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This clause might be so interpreted as to include the rest. Pureness, knowledge, and love, are all gifts of the One Spirit. This reflection shows that when St. Paul wrote, "By the Holy Ghost," amongst a number of particulars, he must have meant something more precise and less comprehensive. A man might have pureness and knowledge, and yet lack two things. We have known men of clean hands and a pure heart, of extensive knowledge and well-defined doctrine, who were singularly deficient in power. That elevating, transforming, re-creating influence, which brings a glow, and a force, and a rush into the whole being, and turns the commonplace into the original, and the natural into the spiritual, and the earthly into the heavenly, has not yet passed over them. They are clean and sound, but they are not illuminated and transfigured. Their life is not a motive life. It does not kindle, because it is not alight. No one catches fire at sleeping embers. These men are like a fire laid, to which the match has not yet brought the life-giving spark. Something of this kind is often made the special office of the Holy Ghost. The cleansing water is one of His emblems; but the rushing wind is another, and the enkindling fire is a third. And though the miraculous gifts are gone — gone because their work is done, and they would but impede the gospel progress in this nineteenth century — still power remains, as one of the proofs, and not one of the meanest or least convincing proofs, of the Divine origin of the gospel. Only let your mind receive into it, in answer to prayer, the real presence of God Himself in the Holy Spirit — and you are a man of power at once. The energy communicated to your soul must act and influence. The grace of pureness, the grace of knowledge, pass on into the grace of power. Multitudes,. even of sincere Christians, stop short of this; and, though safety may be theirs, it is a half-selfish safety — they go for next to nothing in the real battle-field of the gospel. Let us be Christians through and through.

(Dean Vaughan.)

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KJV: By pureness, by knowledge, by longsuffering, by kindness, by the Holy Ghost, by love unfeigned,

WEB: in pureness, in knowledge, in patience, in kindness, in the Holy Spirit, in sincere love,