The-Person-and-Work-of-the-Holy-Spirit-by-R.A.-Torrey (continued)
gifts. An opening soon came to him as a Sundayschool missionary, and then, when he had given up choosing for himself and left it with the Holy Spirit to divide to him as He would, a strange thing happened ; he did receive power as an evangelist and went through the country districts in one of our northwestern states with mighty power as an evangelist.
4. While the power may be of one kind In one person and of another kind in another person, there will always be power, the very power of God, when one is baptised with the Holy Spirit. We read in Acts i. 5, 8, " For John truly baptized with water ; but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence. . . .
But ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost: and ye shall be witnesses unto Me is come upon you both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and unto the uttermost part of the earth." As truly as any one who reads these pages, who has not already received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, seeks it in God's way, he will obtain it, and there will come into his service a power that was never there before, power for the very work to which God has called him. This is not only the teaching of Scripture 5 it is the teaching of religious experience throughout the centuries. Religious biographies abound in instances of men who have worked along as best they could, until one day they were led to see that there was such an experience as the baptism with the Holy Spirit and to seek it and obtain it and, from that hour, there came into their service a new power that utterly transformed its character. In this matter, one thinks first of such men as Finney,
The Baptism With the Holy Spirit 191 and Moody, and Brainerd, but cases of this character are not confined to the few exceptional men. They are common. The writer has personally met and corresponded with hundreds and thousands of persons around the globe, who could testify definitely to the new power that God has granted them through the baptism with the Holy Spirit. These thousands of men and women were in all branches of Christian service ; some of them are ministers of the Gospel, some evangelists, some mission workers, some Y. M. C. A. secretaries, Sunday-school teachers, fathers, mothers, personal workers. Nothing could possibly exceed the clearness and the confidence and the joyfulness of many of these testimonies.
I shall not soon forget a minister whom I met some years ago at a State Convention of the Young People's
Society of Christian Endeavour at New Britain, Conn.
I was speaking upon the subject of personal work and as I drew the address to a close, I said that in order to do effective personal work, we must be baptized with the Holy Spirit, and in a very few sentences explained what I meant by that. At the close of the address, this minister came to me on the platform and said, " I have not this blessing you have been speaking about, but I want it. Will you pray for me ? " I said, " Why not pray right now ? " He said, " I will." We put two chairs side by side and turned our backs upon the crowd as they passed out of the Armoury. He prayed and I prayed that he might be baptized with the Holy
Spirit. Then we separated. Some weeks after, one who had witnessed the scene came to me at a conven-
tion in Washington and told me how this minister had gone back to his church a transformed man, that now his congregations filled the church, that it was largely composed of young men, and that there were conversions at every service. Some years after,, this minister was called to another field of service. His most spiritually-minded friends advised him not to go, as all the ruling elements in the church to which he had been called were against aggressive evangelistic work, but for some reason or other, he felt it was the call of God and accepted it. In six months, there were sixty-nine conversions, and thirty-eight of them were business men of the town.
After attending in Montreal some years ago an Interprovincial Convention of the Young Men's Christian
Association of the Provinces of Canada, I received a letter from a young man. He wrote, " I was present at your last meeting in Montreal. I heard you speak upon the Baptism with the Holy Spirit. I went to my rooms and sought that baptism for myself and received it. I am chairman of the Lookout Committee of the Christian Endeavour Society of our church. I called together the other members of the committee. I found that two of them had been at the meeting and had already been baptized with the Holy Spirit. Then we prayed for the other members of the committee and they were baptized with the Holy Spirit, Now we are going out into the church and the young people of the church are being brought to Christ right along." A lady and gentleman once came to me at a convention and told me how, though they had never seen me