A New Dispensation

"Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you." — John 16:7 KJV.

The declaration that it was expedient, or "good," as Luther translates it, for Christ to go away in order that the Comforter might come, proves the fact that the work of the Holy Spirit is so indispensable a complement to His own work that His bodily withdrawal, which is the condition of the Spirit's advent, should awaken great joy in the hearts of His disciples. A few disciples, comparatively, had seen Him in His humiliation, rejected of men; now One was to come who should be a mirror in which all disciples in all lands and in all generations should see Him glorified, and, seeing, "should be transformed into the same image from glory to glory." Without Jesus radiant with divinity, the Comforter would have nothing to reproduce in the heart of the believer. It would be like removing from the photographer's studio the person whose features the sun is about to fix on the plate prepared to receive them.

Christ's Mission Is Extended by the Spirit

"Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you." — John 16:7 KJV.

It is quite obvious that Christ's efficiency in His saving contact with human souls is indefinitely increased by His representative, the Comforter. While on the earth in the limits of the body His range of beneficent effort must be restricted to a few of the many millions of mankind. His method was to individualize. In healing He laid His hands on every one. There was no healing in the mass. If men's diseased bodies required individualization, much more do their depraved souls. Through the Paraclete the Great Physician can simultaneously medicate millions of sin-sick souls on all the islands of the sea and in both hemispheres wherever His gospel is preached.

After the ascension, wherever there was a believer there was an omnipotent Christ. A thousand cities might simultaneously behold the displays of His power. On the day of Pentecost a thousand of the fiercest enemies of Christ laid down their weapons and proclaimed Him Lord to the glory of God the Father. The hearts of His own immediate disciples, so imperfectly subdued during His ministry, having been brought into complete subjection by the outpouring of the Spirit from the throne of their risen Lord, He went forth conquering and to conquer. It was sufficiently manifest then that Christ had all power in heaven and in earth. 

— George Bowen.

But not only is the quantity of His work multiplied infinitely, but the quality is vastly improved through the mission of the Spirit. While in the body on the earth the work of reconstructing fallen human nature must he done from the outside, at a distance from the centre of personality within. But the Spirit can interpenetrate the soul, impart spiritual life, and lodge the transforming principle in the very core of our being. Yea, He Himself, with my free consent makes my heart His domicile, His earthly holy of holies, thus imparting and conserving holiness at the fountain of action and character. This He can more effectually do than did Jesus in the flesh. For the Comforter does not take up His abode in my body merely, nor in my intellect, nor in any one of my mental powers; but in my spirit, which He found as a mere unused capacity and filled with His subtle energies which stream forth, quickening intellect, sensibilities and will, chastening every bodily appetite, and in this way sanctifying the material organism through which my spirit acts. Not in what we know but in what we are, does the Spirit take up His abode. Taking possession of the unexplored recesses of my spirit, the Holy Spirit, after my voluntary surrender and self-effacement, is in a position to inspire and safely guide me individually through all the perils and turning points of my probation. Thus I am, through the Paraclete, on more intimate terms with the Lord Jesus than ever was "that disciple whom Jesus loved" and who leaned on His bosom. It is this spiritual privilege, this closer intimacy with God in His Son, that makes the least in the kingdom of God, the spiritual kingdom established on the day of Pentecost, greater than John the Baptist, even though he was greater than Abraham, the founder, and Moses, the lawgiver, of the greatest nation on earth in God's eyes. Hence we emphatically indorse the strong declaration of Alford, especially his capitalized words:

 This 'the Comforter will not come if I go not,' is a convincing proof that the gift of the Spirit at and since the day of Pentecost is something TOTALLY DISTINCT from anything before that time; a new and loftier dispensation.

 — The Gospel of the Comforter, Chapter 10.

A Higher School of Faith

"Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you." — John 16:7 KJV.

The withdrawal of the visible Christ and the substitution of His visible presence in the Paraclete whom He sent was the introduction of His disciples into a higher school of faith. Hitherto they had walked chiefly by sight. The Miracles of their Master had appealed to their reason through the senses. They were not entirely destitute of faith, else they would not have forsaken their fish-nets and followed the Man of Nazareth. But their faith was weak; it needed to be exercised and developed by struggles in a far different arena. They must be taught the spiritual nature of Messiah's kingdom. The visible presence of Christ as a veritable man had been a help to the primary lesson they had already learned; it would be a hindrance to the advanced lesson now to be learned. They must learn that deliverance from sin and restoration to true holiness consist not in outward ceremonials and prescribed rituals, nor in abstract truths grasped by the intellect, but in a vital union with a personal Saviour effected by the Spirit.

Pentecost and the Founding of the Church

"Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth: for he shall not speak from himself; but what things soever he shall hear, [these] shall he speak: and he shall declare unto you the things that are to come He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare [it] unto you" — John 16:13, 14 (Revised Version).

This intimate identification of the Spirit's mission with the person of Christ and the success of His work was because in the wisdom of God it was seen to be necessary to the establishment and universal spread of His kingdom. There is truth in the argument that the existence of the Church as the visible exponent of Christ's kingdom is the great proof of the resurrection and divinity of its Founder. This is true. But our contention is that the Church which was not organized when Jesus Christ, its living head, ascended, would not have had a beginning on the earth without the Pentecostal gift. This idea has found expression in that beautiful and inspiring formula of worship, the Te Deum Laudamus, called by Canon Liddon "at once a hymn, a prayer and a creed," in these sublime words,

"When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death,
Thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers."

The Spirit Testifies to Christ

"Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth: for he shall not speak from himself; but what things soever he shall hear, [these] shall he speak: and he shall declare unto you the things that are to come He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare [it] unto you" — John 16:13, 14 (Revised Version).

If the Paraclete had come to testify of Himself and to do an independent work irrespective of Christ, His mission would not have conserved the memory of Christ, but would have eclipsed it. If He had come in the name of the Father to maintain the meager unity of God in the bare and simple sense taught by so called liberal Christianity, the outcome would have been the final oblivion of Jesus Christ following the denial of everything supernatural in His birth and ministry.

But He proceeded from the Father and the Son specially charged with the office of testifying of the Son, yea, of glorifying Him, not only in the gospel record, which He should inspire, and in the doctrines to be unfolded in apostolic sermons and epistles, but by His indwelling presence in the consciousness of believers, revealing Christ in them in a manner wholly indescribable but blessedly real and certain. We do not wonder at the tenacity with which western Christianity has insisted on the "Filioque" (and from the Son) in the creed respecting the procession of the Holy Ghost. This enlargement of the creed not only conserves the dignity of the Son of God and harmonizes with His Trinitarian address in John xiv. -xvi. and with other texts in which the Paraclete is called the "Spirit of Christ" (Rom. viii. 9), the "Spirit of Jesus" (Acts xvi. 7, Revised Version) and "Christ" (Eph. iii. 17), but it is confirmed by the experience of all who testify that the Comforter "has taken up His lasting abode in their hearts." (Alford). These rejoice in a wonderful magnifying of Christ and in an inexpressible increase of love to Him. If troubled before by doubts of His divinity, their doubts are forever dispelled, and "in the Holy Spirit" they gladly and spontaneously say, "Jesus is Lord" (I Cor. xii. 3, Revised Version). They are as sure of his Godhead as was Thomas in the presence of his risen Master when he exclaimed, "My Lord and my God" (John xx. 28).

— The Gospel of the Comforter, Chapter 9.

The Pentecostal Attestation

Pentecost is the final, indispensable and standing attestation of the Lordship of Jesus Christ and of the truth of all His declarations. In other words, the gift of the Paraclete, not merely as a solitary event, but as a perpetual dispensation of grace and power, is absolutely necessary to the perfection of the Christian evidences. The resurrection of Christ, according to Paul in I Cor. xv. and all Christian apologists, is the fundamental proof of His divine mission. It is my purpose to show that this greatest miracle, taken by itself as an isolated event, without the standing and perpetual attestation of the Pentecostal dispensation as a predicted sequence, would have been insufficient for the establishment of Christianity against the universal opposition of Jews and Gentiles, including ten imperial edicts of persecution and extermination beginning with Nero, A. D. 64, and ending with Diocletian, A. D. 313. Much less would it have been sufficient to perpetuate the gospel eighteen hundred years as a system dominating the world's best thought and keeping in advance of the progress of the ages. We mean to say that the empty tomb without the tongues of fire descending from generation to generation on Spirit-baptized believers would have been inadequate to the permanent enthronement of Christianity over mankind. If "another Comforter" had not succeeded Christ, His mission, with all His miracles, including His victory over the tomb, would have been a failure, and His sermons and parables would long since have been forgotten. This idea is beautifully expressed in the first verse and the last of President W. F. Warren's hymn.

"I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost,
I love to worship Thee;
My risen Lord for aye were lost
But for Thy company.

"I worship Thee, O Holy Ghost,
I love to worship Thee;
With Thee each day is Pentecost,
Each night nativity."

— The Gospel of the Comforter, Chapter 9.

Does the Carnal Nature Return?

QUESTION: Does the carnal nature, destroyed by entire sanctification, return and become the impulse to the sinful act when a person entirely sanctified commits sin?

ANSWER: No. The sinful act defiles the nature. This raises the question how a perfectly holy being can sin. How did sin get into a holy universe. This is an unanswerable question which has vexed all the philosophy of all generations. There are no causes of sin, and no good reason, only conditions privative, such as defect of knowledge in Adam and in all children; want of acquaintance with law and its penalty, with the added fact that no free agent is ever created or born fully equipped for liberty by experience and good habits. And lastly, the holiest person on the earth is exposed to the irruption of evil spirits. These considerations do not necessitate sin, but they render it highly probable. Father E. T. Taylor, "the old man eloquent" in the Boston Seaman's Bethel, used to speak of Adam as a "big baby toddling forth amid the pitfalls of Satan." This is only a concrete way of saying with Bishop Butler's Analogy, that the Creator could not make a moral agent with good moral habits. The puzzle of the sin of an entirely sanctified person, though of the same kind as that of the sin of the holy angels, may be somewhat greater because of his former experience of the sorrow of sinning.

— Steele's Answers pp. 212, 213.

From What Do Sins Originate?

QUESTION: From what cause does the act of sin in man originate?

ANSWER: The free will is the first cause of its own moral acts, just as God is the first cause of all created being. A first cause is unthinkable; we cannot mentally construe either the absolute, like a first cause, or the infinite, like a succession of causes running back without end. Man is the creator of his own character and destiny. The most important part of God's universe is left for free agents to create — moral character. When it is completed at the close of each one's probation, whether the character is good or bad, God. cannot arbitrarily interpose to change it. As the free agent has fixed it so it must remain eternally.

— Steele's Answers pp. 212.

Were All the Disciples Backsliders?

QUESTION: A prominent evangelist teaches that the disciples were all backsliders before Pentecost and had to be reclaimed. He used John 21 to prove his point, especially the conversation between Jesus and Peter. Is he not mistaken?

ANSWER: Yes, he is egregiously mistaken. The recurrence of seven of the apostles to their former occupation waiting calmly for some sign from the Master which should determine their future was not indicative of backsliding, but it was in accord with the intimation in Luke 22:36 that they must now be self-supporting preachers as Paul was an example in Acts 18:3, II Thess. 3:8. It is very evident that the thrice-repeated question to Simon Peter had reference, not to the other apostles, but to him alone, and that it related to his three denials of Christ in the court of the high priest's house.

— Steele's Answers pp. 210, 211.

On Speaking in Tongues

QUESTION: How shall we treat those good people who profess to have the gift of tongues?

ANSWER: With Christian kindness, telling them that tongues are not an infallible sign of love, and much less of' perfect love, I Cor. 13:1, and that they "will cease" (ver. 8), but that "love never faileth." Tongues were the first gift on the day of Pentecost, but they did not continue in the primitive church so long as the other miraculous gifts. If the purpose of this gift was to facilitate the spread of this gospel, it would be advisable to use it now on the unsaved immigrants who make our great cities Babels. While Paul says, "Forbid not to speak with tongues," he, in the same chapter strongly discourages it when he writes, "I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue."

— Steele's Answers pp. 211, 212.