UNITED CHRISTIAN CONVENTION

Dominion, Volume 17, Issue 288, 22 August 1923, Page 8

UNITED CHRISTIAN CONVENTION

This unique convention began its full sessions yesterday, when a good number of earnest people gathered in the Vivian Street Baptist Church in the afternoon to listen to Biblical expositions by the Revs. Rollings and Leng. The former spoke on the personality of the Holy Spirit, showing from the Scriptures how He displayed all the characteristics of personality, speaking, appointing, commanding, forbidding, sealing, and grieving. He was called the Paraclete, the Advocate, and so was Jesus. No one denied personality to Jesus; whv, then, to the Holv Spirit? It was the Spirit who took up and carried on Christ’s work in the world. Mr. Leng spoke of the inward energy of the Holy Spirit, and pointed out that fruit was the product of life within the tree: so that ill believers who would display the fruits of the Spirit must be possessed by His inward energy and life. -All forces contributed to the formation of fruit, sun, rain, wind, cold, and the energy stored in tiie earth itself. So it was ths growing soul within the man that made the man grow, and the need of the day was for more life and fruit through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the believer and in the Church. The Rev. R Baird presided over the session. Between the afternoon ind evening sessions an interval meeting of 3 bright and happy character was held. The evening session was in charge of the Rev. Robertson Orr, i’id the Rev. \V. M. Holland gave tn exposition of the first fruit of the spirit,/‘love. In illustration of his subject the speaker called attention to the fact that the platform that night bad a Presbyterian chairman with one speaker from the Salvation Army and the other from the Congregationalist Church. Love to God begot love to man. A man possessed by the Holy Spirit would certainly love God with sincere devotion; but he would love his neighbour also, and do him all the good he could. So-called “free love’ was neither free nor love. Tho two things which characterised the early Church were holiness and love, and the latter was quite different from that which paganism knew. It was unselfish, it broke down race barriers, it removed class distinctions, it unified all trues of men and women in a glorious fellowship. It was the same fruit to-day, and nothing else than that would solve the Ruhr problem and alt kinds of international and industrial disputes. Brigadier Kirk, of the Salvation Army, followed with an address on “Joy.” Everybody, he said, wanted this fruit, first and last; but really it could only be found and kept in service for others. He appealed to his hearers to find their joy in the study of God’s Word, in incessant prayer and intercession, in fellowship with God in the saving of tho world, and in worship of one great Triune God. These meetings will be continued this afternoon and evening.