CHAPTER III

THE HOLY SPIRIT IN VICARIOUS SACRIFICE.

HAVING showed, in my last chapter, that the Creator and God of the former dispensation, sometimes called the Father in that relation, was inserted into our human conditions, in just the same vicarious feeling as Christ was in his incarnate suffering, and bore our sins as truly, and wrestled for us in the same tender burdens of love, I now undertake to show the same in respect to the Holy Spirit after Christ; that he works in love as Christ did, and suffers all the incidents of love—compassion, wounded feeling, sorrow, concern, burdened sympathy, violated patience—taking men upon him, to bear them and their sins, precisely as Christ himself did in his sacrifice. He is, in fact, a Christ continued, in all that distinguishes the offering and priesthood of Christ, and is fitly represented in the same way, under a priestly figure, as our intercessor.

I am well aware how very distant all such conceptions are from the commonly received impressions of the The Holy Spirit in personal feeling and character. Holy Spirit. For it is a remarkable fact, apart from all conceptions of a properly vicarious sacrifice in his ministry, that even where his personality is much insisted on, almost nothing is left him commonly in the matter of 75feeling and character, that belongs to personality. Probably enough the reason may be that when we pray, as we familiarly do, that God will send, or give, the Holy Spirit; or shed down, or shed abroad, or pour out, or breathe the Holy Spirit; we allow such figures to carry their meaning too literally, and so fall into the way of regarding him, unwittingly, as a mere influence; some invisible missive, or fluid, or magnetic force, traversing unseen, the hidden depths of souls, to work God’s purpose in them. However this may be, it certainly comes to pass, somehow, that we practically lose out the conception of a genuinely personal character and life, as pertaining to the Holy Spirit. And, in this view, it becomes a matter of great spiritual consequence, apart from the particular subject I have in hand, to restore a juster and more vital conception of the Spirit, such as I am undertaking now to assert. I begin then by a distinct recognition—

1. Of the personality of the Spirit, insisting that, if it be asserted at all, as it certainly should be, it must be asserted with a meaning and not without. Personality that makes no true person. It is very true that the word Spirit [πνευμα,] is a neuter noun, drawing after it the neuter pronoun it. But this is only because the natural symbol resorted to, viz., breath, happened to be a neuter word. Still there are other terms applied to the Spirit, which bear the very highest character of personality. Thus he is promised as being even Christ himself—“I will come to you;” and is called, with Christ, Paraclete, Advocate, Comforter, another Comforter76—and the personal pronoun he is applied to him, just as it is to the Father and the Son. I raise no question here upon the nature of this personality. I only say that he is a person, in just the same personal proper. ties of feeling, love, sacrifice, as the Father and the Son, and that, being perfect in character, he must have exactly the same character. Besides, according to all right conceptions of trinity, God is still a strict unity, or undivided substance, not three substances; and so, on the score of unity, as before on the score of personality, the Holy Spirit must be more than a divine somewhat, emptied of all divine graces and perfections—the full and perfect God, even as that same fullness dwelt in Jesus bodily. The Holy Spirit works thus in a ministry of love precisely as Jesus did, end the love is just the same kind of love, burdened for men, burdened for enemies, heaving in silent agonies of passion to recover and save; fulfilling in every particular the Christly terms of sacrifice. Again—

2. It requires, every one may easily perceive, quite as much suffering patience, and affliction of feeling, or The work of the Spirit is in sacrifice. even of what is called passion, to carry on the work of the Spirit, as it did to fulfill the ministry and bear the cross of Jesus. In the first place, the work of the Spirit covers the whole ground of human life, broad as the world is, and continues through all the untold generations of time. And in this world-wide operation he is enduring, not Pilate, and the soldiers, and a few Jewish priests, but the contradiction of all sinners that live. He is betrayed by 77more then Judas, denied by more than Peter; struggling on, from age to age, with all the falsities, and treasons, and corruptions, all the unspeakable disgusts, of all bosom perversity; acting, and suffering, not before them indeed as Christ did, but as it were in perpetual contact with them.

Neither let us imagine, as too many do, in their superficial haste, that the principal suffering and sacrifice of Christ consisted in the pains he bore in his body. The pains of his moral sensibility, the burdens that oppressed his vicarious feeling, cost him more than his cross, as any one may see who takes the meaning of his Gethsemane. Indeed this one look down into the depth of his divine feeling seems to have been permitted us, that our mind might be taken away from the foolish opinion that his principal sacrifice lay in the pangs of a few hours’ bodily suffering. Indeed these bodily pains of Christ on the cross appear to be a kind of condescension rather to our coarseness, that he might raise an outward flag of distress for our dull sensuous nature to look upon; while to him, the principal woe is that which, as incarnate love, he bore all through his ministry, in his griefs, disgusts, and wounded sensibilities; that which once or twice he barely speaks of, as when he says “now is my soul troubled;” that which made him, to his friends, “a man of sorrows;” that which, in the garden, took hold of him, even as an agony, the most appalling scene of tragedy ever beheld in our world. In a quiet, silent hour, when his person is threatened by no appearance of danger, the wail of 78his burdened heart breaks out in a way of intensity that is even terrible; while in his trial and mockery, and the bodily torture of his death, his serenity is more remarkable even than his distress. Perceiving thus how the real pain of Jesus, that which constituted the principal cost of his sacrifice, was the burden that lay upon his feeling, baffled and wronged as that feeling ever was, we are let into the precise conception of that equally heavy burden that is borne by the Spirit always. And this long, weary draft upon his patience, his disgusts, and wounded sensibilities—this it is that makes his intercession. We pass now—

3. To that which is to be more decisive than our own thoughts or constructive endeavors, viz., to the direct Scripture representations. exhibitions of the Scripture itself. And here, since I must abridge the review as much as possible, I will pass all the more casual notifications of the Spirit which speak of doing him “despite,” of his being “grieved,” and “vexed,” and “lied unto,” and “resisted;” that show the eminently Christly “gifts of healing” ministered by him, allowing it also to be said of him as of Christ—“Himself took our infirmities and bare our sicknesses;” that call him “Christ,” and “the Spirit of Christ,” and “Christ dwelling in us,” and “Christ living in us”—in all which it is made clear that he has all the sentiment, and sensibility, and even wounded sensibility, of Christ himself—Christ’s equivalent in short, abiding in the heart.

Having merely alluded to these very significant tokens, I go on to notice three principal conceptions 79under which the intercessory character and feeling of the Spirit are specially displayed.

Thus, first of all, he goes into the ministry of Christ with him and upon him, as the qualifying impulse, in some sense, of his work; resting upon With Christ in his ministry. him as a dove in his baptism; leading him into and through the great soul-struggle of the temptation; bestowed upon him “without measure” in his doctrine; travailing with him, last of all, in his Gethsemane and his cross; so that we may say, when all is done, “who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without spot to God.” Instigator thus, and upholder of Jesus, in all his ministry and sacrifice, how strange is the inversion we make, when we allow ourselves to think of him as being only a bare impersonal force or influence!

A second and partly reverse, though really agreeing conception of the Spirit is met, in his appointed vicarship, or substituted ministry, acting in Takes Christ’s place and continues his work. the place of Christ himself. Thus Christ declaring to his disciples, “it is expedient for you that I go away,” promises the Spirit as “another Comforter” in his place. And the reason of the substitution is not difficult. Having brought on his outwardly historic work to a close, Christ perceives that his permanent, or protracted stay in the flesh and before the senses, would be rather a hindrance than a help to farther progress. If it were possible for him, as a visible Saviour and resident, to win disciples all over the world and in all ages, they would yet be disciples 80not of faith, but of the eyes; aching still to see him, more than to be like him; thronging on to his seat as pilgrims over continents and seas; yet not one in a hundred of them ever getting near enough to speak with him; wanting all, of course, a visible kingdom since they have a visible king. Therefore he declares a change of administration—that the Christ of the eye is to be withdrawn, and the Spirit, an invisible, diffusive, pervasive, every where present, always abiding, Christ substituted—a Christ whom no distance can remove, whom the sick man can have in his chamber, the prisoner in his dungeon, the exile in his place of banishment, the martyr in his fires; present to the heart, more present than looks, or words; present where the eye is blind and can not see him, and the ear is deaf and can not hear him speak. And yet he is to be the consciously felt Christ. “The world seeth me not but ye see me.” “At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father and ye in me and I in you.” In him, as their living interpreter, present to consciousness in all the sentiment, love, sacrifice, of the Father and the Son, the disciples are always to know the ascended Lord of their hearts, and be kept in the sense of his society and even of his burdened sympathy itself.

This brings us to a third Scripture conception of the Spirit, where the vicarious working is even more formally Has his Gethsemane. displayed³³Rom. viii, 26-7.—“Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities; for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit 81itself maketh intercession for us with groanings that can not be uttered. And he that searcheth the hearts, knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.”

Our translators appear to have looked upon it as a thing quite unsupposable, that any priestly and vicarious working pertains to the ministry of the Spirit, and have cast the words of their version accordingly, so as to make it a great deal less distinctly vicarious than the original. Besides it would be nearly impossible to so translate the passage as to give it, in English, the full vicarious typology and substitutive import of the original Greek version. Thus our English word helpeth—[“helpeth our infirmities”]—represents a long Greek word compounded of two prepositions and a verb; the preposition with indicating a conjunction of sympathy, the preposition instead of, indicating substitution, and the verb taking hold of as in participation;⁴⁴συναντιλαμβάνεται. precisely the same verb in precisely the same phrase which is translated, “took our infirmities,”Matth. viii, 17 in the remarkable passage that declares the vicarious assumption of our bodily infirmities and evils by Christ; only there the verb is not intensified by the prepositions here compounded with it. Are we then to judge that a much stronger word of vicarious assumption is here to be emptied of every such import, and translated simply “helpeth” because it refers to the Holy Spirit?

Again it is to be specially noted that the Holy Spirit is twice represented in this passage under the priestly 82figure of making intercession; the same which is applied to Christ in but a single instance, and becomes, The priestly conception of his work. in the estimation of many teachers, the crowning doctrine of his mediatorship. Precisely how much, or what is to be understood by this intercession, as affirmed of Christ, it may be difficult to settle. The word means literally to intervene for, as when a friend intervenes between a superior and an inferior, to obtain some act of forgiveness, or help from the former. There is somewhat of a mediatorial character in the intervention, somewhat also of a vicarious character, inasmuch as the intervening or interceding party is supposed to have the case of the humbler and more dejected one upon his own feeling, and to be a volunteer bearer of his burden for him. In the case of the Spirit the vicarious, substitutive character of the intervention or intercession is grammatically intensified, when compared with the intercession ascribed to Christ, by the doubling of the preposition for, compounding it, first with the verb, and then placing it again before the noun or subject.⁵⁵ὑπερεντυγχάνει ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν The intercession ascribed to Christ—“able to save them to the uttermost them that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them”—plainly enough represents the reconciling work he is able to do in souls, under the objective and priestly figure of a perpetual offering to God, for the propitiation of God to them. The intercession of the Spirit on the other hand is subjectively conceived and not otherwise, for his ministry is 83only subjective in men’s hearts; it is the wrestling within of his own divine sympathy and suffering love, to raise them into accord with God’s mind and the secret motions of his goodness; thus to give insight and power to their prayers, and draw them into all the secret helpings of God in a state of reconciliation.

All which he is said to do “with groanings which can not be uttered”—better “with groanings unuttered;” that is, with strivings of concern or burdened feeling, that are the silent Gethsemane of his ministry. The groanings of Christ are audible and so might the groanings of the Spirit be, if he had the vocal organs of a body connected with his feeling. Enough that one, as truly as the other, and both in exact conformity, fulfill the natural pathology of love and sacrifice; Christ when he throws himself upon the ground, groaning aloud for the mere burden he has upon his feeling, and without any other kind of distress; and the Spirit when he enters into the struggles of our disorder and weakness with so great concern, groaning inaudibly in us and heaving out our soul in sighs and prayers.

It is no small confirmation of the view thus given, that when it is carried forward into the latter of the: two verses, all that awkwardness which the commentators appear to have felt, in assigning to it any precise meaning, is completely removed. Omitting the words “will of,” which are not in the original, we read—“And he that [sought unto by prayer] searcheth the hearts, knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit [the mind which the Spirit is working in us] because he [the Spirit] maketh 84intercession for the saints [preparing a mind in them] according to God”—working that is from and toward just that counsel of vicarious love which has dwelt in the Godhead from eternity. God he infers—this is the strain of his argument—must certainly be in the secret of what proceeds from himself, and when fallen souls are wrought into that same mind by the Spirit, their prayers must be accepted and their footing of reconciliation established. In this manner do the Scriptures represent the Holy Spirit, in his vicarious work and office of intercession—bathing us inwardly in all Christly sympathy, bearing our burdens of weakness, and sin, and groaning, as it were, his own longings for us into our prayers. At the same time it is to be admitted that there is a good deal of language applied to Christ and his work in the Scriptures which is not applied to the Holy Spirit; which also it is no part of my present subject to explain. I only say that it contemplates a difference in the offices of Christ and the Spirit, and their modes and kinds of operation. My present concern is simply to show that the Holy Spirit works in the same feeling as Christ did, bears the same burdens on his love, suffers the same wounded sensibility, encounters loss and sacrifice under the same vicarious impulse. I do not undertake to identify Christ and the Spirit in such a sense as to make them do the same things, or work by the same method. One operates outwardly, the other inwardly; one before the understanding, the other in it; one making impressions by what is acted before the senses and addressed to thought, 85the other by groanings and throbs of divine feeling back of thought. This much, however, I will say, that if the sacrifices of the much enduring, agonizing spirit, were acted before the senses, in the manner of the incarnate life of Jesus, he would seem to make the world itself a kind of Calvary from age to age, and would just as impressively sanctify the law, by the perennial obedience of his sacrifices, as Christ did by the casual sacrifice of his cross. And this brings me to add—

4. That the reason why the Holy Spirit is regarded so much less tenderly by us than Christ, or even as having no particular title to our love, is Only does not meet us in the senses. that we are creatures in the senses, carnalized also and blinded, as regards all spiritual perceptions, by the sensuous habit of our sin, and that Christ meeting us in the senses, speaking to us with a man’s voice, enduring toil and contempt for us, joining himself to us in all our external adversities, looking on us with a face gloomed by sorrow, or bathed in the sweat of agony, or stained by the blood of his thorny crown and cross—meeting us in this way, having a human person for his organ, Christ lays hold of our feeling, by his address to the senses, and we begin to imagine some special tenderness and fellow sensibility in him, awakened by his human relationship itself, and dating after that relationship begun. Whereas he has only come into humanity because the feeling was in him before, and has taken up the human nature, that he might have an organ of what before was hid, unexpressed, in his divine feeling. And so the Holy Spirit, 86coming after, comes in that same feeling, tempered to just the same pitch of vicarious sacrifice for men. Jesus is not better than the Father, nor better than the Spirit, his substitute. We think so, if at all, only because we see him with our eyes; and he is put before our eyes, in the flesh, for the very purpose of expressing to us adequately what is in the Everlasting Godhead, unvoiced to feeling in us hitherto, unexpressed by look, or form, or act, or agony. Could we make the still small voice of the Spirit audible, could we bring into sound the groanings unuttered, could we invest the Spirit in our hearts with a look that is the fit expression of his sensibility, and feel the tears of his divine pity dropping on the face of our sin, how evident would it be made to us, that we have, in him, the true Christ-passion, living always in the secret center of our life; the very same that we had visibly before us, in the tender ministries and suffering graces of the Son of Mary.

Perhaps it may be necessary to add, that the Holy Spirit in such a ministry of sacrifice and burdened feeling, Works in authority also. holds the magisterial key of divinity still, and makes it none the less a piercing and strong ministry. He is just like Christ in this respect. The tenderness and self-sacrificing love of Christ never subsided into softness, or a look of weakness. Authority goes with him. He lays himself upon the proud, the plunderers of the poor, the pretenders and hypocrites in religion, in words of fearful severity. He is kingly even in his passion. And in just the same manner the Spirit has thunders for guilty consciences, 87none the less terrible, that, like his groanings, they are inaudible; scourges of rods to lay upon the backs of all defiant sins; fiery-pointed arrows of conviction to hurl among the drowsy fears, and awake them out of their sleep. He sharpens the soul’s hunger, stirs it up to self-disgust, kindles aspiration, strikes the bell of time and makes it ring the note of flying years. A faithful and strong Spirit, he can also be a piercing and severe Spirit. The vicarious love makes him none the less a king, and the kingdom of God he establishes within none the less truly a kingdom. In a word, he bears the whole divine character into his ministry; and brings it in upon our hearts’ presence as a revelation there of God’s full majesty. Adding this for safeguard, our conclusion is that the ministry of the Holy Spirit is as truly a ministry of suffering and vicarious sacrifice as that of Christ himself.

I can not drop the subject in hand without adverting to a great and very hurtful misconception of the Gospel plan itself, that connects with this same misconception of the Holy Spirit which I am here trying to correct. Thus how very commonly is it given as a true summation of the Gospel, that Christ, by his death and A mechanical Gospel which is not the true. sacrifice, prepares a ground of forgiveness or justification, and then that the Holy Spirit is sent by a kind of immediate, or efficient agency, to renew the soul in a forgivable state. Christ works before the law, and the Holy Spirit works in the soul; one to open a gate of mercy, the other to lead into that gate. As if Christ, in his agony, and cross, and 88all the feeling of his most feeling and beautiful ministry, were not engaged to be a reconciling power in souls, at all, but only to set himself before God’s justice, and his just retributions, buying their silence by his pains; whereupon the Holy Spirit, a very good being doubt. less, though doing nothing specially here by goodness, is sent forth, in adequate force, to be the great Regenerator. The regeneration accordingly is not a point won by any Gospel siege of love and sacrifice, but carried by mighty impressment rather, much as if by some unseen hydrostatic pressure, or some silent gun-shot stroke of omnipotence. These sapless timbers! these fleshless, nerveless bones! how sad a figure do they make of the Gospel, where the true Christ and Spirit come together, in love and sacrifice, to beget us in holiness, by the longings felt of their joint passion in our hearts.

It results, of course, under such a conception of the Gospel plan, that we are drawn to no very close personal union either with Christ, or the Spirit, and just that is missed which, in God’s view, is the principal aim of all; viz., the power to be exerted in us by the feeling expressed to us. For if Christ, in what is called his vicarious sacrifice, is wholly withdrawn from us, and is only doing a work before justice and the law, in some court of reckoning we know not where, he is plainly doing nothing to win a place in our consciousness, or to produce a Christly consciousness in us. He does not move upon us, but upon the books, thinking only of the credit to be gained for us there by the contribution of his pains. How then is he going to be 89formed in us? And by what conceivable method are we to have him inwardly revealed, and to say, as the conscious witness of our hearts, Christ liveth in us? However good and great the work he is doing among the retributive economies for us, he is not here for the doing specially of any thing in us.

Meantime the Spirit is reduced to an attitude where we are unlikely as may be, to conceive any such thing as the greatness and blessedness of a conscious, The Spirit our invisible friend. everlastingly established friendship with him. He is not here, to reach us, in any sense, by the divine feeling. He is not Christ taken out of form and locality, to be present everywhere and be revealed, unseen, as a Christ living in all hearts. But he is thought of more as an efficient divine operator in souls; doing a work of repair in them, or, at most, a work of moral suasion before their choices; neither of which is very much related to our personal sentiments and the engagement of our love to his character. We think of him as of some impersonal force, some hidden fire, some holy gale, not as a friend present in sympathy, or wounded feeling, to every throb of our hearts; disgusted by sensuality and passion, pained by vanity, offended by pride, grieved by neglect, hurt by unbelief and all worldly inclinings; our eternal counselor, guide, helper, stay; such a Spirit as, living in us, keeps the sensibilities even of Gethsemane and the passion in immediate contact with our inmost life. How great value and power there might be in such a conception is obvious. What mindfulness. what delicate reverences and exact 90loyalty of living would it require, and how dear the confidence it would support. Whether it be a relation more fearful or tender, more humble or lofty, more careful or inspiring, I hardly know; it is every thing great, beautiful, tender, holy, powerful. Losing the sense of such a Spirit and of such a personal friendship with him, we seem to lose every thing. He is our other Comforter, our second Christ; and when we lose our faith in him, or hold him but dimly, we are just so far reduced to an experience that is orphanage—even as Christ himself conceived when he said, “I will not leave you orphans, I will come to you.”