Religious Reality | Page 9

seen
rather--apart from His work in the gradual purification and deepening
of character and motive, the bringing to birth and development in men's
souls of the "new man" who is "Christ in them, the hope of glory"--in
the intensification of men's normal faculties and gifts, and the direction
of their exercise into channels profitable to the well-being of the
community. For the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of brotherhood: and His
gifts are bestowed "for the fitting of GOD'S people for the work of
mutual service": they are for the upbuilding of the Body of Christ. The
real miracle of the Christian life is simply the Christian life itself: and
that a man should love his neighbour as himself is at least as wonderful
as that he should speak with tongues.
Reflecting upon the experience which had come to them, Christian men
came to see that the Holy Spirit, who was the Spirit of the Father and
the Son, was Divine, even as Jesus was Divine. In this strange Power
which had transformed their lives they discovered GOD, energizing
and operative in their hearts. Instinctively they worshipped and
glorified the Spirit as the Lord, the Giver of Life. Those who have
entered upon any genuine measure of Christian experience are not
prepared to say that they were wrong.

The Christian life depends upon the Spirit, now as then. Only in the
power of the Holy Spirit is Christianity possible, and no one ever yet
made any real advance in personal religion except in dependence upon
an enabling energy of which the source was not in himself. "It is the
Spirit that maketh alive." "The Spirit helpeth our infirmities." "I know
that in myself, that is, in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing." "If ye,
being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much
more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask
Him." It is because of our lack of any living or effectual belief in the
Holy Spirit, and because of our consequent failure to seek His
inspiration and to submit ourselves to His influence, that the
Christianity of men to-day is often so barren and so poor a thing; and
the corporate life of Christendom languishes for the same reason. The
Church is meant to be a fellowship, a brotherhood: the most real and
living brotherhood on earth. Men find to-day the realization of
brotherhood in a regiment: they find it in a school or in a club: in a
Trade Union: or in such an organization as the Workers' Educational
Association. They fail to find it in the Church of Christ.
The Church can never be a brotherhood save in the Holy Spirit: for
Christianity is essentially and before all things a religion of the Spirit,
and the external organization and institutions of the Church, apart from
"His vivifying breath, are a mere empty shell. Where there is no vision
the people perish: and it is only under the inspiration of the Spirit that
men see visions and dream dreams. Come from the four winds, O
Breath, and breathe upon these dry bones of our modern
churchmanship, that we may live: and so at last shall we stand upright
on our feet, an exceeding great army, and go forth conquering and to
conquer in the train of the victorious Christ."

CHAPTER IV
THE HOLY TRINITY
God, as Christianity reveals Him, is no cold or remote Being, no
abstract Principle-of-All-Things, reposing aloof and impersonal in the

stillness of an eternal calm. He is rather the boundless energy of an
eternal Life--"no motionless eternity of perfection, but an overflowing
vitality, an inexhaustible fecundity, the everlasting well-spring of all
existence." He is the eternal Creator of all things; not indeed in any
sense which commits us to a literal acceptance of the mythology of
Genesis, but in the sense that the created universe has its origin in His
holy and righteous will, and that upon Him all things depend. "In
affirming that the world was made by GOD, we do not affirm that it
was ready-made from the beginning." The work of creation is still
going on. GOD is eternally making all things new.
The nature of GOD, in so far as the mind and affections of man are
capable of knowing Him and entering into relationships with Him, is
revealed in Jesus Christ His Son, and the revelation is completed and
made intelligible by the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. S. Paul
expressed the practical content of GOD'S self-disclosure in his phrase
"the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of GOD, and the
fellowship of the Holy Ghost." Later Christian thinkers worked it out
into the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the conception of GOD as at once
Three