Now, that is implied in our Lord’s own language, as commented upon by the Evangelist.  For Jesus Christ declared that this was the standing law of His kingdom, to be universally applied to all its members, that ’He that believeth on Him, out of him shall flow rivers of living water’; and the Evangelist’s comment goes on to say, ’This spake He of the Spirit which they that believe on Him should receive.’ There is the condition and the qualification.  Wherever there is faith, there the Spirit of God is bestowed, and bestowed in the measure in which faith is exercised.  So, then, in full accordance with such fundamental principles in reference to the gift of the Spirit of God, comes the language of my text, and of many another text to which I cannot do more than refer.  But let me just quote one or two of them, in order that I may make more emphatic what I believe a great many Christian people do not realise as they ought—­viz. that the gift of God’s Holy Spirit is not a thing to be desired, as if it were not possessed or confined to select individuals, or manifested by exceptional and lofty attainments, but is the universal heritage of the whole Christian Church.  ’Know ye not that ye are the temple of the Holy Ghost?’ ‘We have all been made to drink into one Spirit,’ says Paul again, in the immediate context.  ’If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His,’ says he, unconditionally.  And in many other places the same principle is laid down, a principle which I believe the Christian Church to-day needs to have recalled to its consciousness, that it may be quickened to realise it in its experience far more than is the case at present.

Let me remind you, too, that that universality of the gifts of the Divine Spirit is implied in the very conception of what Christ’s work, in its deepest and most precious aspects to us, is.  For we are not to limit, as a great many so-called earnest evangelical teachers and believers do—­we are not to limit His work to that which is effected when a man first becomes a Christian—­viz. pardon and acceptance with God.  God forbid that I should ever seem to underrate that great initial gift on which everything else must be built.  But I am not underrating it when I say, ’Let us prophesy according to the proportion of faith,’ and the ‘proportion of faith’ has been violated, and the perspective and completeness of Christian truth, and of Christ’s gifts, have been, alas! to a very large extent distorted because Christian people, trained in what we call the evangelical school, have laid far too little emphasis on the fact that the essential gift of Christ to His people is not pardon, nor acceptance, nor justification, but life; and that forgiveness, and altered relationship to God, and assurance of acceptance with Him, are all preliminaries.  They are, if I may recur to a figure that I have already employed, the preparing of the channel, and the taking away of the obstacles that block its mouth, in order to the inrush of the flood of the river of the water of life.