Frater Acher's Holy Heretics, which I was just reading yesterday, covers some of the same material of the last section.
J.B. Krebs/Kerning did not emphasize that every believer should strive to 'acquire the Holy Spirit', but rather that they already had it and should strive to 'recognise' it. Personally I don't think the church deliberately hid the knowledge - it was more a case of a) not understanding it, and b) being put off by the antisocial behaviour of the desert fathers, and c) the usual entropy of dogma taking over.