Thus, obviously enough, the doctrine of the Spirit is no remote or esoteric thing; it is no mere ultimate object of the rapt contemplation of the mystic; it is the doctrine of that wherein God touches man most nearly, most familiarly, in common life. Last in the eternal order of the Divine Being, 'proceeding from the Father and the Son,' the Holy Spirit is the first point of contact with God in the order of human experience[251]. 'I believe in the Holy Ghost, the giver of life.' All life is His operation. 'Wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is also life; and wherever life is, there is also the Holy Spirit[252].' Thus if creation takes its rise in the will of the Father, if it finds its law in the being of the Word or Son, yet the effective instrument of creation, the 'finger of God,' the moving principle of vitalization is the Holy Spirit, 'the divider and distributor of the gifts of life[253].' Nature is one great body, and there is breath in the body; but this breath is not self-originated life, it is the influence of the Divine Spirit. 'By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.' The Spirit, the breath of God, was brooding upon the face of the waters of chaos ere life and order were. It is the sending forth of the breath of God, which is the giving to things of the gift of life; it is the withdrawal of that breath which is their annihilation[254]. So keenly indeed were the Christians of the early period conscious of the one life of nature as the universal evidence of the one Spirit, that it was a point of the charge against Origen that his language seemed to involve an exclusion of the Holy Spirit from nature, and a limitation of His activity to the Church[255]. The whole of life is certainly His. And yet, because His special attribute is holiness, it is in rational natures, which alone are capable of holiness, that He exerts His special influence. A special in-breathing of the Divine Spirit gave to man his proper being[256]. In humanity, made after the Divine Image, it was the original intention of God that the Spirit should find His chiefest joy, building the edifice of a social life in which nature was to find its crown and justification: a life of conscious and free sonship, in which the gifts of God should be not only received, but recognised as His, and consciously used in willing and glad homage to the Divine Giver, in reverent execution of the law of development impressed by the Divine Reason, in the realized fellowship of the Blessed Spirit of knowledge and love. The history of humanity has in fact been a development, but a development the continuity of which is most apparent in that department in which man appears simply as the child of nature, the most perfect and interesting of her products, consciously adapting himself to his environment and moulded by it. This indeed has been so much the case that the facts of the history of