Article August 5, 1916 Issue

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with contributions from J. G. Beaumont, John Reid Shannon

[The Methodist Times]

The gift of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost is the supreme event in the history of the church. In that gift the work of Christ finds its spiritual culmination. By it the church was constituted. Its spiritual inheritance was conveyed to it, and the lines of its advance were clearly marked out. Through the gift of the Spirit the church as a whole entered into the conscious enjoyment of the new relationship to God in Christ Jesus. This new consciousness brought its possessors into a state of permanent spiritual uplifting and enlargement, affecting alike the mind, the affections, and the will through the reenforcement of sanctified personality.

The gift was corporate, conferred on the whole body of the church; it was also personal, as coming to individual believers who through the divine gift were made members one of another. Unhappily these two qualities of the gift—its social and its personal nature—have seldom been seen in their true relationship to one another. From this failure has sprung the greater part of the mistakes, the lapses, and the confusion of subsequent church history. The time seems to be approaching when the fuller recognition both of the social and of the personal meaning of the gift of the Holy Spirit may lead to the reconciliation of many differences and to the promotion of the real unity of Christ's church.

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