a completed revelation, and therefore we need 'ask Him nothing.'

And we have a divine Spirit that will come to us if we will, and
teach us by means of blessing the exercise of our own faculties, and
guiding us, not, indeed, into the uniform perception of the
intellectual aspects of Christian truth, but into the apprehension
and the loving possession, as a power in our lives, of all the truth
that we need to mould our characters and to raise us to the likeness
of Himself.

Only, brother! let us remember what such a method of teaching demands
from us. It needs that we honestly use the revelation that is given
us; it needs that we loyally, lovingly, trustfully, submit ourselves
to the teaching of that Spirit who will dwell in us; it needs that we
bring our lives up to the height of our present knowledge, and make
everything that we know a factor in shaping what we do and what we
are. If thus we will to do His will, 'we shall know of the doctrine';
if thus we yield ourselves to the divine Spirit, we shall be taught
the practical bearings of all essential truth; and if thus we ponder
the facts and principles that are enshrined in Christ's life, and the
Apostolic commentary on them, as preserved for us in the Scripture,
we shall not need to envy those that could go to Him with their
questions, for _He_ will come to us with His all-satisfying answers.

Ah! but you say experience does not verify these promises. Look at a
divided Christendom; look at my own difficulties of knowing what I am
to believe and to think. Well, as for a divided Christendom, saintly
souls are all of one Church, and however they may formulate the
intellectual aspects of their creed, when they come to pray, they say
the same things. Roman Catholic and Protestant, and Quaker and