It is the office of the Father to lead us to his Son Jesus. It is the office of the Holy Spirit to cleanse and fill us, and lead us back to the Father and the Son, revealing them to us, and bringing us into union and fellowship with them. These three propositions can be proved by a great many passages of Scripture. Jesus tells us that "no man can come to him, except the Father draw him. And then he tells us he will send another Comforter, and that we are to hear what the Holy Spirit shall say in us."

In the second and third chapters of Revelation, in which our Saviour sends his last Scripture message to the churches on earth, he says seven times, "He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches.'' So that if we fail to receive the personal Holy Ghost in our hearts, and fail to hear what he says to us, we are most flagrantly disobeying a definite command of our Lord. There is a class of so-called Christians who deny the independent and personal operation of the Holy Spirit, affirming that the Holy Spirit is nothing more than the mere latent truth, or intellectuality that lies in the written word. Such persons have no conscious experience of the new birth, or of sanctification, and are really infidels, for they deny that very Person in the Godhead who acts directly on our moral consciousness, and without whose operation within us we can have no vital relation with God.

The Holy Spirit inspired the writing of the Bible, but he has an eternal, independent existence, outside of the Bible, and from his infinite fecundity could produce millions of other Bibles. As he inspired other minds to write the Scripture, he alone can illuminate our minds to have a spiritual understanding of the Scriptures. Hence all true scriptural knowledge must have two inspirations to it, one inspiration in the writing of the book and another inspiration in the mind of the reader of the book; and these two inspirations proceeding from the same fountain of light will agree with each other. The personal Holy Spirit has come forth from the Father and the Son to positively live as a real person within us, to speak to us in a manner perfectly intelligible to our nature, to reprove us or to approve us, to lay his fingers on all our spiritual faculties, to work on our memory, and perception, and desire, and will, and reason; and to do all this from the interior center of our being, just as really as any other person could speak to us from without.

The blessed Comforter has come to take the place of Jesus, to be to us just what Jesus would be if he were with us bodily in our homes, to console us, to answer our questions, to give us instruction, to fortify us with his presence in place of the absent Jesus. The written word is the visible representation of Jesus to us as the Logos, the revealed will of the Father, in which we have the very words of the Father and the Son. And then the Holy Spirit is the living God within us, to regenerate, sanctify, and illuminate, and bring our whole being into sweet living union with the written word, and thereby into union with the person of the eternal word, who is one with the Father. So that we have, as it were, two Bibles, one written on paper, which is the articulated mind of God concerning us, and the other Bible is the daily voice, and the continued writing of the Holy Spirit within us. And these two Bibles will always agree with each other. If they disagree it betrays the penmanship of another spirit than that of God.

I. Let us consider this voice of the Spirit. How many skeptical, professed Christians think it a mere fancy to talk of the real voice of the Holy Spirit. But what stupidity it is to suppose that he who made the tongue and the ear does not know how to speak. The Bible contains hundreds of instances where the Holy Ghost spoke to the people in clear, distinct, unmistakable language, from the days of Noah to the days of John; and if we are not living in communion with the Holy Ghost where he can speak to us with unmistakable intelligence, then we are not living a Bible life. How does the Spirit speak to us? Sometimes by an audible voice, but which is uttered from within the soul, upon the spiritual ear, but with such distinctness, it sounds exactly as if spoken from without. But if his voice was uttered from without, then bystanders could hear the words as well as the person addressed; but as no one hears the voice except the person spoken to, it is a proof that it is addressed in accents upon the spiritual ear, and not upon the fleshly ear, as was the case of young Samuel and many others. Persons who have heard the audible voice of the Spirit affirm that it is the sweetest voice possible to the imagination. It is nothing less than the voice of Jesus, of infinite mildness, and softest melody, articulated by the Holy Ghost. If the Son of God created every sound in the universe, then we must remember that he has a voice which can include, and unite, and surpass, every created sound that ever has been heard, for he is greater than all his works. Hence Jesus could speak with a voice more loud and terrific than every thunder peal of the ages rolled into one, and on the other hand he can speak softer than any æolian note that floats on the air of a summer night. He can speak in such a tone as to melt all the angels into ecstasy, and pronounce words with such inexpressible soothingness in them as to take the last trace of grief out from the soul that hears it. We can comprehend the entire Godhead just as easily as we can comprehend the inexhaustible capabilities of the voice of Jesus. And the Holy Spirit has come to reutter that voice to us, according to the needs of the occasion. But more frequently there is no voice heard, but there is the distinct pronunciation of mental words. Oftentimes words of Scripture are mentally spoken with great clearness. Sometimes we are wakened early in the morning, with a clear, startling, mental articulation of Scripture words in our mind, that seem to penetrate like a hot, spicy oil, to our innermost being. Such words, so spoken, remain with us for months and years, and like sandal wood never lose their odor. This seemed to be a frequent experience with Isaiah, He wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned. The Lord God hath opened mine ear " (Isa. 1. ).

At other times the Spirit speaks to us by flashing a picture of some truth, or person, or event, upon the retina of the soul's eye; and this is a mode of speaking just as real as any other. Every verb and noun in the Hebrew Bible (which was man's first language) is simply a picture of some sort of being or acting. Just as colors and notes of music are just alike, so pictures and thoughts, or voice and vision, correspond with each other. Multitudes of God's children in seasons of prayer have had prophetic pictures flashed into their minds of what God would do, which have filled the soul with a sweet assurance that the prayer was answered. In thousands of cases when persons are seeking the Lord, the Spirit shows them a mental picture of Jesus on the cross which dispels their guilt and gloom, and is nothing less than the Holy Ghost speaking to them.

Then again the Spirit speaks by producing certain states of feelings. He gives premonitions of things to come, and especially is this mode of speaking used if he is warning the soul of danger. There is sometimes a strange tremor or uneasy feeling, or an extra inward sense of caution that seems to vibrate through the heart like the doleful tide bell placed at the entrance of an harbor to warn the sailor of the sand bar. Sometimes he speaks into our feelings, and gives us distinct drawings in a certain direction, or toward certain persons or places, or kind of work, as a call to the ministry, or to mission fields; and he gives just as distinct repulsions from dangerous characters, or places, or enterprises. At other times the Spirit speaks through dreams. From the beginning of the world, through all Scripture history, and to the present hour, God has fulfilled the words in Job of " speaking to men in the visions of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men."� To deny this mode of divine speaking is as irrational as to deny the existence of the mental faculties, and as unscriptural as to deny that God spake to Joseph or to Paul in dreams. These are the various modes in which the Holy Spirit speaks to the soul.

II. He that hath ears to hear, says Jesus, let him hear what the Spirit sayeth. Let us consider our side of this matter. First, we are to have ears, and then we are to hear. These words plainly imply that our inner spiritual man possesses the five senses of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling, just as really as- the body has these senses; and the spiritual senses can be raised to a pitch of capacity as much superior to the fleshly senses as the immortal spirit is superior to the body. In the unregenerated soul all the spiritual senses lie perfectly dormant, like those insects and animals that hibernate in the winter, without conscious life or motion. In regeneration these interior senses are restored to life, and under the baptism of the Holy Spirit these interior senses are purified, and enlarged, and illuminated, and then, as Paul very pointedly tells us, by the practical use or the holy habit of exercising these senses, they are brought to a state of keenness, and delicacy, and quickness of action. Heb. v. 14. This is what Jesus means by saying, He that hath an ear that is, he who has had his soul's ears rejuvenated, let him hear; that is, let him form the habit of listening to the Holy Spirit.

It is very rare for Christian people to know the voice of the Holy Ghost until they are sanctified, because the action of the self-life within them is so full of carnal reason that it blurs the delicate lines of Divine light and merges different voices together, such as are heard through a telephone when the wires are crossed and the phone is not entirely insulated. This is why, throughout all Scripture, sanctification is spoken of as an inward qualification for correctly reading the voice of God in the soul. Jesus does not say that the lambs hear his voice, but that" "my sheep hear my voice." Lambs invariably run with the older sheep, not recognizing the shepherd's voice. Hence by the baptism of the Holy Ghost we are to pass into the sheephood condition, to hear the Shepherd's voice.

III. We are to exercise our spiritual hearing, so as to readily detect the soft, sweet voice of the Spirit, when he speaks to us. This is what the old writers in the middle ages called "corresponding with grace,"� that is, the inward mental habit of noticing the impressions God may give us, and then promptly obeying him. To do this requires great humility, and a continual attitude of self-renunciation, and keeping the attention always open and awake to intimations from God's will, like an æolian harp placed in the window, ready to be swept upon by the softest zephyrs that quiver through the summer night.

What seems a very difficult task to a young beginner in these exercises will become not only easy, but the very delight of our lives, when we have learned how to receive the Holy Spirit as an everlasting inward companion, and made it our joy to hear his dictates and obey. When persons fail to respond to the voice of the Spirit, their spiritual senses become blunted, so that they soon fail to hear that voice at all, and they settle down into cold rationalism, and then deny the supernatural life, and repudiate spiritual emotion, and have a frozen religion, which may glitter like an iceberg with religious intellectualism, but is as devoid of the life of the Holy Ghost as the iceberg is of tropical flowers. This is the condition of thousands in the nominal church. But when the believer, with humility and prayer, forms a habit of looking out for communications from God, and obeys, keeping the spirit of obedience in harmony with the written word, God will show his favor to such a soul, and will multiply Divine manifestation to him, in any or all the various ways which have been previously mentioned.

The blessed Comforter loves to be appreciated, and those who talk with him, and lovingly confide to him, and continually open their natures to him, and are humble enough to believe what God may speak, he will say and reveal great and hidden things, delicate and precious things, strong and inspiring things, which the non-appreciative soul knows nothing of. This practice of hearing the Spirit's voice not only draws him to reveal himself more to us, but it also sharpens our hearing faculty, so that we can detect the softer whispers, and read more quickly the intimations of his will, as to duty and privilege, and see through the mechanism of his daily providences as through a glass veil.

It is the extent to which we hear the Spirit's voice that measures our real value of God, and when we get to know God in a real, inward, experimental way, it becomes the supreme joy of our existence. To hear this Divine voice we must be deaf to a thousand other voices of men, and earth, and time. Do we know that as the Father uttered himself in the person of Jesus, so the blessed Jesus utters himself through the abiding Comforter, and then do we all know that the Comforter has come, and longs to speak to us in his many-languaged voice, and that he lovingly yearns to tell us things that will quiet our fears, soothe our sorrows, gird our weakness, beautify our vision, soften our manners, sweeten our dispositions, inflame our devotion, and prepare us to meet Jesus when he comes in his kingdom?

Oh, that we may be whispering galleries for the voice of the Spirit!