This teaching places the Spirit in a very unenviable position, that of preaching four or five different teachings at the same time, each within a half-mile of the other.  Suppose a preacher were to do that!  What would the people think of him?  It would ruin the reputation of any preacher in Christendom.  There is something wrong, and that something is to apply to the world the promise of the Paraclete, which was only given to the apostles.

Paul tells Timothy:  “The things thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men who shall be able to teach others also.”  Was that not an impertinence in Paul if Timothy had the same divine leading as he?  Was it not impertinence in Jude to say that the faith was “once for all delivered to the saints,” if there were deliverances being constantly made?  What need to preach the gospel to the heathen world if God is directly leading men into the truth?  What need for a New Testament if all men possess this Paraclete?  How can one man deny the claims of another whom he admits to be divinely guided into all truth?

Some have thought that Christ bestowed the Paraclete upon the apostles when he breathed upon them and said:  “Receive ye the Holy Spirit.”  At best that was a prophetic and not an actual bestowal, for after that onbreathing we find Peter (Acts I) calling upon the assembly of brethren to take a vote as to who should succeed Judas in the apostolic college.  If he had possessed the Paraclete at that time, he would not have been compelled to resort to the judgment of his brethren to determine such a question.  Moreover, Christ indicated when the Paraclete would come, by stating the work that would follow his coming:  “When he is come he shall convict the world [age] of sin, of righteousness and of judgment.”  How did he do this?

1.  His first act at his coming was to baptize the apostles in the Spirit and endow them with the Paraclete.  “Ye shall be baptized in the Holy Spirit not many days hence” (Acts 1:5).

2.  When the Spirit baptized these apostles with divine guidance he began his work of convicting the world through them.

(1) To convict the world of sin.  Not of sin in general.  It is a mistaken idea that the Spirit is sent to personally convict a man of the sin of lying, stealing or defrauding his neighbor.  When I was a boy in old Kentucky the colored people used to hold great revivals; they generally selected corn-planting-time or harvest-time for these meetings.  Many of them would lie for days in a cataleptic condition, which, they said, was a “conviction of the Spirit.”  A man would go groaning and moping to his task because he was “under conviction of the Holy Ghost.”  The above passage teaches nothing of the kind, nor does any other passage in the New Testament teach it.  There is not a case in the New Testament where the Holy Spirit ever made an issue with a man to personally convict him of sin.  All men are