every man his brother and every man his neighbour, saying, “Know the Lord”—­that is, by a will revealed by external authority from other human minds—­“for they shall all know him, from the least of them to the greatest.”  This is the dispensation, too, of whose close the Apostle Paul speaks thus:  “Then shall the Son also be subject to Him that hath put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.”

The outward humanity is to disappear, that the inward union may be complete.  To the same effect, he speaks in another place, “Yea, though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth know we Him no more.”  For this reason, the Ascension was necessary before Pentecost could come:  the Spirit was not given, we are told, because Jesus was not yet glorified.  It was necessary for the Son to disappear as an outward authority, in order that he might re-appear as an inward principle of life.  Our salvation is no longer God manifested in a Christ without us, but as a Christ within us, the hope of glory.  To-day is the selected anniversary of that memorable day when the first proof was given to the senses, in the gift of Pentecost, that that spiritual dispensation had begun.

There is a twofold way in which the operations of the Spirit on mankind may be considered—­His influence on the Church as a whole, and His influence on individuals; both of these are brought together in the text.  It branches, therefore, into a twofold division.

    I. Spiritual gifts conferred on individuals. 
   II.  Spiritual union of the Church.

Let us distinguish between the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit:  by the Spirit, the apostle meant the vital principle of new life from God, common to all believers—­the animating Spirit of the Church of God; by the gifts of the Spirit, he meant the diversities of form in which He operates on individuals; its influence varied according to their respective peculiarities and characteristics.  In the twenty-eighth verse of this chapter a full catalogue of gifts is found; looking at them generally, we discover two classes into which they may be divided—­the first are natural, the second are supernatural:  the first are those capacities which are originally found in human nature—­personal endowments of mind, a character elevated and enlarged by the gift of the Spirit; the second are those which were created and called into existence by the sudden approach of the same influence.

Just as if the temperature of this Northern hemisphere were raised suddenly, and a mighty tropical river were to pour its fertilizing inundation over the country, the result would be the impartation of a vigorous and gigantic growth to the vegetation already in existence, and at the same time the development of life in seeds and germs which had long lain latent in the soil, incapable of vegetation in the unkindly climate of their birth.  Exactly in the same way,