SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Jan 29, 1902

SPIRITUAL KNOWLEDGE.

There is not so much need of learning as of grace to apprehend those things which concern our everlasting peace; neither is it our brain that must be set to work, but our hearts. However excellent the use of scholarship in all the sacred employments of Divinity, yet, in the main act, which imparts salvation, skill must give place to affection.

Happy is the soul that is possessed of Christ, how poor soever in all inferior endowments. Ye are wide, O ye great wits, while ye spend yourselves in curious questions and learned extravagances. Ye shall find one touch of Christ more worth to your souls than all your deep and laborious disquisitions. In vain shall ye seek for this in your books, if ye miss it in your bosoms.

If you know all things, and can not say, “I know whom I have believed,” you have but knowledge enough to know yourselves completely miserable. The deep mysteries of godliness, which to the great clerks of the world are as a book clasped and sealed up, lie open before him (the pious and devout man) fair and legible; and while those book-men know whom they have heard of, “he knows whom he hath believed!”

“The truth of Christianity,” says a pious author, “is the Spirit of God living and working in it; and when the Spirit is not the life of it, then the outward form is but like the carcass of a departed soul.”

Divinity has certainly been confused and perplexed by the learned. It requires to be disentangled and simplified. It appears to me to consist of this single point, the restoration of the Divine life, the image of God (lost and defaced at the fall), by the operation of the Holy Ghost. When this is restored, every other advantage of Christianity follows in course.—Bishop Hall.