(5) The climax of our Lord's teaching in this line is reached in 16"'^'. Here Jesus announces the paradoxical truth that it is expedient for the dis- ciples that He should leave them, because the com- ing of tlie Paraclete is dependent on His departure. There arc natural Miialogies to this : often there is a truer apiireciation, even of a person who has been intimately known and loved, after death than before, a more adequate possession in memory than there was in actual intercourse. But more is meant here than that the disciples will get a better view of Jesus from a distance. It is Jesus Himself who is to send them tlie Paraclete, and He can do it, as He has already said (7""), only on the ground of His death and exaltation. When He does do it, they have not lost Him, they really possess Him in the power in which He lives and reigns. The functions of the Spirit are here two- fold, according as they have for their object (a) the world (vv.S;"), (^) the Apostles themselves (vv.i3-i=). As for (a), it is the Spirit's function to convict the world, to reach its conscience with demonstration, in regard to certain subjects. This conviction is not wrought in an immediate supernatural way, but through tlie ministry of the Apostles ; it is to them the Spirit comes, and through their preach- ing the worlil is convicted. It is convicted of sin, because men do not believe in Christ. This is perhaps the most general statement on sin in Scripture : it consists at bottom in refusing to be- lieve in Christ. If men did believe in Him, sin in all its kinds would disappear. Conviction of it cannot be produced by denunciation, or satire, or clever exposures, or by what is miscalled know- ledge of human nature ; it can be produced only by witnessing to Christ in the power of the Spirit. The Spirit also produces in the world a conviction of conscience with regard to rigliteousness. This is connected with the exaltation of Jesus : ' I go to the Father and ye see me no longer.' When this exaltation is brought home to men's minds with the power of the Spirit (Ac 4''3), they realize that there is such a thing as righteousness, and that the supreme power in the world is on its side. In a sense it might be said that it was easier to believe in righteousness when men saw it present in the world, incarnate in Jesus Christ the Righteous ; but it is a more solemn sense of its reality and supremacy that rises in the heart when, through the power of the Spirit, we realize that that right- eous One is seated at the right hand of the Father. The third point in regard to which the Spirit con- victs tlie world is judgment. This may be said to combine the other two. Sin and righteousness are
at issue with each other, and the Apostolic minis try, in the power of the Spirit, convinces men that in Christ a final judgment has been pronounced upon the issue. The protagonists in the great cause — -Christ and the Prince of this world — have confronted each otlier decisively, and the Prince of this world has been judged (16", cf. 12^'). A mind unenlightened or unconvinced by the Spirit might easily hold the opposite, and, looking to the life and death of Jesus, infer the impotence of the good, its condemnation, as futile and ineftective, by the nature of things ; but even in the Cross of Jesus what the Spirit-taught man sees is the con- demnation of evil, the sentence which God has passed and will finally execute on the Prince of this world, the verdict of the supreme tribunal on belialf of the good. Sin, righteousness, and judg- ment are abstract ideas, antl come home to men in their reality only wlien in tlie power of the Spirit they are interpreted in their connexion with Christ. In these verses (16*-") the main idea involved in the S))irit is that of power : it is what is required to make the Apostles' message efi'ective (cf. Ac 4^, 1 Th P, 1 Co '», 2 Co &'■). But when we pass to ((3) vv.i2-'=, the main i(U'a is that of illumination. The Sjurit is i'(m(ci\ cd as giving the disciples that coraprehensiim ni Cliii^l \\ hich, according to St. Paul also (sec i! Cii ;i), is necessary to make a man a fit minister of tlie new covenant, not of letter but of spirit. Both kinds of sufficiency — that of power and that of illumination — are of God, and specific- ally of the Spirit. If w.^-^i state the dependence of the Evangelist on the Spirit, vv.'^"'" state the dependence of the theologian on the Spirit. The idea underlying the latter passage is that of v.'- : Jesus is greater than His words. When the time comes for Him to leave His disciples, many things remain unuttered. Many things are involved in His presence in the world, and especially in His impending Passion, which He understands, but they do not and cannot : are these things to be lost for ever ? Is the significance of Jesus to be so far thrown away ? This is not what Jesus contem- plates. On the contrary, the Spirit which He promises as the Spirit of truth will have this as His very task, to initiate them into the whole meaning of Jesus. He will lead them, not into all truth, but into all the truth— that is, the truth which is embodied in Him in all its dimensions. The new point which is empliasized here about the Spirit is that He shall not speak of Himself {atj>' eavTov, i.e. of His own motion, self-prompted or independently). Many scholars, in reading what is told of spiritual gifts in Acts or the Pauline Epistles, have felt that the early Church ran a real risk. Who c-duhl tell whether the Spirit, under tliu imimlsc cif wliicli men uttered themselves, did not sonictiiiics s[ieak of itself, and say things which may liave been in a vague sense TTufv/iaTiKa., but were not in any true sense Chris- tian ? We have seen already how St. Paul met this danger. Partly (as in 1 Th 5""", 1 Co 14) he provides for the control of 'sjiiritual' utterances by the gift of discernment or by the common sense of the Christian .society. Partly (as in 1 Co 12») he lays down a dogmatic criterion of what is Christian. This latter course is fol- so in 1 Jn. (4=) : the spirit which is really of God is that which cimfesses Jesus Christ as come in flesh, in ((iiilr.ist with a more 'spiritual' kind of spirit wliicIi did not allow the heavenly Christ to ally Himself permanently, and especially by birth and death, to our humanity. But what we have here in the Gospel is really more search- ing, and goes to the root of the matter. The Spirit, personally as it is here conceived, is not a pure spontaneity ; it is always historically prompted and historically controlled. What viniiicates any