The work of the Holy Spirit - pagina 32

INTRODUCTORY NOTE

xxxii clesiastical,

and dogmatic

historical,

sides.

The

history of his book

exceedingly instructive and suggestive with respect to the topic itself. He found the subject, as he approached it more closely, in a very special degree a difficult one, chiefly on account of the manifoldness of the conception. At first his results became ever more and more negative. A controversy with the friends of light of the time helped him forward. Testiutn nubestnagts juvant, (jtiam luciferorum virorum importntia lumina. But God, he says, led him to greater clearness the doctrine of the Church approved itself to him. Nevertheless it was not his purpose to establish the Scriptural doctrine in all its points, but only to exhibit the place which the Holy Spirit occupies in the development of the Word of God the Old and New Testaments. There was a feeling that came to him that we were standing upon the eve of a new outpouring of the Spirit. But the wished-for dawn, he says, still held back. His wide survey, beyond his is

'

'

;

m

—

special subject, of the whole

domain

of science in the corporate life of the

Church, is characteristic no less of the subject than of the man. It was not given to him, however, to see the longed-for flood poured over the parched fields. His exegetical foundation (chaps, i.-iii.) moves in the old tracks. Since he shared essentially the subjective point of view of Schleiermacher and committed the final decision in the determining conceptions to philosophy, in spite of many remarkable flashes of insight into the Scriptures he remained fixed in the intellectualistic and ethical mode of conceiving the Holy Ghost, tho this was accompanied by many attempts to transcend Schleiermacher, but without the attaining of any unitary conception and without any effort to bring to a Scriptural solution the burning question of '

'

the personality or impersonality of the Spirit.

The

fourth chapter insti-

between the Spirit of Christianity and that of heathenThe second book deals first with the relation of the Church to the ism. Holy Spirit in general, and then enters upon a history of the doctrine, which is carried, however, only through the earliest fathers, and breaks off with a survey of the scanty harvest which the first age supplied to the succeeding epochs, in which the richest development of the doctrine took ."* place. Here the book closes.

tutes a comparison

.

.

German theology has made to produce a comprehensive treatise on the work of the Holy Ghost remains a neglected torso till to-day. If v^^e will gather up the facts to which we have thus somewhat deThus

the only worthy attempt

sultorily called attention into a prepositional statement,

we

shall

compelled to recognize that the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was only slowly brought to the explicit consciousness of the Church, and has even yet taken a firm hold on the mind and consciousness of only a small section of the Church. To be more spefind ourselves

cific,

we

shall

need

to note that the early

Church busied

itself

with

the investigation within the limits of this locus of only the doctrine *

Compare

the remarks of Dr. Smeaton, op.

cit.

,

ed.

2, p.

396.

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