it would be if you held it steadily. It
is the old story--the miraculous flow of the oil stopped when the
widow had no more pots and vessels to bring. The reason why some of
us have so little of that Divine Spirit is because we have not held
out our vessels to be filled. You can diminish the flow by ignoring
it, and that is what a host of so-called Christian people do
nowadays. You can diminish it by neglecting to use the little that
you have for the purpose for which it was given you. Does anybody
profit by your spiritual life? Do you profit much by it yourselves?
Has it ever been of the least good to anybody else in the world? 'The
manifestation of the Spirit is given to' you, if you are a Christian
man or woman, more or less. And if you shut it up, and do never an
atom of good with it, either to yourselves or to anybody else, of
course it will slip away; and, sometime or other, to your
astonishment, you will find that the vessels are empty, and that the
Spirit of the Lord has departed from you. 'Grieve not the Holy Spirit
of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.'

[Footnote 1: Whitsunday.]

WHAT LASTS

'Whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether
there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be
knowledge, it shall vanish away. 13. And now abideth
faith, hope, charity, these three....'--1 COR. xiii. 8, 13.

We discern the run of the Apostle's thought best by thus omitting the
intervening verses and connecting these two. The part omitted is but
a buttress of what has been stated in the former of our two verses;
and when we thus unite them there is disclosed plainly the Apostle's
intention of contrasting two sets of things, three in each set. The
one set is 'prophecies, tongues, knowledge'; the other, 'faith, hope,
charity.' There also comes out distinctly that the point mainly
intended by the contrast is the transiency of the one and the
permanence of the other. Now, that contrast has been obscured and
weakened by two mistakes, about which I must say a word.

With regard to the former statement, 'Whether there be prophecies,
they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease,' that
has been misunderstood as if it amounted to a declaration that the
miraculous gifts in the early Church were intended to be of brief
duration. However true that may be, it is not what Paul means here.
The cessation to which he refers is their cessation in the light of
the pe