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'There is great silence in Scripture of precepts or patterns of prayer and praise to the Holy Spirit. 'Therefore, he thinks, 'we should not bind it on our own consciences or on others as a piece of necessary worship, but rather practise it occasionally as prudence and expediency may require. On the famous question of the Homoousion, he thinks 'it is hard to suppose that the eternal generation of the Son of God as a distinct person, yet co-equal and consubstantial or of the same essence with the Father, should be made a fundamental article of faith in the dawn of the Gospel. He is persuaded therefore 'that faith in Him as a divine Messiah or all-sufficient and appointed Saviour is the thing required in those very texts where He is called the Son of God and proposed as such for the object of our belief; and that a belief of the natural and eternal and consubstantial sonship of Christ to God as Father was not made the necessary term or requisite of salvation; neither can he 'find it asserted or revealed with so much evidence in any part of the Word of God as is necessary to make it a fundamental article of faith. And once more, on the Personality of the Holy Ghost, he writes: 'The general and constant language of Scripture speaks of the Holy Ghost as a power or medium of divine operation. Some places may speak of him as personal, but 'it was the frequent custom of Jews and Oriental nations to speak of powers and qualities under personal characters. He can find 'no plain and express instance in Holy Scripture of a doxology directly and distinctly addressed to the Holy Spirit, and he thinks the reason of this may be 'perhaps because he is only personalised by idioms of speech.
Doctor Kirby tells him it will do the work all right. And then the bishop, after beating around the bush some more, comes out with his idea. Whether he expected there would be any Messiah come or not, of course he knowed the doctor wasn't him. But he is willing to boost the doctor's game as long as it boosts HIS game. He wants to be in on the deal. He wants part of the graft.
"Monsignor, have you ever speculated on the possible appearance of a second Mahomet, a second Buddha? What if, from some Asiatic jungle, there sallied out upon Europe a terrible ape-god, a Mongolian with exotic eyes and the magnetism of a religious madman " "You are speaking of Antichrist?" he calmly questioned. "Antichrist! Do you really believe in the Devil's Messiah?"
We have to mark in it our Lord's deliberate assumption of the role of Messiah; His shaping His conduct so as to recall to all susceptible hearts that last utterance of prophecy, and to recognise the fact that at the beginning of His career He was fully conscious of His Son-ship, and inaugurated His work by the solemn appeal to the nation to recognise Him as their Lord.
The advent of the Messiah, with his glories and his terrors the nations falling down one after another, the cataclysm of heaven and earth were the familiar food of his imagination; and, as these revolutions were reputed near, and a great number of persons sought to calculate the time when they should happen, the supernatural state of things into which such visions transport us, appeared to him from the first perfectly natural and simple.
Sabbataï abolished it, proclaiming that on that day the conviction that he was the Messiah had been borne in upon him.
When the nation was in great peril, the people said, "the Messiah will soon come and restore all things;" but probably they had no very definite notion about the Deliverer or the work he was to do. When Jesus was about thirty years old, he began to speak in public.
In their place behind the soldiers, they noted every word and motion of the Nazarene, and hung with fear upon his sighs, and talked in whispers. The man might be the Messiah, and then But they would wait and see! In the meantime Ben-Hur was not once visited by the old spirit. The perfect peace abode with him. He prayed simply that the end might be hastened.
Art thou Messiah? I strove to drown them in the festive song; but in the stillness of the night, when thou wast sleeping at my side, the voices came back, and they cried mockingly, 'Man! Man! Man! And when Nehemiah came " "Man!" interrupted Melisselda impatiently. "Cease to cozen me. Have I not known men? Ay, who more? Their weaknesses, their vanities, their lewdnesses enough!
His method of work was instructive. He never dazed his Jewish friends with dogmatic theology. He never tried to prove that Christ was the Messiah of the prophecies.
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