of the Holy Spirit. If John had thought that he would never have
written this epistle to teach others. The man who is the most fully taught
of God is the very one who will be most ready to listen to what God has
taught others. Much less does it mean that when we are taught of the
Spirit, we are independent of the written Word of God; for the Word is the
very place to which the Spirit, who is the Author of the Word, leads His
pupils and the instrument through which He instructs them (Eph. vi. 17;
John vi. 33; Eph. v. 18, 19; cf. Col. iii. 16). But while we may learn
much from men, we are not dependent upon them. We have a Divine Teacher,
the Holy Spirit.

We shall never truly know the truth until we are thus taught directly by
the Holy Spirit. No amount of mere human teaching, no matter who our
teachers may be, will ever give us a correct and exact and full
apprehension of the truth. Not even a diligent study of the Word either in
the English or in the original languages will give us a real understanding
of the truth. We must be taught directly by the Holy Spirit and we may be
thus taught, each one of us. The one who is thus taught will understand
the truth of God better even if he does not know one word of Greek or
Hebrew, than the one who knows Greek and Hebrew thoroughly and all the
cognate languages as well, but who is not taught of the Spirit.

The Spirit will guide the one whom He thus teaches "into all the truth."
The whole sphere of God's truth is for each one of us, but the Holy Spirit
will not guide us into all the truth in a single day, nor in a week, nor
in a year, but step by step. There are two especial lines of the Spirit's
teaching mentioned:

(1) "He shall declare unto you the things that are to come." There are
many who say we can know nothing of the future, that all our thoughts on
that subject are guesswork. It is true that we cannot know everything
about the future. There are some things which God has seen fit to keep to
Himself, secret things which belong to Him (Deut. xxix. 29). For example,
we cannot "know the times, or the seasons" of our Lord's return (Acts i.
7), but there are many things about the future which the Holy Spirit will
reveal to us.

(2) "He shall _glorify Me_ (that is, Christ) for He shall take of Mine and
shall declare it unto you." This is the Holy Spirit's especial line of
teaching with the believer, as with the unbeliever, Jesus Christ. It is
His work above all else to reve