The work of the Holy Spirit - pagina 244

INTRODUCTION

204 in that counsel,

must

bom, increase, and and since that counsel is

in the course of ages be

perfect itself according to that counsel

;

indestructible the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church.

This

is

the ground of the security and consolation of the saints.

They have no other ground

From

of trust.

the fact that

God

is

God, and that therefore His pleasure shall stand, they draw the sure conviction with which they prophesy against all that is visible

and phenomenal. In the work of grace there has determined not only the

no trace of chance or fatalism God leaving the way by which it is to be attained undecided, but in His counsel He has prepared every means to realize His choice. And in that counsel ways disThe close themselves which human eye can not trace nor fathom. divine omnipotence adapts itself to the nature of the creature. It causes the cedars of Lebanon to grow and the bulls of Bashan to increase but it feeds and strengthens each according to its nature. The cedar eats no grass, and the ox does not burrow in the ground is

;

final issue,

;

for food.

The

divine ordinance requires that by

its

roots the tree shall ab-

sorb the juices from the ground, and that by the mouth the ox shall take his food and convert it into blood. And He honors His own

ordinance

bj'

providing food in the

soil for the one,

and grass in the

field for the other.

The same

principle prevails in the

Kingdom

of Grace.

To man

as a subject of that Kingdom, and of the moral world belonging to

God has given another organism than to the ox, cedar, wind, or The movements of the latter are purely mechanical from the steep mountain the stream must fail. In a different way He acts upon ox and tree and in still another way upon man. In the huit,

stream.

;

;

man body

chemical forces work mechanically, and other forces like

those in the ox and cedar.

And

besides these there are in

man

moral forces which God operates also according to their nature. Upon this ground our fathers rejected as unworthy of God the

view that in the work of grace man is a stock or block; it attributes something to man, but because it represents God as denying His own work and ordinance. Creating an ox or a tree or stone each different from the other, giving each a nature of its own, it follows that He can not violate this, but must adapt Himself to it. Hence all His spiritual operations are subject fanatical

not because

to the divinely ordained dispositions in

man

as a spiritual being;

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