irit of God
with our spirits, which is expressed, as you may remember, in the other
metaphors of being baptized in and anointed with, and yet more
important, the result purposed by that contact being mainly to make us
holy.

Now, I pray you to think of how different that is from all other notions
of inspiration that the world has ever known, and how different it is
from a great many ideas that have had influence within the Christian
Church. People say there are not any miracles now, and say we are worse
off than when there used to be. That Divine Spirit does not come to give
gifts of healing, interpretations of tongues, and all the other abnormal
and temporary results which attended the first manifestations. These,
when they were given, were but means to an end, and the end subsists
whilst the means are swept away. It is better to be made good than to be
filled with all manner of miraculous power. 'In this rejoice, not that
the spirits are subject to you, but rather rejoice because your names
are written in heaven.' All the rest is transient. It is gone; let it
go, we are not a bit the poorer for want of it. This remains--not
tongues, nor gifts of healing, nor any other of these miraculous and
extraordinary and external powers--but the continual operation of a
divine influence, moulding men into its own likeness.

Christianity is intensely ethical, and it sets forth, as the ultimate
result of all its machinery, changing men into the likeness of God.
Holiness is that for which Christ died, that for which the Divine Spirit
works. Unless we Christian people recognise the true perspective of the
Spirit's gifts, and put at the base the extraordinary, and higher than
these, but still subordinate, the intellectual, and on top of all the
spiritual and moral, we do not understand the meaning of the central
gift and possible blessing of Christianity, to make us holy, or, if you
do not like the theological word, let us put it into still plainer and
more modern English, to make you and me good men and women, like God.
That is the mightiest work of that Divine Spirit.

We have here--

III. A plain warning as to the possibility of thwarting these
influences.

Nothing here about irresistible grace; nothing here about a power that
lays hold upon a man, and makes him good, he lying passive in its hands
like clay in the hands of the potter! You will not be made holy without
the Divine Spirit, but you will not be made holy without y