Influences of the Holy Spirit ' 4. Dr. By Henry Parry Liddon a@a*=a®®®
Text. —The w ind blow eth w here it listeth , and th o u h earest the sound thereof, b u t can st no t tell whence it com eth, and w h ith er it goeth.—St. Jo h n iii.8.
HO has not felt thè contrast, the almost tragic contrast, between the high station of the Jewish doctor, member of the Sanhedrin, master in Israel, and the ignorance of
is to lead on from familiar phrases and the well-remembered letter to the spirit and realities of religion. v ■■ A SHRED OF .RHETORIC The Jewish schools were acquainted with the expression “a new creature;” but it had long since become a mere shred of official rhetoric. As/applied to a Jewish proselyte, it scarcely meant more than a change in the outward relations of relig ious life. Our Lord told Nicodemus that every man who would see the kingdom of God which He was founding must undergo a second birth; and Nicodemus, who had been accustomed to the phrase all his- life, could not understand it if it was to be sup posed to' mean anything real. “How,’’ he asks, “can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” Our Lord does not extricate him from this blunder ing literalism; He repeats his own original assertion, but in terms which more fully express His meaning: “Verily, ierily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water' and of the Spirit, he can not enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which
elementary religious truth, as we Christians must deem it, which he displayed in this in terview with our blessed Lord ? At first sight it seems difficult to understand how our Lord could have used the simile in the text when conversing with an educated and thoughtfuLman, well versed in the history and literature of God’s ancient people; and, indeed, a negative criticism has availed itself of this and of some other features in the narrative, in the interest of the theory that Nicodemus was only a ficti tious type of the higher classes in Jewish Society, as they were pictured to itself by the imagination of the fourth Evangelist. Such a supposition,, opposed to externàl facts and to all internal probabilities, would hardly have been entertained, if the criti cal ingenuity of its author, had been sec onded by any spiritual experience! Nicode mus is very far from being a caricature; and our Lord’s method here, as elsewhere,
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