It is this ever-recurring revelation to penitent, believing hearts, by the agency of the ever-present Holy Spirit, that makes faith in Jesus Christ living and invincible. “I know He is Lord, for He saves my soul from sin, and He saves me now,” is an argument that rationalism and unbelief cannot answer nor overthrow, and so long as there are men in the world who can say this, faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ is secure; and this experience and witness come by the Holy Ghost.
“I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost,
I love to worship Thee;
My risen Lord for aye were lost
But for Thy company.”
And so it is by the guidance and teaching of the Holy Spirit that all saving truth becomes vital to us.
It is He that makes the Bible a living Book; it is He that convinces the world of judgment (John xvi. 8-11); it is He that makes men certain that there is a Heaven of surpassing and enduring glory and joy, and a Hell of endless sorrow and woe for those who sin away their day of grace and die in impenitence.
Who have been the mightiest and most faithful preachers of the gloom and terror and pain of a perpetual Hell? those who have been the mightiest and most effective preachers of God’s compassionate love.
In all periods of great revival, when men seemed to live on the borderland, and in the vision of eternity, Hell has been preached. The leaders in these revivals have been men of prayer and faith and consuming love, but they have been men who knew “the terrors of the Lord,” and, therefore, they preached the judgments of God, and they proved that the law with its penalties is a schoolmaster to bring men to Christ (Gal. iii. 24). Fox, the Quaker; Bunyan, the Baptist; Baxter, the Puritan; Wesley and Fletcher, and Whitefield and Caughey, the Methodists; Finney, the Presbyterian; Edwards and Moody, the Congregationalists; and General Booth, the Salvationist, have preached it, not savagely, but tenderly and faithfully, as a mother might warn her child against some great danger that would surely follow careless and selfish wrong-doing.
What men have loved and laboured and sacrificed as these men? Their hearts have been a flaming furnace of love and devotion to God, and an over-flowing fountain of love and compassion for men; but just in proportion as they have discovered God’s love and pity for the sinner, so have they discovered His wrath against sin and all obstinate wrong-doing; and as they have caught glimpses of Heaven and declared its joys and everlasting glories to men, so they have seen Hell, with its endless punishment, and with trembling voice and overflowing eyes have they warned men to “flee from the wrath to come.”
Were these men, throbbing with spiritual life and consumed with devotion to the Kingdom of God and the everlasting well-being of their fellowmen, led to this belief by the Spirit of Truth, or were they misled? Is it the prophet, weeping and praying and preaching and fighting for God and men, to whom the Spirit has always first spoken and revealed the things of God? Or is it the philosopher, or dry-as-dust theologian, or the popular preacher of smooth things, sitting in his study and among his books, spinning out of his own mind his conceits concerning God’s plan and purpose in the universe?
Does Seneca or the Psalmist, Plato or Paul, Rousseau or Wesley, the idolised, high-salaried, soft-raimented preacher of a wide gate and broad way to life and Heaven, or the veteran soul-winner, General Booth, more clearly make known the mind of God in matters that are spiritual?
“The things of the Spirit... are spiritually discerned” (I Cor. ii. 14), says Paul. It is not by searching and philosophising that these things are found out, but by revelation. “Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee,” said Jesus to Peter, “but My Father which is in Heaven” (Matthew xvi. 17). The great teacher of truth is the Spirit of Truth, and the only safe expounders and guardians of sound doctrine are men filled with the Holy Ghost.