power
of receptivity, will receive a varying measure of that gift. Yet it is
meant that all shall be full. The little vessel, the tiny cup, as well
as the great cistern and the enormous vat, each contains according to
its capacity. And if all are filled, then this quick Spirit must have
the power to influence all the provinces of human nature, must touch the
moral, must touch the spiritual. The temporary manifestations and
extraordinary signs of His power may well drop away as the flower drops
when the fruit has set. The operations of the Divine Spirit are to be
felt thrilling through all the nature, and every part of the man's being
is to be recipient of the power. Just as when you take a candle and
plunge it into a jar of oxygen it blazes up, so my poor human nature
immersed in that Divine Spirit, baptized in the Holy Ghost, shall flame
in all its parts into unsuspected and hitherto inexperienced brightness.
Such are the elements of the promise of Pentecost.

II. And now, in the next place, look at the apparent failure of the
promise.

'Is the Spirit of the Lord straitened?' Look at Christendom. Look at all
the churches. Look at yourselves. Will any one say that the religious
condition of any body of professed believers at this moment corresponds
to Pentecost? Is not the gap so wide that to fill it up seems almost
impossible? Is not the stained and imperfect fulfilment a miserable
satire upon the promise? 'If the Lord be with us,' said one of the
heroes of ancient Israel, 'wherefore is all this come upon us?' I am
sure that we may say the same. If the Lord be with us, what is the
meaning of the state of things which we see around us, and must
recognise in ourselves? Do any existing churches present the final
perfect form of Christianity as embodied in a society? Would not the
best thing that could happen, and the thing that will have to happen
some day, be the disintegration of the existing organisations in order
to build up a more perfect habitation of God through the Spirit? I do
not wish to exaggerate. God knows there is no need for exaggerating. The
plain, unvarnished story, without any pessimistic picking out of the
black bits and forgetting ail the light ones, is bad enough.

Take three points on which I do not dwell and apply them to yourselves,
dear brethren, and estimate by them the condition of things around us.
First, say whether the ordinary tenor of our own religious life looks
as if we had that Divin