Quebec Chapel Sermons Author:Henry Alford Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SERMON III. SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EPIPHANY. 1854. 1 Cor. xiv. 15. " 1 will pray with the spirit, and 1 will pray with the understanding also." St. Pau... more »l lived under the first great outpouring of the Spirit on the Church. In his time, it was no uncommon thing for divine inspiration to fall on one and another in a Christian assembly, and for the persons thus inspired to speak, in teaching or in prayer, not their own words, but those of the Spirit of God. Sometimes indeed the utterance was not understood by the speaker, being given forth merely as the Spirit prompted, without any intelligent perception in the person so affected. Sometimes it would happen that none present could interpret the words spoken, and they then fell useless on the congregation. Amidst manymatters of detail which it is difficult to explain, thus much appears certain. Now if no epistle of St. Paul had been extant in which he dealt with the perplexities of such a state of things, it might have been uncertain how, judging by his other writings, he would have treated them. And two views, I can imagine, would have divided men's judgments. Some would tell us that he who wrote " Quench not the Spirit," would at all hazards have encouraged the utterances of that Spirit, as sacred and holy tokens, testifying to God's power in His Church, irrespective of any immediate useful purpose which they might have served. Others again might surmise that he who wrote " Let all things be done to edifying," would in this case also have followed out that principle; and however sacred and precious he might account the outward tokens of the working of the Spirit, would regard as more sacred and precious the cultivation of far greater gifts than any accidental and supernatural one,—viz. the understandings and affections of ...« less