The work of the Holy Spirit - pagina 29

— .;

BY PROFESSOR WARFIELD

xxix

and spiritual power; while, if we may be permitted to go back only a few years, we may find in Dr. James Buchanan's " The Office and Work of the Holy Spirit," and in Dr. George Smeaton's " The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit," two treatises covering the whole ground the one in a more practical, the other in a more didactic spirit in a manner worthy of the best traditions of our Puritan fathers. There has always been a copious stream of literature on the work of the Holy Spirit, therefore, among the English-speaking churches and Dr. Kuyper's book comes to us not as something of a novelty, but as a specially finely conceived and executed presentation of a topic on which we are all thinking. But the case is not the same in all parts of Christendom. If we lift our eyes from our own special condition and view the Church at

—

large,

it

is

a very dififerent spectacle that greets them.

As we

sweep them down the history of the Church, we discover that the topic of the work of the Holy Spirit was one which only at a late date really emerged as the explicit study of Christian men. As we sweep them over the whole extent of the modern Church, we discover that it is a topic which appeals even yet with little force to very

The

large sections of the Church. in this locus

one or two

is,

little

povertj' of Continental theology

and done, depressing. Note French books, by E. Guers and G. Tophel,* and a

indeed, after

all is

said

couple of formal studies of the New-Testament doctrine of the Spirit

by the Dutch writers Stemler and Thoden Van Velzen, called out by The Hague Society and we have before us almost the whole list of the older books of our century which pretend in any way Nor has very much been done more recently to cover the ground. to remedy the deficiency. The amazing theological activity of latter-day Germany has, to be sure, not been able to pass so fruitful a theme entirely by and her scholars have given us a few scienThe two most tific studies of sections of the Biblical material. significant of these appeared, indeed, in the same year with Dr. Kuyper's book Gloel's " Der heilige Geist in des Heilsverkiindigung des Paulus," and Gunkel's " Die Wirkungen des heiligen Geistes nach d. popular. Anschauung der apostoHschen Zeit und der Lehre d. A. Paulus" (2d ed., 1899); these have been followed in the same spirit by Weienel in a work called " Die Wirkungen des Geistes und

—

;

—

Guers' " Le Saint-Esprit fetude Doctrinale et Practique " (1865); G. "The Work of the Holy Spirit in Man" (E. T., 1S82), and also :

Tophel's

more recently

"

Le Saint-Esprit Cinq Nouvelles Etudes Bibliques " ;

(1899)

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