have of God; we are not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by which we are sealed for the day of redemption. What is the appeal of the apostle to the Galatians connected with justification by faith? “This only would I learn of you, received ye the Spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? Are ye so foolish, having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect in the flesh?” They were slipping away through Judaizing teachers, teachers of the law, who were subverting, we read, whole houses, from justification by faith, and his appeal, as that which they all knew, is to their having received the Holy Ghost, not that they all walked well, but that the Holy Ghost was come, and that they had received it.
It may be said, But they who ministered the Spirit to them, an expression much to be noted, worked miracles. But all knew they had the Holy Ghost: if the flesh lusted in them, it lusted against the Spirit. In Romans a Christian is described as he that is after the Spirit; they were not in the flesh, their old Adam standing, but in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God dwelt in them. If any man had not the Spirit of Christ, he was none of His; and this is not mere temper, for he continues, “and if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin, and the Spirit is life because of righteousness”—the Christian state was the effect of Christ being in them. It is by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body; we are also builded together for a habitation of God through the Spirit.
But it is not my object to draw all the consequences of the presence of the Holy Ghost, but merely to shew that Christianity was characterized by it, even if they walked badly; they grieved the Holy Spirit of God by
