our spirits'; and you are not to expect that you can hear two voices
speaking, but it is one voice and one only.

Now, that universality of this divine gift underlies the very
constitution of the Christian Church. 'Where the Spirit of the Lord
is there is liberty,' said Paul. It is because each Christian man
has access to the one Source of illumination and of truth and
righteousness and holiness, that no Christian man is to become
subject to the dominion of a brother. And it is because on the
servants and on the handmaidens has been poured out, in these
days, God's Spirit and they prophesy, that all domination of classes
or individuals, and all stiffening of the free life of God's Church
by man-made creeds, are contrary to the very basis of its existence,
and an attack on the dignity of each individual member of the Church.
'Ye have an unction from the Holy One' is said to all Christian
people--and 'ye need not that any man teach you,' still less that any
man, or body of men, or document framed by men, should be set up as
normal and authoritative over Christ's free people.

Still further, and only one word--Let me remind you of what I have
already said, and what is only too sadly true, that this grand
universality of the Spirit's gift to all Christian people does not
fill, in the mind of the ordinary Christian man, the place that it
ought, and it does not fill it, therefore, in his experience. I say
no more upon that point.

II. And now let me say a word, secondly, about the many-sidedness of
this universal gift.

One of the reasons why Christian people as a whole do not realise the
universality as they ought is, as I have already suggested in a
somewhat different connection, because they limit their notions far
too much of what the gift of God's Spirit is to do to men. We must
take a wider view of what that Spirit is meant to effect than we
ordinarily take, before we understand how real and how visible its
universal manifestations are. Take a leaf out of the Old Testament.
The man who made the brass-work for the Tabernacle was 'full of the
Spirit of God.' The poets who sung the Psalms, in more than one
place, declare of themselves that they, too, were but the harps upon
which the divine finger played. Samson was capable of his rude feats
of physical strength, because 'the Spirit of God was upon him.' Art,
song, counsel, statesmanlike adaptation of means to ends, and
discernment of proper courses for a nation, suc