The Inner Life

Harris will understand the phrase “Internal Respiration.” To others it may be briefly described thus: It is the breathing not only into the spirit, but also into the body, of the atmosphere of Heaven, the Divine Proceeding, or as the Christian Church somewhat quaintly terms it, of the Holy Ghost.

In 1860, T. L. Harris writes as follows, in an article on the “Divine Breath in Man.” If there is an internal spiritual organ made up of organs, as the Word teaches and our thoughts admit, there are respirations in the spiritual lungs. But whence do they derive their breath? Who breathes in them and what is the air of Heaven that blows from land to land, from heart to heart, in gracious visitings of the Pentecostal Life of Christendom? It is the breath of the Holy Spirit the going out of the influence of God.

So then to those who are quickened in faith and life, there is a constant inbreathing of the Divine Spirit into the spiritual lungs of the internal organism of the soul.

We inhale from nature through outer lungs, and as science demonstrates, thought follows respiration. And we inhale through the spiritual lungs spiritual breath from the Holy Spirit, and spiritual thought follows this internal respiration; and hence subjectively there is a respiration of righteousness within every Christian man.

The highest science demonstrates that the normal, the unfallen condition of man, the condition we all should have inherited into had not sin swept through Eden, was one in which the whole race would have inhaled continuously from the spiritual lungs into the natural lungs, receiving thus in our outer consciousness the living love-breath of Almighty God.

So the process of Divine thoughts would have descended from the higher or spiritual to the lower or natural consciousness, and all would have been one speech of love and one faith of life. The revelations of Divine Order and virtue, now contained in the Holy Scriptures, would have been inwrought in the heart of every living, breathing, human creature.

The Gospel teaches that Christ was manifested for the purpose of the restoration of mankind, spiritually and naturally, to the condition which it held prior to the ruinous subversive ages which elapsed after the fall. As a consequence of His incarnation and