There was no doubt in our Lord's mind that His asking would be at once followed by the Father's giving. Indeed, the two actions seemed, in His judgment, indissolubly connected--"I will ask, and He shall give." From which we learn that prayer is a necessary link in the order of the Divine government. Though we are assured that what we ask is in God's purpose to communicate--that it lies in the heart of a promise, or in the line of the Divine procedure, yet we must nevertheless make request. "Ye have not," said the Apostle James, "because ye ask not." "Ask," said the Master, His eye being open to the laws of the spiritual world, "and it shall be given you." The prayer of the Head of the Church was heard, and He received the Holy Spirit to bestow Him again. "Having received of the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit," said the Apostle Peter, "He hath shed forth this, which ye now see and hear." Thus the Holy Spirit is the gift of the Father, through the Son, though He is equal with each of the blessed Persons in the Trinity, and is with them to be worshipped and glorified. I. THE PERSONALITY OF THE HOLY GHOST.--That word, "another"--"He shall give you _another_ Comforter"--is in itself sufficient to prove the Divinity and Personality of the Holy Ghost. If a man promises to send another as his substitute, we naturally expect to see a man like himself, occupying his place, and doing his work. And when Jesus foreannounced another Comforter, He must have intended a Person as distinct and helpful as He had been. A breath, an afflatus, an impersonal influence could not have stood in the same category with Himself. There are those who think that the Holy Spirit is to the Lord Jesus what a man's spirit is to his body; and imagine that our Lord simply intended that the spirit of His life-teaching and self-sacrifice would brood over and inspire His followers; but this could not have fulfilled the promise of "the other Comforter." It would simply have been Himself over again, though no longer as a living Person; rather as the momentum and energy of a receding force which gets weaker and ever weaker as the ages pass. Thus the spirit of Napoleon or of Caesar is becoming little more than a dim faint echo of footsteps that once shook the world.