III.

THE BLESSED COMFORTER.

"The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost." JOHN xiv. 26.

SOMETIMES think, my friends, that there is One Person in the Godhead, whom we practically do somewhat slight. We do not think of Him so kindly and hopefully as we ought; we do not enough recognize Him as God, with the Father and the Son together to be worshipped and glorified. We seldom hear even a sentence in a prayer, addressed expressly to the Blessed and Holy Spirit, the Third Person in the Godhead. I do not believe that any among us doubts that there is such a Being: we are fully persuaded of His Personality, and His Agency, and the inestimable. value and importance of the work He does. We believe all that. May God help our unbelief and increase our faith! Yet still, I think we greatly fail practically to realize these things. We are ready to think of the Holy Ghost rather as an influence, an energy proceeding from God, than as a real kindly Person, loving us, caring for us, dwelling in us if that

be God's gracious will. And yet, if we think at all, we cannot but feel that none can be more interested in our salvation; that none is more closely and completely linked with our whole Christian life; that there is none whose presence is so needful for us while we remain in this present evil world.

We can see a kind of reason for this lack of full and express recognition of the Blessed Spirit. No doubt, no doubt, there is One Person in the Godhead, whom we love, and may fitly love, most of all. There is One, whose name (let us pray) will never fail to warm our heart, till our heart turns cold with the last chill it is to know. It is, doubtless, that beloved Redeemer who died for us; that Divine Person who took upon Himself our human nature, and became our Elder Brother in humanity; that Blessed Saviour Jesus Christ who went about doing good, and to whom little children came so naturally, drawn by the sweetness of that kind face and that gentle voice; and concerning whom we seem to feel that, the Mighty God as he was, we could have gone to Him, and told our story to Him, rather in love and confidence than in fear.

It is not wonderful, brethren, that in the believing heart, Christ should always be the First, yea, the All in All. And there is more and deeper in this than the mere weak impulse of our fallen nature. For in the face of Christ we see the glory of the whole Godhead. He is the Image of the Invisible God, Father,

Son, and Spirit. And looking at Him, and loving Him, we look at God, and we love God. And the visible representative is naturally more conspicuous, more manifest to our view, than the invisible Godhead which He represents. But, besides this right reason for special love to the Saviour, our Elder Brother, there is another wrong reason in many minds: a reason founding upon a notion which cannot be too carefully dispelled from your minds. This is the notion, entertained by many, that Christ is far kinder and milder and more easily won, than God the Father and God the Spirit; that God the Father, especially, is a stern, severe being, who would willingly have consigned us to all perdition; and that the gentler, kinder Son interposed, and suffered, and saved us almost against the angry Father's will. Oh, what a miserably false and unchristian way that is of regarding God! Is that the kind of idea conveyed to us by Christ, when He tells us that God waits to welcome back the sinner as kindly as the father did his prodigal son; and when He tells that the kindest-hearted among you is not so ready to show kindness to your children as He is to give every blessing to you! Always remember, brethren,— and pray for grace to feel it far more really than you have ever yet done, that just what Christ was, God is; that, when you desire to think of the Almighty Being above us, your right course is, not to put your mind upon the stretch, to reach out to thoughts of infinite

space and infinite years, but rather to open the Gospel of St. Luke or St. John, and to see Jesus of Nazareth as He trod this world; to listen to His comfortable words, to mark His deeds of mercy; to think of His never-failing compassion to the sorrowful, of His willingness to receive the sinful; to look on His unspeakable love to lost man, shown in His life and His death; and then to remember that this same Jesus of Nazareth "hath shown us the Father," and that He is the "Image of the Invisible God!"

It is an end, my friends, to which a Christian minister can never devote too much care and thought, to dispel from the minds of the people committed to his ministry, the wrong ideas and beliefs, which are so ready to creep in and establish themselves, as to Almighty God; as to His nature and character; as to how He feels towards us. And I cannot but frankly confess, that I believe there is no small measure of truth-though truth stated in a most morbid and exaggerated fashion in what has been written by an eminent historian whose life and work were lately and sadly cut short together, as to the stern and gloomy views of our Heavenly Father entertained by not a few in Scotland. My desire and prayer at this time are, that we may this day be enabled rightly and truly to think of One who is indeed God; of One who cares for us as warmly and sincerely as the Redeemer Himself; of One who "makes intercession for us with groanings that cannot be uttered;"

of One to be worshipped and glorified as God, and to be loved and confided in only less than Him who died for us on the tree.

Let us remember, then, that in the Godhead, besides the Father and the Son, there is a Third Person, the same in substance, equal in power and glory, who is called the Holy Ghost, or the Holy Spirit; mysterious in His nature and being; proceeding from the Father and the Son; who spake by the prophets, and who fulfils certain great works in that wonderful operation which brings man from death to life, and which makes man fit to dwell in God's beatific presence. We shall hereafter think of the varied operation of this Blessed Spirit; but let us now think of that one precious truth which our Saviour sets before us in the words of the text. See how our Lord names Him: "The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost." And in several other places, Christ calls Him by the same name. It is known to many of you, that, while the word which our Saviour used is very fitly translated by the English word Comforter, and while it unquestionably means that, it has been maintained that it means yet more, and that some hint, some suggestion, of all the varied work of the Holy Spirit, is conveyed by that wellremembered word PARACLETE, which was actually used by Christ. We are too ready, all of us, to feel towards the mysterious Holy Ghost something of the shrinking and the chill with which we naturally regard a disembodied spirit; and superstition, and stu