in its deepest and most precious aspects to us, is. For we are
not to limit, as a great many so-called earnest evangelical teachers
and believers do--we are not to limit His work to that which is
effected when a man first becomes a Christian--viz. pardon and
acceptance with God. God forbid that I should ever seem to underrate
that great initial gift on which everything else must be built. But I
am not underrating it when I say, 'Let us prophesy according to the
proportion of faith,' and the 'proportion of faith' has been
violated, and the perspective and completeness of Christian truth,
and of Christ's gifts, have been, alas! to a very large extent
distorted because Christian people, trained in what we call the
evangelical school, have laid far too little emphasis on the fact
that the essential gift of Christ to His people is not pardon, nor
acceptance, nor justification, but _life_; and that forgiveness,
and altered relationship to God, and assurance of acceptance with
Him, are all preliminaries. They are, if I may recur to a figure that
I have already employed, the preparing of the channel, and the taking
away of the obstacles that block its mouth, in order to the inrush of
the flood of the river of the water of life.

This life that Christ gives is the result of the gift of the Spirit.
So 'If any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His.' The
life is the gift considered from our side, and the Spirit is the gift
considered from the divine side. 'Every man that hath the Son hath
life'; because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ has made him
free from the law of sin and death. So you see if that is true--and I
for my part am sure that it is--then all that vulgar way of looking
at the influences of the Holy Spirit upon men, as if they were
confined to certain exceptional people, or certain abnormal and
extraordinary and elevated acts, is swept away. It is not the
spasmodic, the exceptional, the rare, not the lofty or
transcendentally Christlike acts or characters that are alone the
manifestation of the Spirit.

Nor is this gift a thing that a man can discover as distinct from his
own consciousness. The point where the river of the water of life
comes into the channel of our spirits lies away far up, near the
sources, and long before the stream comes into sight in our own
consciousness, the blended waters have been inseparably mingled, and
flow on peacefully together. 'The Spirit beareth witness _with_