is religion’s self but feeling?  The highest form of religion is charity.  Love is of God, and he that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.  This is an intense feeling, too intense to be excited, profound in its calmness, yet it rises at times in its higher flights into that ecstatic life which glances in a moment intuitively through ages.  These are the pentecostal hours of our existence, when the Spirit comes as a mighty rushing wind, in cloven tongues of fire, filling the soul with God.

II.  The dissimilarity or contrast in St. Paul’s idea.  The one fulness begins from without, the other from within.  The one proceeds from the flesh and then influences the emotions.  The other reverses this order.  Stimulants like wine, inflame the senses, and through them set the imaginations and feelings on fire; and the law of our spiritual being is, that that which begins with the flesh, sensualizes the Spirit—­whereas that which commences in the region of the Spirit, spiritualizes the senses in which it subsequently stirs emotion.  But the misfortune is that men mistake this law of their emotions; and the fatal error is, when having found spiritual feelings existing in connection, and associated with, fleshly sensations, men expect by the mere irritation of the emotions of the frame to reproduce those high and glorious feelings.

You might conceive the recipients of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost acting under this delusion; it is conceiveable that having observed certain bodily phenomena—­for instance, incoherent utterances and thrilled sensibilities coexisting with those sublime spiritualities—­they might have endeavoured, by a repetition of those incoherencies, to obtain a fresh descent of the Spirit.  In fact, this was exactly what was tried in after ages of the Church.  In those events of church history which are denominated revivals, in the camp of the Methodist and the Ranter, a direct attempt was made to arouse the emotions by exciting addresses and vehement language.  Convulsions, shrieks, and violent emotions, were produced, and the unfortunate victims of this mistaken attempt to produce the cause by the effect, fancied themselves, and were pronounced by others, converted.  Now the misfortune is, that this delusion is the more easy from the fact that the results of the two kinds of causes resemble each other.  You may galvanize the nerve of a corpse till the action of a limb startles the spectator with the appearance of life.  It is not life, it is only a spasmodic hideous mimicry of life.  Men having seen that the spiritual is always associated with forms, endeavour by reproducing the forms to recall spirituality; you do produce thereby a something that looks like spirituality, but it is a resemblance only.  The worst case of all occurs in the department of the affections.  That which begins in the heart ennobles the whole animal being, but that which begins in the inferior departments of our being is the most