e you notice a marvellous change. His
conversation is sweet and wholesome and uplifting; everything about his
manner is attractive and delightful. You soon discover that the man's
whole conduct and life has been transformed. He is no longer a putrefying
corpse but a living child of God. What has happened? The Wind of God has
blown upon him; he has received the Holy Spirit, the Holy Wind. Some quiet
Sabbath day you visit a church. Everything about the outward appointments
of the church are all that could be desired. There is an attractive
meeting-house, an expensive organ, a gifted choir, a scholarly preacher.
The service is well arranged but you have not been long at the gathering
before you are forced to see that there is no life, that it is all form,
and that there is nothing really being accomplished for God or for man.
You go away with a heavy heart. Months afterwards you have occasion to
visit the church again; the outward appointments of the church are much as
they were before but the service has not proceeded far before you note a
great difference. There is a new power in the singing, a new spirit in the
prayer, a new grip in the preaching, everything about the church is
teeming with the life of God. What has happened? The Wind of God has blown
upon that church; the Holy Spirit, the Holy Wind, has come. You go some
day to hear a preacher of whose abilities you have heard great reports. As
he stands up to preach you soon learn that nothing too much has been said
in praise of his abilities from the merely intellectual and rhetorical
standpoint. His diction is faultless, his style beautiful, his logic
unimpeachable, his orthodoxy beyond criticism. It is an intellectual treat
to listen to him, and yet after all as he preaches you cannot avoid a
feeling of sadness, for there is no real grip, no real power, indeed no
reality of any kind, in the man's preaching. You go away with a heavy
heart at the thought of this waste of magnificent abilities. Months,
perhaps years, pass by and you again find yourself listening to this
celebrated preacher, but what a change! The same faultless diction, the
same beautiful style, the same unimpeachable logic, the same skillful
elocution, the same sound orthodoxy, but now there is something more,
there is reality, life, grip, power in the preaching. Men and women sit
breathless as he speaks, sinners bowed with tears of contrition, pricked
to their hearts with conviction of sin; men and wom