ew the function of
the Spirit as an inward teacher and strengthener of the moral powers. He
is the fellow-witness of the Apostles, mainly and permanently, by
enlightening men in the significance of the facts reported by them, and
by opening the heart and conscience to their influence.

The subject-matter of the Spirit's testimony is threefold: "He will
convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of
judgment."

I. He should convict the world of sin. No conviction cuts so deeply and
produces results of such magnitude as the conviction of sin. It is like
subsoil ploughing: it turns up soil that nothing else has got down to.
It alters entirely a man's attitude towards life. He cannot know himself
a sinner and be satisfied with that condition. This awakening is like
the waking of one who has been buried in a trance, who wakes to find
himself bound round with grave-clothes, hemmed in with all the insignia
of corruption, terror and revulsion distracting and overwhelming his
soul. In spirit he has been far away, weaving perhaps a paradise out of
his fancies, peopling it with choice and happy society, and living
through scenes of gorgeous beauty and comfort in fulness of interest and
life and felicity; but suddenly comes the waking, a few brief moments of
painful struggle and the dream gives place to the reality, and then
comes the certain accumulation of misery till the spirit breaks beneath
its fear. So does the strongest heart groan and break when it wakes to
the full reality of sin, when the Spirit of Christ takes the veil from a
man's eyes and gives him to see what this world is and what he has been
in it, when the shadows that have occupied him flee away and the naked
inevitable reality confronts him.

Nothing is more overwhelming than this conviction, but nothing is more
hopeful. Given a man who is alive to the evil of sin and who begins to
understand his errors, and you know some good will come of that. Given a
man who sees the importance of being in accord with perfect goodness and
who feels the degradation of sin, and you have the germ of all good in
that man. But how were the Apostles to produce this? how were they to
dispel those mists which blurred the clear outline of good and evil, to
bring to the self-righteous Pharisee and the indifferent and worldly
Sadducee a sense of their own sin? What instrument is there which can
introduce to every human heart, howsoever armoured and fenced round,
thi