vj Some Implications of the Incarnation* \ 75 



Person. The coming of the Holy Spirit is not generally 

 felt to have been a coming in quite the same sense that 

 the coming of the Son of Man was a coming. Most men 

 feel that the Holy Spirit had always been in the world, 

 inspiring, guiding towards unity through freedom, and 

 that the Pentecostal gift was the realisation of His 

 Presence, the sudden vision of unity and freedom, the 

 sudden understanding of the truth, the beginning of 

 recognition of Him who was guiding and still would 

 guide into all truth. As in the old fairy-tales the fern 

 seed dusted on the eyes made visible things before un- 

 seen, so the sudden overwhelming understanding of 

 Christ opened the eyes of the apostles, dimmed by 

 sorrow and perplexity, to the understanding of the 

 things pertaining to the Kingdom of God. They saw 

 all the history of souls in a vivid present. Henceforward 

 the Holy Spirit was in them in a new manner. They 

 knew His presence. The Pentecostal gift was a gift of 

 open eyes; and there followed from it all the new powers 

 that sight brings. Such an event must have come at a 

 definite moment in time to a band of men who were 

 gathered together waiting for illumination, whose 

 nature they did not guess. Such an event, such a Pente- 

 cost, still comes, often at a definite moment in time, 

 sometimes by the gradual process of long years, to those 

 who are looking for it. The Pentecost, as Moberly says, 

 was the perpetual extension, or spiritual realisation, of 

 the Incarnation. 



Looked at in this way, the historic facts of the Incar- 

 nation and the Coming of the Holy Ghost seem to me 

 each in its own way to lose all difficulty. They become 

 simply parts of the great scheme of Creation in which 

 God entered into limitation and change for the sake of 

 His creatures who were to be perfected in the eternity 

 of union with Him. They enter the temporal series, im- 

 pinging on common life, yet belong to the Eternal Series. 



