the flood of a Divine life, poured suddenly into the souls of men, enlarged and ennobled qualities which had been used already, and at the same time developed powers which never could have become apparent in the cold, low temperature of natural life.

 Among the natural gifts, we may instance these:  teaching—­healing—­the
 power of government.  Teaching is a gift, natural or acquired.  To know,
 is one thing; to have the capacity of imparting knowledge, is another.

The physician’s art again is no supernatural mystery; long and careful study of physical laws capacitate him for his task.  To govern, again, is a natural faculty:  it may be acquired by habit, but there are some who never could acquire it.  Some men seem born to command:  place them in what sphere you will, others acknowledge their secret influence, and subordinate themselves to their will.  The faculty of organization, the secret of rule, need no supernatural power.  They exist among the uninspired.  Now the doctrine of the apostle was, that all these are transformed and renovated by the spirit of a new life in such a way as to become almost new powers, or, as he calls them, gifts of the Spirit.  A remarkable illustration of this is his view of the human body.  If there be anything common to us by nature, it is the members of our corporeal frame; yet the apostle taught that these, guided by the Spirit as its instruments and obeying a holy will, became transfigured; so that, in his language, the body becomes a temple of the Holy Ghost, and the meanest faculties, the lowest appetites, the humblest organs, are ennobled by the Spirit mind which guides them.  Thus he bids the Romans yield themselves “unto God as those that are alive from the dead, and their members as instruments of righteousness unto God.”

 The second class of gifts are supernatural:  of these we find two
 pre-eminent—­the gift of tongues, and the gift of prophecy.

It does not appear that the gift of tongues was merely the imparted faculty of speaking foreign languages—­it could not be that the highest gift of God to His Church merely made them rivals of the linguist; it would rather seem that the Spirit of God, mingling with the soul of man, supernaturally elevated its aspirations and glorified its conceptions, so that an entranced state of ecstasy was produced, and feelings called into energy, for the expression of which the ordinary forms of speech were found inadequate.  Even in a far lower department, when a man becomes possessed of ideas for which his ordinary vocabulary supplies no sufficient expression, his language becomes broken, incoherent, struggling, and almost unnaturally elevated; much more was it to be expected that when divine and new feelings rushed like a flood upon the soul, the language of men would have become strange and extraordinary; but in that supposed case, wild as the expressions might appear to one coldly looking on and not participating