnish Missionaries, - - - - - - - - 253

3. The Motive of the Church and the Spirit identical, - - 258

§ 1. The Glory of Christ the Motive of Christian Effort, 260 § 2. The Claims of Christ to the Devotedness of his

Church, - 265

CHAPTER III. On the Union of Means and Methods between the Holy

Spirit and the Church, - - 270

Sect. 1. Conversion not Miraculous, ------ 270

2. On the Influence of Truth in Conversion, - - - 275

3. On the Instrumentality of the Church in Conversion, - 281

4. On the Agency of Man in his own Conversion, - - 285

§ 1. The Reality of Human Agency, - - - 285

§ 2. The Adaptation of Measures to the Laws of

Thought and Emotion, ----- 288

5. On the Efficiency of the Holy Spirit in Conversion, - - 295

THE UNION OP

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH.

BOOK I.

On the Relations of Divine Influences to Mankind.

Chapter I. The Scope Of The Work

The penetrations of modern science into the reserves of physical inquiry have discovered animalculae of such magnitude or diminutiveness, that a million of them would be contained in a globule of water less in bulk than the drop of ink employed in writing the first letter of this work. Out of this countless and undiscernible host, even one expatiating and frisking in solitary littleness through the drop of liquid *at the point of the pen, is big with difficulties and mysteries, tendencies and operations, sufficient to engage the ablest intellect of man, and to occupy the most profound inquiries of an age.

After the senses have made an effort to discover the existence of this little agent, and to detain it in sight, the mind struggles to compress itself to an investigation of its structure and functions. Under examination, it developes a curious organization, inconceivably minute, consisting of limbs, muscles, sinews, heart, veins, and a circulating fluid ; and capable of spontaneous activity and great muscular force. Within this animated particle are found, in full play, all the workings of sensations, emotions, and volitions, together with all the energies of instinct; it has its appetites and gratifications, its passions and its pleasures, its fears and hopes, its loves and vindictiveness. It is a universe poised on a point — a universe alive in an atom.

SCOPE OF THE WORK.

This little existence, incredibly and painfully little, has an apparatus for fluids, gases, forces, influences, and operations, incomprehensibly subtile, all in action, all at work, all in dependences, relations, and adaptations, so complicated and so secret, as to baffle the most laborious research of the most penetrating intellects. The knowledge of this even is “ too wonderful for us ; ” but the mighty architect of its frame, its Maker, who measured and weighed, and fixed with precise accuracy its tiny machinery, knows how to work it, and has taught the atom-being how to employ it. When we think how God does both these things, how he maintains an intimate and perpetual contact with its parts, and plies His Omnipotence to communicate his energy to its diminutive agency, we become oppressed with our emotions of astonishment, we are stunned by the rebounding of our own speculations, and we feel that the GRANDEUR of the Divine Power is as incomprehensible, and as unapproachable in the minuteness, as in the amplitude of his productions.

From a prostration so low and so humiliating, the mind finds it distressingly difficult, and almost criminally rash, to rise and to dare soar to a steadfast, vigorous, and enlarged survey of the high and ample doctrine of the influences of God on intelligent spirits. Bewildered in the mysterious agencies of a globule, what shall we do in the swellings of that mighty tide, which issues forth from the secret place of the Most High to baptize the universe, whose sweep is to reach, comprehend, and pervade every world and every atom, and whose vitalizing energies are to be the genial element, in which all are to ^Tive, move, and have their being’’ — of that powerful, subtle, and bland influence which can roll its billowy floods, with a force that will crumble the proudest obstacle in collision with it, and yet can ripple, in gentle flowings, to lave a broken-hearted spirit, without the crush or the shock of an onset ? How can we describe these emanations and influences from God, which brace the faculties, and exercise, in freedom and government, the agency of reasonable and accountable intelligences ; and which can restore abused, blasted, and withered powers into a healthful state of vigor, freshness, and beauty. It would be presumptuous to suppress the private conviction, and it would be aflectation to withhold the public avowal, of the inscrutableness of the subject, whose products are in the splendor of light, but whose processes are in an unfathomable abyss of darkness ; while the vast dimensions of

SCOPE OF THE WOEK.

its sphere, the impenetrable intricacies of its combinations, and the momentous dangers incident to speculations in it, would make a mind of the boldest wing flutter and cower with dismay. Amid all these depressions, the mind feels some thrillings of joy in the boundlessness of its range, and would fain hope that, should it even lose itself amid the mysterious currents and inscrutable operations of the energies of the Almighty, it would only lose itself in him in whom it lives, moves, and has its being, for “even there shall his hand lead it, and his right hand shall hold it. ”

May the God, who called Moses to enter into his presence, an insufferable splendor enveloped in thick darkness, aid our approach to this august subject; and let the reader help me by his prayers, sympathies, and candor. Let him go with me, and let us proceed with reverence and godly fear. Conducted, then, and led by revealed truth, and supported by vigorous prayer, we will try to draw near enough to view our God ; but not rush too nigh to be consumed. Let us view Him as angels view Him, who in their approaches cover their faces with their wings. While thus veiling ourselves with celestial modesty and angelic humility, may the plumage of our wings exhibit to our Great God all the lovely hues of the graces and the gifts of his Holy Spirit !

The intrinsic glory, and the extensive and diversified bearings of this doctrine, demand the close and unwearied attention of the entire church of Christ. Much has been said, and too much never can be said, on the Union between Christ and the Church, in the redemption of the world. On this sublime and inspiring mystery, our writers have kindled into eloquence almost seraphic, and our hymns and spiritual songs have been tuned to raptures akin to those of heaven. The church has considered it as the medium of all its privileges and immunities, and feels eternity to be interesting, only as the season of basking in its ineffable and inexhaustible effulgence.

In the circle of scriptural revelation there is room enough for every truth, and in its comprehension no radius infringes upon, or runs athwart another. The Union of the Holy Spirit and the church, in the conversion of the world, then, may be asserted to be a subject equal in interest to the other, and sustaining commensurate relations to God, and to all his works and ways. On this topic, it is confessed by all, too little has been said, and too little is said ; and much less still is felt. Of all the perfections in the character of the Blessed Spirit,

SCOPE OF THE WORK.

the one the least sensibly felt and realized is his eyer-pres- ENT agency. During the last hundred years this doctrine has been working itself into the notice of the church and the world, by Revivals of religion, and by the impulses of Missionary enterprise. Its deserved prominency in the ministration of the Gospel will be at once the signal and the admiration of millennial glory. Since the days of the apostles the church does not seem to have been ever in full union with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit has always said to a world ready to perish “ Come ! ” but the Bride has not said “ Come ! ” or if she has, it has been in a voice not strong enough, or not sustained enough to be heard. She has drunk so deep into stupefying heresies, that she has dreamed, that the souls of men were in a state as literally lifeless and inactive as inert blocks and logs, that their conversion was a mere affair of predestinated decree, and that if God would wish them converted, he must convert them himself Since the church began to work for Christ in the world, eighteen hundred years have rolled over it, and swept to eternity sixty generations of the human race. In all this time, not only is the greatest part of the world totally unacquainted with the existence of a band of people destined to convert it ; but this very band has not made itself acquainted with the sin and the misery of the nations, which Christ commissioned it to convert. Its mighty energies have been blocked up, or rather its agents have been incased in ice of worldliness and selfishness. It is as of the ice, icy. It has loved the world and sought its own ease. Its affections have been so intent upon gain, fashion, state, and honor, that there is left neither room nor reason for strong emotions concerning the ruin and salvation of a world l}dng in wickedness. From this dead insensibility the Spirit has been for eighteen centuries endeavoring to awake her, sometimes by expostulation and command, and anon by encouragement and entreaty ; still enterprise, influence, talent, wealth, tind feeling, are not consecrated and tasked to the work. Hitherto the spectacle has been, not the church converting the world ; but the world converting the church. As yet the mountain of the Lord’s house is not established in the top of the mountains, nor exalted above the hills. The church has not made the cause of Christ the chief, the supreme, the unique cause of a world. It is impossible it should rise to this mountain eminence by any late efforts. The church has been charmed with other mounts and heights in her scenery ; she has made Parnassus

SCOPE OF THE WORK.

the nursery and the sphere of the energies of her sons ; and there, in witching dalliance, they have forgotten the mount, on which the last tones of the Redeemer pronounced their commission to convert the world. But of all the mounts on earth, the mount of Ophir seems as if it were the Atlas of its heavens. Its redeeming and converting energies are paralyzed by its worldliness. The church seems, now and then, to be awakened out of her swoon ; but is still prone, after a few convulsive and fitful struggles, to relapse. It is true she has done much, when compared with nothing ; but little, compared with the extent of her commission, and with the powerful resources and influences entrusted to her. The greatest part of the work done has been done, not by the entire church, but by a few congregations, and by few in those congregations. Should all congregations, and the whole Christian church, press forward to the onset on the world, with the momentum and the efficiency of “ the few,” the kingdoms of this world would soon become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. In the church, as a whole, we shall look in vain for the melting compassion, the decision of character, the singleness of purpose, the disinterested enterprise, the firm resolve, and the untiring effort, of that stalwart vigor “ which every joint supplieth. ” After the ascension of Christ a handful of men mastered the world ; but that handful, scanty as it was, consisted of all the disciples. There were none weak or feeble among them. The attack of such gallant spirits, in full body, and in close columns, advancing with redoubled energy and quickened step, gave a shock to the powers of darkness, and pushed their conquests to the boundaries of the world. It was by their living and healthy ua^n with the Holy Spirit that they achieved these triumphs. They received their commission on Mount Olivet, and on the day of Pentecost, ^^the Spirit of the Lord raised up a banner,” for the rescue of the world : this banner they heartily joined, and, with this at their head, they went forth, kept the faith, and claimed the world for Christ.

It is a happy truth, that God has never withdrawn this banner of the Spirit from the Christian Camp. Some churches have indeed deserted it, renouncing its shelter, and rejecting its way ; while others have straggled from the line of march, and seeking easier quarters, have shrunk from the heat of the onslaught for the deliverance of the world. With others it is preserved, furled up in a creed, as a sacred relic,

SCOPE OF THE WORKthe boasted and bragged memorial of what Christianity was^ not the triumphant standard of what it now is ; nor is it as yet in its right place, an elevated flag streaming gallantly at the head of an advancing host, who will know no fatigue, or give any peace, till it be lodged on the turrets of tjie foe, and wave over a converted world.

The design of these j)ages is to call the attention of the church to the fact, that it has in its possession this accredited symbol of the Divine presence, a symbol given to it expressly to be displayed because of the truth ; ” to be lifted up and borne along for the mustering of its forces, for the animating of its confidence, for the concentration of its efforts, and the guidance and direction of all its onsets, until it become the conspicuous signal of its victories and triumphs over all nations.

The means of grace in the possession of the church are, in meaning and design, means of Divine influences ; or means of receiving, and of conveying to others, the influences. of the Holy Spirit. As, in the constitution of the universe, nothing is communicated from one agent, and received by another, without junction and impact, the relation or connexion which exists between the Blessed Dispenser and the recipients of his influences, is what is here meant by the union of the Holy Spirit and the Church.

The doctrine of the influence of the Holy Spirit is not identically the same with the doctrine of Divine influences. In explanation of this position a remark or two will for the present suffice.

God is in constant union with the elements of the physical universe ; “ By him all things consist, ” and he upholds all things by the word of his power.” The preservation of the world consists only in renewed acts of creative energy, and fresh emanations of creative influences. When a mass of matter has discharged its electricity, or a seed lost its germinating power, it can be recovered only by the influence of its Creator. This unremitted connexion between God and the material world is, as distinguished from his moral government — the doctrine of Providence.

According to the testimony of the Scriptures, God was in mysterious union with the person of Jesus Christ. The person of our Lord was God manifest in the flesh.” This was a novel and unexampled evolution of the Divine nature, exhibited for the most stupendous purposes, and destined to

THE DOCTRINE INDUCTIVE.

influence every thought and every emotion in the comprehension of existence. This union between God and the person of Jesus Christ is the doctrine of redemption.

The sacred Scriptures, with equal light and distinctness, inform us of a connexion, or union, between God and all good men. When a good man has come into union of disposition and interest with God, the influence of the Divine energy has, by means of truth, gained access to his mind. This is — the doctrine of Divine influences.

According to the arrangements of theological science, in the doctrine of Providence, physical and moral, God, as the Supreme Organ of government, is supposed to preside. In the doctrine of redemption all interests seem to centre in the person of the Son : and in the doctrine of Divine influences the Holy Spirit appears the absolute and sovereign Agent, dispensing to all severally as he pleases. In dispensing these influences, the Holy Spirit exercises a personal will, a spontaneous desire of his own, an individual complacency, as well as official design. It is the exercise of this personal will and intent, in the disposal of the Divine influences, that forms, what is called in theology, the doctrine of the influence of the Holy Spirit.

Chapter II. The Scriptural Doctrine Strictly Inductive

Were this book written on the union between the agency of nature, understanding by nature the God of nature, and the agency of man, in the production of physical phenomena, it would not be expected to define and explain the manner of union, or the process of contact. It would accomplish its end by showing the character and illustrating the attributes of the agency of nature, demonstrating thereby that the agency of nature is designed for the use of man, that up to a given point it can be directed, controlled, and called forth by the agency of man ; that it is pregnant with energies which it never will develope without human agency ; that without it, beside it, or beyond it, the agency of man will effect nothing ; and that the moment he attempts to constrain it, or to force it into some

THE DOCTIIINE INDUCTIVE.

improper combinations, either human agency utterly fails, or the agent himself is destroyed by the energies evoked in the rash experiment.

This, and this alone, should be expected in a theological work on the union of the Holy Spirit and the Church ; that union which combines their respective agencies for the production of the moral phenomenon, the conversion of the world. In the inductions of physical research, philosophical statements stand or fall with nature itself. There they are, or there they are not ; Metaphysical theories, and logical dialectics can neither give them, nor refuse them the ‘‘local habitation.” On the same inductive principle, a theological writer has to present a statement of the operations of the agency of the Spirit and of the agency of man, as he finds them in the Scriptures, leaving his speculations to stand or fall with Inspiration. In the Scriptures the combinations and operations of Divine and human agency are not stated in logical propositions ; but they are wrought out and developed in facts, in characters, in events, and in recorded phenomena ; they are in the history of Joseph, in the journeys of the Israelites, in the crucifixion of the Redeemer, and in the successful promulgation of the gospel by the apostles.

The Bible is a book of Induction. It contains the accumulated and registered experience of patriarchs, prophets, and apostles. The writers were all students of observation, and they noticed and recorded effects as they occurred, without any specific reference to preconceived theory, or hasty generalization. Besides, we believe this Book of Induction to be the Book of God, who, in its composition, employed the writers as his mere amanuenses. The Author - of this book is the Author of mind and matter. He put into action and operation a series of means and agents, adjusted with a view to an end, controlling them at his pleasure, varying their positions, their number, and their combinations, as he thought best, and marking and recording the results as they appeared. The Bible, therefore, on the supposition of having God for its author, is strictly an inductive record of experiments, conducted by that God who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. In the register of these sublime experiments we are taught that the vast globe was erected for their laboratory; that truths and men are the agents put in combination ; that all events are the results of

THE DOCTRINE INDUCTIVE.

trial, test, and probation ; that the eye of God was upon- all, and that his hand recorded all.

The operations of Divine influence are, as much as those of any agent in nature, matters of notice and observation ; and the conversion of an intelligent being is as much a phenomenon produced by combinations, as any result in experimental philosophy ; it follows, therefore, that the doctrines founded on these influences and these phenomena, must be supported by an induction of the facts, and not by abstractions and syllogisms. The circle of metaphysical truths is that which sweeps closest and nearest around the inquiring mind ; and, though it may gradually attain a wider comprehension, in proportion to the growth of the mind, it always holds the same central relations. All the circles of truths relating to time and place, cause and effect, means and end, are outside of it and beyond it. The metaphysical area may, indeed, be an area of truths, but there are other areas of other truths, equally important, and equally sublime. The mere metaphysician is a mental miser, abject in his own dark retreats, and never issuing forth to the ever-expanding areas of experimental truths, except on the mad and quixotic errantry, of compressing the widest circles of the universe within the enclosures of his own abstractions. He will not subordinate his ideas to the facts of experimental science, but contract, press, shrivel up truths of the amplest comprehension to the cramped limits of his own stinted range. Many theological principles are metaphysical, but religious phenomena are not metaphysical ; and, therefore, the operations and combinations of Divine influences ought not to be treated metaphysically. In metaphysics, as an abstract science, there can be no speculation about cause and effect, or the adaptation of means to an end ; for its legitimate subjects are truths necessary in themselves, what must be * independently of all will, and of all positive causation. There is nothing to cause two and two to make four, or a part to be less than the whole. Metaphysical inquiries are not conversant with truths depending on time and place ; they do not seek for facts, but ideas ; for principles and abstract results, and not for causes and their operations.

Theology is the sum of all the methods in which God has worked out, or reduced to probation and experiment, the sublime truths of metaphysics, the pure abstractions of eternity. On the least investigation, it is discovered that God

THE DOCTRINE INDUCTIVE.

has not worked out these immutable principles according to any human estimate of them, — not even in natural philosophy. If we, in the metaphysics of geometry, conceive of two bodies gravitating towards each other, our minds cannot refuse the conclusion that they will and must meet. Metaphysical and mathematical research could not have discovered the proposition in the abstract that the same body which possessed a gravitating tendency to the sun might also have a tendency to escape from the sun. Contrary to, or beyond, all the anticipations of abstract science, the possibility, the practicableness, and the reality of the harmonious combinations of these two forces, have been shown and demonstrated by the Supreme Architect of physical mechanism in actual FACTS ; facts as clear as the sun, as numerous as the stars, as stupendous as the universe. In this position of science, should a mathematician still persist in discussing this intricate and nice adjustment as an abstract idea, he would be justly deemed the sturdy champion of inane conceptions ; and would^' be a specimen of the theologian, who still continues to investigate moral phenomena by the flittering lucubrations of his metaphysics, rather than by the daylight which revelation has thrown around their operations.

The combination of opposite forces is, to the metaphysician, a paradox which it is not in the province of his science to explain. In his investigations of physical phenomena, he discovers a body endowed with the clashing tendencies of attractive and repellent energies. If in this case he act the metaphysician, he will not be able, on any principle of necessary truth, or of abstract speculation, to account for the fact which is transpiring under his notice. What will he do ? he must either deny the fact, or explain it away. He cannot deny the fact, for it is as stubborn as the fixedness of the universe, and as demonstrable as meridian sunbeams. His alternative is to explain it away. This he may attempt ; but while he is making himself the learned dupe of his own prolusions, mighty nature proceeds onward, in undisturbed majesty, demonstrating the beautiful and splendid results of her mysterious and impenetrable relations and adaptations. In the case of a gravitating planet escaping from the sun and yet tending to it, the ingenious mathematician must admit that it had received, at some period, an impulse in a different direction. This impulse must have been given to it by its Maker at its production. By this admission of the change in

THE DOCTRINE INDUCTIVE.

the direction of the gravitating body, he gives up his metaphysics ; for, as its truths are unchangeable, and independent of time and place, they could not alter, nor be otherwise than as they are. He has not admitted the fact by inferences from his own abstractions, but from experience and observation. He has seen that there are other laws than the metaphysical, — laws disposing the relations of cause and effect, regulating the operations of means to an end, all depending on time and place, which, unlike the laws of his province, might have been very different from what they are. Before he resigned his metaphysics, he had his choice of difficulties : he must either deny a fact, or give up an abstraction ; he must either believe a mystery, or admit an absurdity.

In speculations on revealed phenomena embodied in theological science, the divine must act the same part as the honest mathematician : he must renounce his metaphysical abstractions concerning the First Cause. The divine has conceived *^and fostered a long train of home-bred ideas of necessary truth,^ by which he judges what God must be, and invests him with attributes in the abstract ; and, on the supposition that God will ever act these perfections ad extra^ his science arranges and settles certain immutable laws, by which he inevitably will, or necessarily must, exercise them. From the lofty heights, or rather, perhaps, the profound depths, of these abstractions, he comes to investigate God’s moral acts, just as he finds them recorded in the minutes of the scriptures. He finds himself in a foreign realm, in a new order of things, amid the productions of a strange and new Deity, certainly dissimilar to the God of his abstractions. His first impression is that God has worked out abstract attributes and necessary relations, in a manner and way totally at variance with his metaphysical conclusions. He cannot, for instance, refuse the avowal that, somehow or other, there is evil amid the works of a holy agent — that his plans contrived with wisdom and power, are liable to resistance and failure — that there is in a moral intelligence and human spirit, an agency free, and distinct from the agency of God, yet capable of acting freely while the impulse of another influence is acting upon it.

In such a predicament of perplexity and consternation what will metaphysical theologians do ? What will they do ?