THE KING’S BUSINESS
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u s; it has a pathos all its own. "Yet what do we really know about it? “Thou canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth.” Does the wind then obey no rule; is it a mere symbol of unfettered caprice? Surely not. If, as the psalmist sings, “God bringeth the winds out of his treasuries,” He acts, we may be sure, here as always, whether in nature or in grace, by some law which his own perfections impose upon. His action. He may have given to us of these later times to see a very little deeper beneath the surface of the natural world than was the case with our fathers. ” Per chance we explain the immediate antece dents of the phenomenon; but can we explain our own explanation? The frontier of our ignorance is removed one sjage farther back; but “the way of the wind” is as fitting an expression for the mysteries now as it was in the days of Solomon. We know that there is no cave of ¿Eolus.' We know that the wind is the creature of that great Master who works everywhere and incessantly by rule. But, as the wind still sweeps by Us who call ourselves the chil dren of an age of knowledge, and we endeavor to give our fullest answer to the question, “Whence it cometh, and whither it goeth ?” we discover that, as the symbol of a- spiritual1 force, of whose presence we are conscious, while we are unable to determine, with moderate confidence, either the- secret principle or the range of its action, the wind is as full of meaning still as in the days of Nicodemus. A STRIKING SIMILE When our Lord has thus pointed to the freedom and jthe mysteriousness of the wind, He adds, “So is every one that is born of the Spirit.” The simile itself would have led us to expect—“So is the Spirit of God.” The man born of the Spirit would answer' not to the wind itself, but to the sensible effect of the wind. There is a break of correspondence between the simile and its application. The simile directs attention to the divine Author of the new birth in man. The words which follow direct attention to the human sub
ject upon whom the divine* agent works. Something similar is observable when' our Lord compares the kingdom of heaven to a merchantman seeking goodly pearls; the kingdom really corresponds not to the mer chantman, but to the pearl of great price which the merchantman buys. In such cases, we may be sure, the natural cor respondence between a simile and its appli cation is not disturbed without a motive,. And the reason for this disturbance is pre sumably that the simile is not adequate to the full purpose of the speaker, who is anxious to teach some larger truth than its’ obvious application would suggest. In the case before us, we may be allowed to sup pose, that by His reference to the. wind our Lord desired to convey something more than the real but mysterious agency of the Holy Spirit in the new birth of man. •His language seems designed, not merely to cor rect the materialistic narrowness of the Jewish doctor, not merely to answer by anticipation the doubts of later days as to the spiritual efficacy of His own sacra ment of regeneration, but to picture, in words which should be read to the end of time, the' general work of that divine per son whose mission of- mercy to our race was at once thé consequence and the com- : pletion of His own. It may be useful to trace the import of our Lord’s simile in three fièlds of the action of the holy and eternal Spirit; His creation of a sacred literature, His guid ance of a divine society, and His work •upon individual souls. I. As, then, we turn over the pages of the Bible, must we not say ,• "The wind of heaven bloweth where it listeth?” If we might reverently imagine ourselves schem ing beforehand what kind of a book the Book of God ought to be, how different would it be from the actual Bible. There vvould be as many Bibles as there are souls, and they would differ as widely. But in one thing, amid all their differences, they would probably agree ; they would lack the variety, both in form and substance, of the holy Book which the Church of God places
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