' G. Campbell Morgan.
230 THE SPIRIT AND THE WORLD
snow served to bring into view all the dust from the roadside, all the bits of blackthorn from the hedges, all the carbon flakes ejected from the chimneys of the adjoining town that had been caught in their fleeces.^
(2) The Spirit comes with a new atmosphere of sympathy and graciousness, unlike that which exists in the world and provokes to ingenuous self-justification. He who comes under this ministry feels almost instinctively His right to search the heart and bring every delinquency before a Divine tribunal. It is useless to attempt concealment, for the Spirit knows us more thoroughly than we know ourselves, and can constrain the most reluctant natures into a consciousness of their own evil. Indeed, the desire to cloak or dissemble silently disappears, for we instinctively recognize that His revelations, however unwelcome,- are benevolent in motive. Whilst the full revelation of Divine love cannot be vouchsafed at this stage, we see at once that the attempt to con- vict us is not that of some competitor who is trying to smite us down. He acts upon us, not like the angry storm which leads men to bar their doors and close their shutters, but like the soft south wind, which opens every labyrinth of the heart and life to the light. It is no treachery or ill-will or unrelenting antagonism that is bringing home to us the unwelcome facts of the past, but helping and healing beneficence. In the most vivid revival of the half-forgotten sin there is no malicious exaggeration. His enforce- ment of the fact of our guilt is recognized as a gentle and tender effort to teach us those forgotten realities of law with which we have to reckon, and to put us into a better position for dealing with them. Whatever pain He inflicts, it is inseparable from the cure of a dire disease, and from the process of arousing faculties marked hitherto by ominous numbness and dormancy. He brings the hard rebel world, ever on the alert to justify itself, into an atmosphere that is something more wonderful than even the essence of compassionate fatherhood.
(3) A new power of moral discernment is aroused. — In what is called Christendom, there has been a manifest uplifting of the moral standards, and a correspondent quickening of the moral sensibilities, both of individual men and of whole races and peoples. In the people of the old dispensation and of the great
* T. G. Selby, Tfu Holy Spirit and Christian Privilege, 58.
ST. JOHN XVI. 8-1 1 231
pagan empires long ago converted to the Cross, moral ideas have now taken the place, to a great extent, of force ; the coarse blank apathy of sin is broken up ; the sense of duty is more piercing ; and it is even as if a new conscience had been given respecting the soul in its relations to God. It is as if men had seen their state of sin glassed before them, and made visible in the rejection of Christ and His cross. Jews and pagans had before been made conscious at times of particular sins ; we are made conscious, in a deeper and more appalling way, of the state of sin itself, the damning evil that infects our humanity at the root — that which rejected and crucified the Son of God, and is in fact the general madness and lost condition of the race.
^ Immediately after the departure of Christ from the world, that is, on the day of Pentecost, there broke out a new demonstra- tion of sensibility to sin, such as was never before seen. In the days of the Law, men had their visitations of guilt and remorse, respecting this or that wrong act ; but I do not recollect, even under the prophets, those great preachers of the Law and sharpest and most terrible sifters of transgression, a single instance where a soul is so broken or distressed by the conviction of its own bad state under sin as to ask what it must do to be saved — the very thing which many thousands did, on the day of Pentecost, and in the weeks that followed, and have been doing even till now.^
XL
ElGHTEOUSNESS.
" He will convict the world in respect of righteousness." The Gospel of the Son of God is not the Gospel of forgiveness merely. It is also the Gospel of life and power, a great message, declaririg that to the man who believes on Him, the living Lord, there comes new life-force, a new dynamic of virtue ; and therefore the sin that ruins is the sin of unbelief. j\Iergiug into that first statement is necessarily the second statement of the text. " Of righteousness," said Jesus, " because I go to the Father." Who else could have uttered these words ? If we can say that we shall go to the Father, our going is through the merit and for the sake of another, but none introduced the Man of Nazareth to the Father. He ^ Horace Bushnell, Christ and His Salvation, 115.
232 THE SPIRIT AND THE WORLD
asked no mercy ; when He ascended on high He did not appear in Heaven's court in virtue of what another had done, but stood unafraid in Heaven's Hght, in the perfect light of His victorious manhood. He says, " I go to the Father," and in His going to the Father He has vindicated the possibility of the perfection of righteousness as an ideal life. And yet He did infinitely more by going to the Father. He received that Spirit which, poured out, becomes the life-force for others.