The Work of the Holy Spirit

a new outpouring of the Spirit. But the wished-for dawn, he says, still held

back. His wide survey, beyond his special subject, of the whole domain of

science in the corporate life of the Church is characteristic no less of the

subject than of the man. It was not given to him, however, to see the longed-

for flood poured over the parched fields. His exegetical ‘foundation’ (chaps.

i.-iii.) moves in the old tracks. Since he shared essentially the subjective point

of view of Schleiermacher and committed the final decision in the determin-

ing conceptions to philosophy, in spite of many remarkable flashes of insight

into the Scriptures he remained fixed in the intellectualistic and ethical mode

of conceiving the Holy Ghost, though this was accompanied by many attempts

to transcend Schleiermacher, but without the attaining of any unitary con-

ception and without any effort to bring to a Scriptural solution the burning

question of the personality or impersonality of the Spirit. The fourth chapter

institutes a comparison between the Spirit of Christianity and that of hea-

thenism. The second book deals first with the relation of the Church to the

Holy Spirit in general, and then enters upon a history of the doctrine which

is carried, however, only through the earliest fathers, and breaks off with a

survey of the scanty harvest which the first age supplied to the succeeding

epochs, in which the richest development of the doctrine took place. Here

the book closes... ."^5

Thus the only worthy attempt German theology has made to produce a

comprehensive treatise on the work of the Holy Ghost remains a neglected

torsotill today.

If we will gather up the facts to which we have thus somewhat desultorily called attention
into a propositional statement, we shall find ourselves compelled to recognize that the
doctrine of the Holy Spirit was only slowly brought to the explicit consciousness of the
Church and has even yet taken a firm hold on the mind and consciousness of only a small
section of the Church. To be more specific, we shall need to note that the early Church

xxxiii

busied itself with the investigation within the limits of this locusof only the doctrine of the
person of the Holy Ghost—His deity and personality—and of His one function of inspirer
of the prophets and apostles, while the whole doctrine of the work of the Spirit at large is a
gift to the Church from the Reformation;^6 and we shall need to note further that since its

5 Compare the remarks of Dr. Smeaton, op. cit., ed. 2, p. 396.
6 For the epoch-making character of the Reformation in the history of this doctrine cf. also Nösgen, op. cit.,
p. 2. “For its development, a division line is provided simply and solely by the Reformation, and this merely
because at that time only was attention intensely directed to the right mode of the application of salvation. Thus
were the problems of the specially saving operation of the Holy Spirit, of the manner of His working in the

Introductory Note