# The Power of the Spirit/Chapter 3

III
THE TALENTS OF THE SPIRIT
That the Six Gifts which we last considered were regarded as the normal dower of the ordinary Christian, is made certain by the remarkable fact that S. Paul describes nine other gifts as the special and extraordinary energizing of God's Spirit among certain exceptional individuals. The Nature of the Spirit in ordinary life may be summed up in the five names given him in different parts of the New Testament—The Spirit of Truth, of Wisdom, of Grace, the Spirit of Life, and Sonship, the last two being emphasized in the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans to show that he is the Spirit of Liberty. Indeed, in another epistle S. Paul says that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty. We may summarize them in a little table:
The Spirit of God is the Spirit of :
| Truth | | Life |
| Wisdom | | Sonship |
| Grace | | Liberty |
| | Love |
S. Paul certainly thought that the ordinary Christian is inspired, and that his whole life is the expression of the Spirit's activities because ​the Spirit dwells in him. But he also thought that some people had an exalted degree of inspiration.
We may pass over with little more than a bare mention those Seven Gifts of Service (as we may call them) which are mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans: Prophecy, Administration ('ministry', or 'deaconship'), Teaching, Exhorting, Giving, Ruling (superintending), Succouring the afflicted ('showing mercy')—summed up, perhaps, in the next sentence as Charity ('love'). We must content ourselves also with the bare enumeration of what we may call the Nine Gifts of Office, which are mentioned in the chapter we are now coming to: Apostles, Prophets, Teachers, Powers, Gifts of Healing, Helps ('ability to render loving service'), Governments ('wise counsels', 'powers of organization'), different kinds of Tongues, and their Interpretation. It is interesting to place side by side with these the sevenfold list of special endowments set out by Justin Martyr some hundred years later, which are a curious mixture of the Gifts of Office and the ordinary Gifts of the Spirit—Understanding, Counsel, Might, Healing, Foreknowledge, Teaching, the Fear of God.
Now these Gifts of Service and Office are clearly ​not universal, but are qualities of special excellence possessed by different people. They are secondary, however, to the greatest class of all, the Nine Talents of the Spirit, to which they form on the whole a fringe of useful and benevolent activities, though identical with them at one point in the case of the Gifts of Service, and at four in that of the Gifts of Office.
Let us then place the Nine Talents, as they were noted in the Church of Corinth, in the order given by S. Paul, side by side with the other lists at the points where these wholly or partly coincide:
| | The Nine Talents. | Gifts of Service. | Gifts of Office. | Justin's Gifts. |
| 1. | Wisdom | Administration | Governments | Counsel |
| 2. | Knowledge | Teaching | Teachers | Teaching |
| 3. | Faith | | |
| 4. | Healing | | Healing | Healing |
| 5. | Powers | | Powers | (Might) |
| 6. | Prophecy | Prophecy | Prophets |
| 7. | Discerning of Spirits |
| 8. | Tongues | | Tongues |
| 9. | Interpretation of Tongues | | Interpretation |
| | | Exhorting | Apostles | Understanding |
| | | Giving | Helps | Foreknowledge |
| | | Superintending | | Reverence |
| | | Succouring |
| | | [Charity] |
It is certain that all S. Paul's three lists refer to ​special, and the 'Talents' list to extraordinary qualities; wisdom, knowledge, and faith, therefore, mean wisdom, knowledge, and faith far above the ordinary degree: they do not occur in the secondary lists, but are represented by powers of administration and by the humbler (though none too common) gift of teaching. Healing and Powers and Tongues are apparently more common, since they occur also in the Gifts of Office, and healing is reinforced in the next century, as teaching is also, by S. Justin. Prophecy is the commonest of all, being mentioned in all S. Paul's lists, while the discerning of spirits occurs only among the Talents.
That is the first characteristic of all the special gifts. They are above the capacity of the ordinary Christian, though in varying degree. The second is that they are of social utility, 'to profit withal', as is made quite clear by S. Paul. A Simeon Stylites may owe his ability to live on the top of a pillar to some special gift of the spirit, and so may any other ascetic; but, like the asceticisms of India, such acts are individualistic they are not directly for the benefit of the Church; and therefore they are neither Gifts of Service, nor Gifts of Office, nor are they Talents of the Spirit in the meaning of S. Paul, who by thus moralizing these phenomena saves them from being merely 'miraculous' or wonder-provoking. He indeed only mentions them ​as it were incidentally (since they were very familiar to his hearers) in connexion with that fraternal spirit which is the main subject of his discourse in both letters. The Seven Gifts of Service are mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans so that men may acquire community of spirit, may desire to serve rather than to shine: the Nine Gifts of Office and the Nine Talents are mentioned in order to prevent the vice of rivalry in the exercise of these 'grace-gifts'; for, he says, if one member is honoured, all the members are honoured with it, and all the members of the body, being many, are one body. The whole passage in the First Epistle to the Corinthians is in fact devoted to the great social thesis of the body and its members, and culminates in the panegyric on Charity.
You will notice also that the power of writing infallible books is not included in any of the gifts or works of inspiration, nor is the power of issuing infallible bulls. We need not then be worried because the First Gospel is less accurate than S. Mark, or because S. Luke sometimes accepted accounts of events at which he was not present, which had ​become a little vague with the lapse of years, as seems to have been the case with the tradition of Pentecost itself. There is an inveterate human craving for inerrant guidance; but such guidance is not in God's plan for the world, since all is life and growth; and knowledge must grow like the rest. God helps us through our fellow men: he speaks by the prophets, but he does not speak into gramophones. Some men are inspired; and their inspiration includes wisdom and knowledge as well as faith and prophecy, but it does not include the power of never making a mistake.
As for the classification of the Talents, I do not suppose that S. Paul foresaw the ingenious activities of hermeneutics. Even apostolic vision could hardly have imagined what the exegete would accomplish through the centuries of his sermons and commentaries; and certainly no amount of apostolic inspiration could have guarded itself against that terrible ingenuity. S. Paul, happily for his peace of mind, did not know that he was destined to be infallible, and to provide proof-texts for the theology of nearly two thousand years. He wrote, like other men, though with a greater sense of responsibility and authority, for the people to whom he sent his letters; and he sometimes dashed passages off in a great fervour of passion. It would, therefore, be justifiable to classify the list of his gifts in an order different from that in which ​he set them down. None the less, the Talents probably presented themselves to his mind in a logical sequence; nor do I think that we shall err in classifying them as they stand.
There seem to be three Mental gifts, and six which we should now call Psychic; and the list seems to move gradually away from the more ordinary and constant of these special gifts to the three last, which we may class as supernormal. Thus, keeping to the original order:
| Mental. | Psychic. | Psychic. |
| | Normal. | Supernormal. |
| Special Wisdom | Healing | Discerning of Spirits |
| Special Knowledge | Powers | Glossolaly ('Tongues') |
| Special Faith | Prophecy | Interpretation of Tongues |
We need not dwell again on the word of Wisdom and of Knowledge. It is only necessary to repeat that the whole context shows a more than usual endowment of these qualities to be meant. The stress, moreover, is laid, not on the possession but the utterance of Wisdom and Knowledge—'the word of wisdom', 'the word of knowledge'. It is one thing to possess these qualities, but another to use them, and to use them in the service of the community. The same is true of Faith: it is surely mistaken of some commentators to maintain that S. Paul only means the 'faith, so as to remove mountains' of the great passage on Charity in the next chapter, since the words there are obviously rhetorical; and the writer no more means thus to ​characterize this faith, than he means to say that the gift of Tongues was always that 'of men and of angels'. Faith is the receptive organ of the human spirit; it is to the spirit what eyes and ears, and other organs of sense, are to the body; it sees, hears, tastes, and touches the invisible things. All religious people have this in some degree—no one can be entirely without it; but the charism of faith is to possess the receptive power in a special degree.
We next come to the Normal Psychic Gifts.
Gifts of Healing were extremely common, not only in S. Paul's time, but, as is illustrated in Justin Martyr's list, in the next century also, and indeed throughout Christian history, down to our own day, as I have shown elsewhere. It is the power of curing diseases of the body through the spiritual agency of the mind. Common as it is, we may class it among the psychic gifts, using the word 'psychic' in its modern signification, 'pertaining to the class of extraordinary and obscure phenomena not ordinarily treated of by psychologists.'
The next, Powers, 'works of powers,' has been obscured by the persistent determination of translators, and of commentators and theologians also, to use the question-begging word 'miracles' instead of the simple terms used in the New Testament—'powers', or 'signs', or 'works', or 'mighty works', or 'wonders'. Even the Revised Version ​gives us here the word 'powers' only in the margin. Now 'powers' never means in the New Testament a work not brought about by natural agency, which is the meaning of a miracle: the word is sometimes used vaguely, but generally of faith-healing or the casting out of daemons; indeed, in no case does it in the New Testament necessarily connote more than this. But occurring, as it does, in S. Paul's list, between healing and prophecy, the word must mean more than mere healing. It may therefore be meant to include exorcism and such-like powers of quelling psychic disturbance; or—more probably, one would think—it includes a wider exercise of spiritual mastery. As for exorcism, we are only at the beginning of our knowledge: dual personality is an established fact; 'possession' we do not hear much about in Christian countries, but most people who have lived close to life in Asia or Africa are full of queer stories, some of which have been carefully recorded. If, as seems probable, ​the evil spirit is merely a fraction of the sufferer himself, it still remains a very evil fraction, which needs removal. Many such cases have been cured by hypnotism; and very likely the genuine exorcist was a hypnotizer. Such exorcisms as we find in unreformed service books sometimes excite our repulsion and contempt, especially those of the Eastern Churches; but there may be something more rational behind the notions that water or salt are inhabited by evil spirits.
'Powers' in general are certainly found in the biographies of many famous persons; exaggerated in ancient times, they have been shirked in modern, but they occur not least in the best attested biographies —down to the present year. There is, indeed, a much larger mass of carefully verified contemporary evidence of such faculties as second sight than is still generally realized. Of historic examples perhaps the most famous is Joan of Arc: there are few events in the past for which there is such thorough evidence—much of it in the careful records of a hostile board of judges—as her visions, her premonitions, her second sight; but, after all, these are really less remarkable exhibitions of 'supernatural powers' than the miracle of her achievement. Her life, from the beginning of her ministry to the end, was one beyond the powers not only of a peasant girl but of the ablest princes, and justifies her claim to be the agent of intelligences ​outside herself. She is famous, because she happened to turn the tide of history; but many others had, and have, that charism of the 'workings of powers'.
But, it may be asked, are not such Powers clearly supernormal? If then S. Paul's list forms an ascending scale, why are they not put last of all, instead of between healing and prophecy? I think the answer is that Powers are very common, and in their common form are not far removed from ordinary shrewdness and insight. We have all known people whose gifts of penetration are what we call 'uncanny'; it is not easy, for instance, to deceive a saint. Of this we have ample historic evidence: the power of divining people's thoughts was, for instance, almost constant in the lives —exceptionally well attested—of S. Catharine of Siena and S. Teresa.
The Powers in the Church of Corinth consisted, we may then suppose, partly in exorcism and partly in the extension of human faculties beyond the capacity of mere mental quickness or ability. Such psychic power S. Paul evidently regarded as part of his own ordinary life.
Prophecy is the third of the Normal Psychic Gifts, each of which is reinforced by inclusion also in the Gifts of Office. It does not of course mean foreknowledge, except in so far as intuition into the present may guide a man's natural forecast of the future; nor does it mean preaching—or, shall we ​say? the habit of delivering sermons. It means rather the power of public speaking which is dependent on the inspiration of the moment—if one may use in a very definite sense a phrase which is generally misused; a form of inspired or, in the old Quaker sense, 'enthusiastic' preaching, which is the result of internal revelation rather than of the deliberate wisdom and acquired knowledge that head S. Paul's list. 'God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers', said Plato; and most poets know the experience—sometimes in an extreme form, as when Coleridge dreamt 'Kubla Khan'; some orators also have it in speaking. It is a common experience also among those who 'wait upon the Spirit': and the extraordinary wisdom and foresight of the Quakers—the modernity of men and women like the Emancipators and Elizabeth Fry, who were generations ahead of their time—were due to the spirit of prophecy which came to them in the silence. This intuition was the experience also of the Jewish prophets, whose testimony is well summarized by Dr. Sanday:
'Scattered all through the prophetic writings are expressions which speak of some strong and irresistible impulse coming down upon the prophet, determining his attitude to the events of his time, constraining his utterance, making his words the vehicle of a higher meaning than their own. … The personality of the prophet sinks entirely into ​the background; he feels himself for the time being the mouthpiece of the Almighty.'
And it was from one of these prophets that our Lord took the words of his first public utterance,
'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.'
But not all inspiration was supposed to be the work of God, as we shall now see.
In the group of six Psychic Charismata, we arrive then at the last three, which we are calling Supernormal, to distinguish them from Healing, Powers, and Prophecy.
The first of these is the Discerning of Spirits, or 'discriminating between spirits'. Commentators in the past have generally shirked this also, and have interpreted it as meaning 'to discern between distributions of the Holy Spirit'. But this has no meaning, since, if all manifestations came from the Spirit of God, there would be no cause to sift them. S. Paul also says quite distinctly, not the Spirit, but 'spirits' in the plural; and I think that unbiassed scholars to-day would agree with Schmiedel that the apostle meant just what he said. Most people are still at the present day strongly prejudiced ​against spiritualism; but there was a particular kind of spiritualism in the Apostolic Church which we have honestly to face.
Christians at that time believed in the existence of spirits, personal and very active, 'angels' they might be, or 'daemons', good, bad, or neutral. It is curious that, side by side with the horror of spiritualism, largely fostered by the Roman Church, which had dogmatized so freely about the next world as to have the strongest reasons for discouraging investigation of it—side by side with this has continued the belief in spirits, under the name of angels. Christian people forget that angels are spirits, because art has so long materialized them with armour and vestments, and with wings constructed in defiance of the laws both of flight and of anatomy. Now, angels must be spirits; and a guardian angel would really be, not like the beautifully draped lady of nineteenth-century art, but much more like the daemon, the δαιμόνιον, of Socrates, which, although according to Xenophon and Plato it was neither a divinity nor a genius, appeared to the philosopher as a warning voice, which he heard frequently with his outward ear, and never disobeyed. The whole matter has not been adequately dealt with by theologians, because their methods are still so predominantly scholastic, and at the very mention of an angel or a daemon, they fly to the rummaging of Hebrew texts. Such research into ancient ​demonologies can add little or nothing to our knowledge; but modern psychology and psychic research have already helped us a great deal. Whereas primitive races have peopled their world with horror, and have believed mostly in cruel gods and malevolent spirits, we are coming not only to believe in the complete love of God, but also, it may be, to disbelieve in the existence of wicked spirits, or of anything naughtier perhaps than a poltergeist. 'There may be often cause for perplexity', wrote Frederic Myers, 'but I have never seen cause for fear'; after persistent investigation, he, and many others, came to the conclusion that temporary control of the organism by a widely divergent fragment of the personality is the formula to which we can reduce probably the great majority of cases of supposed spirit-possession. But he at least thought, and an increasing number of cautious investigators think with him, that there may be, and are, some cases of possession by spirits, though only the spirits of those who once were men like ourselves. Evidence has indeed accumulated, sufficiently strong to convince many hard-headed and sceptical inquirers, of such departed spirits speaking through the medium of living persons. We are not in a position to dogmatize; and here we have only to note the existence of the phenomenon of possession, without trying to explain it. ​The strange phenomena observed in non-Christian countries may be attributed to some form of dual personality or telepathy: it is at least remarkable that the New Testament contains so much evidence of possession, also among non-Christians, and that the power of Christ is always represented as destroying it; and it would be unhistorical to shut our eyes to incidents like these, which were certainly not invented. As for credibility, they are less strange than some modern cases of complex personality such as the authenticated one of Sally Beauchamp—a case so extraordinary that some of its most careful observers have been compelled to the hypothesis of possession.
Christian belief, both Protestant and Catholic, accepts the existence of certain good spirits who are called angels. This belief, together with that in evil spirits, was shared by the whole ancient world, including the Christians of the first century. The influence of the spirits of the departed had, however, occupied men's minds very little, if at all; because the belief in human immortality had been of a hazy nature. But with the growth of that belief through Christianity, the spirit world came to be associated more and more with the departed, and the cultus of the saints very naturally grew up. The Christian Church had an entirely different ​orientation in this regard: the next world was very definitely conceived, belief in the immortality of the soul was intense; and Christians had the word of the Master that, going to the next world, he would still be with them, and would teach and strengthen them through his Spirit.
It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that Christians not only believed angelic or other spirits to speak into their hearts—that is, into the undermind or subliminal consciousness; but that the Church soon came to believe also that the heavenly visitants were often the spirits of departed and canonized saints, who appeared and spoke to the senses of the conscious mind, as in the case of Joan of Arc, and of countless other persons, who saw visions. Very likely they were right too: if the souls of the dead are immortal and dwell in another plane, the strange thing would be—not that we should have glimpses of them now and then—but that they should never show any sign of their existence, that the veil, as we say, should never be lifted; since this 'veil' is probably only a defect of our present rather gross existence, and the object of religious people is, in Browning's words, 'to wear the thickness thin, and let men see'. Thus very curiously there have gone side by side the belief in communication with departed saints and the horror of communication with departed Christians in general. This aversion has been strengthened by ​much Roman Catholic teaching about such communication being the work of evil spirits; but for that there is rather less to be said than for the old-fashioned Christmas ghost-story. The difference between the mediaeval visionaries and modern religious-minded spiritualists is partly one of method; but fundamentally it is that while both practised the communion of saints, the former meant by a saint one who had been canonized by the Church, and the latter use the word in the Pauline sense to include their relations and friends.
After this digression, which our still prevalent rabbinism has rendered necessary, we are able to suggest that S. John meant just what he said when he wrote: 'Beloved, believe not every spirit, but prove the spirits, whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God.' Some prophets, that is to say, refused to recognize the real humanity of Christ: they were inspired by spirits who were at best ignorant; other prophets could be judged by their doctrine to teach rightly, and these were the mouthpieces of spirits that were 'of God', and thus the true prophets (and presumably their familiar spirits also) had the Spirit of God.
S. Paul also meant what he said when he besought ​the Church of Thessalonica not to be shaken or troubled, 'either by spirit, or by word, or by epistle as from us, as that the day of the Lord is now present'. Nor did he mean 'spiritual gifts', as both the Revised and Authorized Versions mistranslate him; but he meant what he said when he wrote a little further on in this same letter to the Church of Corinth: 'So also ye, since ye are zealous of the spirits, seek that ye may abound unto the edifying of the Church.' He probably also meant in the same personal sense the words two verses further on: 'For if I pray in a tongue, my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful.'
The Discerning of Spirits is then placed after Prophecy, both in this List of the Talents, and when he says, 'Let the prophets speak by two or three, and let the others discern', because S. Paul believed with S. John that discarnate spirits spoke by the prophets. For us to-day the significance of this charisma lies in the fact that so far from discouraging any form of spiritualist investigation, as modern preachers usually do, he counts it among the special gifts of the Holy Ghost.
The greatest achievements of the nineteenth century lay in the field of physical discovery; and ​the Church nearly destroyed herself among intelligent people by her opposition to science in the interest of Moses. The twentieth century bids fair to be the age of psychical discovery; and yet many are anxious that the Church should once again throw herself in opposition to the new knowledge which is coming in—a science which shows promise already of working an even greater and better revolution in thought than that of Darwin. S. Paul's advice, and that of S. John, to test the spirits and to discriminate, would, I conclude, be best followed to-day by our becoming active members of the Society for Psychical Research.
The next in the list is 'Kinds of Tongues' which is perhaps best called by the distinctive name of Glossolaly. This was a psychic manifestation, quite common and familiar among the ancients. It died out rapidly in the Early Church; but it has appeared since in movements of great spiritual vigour, such as that of the Friars in the thirteenth century, the Jansenists at one period, the early Quakers, the persecuted Protestants of the Cevennes, the converts of Wesley and Whitfield, and the Irvingites, among which last it was perhaps artificially stimulated by the study of this Epistle. S. Paul spoke ​with tongues 'more than you all.'; but none the less the practice seems to have somewhat worried him because of its disorderly consequences, and on the whole he discouraged it, and himself preferred to speak five words with his understanding rather than ten thousand in a tongue. The theory was that the mind slept while God played over a man 'like a lyre'—so at least Montanus described it at the end of the next century, when it seemed only to survive in his sect. The conscious mind of the speaker was certainly asleep; his words were unintelligible, but not meaningless like the sounds of a musical instrument—though there were some in whom the trumpet gave an uncertain sound); when the speaker recovered consciousness, his memory was a blank, yet sometimes he could interpret for himself.
Glossolaly was evidently much sought after among the Christians of Corinth. It was of less social value than the other Talents of the Spirit, since it could not be shared in the same way; and, as the first enthusiasm died down, it may have become tiresome. None the less, it must have been popular with the congregation at first, and it may well have been impressive. We need not imagine it to have consisted in mere ugly gabble: even baby-talk is pretty and full of meaning, and glossolaly we may suppose to have included not only cries and ​laughter, sounds and syllables, but also of disconnected words, and new words, and perhaps short sentences, the whole delivered with rapt expression, and lofty gesture, and given significance by dramatic action and tone. It was evidently regarded as like prophecy, in that the speaker was the mouthpiece of God or of lesser spiritual personalities, but unlike prophecy in its not being immediately intelligible. A rare psychic phenomenon at the present day, glossolaly would seem to be a natural accompaniment of periods of intense religious excitement.
The Interpretation of Tongues, the last of the Talents, shows that glossolaly was not without some coherence and meaning, and like music could be interpreted by the initiate. Some had the power of interpretation: and S. Paul is against the exercise of glossolaly at all, except when it can be put to good use for edification by the presence of an interpreter; since otherwise it has no social value, and therefore does not come into the category of these charismata at all. 'But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself and to God'. The need of an interpreter had been mentioned long before by Plato, when in the Timaeus he says that the mantis 'cannot judge of the visions which he sees or the words which he utters', and 'for this reason it is customary to ​appoint diviners or interpreters as discerners of the oracles of the gods'.
We cannot imagine what going to church was like in the first century unless we try to realize that the Sunday service was not the Eucharist alone, but the Eucharist preceded by a fraternal love-feast, the Agapè or Lord's Supper, and followed by an amazing 'Liturgy of the Spirit'. There were in fact three services. The last is thus described by Mgr. Duchesne. These spiritual exercises, he says, held a very large place in the Christian service, as it is shown to us in the most ancient documents:
'After the Eucharist, inspired persons begin to speak and manifest before the assembly the presence of the Spirit that animates them. The prophets, the ecstatics, the glossolalists, the interpreters, the faith-healers (médecins surnaturels) now take possession of the attention of the faithful. There is a liturgy, as it were, of the Holy Spirit (il y a comme une liturgie du Saint-Esprit) after the liturgy of the Christ, a real liturgy, with a real presence and a communion. The inspiration can be felt: it vibrates the organs of certain privileged ones among the faithful; but all the congregation is moved, edified, and even more or less ravished and transported in the divine spheres of the Paraclete'
Modern writers generally dwell on the difference between what they call the 'miraculous' and the ​'moral' gifts among these charismata, and point out that the former degenerated whereas the latter have remained of abiding value. This is surely rather unscientific: none of the gifts are miraculous, though some are psychic, and some of these rarer than others; while all the nine are moral in so far as they are well used. Is not the suggestion also rather complacent? We seem to congratulate ourselves that, because we leave almost dormant the great boon of mental healing, and because our tame lives show hardly any signs of psychic power; and because our plethora of Sunday sermons is fatal to the very spirit of prophecy, therefore we have made some indefinable growth in moral excellence since the time of S. Paul. He shared these gifts and believed in them, and found value even in the last three, supernormal though they were; and those primitive disciples of his, whom we contemplate from the altitude of our libraries, proved their mettle when the time came. May it not be that God intends specially religious people to have more than normal capacities, that the law of spiritual increment naturally produces psychic results; and that it is no virtue of ours to have sacrificed these capacities to a rather dusty intellectualism which is already sinking into obsolescence? Perhaps S. Paul was right after all. He had excellent opportunities for knowing, and he seems to have had no doubt of the permanent value of any of the charismata ​except that of Tongues; and even this, one would suppose, he expected to increase in value as it came to be more regulated in a maturer and more settled Church.
Perhaps he would be really disappointed, if he looked around to-day (as mayhap he does), and saw what a mature and settled Church is like. Conceivably he might find us a little dull. Certainly he would be surprised at the flatness of our abilities. He might indeed turn to us very gently, and say, 'Concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant.'
Did the psychic gifts, after all, 'degenerate', any more than the mental? Are they not all permanent, because all are real? As the Church grew in numbers and added a larger proportion of tame people to the fold, her enthusiasm was doubtless diluted and spiritual fervour grew less intense; but is it not probable that the mental talents of special wisdom, understanding, and faith (especially faith) grew weaker also, and that the psychic talents merely followed in the general and inevitable process? In all the great revivals of history, the enhanced mental powers came back, but the psychic powers came back also. The saints of whom the Church is proudest had both; and their wisdom is proved by their works. S. Francis changed the face of Mediaeval Europe; John Wesley changed the heart of Hanoverian England. We are not ​changing anything, not even ourselves very much; we bark at the heels of progress, and leave statesmen, and scientists, and labour leaders, sociologists, poets, novelists, and psychologists, to convert the world and lead it in the ways of peace and goodwill. A Church, half paralysed in the higher centres, is not in a position to look down upon the talents of the great enthusiasts; nor have the leaden hands of German theologians, or the timid fingers of our own, as yet brought that old garden of the soul into growth and productivity again.
We have not lived dangerously, but academically: almost apart from real science, and blind to the revelations of art, we have trifled with old books, and have focussed our religion to the furbishing of old formulas. At best, we have been purely intellectual; and for a large part we have not been so much as that, but scholastic, sentimental, and sordid. We complained of nineteenth-century materialism, but it may be we were materialized ourselves, and fought materialism with the weapons of materialism. And now that the world is emerging from this nightmare, it is not because of any achievements of the official Church, but simply because the Spirit will not be bound by the wrappings we have made.
The 'miraculous' gifts have disappeared? May it not be that many years of concentration upon material things, and upon the material aspects of ​religion, have deadened our spiritual faculties? They are indeed atrophied now; but we can at least record their existence, and look forward to the time when the Church will gird up her loins again, and go forth in the power of the Spirit.
* ↑ Truth, John 14$^{17}$, 15$^{26}$, 16$^{13}$; Wisdom, Acts 6$^3$, $^{10}$; Grace, Heb. 10$^{29}$; Life and Sonship, Rom. 8$^2$, $^{15}$.
* ↑ 2 Cor. 3$^{17}$.
* ↑ See, for instance, Rom. 5$^5$, 8$^{4-17}$; 1 Cor. 12$^3$; Gal. 3$^2$, $^5$, $^{14}$; 5$^5$, $^{16-25}$.
* ↑ Rom. 12$^7$.
* ↑ 1 Cor. 12$^{28}$.
* ↑ Ibid. 30.
* ↑ Trypho, sect. 39. The substitution of Foreknowledge (?) for Knowledge is specially curious. (Most scholars would agree to the date c. 55 for the Epistles to the Corinthians, and c. 155 for S. Justin's Dialogue.)
* ↑ I have ventured to call them 'talents'. The word χάρισμα, i. e. manifestation of grace (χάρις), well rendered by Dr. Armitage Robinson ' grace-gift ' (H. B. Swete, Essays on the Early History of the Church Ministry, 1918, p. 73) was not confined by S. Paul to these special nine gifts.
* ↑ 1 Cor. 12 $^{8-10}$.
* ↑ 1 Cor. 12$^7$, 14$^{2-33}$; Rom. 12$^{6-14}$.
* ↑ Bishop Gore, St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, II, 112. 'We linger lovingly, wistfully,' he says, 'on the picture of the corporate life of a Christian community. Has it vanished from the earth, this real fraternal living …?' and he goes on to point out what a 'really fraternal, self-governing, and mutually co-operative community the Mediaeval English parish was.'
* ↑ ἐνεργήματα δυνάμεων.
* ↑ Δυνάμεις, in the sense of 'miracles', occurs in the New Testament as follows: In Mark 6 $^2$, $^{14}$ healing; 9 $^{39}$ exorcism; Matt. 7 $^{22}$ classed with prophecy and exorcism; 11 $^{20}$ again vaguely used (of Chorazin and Bethsaida) as in the parallel Luke 10 $^{13}$. In Luke 19 $^{37}$ the crowd on Palm Sunday praise God for the 'powers' they had seen. In Acts 2 $^{22}$ S. Peter speaks of the 'powers and wonders and signs' of Jesus; in Acts 8 $^7$ Philip heals and exorcises, and this is referred to in verse 13 as 'signs and great powers'; and in Acts 19 $^{11}$ the faith-healing by contact with handkerchiefs, &c., is referred to as 'special powers'.
* ↑ Plato, Ion, 534. Jowett's trans., i, p. 238.
* ↑ The Oracles of God, 1891, pp. 54, 55.
* ↑ Is. 61 $^{1-2}$; Luke 4$^{18-19}$.
* ↑ διακρίσεις πνευμάτων. Weymouth translates this, unfairly enough, by 'discriminating between prophetic utterances'.
* ↑ Paul W. Schmiedel, Enc. Bib. iv. 4773.
* ↑ Human Personality, 1903, ii. 200, 201.
* ↑ Abridged in F. W. H. Myers, Human Personality, 1903, i. 341-52.
* ↑ 1 John 4 $^{1-3}$.
* ↑ 2 Thess. 2$^2$.
* ↑ 1 Cor. 14$^{12}$ ζηλωταί ἐστε πνευμάτων. Weymouth also translates this quite wrongly, 'ambitious for spiritual gifts.'
* ↑ 1 Cor. 14$^{29}$. Cf. 1 Thess. 5$^{21}$.
* ↑ Those who wish to give that serious study to psychical research which has hitherto been so little given in the Churches could not do better than begin by reading Professor Bergson's address to the Society.
* ↑ I Cor. 14 4-37, esp. verses 18-19.
* ↑ I Cor. 14 7-9.
* ↑ Ibid., verse 13.
* ↑ I Cor. 14 28.
* ↑ Timaeus, 72. Jowett's trans., ii, p. 565.
* ↑ L. Duchesne, Origines du culte Chrétien, 5$^{me}$ éd., 1909, p. 34.