n the passage from which the text is taken, speaks of the third
Person in the Trinity in such a manner as to convey the impression that
His agency is as indispensable, in order to spiritual life, as food is in
order to physical; that sinful man as much needs the influences of the
Holy Ghost as he does his daily bread. "If a son shall ask bread of any
of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?" If this is not at all
supposable, in the case of an affectionate earthly parent, much less is
it supposable that God the heavenly Father will refuse renewing and
sanctifying influences to them that ask for them. By employing such a
significant comparison as this, our Lord implies that there is as
pressing need of the gift in the one instance as in the other. For,
he does not compare spiritual influences with the mere luxuries of
life,--with wealth, fame, or power,--but with the very staff of life
itself. He selects the very bread by which the human body lives, to
illustrate the helpless sinner's need of the Holy Ghost. When God, by
his prophet, would teach His people that he would at some future time
bestow a rich and remarkable blessing upon them, He says: "I will pour
out my Spirit upon all flesh." When our Saviour was about to leave his
disciples, and was sending them forth as the ministers of his religion,
he promised them a direct and supernatural agency that should "reprove
the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment."

And the history of Christianity evinces both the necessity and reality of
Divine influences. God the Spirit has actually been present by a special
and peculiar agency, in this sinful and hardened world, and hence the
heart of flesh and the spread of vital religion. God the Spirit has
actually been absent, so far as concerns his special and peculiar agency,
and hence the continuance of the heart of stone, and the decline, and
sometimes the extinction of vital religion. Where the Holy Spirit has
been, specially and peculiarly, there the true Church of Christ has been,
and where the Holy Spirit has not been, specially and peculiarly, there,
the Church of Christ has not been; however carefully, or imposingly, the
externals of a church organization may have been maintained.

But there is no stronger, or more effective proof of the need of the
presence and agency of the Holy Spirit, than that which is derived from
the _nature of the case_, as it appears in the individual. Just in
proportion as we co