cane-brake and leave the plants in the next standing upright.  But the best, the highest, the truly divine gifts which He is yearning to give to us all, cannot be given except there be consent, trust, and desire for them.  You can shut your hearts or you can open them.  And just as the wind will sigh round some hermetically closed chamber in vain search for a cranny, and the man within may be asphyxiated though the atmosphere is surging up its waves all round his closed domicile, so by lack of our faith, which is at once trust, consent, and desire, we shut out the gift with which God would fain fill our spirits.  You can take a porous pottery vessel, wrap it up in waxcloth, pitch it all over, and then drop it into mid-Atlantic, and not a drop will find its way in.  And that is what we can do with ourselves, so that although in Him ‘we live and move and have our being,’ and are like the earthen vessel in the ocean, no drop of the blessed moisture will ever find its way into the heart.  There must be man’s faith before there can be God’s filling.

Further, this relation of the two things suggests to us that a consequence of a Christian man’s faith is the direct action of God upon him.  Notice how the Apostle puts that truth in a double form here, in order that he may emphasise it, using one form of expression, involving the divine, direct activity, at the beginning of his prayer, and another at the end, and so enclosing, as it were, within a great casket of the divine action, all the blessings, the flashing jewels, which he desires his Roman friends to possess.  ’The God of hope fill you ... through the power of the Holy Ghost.’  I wish I could find words by which I could bear in upon the ordinary type of the Evangelical Christianity of this generation anything like the depth and earnestness of my own conviction that, for lack of a proportionate development of that great truth, of the direct action of the giving God on the believing heart, it is weakened and harmed in many ways.  Surely He that made my spirit can touch my spirit; surely He who filleth all things according to their capacity can Himself enter into and fill the spirit which is opened for Him by simple faith.  We do not need wires for the telegraphy between heaven and the believing soul, but He comes directly to, and speaks in, and moves upon, and moulds and blesses, the waiting heart.  And until you know, by your own experience rightly interpreted, that there is such a direct communion between the giving God and the recipient believing spirit, you have yet to learn the deepest depth, and the most blessed blessedness, of Christian faith and experience.  For lack of it a hundred evils beset modern Christianity.  For lack of it men fix their faith so exclusively as that the faith is itself harmed thereby, on the past act of Christ’s death on the Cross.  You will not suspect me of minimising that, but I beseech you remember one climax of the Apostle’s which, though not bearing the same message as my text, is in harmony with it, ’Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.’  And remember that Christ Himself bestows the gift of His Divine Spirit as the result of the humiliation and the agony of His Cross.  Faith brings the direct action of the giving God.