Therefore we have to come back to this, which is the point to which I seek to bring you and myself, in lowly penitence and contrite acknowledgment—­that it is all our own fault and the result of evils in ourselves that may be remedied, that we have so little of that divine gift; and that if the churches of this country and of this day seem to be cursed and blasted in so much of their fruitless operations and formal worship, it is the fault of the churches, and not of the Lord of the churches.  The stream that poured forth from the throne of God has not lost itself in the sands, nor is it shrunken in its volume.  The fire that was kindled on Pentecost has not died down into grey ashes.  The rushing of the mighty wind that woke on that morning has not calmed and stilled itself into the stagnancy and suffocating breathlessness of midday heat.  The same fulness of the Spirit which filled the believers on that day is available for us all.  If, like that waiting Church of old, we abide in prayer and supplication, the gift will be given to us too, and we may repeat and reproduce, if not the miracles which we do not need, yet the necessary inspiration of the highest and the noblest days and saints in the history of the Church.  ’If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask Him?’ ’Ask and ye shall receive,’ and be filled ‘with the Holy Ghost and with power.’

CHRIST THE BREAKER

’The Breaker is come up before them:  they have broken up, and have passed through the gate, and are gone out by it:  and their king shall pass before them, and the Lord on the head of them.’—­MICAH ii. 13.

Micah was contemporary with Isaiah.  The two prophets stand, to a large extent, on the same level of prophetic knowledge.  Characteristic of both of them is the increasing clearness of the figure of the personal Messiah, and the increasing fulness of detail with which His functions are described.  Characteristic of both of them is the presentation which we find in this text of that Messiah’s work as being the gathering together of the scattered captive people and the leading them back in triumph into the blessed land.

Such is the image which underlies my text.  Of course I have nothing to do now with questions as to any narrower and nearer historical fulfilment, because I believe that all these Messianic prophecies which were susceptible of, and many of which obtained, a historical and approximate fulfilment in the restoration of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity, have a higher and broader and more real accomplishment in that great deliverance wrought by Jesus Christ, of which all these earlier and partial and outward manifestations were themselves prophecies and shadows.