The Pulpit Commentary — Mark — Volume 1 — Section 159

Spirit co11ld not then be in ignorance or for lack of sufficient demonstration; but pre- aumptuous against light and agaiast knowledge, from sheer malevolence and unaccount- able malignity. The Pharisees were preparing for this-they were approaching the brink of this fearful abyss, and 011r Lord warns them back before it wa.e possible for them to take the fatal plunge, and involve themselves in ruin without remedy. A third class of interpreters generalizes the sin in question in much the same way a.e we have seen Augustine do, and resolves it into continued resistance and obstinate opposition to the grace of the gospel, impeBKe11tly and unbelievingly persisted in till the end. This is the view which Dr. Chalmers elaborates with great eloquence and power in his ser- mon on "Sin against the Holy Ghost." In that sermon we read as follows :-" A man may shut against himself all the avenues of reconciliation. There is nothing mysterious in the kind of sin by which the Holy Spirit is tempted to abandon him to that state in which there can be no forgiveness and no return unto God. It is by a movement of conscience within him, that the man is made sensible of sin, that he is visited with the desire of reformation, that he is given to feel his need both of mercy to pardon, and of grace to help him; in a word, that he is drawn unto the Saviour, and brought into that intimate alliance with him by faith which brings down upon him both acceptance with the Father and all the power of a new and constraining impulse to the way of obedience. But this movement is a suggestion of the Spirit of God, and, if it be resisted by any man, the Spirit is resisted. The God who offers to draw him unto Christ is resisted. The man refuses to believe because his deeds are evil; and by every day of perseverance in these deeds, the voice which tells him of their guilt and urges him to abandon them is resisted; and thus the Spirit ceases to suggest, and the Father, from whom the Spirit proceedeth, ceases to draw, and the inward voice ceases to remon- strate-and all this because their authority has been so often put forth and so often turned away. This is the deadly offence which has reared an impassable wall against the return of the obstinately impenitent. This is the blasphemy to which no forgive- ness can be granted, because, in its very nature, the man who has come this length feels no movement of conscience towards that ground on which alone forgiveness can be awarded to him, and where it is never refused even to the very worst and most malig- nant of human iniquities. This is the sin against the Holy Ghost. It is not peculiar to any one age. It does not lie in any one unfathomable mystery. It may be seen at this day in thousands and thousands more, who, by that most familiar and most frequently exemplified of all habits, a habit of resistance to a sense of duty, have at length stifled it altogether, and driven their.inward monitor away from them, and have sunk into a profound moral lethargy, and so will never obtain forgiveness-not because forgiveness is ever refused to auy who repent and believe the gospel, but because they have made their faith and their repentance impracticable. . . . The whole mys- teriousness of .this sin against the Holy Ghost is thus done away. Grant him the office with which he is invested in the Word of God, even the office of instigating the conscience to all its reprovals of sin, and to all its admonitions ofrepentance ; and then, if ever you witnessed the case of a man whose conscience had fallen into a profound and irrecoverable sleep, or, at least, had lost to such a degree its power of control over him, that-he stood out against every engine which was set up to bring him to the faith and repentance of the New Testament,-behold in such a man a sinner against conscience to such a woeful extent that conscience had given up its direction of him; or, in other words, a sinner against the Holy Ghost to such an extent that he had let down the office of warning him away from that ground of danger and of guilt on which he stood so immovably posted." There are some modifications of this view which it may be well to notice. One is that which makes the sin against the Holy Ghost to be resistance to conscience as the voice of God in the soul-the voice which the Holy Spirit employs in testifying to truth and goodness, and in reprobating sin and reco=ending the Saviour. Another modification is that which makes blasphemy against the Holy Ghost to con- sist in the expression of malignant unbelief of, and wilful apostasy from, the truth of God, and that, because it is the Holy Ghost which illumines the understanding and applies the truth to the heart of believers. 4. Remarks on the foregoing theories. In our observations on the foregoing theories wo do not deem it prudent dogmatically to determine which of them is the correct one. In a case where such diversities of opinion have prevailed, even among the aolest  154 THE GOSPEL AOOORDING TO ST. MARK. [au. III, 1-35.