"A man who continues in his sins, and who has no living faith in the Son of God, cannot receive the gift of the Holy Spirit through the ministration of any agent, however holy he may be. The impure spirit of such a one will repulse the pure element, upon the natural laws of sympathetic affinity, or of attraction and repulsion."[O] [Footnote O: Key to Theology, pp. 96, 97, 98.] In other words, the Spirit of God will not dwell in unholy temples, hence repentance and baptism for the remission of sins go before the baptism of the Spirit that men may be cleansed of their sins, justified before God, and their bodies by these means made fit dwelling-places for the Holy Ghost--the living temples of God. CHAPTER XXVIII. THE HOLY GHOST.--CHARACTER AND SOURCE. Can the naturalist find out and comprehend the secret of the endless variety of life in the vegetable and animal kingdoms? Can the chemist find out the essences of substances, or make himself master of the secrets of great nature's laboratory where those wonderful combinations are wrought which produce the substances that constitute the material universe? Can the physician or surgeon with scalpel and microscope "trace to its source the lightning of the soul"--trace out the secret springs of life and intelligence in the human organism? Can the astronomer, even with his mightiest telescope, penetrate to the outside curtains of space where worlds and planetary systems do not exist--can he circumscribe the creations of God, within the scope of his vision or knowledge? To all these questions a negative answer must be given; when man has done his best, when his whole life has been spent in seeking knowledge and finding out wisdom, even then the facts which he has mastered, compared with those beyond the power of his intellect to comprehend, are insignificant; and the fields of knowledge which he has explored, compared with those wherein man has never yet set his foot, are as the few grains of sand compared to the untold millions of such grains that form old ocean's beach. The great Sir Isaac Newton at the close of his life--a life devoted to the search for knowledge in which pursuit he had been more than ordinarily successful, and most men thought he had accomplished something of which he could boast--said in accents most humble, "I have been like a child playing upon the beach; I have succeeded in finding a few pretty shells, and picking up a few pretty pebbles, but the great ocean lies before me unexplored." Questions and considerations like these, are calculated to reveal the fact that man, with all his boasted intelligence, is, after all, in this sphere of existence, "cribbed, cabined and confined" to limits extremely narrow, so far as his ability to comprehend facts is concerned.