QUESTION. Please tell me how we may know that we have the Holy Spirit abiding in us.

ANSWER. There are two ways in which we may know that we have the abiding Spirit. The first way in which we know it is by the "witness of the Spirit" Himself.

The Holy Spirit, when He comes to fill us, bears witness with our spirit that He fills us. He doesn't perhaps say, "I fill you"; but when He fills the heart, when the heart is cleansed and the Holy Ghost bears witness to it, there is a conviction in the soul which is not in words, perhaps, but it is a conviction: "This is the Holy Spirit, this is the Comforter, this is the presence of God, this is full, salvation." It seemed to me the day I received the baptism of the Holy Spirit that there was a voice in my breast saying, "This is the Holy Ghost"; no uttered word, but it seemed to me there was the mental word — that it shaped itself in my mind. St. John says, "We know that God dwells in us and we dwell in him by the Spirit which he hath given unto us."

There is another way you may know it, and that is by faith. If we are conscious that we are not resisting God, if we are conscious that we are obeying the Lord, if we are conscious that we are in harmony with the divine will, that we have no resistance to God, we are on ground where it is perfectly clear and legitimate for us to believe that the Spirit abides in us; and when the demonstration and the overflowing of spiritual feeling subsides, we are to fall back on this great bed-rock principle of faith, "That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith." That is Scriptural. " How did you receive the Spirit," says Paul, "by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?" Not by works but by faith. And so we are taught through the Scriptures that we retain the presence of God by faith. I remarked the other day in a meeting that one of the best ways in which to realize that the spirit of faith is within us, is to recognize His presence. If we recognize the fact, God is in my soul, the Holy Ghost is in my soul, the very fact that we recognize that presence will cause us to feel that presence. If you doubt that the Holy Ghost is in your heart you cannot expect to feel anything. But if thou dost believe in thine heart that the Jesus who was raised from the dead has baptized you with the Holy Ghost, you recognize that fact — and you will realize it by believing it.

How do we feel God's love in our hearts? St. John tells us, by believing "the love God hath to us." And I can get happy any time I please, day or night, by just lifting up my mind and recollecting, " Lord, I believe you love me." John gives us the key. We are to believe the love that God hath to us, and when we believe that love, we feel it. Keep yourselves in the love of God by building yourselves up in your most holy faith. You take away the faith and the love will leak out. So I say there are two ways, by the direct witness of the Spirit and then by faith.

QUESTION. Is it possible for one to believe without any corresponding reality?

ANSWER. It is impossible to have genuine faith without a corresponding reality, but the reality may not at first be very pronounced; there may not be a wonderful demonstration of it.

QUESTION. I want a pure heart, and I desire it now. Tell me how to get it, and ask all to pray that I may so believe as to receive it.

ANSWER. Well, I will tell you how I got it. I was praying for three months for a clean heart. One Friday night, on the second day of December, 1876, when the family had all retired, I remained awake and prayed until midnight. When I retired it seemed to me as if my whole being broke down and I wept like a child. The Holy Spirit would suggest certain things to me. "Will you preach this?" — "Yes, Lord." — "Will you let me sanctify you?" — "Yes, Lord." — "Will you resign your wife and your children into my hands, and let me have them and their life just as I see fit? " — " Yes, Lord." — " Will you resign your health to me and your natural life as to how long you will live and when you die?" — "Yes, Lord."— "Will you die any time I want you to die, — at home or abroad, on a train of cars or a steamboat? will you just die when I say I want you to die?" — "Yes, Lord." (God had been three months getting me there.) "Will you preach this in your pulpit?" (I had the finest church in Indiana, a Baptist church.) "Yes, Lord." — "Will you go down to the preachers' meeting and confess this to the preachers there?" — "Yes, Lord." — "Will you consent to give up these fine appointments, if need be, and take some poor appointments? " — " Yes, Lord." — " Suppose I want you to go down South to work among the colored people, will you go?" — "Yes, Lord: anything, anything!" — "Will you quit smoking your cigar, give up your tobacco?" — " Yes, Lord, anything."

God riddled me with questions, more than the pine trees in the Battle of the Wilderness with bullets and grapeshot. When I had said "yes" to every single question, I just felt like a tired person that is climbing a mountain, and just has strength enough to get to the top and fall down. I. had strength enough to answer "yes," and fell down and went to sleep. Next morning I woke up and found that the taste for tobacco was gone. I found that I was calm and serene. I didn't know I was sanctified yet, though. I went out and visited a sick lady. I went to preach the funeral sermon of a child. I came back to the church where a prayer meeting was going on, conducted by laymen, and in that prayer meeting I was so. eager and hungry! I had gone through all the hard tug, just about as you have; just needed now to pull the trigger and fire the gun off. I opened my Bible and I saw these words: " Cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished." "Thank the Lord!" I said. "For she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins." "Thank the Lord!" I said, "I will take it." I arose and said, "Brethren, I am going to say something you have never heard me say in this church." Then I went on and told about my consecration. " I am going to believe that the blood of Christ cleanses me from all sin. I am going to believe it, and I do believe it, and now I confess it." I sat down, and I had no more feeling than that pine board has, only I felt perfectly careless and calm and serene and quiet. And that is all that I expected. I never expected anything beyond that. But on Monday morning, while I was reading my Bible, the Lord gave me a baptism of the Holy Spirit.

Now, I suppose I got a clean heart just at the point where I said, "Lord, I accept it!" Brother, if you are conscious that you can say "yes" to God when He goes round your soul and touches every spot, then you can go right back to the hub of your nature and say, " Lord, I will believe, and leave the results with Thee." I tell you, friends, if you want to get a clean heart you have got to fling the responsibility on God: "Here, Lord, I am going to believe it, claim it, and profess it, and if the thing is a failure you are to blame for it." God loves to have people put responsibility on Him. That is faith.

QUESTION. What is meant in the Scriptures by "the wiles of the devil "?

ANSWER. Christian people, and sanctified people especially, are exhorted to put on the whole armor of God that they may withstand the wiles of the devil. The Greek word says " methods." Did you know that the devil was a Methodist? Well, the devil is a Methodist. And did you know one thing else? It takes a sanctified Methodist to outwit the devil's methods. It takes a Methodist to fight a Methodist. The Greek word is "methods": and they named the Methodists so because they were so methodical. They had a method in getting people converted and a method in getting sanctified and a method in raising money and a method in this and that. Here the Greek word is " methods ": put on the whole armor of God that ye may withstand the methods of the devil.

Satanic agency is a subject that is hardly ever taught in the Christian Church of to-day; the personality of the devil, the genius and ability and spirit of the devil, the wiles, the methods, and art of the devil, are not brought out. Many persons think it is such a realm of imagination or fiction that Christian people are afraid to venture out there. I deny that. The Bible reveals to us everything about the devil — reveals his personality, his ability, his rank, his influence, his subordinates, and his plans. It is in the Scriptures.

I will now tell you some of the devil's methods. I just wish all the sanctified people who ever professed holiness could learn these lessons. Before we are sanctified the method of the devil is to work on Christian people through their carnal mind, without letting them know it is the devil. He will come to Christian men, to Christian women, Christian ministers, good people who are endeavoring to serve God and are on the way to heaven; he will work his plans and purposes upon them by using their carnal mind, and so work that they think it is their wisdom. The devil will come to an unsanctified Christian who is converted and will put a certain idea into his mind or heart, and he will say, " Now, isn't that wise, isn't that prudent, isn't that cautious? " Thus he will work on their prudential motives, on their reason, and on their carnal fears. He will work on their man-fearing spirit. He will work on their worldly policy and their worldly wisdom, making a playground upon their carnal mind.

Now, mark you, he has no possession of God's children, but he will annoy them and disturb them and hinder them. They are doing ten thousand things in which they do not dream they are doing the devil's work. The devil goes to Christian people and gets them to have a church theatrical. He wouldn't dare have them start a regular theater with all the accessories, but he goes and works on their worldly policy and their worldly mind, so that when they have got these things up, church members do not know they are doing the devil's work. They say, "We are doing this to raise money for our church. It is laudable." They think they are right. They simply are doing the devil's work by the devil's suggestions, only the devil is hiding himself and laughing at them all the while. The devil is sharp. He can get people to serve him in the guise of piety. That is a trick of the devil.

If he wants to discourage you, his method is either to work on your carnal mind by puffing you up so you get the " big head " and capsize, or by discouraging you so as to get you down in the mud and you think God isn't your Friend and you can't serve Him anyhow. It is the method of the devil to run people to extremes. Another of his methods is to make you serve him under the guise of being pious. That is the motto of the Romish Church: the end justifies the means. You can commit any crime out of hell, providing you do it for the sake of the Virgin Mary. Another method is to make you think that sanctification is so high that you never can get to it, or else it is so low and commonplace it isn't worth seeking after. If you are sanctified by imputed righteousness, it is such a low thing it isn't worth struggling for. The other is that if you are sanctified, you must be so spotless, holy, and wise, and perfect in everything, just like an angel, and it is so high you can't have it. Either to discourage or to puff up: these are his methods of working upon the carnal mind.

After you are sanctified, the devil comes up to you and hunts all around and says, "Where is my instrument gone? I could run my fingers over the carnal mind and play a tune in this man's soul." He finds no wire in your soul to pull on now. He used to pull on your judgment and reason and carnal nature; but that is all gone, and he finds nothing but Christ.

When the devil finds out he has no territory in you, he gets mad, flings off his cloak, and begins to blaspheme. He will say, "You have professed holiness and you know you haven't it!" You never know how plainly the devil can talk to you until you are sanctified. Before, he could run into the back door of your heart and pull the wires; but after you are sanctified the devil has got to fight you on the outside. He will come to your face and tell you you are not sanctified and you know it! He will threaten you with falling. He will talk to you intellectually, and pronounce words in your mind.

There is a difference between fighting the enemies in the wilderness and fighting them in the land. When you get into the land of Canaan you have to fight ironclad devils, giants, and it is a hand-to-hand war, an open warfare.

Another trick of the devil is to get sanctified people where they are led by impressions. Some are frightened right off and go down; but if the devil finds he cannot scare you and cannot make you stop testifying, then he will go round and attack you on the other side. I don't know whether you folks will believe what I am going to tell you, but it is the truth. The devil can make people feel tremendously happy. I have learned a great deal in the past fifteen years of the experiences of people. He can produce a fictitious happiness, and he will make you feel so with special reference to getting you where you live on impressions, and at that very minute the devil has all he wants. Then he puts on his Sunday clothes and turns himself into an angel of light.

People, even Christian people, do not believe Scriptures at this point. I have seen people so deluded by the devil, and I have said, " Don't you know the devil can turn himself into an angel of light?" u Oh, yes," they say, " but the devil isn't leading me! If God tells me to do so, I will do it," they say. Again he says, " I am the Holy Ghost." And you cannot detect him unless God helps you. He will begin by making you do something that is very nice for God. For instance, he will make you pray, but he will make you pray in the wrong way and at the wrong time. He will tell you to do a great many things, but he will always tell you or impress yon to do these things in a queer way, outlandish or unnatural way. He says to one sister, when the child is crying and the bread about to burn, "Now the Holy Ghost says you must go and pray an hour; let the baby cry, and the coffeepot boil over." I know these are facts. And the person goes off as sincere as an angel and kneels down and prays, and the baby may get scalded to death.

God the Holy Ghost, in all His leadings, never leads people in an abnormal way or in an unnatural or a strained way. God doesn't strain you; He doesn't put the thumbscrew on you and strain your muscles until they crack and snap; but the devil does.

A person goes to meeting and says, " The Lord sent me here to-clay with a special message." It may be time for the meeting to close, but he thinks he has a special message from the Lord and he must tell it, though everybody else thinks it is time to go home. Those people insist that the Holy Ghost sent them. Now, it is nothing in the world but the devil. Why? Because the devil has got them on that road, going by impressions, going the way you feel. One man says, " God has sanctified me and I want to prove to you that I am a holy man, and the Holy Ghost tells me to go down to the door and have you walk over my body." I am giving you facts; all these things occurred. And they walked out the door over Iris body to prove he was holy.

The devil knows he cannot make us lie or steal or do any of these things, but he is trying to make you do pious things in a most outlandish and most unnatural and most abnormal way. I tell you, there is a tremendous amount of that work done. People think they are led by the Holy Ghost, and they are led by the devil as an angel of light.

You can recognize these people. In their prayers, in their talks, in their sermons, in their efforts, there is always a sense of strangeness. They seem to be oppressed, to be burdened; they seem to be unnatural. There is not tranquillity or frankness. The devil is a hard master.

Another trick of the devil is the gift of the Holy Ghost. The devil knows that the Holy Ghost is our Leader. Jesus has gone to heaven. We have got the written Word, but the Holy Ghost must explain to us the Word of God and reveal to us Jesus. And if the devil can only imitate the Holy Ghost, that is his strong forte among the Christian people. Among his own people he talks his own language. The devil doesn't work among sinners as he does among saints. He has one method of work among sinners and another for converted people and another for sanctified people, and in the higher ranges of Christian life it is to imitate the Holy Spirit.

Another method of the devil is to imitate the Holy Spirit by giving people fictitious calls, fictitious beliefs, giving them dreams. The devil can make impressions and produce artificial happiness and artificial joy in order to switch the soul off. Of course, after he gets a soul off he will then make him do something more and more absurd, and by and by make him commit some sin; but he always begins delicately and tenderly. If a person is perfectly true to God, although the Lord God may allow him to be annoyed and sometimes hindered by Satan, I cannot see but what God will see that his soul is delivered from the devil's power.

You can detect the devil by one or two things. The devil always talks loud. Jesus always talks low and tender. I'm talking Greek unless you have ears to hear. " He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." When a spirit makes an impression upon my mind, that impression can be made in a loud, boisterous, rushing, pellmell sort of way, or that conviction can come gently and quietly and sweetly. When the devil makes an impression on people's hearts and when he speaks to the soul, he talks loudly. I mean to say that the impression has a loudness in the mind. I am talking mentally now. The devil wants you to rush and be in a hurry and go pellmell and not wait for anything; whereas Jesus is always quiet and He is calm and always takes His time. Sometimes in business matters the devil makes us think we have got to rush and transact a piece of business without taking time to pray. But when you take things to God in prayer and you wait, if God makes an impression on the mind, it always comes gently, tenderly. You wait on and it will come again, gently, tenderly. The more you wait on God, if the conviction comes from the Holy Ghost, the more you wait and the more you pray, the stronger it becomes. If it comes from the devil, the more you wait and the more you pray the weaker it grows. You can tell by that. If you have a call to some mission work or anything, and you say, "I wish I did know whether it were God or Satan, "you just take time. If the world is on fire and your house half burned down, you take time and wait on God.

QUESTION. By that you admit that there may be impressions from the Holy Ghost? You wouldn't leave the idea that no person could trust an impression?

ANSWER. The Holy Ghost makes the strongest impressions and the best impressions. But there is this difference: the Holy Ghost impresses us upon the conscience and upon the spiritual nature; Satan makes his impressions upon our own human feelings mostly. God does not allow the devil to get at the secret chambers of a sanctified heart. The Holy Ghost makes impressions. He produces convictions, but the convictions of the Holy Spirit come in harmony with the Word of God and with divine providence. There is a depth to them; there is a solemnity and a thoughtfulness; there is a calmness. God works on the spiritual nature. Man has three parts, — body, soul, and spirit. The spiritual nature embraces the affections, conscience, and will. The soul embraces our sensibilities and human feelings. Satan makes his impressions on the human feelings, but the Holy Ghost goes deeper and makes his impressions on the conscience. When God puts conviction on you, it is generally such a conviction as to make you wait and pray awhile, and the more you pray, the stronger it becomes. God has a way of talking to us so that we know it is God.

QUESTION. Don't you think Satan confuses us sometimes in the matter of the will — makes us think we are doing the will of God when we find we are not?

ANSWER. Yes; that is one of his methods. People get off on a line where they are dedicated to their own will and not to God's will. I know professors of sanctification that will not go to church unless they think they are going to take part in the services, unless there is some work for them to do. So people are not dedicated to God's will but to their own will. There are a great many ways in which professing Christians can show that they are dedicated to their own will and not to the will of God. At a camp meeting the other day one brother stood up and said that he felt he must talk in every meeting he attended, and he was rebuked right there by another man, who said to him, " That is not of God. God does not command anybody on this earth to talk in every meeting he attends! " A person simply gets a notion in his head and is dedicated to his own will. In various little ways people can be dedicated to their own will. It is a trick of the devil to get people to make a rash vow and run themselves half to death to live up to their vows.

QUESTION. Please mention some of the fanaticisms of the present time.

ANSWER. In answering that question I will say that fanaticism changes. The old word was "enthusiasm." The word "enthusiasm" means "to be filled with God." The old Greeks put it, "To be filled with one of the gods or with several of the gods," The modem word is fanaticism; and fanaticism changes. And it changes as a result of what I have previously said about the devil's devices. The fanaticism of a few years ago is past and gone. Satan's fanaticism is in the end all the same, but he has two roads. The fanaticism of this age runs off on two principal lines. One is the denial of those things in the Scriptures that are historical, taking everything figuratively, until there is nothing historical and real; it is all mystical. There is no real devil,. no real Christ, no real cross. But there is a mystical garden, a mystical Eden, a mystical devil, and a mystical crucifixion. It is all mystical. It is to run away from the reality. Now, that fanaticism a hundred years ago or more put on the shape of Swedenborgianism then it ran off into Transcendentalism, Theosophy, Christian Science. Christian Science of to-day is nothing on this earth but the Transcendentalism of certain localities, and nothing but the old philosophies that the Hindoos had five thousand years ago. These people who think they have struck something new have only struck the nonsense of what they had in Bombay and Calcutta five thousand years ago. St. John struck at that. He says, "Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God." There is always a class of people who deny the flesh and blood side of Jesus Christ. That is all of the devil; and St. John says if we deny the real flesh and blood of Jesus we have got the devil.

There is another branch to it. One says, "We have no body," and one, " We have no soul." One class of people do everything physically, physically, physically. They go around preaching that you are full of depravity, and never can be made holy until the second coming of Christ. They say, "When Jesus comes the second time He will appear without sin unto salvation." Now those words, " without sin," mean this: He will appear the second time not as a sin offering. When Jesus came in Bethlehem He came as a sin offering. At this second coming He does not come as a sin offering. So they say you cannot get a clean heart, you cannot get saved, until the second advent of Christ. It is physical religion.

So we have one class of people who say we have no soul, and another class who say we have no body. The one is the head and the other is the tail of the same identical devil. Both roads lead to the same result. A lady in New York says she never will die, she has got eternal life, her body will be etherealized.

Brothers and sisters. Christianity must have a body and soul to it. We have a body and a soul. Jesus had a physical body and an immortal, divine soul. Religion must have an outward, physical, human, earthly side, and an inward, spiritual side; and the only way to avoid the various fanaticisms and the various heresies that are now afloat in the world is for us to do as the colored people down South say, — "Keep right in the middle of the King's highway," — don't switch off either to the right or to the left. The main track of salvation is a pure heart full of love. If you have visions, dreams, if God does wonders for you, thank Him for it. If you have discouragements, crosses, sorrows and trials, don't get discouraged. If God blesses you wonderfully, don't get carried away by your blessings, and don't get depressed by your sufferings. Remember that in the Christian life we must take both the "ups" and the "downs." We must take the whole cross and the whole Christian life. But right through the center of every life there can be perfect resignation to God's will and perfect love to God and man.