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The little fellowship of followers and witnesses who formed the nucleus of the new-born Church felt themselves “endued with power” on the day of Pentecost. Something new and dynamic entered the consciousness of the feeble band and left them no longer feeble. There was an in-rushing, up-welling sense of invasion. They passed over from a visible Leader and Master to an invisible and inward Presence revealed to them as an unwonted energy. Ecstatic utterance, which seems to have followed, is not the all-important thing. The important thing is heightened moral quality, intensified fellowship, a fused and undying loyalty, an irresistible boldness in the face of danger and opposition, a fortification of spirit which nothing could break. This energy which came with their experience is what marks the event as an epoch.

St. Paul writes as though he were an expert in dynamics. “Dynamos,” the Greek word for power, is one of his favorite words. He seems to have found out how to draw upon energies in the universe which nobody else had suspected were even there. It is a fundamental feature of his “Aegean gospel” that God is not self-contained but self-giving, that He circulates, as does the sun, as does the sea, and comes into us as an energy. This incoming energy he calls by many names: “The Spirit,” “holy Spirit,” “Christ,” “the Spirit of Christ,” “Christ in you,” “God that worketh in us.” Whatever his word or term is, he is always declaring, and he bases his testimony on experience, that God, as Christ reveals Him, is an active energy working with us and in us for the complete transformation of our fundamental nature and for a new creation in us.