lently written them; but the more difficult
way is the more acceptable way to him who seeks for worshipers who
"worship in Spirit and in truth." It is easier to get "the sense of
the meeting" in choosing a pastor than to learn "the mind of the
Spirit" by patient tarrying and humble surrender to God; but the more
laborious way will certainly prove the more profitable way. The
failure to take this way is, we are persuaded, the cause of more decay
and spiritual death in the churches than we have yet imagined. From
the watch-tower where we write we can look out on half a score of
churches on which "Ichabod" has been evidently written, and the glory
of which has long since departed. They were founded in prayer and
consecration, "to serve the living and true God, and to wait for his
Son from heaven." Why has their light been extinguished, though the
lampstand which once bore it still remains, adorned and beautified with
all that the highest art and architecture can suggest? Their history
is known to him who walks among the golden candlesticks. What violence
may have been done, by headstrong self-will, to him who is called "the
Spirit of counsel and might"? What rejection of the truth which he,
"the Spirit {141} of truth," has appointed for the faith of God's
church till at last the word has been spoken: "Ye do always resist the
Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, so do ye." Is it only Jewish
worshipers to whom these words apply? Is it only a Jewish temple of
which this sentence is true: "Behold your house is left unto you
desolate"? The Spirit will not be entirely withdrawn from the body of
Christ indeed, but there is the Church, and there are churches. A man
may yet live and breathe when cell after cell has been closed by
congestion till at last he only inhales and exhales with a little
portion of one lung. Let him that readeth understand.

The Spirit is the breath of God in the body of his church. While that
divine body survives and must, multitudes of churches have so shut out
the Spirit from rule and authority and supremacy in the midst of them
that the ascended Lord can only say to them: "Thou hast a name to live
and art dead." In a word, so vital and indispensable is the ministry
of the Spirit, that without it nothing else will avail. Some trust in
creeds, and some in ordinances; some suppose that the church's security
lies in a sound theology, and others locate it in a primitive
simplicity of government an