Isaiah 44:3-5 For I will pour water on him that is thirsty, and floods on the dry ground: I will pour my spirit on your seed… There are souls around us so arid, scorched, and desolate that it seems almost impossible to educe within them a single grace or morality. Races are to be found — at least such is the testimony of the white men who are anxious to supplant them — which lack the rudimentary aptitudes for virtue, humanity, religion. They have received a prodigious endowment of appetite, passion, blood-thirstiness from the beast-world below them; but the spirit-world above them seems to have failed to filter down into their lives a single principle of light, truth, tenderness. Even these may be vitalised with a new ethic and fitted for a higher destiny than that of the dust-heap. But it must be by the Spirit in Christ's disciples. The trader who is a nominal Christian and a practical savage goes into their borders, and is an emissary of swift and complete destruction. They are touched by European commerce, and deteriorate and die off m swarms. They are forced into contact with Western civilisation, and they resent its restraints and perish from the lands of their forefathers. All these secondary influences are but as rivers of poison flowing through their borders, and a strange fate compels them to drink what they know to be the cup of death. The streams which can make this human desert, without a hint of verdure and land-marked with whitened bones, into a paradise, and keep it shaded with foliage, glorious with fruit, thick-set with holy homes and song-filled temples, must go out from the souls of men and women who have received the Holy Ghost. (T. G. Selby.) Parallel Verses KJV: For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground: I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring: |
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