THE OFFICE OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.
By Mammon
The Holy Spirit was designed to assist in restoring the spirit of benevolence. The world could not be surprised out of selfishness and charmed into benevolence by the mere spectacle even of divine love. That love can be understood only by sympathy; but for this, sin had disqualified us. According to the economy of grace, therefore, the exhibition of that love in God is to be made the means of producing love in us; the glorious spectacle of love as beheld in God, is to be turned into a living principle in us. For this end, the holy, unconfined and infinite Spirit came down. His emblem is the wind; he came like a rushing, mighty wind, came with a fullness and a power, as if he sought to fill every heart, to replenish the church, to be the soul of the world, to encircle the earth with an atmosphere of grace as real and universal as the elemental air which encompasses the globe itself and circulates around it, that whoever inhaled it might have eternal life. In the prosecution of his office, he was to take of the things of Christ, and show them unto men. Heaven stooping to earth; God becoming man, dying upon the cross; infinite benevolence pouring out all its treasures for human happiness,—these were the things which he was to reveal—the softening and subduing elements with which he was to approach and enter the human heart. In his hands, these truths were to become spirit and life. From the moment they were felt, men were to be conscious of a change in their relation both to God and to each other. A view of the great love wherewith he had loved them was to fill their minds with a grand and overpowering sentiment of benevolence, which should melt their obduracy, cause them to glow with gratitude, and bind them fast to himself in the strongest bands of love. That love, with all the communicativeness of fire, was to extend to their fellow-men. Every weapon of revenge was to fall from their hands; every epithet of anger was to die on their lips; and where before they saw nothing but foes, they were henceforth to behold magnificent objects of affection. The love of Christ would constrain them: glowing and circulating in their spiritual systems, like the life-blood in their hearts, it would impel them to be active for his glory. Having communed with the heart of Infinite Love, they were to go forth and mingle with their race, filled with a benevolence like that which brought their Lord from Heaven. Placing themselves at his disposal, they were to find that they were no longer detached from the species, but restored and related to all around—the sworn and appointed agents of happiness to the world. The institution of a church is only the continuation and application of the great scheme of love. Its offices were not to terminate on itself. It was constructed on the principle of consolidating and facilitating the operations of divine benevolence upon the world. The Son of God—the great manifestation of that love—must personally withdraw from the earth; but his church, consisting of the aggregate of all on whom that love had taken effect, would continue to give visibility and activity to that love. He stopped not at the bare exhibition of his grace, but turned that exhibition into a means of implanting a kindred principle of love in the human heart; he stopped not at the implantation of this principle, but instituted a church for the express purpose of employing it for the benefit of the world;—of employing it on the largest scale and with the greatest effect, and of thus conferring on it the power of propagating itself. In the Christian church, everything would conspire to keep alive in its members the new principle which Christ had brought into the world, and to give efficiency to its benign operations. Love was the principle which would bring them together, which would draw them from their distant and detached position, harmonize their jarring natures, and fuse all their hearts and interests into one. Converging from the most opposite points, they would meet at the cross; and the principle which had drawn them to that would bind them to each other. Each would behold in every other a living memorial of his Lord, and see, in the grace of Christ to the whole, a token of that grace to himself in particular. Here, love, as an agent or instrument, either giving or receiving, was to find itself in perpetual exercise, and to behold its image reflected in every face.—Mammon.