20 NOVEMBER 1909, Page 12

11:1h. HOLY SPIRIT IN 'lab NEW TESTAMENT.

The Holy Spirit in the New Testament. By Henry Barclay Swete, Di). (Macmillan and Co. 8s. 6d. net.)-Professor Swot° has done a, great service to English theology by giving us this admirable book. For reasons which are sufficiently obvious, this part of the Christian creed is apt to lose the prominence which rightfully belongs to it. The theory of Trinitarian belief is not only a formal acknowledgment of the equality of the Divine Persons, but- a practical recognition of it in the devotional life. Can we say that this is realised ? We are often told, nor are we

concerned to controvert the statement, that the Christian life, as it is outwardly expressed, culrainates in the Eucharist. Where is the recognition of the Holy Spirit's work in the Eucharist ? The primitive liturgies contained an invocation. That has dropped out of our forms, and there is now but a bare mention of the name. The fact is that as long as we are men we cannot rid ourselves of anthropomorphism, nor, indeed, should we wish to when we think of the Incarnation. "He was formed in fashion as a man." But all this makes us prize the more such a work as Professor Swete's. He begins with a foreword, which is only too brief, about the doctrine of the Holy Spirit as it is found in the Old Testament, and then proceeds to trace it regularly through the teaching of the Gospels and the Epistles, and does it with the scrupulous care that is characteristic of his work.