The indignant questions of my text may be taken, with a little possibly permissible violence, as expressing and dismissing some untrue explanations.  One explanation that sometimes is urged is, the Spirit of the Lord is straitened.  That explanation takes two forms.  Sometimes you hear people saying, ’Christianity is effete.  We have to go now to fresh fountains of inspiration, and turn away from these broken cisterns that can hold no water.’  I am not going to argue that question.  I do not think for my part that Christianity will be effete until the world has got up to it and beyond it in its practice, and it will be a good while before that happens.  Christianity will not be worn out until men have copied and reduced to practice the example of Jesus Christ, and they have not quite got that length yet.  No shadow of a fear that the gospel has lost its power, or that God’s Spirit has become weak, should be permitted to creep over our hearts.  The promise is, ’I will send another Comforter, and He shall abide with you for ever.’  It is a permanent gift that was given to the Church on that day.  We have to distinguish in the story between the symbols, the gift, and the consequences of the gift.  The first and the last are transient, the second is permanent.  The symbols were transient.  The people who came running together saw no tongues of fire.  The consequences were transient.  The tongues and the miraculous utterances were but for a time.  The results vary according to the circumstances; but the central thing, the gift itself, is an irrevocable gift, and once bestowed is ever with the Church to all generations.

Another form of the explanation is the theory that God in His sovereignty is pleased to withhold His Spirit for reasons which we cannot trace.  But it is not true that the gift once given varies in the degree in which it is continued.  There is always the same flow from God.  There are ebbs and flows in the spiritual power of the Church.  Yes! and the tide runs out of your harbours.  Is there any less water in the sea because it does?  So the gift may ebb away from a man, from a community, from an epoch, not because God’s manifestation and bestowment fluctuate, but because our receptivity changes.  So we dismiss, and are bound to dismiss, if we are Christians, the unbelieving explanation, ’The Spirit of the Lord is straitened,’ and not to sit with our hands folded, as if an inscrutable sovereignty, with which we have nothing to do, sometimes sent more and sometimes less of His spiritual gifts upon a waiting Church.  It is not so.  ‘With Him is no variableness.’  The gifts of God are without repentance; and the Spirit that was given once, according to the Master’s own word already quoted, is given that He may abide with us for ever.