Daily Reading for September 26 • Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Winchester, 1626
Andrewes declares that on the mystery of the incarnatio Dei, the incarnation of God, there follows a corresponding mystery, the inspiration hominis, the in-spiration of man. The once for all event of the birth of Christ finds its fulfillment in the ever-renewed process of the coming of the Spirit. Both in the life of the Church and in the life of each member of the Church, progress and change are as necessary as fidelity and stability. Only in the unpredictable and infinitely varied action of the Spirit who is God and Lord and giver of life, and who moves with sovereign freedom throughout the affairs of men, do we begin to see the riches of God’s glory and God’s wisdom revealed. Only thus do we see how it is that while the history which led up to Jesus was full of the promise of his coming, the history which follows from him is full of an even greater and more mysterious expectation, the coming of the Spirit to dwell at the very heart of humanity and of all creation. The whole movement tends towards this in-spiration of man, this taking of humankind into the very life and being of the Triune God. We are caught up in a process as yet incomplete.
This aspect of the work of the Holy Spirit is fully developed in the preaching of Andrewes. A single quotation will give an example of it:
“Now to be made partakers of the Spirit, is to be made ‘partakers of the divine nature’. That is this day’s work. Partakers of the Spirit we are by receiving grace, which is nothing else but the work of the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of grace. Grace into the entire substance of the soul, dividing itself into two streams; one goes to the understanding, the gift of faith; the other to the will, the gift of charity, the very bond of perfection. The tongues to teach us knowledge, the fire to kindle our affections.”
From Participation in God: A Forgotten Strand in Anglican Tradition by A.M. Allchin (Morehouse-Barlow, 1988).