WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT.
The Holy Spirit was promised to the disciples as "the Comforter," which is more fully ex plained by St. Paul by the phrase "the Spirit of adoption ; so that it is through him that we re ceive a direct inward testimony to our personal forgiveness and acceptance through Christ, and are filled with peace and consolation. John Wes ley thus treats of this important doctrine: "But what is the witness of the Spirit? The original word, tuarturia, may be rendered either, as it is in several places, the witness, or, less ambiguously, the testimony or the record: so it is rendered in our translation: 'This is the rec ord,' the testimony, the sum of what God testifies in all the inspired writings, 'that God bath given unto us eternal life, and this life is in his Son' (1 John v :II). The testimony now under consid eration is given by the Spirit of God to and with our spirit. He is the person testifying. What he testifies to us is, 'that we are the children of God.' The immediate result of this testimony is, 'the fruit of the Spirit ; namely, 'love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, goodness.' And without these, the testimony itself cannot continue. For it is inevitably destroyed, not only by the commission of any outward sin, or the omission of known duty, but by giving way to any inward sin; in a word, by whatever grieves the Holy Spirit of God." John Calvin, on Romans viii :i6, says : "St. Paul means that the Spirit of God gives such a mony to us, that he being our guide and teacher, our spirit concludes our adoption of God to be certain. For our own mind, of itself, independent. of the preceding testimony of the Spirit [nisi prceunte Sj5iriMs testimonio] could not produce this persuasion in us. For while the Spirit .. nesses that we are the sons of God, he at the same time inspires this confidence into our minds, that we arc bold to call God our Father." The witness of our own spirit must be distinguished from the witness of the Holy Spirit. On this point Mr. Wesley says: "The apostle states that 'Ye have received, not the spirit of bondage, but the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.' It
follows, 'The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit that we are the children of God.' This is further explained by the parallel text (Gal. iv : 6) : 'Because ye are sons, God bath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father.' Is not this something immediate and di rect, not the result of reflection or argumentation? Does not this Spirit cry, 'Abba, Father,' in our hearts the moment it is given ? antecedently to any reflection upon our sincerity, yea, to any reason ing whatsoever? And is not this the plain, nat ural sense of the words, which strikes any one as soon as he bears them? All these texts, then, in their most obvious meaning, describe a direct tes timony of the Spirit. That the testimony of the Spirit of God must, in the very nature of things, be antecedent to the testimony of our own spirit, may appear from this single consideration : \Ve must be holy in heart and life before we can be conscious that we are so. But we must love God before we can be holy at all, this being the root of all holiness. Now, we cannot love God till we know lie loves us: 'We love him, because he first loved us.' And we cannot know his love to us till his Spirit witnesses it to our spirit. Since, there fore, the testimony of his Spirit must precede the love of God and all holiness, of consequence it must precede our consciousness thereof." "This direct and distinct witness of the Spirit is frequently merged into and confused with the wit ness of our own spirit, as notably by Dr. Chal mers (Lectures on Rom., p. 202), where he re duces the work of the Spirit to the graving 'upon us the lineaments of a living epistle of Jesus Christ, and tells us in the epistle of a written revelation what these lineaments are.' But this is in oppo sition to a fair exegesis of Rom. viii :16, where the idea of two joint yet distinct testimonies appear." (A. McCurdy, Barnes, Bib. Diet.).