Binding: Paperback
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Banner of Truth
ISBN#: 9780851511870
Availability: Usually Ships the Same Business Day
Description: Smeaton's work remains the most valuable of many volumes on this subject.
The topic on which we enter is by no means superfluous at this time. We may safely affirm that the doctrine of the Spirit is almost entirely ignored. The representatives of modern theology, it is well known, have almost wholly abandoned it. Many of them deny the Spirit’s personality in the most open and undisguised manner. Some affirm that a dogma on this topic is not essential either to religion or theology, and that we may altogether dispense with it. On the contrary, wherever Christianity has become a living power, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit has uniformly been regarded, equally with the atonement and justification by faith, as the article of a standing or falling Church. The distinctive feature of Christianity, as it addresses itself to man’s experience, is the work of the Spirit, which not only elevates it far above all philosophical speculation, but also above every other form of religion.
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That there is one God or divine essence.
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That the same numerical divine essence is common to three truly divine Persons, who are designated Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
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That between these three divine Persons there obtains a natural order of subsistence and operation: that the first
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Person hath life in Himself (John v. 26); and that the second and third Persons subsist and act from the first.
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That this order of the divine Persons belongs to the divine essence prior to, and irrespective of, the covenant of grace.
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That this natural order of subsistence and action is the ground and reason of the several names, Father, Son, and Spirit; the Son being begotten of the Father, and the Spirit by spiration proceeding from both.
And as to the divine WORKS, the Father is the source FROM WHICH every operation emanates, the Son is the medium THROUGH WHICH it is performed, and the Holy Ghost is the EXECUTIVE BY WHICH it is carried into effect.
“George Smeaton was ordained to the ministry of the Church of Scotland at Falkland in the Presbytery of Cupar in 1839. He was among those hundreds of ministers who came out at the Disruption in 1843 to form the Free Church of Scotland. Later he was appointed by Church to be professor in her College at Aberdeen (1854) and in 1857 he became professor of Exegetics in the New College, Edinburgh. He died on the 14th April, 1889. He was one of the brilliant galaxy of men on the staff of the Free Church College in Edinburgh a century ago. Principal John Macleod describes Smeaton as ‘the most eminent scholar of the set of young men who with McCheyne and the Bonars sat at the feet of Chalmers’”.
--W.J. Grier
A True Classic!
