10 - Chapter 10

CHAPTER X.

How can the savor of this Baptism be obtained^ And is it ever lost?

We have before shown that it exerts a powerful sealing influence. Many passages affirm this. We need not repeat them here. In accord with them, is the testimony of Christian experience. The Baptism once enjoyed can never be forgotten! Its peace, its joy, its victory and communion with God, will remain engraved on the memory, as doubtless are pictures of heaven on the minds of the Angels who fell! Life ever after will be to such, as was captivity and slavery to Israel, when they sang so sadly, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down! Yea, we wept when we remembered Zion! We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof! How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land!" And this sweet memory of liberty lost, will lead to many a stout uprising against the powers that oppress. And in some of them, most likely the lost ground will be regained. Hence in part the recovering and sealing power of the Gift, when once received. And hence while great numbers go back who have received in conversion the first installment of spiritual power, those who receive the second, with few exceptions, hold on their way. Yet we have reason to believe, there are sad exceptions to the rule. Paul intimates this when in his letter to the Church in Galatia he asks, “Are ye so foolish, having begun in the Spirit, are you now made perfect in the flesh? " And in the exhortation, not to “quench the Spirit whereby they had been sealed , " he certainly intimates that even such are in danger. And more strongly still he warns against the danger when he says, " It is impossible for those who have tasted the heavenly gift and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, if they fall away to renew them again unto repentance. " We think we have known some such during an observation of nearly seventy years, who evidently received the Great Gift, ran well for a time, and afterward relapsed, finally and fatally. We call to mind one, who received, apparently, this blessing. God anointed him to preach; for a time he ran well; God blessed his labors, and souls were converted under his preaching. But his views were sharply criticised by his brethren, wrongfully I think, both as to the assaults on his Theology and in the spirit of severe censure manifested. He retaliated, withdrew from the Church and went off with a faction, which finally broke up and was scattered to the four winds. Poor man! He is dead now, but I fear he never regained the height from which he fell.

I knew yet another, who while in the Theological Seminary, seemed to receive richly of this gift, and for a time seemed to walk in heavenly places in Christ. But when he went to preach where his father lived, south of Mason an Dixon’s line, he was fiercely persecuted and driven from his native State on account of his views of slavery. And north of that line, even in the free States he was shut out of Orthodox pulpits, assailed by the mob and caricatured by the press. By degrees his spirit become soured, his tongue censorious and vituperative. He left the Church, denounced it unsparingly and finally lost all faith in the Bible and I believe in God. Such cases, though rare are sufficiently numerous, to warn us that as once the angels fell from their lofty principalities, so even eminently sanctified men, are liable to fall from their steadfastness. On the question, how shall the savor of this holy anointing be retained? We reply :

1st. By retaining a perpetual sense of dependence on the Indwelling Spirit. The convert who commences his religious life in conscious weakness, looking wholly to God for help, finds himself sustained. But when he has waxen strong and became fortified, as he thinks, by experience and knowledge and Christian association? and leans on them, then his strength departs and his enemy assails and overcomes him. So also is the man of Pentecostal endowments shorn of his strength, when he fancies himself so rooted and grounded in character that no wind of temptation will ever overthrow him. This was the fatal mistake of a noted sect of modern Perfectionists, now nearly extinct. They held that they had asked God to make their faith perpetual and had exercised faith that He would, and that therefore the banner of holiness was nailed to mast head, and falling into sin thenceforth was impossible! To retain our standing, there must be preserved a perpetual sense of personal weakness and absolute dependence on the Holy Helper. Nor will continual watchfulness, prayer and effort become obsolete, while we are in the flesh and in a world of Devils and sin.

2d. To retain the blessing, we must seek a constant growth Forgetting the things behind, we must press forward to those before. Even after this baptism there remains much land to be possessed. Said Paul, " Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended, but this one thing I do, forgeting the things behind and reaching forward to those before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. " It will not therefore do for the man who has received this baptism to rest on his laurels, but like an army to which the King has sent a great re-enforcement, it must lift its tents and march forward to larger conquests. So must he seek growth and enlargement and richer and yet richer acquisitions. Says the Psalmist, " He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; " and Isaiah, " They go from strength to strength;" and Paul, " We all with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image, from glory to glory! Even as by the Spirit of the Lord! "