one enlightenment produced by the one revelation of God in His Son.
It may be compared to the opening of blind eyes or the startled waking
of the soul by a great idea. To taste the heavenly gift is to make trial
of the new truth. To be made partakers of the Holy Ghost is to be moved
by a supernatural enlightening influence. To taste the good word of God
is to discern the moral beauty of the revelation. To taste the powers of
the world to come is to participate in the gifts of power which the
Spirit divides to each one severally even as He will. All these things
have an intellectual quality. Faith in Christ and love to God are
purposely excluded. The Apostle brings together various phases of our
spiritual intelligence, the gift of illumination, which we sometimes
call genius, sometimes culture, sometimes insight, the faculty that
ought to apprehend Christ and welcome the revelation in the Son. If
these high gifts are used to scoff at the Son of God, and that with the
persistence that can spring only from the pride and self-righteousness
of unbelief, renewal is impossible.

_Second_, the negative result of not bringing forth any useful herbs
corresponds to falling away.[100] God has bestowed His gift of
enlightenment, but there is no response of heart and will. The soul does
not lay hold, but drifts away.

_Third_, the positive result of bearing thorns and thistles corresponds
to crucifying to themselves the Son of God afresh and putting Him to an
open shame. The gifts of God have been abused, and the contrary of what
He, in His care for men, intended the earth to produce, is the result.
The Divine gift of spiritual enlightenment has been itself turned into a
very genius of cynical mockery. The Son of God has already been once
crucified amid the awful scenes of Gethsemane and Calvary. The agony and
bloody sweat, the cry of infinite loneliness on the Cross, the tender
compassion of the dying Jesus, the power of His resurrection--all this
is past. One bitterness yet remains. Men use God's own gift of spiritual
illumination to crucify the Son afresh. But they crucify Him only for
themselves.[101] When the sneer has died away on the scoffer's lips,
nothing is left. No result has been achieved in the moral world. When
Christ was crucified on Calvary, His death changed for ever the
relations of God and men. When He is crucified in the reproach of His
enemies, nothing has been accomplished outside the scoffer's little
world of