s baptized with the Holy Spirit._ We read in Acts i. 5, 8, "For John
truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost
not many days hence.... But _ye shall receive power_, after that the Holy
Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto Me both in
Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part
of the earth." As truly as any one who reads these pages, who has not
already received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, seeks it in God's way,
he will obtain it, and there will come into his service a power that was
never there before, power for the very work to which God has called him.
This is not only the teaching of Scripture; it is the teaching of
religious experience throughout the centuries. Religious biographies
abound in instances of men who have worked along as best they could, until
one day they were led to see that there was such an experience as the
baptism with the Holy Spirit and to seek it and obtain it and, from that
hour, there came into their service a new power that utterly transformed
its character. In this matter, one thinks first of such men as Finney, and
Moody, and Brainerd, but cases of this character are not confined to the
few exceptional men. They are common. The writer has personally met and
corresponded with hundreds and thousands of persons around the globe, who
could testify definitely to the new power that God has granted them
through the baptism with the Holy Spirit. These thousands of men and women
were in all branches of Christian service; some of them are ministers of
the Gospel, some evangelists, some mission workers, some Y. M. C. A.
secretaries, Sunday-school teachers, fathers, mothers, personal workers.
Nothing could possibly exceed the clearness and the confidence and the
joyfulness of many of these testimonies.

I shall not soon forget a minister whom I met some years ago at a State
Convention of the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavour at New
Britain, Conn. I was speaking upon the subject of personal work and as I
drew the address to a close, I said that in order to do effective personal
work, we must be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and in a very few
sentences explained what I meant by that. At the close of the address,
this minister came to me on the platform and said, "I have not this
blessing you have been speaking about, but I want it. Will you pray for
me?" I said, "Why not pray right now?" He said, "I will." We p