us has been as it were diffused through our consciousness, poured out in a glad experience as rain from the cloud, as floods from the rising spring,[68] =through the Holy Spirit that was given to us.= Here first is mentioned explicitly, in the Apostle's argument, (we do not reckon ch. i. 4 as in the argument,) the blessed Spirit, the Lord the Holy Ghost. Hitherto the occasion for the mention has hardly arisen. The considerations have been mainly upon the personal guilt of the sinner, and the objective fact of the Atonement, and the exercise of faith, of trust in God, as a genuine personal act of man. With a definite purpose, we may reverently think, the discussion of faith has been kept thus far clear of the thought of anything lying behind faith, of any "grace" _giving_ faith. For whether or no faith is the gift of God, it is most certainly the act of man; none should assert this more decidedly than those who hold (as we do) that Eph. ii. 8[69] _does_ teach that where saving faith is, it is there because God has "given" it. But how does He "give" it? Not, surely, by implanting a new faculty, but by so opening the soul to God in Christ that the divine magnet effectually draws the man to a willing repose upon such a God. But the man does this, as an act, himself. He trusts God as genuinely, as personally, as much with his own faculty of trust, as he trusts a man whom he sees to be quite trustworthy and precisely fit to meet an imperative need. Thus it is often the work of the evangelist and the teacher to insist upon the _duty_ rather than the _grace_ of faith; to bid men rather thank God for faith _when they have believed_ than wait for the sense of an afflatus before believing. And is this not what St Paul does here? At this point of his argument, _and not before_, he reminds the believer that his possession of peace, of happiness, of hope, has been attained and realized not, ultimately, of himself but through the working of the Eternal Spirit. The insight into mercy, into a propitiation provided by divine love, and so into the holy secret of the divine love itself, has been given him by the Holy Ghost, who has taken of the things of Christ, and shewn them to him, and secretly handled his "heart" so that the fact of the love of God is a part of experience at last. The man has been told of his great need, and of the sure and open refuge, and has stepped through its peaceful gate in the act of trusting the message and the will of God. Now he is asked to look round, to look back, and bless the hand which, when he was outside in the naked field of death, opened his eyes to see, and guided his will to choose.