The Power of the Spirit/Chapter 2

by Percy Dearmer

II

THE GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT

Christianity is war: it is also peace confidence and happiness as well as onslaught and struggle; meditation as well as sacrifice. The gift of the Spirit is indeed the gift of Christ—not peace, but a sword; but, and therein lies the paradox of his infinite range, the gift is also the quiet flow of wisdom. Inspiration is not only enthusiasm; it is also critical common sense.

Now, many people have utterly departed from spiritual Christianity. To some the work of the Holy Ghost has meant, not science, but the opposition to science of a dogma of verbal inspiration, which was used to protect certain writings against that very faculty of judgement which is the working of the Spirit. The complicated tangle of ancient renderings, the various points of view, stages of development, and opportunities of knowledge, which ancient writers had, were all resolved into a final infallibility, and this because they were inspired. Inspiration covered the Book of Judges, or Esther, with consequent infallibility; it covered equally a passage in S. Mark and a different rendering of the same in S. Matthew, or a letter of doubtful canonicity and more than doubtful authenticity like that ascribed to Jude; but the writings of great Christian saints were 'uninspired' writings, and uninspired also were Blake and Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Possibly this, after all, is what is meant by the sin against the Holy Ghost; perhaps it was to guard against it that our Lord refrained from putting anything into writing, an example which was followed by all his disciples during the generation which succeeded him.

To others, the work of the Holy Spirit was chiefly manifested in the transmission of orders; the Church could hardly be thought of apart from the vexed question of the ministry, and seemed to exist not as a divine fellowship of all kindreds and peoples and nations, appointing its ministers and offering them to God for his blessing—but as an organization that existed for its ministers and because of them only. The fact that the Spirit of God persisted in working through other channels stared us in the face, till the theory of inspiration became here also a barren dogma not consonant with the plain facts of life. The magnificent belief in the universal fellowship of the Holy Catholic Church had become to many a belief in a particular theory about apostolic succession, a mechanical theory which, it seems, cannot be traced back to an earlier date than the reign of George IV.

To others again, as we have already said, the working of the Holy Spirit meant a gentle warming of the heart, or a gush of pious emotion. 'All warmed by prayer', in a well-known hymn, is an example of the depths to which religious verse can descend.

We shall do well, indeed, not to despise the work of grace in its slenderest manifestations or among the least of God's little ones. There must be many to whom little more than a faint sensation is possible; but we need not therefore encourage—as modern religion in its prayers, hymns, and preaching has encouraged—the idea that a sentimental man is the noblest work of God, I remember a chapter in the record of his work by that good mission-priest, Robert Dolling,^[1] called 'Our Saints'; and hardly one of those parochial saints is quite right in the head. We have too often not asked and not expected more from the picked members of our churches than ambiguous religiosity and a patient endurance of our sermons. We have been content with negative virtues; and we sometimes find ourselves not a little disturbed at the foolishness which surrounds us, masquerading as good churchmanship or as a state of salvation.

Now the Christian Church long ago bore her testimony about such perversions of the doctrine of inspiration. She did it by the strongest insistence upon the mental effects of God's Spirit. We constantly oppose spiritual to intellectual activities, faith to reason, religion to science. The tradition of the historic Church is that science is religion, and that the highest spiritual activities are intellectual; that if our religion does not make us more sensible, it is a very poor religion; that, in fact, it is not merely futile to be silly, but that it is a sin to be silly. For religion is the working in our hearts of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of wisdom and of knowledge.

The fact that the Spirit of the Lord is thus described in Isaiah is for us Christians of secondary importance. If that were all, the second verse of the eleventh chapter of that book would rank but as one among the many glorious utterances in this greatest of prophetic treasuries. The significant value of the text in Christian theology is that, from the earliest times apparently indeed from the age of the Apocalypse itself^[2]—it has been seized upon by the Church, and given a prominence above that of any other text in the Old Testament, and not lower than the greatest in the Christian scriptures. The instinct of Christianity picked out this single verse from the fifty-three Hebrew books, and set it in the forefront of its theology, accepting as the best description of the very Spirit of God these words which were originally used in the picture of the earthly rule of an inspired deliverer. The Church has taught consistently to simple and to learned that this expresses her faith in the Holy Spirit, that wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and reverence, these noble qualities, and nothing less, are the gifts of the Holy Ghost. And she, in the West, has repeated the enumeration of these gifts at the Confirmation of every humble little child, in the prayer which our English service has inherited from the Sarum rite, and which is at least as old as the Gelasian Sacramentary of the seventh century.^[3]

Commentators naturally differ a little as to the exact force of the Hebrew words; and early Christian exegetists added 'Godliness', pietas. a rather vague word in this context, to the original six, in order to reach the sacred number, finding their justification in the Greek and Latin rendering of the next sentence 'and shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the Lord'.^[4] Others, with Delitzsch, could look rather to the opening words, 'The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him', the Spirit here being taken as the communicator of the whole creative fullness of the divine powers; but this does not after all make a seventh gift.^[5]

The text of the Authorized Version is well known, and it can hardly be improved,, except perhaps in the last phrase:

'The spirit of the Lord shall be upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the Lord.'

And the passage proceeds with the words—in the Revised Version—about his delight in the fear of the Lord, and about his not judging by hearsay, but arbitrating with equity for the humble and helpless, and smiting the terrible and slaying the wicked— thoughts often recalled during the war, and never far from the mind of the social reformer.

The description is clear, and commentators have not obscured it. Swete merely substitutes 'power' for 'might', and follows Delitzsch in seeing six pairs, the first pair referring to the intellectual life, the second to the practical life, and the third to the immediate relation with God. Delitzsch says that Wisdom is the power of recognizing the essence of things through the appearance, σοφία; Understanding, the power of recognizing the distinction of things in their appearance, διάκρισις or σύνεσις; Counsel, the gift of forming right resolves; and Might, the putting them energetically into execution; while the Knowledge is that which rests on the fellowship of love, and the Fear is that which passes readily into adoration.

Cheyne also brings out the meaning well in his commentary, where he translates: 'The spirit of Jehovah, a spirit of wisdom and discernment, a spirit of counsel and might, a spirit of knowledge and the fear of Jehovah;' and comments that the qualities are arranged in three pairs, but all spring from one source, 'the Spirit of the Lord'; and are (1) moral and intellectual clearness of perception, (2) the wisdom and bravery which befit a ruler, (3) a knowledge of the requirements of od, and the will to act agreeably to this knowledge.

Sir George Adam Smith paraphrases the description as 'ripeness but also sharpness of mind; moral decision and heroic energy; piety in its two forms of knowing the will of God and feeling the constraint to perform it. We could not have a more concise summary of the strong elements of a ruling mind.' Sir George goes beyond other Old Testament commentators, and is alone in pointing out the significant way in which the Christian Church dwelt on the religious importance of these strong elements. He is not, however, free from inaccuracies: it is by no means true, for instance, that Gregory of Tours 'expressly declared' that the Holy Spirit is the 'God of the intellect more than of the heart'. This sixth-century writer does not seem to have said more than that the pillar of fire which guided the Israelites was a type of the Holy Ghost.

We are then concerned less with the Hebrew original than with the use which the Christian Church has made of it. There was already a slight improvement in the Septuagint rendering of 'the fear of Yahwè' by εὐσέβεια, or 'reverence'.^[6] In the translation back to English of the Greek version we have:

'A spirit of God, a spirit of wisdom and understanding, a spirit of counsel and might, a spirit of knowledge and of reverence.'^[7]

Because of the last word^[8] this rendering is perhaps the best, and we will use it here.

Latin is a heavy language compared with Greek and English; and the Vulgate does not help us much, but Latin is a good tongue for strength and common sense. The Vulgate runs: Spiritus Domini: spiritus sapimtiae, et intellectus,^[9] spiritus consilii, et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiae^[10], et pietatis.

Pietas is here used for εὐσέβεία, 'reverence', for which it is indeed the common Latin equivalent;^[11] but a seventh gift was added, because of the loose rendering of the Vulgate, which, following the Greek version, began the next verse with Et replebit eum spiritus timoris Domini, 'and the spirit of the fear of the Lord shall fill him', 'fear of the Lord' being used here instead of pietas. This, as we have seen, is inaccurate, the true rendering being that he shall find his delight in that fear of God which is already mentioned in the preceding sentence. There is no new gift, but only a description of his joyful emotion in the possession of the old: pietas and timor Domini are but two words for the same original.^[12]

Doubtless this intruding of a seventh gift which is but a doublet of the sixth was influenced by the sacred number. Old writers derived infinite pleasure from the reflection that there were also seven branches on the lamp-stand of Moses, seven Churches of Asia, seven mystic seals, seven stars, and seven trumpets, seven heads to the dragon, seven original deacons, seven joys of Mary and seven sorrows, seven deadly sins (with exactly seven penitential psalms to fit them, and seven contrary virtues), seven sacraments, seven planets, and seven days of the week—which last, at all events, no one can deny. How delighted they would have been to know that the psychologists of the Twentieth Century would one day discover that there are also seven simple Instincts with their seven Primary Emotions.

They associated the number especially with the Holy Ghost, because of the Book of Revelation, where are mentioned the 'seven spirits which are before his throne',^[13] the 'seven blazing lamps burning in front of the throne',^[14] and, especially, the 'seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth'.^[15] There is, indeed, a little later in this vision of the Lamb, a sevenfold ascription, which seems to be based upon the passage in Isaiah: 'Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and might, and honour, and glory, and blessing.'^[16] Here wisdom and might are identical with the Messianic list; and the writer may have intended the other words to be the divine equivalents of the human qualities—counsel becoming power; understanding, riches; knowledge, honour; and the fear of God, glory and blessing. In any case the number is seven, and this helped to make men certain that the Spirit must give a sevenfold dower. The Apocalypse is indeed pervaded with the figure, which is not intended so much to have a numerical significance as to convey the idea of fullness and perfection, as in the seven golden lamp-stands (not candlesticks, by the way) of the first chapter, which are so described in contrast to the single lamp-stand of the Temple.^[17]

We may conclude that the seventh gift, 'godliness' or pietas in the later sense, was meant rather as a Christian summary of the rest, inserted to guard against any possible omission, and to give the idea of completeness, rather than as an addition. Since it does not really add anything to the powers enumerated by Isaiah, we may content ourselves, if we will, with the consideration of the six definite gifts.

But when we have followed out this little study of the meaning of the gifts, we find that the instinct of Christendom has not only seized on this prophetic verse to describe the indwelling of Christ's human nature by the Holy Ghost, but has also achieved a considerable extension of its meaning, or we may rather say, a further insight into the truth which the prophet had received.

Instead of being only the description of a strong and just ruler, an exceptional man, indeed a unique man—the liberating Messiah whom the Jews longed for—the description now becomes that of the ordinary Christian. Every one is expected to show these ruling qualities, just because he is a Christian. Here then is the banner of democracy unfurled, ages before it had come into practical politics! Democracy has as a matter of fact always followed in the wake of Christianity, and has never existed in any but Christian nations. Japan itself, which has borrowed so many material advantages from Western civilization, is not only an autocracy but makes autocracy its religion. And the reason is, not only that Christianity proclaims human brotherhood under an All-Father, not only that it teaches the infinite worth and therefore the equal worth of every human soul in the sight of God; but also because it insists that the Holy Spirit is offered to every little child in order to make him a prince, in wisdom and counsel and might. Gradually the Christian peoples have risen, and are still rising, to the gift, and making its acceptance generally possible; so that to-day we see all the Christian autocracies swept away, except one, the Papacy, which is more than half destroyed, and which curiously enough rules in the name of one who warned us that 'the so-called rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men overbear them: not so with you'.^[18]

In these words, our Lord himself put the new interpretation on the words of Isaiah. The ruling virtues are not to be used for subjection, but the great are to be servants, in order that the servants may be great.

Thus was the first change made, a change of application, with illimitable results. In the mediaeval form of the Confirmation prayer, a curious little change was made—a change of order only, but an interesting one, since it emphasizes the intellectual character of the Gifts. In Isaiah, knowledge and the fear of God are coupled together, and so closely that many commentators understand them as the knowledge and the fear of God, which is almost a doublet, since to know God is to revere him. But in the Confirmation prayer the order is changed: 'Send into them the sevenfold holy spirit, the Paraclete from the heavens. The spirit of wisdom and understanding. The spirit of knowledge and reverence. The spirit of counsel and might. And fill them with the spirit of the fear of the Lord.'^[19] Knowledge is thus definitely brought into the intellectual category, following S. Paul,^[20] as savoir not connaître, wissen not kennen, and placed next to wisdom and understanding. The Reformers, in the first English Prayer Book, 1549, rather unfortunately altered the order back to that of the original, while they did not venture so far as to revert to the original six gifts: they also translated paraclitus by the weaker word 'Comforter',^[21] and rather unnecessarily prefixed 'ghostly' to 'strength'; but they reinforced the prayer in 1552 with the words 'strengthen', and with the substitution also of 'daily increase in them' for 'send into them', thus securing the grace of Confirmation from being regarded as an act of instantaneous magic: 'Strengthen them, we beseech thee, O Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Comforter; and daily increase in them thy manifold gifts of grace; the spirit of wisdom and understanding; the spirit of counsel and ghostly strength; the spirit of knowledge, and true godliness; and fill them, O Lord, with the spirit of thy holy fear, now and for ever'.

In all versions, the fear of God is, by the use of the special verb 'fill them', taken as a general quality pervading all the rest, and thus the construction of the original text in Isaiah is never quite lost sight of. It is understood as the final grace—to secure, it would seem, against pride the possessor of six such princely virtues.

Thus are the mental gifts exalted in the strongest possible contrast to our modern custom of opposing 'mental' to 'spiritual'. The mental qualities are spiritual: art is as spiritual as holiness, and science is as spiritual as worship. Yet how people speak of 'a really spiritual' man, sometimes meaning nothing more than a very crass person just saved by a pious disposition; and how in certain circles do they argue about the profound distinction between mental healing and spiritual healing. There is no such distinction; but there is a distinction between good and bad; and spiritual evil is the worst of all because it is a corruption of the best.

This exaltation of the intellect and will was deliberate in the Church, and was well understood in the Middle Ages—not only in the progressive and major part of the Church, the West, but also in the Eastern Churches; though unfortunately— less indeed from any fault of their own than from the exigencies of their stubborn and heroic struggle with the tyrants of Islam, a struggle now at last triumphantly concluded—they came to forget their central dedication to S. Sofia, and to take their stand upon unchanging conservatism.^[22] Perhaps the time is coming when the East will dedicate itself again to the Holy Wisdom. But we must never forget that it was Constantinople which preserved all the learning of Europe during the Dark Ages, and was the storehouse from which art and knowledge filtered, principally through Arabic carriers (who have got the credit, and have it still in words like 'algebra' and 'alchemy'), though their science was Greek, their medicine Greek, and their philosophy Greek; through the Crusades also; and lastly through her fall, after a thousand years of struggle, in 1453, which finally distributed Greek learning throughout the world, and gave us a new science, a new philosophy, and a new theology.^[23] We should be ungrateful indeed if we forgot that we owe the civilization of to-day to the scholars who were so long gathered round the church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople, before she fell into the hands of the barbarian, and Hagia Sophia became a mosque.

In the Middle Ages, then, it was well understood that the Holy Spirit was the giver of intelligence. Judges opened their tribunals, professors their courses, and councils their deliberations, with a Red Mass, the service of the Holy Ghost. In East and West alike, the symbolic dove is represented hovering over, or whispering into the ears only of those saints who were distinguished for their learning or their literary gifts.^[24] But perhaps the most remarkable as well as the most famous instance is Taddeo Gaddi's fresco, at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, of the Descent of the Holy Ghost, where are represented on the one side the seven theological sciences, and on the other the seven sciences proper— Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, Astronomy. Well might an old writer— a hundred and fifty years before Taddeo—write ' Spiritus sanctus inventor est septem liberalium artium' , 'the Holy Ghost is the inventor of the seven liberal arts, which are, Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectics, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy': for this was bound up with the philosophy of the age from which our modern civilization is sprung, and in nothing is it illustrated more convincingly than in the unwitting testimony of art.

This conviction was not only grounded on the words of Isaiah: it was accepted because Christ had said the Spirit would guide men into all truth;^[25] because at Pentecost the Spirit had brought strangely enhanced knowledge and power of expression;^[26] because the seven deacons were chosen for their being 'full of the Spirit and of wisdom';^[27] because S. Stephen overcame his adversaries through 'the wisdom and the Spirit by which he spake';^[28] because S. Paul also had identified wisdom and knowledge as gifts of the Spirit,^[29] and had said that the Spirit searches the deep things of God;^[30] because S. Peter had said that God spoke by the mouth of the prophets,^[31] and that the Spirit would make people see visions and prophesy;^[32] and was it not in the Creed at Mass that the Holy Ghost spake by the prophets?—and for many

other good reasons; but chiefly perhaps because, every school-boy knew the Seven Gifts by heart.

But, before we go on, it may be worth while to contrast this ancient teaching of the Church with a representative modern statement; and to notice how all the strong distinctive virtues are merged into one vague mass of sickly pietism which has nothing definite about it except the determination to get to heaven. Let us take an instance from a careful and responsible contemporary source, the article on the Holy Ghost by Professor Jacques Forget in the great Catholic Encyclopaedia—for modern Roman Catholicism is quite as sentimental as modern Protestantism:

'The gift of wisdom, by detaching us from the world, makes us relish and love only the things of heaven. The gift of understanding helps us to grasp the truths of religion as far as is necessary. The gift of counsel springs from supernatural prudence, and enables us to see and choose correctly what will help most to the glory of God and our own salvation. By the gift of fortitude we receive courage to overcome the obstacles and difficulties that arise in the practice of our religious duties. The gift of knowledge points out to us the path to follow and the dangers to avoid in order to reach heaven. The gift of piety, by inspiring us with a tender and filial confidence in God, makes us joyfully embrace all that pertains to His service. Lastly, the gift of fear fills us with a sovereign respect for God, and makes us dread, above all things, to offend Him.' Can we not understand what the ordinary man means when he rails against cant?

In conclusion, let us take this final list of the Seven Gifts, which sums up the faith of Christendom, and consider it again for psychological reasons beginning with the last:

WISDOM, UNDERSTANDING, KNOWLEDGE

COUNSEL AND MIGHT

REVERENCE

(Godliness)

The Fear of God is better expressed by Christians as Reverence. Ancient faiths were, and primitive idolatries still are, largely religions of fear; but there is no fear in love, and perfect love casteth out fear, as S. John says.^[33] Nothing is v more striking than to study a Concordance, and see with what enormous frequency the fear of God occurs in the Old Testament, and how it has dropped out in the New.^[34] The phrase remains with us, when we think of the wicked who do horrible things and have no fear of God before their eyes: 'You may have no compassion, but are you not afraid to do such things?' must have been the thought of many people when Belgium and Serbia were ravaged. But to the Christian the idea can only be that of reverence for God's almighty love in every moment and aspect of life, the humble reverence that passes into worship, and prevents the strong virtues from being tainted with pride. Reverence, says Dr. McDougall, is a highly compound emotion: it is 'the religious emotion par excellence; few mere human powers are capable of exciting reverence, this blend of wonder, fear, gratitude, and negative self-feeling'.^[35]

So the pietas^[36] of reverence, the eusebeia,^[37] is close akin to pietas in the secondary sense of Godliness. The man who reverences God in all things, and fears to thwart his will, is also the man who sees God in all things and in all the happenings of life. He is the godly man, whose whole existence is dependent on God, whose every act is shaped according to the divine purpose, whose work itself is an increasing prayer, and worship his happiest recreation.

Such Godliness, though rooted in the heart, is by no means unconnected with the mind, and depends for its activity upon a very firm strength of will.

The remaining five gifts all originate in the reason, except the fifth, Might or Power, which lies in the will. It is closely connected with the mental gift of Counsel—βουλὴ καὶ ἰσχύς—since ill-directed force is worse than useless. Just now we call it Bolshevism—power that proceeds from unchristianized wills. In the individual, obstinacy is the defence of weak men, and is but the simulacrum of triumphant strength of will. And as Might is not the headlong dashing into obstacles, or the ferocious determination to have one's own way, so it is not mere fortitude either—it is more than the power of patient resistance, and to render it only as fortitude under adversity is to rob it of its highest quality. To weigh and then to act, to balance with perfect judgement and then to perform with resistless energy and courage—that is Counsel and Might. It is the quality of the great ruler, the great general, and also of the perfect subordinate, in peace or war. We all must, during the years of struggle for freedom, have imagined sometimes the horrible difficulty of our marshals, admirals, presidents, and prime ministers, the agonizing process of making some irrevocable decision; and, as we watched the gradual unfolding of the plans of Marshal Foch, we must have realized the quality of real power, how courage is needed for right counsel, not less than for right action, how the highest form of power is after all intellectual as well as moral, and how inseparable in all right undertaking are Counsel and Might. It is really the same with every activity of life, with the decisions that put us on our way, with every direction we pursue, with every result we accomplish.

There remain the three related gifts, which we often think of simply as wisdom, but which are analysed for us as Wisdom, Understanding, and Knowledge. Many people must have asked why so much of the six divisions is devoted to the intellect, and whether after all they are not but different words for the same thing, or at most different aspects of the same quality. And I think that religious teachers have been apt to fall into vagueness when they expounded these three gifts.

They are really entirely distinct, and have nothing in common but their intellectual nature.

The Jews were not a metaphysical race, and the prophets spoke by intuition rather than by ratiocination, the genius of Christendom has also been intuitive, like all genius. But intuition is nothing unless it corresponds with what is; and this is what philosophy can explain to us. Philosophy tells us that there are three human desires, three things that can each be rightly sought only for its own sake—Goodness, Beauty, and Truth; and thus that there are three spiritual activities, and three only—the Moral, the Aesthetic, and the Intellectual activity.^[38] If then these three mental Gifts of the Spirit have a true and definite meaning, they ought to correspond with the three absolute values of the human spirit. This is the philosophy of the spirit; and theology would add that since men desire these three spiritual qualities and no other, intuitively, it must be because they are the nature of God; and that the desire for them is in man, because he is himself made in the image of God. And therein, we may conjecture, lies an explanation of those three personal manifestations of God, which we call the Holy Trinity—Beauty in the Creator who is power, and is the artist of the world, Truth in the Word who is the wisdom of the Father, and Goodness in the Spirit who is the will, and because the will is divine is the will to Good. There are not three Gods in orthodox theology; but God is one, and is at one and the same time Power or Cause (the Father), Wisdom (the Son), and Will (the Holy Ghost).^[39] In scholastic theology the Holy Spirit or Will was thought of especially in terms of Love;^[40] but at the same time the Power of the Spirit was, as we have seen, conceived as mainly intellectual. The reason for this is because the Holy Spirit brings the gift of Christ, and is his Spirit;^[41] 'he shall bear witness of me' and 'he shall take of mine and shall declare it unto you'.^[42] In this way also Christianity gives a new meaning to the words of Isaiah.

Wisdom then, Σοφία, Sapientia, I would suggest, is the moral aspect of the mind, akin to the holy and exalted personifications in the Wisdom books of the later Hebrew scriptures. We always instinctively associate goodness with the word. 'He is so wise ' could not be well said of an intellectual rascal. Wisdom, then, is the power of appreciating Goodness.

Understanding in the Septuagint is Σύνεσις, 'comprehension, understanding, judgement, perception', or according to Delitzsch, 'the power of recognizing the distinction of things in their appearance, διάκρισις.' We. generally talk as if there were only one activity of the spirit, the moral, and as if the aesthetic and intellectual activities were not spiritual at all—especially the aesthetic; and it was against this fallacy that Keats struggled as the prophet of beauty, of 'feeling and perception', and for 'intuition as against intellect', as we can read in Sir Sidney Colvin's Life. Consequently we have no word, except the utterly unworthy metaphor of taste, to describe the aesthetic faculty—the faculty, as the word means, of 'perceiving'. Let us call it understanding—we could have no better word—this power of vision, of comprehension, which makes poetry real to us, which makes pictures something more than paint, and music something more than noise, which is the secret of all the arts. God has cast his beauty over all the face of nature; and yet we have no word to describe our reception of that manifestation. Let us include it in the second gift. Understanding is the power of appreciating Beauty.

Knowledge, Γνῶσις, Scientia, needs no comment. To class it with reverence as the knowledge of God would make no ultimate difference to its meaning; for to know God is to know truth. The scientist, as well as the artist and the saint, owes his gift to the Spirit of God. All truth is sacred and only falsehood is secular. The obscurantist divine is an adversary of the Holy Ghost, and the open-minded scholar a servant of the Holy Ghost. Knowledge is the power of appreciating Truth.

But the saint, the artist, the scholar, like the statesman or the general, represent only the highest examples of common human activity. The gifts are given to every man in his degree, and the Holy Spirit is in each one of us. Each of us has some desire for truth, for goodness, for beauty, and some appreciation of them, some instinct that they are the more excellent things which cannot be explained— because they are themselves the explanation. Each, of us in some degree has counsel, and in some measure puts forth power. Each of us is inspired.

Wisdom, understanding, and knowledge are our life, and the Spirit comes to give it us more abundantly. Counsel and might are the way in which we use this life, and godliness is the purpose for which we use it.

Are we saved? Yes, but the test is, Are we sensible? For the Holy Ghost is the Spirit of truth, and comes to guide us into all truth. He is come, not to make a few men infallible, but to make many wise.

1. Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum.
2. See p. 36. Justin Martyr, about the year 155, refers to Is. 11 ^2-3, and applies the gifts, in his argument with the Jew, to Christ as the true Messiah. Following the Septuagint, he includes the first part of verse 3, and makes the number seven, Trypho, sect. 87: he may have had in mind the two instances of the work of the Spirit in Christ's growth—'strong, filled with wisdom' (Luke 2 ⁴⁰), and the quotation from Is. 61 ¹ in Luke 4 ¹⁸—'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.'
3. Or beginning of the eighth. See p. 39, n. 2.
4. A passage which some versions omit, and which in any case should be either 'He shall draw his breath in the fear of the Lord', or 'He shall find a sweet savour in the fear of the Lord'.
5. See further, p. 37.
6. The Septuagint version is : πνεῦμα τοῦ θεοῦ, πνεῦμα σοφίας καὶ συνέσεως, πνεῦμα βουλῆς καὶ ἰσχύος, πνεῦμα γνώσως καὶ εὐσεβείας.
7. R. R. Ottley, The Book of Isaiah according to the Septuagint, Cambridge, 1904.
8. See p. 46.
9. Intellectus in Latin means primarily understanding or insight. 'Intellect' is quite a secondary meaning.
10. Scientia, always used subjectively in good Latin, and not in our sense of 'science'.
11. See p. 47, n. 2.
12. The full text of the Vulgate is: 'Et requiescet super eum spiritus Domini: spiritus sapientiae, et intellectus, spiritus consilii, et fortitudinis, spiritus scientiae, et pietatis, et replebit eum spiritus timoris Domini.' In older versions colons take the place of the commas, but the same stop is used throughout, and after pietatis; and, as there were no verse numbers or divisions, the last sentence was naturally taken as part of the enumeration. The Vulgate thus follows the Septuagint, which, after εὐσεβεία, proceeds ἐμπλήσει αὐτὸν πνεῦμα φύβου θεοῦ.
13. Rev. 1 ⁴.
14. Rev. 4 ⁵.
15. Rev. 5 ⁶.
16. Rev. 5 ¹².
17. Ex. 25 ^31-37. It had six branches and seven lamps; and is referred to in Heb. 9 ².
18. Mark 10 ⁴². Moffat's translation.
19. '… immitte in eos septiformem spiritum sanctum paraclitum de celis. Amen. Spiritum sapientiae et intellectus. Amen. Spiritum scientiae et pietatis. Amen. Spiritum consilii et fortitudinis. Amen.' Et imple eos vel eas spiritu timoris domini. Amen.' This is altered from the original prayer as it stands in the Gelasian Sacramentary (ed. H. A. Wilson, Oxford, 1894), which has scientia and pietas, in the order of the Vulgate, immediately before timor domini, and is without septiformem.
20. 'To one is given through the Spirit the word of wisdom, and to another the word of knowledge': 1 Cor. 12 ⁸.
21. The force of the prayer would be improved if it were brought nearer to the true meaning, thus: 'Strengthen them with the holy Spirit, thy Paraclete; and daily increase in them the manifold gifts of grace: the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of knowledge and reverence, the spirit of counsel and might; and make their delight to be in thee, O Lord, now and for ever.'
22. It must be remembered that Russia herself, also owing her Christianity to S. Sofia, was for long under Tatar domination. Indeed at the time when Constantinople fell, every Eastern Church was under the heel of Islam, and this not for any fault, but because of the geographical position of Eastern Christianity.
23. See for a fuller statement W. Cunningham, Western Civilization, Cambridge, 1902, Cap. IV.
24. For instance, in a tenth-century Greek Psalter (reproduced in M. A. N. Didron, Christian Iconography, Eng. trans. 1851, p. 432) where the dove hovers over David, who is supported by two figures labelled sophia and prophetia, and underneath is written in Greek 'O God, give wisdom to the king, and justice to the son of the king' (Ps. 74 ¹). S. Ephraim of Syria declared that he had seen a shining dove alight upon the shoulder of S. Basil. The ancient pictures of S. Jerome and S. Gregory the Great, with the dove whispering to them, are well known.
25. John 16 ¹³.
26. Acts 2 ⁴, ⁸.
27. Acts 6 ³.
28. Acts 6 ¹⁰.
29. 1 Cor. 12 ⁸.
30. 1 Cor. 2 ¹⁰.
31. Acts 3 ¹⁸.
32. Acts 2 ^17-18.
33. 1 John 4 ¹⁸.
34. In the Gospels, it occurs in Luke 18 ² in the story of the Judge who feared not God neither regarded man: the penitent thief, in Luke 23 ⁴⁰, asks, 'Dost thou not fear God?' In the Acts and Epistles it is echoed but rarely, and the 'spirit of bondage again unto fear' is especially repudiated by S. Paul on the ground of our sonship to God, in Rom. 8 ¹⁵.
35. William McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology, 1915, p. 132.
36. Pietas, 'conduct conformable with duty, in particular the performance of duty to gods, Gr.εὐσέβεια'; also 'piety, religiousness'.
37. Εὐσέβεια , 'reverence; especially reverential love and behaviour towards the gods, Lat. pietas.' But there is a slight difference, characteristic of the two races, between reverential behaviour and the performance of duty.
38. This has been most lucidly set forth by Mr. A. Clutton-Brock in The Ultimate Belief, London, 1916.
39. H. Rashdall, Philosophy of Religion, London, 1914, p. 183.
40. According to S. Augustine the love of the Father to the Son is the Holy Spirit. S. Thomas Aquinas speaks of the Third Person as Will and, since the Will of God is always a loving will, therefore as Love, ' duae processiones: una per modum intellectus, quae est processio Verbi; alia per modum voluntatis, quae est processio Amoris ' (Summa Theologica, Pars I, Q. xxxvii, Art. i). The tres personae are tres proprietates, 'three essential and eternally distinct attributes,' as Dr. Rashdall paraphrases—it three subsistences (Summa, ibid.xxix. 2)—Power, Wisdom, and Will; just as there are three elements in human personality, since all personality must be power having both reason and will.
41. So S. Paul: 'The Spirit of God,' I Cor. 2¹¹; 'The Spirit of Christ' Rom. 8⁹; 'The Spirit of Jesus Christ', Phil, 1¹⁹; 'The Spirit of God's Son,' Gal. 4⁶.
42. John 15²⁶, 16¹⁵.