to whom all space ought to be left perfectly free, should be enclosed within walls and roofs. As if it were not in the power of God to descend in any way to us, and yet at the same time not to make any change of place, or to confine us to earthly means, but rather to use them as vehicles to elevate us towards his celestial glory, which fills all things with its immensity, as well as transcends the heavens in its sublimity. VI. Now, as the present age has witnessed a violent dispute respecting the efficacy of the ministry, some exaggerating its dignity beyond measure, and others contending that it is a criminal transfer to mortal man of what properly belongs to the Holy Spirit, to suppose that ministers and teachers penetrate the mind and heart, so as to correct the blindness of the one, and the hardness of the other,—we must proceed to a decision of this controversy. The arguments advanced on both sides may be easily reconciled by a careful observation of the passages, in which God, the Author of preaching, connecting his Spirit with it, promises that it shall be followed with success; or those in which, separating himself from all external aids, he attributes the commencement of faith, as well as its subsequent progress, entirely and exclusively to himself. The office of the second Elias, according to Malachi, was to illuminate the minds and to “turn the hearts of the fathers to the children,” and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just.[727] Christ declares that he sent his disciples, that they “should bring forth fruit”[728] from their labours. What that fruit was, is briefly defined by Peter, when he says that we are “born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible.”[729] Therefore Paul glories that he had “begotten” the Corinthians “through the gospel,” and that they were “the seal of his apostleship;”[730] and even that he was “not a minister of the letter,” merely striking the ear with a vocal sound, but that the energy of the Spirit had been given to him to render his doctrine efficacious.[731] In the same sense, he affirms, in another Epistle, that his “gospel came not in word only, but also in power.”[732] He declares also to the Galatians, that they “received the Spirit by the hearing of faith.”[733] In short, there are several places, in which he not only represents himself as a “labourer together with God,”[734] but even attributes to himself the office of communicating salvation. He certainly never advanced all these things, in order to arrogate to himself the least praise independent of God, as he briefly states in other passages: “Our entrance in unto you was not in vain.”[735] “I labour, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily.”[736] “He that wrought effectually in Peter to the apostleship of the circumcision, the same was mighty in me toward the Gentiles.”[737] Besides, it is evident, from other places, that he leaves ministers possessed of nothing, considered in themselves: