If the Holy Spirit was sent by our Lord as His Vicar to preside in the Church, as I suppose we all believe, it was in fulfilment of our Lord’s promise to be with it till the end of the world and that the gates of hell should not prevail against it.  There is nothing anywhere in Holy Scripture indicating that the Holy Spirit was to be sent to the “primitive Church,” even if any one could tell what the primitive Church is, or rather when the Church ceased to be primitive.  The Holy Spirit is present as a guide to the Church to-day quite as fully as He was in the first century.  His presence then was not a guarantee that all men should believe the truth or do the right, nor is it now.  The state of Christendom is a sufficient evidence of the ability of men to defy the will of God, the Holy Spirit; but that does not mean that the Holy Spirit has withdrawn any more than the state of things at Corinth which called out S. Paul’s two Epistles to that Church is a proof that God the Holy Ghost never came or did not stay with that primitive Christian community.  The power of the Spirit is not an irresistible power, but a spiritual influence which will guide those who are willing to be guided, who will to be submissive to His will.  But the will of God can always be resisted—­and always is.  Nevertheless the Holy Spirit is in the Church.  He shaped and is shaping its beliefs and institutions:  and to-day we trust that He is leading us back to His obedience that we may at length realize the unity of the Spirit in the bonds of peace.

The work of the Holy Spirit in the individual Christian is a constructive work; it has in view the growth of the child of God in holiness.  He makes the soul of the baptised His dwelling-place and wishes to remain there as in His Temple, carrying on the work of its sanctification.  The state of guiltlessness that follows absolution is not the equivalent of sanctity.  Guiltlessness is a negative, sanctity is a positive state, and is acquired as the result of active correspondence with the will of God.  In order that there may be this correspondence the will of God must be known, not merely as we know the things that we have learned by rote, but known in the sense of understood and appreciated.  The will of God is knowable:  that is, it has been revealed to man; but it needs to be effectively made known to the individual man.  He must be convinced of the importance of divine truth to him.  We know that just there is the supremely vital point in the teaching of the truth.  Men assent to truth as true; but they are not thereby necessarily moved to act upon it:  it may remain unassimilated.  The vast majority of the people of this country, if they were questioned, would assert a belief in God; but a surprising number of them are unmoved by that belief, are led by it to no action.  Or take the membership of any parish; they would all profess a belief in the efficacy of the sacraments:  yet there is a surprisingly large number who do not frequent the sacraments.  How many of you, for example, make your confessions and communions with the frequency and regularity that your theory about the sacraments implies?