hat is the very thing that
all other teachers cannot do. They can teach tricks of imitation, they
can galvanise men, for a little while, into some kind of copy of their
characteristics. They can give them the principles which they themselves
have been living on, but to repeat and to continue the spirit of the
Teacher is the very thing that cannot be done. 'Let a double portion
fall upon me,' said Elisha; and Elijah, knowing the limits of the human
relationship between master and disciple, could only shake his head in
doubt and say, 'Thou askest a hard thing; perhaps thou wilt get it,
perhaps thou wilt not, but it will not be I that will give it you.' But
Christ says: 'I give My Spirit to you all.'

And let us remember, too, how full of blessed teaching, of rebuke, and
of instruction that symbol is, in reference to ourselves. To all of us
there is offered, if we like to have it, this dove-like Spirit. What
does that mean? Let us for a moment dwell upon the various uses of the
emblem, for they all carry important lessons. Our hearts are like that
wild chaos which preceded the present ordered state of things. And over
the seething darkness, full of all formless horrors and half-discerned
dead monstrosities, over all the chaos of disordered wills, rebellious
appetites, stinging conscience, darkened perceptions, there will come,
if we will (and we may will by His help, which is never far away from
us), gently, but quickening us into life and reducing confusion into
order, and flooding our cloudy night with light, that divine Spirit. The
dove that brooded over Chaos and made it Cosmos, will brood over your
nature, and re-create the whole. 'If any man be in Christ, he is a new
creation.' 'The old things are passed away.' Creator Spirit! create a
clean heart in me.

And then again let me remind you that this emblem brings to us another
cognate and yet distinct hope, inasmuch as the dove was the emblem of
purity and clean for sacrifice. This is the characteristic of the
scriptural doctrine of inspiration, by which it is distinguished from
all heathen and secular conceptions of a similar sort, viz., that it
puts the moral in the foreground, and that the Spirit, which is the
Spirit of truth, and of wisdom and of power, is first and foremost the
Spirit of holiness. So that if a man is not clean, no matter what his
gifts, no matter what his wisdom, no matter what his intellectual force,
no matter what his supernatural and miraculou