olly and permanently in men. One prophet had a
dream, another a vision, a third legislated, a fourth wrote a psalm, a
fifth founded an institution, a sixth in the power of the Spirit smote
the Philistines, or, like Samson, tore a lion in pieces.

In Christ all powers are combined--power over nature, power to teach,
power to reveal, power to legislate. And as in the Old Testament the
Spirit passed from man to man, so in the New Testament Christ first
Himself receives and then communicates to all the whole Spirit. Hence
the law noticed at a subsequent stage of this Gospel that "the Spirit
was not yet given; because Jesus was not yet glorified" (vii. 39). We
cannot see to the bottom of the law, but the fact is apparent, that
until Christ received into every part of His own humanity the fulness of
the Divine Spirit, that Spirit could not fill with His fulness any man.

But why was the Spirit needed in a personality of which the Word, who
had been with God and known God, was the basis? Because the humanity of
Christ was a true humanity. Being human, He must be indebted to the
Spirit for all impartation to His human nature of what is Divine. The
knowledge of God which the Word possesses by experience must be humanly
apprehended before it can be communicated to men; and this human
apprehension can only be arrived at in the case of Christ by the
enlightenment of the Spirit. It was useless for Christ to declare what
could not be apprehended by human faculty, and His own human faculty was
the measure and test of intelligibility. By the Spirit He was
enlightened to speak of things Divine; and this Spirit, interposed, as
it were, between the Word and the human nature of Jesus, was as little
cumbrous in its operation or perceptible in consciousness as our breath
interposed between the thinking mind and the words we speak to declare
our mind.

To return to the direct testimony of the Baptist, we must (1)
acknowledge its value. It is the testimony of a contemporary, of whom we
know from other sources that he was generally reckoned a prophet--a man
of unblemished and inviolable integrity, of rugged independence, of the
keenest spiritual discernment. There was no man of larger size or more
heroic mould in his day. In any generation he would have been
conspicuous by his spiritual stature, his fearless unworldliness, his
superiority to the common weaknesses of men; and yet this man himself
looks up to Jesus as standing on quite a differ