No enumeration of the fruits of the Spirit will be found which excludes peace and joy, much less love; and from these graces, if, indeed, not from the last alone, spring the various fruits which unitedly constitute righteousness.
When the blessed Spirit, that bloweth where it listeth, visits you and stirs the plumage of the soul, seek no cowardly shelter from it, but fling yourself upon it, and, though its sweep be awful, you shall be sustained. Only do this, do all, not in presumptuous daring, but in divine submission; in dependence, not on any strength that can be spent, but on the ever-living stay of all that trust in Him.
Whatever the Holy Spirit prompts a true Christian to do for the glory of God, He allures him to do in a modest way, and with a disposition of indescribable tenderness.
You will find that for a smoking flax there is no specific like heaven's oxygen; for a faint and flickering piety there is no cure comparable to the one without which all our own exertions are but an effort to light a lamp in a vacuum—the breath of the Holy Spirit.
Religion has never, in any period, sustained itself except by the instrumentality of the tongue of fire. Only where some men, more or less imbued with this primitive power, have spoken the words of the Lord, not with "the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth," have sinners been converted, and saints prompted to a saintlier life.
