its Origin. This is here referred by St. Paul explicitly to what may be denominated the Ascension Gift of our Lord Jesus Christ. When he ascended up on high, we are told, leading captivity captive, far above all heavens, that he might fill all things, he gave gifts unto men; and he gave some apostles, and some prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers. The ministry was the result and fruit of his glorification at the right hand of God, when he became “head over all things to the Church, which is his body, the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”63 All lay in the Gift of the Holy Ghost, as his presence began to reveal itself in the world on the day of Pentecost.
This gift forms in a certain sense the end or completion of the Gospel. In it the “Mystery of Godliness,” the economy of redemption, came first to its full perfection as the power of God, not in purpose merely, but in actual reality, for the salvation of the world. What was begun when the Word became Flesh in the Virgin’s womb, was brought here to its proper consummation. The Incarnation of Christ and the Mission of the Holy Ghost stand related to each other, not simply as cause and effect, but as commencement and conclusion of one and the same grand fact. The first was in order to the last, and looked forward to it continually as its own necessary issue and scope. Short of this, the design of Christ’s coming into the world could not be reached. He took upon him our nature, that he might die for our sins and rise again for our justification, that is, that having by his death exhausted the curse which lay upon the world through the fall, and having broken thus the power of death and hell, be might be constituted by his resurrection and glorification the head of a new creation, the principle and fountain of a new order of life among men, in the bosom of which it should be possible for the believing and obedient, through all time, to be saved from their iniquities and made meet for the inheritance of the saints in light. All this took place by the mission of the Holy Ghost, for which it was necessary that room should in this way be first made by the whole previous manifestation and work of the Redeemer.
The New Testament is full of this thought; so that it is truly wonderful there should ever be any doubt in regard to it, with those who pretend to take the Scriptures as their guide. The Gospel goes throughout upon the assumption that the power which Christ carried in himself for the salvation of the world could not make itself felt with free, full, constant action among men, till it had gone through a certain course of qualification previously in his own person. The Spirit dwelt in him, we know, without measure; but so long as he continued in our present mortal state, it was necessarily confined to his own individual life. Between it and the surrounding world of humanity, comprehended as this was in the order of mere nature, rose as a high wall of separation, the law of sin and death which reigns throughout this constitution, making it impossible for the law of spiritual life in Christ Jesus to reach it under its own form. Death and sin must first be conquered on their own territory by the Son of God himself; which however implied, of course, that he should with real victory transcend, at the same time, their domain, and so take possession of the world under the form of a new, higher existence, no longer natural, but supernatural, from the plain of which it might be possible for him to extend to men generally the power of his redemption in a corresponding real and truly supernatural way. The order of nature could never be the platform of any such work; and therefore it must be left behind for the sake of the work itself; and room must be found for the mystery of righteousness in another system altogether, in the order of grace, as this was to be constituted and made permanent in the world by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
This great idea underlies all our Saviour’s instructions, as it may be said also to be the actuating sense of his own entire life. “Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die,” we hear him saying (John 12:24), “it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” This refers to himself; but then he adds immediately, as the standing law and general conception of the Christian salvation: “He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world, shall keep it unto life eternal.”64 So after his resurrection (Luke 24:25–26), “O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” Everywhere we may see, that in the mind of our Saviour, the whole purpose and force of his life were felt to be conditioned by his dying, and so entering upon a new mode of existence, in which he should no longer be subject to the limitations of his mortal state, but have his humanity itself exalted above nature, and clothed with dominion over it for the benefit of his Church. His removal from the world of sense in this way was to be no loss to his disciples, but on the contrary great gain. He would be put to death in the flesh, as St. Paul expresses it, only that he might be quickened in the Spirit.65 His presence with his people, under this form, would be not less real than it had been before, but in some sense, we might say, even more real, as being at the same time far more unrestrained, and intimately near, and powerfully efficacious for the ends of the Gospel, than it was ever possible for it to be previously to his glorification. For it is by the Spirit that he enters into living communication with the members of his mystical body; and the Spirit or Holy Ghost, we are told (John 7:39), could not be given, or was not, as the original text has it—that is, was not as the actual revelation of the Saviour’s higher presence in the world—till Jesus was glorified. “I will not leave you orphans,” he says (John 14:18–19), “I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me because I live, ye shall live also.” So again (John 16:7), “It is expedient for you that I go away; for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you, but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” The presence in the flesh must be withdrawn, to make room for a higher, better, and far more glorious presence in the Spirit.
The great burden indeed of our Saviour’s valedictory discourse may be said to turn upon this thought; and after his resurrection, accordingly, all is made to depend with him on what was to be now brought to pass by his formal ascension into heaven. “Behold I send the promise of my Father upon you,” it was said (Luke 14:49. Acts 1:4–5), “but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high. For John truly baptized with water; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.” The mission of the Spirit is made thus to be the great object of his whole previous life. It formed the travail of his soul, from the commencement of his sufferings to their close. For this he wrestled with the powers of hell. This was emphatically the purchase of his death, the boon of salvation which he came into the world to obtain for our fallen race. He became the author and finisher of our faith (Heb 12:2), by enduring the cross, with all its shame, and so being set down at the right hand of the throne of God; ascending up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things; leading captivity captive, and taking possession of the world as its supernatural king and head, that he might bestow gifts upon men. And all these gifts were comprehended primarily in the Holy Ghost, as the form under which it was now made possible for the power of his glorified life to reveal itself with free effect in the world. The Holy Ghost, in this view, is not one among other gifts for which the world is indebted to Christ, but the sum and absolute unity at once of the whole; the Gift of gifts; that without which there could be no room to conceive of any other, and through which only all others have their significance and force. It is that which men need as the very complement of their life, that they may be redeemed from the power of the fall, and raised to a participation of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4), having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. For “except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God;” and only what is thus born of God, as distinguished from all that is the birth of mere flesh (1 John 5:4), can ever have power to overcome the world. So wide and vast is the grace procured for man by the death and resurrection of the Son of God, and bestowed upon them after his ascension through the gift of the Holy Ghost.
This Gift now forms the origin and ground of the Christian Church; which by its very nature, therefore, is a supernatural constitution, a truly real and abiding fact in the world, and yet, at the same time, a fact not of the world in its natural view, but flowing from the resurrection of Christ and belonging to that new order of things which has been brought to pass by his glorification at the right hand of God; a fact not dependent, accordingly, on the laws and conditions that reign in “this present evil world,”66 and not at the mercy of its changes in any way—“against which the
