This life that Christ gives is the result of the gift of the Spirit.  So ‘If any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of His.’  The life is the gift considered from our side, and the Spirit is the gift considered from the divine side.  ’Every man that hath the Son hath life’; because the law of the Spirit of life in Christ has made him free from the law of sin and death.  So you see if that is true—­and I for my part am sure that it is—­then all that vulgar way of looking at the influences of the Holy Spirit upon men, as if they were confined to certain exceptional people, or certain abnormal and extraordinary and elevated acts, is swept away.  It is not the spasmodic, the exceptional, the rare, not the lofty or transcendentally Christlike acts or characters that are alone the manifestation of the Spirit.

Nor is this gift a thing that a man can discover as distinct from his own consciousness.  The point where the river of the water of life comes into the channel of our spirits lies away far up, near the sources, and long before the stream comes into sight in our own consciousness, the blended waters have been inseparably mingled, and flow on peacefully together.  ’The Spirit beareth witness with our spirits’; and you are not to expect that you can hear two voices speaking, but it is one voice and one only.

Now, that universality of this divine gift underlies the very constitution of the Christian Church.  ’Where the Spirit of the Lord is there is liberty,’ said Paul.  It is because each Christian man has access to the one Source of illumination and of truth and righteousness and holiness, that no Christian man is to become subject to the dominion of a brother.  And it is because on the servants and on the handmaidens has been poured out, in these days, God’s Spirit and they prophesy, that all domination of classes or individuals, and all stiffening of the free life of God’s Church by man-made creeds, are contrary to the very basis of its existence, and an attack on the dignity of each individual member of the Church.  ‘Ye have an unction from the Holy One’ is said to all Christian people—­and ‘ye need not that any man teach you,’ still less that any man, or body of men, or document framed by men, should be set up as normal and authoritative over Christ’s free people.

Still further, and only one word—­Let me remind you of what I have already said, and what is only too sadly true, that this grand universality of the Spirit’s gift to all Christian people does not fill, in the mind of the ordinary Christian man, the place that it ought, and it does not fill it, therefore, in his experience.  I say no more upon that point.

II.  And now let me say a word, secondly, about the many-sidedness of this universal gift.