Holy Spirit of God.  For simply:  because that Spirit is the Spirit of God, He is a Holy Spirit, who tries to make you—­O man and not animal—­holy; a moral, and spiritual, and good being.  Because you are a moral and spiritual being, God’s Spirit exercises over you a moral power which He does not exercise over the plants and animals.  He works not merely on your body and your brain:  but on your heart and immortal soul.  But if you choose to be immoral, when He is trying to keep you moral; if you choose to be carnal like the brutes, while He is trying to make you spiritual, like Jesus Christ, from whom He proceeds:  then, oh then, tremble, and beware, and be ashamed before the very flowers which grow in your own garden-bed; for they fulfil the law which God has given them.  They are what they ought to be, each after its kind.  But you are not what you ought to be, after your kind; which is a good man, or a good woman, or a good child.

Oh beware lest the Lord should fulfil in you the awful words of this Psalm; lest He should hide His face from you, and you be troubled; and lest when He takes away your breath you should die, and turn again to your dust; and find, too late, that the wages of sin are death—­death not merely of the body, but of the soul.  Rather repent, and amend, and remember that most blessed, and yet most awful fact—­that God’s Spirit is with you from your baptism until now, putting into your heart good desires, and ready to enable you—­if you will—­to bring those good desires to good effect:  instead of leaving them only as good intentions, with which, says the too true proverb, hell is paved.

So will be fulfilled in you the blessed words of the next verse—­When Thou lettest Thy Spirit go forth, they shall be made; and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth—­words which St Augustine of old applied to the work of God’s Spirit on the souls of men.

For well it is with us—­as St Augustine says—­when God takes away from us our own spirit, the spirit of pride and self-will and self-righteousness; and we see that we are but dust and ashes; worse than the animals, in that we have sinned, and they have not.  Confess—­he says—­thy weakness and thy dust:  and then listen to what follows:—­Thou shalt take away from them their own spirit; but Thou shalt send forth Thy Spirit on them, and they shall be made and created anew.  As the Apostle says, “We are God’s own workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works.”  And so—­he says—­God will indeed renew the face of the earth with converted and renewed men, who confess that they are not righteous in themselves, but made righteous by the grace of the Spirit of God; and so the Lord shall rejoice in His works; you will be indeed His work, and He will rejoice in you.