The Spirit's Place in Missionary Preaching
**Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” — MATT. xxviii. 19.
=H HREE things there are which, each in; their turn, have been the worship of the nations — the form of nature, the form of man and the life which has no form. There are some who have reverenced nature and called it the Father; there are some who have reverenced human beings and called them Sons of God; there are some who have reverenced the hidden life of the universe and called it the Divine Spirit. Christ says that the true worship must be a baptism into the character of all the three. He cries across the mission-field to the nations seeking light, ‘“O ye that hold the truth in fragments, come and behold these fragments united in a single temple. Come and see your rival creeds reconciled and blended in one religion. Come and recognise that the faith which you profess is not perfect till it is joined with the faith professed by your brother. Within this temple of mine you and your brother can meet side by side. Within this temple of mine the three corners of all worship are sanctified — the world above, the world around, and the world within. Here stand the children of the Father — those who worship the stars of heaven. Here stand the children of the Son — those who reverence the heroes of humanity. Here stand the children of the Spirit — those who bow down before the mystery of universal life. You will lose nothing in my temple of your own; you will only add your brother’s to your own. You will learn a new lesson in my temple — the lesson of charity. You and your brother shall for the first time worship together; ye shall be no more twain, but one flesh. Ye shall not call one another idolators when ye shall see that each completes the other, that within my sacred Pantheon there is a place for all. The Presence in the sky, and the Presence in the soul, and the Great Presence everywhere that can be felt but never seen shall be united in one glory, and all flesh shall worship it together — the Father of an Infinite Majesty, His honourable, true, and only Son, also the Holy Ghost the Comforter.”