Word: dewar
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Published last week was a new book on the Holy Ghost that will interest many a man in the pew as well as in the pulpit. In The Holy Spirit and Modern Thought (Harper; $4.50), Anglican Canon Lindsay Dewar, a Fellow of King's College, London, concisely surveys the history of thought about the Holy Ghost from the Old Testament concept of ruach, the "breath" or spirit of God, to his own arresting hypothesis that the Holy Spirit works through the unconscious with extrasensory perception...
Irrational Individualism. The commonest mistake about the Holy Ghost, writes Canon Dewar, is to say "it" instead of "He." The gift of the Holy Spirit is "not the bestowal of a thing but the action of a person." The classic description of the Holy Spirit appears in the Gospel of John, where Jesus is quoted as promising to send the disciples "the Paraclete"-a Greek word variously translated as "comforter," "advocate," or "counselor"-to remind them of Jesus' teaching and to guide them to truth. At Pentecost, the 50th day after the Resurrection, the Holy Spirit descended upon...
Fellowship of the Spirit. The Christians who have set greatest store by the Holy Spirit have been the post-Reformation sects, such as the Baptists, Quakers, Mennonites and Moravians. Anglican Dewar is too much of a high churchman to approve of them. As a prime example, he cites Britain's George Fox (1624-1691), founder of the Society of Friends, and takes him to task for not appreciating the personality of the Holy Spirit ("he constantly refers to Him as 'it' "), and for having no "doctrine of the Church...
...Canon Dewar's own original interpretation of the working of the Holy Spirit is that His field of operation is the unconscious, where He can make Himself felt in terms of what the parapsychologists call "psi phenomena"-clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, etc.-as well as in everyday life, the source of what the Christian calls his "conscience." Nor, in Canon Dewar's thinking, is the Holy Spirit limited to Christians...
...major value of the book--to this Montrealer, at least-seems to lie in MacLennan's incredible sympathy for his characters and their city. If in advanced middle age they now appear flabby and indifferent as they quietly sip Dewar's Best-Ever-Bottled, they exist, at least. MacLennan has explained how hard knocks made them the way are. Hard knocks always arouse sympathy, particularly if the victims are people you know...