The Holy Spirit Never Denigrates Christ

The Holy Spirit never utters a word or prompts to an act derogatory to Christ. Since it is His office to glorify Christ, the Comforter will never degrade Him by denying or detracting from one of His claims. He professed to be an infallible Teacher, to be absolutely sinless, to set a faultless example, to have a right to universal obedience, to work miracles, to fulfill the prophecies, to be the Messiah of the Jews, the Light of the world, the Savior of men, the Son of God, in a sense so unique that He was the only-begotten; He declared that He would raise the dead, and judge the world; and, lastly, that He was one with the Father, having all power in heaven and on earth. The Paraclete is a mirror, wherein is reflected the image of the risen and invisible Jesus, as He truly is, without distortion. "The Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father, HE SHALL TESTIFY OF ME. . . He shall GLORIFY ME, for He shall receive of Mine and show (tell, Greek) it unto you." He never mars the symmetry of the God-man. "Wherefore I give you to understand that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed" (I Cor. xii. 3). Hence it is an incontestable fact of Church history that every lapse from orthodoxy has been preceded by spiritual decay. The Holy Ghost leaves the Church before she can deny the lordship of Jesus her great Head. For proof of this, study the religious history of New England. "Every spirit that confesseth not Jesus Christ come in the flesh, is not of God." This is Dean Alford's version, who asserts that the PERSON of Christ, and not some fact pertaining to Him, is the object of the confession. Whatever that spirit is that denies one claim of Christ, or obscures one feature of His glorious likeness, as it beams upon us in the Gospels, we may be well assured that this spirit is not the Divine Limner who portrayed that likeness with the pen of the four evangelists. When Jesus is ranked with Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, and Mohammed, in the style of our modern free-religionists, we may feel certain that the Spirit of truth does not suggest this degrading classification.

— Mile-Stone Papers  (1878) Part 1, Chapter 22.