And let us remember, too, how full of blessed teaching, of rebuke, and of instruction that symbol is, in reference to ourselves.  To all of us there is offered, if we like to have it, this dove-like Spirit.  What does that mean?  Let us for a moment dwell upon the various uses of the emblem, for they all carry important lessons.  Our hearts are like that wild chaos which preceded the present ordered state of things.  And over the seething darkness, full of all formless horrors and half-discerned dead monstrosities, over all the chaos of disordered wills, rebellious appetites, stinging conscience, darkened perceptions, there will come, if we will (and we may will by His help, which is never far away from us), gently, but quickening us into life and reducing confusion into order, and flooding our cloudy night with light, that divine Spirit.  The dove that brooded over Chaos and made it Cosmos, will brood over your nature, and re-create the whole.  ’If any man be in Christ, he is a new creation.’  ‘The old things are passed away.’  Creator Spirit! create a clean heart in me.

And then again let me remind you that this emblem brings to us another cognate and yet distinct hope, inasmuch as the dove was the emblem of purity and clean for sacrifice.  This is the characteristic of the scriptural doctrine of inspiration, by which it is distinguished from all heathen and secular conceptions of a similar sort, viz., that it puts the moral in the foreground, and that the Spirit, which is the Spirit of truth, and of wisdom and of power, is first and foremost the Spirit of holiness.  So that if a man is not clean, no matter what his gifts, no matter what his wisdom, no matter what his intellectual force, no matter what his supernatural and miraculous power, he has not the Spirit of God in him.  The Dove comes, and where it comes there is peace, there is purity, there is sacrifice.  If any man have not the Spirit of holiness he is none of Christ’s.

So, brethren, remember that not in shining faculty, not in piercing vision into mystery, not in the eloquence of honeyed tongue, nor the power of a swift hand, not in any of the lesser and subordinate gifts which the world exclusively honours as inspiration, is the power of the indwelling Spirit to be manifested.  If the Spirit of God is in you, it is making you clean.

Still further, remember how, as for the King so for His subjects, the Dove that crowns Him and that dwells in them is the Spirit of meekness and of gentleness.  That is the true force.  Light, which is silent, is mightier than all lightnings.  The Spirit, which is the ‘Spirit of love,’ is therefore ‘the Spirit of power.’  The true type of Christian character, which the gospel has brought into being, looks modest, inconspicuous and humdrum, by the side of the more brilliant and vulgar beauties of the world’s ideals.  Just as the iridescent hues on a dove’s neck, and the quiet blue of its plumage, look modest and Quaker-like beside gaudy parroquets and other bedizened birds, so the Christian type of character, patient, meek, gentle, not self-asserting, seems pale and sober-tinted beside the world’s heroes.  But gentleness is the mightiest and will conquer at last.  For Christ and Christ’s followers go forth, through universal love to universal power.