secretly while He was present. 'But as long as the Lord was plainly present in the world, the Holy Spirit (although He is the Spirit of Truth, that is, of the Son) was with the Father, and absent from the world; but after the Lord was received up to the Father and was plainly absent from the world, He sent Him from the Father. . . . Certain it is that the Paraclete, that is the Holy Spirit, has proceeded from the Son even as He has proceeded from the Father." At least, now that He has been poured out upon the world, His regenerating power is manifest, for those whom the Holy Spirit arrests He unexpectedly makes spiritual.' The sixteenth chapter, too, gives evidence that the Holy Spirit was sent by the Son even as the Son was sent by the Father. Then the incident of the breathing of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles as recorded in the twentieth chapter of the Gospel is considered, receiving the following comment: On that occasion the Lord gave the Holy Spirit to the apostles in one way; in another way on about the fiftieth day after. And each manner was necessary for the world.' The explanation follows that the bestowal of the Holy Spirit in St. John's account had particular application to the Lord's followers in that it conveyed authority for remitting sins. This gift Faber believes has never been withdrawn, nor will be withdrawn till the Last Day, even though there may be changing forms of its employment.' Thus these heralds of the Reformation, with but one exception, received and passed on the accepted teaching of the Church with regard to the Holy Spirit and His place in the Deity, never forgetting to remind their readers of the fact that God is One. To the Doctrine of the Trinity they gave careful thought without being abstruse, substituting for the extreme subtlety so often found in Scholasticism an attitude of simple belief which recognized the inadequacy of the human intellect in face of infinite mysteries. Most striking, however, is their insistent emphasis upon the authority of the Bible as the Rule of Faith, with the consequent enforcement of its inspiration by the Holy Spirit, the infallibility of the Spirit's teaching as therein contained, and the regenerating and sanctifying power of the Spirit as therein preached. Accordingly, the pre-Reformation Reformers speak of the Holy 1 Comm. in Evang. Joannis (ed. 1522), on chap. xv. Ibid., on chap. xx. Spirit's operations in the soul in conjunction with a more direct and conscious relation of the soul to Him, the ground of such relation being the Atonement wrought by Christ. They carried on this discussion in a distinctly evangelical spirit, ignoring alike the intermediaries of scholastic sacramentarianism and of mystical progression. But the doctrine of justification by faith, which was the great spiritual message of the Reformation, they left to Luther to proclaim. VII THE HUMANISTS THE revival of learning associated with the Humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was as the introduction of fresh air into a well-used atmosphere. In 1438 ecclesiastics from the East brought Greek with them into Italy, where the classical movement of Rienzi had been rescued from its political groove by Petrarch; and during the following year certain of them proceeded to England to teach their ancient language. The stimulus given to the new intellectualism by the fall of Constantinople and by the patronage of Nicholas V made Italy the centre of light. Here the Renaissance took philosophical and artistic forms, ranking gratification of taste before doctrine and thereby revealing those sceptical tendencies so strongly denounced by Savonarola. Philosophy was now divorced from theology. The efforts of the Schoolmen to combine science and philosophy were completely discredited, and the Humanists, who employed their knowledge of Greek in the study of the New Testament as well as of Plato, widened the breach by adopting a critical attitude toward this authority. Moreover, the appearance of politics, in the more modern sense of the term, supported the progress of religious and philosophic thought in its protest against the theological rigidity which had long been one of the chief features of mediaevalism. In his day Boniface VIII had come into contact with the rising sense of nationality which the papacy itself had encouraged in order to defeat the Empire; and now, with the exception of Italy and Germany, which still endured the antique government of the Holy Roman Empire, the great states were modernizing themselves while the Church remained mediaeval. Accordingly, along parallel lines of inward and outward movements, the domination of system was passing away and the individual was coming to his own, a fact which the work of the pre-Reformation Reformers serves only to emphasize. In Germany and in England Humanism took upon itself a more theological character with such spiritual minds as Reuchlin and Erasmus, Colet and More, whose views on the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit reflect in part the individualism of the time. But Humanism itself was an essentially mediaeval phenomenon, anti-ecclesiastical in part while not definitely anti-dogmatic; consequently the theology of the Trinity is presented by these four writers in quite a familiar form. 1 JOHANN REUCHLIN Prominent among the Humanists is Johann Reuchlin (14551522), a great classical scholar and Platonist, and a pioneer of the Renaissance in Germany. While in Rome in 1482 as ambassador from the Elector he applied to be a student of Argyropulos, an aged exile from Constantinople, who was teaching Greek in that city to distinguished audiences; and it was Argyropulos who, on hearing his new pupil read into excellent Latin a passage from Thucydides, exclaimed with emotion, 'With our exile Greece has passed over the Alps.' But, even more than as a classic, Reuchlin is famed as a Hebraist, and he incurred the bitter hostility of the German Dominicans for upholding the necessity of studying the mind of the Jewish people in their own writings. His De Verbo Mirifico, which he published in 1494, is based on the Jewish theosophy of the Cabbala. In this work may be seen his fondness for the study of the Scriptures in their original tongues, but in devoting the main portion of it to the consideration of the Old Testament and the pagan philosophers, he gives little attention to the New Testament, which accounts for the scantiness of material relative to the Holy Spirit. God is a Spirit, he declares. No one, however, knows the Mind of the eternal God but he within whom is His Spirit and to whom He reveals Himself; just as no being knows the thoughts of a man save only his own spirit which is in him. Within this one most simple God exists the Holy Spirit, who has been spoken of as Fire' by Moses, Ezekiel, Plato, and others." Full knowledge of the whole Trinity has been gained by no one, though the analogy of mind, reason, and feeling (sensus), found in the human intellect, indicates that partial knowledge 1 Pius II, one of its promoters, made a vain attempt to revive the glories of the mediaeval papacy. • Ibid., 13. 4 Ibid., 16. 5 iii. 4. De Verbo Mirifico, ii. 6 (ed. 1561). of this mystery has already been attained. Then, before proceeding to consider the Eternal Generation of the Son, he delivers this judgement: 'It should be openly professed that the true eternal God is One, immeasurable, unchangeable, incomprehensible, omnipotent, and indescribable—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-three Persons truly, but one Essence, Substance, Nature, utterly simple. . . There are three "hypostases," which in Latin is translated "Persons." And the Catholic faith is this, that we worship the one God in a Trinity, and the Trinity in a Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the Substance.'' JOHN COLET Though Reuchlin enjoyed the friendship of Wessel ever since he had studied under him at Basel, and also greatly influenced his young relative and pupil Melanchthon, he himself shrank from any tendencies toward Church reform. Not so, however, did John Colet (c. 1467–1519), Dean of St. Paul's, who, on the contrary, associated with his Humanism a passion for reform which fills his powerful sermons and writings. Colet's learning thus possessed a distinctly religious aim. An ardent student of the Bible and, in particular, of the New Testament in its original tongue, he had no sympathy with the Scholastic system, with its subtlety and championship of the supreme authority of the Church. On the other hand he was content to place Jesus Christ at the centre, and from that centre to labour straightforwardly for the bringing about of a widespread moral revival; and, indeed, the secret of his greatness as a preacher lay in his directness and simplicity. It is not surprising, then, to observe that during his sojourn in Italy in 1493 he was influenced not by the enthusiasts for art but by Savonarola. Yet, persecuted as he was on account of his open dislike of certain Romish practices and his plain speaking concerning abuses, he, like Faber, desired reform to come quietly from within; accordingly he worked for the spiritual uplift of the English Church without seeing any necessity for her separation from Rome. Colet was a firm believer in the power of the Holy Spirit to regenerate and sanctify the human heart, but to the development of the Doctrine he contributes little. In his treatise On |