is renewed.  But by what?  “God,” says the Psalmist, “has renewed the face of the earth.”  True, the seeds, the animals came by natural causes:  but who was the Cause of those causes?  Who sent the things thither, save God?  And who gave them life?  Who kept the life in floating seeds, in flying spores?  Who made that life, when they reached the barren shore, grow and thrive in each after their kind?  Who, but the Spirit of God, the Lord and Giver of life?  God let His Spirit proceed and go forth from Himself upon them; and they were made; and so He renewed the face of the earth.

That, my good friends, is not only according to Scripture, but according to true philosophy.  Men are slow to believe it now:  and no wonder.  They have been always slow to believe in the living God; and have made themselves instead dead gods—­if not of wood and stone, still out of their own thoughts and imaginations; and talk of laws of nature, and long abstractions ending in ation and ality, like that “Evolution” with which so many are in love just now; and worship them as gods; mere words, the work of their own brains, though not of their own hands—­even though they be—­as many of them are—­Evolution, I hold, among the rest—­true and fair approximations to actual laws of God.  But before them, and behind them, and above them and below them, lives the Author of Evolution, and of everything else.  For God lives, and reigns, and works for ever.  The Spirit of God proceedeth from the Father and the Son, giving, evolving, and ruling the life of all created things; and what we call nature, and this world, and the whole universe, is an unfathomable mystery, and a perpetual miracle, The one Author and Ruler of which is the ever-blessed Trinity, of whom it is written—­“The glorious majesty of the Lord shall endure for ever:  the Lord shall rejoice in His works.”

I believe, therefore, that the Psalmist in the text is speaking, not merely sound doctrine but sound philosophy.  I believe that the simplest and the most rational account of the mystery of life is that which is given by the Christian faith; and that the Nicene Creed speaks truth and fact, when it bids us call the Holy Spirit of God the Lord and Giver of life.

That this is according to the orthodox Catholic Faith there is no doubt.  Many mistakes were made on this matter, in the early times of the Church, even by most learned and holy divines; as was to be expected, considering the mysteriousness of the subject.  They were inclined, often, to what is called Pantheism—­that is, to fancy that all living things are parts of God; that God’s Spirit is in them, as our soul is in our body, or as heat is in a heated matter; and to speak of God’s Spirit as the soul and life of the world.

But this is exactly what the Nicene Creed does not do.  It does not say that the Holy Spirit is life:  but that He is the Lord and Giver of life—­a seemingly small difference in words:  but a most vast and important difference in meaning and in truth.