Son from heaven." Why has their light been extinguished, though the lampstand which once bore it still remains, adorned and beautified with all that the highest art and architecture can suggest? Their history is known to him who walks among the golden candlesticks. What violence may have been done, by headstrong self-will, to him who is called "the Spirit of counsel and might"? What rejection of the truth which he, "the Spirit {141} of truth," has appointed for the faith of God's church till at last the word has been spoken: "Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost; as your fathers did, so do ye." Is it only Jewish worshipers to whom these words apply? Is it only a Jewish temple of which this sentence is true: "Behold your house is left unto you desolate"? The Spirit will not be entirely withdrawn from the body of Christ indeed, but there is the Church, and there are churches. A man may yet live and breathe when cell after cell has been closed by congestion till at last he only inhales and exhales with a little portion of one lung. Let him that readeth understand. The Spirit is the breath of God in the body of his church. While that divine body survives and must, multitudes of churches have so shut out the Spirit from rule and authority and supremacy in the midst of them that the ascended Lord can only say to them: "Thou hast a name to live and art dead." In a word, so vital and indispensable is the ministry of the Spirit, that without it nothing else will avail. Some trust in creeds, and some in ordinances; some suppose that the church's security lies in a sound theology, and others locate it in a primitive simplicity of government and worship; but it lies in none of these, desirable as they are. The body may be as to its organs perfect and entire, wanting nothing; but simply because the Spirit has been {142} withdrawn from it, it has passed from a church into a corpse. As one has powerfully stated it: "When the Holy Spirit withdraws, . . . he sometimes allows the forms which he has created to remain. The oil is exhausted, but the lamp is still there; prayer is offered and the Bible read; church-going is not given up, and to a certain degree the service is enjoyed; in a word religious habits are preserved, and like the corpses found at Pompeii, which were in a perfect state of preservation and in the very position in which death had surprised them, but which were reduced to ashes by contact with the air, so the blast of trial, of temptation, or of final judgment will destroy these spiritual corpses."[3]