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LIDDON INFLUENCES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Henby Parry Liddon was bom at Nortb Stoneham, Hampshire, in 1829. His in tellectual power and fearless and earnest preaching attracted immense congrega tions to St. Paul's Cathedral, London. He sought to meet the speculative falla cies of his day by truth clearly and boldly proclaimed. Probably his greatest fault in delivery was that he tied himself slav ishly to a manuscript in all his preaching. There was a force and intensity to his de livery, however, that often projected his words towards his hearers like great pro jectiles across a battlefield. Dr. Arthur S. Hoyt recommends him for study in these words: "Canon Liddon brings the riches of exegesis and theology and philosophy to the pulpit, and gives to the sermon the distinction of his refined and spiritual personality." He died in 1890.
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1829― INFLUENCES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, hut canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth, ―St. John iii., 8.
WHO has not felt the contrast, the al most tragic contrast, between the high station of the Jewish doctor, member of the Sanhedrin, master in Israel, and the ignorance of elementary religious truth, as we Christians must deem it, which he displayed in this interview with our blest Lordf At first sight it seems diflScult to un derstand how our Lord could have used the simile in the text when conversing with an educated and thoughtful man, well conversed in the history and literature of God's ancient people ; and, indeed, a negative criticism has availed itself of this and of some other fea tures in the narrative, in the interest of the theory that Nicodemus was only a fictitious type of the higher classes in Jewiish society, as they were pictured to itself by the imagina tion of the fourth Evangelist. Such a sup position, opposed to external facts and to all internal probabilities, would hardly have been entertained, if the critical ingenuity of its au
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thor had been seconded by any spiritual expe rience. Nicodemus is very far from being a caricature; and our Lord's method here, as elsewhere, is to lead on from familiar phrases and the well-remembered letter to the spirit and realities of religion. The Jewish schools were acquainted with the expression *'a new creature"; but it had long since become a mere shred of official rhetoric. As applied to a Jewish proselyte, it scarcely meant more than a change in the outward relations of religious life. Our Lord told Nicodemus that every man who would see the kingdom of God which He was founding must undergo a second birth; and Nicodemus, who had been accustomed to the phrase all his life, could not understand it if it was to be supposed to mean anything real. ''How," he asks, ''can a man be bom when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb, and be bomf " Our Lord does not extricate him from this blundering literalism; He repeats His own original assertion, but in terms which more fully express His meaning: "Verily, verily, I say unto theie, Except a man be bom of water and of the Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of God. That which is bom of the flesh is flesh; and that which is bom of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee. Ye must be bom again." Our Lord's reference to water would not have been unintelligible to Nicodemus; every one in
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Judaea knew that the Baptist had insisted on immersion in water as a symbol of the puri fication of the soul of man. Certainly, in con necting ** water" with the Spirit and the new birth, our Lord's language, glancing at that of the prophet, went very far beyond this. He could only be fuUy understood at a later time, when the sacrament of baptism had been instituted, just as the true sense of His early allusions to His death could not have been ap prehended until after the crucifixion. But Nicodemus, it is plain, had not yet advanced beyond his original difficulty; he could not conceive how any second birth was possible, without altogether violating the course of na ture. And our Lord penetrates His thoughts and answers them. He answers them by pointing to that invisible agent who could achieve, in the sphere of spiritual and mental life, what the Jewish doctor deemed so im possible a feat as a second birth. Nature, in deed, contained no force that could compass such a result ; but nature in this, as in other matters, was a shadow of something beyond itself.
It was late at night when our Lord had this interview with the Jewish teacher. At the pauses in conversation, we may conjecture, they heard the wind without as it moaned ^ along the narrow streets of Jerusalem; and our Lord, as was His wont, took His creature into His service ―^the service of spiritual
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truth. The wind was a figure of the Spirit. Our Lord would not have used the same word for both. The wind might teach Nieodemus something of the action of Him who is the real Author of the new birth of man. And it would do this in two ways more especially.
On a first survey of nature, the wind arrests man's attention, as an unseen agent which seems to be moving with entire freedom. ** The wind bloweth where it listeth." It is fettered by none of those conditions which confine the swiftest bodies that traverse the surface of the earth; it sweeps on as if independent of law, rushing hither and thither, as tho obeying its own wayward and momentary im pulse. Thus it is an apt figure of a self-de termining invisible force; and of a force which is at times of overmastering power. Sometimes, indeed, its breath is so gentle, that only a single leaf or blade of grass will at distant intervals seem to give the faintest token of its action ; yet, even thus, it "bloweth where it listeth." Sometimes it bursts upon the earth with destructive violence; nothing can resist its onslaught ; the most solid build ings give way; the stoutest trees bend before it; whatever is frail and delicate can only escape by the completeness of its submission. Thus, too, it "bloweth where it listeth." Be yond anything else that strikes upon the senses of man, it is suggestive of free su persensuous power ; it is an appropriate sym
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bol of an irruption of the invisible into the world of sense, of the action, so tender or so imperious, of the divine and eternal Spirit upon the human soul.
But the wind is also an agent about whose proceedings we really know almost nothing. "Thou hearest the sound thereof'*; such is our Lord's concession to man's claim to knowl edge. '* Thou canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth"; such is the reserve which He makes in respect of human ignor ance. Certainly we do more than hear the sound of the wind ; its presence is obvious to three of the senses. We feel the chill or the fury of the blast ; and, as it sweeps across the ocean, or the forest, or the field of com, we see how the blades rise and fall in graceful curves, and the trees bend, and the wateirs sink and swell into waves which are the meas ure of its strength. But our Lord says, ' * Thou hearest the sound thereof. ' ' He would have us test it by the most spiritual of the senses. It whispera, or it moans, or it roara as it passes us; it has a pathos all its own. Yet what do we really know about it ? * ' Thou canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth." Does the wind then obey no rule ; is it a mere symbol of unfettered caprice? Surely not. If, as the psalmist sings, **God bringeth the winds out of his treasuries," He acts, we may be sure, here as always, whether in nature or in grace, by some law,
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which his own perfections impose upon His action. He may have given to ns of these later times to see a very little deeper beneath the surface of the natural world than was the case with our fatheirs. Perchance we explain the immediate antecedents of the phenome non ; but can we explain our own explanation ? The frontier of our ignorance is removed one stage farther back; but "the way of the wind" is as fitting an expression for the mys teries now as it was in the days of Solomon. We know that there is no cave of -^olus. We know that the wind is the creature of that great Master who works everywhere and in cessantly by rule. But, as the wind still sweeps by us who call ourselves the children of an age of knowledge, and we endeavor to give our fullest answer to the question, ** Whence it cometh, and whither it goethT' we discover that, as the symbol of a spiritual force, of whose presence we are conscious, while we are unable to determine, with mod erate confidence, either the secret principle or the range of its action, the wind is as full of meaning still as in the days of Nicodemus. When our Lord has thus pointed to the free dom and the mysteriousness of the wind, He adds, **So is every one that is bom of the Spirit." The simile itself would have led us to expect ―^**So is the Spirit of God." The man born of the Spirit would answer not to the wind itself, but to the sensible effect
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of the wind. There is a break of corre spondence between the simile and its ap plication. The simile directs attention to the divine Author of the new birth in man. The words which follow direct atten tion to the human subject upon whom the divine agent works. Something similar is observable when our Lord compares the king dom of heaven to a merchantman seeking goodly pearls ; the kingdom really corresponds not to. the merchantman, but to the pearl of great price which the merchantman buys. In such cases, we may be sure, the natural cor respondence between a simile and its appli cation is not disturbed without a motive. And the reason for this disturbance is presumably that the simile is not adequate to the full pur pose of the speaker, who is anxious to teach some larger truth than its obvious application would suggest. In the case before us, we may be allowed to suppose, that by His reference to the wind our Lord desired to convey some thing more than the real but m3rsterious agency of the Holy Spirit in the new birth of man. His language seems designed, not mere ly to correct the materialistic narrowness of lie Jewish doctor, not merely to answer by anticipation the doubts of later days as to the spiritual efficacy of His own sacrament of regeneration, but to picture, in words which should be read to the end of time, the general work of that divine person whose mission of
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mercy to our race was at once the consequence and the completion of His own.
It may be useful to trace the import of our Lord's simile in three fields of the action of the holy and eternal Spirit ; His creation of a sacred literature, His guidance of a divine so ciety, and His work upon individual souls.
I. As, then, we turn over the pages of the Bible, must we not say, *'The wind of heaven bloweth where it listeth*'? If we might rev erently imagine ourselves scheming before hand what kind of a book the Book of Ckxi ought to be, how different would it be from the actual Bible. There would be as many bibles as there are souls, and they would differ as widely. But in one thing, amid all their differences, they would probably agree ; they would lack the variety, both in form and sulKttance, of the holy Book which the Church of God places in the hands of her children. The self-assertion, the scepticism, and the f as^ tidiousness of our day would meet like the men of the second Roman triumvirate on that island in the Reno, and would draw up their lists of proscription. One would condemn the poetry of Scripture as too inexact ; another its history as too largely secular; another its me taphysics as too transcendental, or as hostile to some fanciful ideal of ** simplicity,*' or as likely to quench a purely moral enthusiasm; The archaic history of the Pentateuch, or the sterner side of the ethics of the psalter, or the
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supematuralism of the histories of Elijah or of Daniel, or the so-called pessimism of Eeele siastes, or the alleged secularism of Esther, or the literal import of the Song of Solomon, would be in turn condemned. Nor could the apostles hope to escape: St. John would be too mysticid in this estimate; St. James too legal in that ; St. Paul too dialectical, or too metaphysical, or too easily capable of an an tinomian interpretation; St. Peter too unde cided, as if balancing between St. Paul and St. James. Our new Bible would probably be uniform, narrow, symmetrical; it would be entirely made up of poetry, or of history, wr of fonnal propositions, or of philosophical speculation, or of lists of moral maxims; it would be modeled after the type of some cur rent writer on English history, or some popu lar poet or metaphysician, or some sentimen talist who abjures history and philosophy alike on principle, or some composer of well intentioned religious tracts for general cir culation. The inspirations of heav^i would be taken in hand, and instead of a wind blow ing where it listeth, we should have a wind, no doubt, of some kind, rustling earnestly enough along some very narrow crevices or channels, in obedience to the directions^ of some one form of human prejudice, or pas sion, or fear, or hope.
The Bible is like nature in its immense, its exhaustless variety ; like nature, it reflects all
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the higher moods of the human soul, because it does much more ; because it brings us face to face with the infinity of the divine life. In the Bible the wind of heaven pays scant heed to our anticipations or our prejudices; it ' * blowetii where it listeth. ' ' It breathes not only in the divine charities of the gospels, not only in the lyrical sallies of the epistles, not only in the great announcements scattered here and there in Holy Scripture of the mag nificence, or the compassion, or the benevo lence of € but also in tiie stem language of the prophets, in the warnings and lessons of the historical books, in the revelations of divine justice and of human responsibility which abound in either Testament. ** Where it listeth. ' ' Not only where our sense of liter ary beauty is stimulated, as in St. Paul's pic ture of charity, by lines which have taken cap tive the imagination of the world, not only where feeling and conscience echo the verdict of authority and the promptings of reverence, but also where this is not the case; where neither precept nor example stimulates us, and we are left face to face with historical or ethi cal material, which appears to us to inspire no spiritual enthusiasm, or which is highly sug gestive of critical difficulty. Let us be patient ; we shall understand, if we will only wait, how these features of the Bible too are integral parts of a living whole; here, as elsewhere, the Spirit breathes ; in the genealogies of the
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Chronicles as in the last discourse in St. John, though with an admitted difference of manner and degree. He **bloweth where He listeth.*' The apostle's words respecting the Old Testament are true of the New: **A11 Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for cor rection, for instruction in righteousness." And, ** Whatsoever things were written afore time were written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scrip tures might have hope."
** But thou hearest the sound thereof, and canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth. " The majesty of Scripture is recog nized by man, wherever there is, I will not say a spiritual faculty, but a natural sense of beauty. The ''sound" of the wind is per ceived by the trained ear, by the literary taste, by the refinement, by the humanity of every generation of educated men. But what be yond? What of its spiritual source, its spirit ual drift and purpose, its half -concealed but profound unities, its subtle but imperious re lations to conscience? Of these things, so precious to Christians, a purely literary ap preciation of Scripture is generally ignorant ; the sacred Book, like the prophet of the Che bar, is only **as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument." Or again, the "sound thereof" is heard in the admitted empire of
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the Bible over millions of hearts and eon sciences; an empire the evidences of which strike upon the ear in countless ways, and which is far too wide and too secure to be affected by the criticisms that might occasion ally seem to threaten it. What is the secret of this influence of Scripture? Not simply that it is the Book of Revelation ; since it con tains a great deal of matter which lay fairly within the reach of man's natural faculties. The Word or eternal Reason of God is the Revealer ; but Scripture, whether it is a record of divine revelations or of naturally observed facts, is, in the belief of the Christian Church, throughout ''inspired" by the Spirit. In spiration is the word which describes the pres ence and action of the Holy Spirit everywhere in Scripture. We know not how our own spirits, hour by hour, are acted upon by the eternal Spirit, though we do not question the fact; we content ourselves with recognizing what we can not explain. If we believe that Scripture is inspired, we know that it is iii stinct with the presence of Him whose voice we might hear in every utterance, but. of whom we cannot tell whence He cometh or whither He goeth.
II. The history of the Church of Christ from the days of the apostles has been a his tory of spiritual movements. Doubtless it has been a history of much else ; the Church has been the scene of human passions, human
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speculations, human errors. But traversing these, He by whom the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified, has made His presence felt, not only in the perpetual proclamation and elucidation of truth, not only in the silent, never-ceasing sanctification of souls, but also in great upheavals of spir itual life, by which the conscience of Christians has been quickened, or their hold upon the truths of redemption and grace made more in telligent and serious, or their lives and prac tise restored to something like the ideal of the Gk)spels. Even in the apostolic age it was necessary to warn Christians that it was high time to awake out of sleep ; that the night of life was far spent, and the day of eternity was at hand. And ever since, from generation to generation, there has been a succession of efforts within the Church to realize more wor thily the truth of the Christian creed, or tiie ideal of the Christian life. These revivals have been inspired or led by devoted men who have represented the highest conscience of Christendom in their day. They may be traced along the line of Christian history ; the Spirit living in the Church has by them at tested His presence and His will; and has recalled lukewarm generations, paralyzed by indifference or degraded by indulgence, to the true spirit and level of Christian faith and life. . In such movements there is often what
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seems, at first sight, an element of caprice. They appear to contemporaries to be one sided, exaggerated, narrow, fanatical. They are often denounced with a passionate fervor which is so out of proportion to the reality as to border on the grotesque. They are said to exact too much of us, or to concede too much. They are too contemplative in their tendency to be sufficiently practical, or too energetically practical to do justice to religious thought. They are too exclusively literary and aca demical, as being the work of men of books; or they are too popular and insensible to phi losophical considerations, as being the work of men of the people. Or, again, they are so oc cupied with controversy as to forget the claims of devotion, or so engaged in leading souls to a devout life as to forget the un welcome but real necessities of controveray. They are intent on particular moral improve ments so exclusively as to forget what is due to reverence and order; or they are so bent upon rescuing the Church from chronic slov enliness and indecency in public worship as to do less than justice to the paramount in terests of moral truth. Sometimes these move ments are all feeling; sometimes they are all thought; sometimes they are, as it seems, all outward energy. In one age they produce a literature like that of the fourth and fifth centuries; in another they found orders of men devoted to preaching or to works of
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mercy, as in the twelfth; in another they enter the lists, as in the thirteenth century, with a hostile philosophy ; in another they at tempt a much-needed reformation of the Church; in another they pour upon the heathen world a flood of light and warmth from the heart of Christendom. It is easy, as we survey them, to say that something else was needed; or that what was done could have been done better or more completely; or that, had we been there, we should not have been guilty of this onesidedness, or of that exaggeration. We forget, perhaps, who really was there, and whose work it is, though often overlaid and thwarted by human weakness and human passion, that we are really criti cizing. If it was seemingly onesided, exces sive or defective, impulsive or sluggish, specu lative or practical, esthetic or experimental, may not this have been so because in His judgment, who breatheth where He listeth, this particular characteristic was needed for the Church of that day? AU that contempo raries know of such movements is **the sound thereof ; the names with which they are asso ciated, the controversies which they precipi tate, the hostilities which they rouse or allay, as the case may be. Such knowledge is su perficial enough; of the profound spiritual causes which really engender them, of the di rection in which they are really moving, of the influence which they are destined perma
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nently to exert upon souls, men know little or nothing. The accidental symptom is mistaken for the essential characteristic; the momen tary expression of feeling for the inalienable conviction of certain truth. The day may come, perhaps, when more will be known; when practise and motive, accident -and sub stance, the lasting and the transient, will be seen in their true relative proportions; but for the time this can hardly be. He is passing by, whose way is in the sea, and His patlu in the deep waters, and His footsteps un known. The Eternal Spirit is passing; and men can only say, '*He bloweth where He listeth.''
III. Our Lord's words apply especially to Christian character. There are some effects of the living power of the Holy Spirit which are invariable. When He dwelLs with a Christian soul. He continually speaks in the voice of conscience ; He speaks in the voice of prayer. He produces with the ease of a .natural process, without effort, without the taint of self -consciousness, **love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meek ness, temperance." Some of these graces must be found where He makes His home. There is no mistaking the atmosphere of His presence: in its main features it is the same now as in the days of the apostles. Just as in natural morality the main elements of ' ' goodness ' ' do not change ; so in religious life,
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spirituality is, amid great varieties of detail, yet, in its leading constituent features, the same thing from oae generation to another. But in the life of the individual Christian, or in that of the Church, there is legitimate room for irregular and exceptional forms of activ ity or excellence. Natural society is not strengthened by the stem repression of all that is peculiar in individual thought or prac tise ; and this is not less true of spiritual or religious society. From the first, high forms of Christian excellence have often been asso ciated with unconscious eccentricity. The eccentricity must be unconscious, because con sciousness of eccentricity at once reduces it to a form of vanity which is entirely incon sistent with Christian excellence. How many excellent Christians have been eccentric, devi ating more or less from the conventional type of goodness which has been recognized by con temporary religious opinion. They pass away, and when they are gone men do justice to their characters ; but while they are still with us how hard do many of us find it to remem ber that there may be a higher reason for their peculiarities than we think. We know not the full purpose of each saintly life in the de signs of Providence ; we know not much of the depths and heights whence it draws its in spirations; we can not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. Only we know that He whose workmanship it is bloweth where He
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listeth ; and this naturally leads us to remark the practical interpretation which the Holy Spirit often puts upon our Lord's words by selecting as His chosen workmen those who seem to be least fitted by nature for such high service. The apostle has told us how in the first age He set Himself to defeat human an ticipations. **Not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called''; learned academies, powerful connec tions, gentle blood did little enough for the gospel in the days when it won its first and greatest victories. The Holy Spirit, as Nico demus knew, passed by the varied learning and high station of the Sanhedrin, and breathed where He listed on the peasants of Galilee ; He breathed on them a power which would shake the world. And thus has it been again and again in the generations which have followed. When the great Aquinas was a student of philosophy under Albertus Mag nus at Cologne, he was known among his con temporaries as '*the dumb Ox"; so little did they divine what was to be his place in the theology of Western Christendom. And to
those of us who can look back upon the memo ries of this University for a quarter of a cen tury or more, few things appear more re markable than the surprizes which the later lives of men constantly afford; sometimes it is a failure of early natural promise, but more often a rich development of intellectual and
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practical capacity where there had seemed to be no promise at all. We can remember, per haps, some dull quiet man who seemed to be without a ray of genius, or, stranger still, without anything interesting or marked in character, but who now exerts, and most legitimately, the widest influence for good, and whose name is repeated by thousands with grateful respect. Or we can call to mind an other whose whole mind was given to what was frivolous, or even degrading, and who now is a leader in everything that elevates and improves his fellows. The secret of these transfigurations is ever the same. In those days these men did not yet see their way; they were like travelers through the woods at night, when the sky is hidden and all things seem to be other than they are.
Since then the sun has risen and all has changed. The creed of the Church of Christ, in its beauty and its power, has been flashed by the Divine Spirit upon their hearts and understandings; and they are other men. They have seen that there is something worth living for in earnest; that God, the soul, the future, are immense realities, compared with which all else is tame and insignificant. They have learned something of that personal love of our crucified Lord, which is itself a moral and religious force of the highest order, and which has carried them forwards without their knowing it. And what has been will assuredly repeat itself. ^^^
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