The Spirit of God | G. Campbell Morgan 

About the Book: 

The Spirit of God by G. Campbell Morgan, D.D., is a rich, reverent, and deeply biblical exploration of the Person and work of the Holy Spirit. Written with theological clarity and pastoral warmth, this classic volume helps readers move beyond vague ideas about the Spirit and return to the solid teaching of Scripture.

Morgan does not treat the Holy Spirit as a mere doctrine to be studied from a distance. He presents Him as the living, divine Person who is active throughout Scripture, at work in creation, revelation, redemption, Christian character, and spiritual service. With careful reasoning and strong biblical grounding, Morgan shows how essential the Spirit is to the whole Christian life.

What makes this book especially valuable is its balance. It is thoughtful without being cold, doctrinal without being dry, and spiritually serious without becoming confusing. Morgan writes with conviction, but also with the heart of a shepherd. He helps readers understand profound truths while always keeping their practical importance in view.

This is not a book of empty religious language or passing religious trends. It is a substantial and enduring work that calls believers back to biblical truth, spiritual reality, and wholehearted surrender to God. For readers who want a deeper understanding of the Holy Spirit and a stronger, more fruitful Christian life, The Spirit of God remains an important and rewarding book.

Why This Book Is Worth Reading

One of the great strengths of The Spirit of God is that Morgan combines doctrinal depth with spiritual urgency. He explains difficult subjects clearly, including the personality of the Holy Spirit, His divine nature, His work in the believer, and the dangers of resisting, grieving, or quenching Him. Yet the book never feels merely academic. It constantly presses truth into the heart and conscience.

Morgan also writes with unusual steadiness and discernment. He avoids shallow emotionalism on one side and lifeless rationalism on the other. Instead, he leads readers back to Scripture as the final authority. That makes this book especially helpful for anyone who wants a trustworthy, balanced, Bible-centered understanding of the Holy Spirit.

The book is also powerful because it is not only about doctrine, but about life. It speaks to the inner life of the believer, to holiness, obedience, surrender, spiritual power, and service. It challenges readers not simply to admire truth, but to live under the Spirit’s rule.

What Readers Will Find in This Book

Readers will find a thoughtful study of the Holy Spirit’s identity and ministry throughout God’s redemptive work. Morgan addresses questions such as who the Holy Spirit is, how He relates to the Father and the Son, how He works in regeneration and sanctification, what it means to be filled with the Spirit, and how believers may cooperate with His work rather than resist it.

They will also find a book that speaks not only to the mind, but to the soul. Morgan’s writing calls for reverence, self-examination, faith, and obedience. The result is a book that informs, searches, strengthens, and encourages.

Who Should Read This Book?

This book is especially well suited for Christians who want to deepen their understanding of the Holy Spirit in a serious and biblical way. It is valuable for pastors, teachers, ministry leaders, Bible students, and thoughtful believers who want more than surface-level answers.

It is also an excellent choice for readers who appreciate classic Christian writing and want to learn from one of the great expositors of Scripture. Those who feel confused by modern discussions about the Holy Spirit may find in Morgan a clear, trustworthy, and steady guide. Readers who long for a deeper spiritual life, greater clarity in doctrine, and more fruitful service for Christ will also find this book especially rewarding.

A Lasting Christian Classic

G. Campbell Morgan was known for his exceptional ability to open Scripture with clarity, force, and spiritual insight, and The Spirit of God is a fine example of that gift. This book has enduring value because it addresses truths that are never outdated. The need to know the Holy Spirit, to submit to His work, and to live in His power is just as urgent now as ever.

For anyone seeking a serious, Scripture-rooted, and spiritually enriching book on the Holy Spirit, The Spirit of God is a classic well worth reading.

About This Modernized Edition

This modernized edition of The Spirit of God has been prepared to help today’s readers engage more easily with G. Campbell Morgan’s rich and thoughtful teaching while preserving the substance, reverence, and theological weight of the original work.

The aim of this edition is not to rewrite Morgan, but to present his work in a form that is clearer and more accessible for modern readers. Older expressions, dated sentence structures, and archaic wording have been carefully updated for readability, while the original meaning, tone, and doctrinal intent have been faithfully retained. Every effort has been made to remain true to Morgan’s voice and argument throughout.

Because this book is deeply rooted in Scripture, special care has also been taken to preserve biblical references and the flow of Morgan’s biblical reasoning. The goal has been to remove unnecessary barriers created by older language, so that readers may more readily grasp the beauty, clarity, and spiritual force of the message itself.

This edition is especially intended for readers who appreciate classic Christian writing but may find older prose difficult to follow. It is also designed for comfortable use in both personal reading and ministry settings, making this enduring work more approachable without diminishing its depth.

In preparing this edition, the desire has been simple: to let G. Campbell Morgan speak clearly again to a new generation of readers. His call to know the Holy Spirit more truly, to submit to His work more fully, and to live in deeper fellowship with God remains as timely and needed now as ever.

About the Author: G. Campbell Morgan (1863–1945) — The Prince of Expositors

G. Campbell Morgan (1863–1945) was one of the most respected Bible teachers and expositors of his generation. Known for his clarity, spiritual depth, and remarkable ability to open Scripture in a way that was both intellectually strong and spiritually moving, he became widely recognized as one of the great evangelical preachers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Morgan’s most famous gift was his expository preaching. He had a rare ability to take complex biblical truth and present it with simplicity, order, force, and warmth. For many readers and hearers, he was not merely a preacher, but a trusted guide into the meaning of Scripture. His ministry influenced pastors, Bible teachers, and serious Christian readers across the English-speaking world, and he remains especially admired for helping believers understand the Bible as a unified, living message rather than a collection of isolated texts.

Among his best-known books are The Crises of the Christ, The Parables of the Kingdom, The Teaching of Christ, The Ten Commandments, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Gospel According to John, and The Acts of the Apostles. In these and many other works, Morgan consistently combined careful biblical study with deep devotional power. His writings are marked by balance, reverence, and a strong confidence in the authority of Scripture.

In The Spirit of God, Morgan brings these same strengths to one of the most important themes in Christian faith: the Person and work of the Holy Spirit. With biblical seriousness and pastoral insight, he helps readers think clearly about who the Holy Spirit is, how He works, and why His ministry is essential to the Christian life. The book stands as an excellent example of Morgan at his best—clear, earnest, Scripture-centered, and spiritually searching.

For readers who may not yet know G. Campbell Morgan, this book offers an excellent introduction to his work. It shows why he has been valued for generations as a master expositor of Scripture and a deeply trusted Christian voice. His writings continue to attract readers because they are not driven by passing trends, but by a profound desire to understand God’s Word and to lead others into its truth.

Contents

About This Book 6

About This Modernized Edition 9

About the Author 10

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTORY 12

1.1 Signs of the Times 13

CHAPTER 2. THE SPIRIT OF GOD 19

2.1 The Personality of the Spirit 21

2.2 The Relation of the Spirit to the Trinity 28

CHAPTER 3. IDEAL CREATION 35

3.1 The Spirit in Creation 36

3.2 The Spirit in Relation to Unfallen Man 46

CHAPTER 4. THE SPIRIT PRIOR TO PENTECOST 57

4.1 The Work of the Spirit from the Fall to the Messiah 58

4.2 The Spirit During the Mission of the Messiah 66

CHAPTER 5. THE TEACHING OF CHRIST CONCERNING THE SPIRIT 75

5.1 The Coming of the Spirit 76

5.2 The Character of the Spirit 80

5.3 The Mission of the Spirit 82

5.4 The Results of the Spirit’s Coming 83

CHAPTER 6. THE PENTECOSTAL AGE 85

6.1 Pentecost 86

6.2 The Spirit in the Church 94

6.3 The Spirit in the World 102

CHAPTER 7. THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 109

7.1 The Baptism of the Spirit 110

7.2 The Filling of the Spirit 119

7.3 The Power of the Spirit 127

CHAPTER 8. THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION 137

8.1 Ye Must Be Born Anew 138

8.2 Be Filled with the Spirit 147

8.3 Resist Not, Grieve Not, Quench Not 154

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTORY

1.1 Signs of the Times

During recent years, two movements have been noticeable in the thinking of people outside the Christian Church.

First, there has been the development of materialism. The teachings of Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, and Spencer have tended toward a denial of the spiritual element in man. Thousands of people who have never read their books have nevertheless been influenced by their view of life. Moreover, many of their earlier positions have been accepted, taught, and held to this very hour without proper allowance being made for their later statements, which showed that much of their teaching consisted of suggested hypotheses rather than established facts.

According to such teachers, all the phenomena of human life are to be explained wholly within the range of matter. They admit that matter itself is indestructible; yet they affirm that the rearrangement of matter at death destroys the identity of human beings. In a more cultured and refined form, and with occasional gleams of hope expressed in doubt, men have gradually drifted toward materialism. The effect of this has been seen in average human life apart from the influence and teaching of Christianity.

Earthly, sensual, devilish—these are words that fittingly describe the great mass of life apart from God. Some of the older forms of fleshly living have indeed ceased, and there is in the minds of men a new respect for personal character as a result of the presence of Christianity in the world. Yet a true view of the condition of the masses of the race would reveal that, for the most part, life is being lived in the realm of the fleshly, the material, and the perishing. Thousands of men, while professing to hold the orthodox creed, are nevertheless living in practical atheism, and thus denying their own spiritual nature.

The second movement outside the Church has taken the form of a revolt against materialism, and has found expression in attempts to discover the spiritual, to unfold its laws, and to declare its activities. Spiritualism and theosophy are witnesses to this movement.

Mrs. Annie Besant is one of the most remarkable examples of it in individual life. There was a time when she—sickened, alas, by the inconsistencies with which she came into contact within what was called, and falsely called, Christianity—turned her back upon the faith of her early years. She found refuge in denial of high and sacred things, and lived wholly, to all appearance, outside the realm of the spiritual. For her to have found her way back to an acknowledgment of the spiritual in any form is a gain.

It is, however, a remarkable fact that one who might once have been described as the high priestess of materialism, in rebounding from that position, has leaped into the realm of credulity. Belief in a Mahatma somewhere among the Himalayan heights, who has never been seen, requires a stretch of faith far greater than belief in the living Christ of God, Whose presence on earth nineteen hundred years ago is an indisputable historical fact, and Whose abiding presence is witnessed by countless transformations of character throughout the centuries.

This change of front on the part of so gifted a woman is a startling illustration of the fact that, side by side with the materialistic movement that has characterized the past half-century, there has also been a marked revolt against that movement. Indeed, the revolt against materialism has carried a certain section of the community into the opposite extreme. They are declaring that matter is not real, and that only mind truly exists. The tendency of the past was to deny spirit. That has proved to be absolutely untenable, and now it has become fashionable to deny matter. This is evidenced by the vagaries of Christian Science, falsely so called.

This groping in the darkness outside has had its counterpart within the churches. A wave of rationalism, originating largely in Germany, has been sweeping over the religious world. Its effect has been the drowning of spiritual ideas and the extinguishing of the fires of Christian zeal. There are churches utterly devoid of the true spiritual marks of men and women converted to God and transformed into the likeness of Jesus Christ. Such churches, being destitute of the compassion of Christ for the needs of men, all too sadly prove that the materialistic element has crept within their borders in the form of rationalistic theology, the canker-worm of spiritual life.

But just as outside the Church there has been a spirit of revolt, so within the Church, alongside this rationalistic movement, there has appeared a marked and wonderful revival of interest in the ministry of the Holy Spirit.

In 1856 William Arthur issued his Tongue of Fire. It was indeed a fiery message to the churches, but it was before its time. Not that it was out of place. Every great movement has its forerunner. Every great development of thought begins with some lonely watchman upon the mountain, who catches the first ray of coming day and tells the dwellers in the valley that it is approaching. The book was, in that sense, a book before its time; yet men read it—our fathers tell us—on their knees.

There followed a period of waiting, a time during which it appeared as though the book were dead. It was dead as seed-corn dies, only to bring forth a glorious harvest. During the last quarter of the century, men in every section of the Christian Church have spoken and written on this great theme of the ministry and work of the Holy Spirit. Dr. Scofield, of Northfield, says: More books, booklets, and tracts upon that subject have issued from the press during the last twenty years than in all the time since the invention of printing.

The truth thus proclaimed has resulted in new life within the churches; and everywhere eager souls are inquiring after fuller, clearer, and more systematic knowledge of this great ministry of the Spirit. The ministries that are forceful in accomplishing definite results in the interests of the kingdom of God today are the ministries of men who are laying the whole burden of their work upon the Holy Spirit of God—men who, however different the subjects with which they deal, and however different their theological outlook may be in certain respects, are nevertheless constantly recognizing that the Holy Spirit is to be thought of and spoken of as a Person rather than an influence.

Wherever the Spirit of God is being enthroned in preaching and in all Christian work, and given His rightful place as the Administrator of the things of Jesus Christ, apostolic results are seen to follow.

Here, however, as always in the history of fallen man, the Divine movement has had its counterfeit.

The devil has two methods of dealing with the living truth of God. First, he seeks to hide the vision. When that is no longer possible, when truth with its inherent brilliance and beauty is driving away the mist, then the devil’s method becomes one of patronage and falsification. Taking truth out of its proper proportion, he turns it into deadly error.

The Reformation, for which we still thank God, was a return on the part of men, to whom God gave vision, to the great fundamental truth of justification by faith. The central gospel fact, He that believeth on the Son hath eternal life, (John iii. 36.) was rediscovered. For long and weary years Satan had kept that truth out of sight; but when God raised up Martin Luther and others, the devil immediately adopted, adapted, and misapplied it.

In the wake of the Reformation came the damnable heresy of antinomianism. Its teaching was that if men are justified by faith, conduct is of no account. Man sins continually, and nothing can alter that fact; but being justified by faith, actual life and character are of no consequence. Thus a truth, taken out of its proper setting and stretched beyond due proportion, became a heresy almost more dreadful than that from which justification by faith had delivered men.

Again, some years ago God raised up men to give renewed expression to the truth of the premillennial coming of Jesus Christ. The effect was that of a purifying hope, and believers were called back from worldliness and indifference to the attitude of pilgrims girded for the King’s business and waiting for His appearing. Then there immediately followed innumerable distortions of the truth by the powers of evil, and impertinent predictions of dates have almost brought the whole subject into general disrepute.

Instead of the whole Church being purified, strengthened, and revived in the prospect of events whose timing God Himself alone knows, many are afraid to give the subject any attention whatever because it has been disgraced by attempts to discover a date of which the Master said: Of that day . . . knoweth no one, . . . not even . . . the Son. (Mark xiii. 32.)

Just as it was in these instances, so it has been with the subject of the work of the Holy Spirit. The greatest peril threatening the truth of the Spirit’s personal ministry today arises from the advocacy of that truth by those who are not careful to discover the mind of the Spirit.

With the revival of interest there have been launched a number of wholly unauthorized systems, which have brought bondage where the Spirit would have brought liberty. Men have been misapplying phrases connected with this subject. The baptism of the Spirit, the anointing of the Spirit, the indwelling of the Spirit, the sealing of the Spirit, the filling of the Spirit—all these, though based on Scripture, have been taken out of their setting and made into the current phraseology of a new system of thought, which is in fact a new form of legalism.

It is asserted, for instance, that a man who is converted may be baptized of the Spirit, if—and then after the if comes the statement of certain conditions which amount to a legalism as disastrous as that of the Judaizing teachers among the churches of Galatia. We are told that if a man will abandon this, that, and the other—and in many cases will cease to observe laws of life that are purely natural—he may be filled or baptized with the Spirit. All this is contrary to the teaching of the New Testament.

The baptism of the Spirit is always used in the New Testament with reference to regeneration, and never with reference to what is often spoken of today as the second blessing.

The filling of the Spirit through the fuller faith of the believer is often, though not necessarily, a second blessing. All that is necessary for fuller realization of the Divine life becomes the birthright and possession of believers the moment they are born again of the Spirit of God. Nothing is more to be deprecated than the habit of constructing systems upon disconnected Scripture phrases apart from their relation to the context.

There is one sure and infallible guide to truth, and therefore one, and only one, corrective for error, and that is the Word of God. That, in this series of studies, is the court of appeal. May the Holy Spirit, without Whom there is no understanding of the Word, grant a clearer comprehension of His Person, of His work, and of man’s relation thereto.

In approaching the subject, the mind should be freed from all preconceived conclusions and prejudices, and a stand should be taken upon the old prophetic dictum: To the law and to the testimony! if they speak not according to this word, surely there is no morning for them. (Isa. viii. 20.) There is no revelation of the activities of the Spirit of God, or of the spiritual world, except the revelation that comes through the Book.

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