e are no rooms of the house of my spirit into which He
may not go. Let Him come with the master key in His hand into all the
dim chambers of your feeble nature; and as the one life is light in the
eye, and colour in the cheek, and deftness in the fingers, and strength
in the arm, and pulsation in the heart, so He will come with the
manifold results of the one gift to you. He will strengthen your
understandings, and make you able for loftier tasks of intellect and of
reason than you can face in your unaided power; He will dwell in your
affections and make them vigorous to lay hold upon the holy things that
are above their natural inclination, and will make it certain that their
reach shall not be beyond their grasp, as, alas! it so often is in the
sadness and disappointments of human love. He will come into that
feeble, vacillating, wayward will of yours, that is only obstinate in
its adherence to the low and the evil, as some foul creature, that one
may try to wrench away, digs its claws into corruption and holds on by
that. He will lift your will and make it fix upon the good and abominate
the evil, and through the whole being He will pour a great tide of
strength which shall cover all the weakness. He will be like some subtle
elixir which, taken into the lips, steals through a pallid and wasted
frame, and brings back a glow to the cheek and a lustre to the eye, and
swiftness to the brain, and power to the whole nature. Or as some plant,
drooping and flagging beneath the hot rays of the sun, when it has the
scent of water given to it, will, in all its parts, stiffen and erect
itself, so, when the Spirit is poured out on men, their whole nature is
invigorated and helped.

That indwelling Spirit will be a power for suffering. The parallel
passage to this in the twin epistle to the Colossians is--'strengthened
with all might unto all patience and long-suffering with gentleness.'
Ah, brethren! unless this Divine Spirit were a power for patience and
endurance it were no power suited to us poor men. So dark at times is
every life; so full at times of discouragements, of dreariness, of
sadness, of loneliness, of bitter memories, and of fading hopes does the
human heart become, that if we are to be strong we must have a strength
that will manifest itself most chiefly in this, that it teaches us how
to bear, how to weep, how to submit.

And it will be a power for conflict. We have all of us, in the discharge
of duty and in the