Sermons Preached at Brighton: Third SeriesRobertson, Frederick William
Religion
Sermons Preached at Brighton: Third Series
Robertson, Frederick William
Church of England -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
The physician's art again is no supernatural mystery; long and
careful study of physical laws capacitate him for his task. To govern,
again, is a natural faculty: it may be acquired by habit, but there
are some who never could acquire it. Some men seem born to command:
place them in what sphere you will, others acknowledge their secret
influence, and subordinate themselves to their will. The faculty of
organization, the secret of rule, need no supernatural power. They
exist among the uninspired. Now the doctrine of the apostle was, that
all these are transformed and renovated by the spirit of a new life in
such a way as to become almost new powers, or, as he calls them, gifts
of the Spirit. A remarkable illustration of this is his view of the
human body. If there be anything common to us by nature, it is the
members of our corporeal frame; yet the apostle taught that these,
guided by the Spirit as its instruments and obeying a holy will,
became transfigured; so that, in his language, the body becomes a
temple of the Holy Ghost, and the meanest faculties, the lowest
appetites, the humblest organs, are ennobled by the Spirit mind which
guides them. Thus he bids the Romans yield themselves "unto God as
those that are alive from the dead, and their members as instruments
of righteousness unto God."
The second class of gifts are supernatural: of these we find two
pre-eminent--the gift of tongues, and the gift of prophecy.
It does not appear that the gift of tongues was merely the imparted
faculty of speaking foreign languages--it could not be that the
highest gift of God to His Church merely made them rivals of the
linguist; it would rather seem that the Spirit of God, mingling with
the soul of man, supernaturally elevated its aspirations and glorified
its conceptions, so that an entranced state of ecstasy was
produced, and feelings called into energy, for the expression of which
the ordinary forms of speech were found inadequate. Even in a far
lower department, when a man becomes possessed of ideas for which his
ordinary vocabulary supplies no sufficient expression, his language
becomes broken, incoherent, struggling, and almost unnaturally
elevated; much more was it to be expected that when divine and new
feelings rushed like a flood upon the soul, the language of men would
have become strange and extraordinary; but in that supposed case, wild
as the expressions might appear to one coldly looking on and not
participating in the feelings of the speaker, they would be quite
sufficient to convey intelligible meaning to any one affected by the
same emotions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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