Spirit in man : sermons and selections

Front matter

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THE SPIRIT IN MAN

Part II Sekmons

L Christ the Form op the Soul . . .39 II. Unconscious Prophecy . . . . .53

III. God's Thoughts Fit Bread for Children . 70

IV. A Great Life Begins Early . . .90 V. Our Best Weapons Gotten by Conquest . 103

VI. A Week-day Sermon to the Business Men

OF Hartford . . , , VII, Prosperity Our Duty VIII. Reverses Needed ....

IX. Personality Developed by Religion X. The Finite Demands the Infinite XI. God Preparing the State of Glory

120 135 159 185 199 214

X CONTENTS

Part III Selections From Sermons Page

The Doctrine of Prayer 271

The Meaning of the Supper 277

Death a Leveller of Distinctions . . .281

Death Abolished 284

God's Meaning in Probation 288

Spiritual Things the Only Solid . . . .324 The Preparations of Eternity . . . .331

Existence Consummated in a State of Praise . 345

Revelation 357

Obligation Imperative ■ . 360

Human Personality 362

God's Call to Decision 364

God's Ways Discoverable to Piety • • . 364 Morality and Religion ...... 366

CONTENTS

XI

The War of Our Desires The Small Saints that are No Saints The Connections of Prayer .

Special Prayer . . . . .

Half Converted . . . . .

The Good Wine Last

PAGE

367 370 371 373 375 377

PART IV MISCELLANIES A Marriage Ceremony 385

Aphorisms Selected from Published Writings . 403

Part I. The Writings of Horace Bushnell . . 445

" 11. Controversial Writings Addressed to or

Written Concerning Horace Bushnell 463

** III. Selected References to Horace Bushnell

in Books and Periodicals . , , 469

PART I

Introduction

I begin this day, January 22, 1875, a tract or treatise on the Holy Spirit and his work which I have long been desiring to prepare, but have been detained formerly by other engagements, and of late by advanced age and the growing incapacity of disease. It does not seem to me that I can ever fully execute so heavy a work, but I can begin it, and God will permit me to go on or stop me short in it when he pleases; and to him I gladly submit the result. Only, considering how much of divine insight will be needed to speak worthily of a subject so interior and deep and so far removed from the mere natural intelligence of men, I invoke most earnestly his constant presence with me and the steady oversight of his counsel. Help me, O Eternal Spirit, whose ways I am engaged to interpret, to be in the sense at all times of thy pure teaching and to speak of what thou givest me to presently know!

Seeing that I have no strength left to be expended on superfluities, and scarcely enough to serve my present necessities, I make engagement with myself not to be overexacting in my attention to matters of form and rhetorical finish. It must be sufiicient for the matter of style that I represent my glorious Friend, the Holy Spirit, according to the practical truth of his relationship. The mind of the Spirit is to be my law, as it is my subject.

In case my work is cut short, which is by no means improbable, I submit the manuscript of what is written to the discretion of competent judges. If only a little is done it will of course be suppressed as by the judgment of Providence. If it is carried far enough toward completion to show the general argument, or to give indications of a general treatment that would probably have a degree of freshness and practical benefit, that may be a judgment of Providence favoring its preservation. At this point I pass directly on to my work, proposing no analysis or plan, but simply to let it plan itself as the rivers do when they mark their courses by their own movement. I make no distribution of parts and capita or chapters, but write on in the easy, meandering way, cutting up the strips of product as I proceed into segments or sections at my convenience. I prefer to have my liberty, and especially not to be worried if I sometimes fall into that which is the old man's liberty, better called his infirmity, of repeating what he has said before. At present I hope I may not do it, but I am going on adventure somewhat, and may pass into regions of mental oblivion before I know it.

DIVISIONS OF THE SUBJECT

I. Inspieability.

II. Peesonality of the Spirit.

III. By the Spirit God Communicates Himself.

IV. Promise of the Spirit as Paraclete. V. The Inaugural of the Spirit.

VI. A few pages of Section VI., which was added later, with the title: "Ways and Modes of the Spirit."

I. Inspieability

Insplrableness, or the faculty of inspiration, is the supreme faculty of man. It is the faculty of being permeated or interiorly and receptively visited by the higher nature of God, comimunicating somewhat of his own quality. A window-pane is permeable by the light, but having no receptive quality it retains nothing. The whole body of natural substance in what is called the creation is permeable by the divine omnipresence or the all-ruling Spirit of God, but this mere going through of power lodges no quality where it goes, save that so much of inert substance is thereby modulated in terms of counsel and constituent harmony. The permeating Spirit of God, as Holy Spirit, is a different matter. "We call it inspiration, because it inbreathes something of a divine quality and configures the subject in some way to itself. The sun has been shooting its beams for many thousands of years through the illimitable spaces of the sky and has not raised their heat even by a degree, because it has not encountered anything there that has a receptivity for heat. Whereas the beams of the Holy Spirit shine to beget heat, and to lodge a divine property in moral natures that is akin to itself. Job saw a great many things long ages ago that were never taught him save by his own self-discovery, and this, I think, was one: '^ There is a spirit in man; and the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding." There was never a conception of man and of the

Holy Spirit as related to man that was more exact or more complete. (1) The spirit in man is spirit not a solid too impenetrable, or a vapor too fugitive to be taken possession of, but a grand receptivity of life. And then (2) the Spirit of the Almighty is like to it, to be inbreathed and interfused, and to make internal lodgement in it of his divine properties. Which is called (3) the " giving understanding.'' That is, wisdom is given, and good and great thoughts, and love and truth and energy — a nature, in short, so contempered to God and conformed to his counsel as to have a natural and free working with his. Man was made for this^ from this sin took him away, and the Holy Spirit as a quickening and regenerative force is to beget him anew, and make his life a recovered inspiration, fuller and wiser and more indestructible than it could have been but for the double experience passed through.

It is hardly necessary to say again that this faculty of inspiration is the summit of our human nature. By it we have or may have the inhabitation of God. In a sense, God inhabits the world, and as we just now said turns all the mechanical powers and substances of things to work in harmony with his plan; but in this inhabitation of his Spirit he temples himself socially and morally in our human nature, working it responsively toward himself, imparting his own thought and the very habit in which he lives. In the completest and truly inmost sense, without putting any strain upon the figure, he makes us partakers of his divine nature. It really seems impossible that any human creature, however dulled

INSPIEATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT 9

or besotted by sin^ should be inattentive to so great opportunity, undesiring or unexpectant of an honor and footing of life so transcendent. O, what other promontory that we pass over is fanned by such breezes of health and life-invigorating purity!

II. Personality of the Spirit

In the communication to us or lodgement in us of personal qualities, the supposition is involved that the Holy Spirit is a person. He cannot ingenerate or inbreathe sentiments that are personal, affections that put us in social and reciprocal relation with God, confidences that belong to a personal faith in God, if he be not himself a person. He might be Spirit to us in a certain pantheistic way, as when God is conceived to be the eternal run of causes; and might be just as really operative in what part of our nature belongs to the sphere of causes as he is to all mere things in the domain of nature, that is, no-wise operative save as all unintelligence may be; but he cannot waken love answering to love, nor move any sentiment that is to have society with sentiment in himself. In order to this he must be a person; for without personality the thing is inconceivable or even impossible. That class of teachers who reject the Trinity very commonly resolve the Holy Spirit into a mere influence; and another class, who do not reject the Trinity but are overintent on saving the integrity of the will, that it may seem not to be taken away by the irruption of the Spirit in his converting efficacy, call him also

10 IlSrSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIEIT

an influence, denying that he ever operates save as by influence. But if we insist on reducing his work to a mere influence, supposing no direct agency of personal will, how is he to refashion the personal sentiments, as in regeneration, and set us chiming with God in the closest adaptations of character and the most intricate subtleties of his personal nature? A carpenter makes a tight joint by making it, and not by an influence on the timber. In like manner a power that can inwardly configure a soul to God, and conjoin it by living adaptations with his inmost nature, must be divinely personal itself, working more directly and less vaguely than by any mere influence.

But there is another and different kind of mistake at this point in over-asserting the personality. In preaching the Holy Spirit, a great many have it as their first point to insist on his personality, which, having duly established, they assume it in their simplicity to mean that he is, more humano, personal; so that when they meet the scripture figures of the Spirit, they assert and use them with a most unquestioning emphasis of literality which robs them of their true value, and throws them into a confused medley that is virtual distraction. How large a part of the disciples of our time are incommoded by this kind of distraction, I do not know.

Thus we have given us for epithets or instrumental conceptions of the Spirit the terms : " sent, sent down, poured out, descends, comes, withdraws, departs, present, absent, taken away, restored." Indeed, we can hardly pretend to recite the whole roll

INSPIRATION BY THE HOLY SPIRIT H

of the Scripture words and phrases thus applied, only never applied save in the tacit assumption of their figurative nature and their need of attentive qualification. The Holy Spirit is a person only in the sense that the Father and the Word are persons. Omnipresence is predicable of him as of them. But the epithets just recited suppose, every one of them in the list as far as the natural form is concerned, a lack of omnipresence. For it will be seen when the eye is run over the list that they are all words which imply motion in space, and a nature of course that does not measure space save by motion in it. They do not signify a being omnipresent or infinite. And yet they are all the better, if we can so understand, in that they handle truths concerning the Spirit by instrumentations of language that are finite. Thus when it is said that the Spirit is sent or sent down, the truth signified is not that he was locally absent or that he comes in a horizontal or a downward motion, but only that being inherently and always present he comes into a mode of power or of felt action. And then the word " sent " has another value, viz., that the Spirit is not conceived as omnipresence, beginning from itself to act, but as beginning from the Father and the Son, showing the whole circle of constitutive and redemptive agency concurrent. A great many persons indulge what they suppose to be their wit on these terminologies of Scripture language, asking how many Gods there are in the personal three of trinity?

If the Holy Spirit is poured out, from what vessel, by what hand? If he comes down, why he might not as well have come up? Probably some really serious disclear their way. But the discovery should not be ciples get tangled in this net and know not how to difficult that these figures of Scripture have an overplus of form besides the meaning, as all figures have, which overplus after it has served as vehicle for the meaning is then to be held of no account. So taken, they serve the uses of intelligence and cumber its processes by no distractions caused by residues of form that cannot be reduced. Thus when a man can pray: " Send down thy power," " Pour out thy Spirit," " Breathe upon us, O Breath," " Blow upon us, O Wind," " Come and be present with us," " Leave us not afar off," ^' Return upon us. Holy One of God," knowing perfectly that these lines of motion in space have nothing to do with his prayer save as machineries of language, how greatly is he helped in his endeavo:^ and how perfectly clear of distraction is he! But suppose that, dropping out all these instrumentations, he were to begin at the omnipresence of the Spirit and word a prayer for these same gifts or bestowments, how very soon will he be instructed as to their necessity? " Come down " — i^o, that certainly is not what is wanted. " Draw near " — I^o, he is near enough already. *' Grrant us thy presence" — E'o, we have his presence before we ask it. " Eeturn, O thou departed " — 'No, we must not ask it, for he is not departed. And so the prayer that was going to be worded without these finite epithets and figures fails and leaves us dumb, just because we have no vehicle. But how beautiful and simple and almost wonderful in the wisdom of its machinery is tlie prayer that can be wise enough to lay hold of the figures that are given, and use them as they are meant; for they are not meant to set the Spirit moving in space according to their forms, but simply to obtain a consciousness of his presence, who before was unconsciously or less consciously present.

III. By the Spirit God Communicates Himself

"We may assume it without rashness to be the supreme object of God as the creator and governor of men to bestow himself upon them or be inwardly communicated to them. For this men are constituently made, even as an eye is made for the light. In a certain first view of things, observing chiefly the bounties of the world, one might guess that God's prime object here is the preparing of growths and fruitages that will grow men, growing animals for their sake; but in deeper second thought it will be seen that he is building and ruling for mind, to make himself the light of intelligence, the friend of guidance, the supreme joy of love. Physical production plainly enough is no main purpose with him. He glasses himself on every side in objects and forms related to mind. By music and fragrance and color he wakens the sense of his beauty. By unnumbered and persistent ways of discipline he trains experimentally to the knowledge of himself. So far, in things without, self-communication visibly engages him. To which, inwardly correspondent, we have the all-permeating Spirit engaged to fulfil the self-corn-

"municating purpose and become, what that purpose implies, a universal inspiration. What else or less can he be, as a Spirit omnipresent in all God's dispositions ? As he is a universal Spirit, he must have a universal working. Gravity in matter can as well keep itself back and refuse to be more than a half principle, ruling it by half a law. The Holy Spirit carries the heart of God with him, and the heart of God is miiversal. To say that he ministers the love of God puts him in a like paternal relation to all mind, even as gravity to all matter.

So we reason, but where is the fact? someone will answer. Of course it will not be understood, when I speak in this unrestricted manner, that I imagine no kind of limitation such as will accord with the facts of observation. The term inspiration has been largely used in past times — almost solely applied — to denote a certain special infallibility in the Scripture writings and writers. That particular kind of inspiration, it is generally admitted, has fallen upon no niortal of the race for an almost geologic era — a subject that will be discussed at a future stage in my argument. I only suggest here that inspirable conditions are sometimes wanting or uninspirable conditions present, by which the ranges of inspiraion are partially restricted. The universal inspiration of which I wished to speak is that which is grounded or supposed in the natural relation of God to souls; that which Job affirms, with a great deal more, when he says : " Tor there is a spirit in man; the inspiration of the Almighty giveth them understanding." By this we are to understand, first, a nutritive inspiration that unfolds the natural and moral powers, and secondly, a corrective inspiration. The former is absolute, entering without leave into all the growths of sentiment and intelligence. The latter is distinguishable in two degrees, either as act or as fact. As act, it is to God the permeation of his will in corrective and restorative impulse, while to the subject it is either a grace unobserved, or a grace resisted, or a grace accepted in true welcome. Wherein it becomes a grace as in fact, having found true lodgement and become the seed of a true character, a living, everlasting inspiration. This inspiration of fact is a great deal more, it will be seen, than a mere intromission of God, as in act; adding to the kind first-named the nutritive inspiration^ what respects both character and the staple of the man, what is grown in him or what he grows to be in the scope of his intelligence, the health of his moral sentiments, the beauty of his disposition, the generosity of his temperament. Baising these distinctions of inspiration, it will not be surprising or extravagant to anyone that I assert the doctrine of a universal inspiration ; for there will be room enough after that for any kind of denial that will seem necessary to be made.

It is a pleasant evidence, here to be cited, that Mr. Emerson appears to come as near asserting the fact of a universal inspiration as he well can under his particular mode of conceiving such kind of subjects. I refer to his chapter entitled '^ The Oversoul," where he reports and represents the true inspiration better than he does in most of his writings. By the

Oversoul, he means in fact the Holy Spirit, writing as one who is captivated by the beauty of his character and office. He conceives him to be a kind of all-infolding Soul, coromunicating God and life to man and filling the office of an all-cherishing allcorrecting nurture in the race. He has no questions to raise concerning the universality of the conception. Its beauty proves it, he would say, to be true.

At this point two particular facts ask as it were to be named, which as far as I know are never connected with the doctrine of the Spirit at all. I speak of his inspirations in the time of infancy, and in times of lapsed consciousness in the dying. Infancy has no Bible, no language, no capacity for a time of representative instruction. All the form-world of the mind is vacant or empty. But it is a world open to the Spirit and the dear inspirations of God, where, going through as living bible in the sweet effusions of love and gentleness, he may lodge all most beautiful germs of character, probably sometimes never to be effaced. He is completely beforehand here; milk before the mother's, we may almost say; counsel infused before counsel given. Hence the wondrous and almost divine beauty of childish unconsciousness and guilelessness. It is the sole gift and grace of the spirit. We call it angelic, finding flavors in it that we cannot impute to any purest motherhood, or to anything but some celestial nutrition.

When the Spirit helps the dying it is in a different manner, but sometimes in a manner scarcely less affecting. He has carried the soldier through his war, and now he sleeps. For whole hours or possibly days he has been wholly unconscious and speechless. Is he alone ? or is his divine friend with him? How very often are we permitted to see! As, when he opens suddenly his eyes to say, looking up and round: " Beautiful angels," " Lord Jesus, I come," " The gates, thank God, are open," " Good-by all." What is it now that puts it in the soul, shut up for so many hours in the supineness of a block, to break out thus perceptibly into second life and a second world, unless it be the Spirit of God, who has finished his charge and is by, as the second world's Lord also, to open the gates and usher him in? As he came to the infant, bible before Bible, so here he comes to the servant lapsing in death as a bible revelation within when the word without is gone by, to put him on thoughts not spoken outwardly, and to open discoveries that can be witnessed only by their own light.

TV, Promise of the Spieit as Paeaclete

Just before the departure of Christ from the world, when gathering in his ministry for the close, he added a chapter promising a kind of new beginning to be inaugurated shortly before his departure, and to be carried on by a different executive agency. It is to be a dispensation of the Spirit called by the special name, Paraclete, a name designed to suggest his more official connection with the new economy now organized, to replace the old in which as Spirit he had hitherto held a less conspicuous place. This Greek name, Paraclete, is badly translated in our English version by the name Comforter.* Not that he is never a dispenser of comfort, but that this is never distinctively his office. The two elements of the word. Para and Clete — E"ear and Caller — are probably to have a meaning that is cast in that mould, indicating that the Spirit will have it for his office to call or draw or bring men to the new salvation provided. If the name Paraclete were translated Inductor, it would probably be as closely represented in the name as it well can be in English. It is not the conception of Christ that the Holy Spirit as Paraclete is a new agent or a new fact promised. That kind of interpretation is one that is possible only to a certain want of culture. It imagines in fact that a new God or new Divine Person is now sent to undertake the world — a conclusion that will not be readily accepted. He comes, it is true, by promise, and so far there is an air of newness; but the newness consists in the fact that he before was more especially the illuminator of prophets and the counsellor and guide of magistrates, imparting a divine energy and capacity to the institutional men of the state or state church ; whereas he is now to be, and be understood as appointed to be, the monitor and quickener of souls, dispensing to them life and salvation from the world's Messiah. That is, he drops out his more peculiar charge in the old semi-political economy, and takes up a charge

* The whole passage concerning the Comforter, John xvi. 7-14, is fully discussed in Part I., chapter 3, of my Vicarious Sacrifice, vol. 1.

that is more personal and experimental, and respects the propagation of life in all the people of mankind. We distinguish in the form of the promise two points that Christ appears to have in mind, as points of advantage now to be served by the Spirit. Thus he tells his disciples, giving it as the occasion for a new administration, that the time has now come when the cause he is in will be more easily advanced if he, himself, retires. And he speaks in a way which shows that he is apprehending no mere fatality such as may befall him at the hands of his enemies, but is thinking rather of some prior condition that even requires him to be removed. " I tell you the truth, it is expedient for you that I go away." And if we begin to ask, why expedient and how? it is not difficult, I think, to hit upon the answer. Such a ministry as that of Christ in the world plainly enough could not be perpetual, or be continued for any but a short period of time. He is a visible and audible teacher, acting only where he is and when he is somewhere present; that is, under conditions of locality. He can traverse a small country; he can pass on foot back and forth between Jerusalem and Jericho, or between Jerusalem and Galilee. It is not reported, I think, that he ever went as far south as Hebron, or more than once as far north as Dan. He did once cross the border into the coast of Tyre and Sidon, but never found his way over to Damascus. I^ow consider that he is come into the great world to be the teacher and Saviour of the world, and it will be seen at a glance that he is capable in body of no such transitional velocity as permits the fulfilment of sucli an office. Besides, it is not enough that he should some time reach a given place or people ; he must be with them every week all round the world. Considered thus as a bodily nature, which was to be the great point of the incarnation^ his incarnation would thus be in another view his chain of detention, holding him back from everything most necessary to be done. Taken thus, in the large view of nations and peoples and in the long view of the times without limit, his bodily nature is adapted in fact to nothing which belongs to his undertaking. In fact nothing Christian can be done with Christianity till the visible head, the embodied Christ, is taken quite away and substituted by some other mode or machinery of action set in his place. 'No being can do the work that is undertaken but one who is not under conditions of locality and brings to it an attribute of universal presence. The incarnation is a means to an end only for a certain time. After that time it must be ended. The incarnate person, living in the form of God and revealing the beauty and tragic love of God, will have prepared the necessary power to engage the feeling and make up the staple of a regenerative gospel.

But he must not stay long enough to raise the question: How much longer? Three years of a merely cursitating pedestrian ministry are probably long enough to lodge this gospel in the world; and when that is done it is quite expedient that he go away. And when he goes, it is even required by the supposed conditions of the question that some unlocalized Inductor and Disseminator take his place, and minister his ministry without limit or travel or exhaustion. He requires too, it will be seen, to be omnipresent, not only as related to space but as related to mind — all mind that is concerned to know and receive the salvation provided. How sublime the transition, and how manifestly squared and appointed by the regulative wisdom of God! That the new Inductor thus to be established must be a Spirit divine is just as clear as that he must be in-

1 exhaustible, never to be wearied by his multiplici-

^ ties or staled by time.

( But there was another reason which Christ had in mind when he asserted the expediency of his removal and the introduction of a successor working by another method, viz., that his gospel, gotten into language by his incarnate ministry and teaching, lacked altogether when taken by itself the efficiency needed to make it a great converting power. It does not appear that Christ gained many converts by his preaching; partly for the reason, I suppose, that he was always too much of a problem to be a proper word of salvation. His miracles begot a state of questioning and of idle wonder too curious to be convincingly serious; much as we see now in the levitations and aerial transportations and ghostly oracles of our wizard practitioners. For the time, in the first stages of the development of his mission the promulgations bore a look of extravagance; for what could be the impression first made by the assertion of a descent from heaven and of a nature mysteriously akin to God, but that Christ in such pretences exceeded all bounds of nature and rational credibility? The material he was building thus into a history could never form to itself a state of settled conviction till after his withdrawment, when the disturbances of sight and sense were gone by. And not even then would there be any converting power in the revelation-story prepared.