other truths, equally true of
Him, concerning whom they are spoken. The Spirit of God, it seems to me,
is too majestic a being to be talked of hastily as "sweet." Words may be
true, and yet it may not be always quite reverent to use them. An
earthly sovereign may be full of all human sweetness and tenderness, yet
we should not dare to address him as "sweet."

But, indeed, some of this talk about the Holy Spirit is not warranted by
Scripture at all. In one of the hymns, for instance, in our hymn-book--
an excellent hymn in other respects, there is a line which speaks of the
Holy Spirit as possessing "The brooding of the gentle dove."

Now, this line is really little but pretty sentiment, made up of false
uses of Scripture. The Scripture speaks once of the Holy Spirit of God
brooding like a bird over its nest. But where? In one of the most
mysterious, awful, and important of all texts. "And the earth was
without form and void. And the Spirit of God moved (brooded) over the
face of the deep." What has this--the magnificent picture of the Life-
giving Spirit brooding over the dead world, to bring it into life again,
and create from it sea and land, heat and fire, and cattle and creeping
things after their kind, and at last man himself, the flower and crown of
things;--what has that to do with the brooding of a gentle dove?

But the Holy Spirit is spoken of in Scripture under the likeness of a
dove? True, and here is another confusion. The Dove is not the emblem
of gentleness in the Bible: but the Lamb. The dove is the emblem of
something else, pure and holy, but not of gentleness; and therefore the
Holy Spirit is not spoken of in Scripture as brooding as a gentle dove;
but very differently, as it seems to me. St Matthew and St John say,
that at our Lord's baptism the Holy Spirit was seen, not brooding, but
descending from heaven as a dove. To any one who knows anything of
doves, who will merely go out into the field or the farm-yard and look at
them, and who will use his own eyes, that figure is striking enough, and
grand enough. It is the swiftness of the dove, and not its fancied
gentleness that is spoken of. The dove appearing, as you may see it
again and again, like a speck in the far off sky, rushing down with a
swiftness which outstrips the very eagle; returning surely to the very
spot from which it set forth, though it may have flown over hundreds of
miles of land, and