What presumption is all this, some one says. How preposterous to imagine

that the Maker of the worlds interests Himself in atoms like

ourselves,--in the ephemera of this insignificant planet! But moral

magnitudes are not to be measured by a foot-rule. The mind which can

traverse the immensities of space and hold them in its grasp, transcends

the things it counts and weighs. As it is amongst earthly powers, so the

law may hold betwixt sphere and sphere in the system of worlds, in the

relations of bodies terrestrial and celestial to each other, that "God

has chosen the weak things to put to shame the mighty, and the things

that are not to bring to nought the things that are." Through the Church

He is "making known to the potentates in the heavenly places His

manifold wisdom" (iii, 10). The lowly can sing evermore with Mary in the

Magnificat: "He that is mighty hath magnified me." If it be true that

God spared not His Son for our salvation and has sealed us with the seal

of His Spirit, if He chose us before the world's foundation to be His

saints, He must set upon those saints an infinite value. We may despise

ourselves; but He thinks great things of us.

And is this, after all, so hard to understand? If the alternative were

put to some owner of wide lands and houses full of treasure: "Now, you

must lose that fine estate, or see your own son lost and ruined! You

must part with a hundred thousand pounds--or with your best friend!"

there could be no doubt in such a case what the choice would be of a man

of sense and worth, one who sees with the eyes of the heart. Shall we

think less nobly of God than of a right-minded man amongst

ourselves?--Suppose, again, that one of our great cities were so full of

wealth that the poorest were housed in palaces and fared sumptuously

every day, though its citizens were profligates and thieves and cowards!

What would its opulence and luxury be worth? Is it not evident that

_character_ is the only possession of intrinsic value, and that this

alone gives worth and weight to other properties? "The saints that are

in the earth and the excellent" are earth's riches.

So far as we can judge of His ways, the great God who made us cares

comparatively little about the upholstery and machinery of the universe;

but He cares immensely about men, about the character and destiny of

men. There is nothing in all that physical science discloses for God to

_love_, nothing kindred to Himself. "Hast thou considered my servant

Job?" the Hebrew poet pictures Him saying before heaven and hell!--"Hast

thou considered my servant Job?--a perfect man and upright: there is

none like him in the earth." How proud God is of a man like that, in a

world like this. Who can tell the value that the Father of glory sets

upon the tried fidelity of His humblest servant here on earth; the

intensity with which He reciprocates the confidence of one timid,

trembling human heart, or the simple reverence of one little child that

lisps His awful name? "He _taketh pleasure_ in them that fear Him, in

those that hope in His mercy!" Beneath His feet all the worlds lie

spread in their starry splendour, our sun with its train of planets no

more than one glimmering spot of light amongst ten thousand. But amidst

this magnificence, what is the sight that wins His tender fatherly

regard? "To that man will I look, that is poor and of a contrite spirit,

and that trembles at my word." Thus saith the High and Lofty One that

inhabiteth eternity. The Creator rejoices in His works as at the

beginning, the Lord of heaven and earth in His dominion. But these are

not His "inheritance." That is in the love of His children, in the

character and number of His saints. _We_ are to be the praise of His

glory.

Let us learn, then, to respect ourselves. Let us not take the world's

tinsel for wealth, and spend our time, like the man in Bunyan's dream,

scraping with "the muck-rake" while the crown of life shines above our

head. The riches of a Church--nay, of any human community--lies not in

its moneyed resources, but in the men and women that compose it, in

their godlike attributes of mind and heart, in their knowledge, their

zeal, their love to God and man, in the purity, the gentleness, the

truthfulness and courage and fidelity that are found amongst them. These

are the qualities which give distinction to human life, and are

beautiful in the eyes of God and holy angels. "Man that is in honour and

understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish."

III. One thing more we need to understand, or what we have seen already

will be of little practical avail. We may see glorious visions, we may

cherish high aspirations; and they may prove to be but the dreams of

vanity. Nay, it is conceivable that God Himself might have wealth

invested in our nature, a treasure beyond price, shipwrecked and sunk

irrecoverably through our sin. What means exist for realizing this

inheritance? what power is there at work to recover these forfeited

hopes, and that glory of God of which we have come so miserably short?

The answer lies in the apostle's words: "That ye may know what is the

exceeding greatness of His power toward us that believe,"--a power

measured by "the energy of the might of His strength[67] which He

wrought in the Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and set Him at

His right hand in the heavenly places." This is the power that we have

to count upon, the force that is yoked to the world's salvation and is

at the service of our faith. Its energy has turned the tide and reversed

the stream of nature--in the person of Jesus Christ and in the course of

human history. It has changed death to life. Above all, it certifies the

forgiveness of sin and releases us from its liabilities; it transforms

the law of sin and death into the law of the Spirit of life in Christ

Jesus.

We preachers hear it said sometimes: "You live in a speculative world.

Your doctrines are ideal and visionary,--altogether too high for men as

they are and the world as we find it. Human nature and experience, the

coarse realities of life are all against you."

What would our objectors have said at the grave-side of Jesus? "The

beautiful dreamer, the sublime idealist! He was too good for a world

such as ours. It was sure to end like this. His ideas of life were

utterly impracticable." So they would have moralized. "And the good

prophet talked--strangest fanaticism of all--of rising again on the

third day! One thing at least we know, that the dead are dead and gone

from us. No, we shall never see Jesus or His like again. Purity cannot

live in this infected air. The grave ends all hope for men." But,

despite human nature and human experience, He has risen again, He lives

for ever! That is the apostle's message and testimony to the world. For

those "who believe" it, all things are possible. A life is within our

reach that seemed far off as earth from heaven. _You_ may become a

perfect saint.

From His open grave Christ breathed on His disciples, and through them

on all mankind, the Holy Spirit. This is the efficient cause of

Christianity,--the Spirit that raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. The

limit to its efficacy lies in the defects of our faith, in our failure

to comprehend what God gave us in His Son. Is anything now too hard for

the Lord? Shall anything be called impossible, in the line of God's

promise and man's spiritual need? Can we put an arrest upon the working

of this mysterious force, upon the Spirit of the new life, and say to

it: Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther?

Look at Jesus where He was--the poor, tortured, wounded body, slain by

our sins, lying cold and still in Joseph's grave: then lift up your eyes

and see Him _where He is_,--enthroned in the worship and wonder of

heaven! Measure by that distance, by the sweep and lift of that almighty

Arm, the strength of the forces engaged to your salvation, the might of

the powers at work through the ages for the redemption of humanity.

FOOTNOTES:

[61] See Westcott and Hort's _New Testament in Greek_, vol. ii., pp.

124, 125.

[62] Dr. Beet abides by the critical text. He solves the difficulty by

giving =pistis= a double sense: "the faith among you in the Lord Jesus,

and the _faithfulness_ towards all the saints." See his Commentary on

_Ephesians, etc._, pp. 284-6.

[63] In 1 Thess. i. 7-9; 2 Thess. i. 4, the same thought enters into

Paul's thanksgiving; comp. 2 Cor. ix. 2.

[64] This is the emphatic =epignôsis=, so frequent in the later

epistles. See Lightfoot's _note_ on Col. i. 9; or Cremer's _Lexicon to

N.T. Greek_.

[65] See ch. iii. 3-5, iv. 11; and comp. 1 Cor. xiv. 26-40, etc.

[66] Adolphe Monod: _Explication de l'épître de S. Paul aux Éphésiens_.

A deeply spiritual and suggestive Commentary.

[67] In this amplitude of expression there is no idle heaping up of

words. The four synonyms for _power_ have each a distinct force in the

sentence. =Dynamis= is _power_ in general, as that which is able to

effect some purpose; =energeia= is _energy_, power in effective action

and operation; =kratos= is _might_, _mastery_, sovereign power,--in the

New Testament used chiefly of the power of God; =ischys= is _force_,

_strength_, power resident in some person and belonging to him. This is

the order in which the words follow each other. Compare vi. 10 in the

Greek.

THE DOCTRINE.

CHAPTER i. 20-iii. 13.

=Hypsêlôn sphodra gemei tôn noêmatôn kai hyperonkôn. Ha gar mêdamou

schedon ephthenxato, tauta entautha phêsin.=

JOHN CHRYSOSTOM: _In epistolam ad Ephesios._

CHAPTER VI.

_WHAT GOD WROUGHT IN THE CHRIST._

"He raised Him from the dead, and made Him to sit at His right hand

in the heavenly _places_, far above all rule, and authority, and

power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this

world, but also in that which is to come: and He put all things in

subjection under His feet, and Him He gave--the head over all

things--to the Church which is His body,--the fulness of Him that

filleth all in all."--EPH. i. 20-23.

The division that we make at verse 20, marking off at this point the

commencement of the Doctrine of the epistle, may appear somewhat forced.

The great doxology of the first half of the chapter is intensely

theological; and the prayer which follows it, like that of the letter to

the Colossians, melts into doctrine imperceptibly. The apostle teaches

upon his knees. The things he has to tell his readers, and the things he

has asked on their behalf from God, are to a great extent the same.

Still the writer's attitude in the second chapter is manifestly that of

teaching; and his doctrine there is so directly based upon the

concluding sentences of his prayer, that it is necessary for logical

arrangement to place these verses within the doctrinal section of the

epistle.

The resurrection of Christ made men sensible that a new force of life

had come into the world, of incalculable potency. This power was in

existence before. In prelusive ways, it has wrought in the world from

its foundation, and since the fall of man. By the incarnation of the Son

of God it took possession of human flesh; by His sacrificial death it

won its decisive triumph. But the virtue of these acts of Divine grace

lay in their hiding of power, in the self-abnegation of the Son of God

who emptied Himself and took a servant's form, and became obedient unto

death.

With what a rebound did the "energy of the might of God's strength" put

forth itself in Him, when once this sacrifice was accomplished! Even His

disciples who had seen Jesus still the tempest and feed the multitude

from a handful of bread and call back the spirit to its mortal frame,

had not dreamed of the might of Godhead latent in Him, until they beheld

Him risen from the dead. He had promised this in words; but they

understood His words only when they saw the fact, when He actually stood

before them "alive after His passion." The scene of Calvary--the cruel

sufferings of their Master, His helpless ignominy and abandonment by

God, the malignant triumph of his enemies--gave to this revelation an

effect beyond measure astonishing and profound in its impression. From

the stupor of grief and despair they were raised to a boundless hope, as

Jesus rose from the death of the cross to glorious life and Godhead.

Of the same nature was the effect produced by His manifestation to Paul

himself. The Nazarene prophet known to Saul by report as an attractive

teacher and worker of miracles, had made enormous pretensions,

blasphemous if they were not true. He put Himself forward as the Messiah

and the very Son of God! But when brought to the test, His power utterly

failed. God disowned and forsook Him; and He "was crucified of

weakness." His followers declared, indeed, that He had returned from the

grave. But who could believe them, a handful of Galilean enthusiasts,

desperately clinging to the name of their disgraced leader! If He has

risen, why does He not show Himself to others? Who can accept a

crucified Messiah? The new faith is a madness, and an insult to our

common Judaism! Such were Saul's former thoughts of the Christ. But when

his challenge was met and the Risen One confronted him in the way to

Damascus, when from that Form of insufferable glory there came a voice

saying, "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest!" it was enough. Instantly

the conviction penetrated his soul, "He liveth by the power of God."

Saul's previous reasonings against the Messiahship of Jesus by the same

rigorous logic were now turned into arguments for Him.

It is "_the_ Christ," let us observe, in whom God "wrought raising Him

from the dead": the Christ of Jewish hope (ver. 12), the centre and sum

of the Divine counsel for the world (ver. 10),[68] the Christ whom in

that moment never to be forgotten the humbled Saul recognized in the

crucified Nazarene.

The demonstration of the power of Christianity Paul had found in the

resurrection of Jesus Christ. The power which raised Him from the dead

is the working energy of our faith. Let us see what this mysterious

power wrought in the Redeemer Himself; and then we will consider how it

bears upon us. There are two steps indicated in Christ's exaltation: He

was raised _from the death of the cross to new life amongst men_; and

again from the world of men He was raised _to the throne of God in

heaven_. In the enthronement of Jesus Christ at the Father's right

hand, verses 22, 23 further distinguish two separate acts: there was

conferred on Him _a universal Lordship_; and He was made specifically

_Head of the Church_, being given to her for her Lord and Life, He who

contains the fulness of the Godhead. Such is the line of thought marked

out for us.

I. _God raised the Christ from the dead._

This assertion is the corner-stone of St Paul's life and doctrine, and

of the existence of Christendom. Did the event really take place? There

were Christians at Corinth who affirmed, "There is no resurrection of

the dead." And there are followers of Jesus now who with deep sadness

confess, like the author of _Obermann once more_:

"Now He is dead! Far hence He lies

In the lorn Syrian town;

And on His grave, with shining eyes,

The Syrian stars look down."

If we are driven to this surrender, compelled to think that it was an

apparition, a creation of their own passionate longing and heated fancy

that the disciples saw and conversed with during those forty days, an

apparition sprung from his fevered remorse that arrested Saul on the

Damascus road--if we no longer believe in Jesus and the resurrection, it

is in vain that we still call ourselves Christians. The foundation of

the Christian creed is struck away from under our feet. Its spell is

broken; its energy is gone.

Individual men may and do continue to believe in Christ, with no faith

in the supernatural, men who are sceptics in regard to His resurrection

and miracles. They believe in Himself, they say, not in His legendary

wonders; in His character and teaching, in His beneficent influence--in

the _spiritual_ Christ, whom no physical marvel can exalt above His

intrinsic greatness. And such trust in Him, where it is sincere, He

accepts for all that it is worth, from the believer's heart. But this is

not the faith that saved Paul, and built the Church. It is not the faith

which will save the world. It is the faith of compromise and transition,

the faith of those whose conscience and heart cling to Christ while

their reason gives its verdict against Him. Such belief may hold good

for the individuals who profess it; but it must die with them. No skill

of reasoning or grace of sentiment will for long conceal its

inconsistency. The plain, blunt sense of mankind will decide again, as

it has done already, that Jesus Christ was either a blasphemer, or He

was the Son of the eternal God; either He rose from the dead in very

truth, or His religion is a fable. Christianity is not bound up with the

infallibility of the Church, whether in Pope or Councils, nor with the

inerrancy of the letter of Scripture: it stands or falls with the

reality of the facts of the gospel, with the risen life of Christ and

His presence in the Spirit amongst men.

The fact of Christ's resurrection is one upon which modern science has

nothing new to say. The law of death is not a recent discovery. Men were

as well aware of its universality in the first century as they are in

the nineteenth, and as little disposed as we are ourselves to believe in

the return of the dead to bodily life. The stark reality of death makes

us all sceptics. Nothing is clearer from the narratives than the utter

surprise of the friends of Jesus at His reappearance, and their complete

unpreparedness for the event. They were not eager, but "_slow_ of heart

to believe." Their very love to the Master, as in the case of Thomas,

made them fearful of self-deception. It is a shallow and an unjust

criticism that dismisses the disciples as interested witnesses and

predisposed to faith in the resurrection of their dead Master. Should we

be thus credulous in the case of our best-beloved dead? The instinctive

feeling that meets any thought of the kind, after the fact of death is

once certain, is rather that of deprecation and aversion, such as Martha

expressed when Jesus went to call her brother from his grave. In all the

long record of human imposture and illusion, no resurrection story has

ever found general credence outside of the Biblical revelation. No

system of faith except our own has ever been built on the allegation

that a dead man rose from the grave.

Christ's was not the only resurrection; but it is the only _final_

resurrection. Lazarus of Bethany left his tomb at the word of Jesus, a

living man; but he was still a mortal man, doomed to see corruption. He

returned from the grave on this side, as he had entered it, "bound hand

and foot with grave-clothes." Not so with the Christ. He passed through

the region of death and issued on the immortal side, escaped from the

bondage of corruption. Therefore He is called the "firstfruits" and "the

firstborn _out of_ the dead."[69] Hence the alteration manifest in the

risen form of Jesus. He was "changed," as St Paul conceives those will

be who await on earth their Lord's return (1 Cor. xv. 51). The mortal in

Him was swallowed up of life. The corpse that was laid in Joseph's tomb

was there no longer. From it another body has issued, recognized for the

same person by look and voice and movement, but indescribably

transfigured. Visible and tangible as the body of the Risen One

was--"Handle me, and see," He said--it was superior to material

limitations; it belonged to a state whose laws transcend the range of

our experience, in which the body is the pliant instrument of the

animating spirit. From the Person of the risen Saviour the apostle

formed his conception of the "spiritual body," the "house from heaven"

with which, as he teaches, each of the saints will be clothed--the

wasted form that we lay down in the grave being transformed into the

semblance of His "body of glory, according to the mighty working whereby

He is able to subdue all things to Himself" (Phil. iii. 20, 21).

The resurrection of the Christ inaugurated a new order of things. It was

like the appearance of the first living organism amidst dead matter, or

of the first rational consciousness in the unconscious world. He "is,"

says the apostle, the "beginning, first-begotten out of the dead" (Col.

i. 18). With the harvest filling our granaries, we cease to wonder at

the firstfruits; and in the new heavens and earth Christ's resurrection

will seem an entirely natural thing. Immortality will then be the normal

condition of human existence.

That resurrection, nevertheless, did homage to the fundamental law of

science and of reason, that every occurrence, ordinary or extraordinary,

shall have an adequate cause. The event was not more singular and unique

than the nature of Him to whom it befell. Looking back over the Divine

life and deeds of Jesus, St Peter said: "It was not possible that He

should be holden of death." How unfitting and repugnant to thought, that

the common death of all men should come upon Jesus Christ! There was

that in His Person, in its absolute purity and godlikeness, which

repelled the touch of corruption. He was "marked out," writes our

apostle, "as Son of God, _according to His spirit of holiness_, by His

resurrection from the dead" (Rom. i. 4). These two signs of Godhead

agree in Jesus; and the second is no more superhuman than the first. For

Him the supernatural was natural. There was a mighty working of the

being of God latent in Him, which transcended and subdued to itself the

laws of our physical frame, even more completely than they do the laws

and conditions of the lower realms of nature.

II. The power which raised Jesus our Lord from the dead could not leave

Him in the world of sin and death. Lifting Him from hades to earth, by

another step it exalted the risen Saviour above the clouds, and _seated

Him at God's right hand in the heavens_.

The forty days were a halt by the way, a condescending pause in the

operation of the almighty power that raised Him. "I ascend," He said to

the first that saw Him,--"I ascend to my Father and your Father, to my

God and your God." He must see His own in the world again; He must "show

Himself alive after His passion by infallible proofs," that their hearts

may be comforted and knit together in the assurance of faith, that they

may be prepared to receive His Spirit and to bear their witness to the

world. Then He will ascend up where He was before, returning to the

Father's bosom. It was impossible that a spiritual body should tarry in

a mortal dwelling; impossible that the familiar relations of

discipleship should be resumed. No new follower can now ask of Him,

"Rabbi, where dwellest Thou," under what roof amid the homes of men? For

He dwells with those that love Him always and everywhere, like the

Father (John xiv. 23). From this time Christ will not be known after the

flesh, but as the "Lord of the Spirit" (2 Cor. iii. 18).

"In the heavenlies" now abides the Risen One. This expression, so

frequent in the epistle as to be characteristic of it,[70] denotes not

locality so much as condition and sphere. It speaks of the bright and

deathless world of God and the angels, of which the sky has always been

to men the symbol. Thither Christ ascended in the eyes of His apostles

on the fortieth day from His rising. Once before His death its

brightness for a moment had irradiated His form upon the Mount of

Transfiguration. Clad in the like celestial splendour He showed Himself

to His future apostle Paul, as to one born out of due time, to make him

His minister and witness. Since then, of all the multitudes that have

loved His appearing, no other has looked upon Him with bodily eyes. He

dwells with the Father in light unapproachable.

But rest and felicity are not enough for Him. Christ sits at the right

hand of power, that He may _rule_. In those heavenly places, it seems,

there are thrones higher and lower, names more or less eminent, but His

stands clear above them all. In the realms of space, in the epochs of

eternity there is none to rival our Lord Jesus, no power that does not

owe Him tribute. God "hath put all things under His feet." _The Christ_,

who died on the cross, who rose in human form from the grave, is exalted

to share the Father's glory and dominion, is filled with God's own

fulness, and made without limitation or exception "Head over all

things."

In his enumeration of the angelic orders in verse 21, the apostle

follows the phraseology current at the time, without giving any precise

dogmatic sanction to it. The epistle to the Colossians furnishes a

somewhat different list (ch. i. 16); and in 1 Corinthians xv. 24 we find

the "principality, dominion, and power" without the "lordship." As

Lightfoot says,[71] St Paul "brushes away all these speculations" about

the ranks and titles of the angels, "without inquiring how much or how

little truth there may be in them.... His language shows a spirit of

impatience with this elaborate angelology." There is, perhaps, a passing

reproof conveyed by this sentence to the "worshipping of the angels"

inculcated at the present time in Colossae, to which other Asian Churches

may have been drawn. "Paul's faith saw the Risen and Rising One passing

through and beyond and above successive ranks of angelic powers, until

there was in heaven no grandeur which He had not left behind. Then,

after naming heavenly powers known to him, he uses a universal phrase

covering 'not only' those known by men living on earth 'in the' present

'age, but also' those names which will be needed and used to describe

men and angels throughout the eternal future" (Beet).

The apostle appropriates here two sentences of Messianic prophecy, from

Psalms cx. and viii. The former was addressed to the Lord's Anointed,

the King-Priest enthroned in Zion: "Sit thou on my right hand, until I

make thine enemies thy footstool!" The latter text describes man in his

pristine glory, as God formed him after His likeness and set him in

command over His creation. This saying St Paul applies, with an

unbounded scope, to the God-man raised from the dead, Founder of the new

creation: "Thou madest Him to have dominion over the works of Thy hands;

Thou hast put all things under His feet." To the former of these

passages St Paul repeatedly alludes; indeed, since our Lord quoted it in

this sense, it became the standing designation of His heavenly

dignity.[72] The words of Psalm viii. are brought in evidence again in

Hebrews ii. 5-10, and expounded from a somewhat different standpoint. As

the writer of the other epistle shows, this coronation belongs to the

human race, and it falls to the Son of man to win it. St Paul in quoting

the same Psalm is not insensible of its human reference. It was a

prophecy for Jesus and His brethren, for Christ and the Church. So it

forms a natural transition from the thought of Christ's dominion over

the universe (ver. 21) to that of His union with the Church (ver.

22_b_).

III. The second clause of verse 22 begins with an emphasis upon the

_object_ which the English Version fails to recognize: "and _Him_ He

gave"--the Christ exalted to universal authority--"_Him_ God gave, Head

over all things [as He is], to the Church which is His body,--the

fulness of Him who fills all things in all."

At the topmost height of His glory, with thrones and princedoms beneath

His feet, _Christ is given to the Church_! The Head over all things, the

Lord of the created universe, He--and none less or lower--is the Head of

redeemed humanity. For the Church "is His body" (this clause is

interjected by way of explanation): she is the vessel of His Spirit, the

organic instrument of His Divine-human life. As the spirit belongs to

its body, by the like fitness the Christ in His surpassing glory is the

possession of the community of believing men. The body claims its head,

the wife her husband. No matter where Christ is, however high in heaven,

He belongs to us. Though the Bride is lowly and of poor estate, He is

hers! and she knows it, and holds fast His heart. She recks little of

the people's ignorance and scorn, if their Master is her affianced Lord,

and she the best-beloved in His eyes.

How rich is this gift of the Father to the Church in the Son of His

love, the concluding words of the paragraph declare: "Him He gave ... to

the Church ... [gave] the fulness of Him that fills all in all." In the

risen and enthroned Christ God bestowed on men a gift in which the

Divine plenitude that fills creation is embraced. For this last clause,

it is clear to us, does not qualify "the Church which is His body," and

expositors have needlessly taxed their ingenuity with the incongruous

apposition of "body" and "fulness"; it belongs to the grand Object of

the foregoing description, to "the Christ" whom God raised from the dead

and invested with His own prerogatives. The two separate designations,

"Head over all things" and "Fulness of the All-filler," are parallel,

and alike point back to _Him_ who stands with a weight of gathered

emphasis--heaped up from verse 19 onwards--at the front of this last

sentence (ver. 22_b_). There has been nothing to prepare the reader to

ascribe the august title of the _pleroma_, the Divine fulness, to the

Church--enough for her, surely, if she is His body and He God's gift to

her--but there has been everything to prepare us to crown the Lord Jesus

with this glory. To that which God had wrought in Him and bestowed on

Him, as previously related, verse 23 adds something more and greater

still; for it shows what God makes the Christ to be, not to the

creatures, to the angels, to the Church, _but to God Himself_![73]

Our text is in strict agreement with the sayings about "the fulness" in

Colossians i. 15-20 and ii. 9, 10; as well as with the later references

of this epistle, in chapter iii. 19, iv. 13; and with John i. 16. This

title belongs to Christ as God is in Him and communicates to Him all

Divine powers. It was, in the apostle's view, a new and distinct act by

which the Father bestowed on the incarnate Son, raised by His power from

the dead, the functions of Deity. Of this glory Christ had of His own

accord "emptied Himself" in becoming man for our salvation (Phil. ii. 6,

7). Therefore when the sacrifice was effected and the time of

humiliation past, it "was the Father's pleasure that all the fulness

should make its dwelling in Him" (Col. i. 19). At no point did Christ

exalt Himself, or arrogate the glory once renounced. He prayed, when the

hour was come: "Now, Father, _glorify Thou me_ with Thine own self, with

the glory which I had with Thee before the world was." It was for the

Father to say, as He raised and enthroned Him: "Thou art my Son; I

to-day have begotten Thee!" (Acts xiii. 33).

Again there was poured into the empty, humbled and impoverished form of

the Son of God the brightness of the Father's glory and the infinitude

of the Father's authority and power. The majesty that He had foregone

was restored to Him in undiminished measure. But how great a change

meanwhile in Him who received it! This plenitude devolves not now on the

eternal Son in His pure Godhead, but on the Christ, the Head and

Redeemer of mankind. God who fills the universe with His presence, with

His cherishing love and sustaining power, has conferred the fulness of

all that He is upon our Christ. He has given Him, so replenished and

perfected, to the body of His saints, that He may dwell and work in them

for ever.

FOOTNOTES:

[68] See the note upon this definite article on p. 47.

[69] =Prôtotokos ek tôn nekrôn=, Col. i. 18: comp. Rom. vi. 13, x. 7,

for the force of the preposition. Hence the peculiar =exanastasin tê ek

nekrôn= of Phil. iii. 10, 11,--the _out-and-out_ resurrection, which

will utterly remove us from the sphere of death.

[70] Ver. 3, ch. ii. 6, iii. 10, vi. 12; nowhere else in the New

Testament. Comp., however, 1 Cor. xv. 40, 48; Phil. ii. 10; Heb. viii.

5, ix. 23, xi. 16, xii. 22, where the adjective has the same kind of

use.

[71] _Note_ on Col. i. 16.

[72] Matt. xxii. 41-46, also in Mark and Luke; Acts ii. 34, 35; Rom.

viii. 34; Col. iii. 1; Heb. i. 13; 1 Peter iii. 22, etc.

[73] The reader of the Old Testament, unless otherwise advertized, must

inevitably have referred the words _who filleth all things in all_ to

the Supreme God. See Jer. xxiii. 24; Isai. vi. 1, 3; Hag. ii. 7; Ps.

xxxiii. 5, etc.; Exod. xxxi. 3. "That filleth all in all" is an

attribute belonging to "the same God, that worketh all in all" (1 Cor.

xii. 6). Comp. iv. 6.

CHAPTER VII.

_FROM DEATH TO LIFE._

"And you _did He quicken_, when ye were dead through your trespasses

and sins, wherein aforetime ye walked according to the course of

this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the

spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience; among whom we

also all once lived in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of

the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath,

even as the rest:--but God, being rich in mercy, for His great love

wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead through our

trespasses, quickened us together with the Christ (by grace have ye

been saved), and raised us up together and made us to sit together

in the heavenly _places_ in Christ Jesus."--EPH. ii. 1-6.

We pass by a sudden transition, just as in Colossians i. 21, 22, from

the thought of that which God wrought in Christ Himself to that which He

works through Christ in believing men. So God raised, exalted, and

glorified His Son Jesus Christ (i. 19-23)--_and you_! The finely woven

threads of the apostle's thought are frequently severed, and awkward

chasms made in the highway of his argument by our chapter and verse

divisions. The words inserted in our Version (_did He quicken_) are

borrowed by anticipation from verse 5; but they are more than supplied

already in the foregoing context. "The same almighty Hand that was laid

upon the body of the dead Christ and lifted Him from Joseph's grave to

the highest seat in heaven, is now laid upon your soul. It has raised

_you_ from the grave and death of sin to share by faith His celestial

life."

The apostle, in verse 3, pointedly includes amongst the "dead in

trespasses and sins" himself and his Jewish fellow-believers as they

"once lived," when they obeyed the motions and "volitions of the flesh,"

and so were "by birth" not children of favour, as Jews presumed, but

"children of anger, even as the rest."[74]

* * * * *

This passage gives us a sublime view of the event of our conversion. It

associates that change in us with the stupendous miracle which took

place in our Redeemer. The one act is a continuation of the other. There

is an acting over again in us of Christ's crucifixion, resurrection and

ascension, when we realize through faith that which was done for mankind

in Him. At the same time, the redemption which is in Christ Jesus is no

mere legacy, to be received or declined; it is not something done once

for all, and left to be appropriated passively by our individual will.

It is a "_power_ of God unto salvation," unceasingly operative and

effective, that works "of faith and _unto faith_" that summons men to

faith, challenging human confidence wherever its message travels and

awakening the spiritual possibilities dormant in our nature.

It is a supernatural force, then, which is at work upon us in the word

of Christ. It is a resurrection-power, that turns death into life. And

it is a power instinct with love. The love which went out towards the

slain and buried Jesus when the Father stooped to raise Him from the

dead, bends over us as we lie in the grave of our sins, and exerts

itself with a might no less transcendent, that it may raise us from the

dust of death to sit with Him in the heavenly places (vv. 4-6).

Let us look at the two sides of the change effected in men by the

gospel--at the death they leave, and the life into which they enter. Let

us contemplate the task to which this unmatched power has set itself.

I. _You that were dead_, the apostle says.

Jesus Christ came into a dead world--He the one living man, alive in

body, soul, and spirit--alive to God in the world. He was, like none

besides, aware of God and of God's love, breathing in His Spirit,

"living not by bread alone, but by every word that proceeded from His

mouth." "This," He said, "is life eternal." If His definition was

correct, if it be life to know God, then the world into which Christ

entered by His human birth, the world of heathendom and Judaism, was

veritably dying or dead--"dead indeed unto God."

Its condition was visible to discerning eyes. It was a world rotting in

its corruption, mouldering in its decay, and which to His pure sense had

the moral aspect and odour of the charnel-house. We realize very

imperfectly the distress, the inward nausea, the conflict of disgust and

pity which the fact of being in such a world as this and belonging to it

caused in the nature of Jesus Christ, in a soul that was in perfect

sympathy with God. Never was there loneliness such as His, the solitude

of life in a region peopled with the dead. The joy which Christ had in

His little flock, in those whom the Father had given Him out of the

world, was proportionately great. In them He found companionship,

teachableness, signs of a heart awakening towards God--men to whom life

was in some degree what it was to Him. He had come, as the prophet in

his vision, into "the valley full of dry bones," and He "prophesied to

these slain, that they might live." What a comfort to see, at His first

words, a shaking in the valley,--to see some who stirred at His voice,

who stood upon their feet and gathered round Him--not yet a great army,

but a band of living men! In their breasts, inspired from His, was the

life of the future. "I am come," He said, "that they might have life."

It was the work of Jesus Christ to breathe His vital spirit into the

corpse of humanity, to reanimate the world.

When St Paul speaks of his readers in their heathen condition as "dead,"

it is not a figure of speech. He does not mean that they were like dead

men, that their state resembled death; "nor only that they were in peril

of death; but he signifies a real and present death" (Calvin). They

were, in the inmost sense and truth of things, _dead men_. We are

twofold creatures, two-lived,--spirits cased in flesh. Our human nature

is capable, therefore, of strange duplicities. It is possible for us to

be alive and flourishing upon one side of our being, while we are

paralyzed or lifeless upon the other. As our bodies live in commerce

with the light and air, in the environment of house and food and daily

exercise of the limbs and senses under the economy of material nature,

so our spirits live by the breath of prayer, by faith and love towards

God, by reverence and filial submission, by communion with things unseen

and eternal. "With Thee," says the Psalmist to his God, "is the fountain

of life: in Thy light we see light." We must daily resort to that

fountain and drink of its pure stream, we must faithfully walk in that

light, or there is no such life for us. The soul that wants a true faith

in God, wants the proper spring and principle of its being. It sees not

the light, it bears not the voices, it breathes not the air of that

higher world where its origin and its destiny lie.

The man who walks the earth a sinner against God, becomes by the act and

fact of his transgression a dead man. He has imbibed the fatal poison;

it runs in his veins. The doom of sin lies on his unforgiven spirit. He

carries death and judgement about with him. They lie down with him at

night and wake with him in the morning; they take part in his

transactions; they sit by his side in the feast of life. His works are

"dead works"; his joys and hopes are all shadowed and tainted. Within

his living frame he bears a coffined soul. With the machinery of life,

with the faculties and possibilities of a spiritual being, the man lies

crushed under the activity of the senses, wasted and decaying for want

of the breath of the Spirit of God. In its coldness and

powerlessness--too often in its visible corruption--his nature shows the

symptoms of advancing death. It is dead as the tree is dead, cut off

from its root; as the fire is dead, when the spark is gone out; dead as

a man is dead, when the heart stops.

As it is with the departed saints sleeping in Christ,--"put to death,

indeed, in the flesh, but living in the spirit,"--so by a terrible

inversion with the wicked in this life. They are put to death, indeed,

in the spirit, while they live in the flesh. They may be and often are

powerfully alive and active in their relations to the world of sense,

while on the unseen and Godward side utterly paralyzed. Ask such a man

about his business or family concerns; touch on affairs of politics or

trade,--and you deal with a living mind, its powers and susceptibilities

awake and alert. But let the conversation pass to other themes; sound

him on questions of the inner life; ask him what he thinks of Christ,

how he stands towards God, how he fares in the spiritual conflict,--and

you strike a note to which there is no response. You have taken him out

of his element. He is a practical man, he tells you; he does not live in

the clouds, or hunt after shadows; he believes in hard facts, in things

that he can grasp and handle. "The natural man perceiveth not the things

of the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him." They are pictures to

the eye of the blind, heavenly music to the stone-deaf.

And yet that hardened man of the world--starve and ignore his own spirit

and shut up its mystic chambers as he will--cannot easily destroy

himself. He has not extirpated his religious nature, nor crushed out,

though he has suppressed, the craving for God in his breast. And when

the callous surface of his life is broken through, under some unusual

stress, some heavy loss or the shock of a great bereavement, one may

catch a glimpse of the deeper world within of which the man himself was

so little conscious. And what is to be seen there? Haunting memories of

past sin, fears of a conscience fretted already by the undying worm,

forms of weird and ghostly dread flitting amid the gloom and dust of

death through that closed house of the spirit,--

"The bat and owl inhabit here:

The snake nests on the altar stone:

The sacred vessels moulder near:

The image of the God is gone!"

In this condition of death the word of life comes to men. It is the

state not of heathendom alone; but of those also, favoured with the

light of revelation, who have not opened to it the eyes of the heart, of

all who are "doing the desires of the flesh and the thoughts"--who are

governed by their own impulses and ideas and serve no will above the

world of sense.[75] Without distinction of birth or formal religious

standing, "all" who thus live and walk are dead while they live. Their

_trespasses and sins_ have killed them. From first to last Scripture

testifies: "Your sins have separated between you and your God." We find

a hundred excuses for our irreligion: there is the cause. There is

nothing in the universe to separate any one of us from the love and

fellowship of his Maker but his own unforsaken sin.

It is true, there are other hindrances to faith, intellectual

difficulties of great weight and seriousness, that press upon many

minds. For such men Christ has all possible sympathy and patience. There

is a real, though hidden faith that "lives in honest doubt." Some men

have more faith than they suppose, while others certainly have much

less. One has a name to live, and yet is dead; another, perchance, has a

name to die, and yet is alive to God through Jesus Christ. There are

endless complications, self-contradictions, and misunderstandings in

human nature. "Many are first" in the ranks of religious profession and

notoriety, "which shall be last, and the last first." We make the

largest allowance for this element of uncertainty in the line that

bounds faith from unfaith; "The Lord knoweth them that are His." No

intellectual difficulty, no mere misunderstanding, will ultimately or

for long separate between God and the soul that He has made.

It is _antipathy_ that separates. "They did not like to retain God in

their knowledge"; that is Paul's explanation of the ungodliness and vice

of the ancient world. And it holds good still in countless instances.

"Numbers in this bad world talk loudly against religion in order to

encourage each other in sin, because they need encouragement. They know

that they ought to be other than they are; but are glad to avail

themselves of anything that looks like argument, to overcome their

consciences withal" (Newman). The fashionable scepticism of the day too

often conceals an inner revolt against the moral demands of the

Christian life; it is the pretext of a carnal mind, which is "enmity

against God, because it is not subject to His law." Christ's sentence

upon unbelief as He knew it was this: "Light is come into the world; and

men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil." So

said the keenest and the kindest judge of men. If we are refusing Him

our faith, let us be very sure that this condemnation does not touch

ourselves. Is there no passion that bribes and suborns the intellect? no

desire in the soul that dreads His entrance? no evil deeds that shelter

themselves from His accusing light?

When the apostle says of his Gentile readers that they "once walked in

the way of the age, according to the course of this world,[76] according

to the prince of the power of the air," the former part of his statement

is clear enough. The age in which he lived was godless to the last

degree; the stream of the world's life ran in turbid course toward moral

ruin. But the second clause is obscure. The "prince" (or "ruler") who

guides the world along its career of rebellion is manifestly Satan, the

spirit of darkness and hate whom St Paul entitles "the god of this

world" (2 Cor. iv. 4), and in whom Jesus recognized, under the name of

"the prince of the world," His great antagonist (John xiv. 30).

But what has this spirit of evil to do with "the air"? The Jewish rabbis

supposed that the terrestrial atmosphere was Satan's abode, that it was

peopled by demons flitting about invisibly in the encompassing element.

But this is a notion foreign to Scripture--certainly not contained in

chapter vi. 12--and, in its bare physical sense, without point or

relevance to this passage. There follows in immediate apposition to "the

domain of the air, _the spirit_ that now works in the sons of

disobedience." Surely, _the air_ here partakes (if it be only here) of

the figurative significance of _spirit_ (i.e. _breath_). St Paul refines

the Jewish idea of evil spirits dwelling in the surrounding atmosphere

into an ethical conception of _the atmosphere of the world_, as that

from which the sons of disobedience draw their breath and receive the

spirit that inspires them. Here lies, in truth, the dominion of Satan.

In other words, Satan constituted the _Zeitgeist_.

As Beck profoundly remarks upon this text:[77] "The Power of the air is

a fitting designation for the prevailing spirit of the times, whose

influence spreads itself like a miasma through the whole atmosphere of

the world. It manifests itself as a contagious nature-power; and a

_spiritus rector_ works within it, which takes possession of the world

of men, alike in individuals and in society, and assumes the direction

of it. The form of expression here employed is based on the conception

of evil peculiar to Scripture. In Scripture, evil and the principle of

evil are not conceived in a purely spiritual way; nor could this be the

case in a world of fleshly constitution, where the spiritual has the

sensuous for its basis and its vehicle. Spiritual evil exists as a power

immanent in cosmical nature."[78] Concerning great tracts of the earth,

and large sections even of Christianized communities, we must still

confess with St John: "The world lieth in the Evil One." The air is

impregnated with the infection of sin;[79] its germs float about us

constantly, and wherever they find lodgement they set up their deadly

fever. Sin is the malarial poison native to our soil; it is an epidemic

that runs its course through the entire "age of this world."

Above this feverous, sin-laden atmosphere the apostle sees God's anger

brooding in threatening clouds. For our trespasses and sins are, after

all, not forced on us by our environment. Those offences by which we

provoke God, lie in our nature; they are no mere casual acts, they

belong to our bias and disposition. Sin is a constitutional malady.

There exists a bad element in our human nature, which corresponds but

too truly to the course and current of the world around us. This the

apostle acknowledges for himself and his law-honouring Jewish kindred:

"We were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest." So he wrote in

the sad confession of Romans vii. 14-23: "I see a different law in my

members, warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into

captivity to the law of sin which is in my members."

It is upon this "other law," the contradiction of His own, upon the

sinfulness beneath the sin, that God's displeasure rests. Human law

notes the overt act: "the Lord looketh upon the heart." There is

nothing more bitter and humiliating to a conscientious man than the

conviction of this penetrating Divine insight, this detection to himself

of his incurable sin and the hollowness of his righteousness before God.

How it confounds the proud Pharisee to learn that he _is_ as other men

are,--and even as this publican!

"The sons of disobedience" must needs be "children of wrath." All sin,

whether in nature or practice, is the object of God's fixed displeasure.

It cannot be matter of indifference to our Father in heaven that His

human children are disobedient toward Himself. Children of His favour or

anger we are each one of us, and at every moment. We "keep His

commandments, and abide in His love"; or we do not keep them, and are

excluded. It is His smile or frown that makes the sunshine or the gloom

of our inner life. How strange that men should argue that God's love

forbids His wrath! It is, in truth, the cause of it. I could neither

love nor fear a God who did not care enough about me to be angry with me

when I sin. If my child does wilful wrong, if by some act of greed or

passion he imperils his moral future and destroys the peace and

well-being of the house, shall I not be grieved with him, with an anger

proportioned to the love I bear him? How much more shall your heavenly

Father--how much more justly and wisely and mercifully!

St Paul feels no contradiction between the words of verse 3 and those

that follow. The same God whose wrath burns against the sons of

disobedience while they so continue, is "rich in mercy" and "loved us

even when we were dead in our trespasses!" He pities evil men, and to

save them spared not His Son from death; but Almighty God, the Father of

glory, hates and loathes the evil that is in them, and has determined

that if they will not let it go they shall perish with it.

II. Such was the death in which Paul and his readers once had lain. But

God in His "great love" has "_made them to live_ along with the Christ."

How wonderful to have witnessed a resurrection: to see the pale cheek of

the little maid, Jairus' daughter, flush again with the tints of life,

and the still frame begin to stir, and the eyes softly open--and she

looks upon the face of Jesus! or to watch Lazarus, four days dead,

coming out of his tomb, slowly, and as one dreaming, with hands and feet

bound in the grave-clothes. Still more marvellous to have beheld the

Prince of Life at the dawn of the third day issue from Joseph's grave,

bursting His prison-gates and stepping forth in new-risen glory as one

refreshed from slumber.

But there are things no less divine, had we eyes for their marvel, that

take place upon this earth day by day. When a human soul awakes from its

trespasses and sins, when the love of God is poured into a heart that

was cold and empty, when the Spirit of God breathes into a spirit lying

powerless and buried in the flesh, there is as true a rising from the

dead as when Jesus our Lord came out from His sepulchre. It was of this

spiritual resurrection that He said: "The hour cometh, and now is, when

the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear

shall live." Having said that, He added, concerning the bodily

resurrection of mankind: "Marvel not at this; for the hour cometh, in

which all that are in the tombs shall hear His voice, and shall come

forth!" The second wonder only matches and consummates the first (John

v. 24-28).

"This is life eternal, to know God the Father,"--the life, as the

apostle elsewhere calls it, that is "life indeed." It came to St Paul by

a new creation, when, as he describes it, "God who said, Light shall

shine out of darkness, shined in our hearts, to give the light of the

knowledge of His glory in the face of Jesus Christ." We are born

again--the God-consciousness is born within us: an hour mysterious and

decisive as that in which our personal consciousness first emerged and

the soul knew itself. Now it knows God. Like Jacob at Peniel it says: "I

have seen God face to face; and my life is preserved." God and the soul

have met in Christ--and are reconciled.

The words the apostle uses--_gave us life_--_raised us up_--_seated us

in the heavenly places_--embrace the whole range of salvation. "Those

united with Christ are through grace delivered from their state of

death, not only in the sense that the resurrection and exaltation of

Christ redound to their benefit as Divinely imputed to them; but by the

life-giving energy of God they are brought out of their condition of

death into a new and actual state of life. The act of grace is an act of

the Divine power and might, not a mere judicial declaration" (Beck).

This comprehensive action of the Divine grace upon believing men takes

place by a constant and constantly deepening union of the soul with

Christ. This is well expressed by A. Monod: "The entire history of the

Son of man is reproduced in the man who believes in Him, not by a simple

moral analogy, but by a spiritual communication which is the true secret

of our justification as well as of our sanctification, and indeed of our

whole salvation."

There is no repetition in the three verbs employed, which are alike

extended by the Greek preposition _with_ (_syn_). The first sentence

(raised us up _with the Christ_) virtually includes everything; it shows

us one with Christ who lives evermore to God. The second sentence

gathers into its scope all believers--the _you_ of verse 1 and the _we_

of verse 3: "He raised us up together, and together made us sit in the

heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Nothing is more characteristic of our

epistle than this turn of thought. To the conception of our _union with

Christ_ in His celestial life, it adds that of our _union with each

other in Christ_ as sharers in common of that life. Christ "reconciles

us in one body unto God" (ver. 16). We sit not alone, but together in

the heavenly places. This is the fulness of life; this completes our

salvation.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] For the antithesis of "you" and "we," comp. vv. 11-18, ch. i, 12,

13; also Rom. iii. 19, 23 (_For there is no distinction_), Gal. ii. 15.

[75] =Poiountes ta thelêmata tês sarkos kai tôn dianoiôn= (ver. 3).

[76] Perhaps this double rendering may bring out the force of =kata to

aiôna tou kosmou toutou=.

[77] In the posthumous _Erklärung des Briefes Pauli an die Epheser_--a

valuable exposition, marked by Beck's theological acumen and lucidity.

[78] The =physei= of verse 3 thus corresponds to the =exousia tou aeros=

of verse 2. "Sin entered into _the world_" (=kosmos=), Rom. v. 12, which

signifies more than the nature of individual men.

[79] I John iii. 8; comp. John viii. 41-44.

CHAPTER VIII.

_SAVED FOR AN END._

"That in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His

grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace have ye

been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, _it is_ the

gift of God: not of works, that no man should glory. For we are His

workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore

prepared that we should walk in them."--EPH. ii. 7-10.

The plan which God has formed for men in Christ is of great dimensions

every way,--in its length no less than in its breadth and height. He

"raised us up and seated us together [Gentiles with Jews] in the

heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that _in the ages which are coming on_

He might show the surpassing riches of His grace." All the races of

mankind and all future ages are embraced in the redeeming purpose, and

are to share in its boundless wealth. Nor are the ages past excluded

from its operations. God "afore prepared the good works in which" He

summons us to walk. The highway of the new life has been in building

since time began.

Thus large and limitless is the range of "the purpose and grace given us

in Christ Jesus before times eternal" (2 Tim. i. 9). But what strikes us

most in this passage is the exuberance of the grace itself. Twice over

the apostle exclaims, "By grace you are saved": once in verse 5, in an

eager, almost jealous parenthesis, where he hastens to assure the

readers of their deliverance from the fearful condition just described

(vv. 1-3, 5). Again, deliberately and with full definition he states the

same fact, in verse 8: "For by grace you are saved, through faith; and

this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God. It does not come of

works, to the end that none may boast."

These words place us on familiar ground. We recognize the Paul of

Galatians and Romans, the dialect and accent of the apostle of salvation

by faith. But scarcely anywhere do we find this wonder-working grace so

affluently described. "God being rich in mercy, for the great love

wherewith He loved us--the exceeding riches of His grace, shown in

kindness toward us--the gift of God." _Mercy_, _love_, _kindness_,

_grace_, _gift_: what a constellation is here! These terms present the

character of God in the gospel under the most delightful aspects, and in

vivid contrast to the picture of our human state outlined in the

beginning of the chapter.

_Mercy_ denotes the Divine pitifulness towards feeble, suffering men,

akin to those "compassions of God" to which the apostle repeatedly

appeals.[80] It is a constant attribute of God in the Old Testament, and

fills much the same place there that grace does in the New. "Of mercy

and judgement" do the Psalmists sing--of mercy most. Out of the thunder

and smoke of Sinai He declared His name: "Jehovah, a God full of

compassion and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy and

truth, keeping mercy for thousands." The dread of God's justice, the

sense of His dazzling holiness and almightiness threw His mercy into

bright relief and gave to it an infinite preciousness. It is the

contrast which brings in "mercy" here, in verse 4, by antithesis to

"wrath" (ver. 3).[81] These qualities are complementary. The sternest

and strongest natures are the most compassionate. God is "_rich_ in

mercy." The wealth of His Being pours itself out in the exquisite

tendernesses, the unwearied forbearance and forgivingness of His

compassion towards men. The Judge of all the earth, whose hate of evil

is the fire of hell, is gentler than the softest-hearted mother,--rich

in mercy as He is grand and terrible in wrath.

God's mercy regards us as we are weak and miserable: His _love_ regards

us as we are, in spite of trespass and offence, His offspring,--objects

of "much love" amid much displeasure, "even when we were dead through

our trespasses." What does the story of the prodigal son mean but this?

and what Christ's great word to Nicodemus (John iii. 16)?--_Grace_ and

_kindness_ are love's executive. Grace is love in administration, love

counteracting sin and seeking our salvation. Christ is the embodiment of

grace; the cross its supreme expression; the gospel its message to

mankind; and Paul himself its trophy and witness.[82] The "overpassing

riches" of grace is that affluence of wealth in which through Christ it

"superabounded" to the apostolic age and has outdone the magnitude of

sin (Rom. v. 20), in such measure that St Paul sees future ages gazing

with wonder at its benefactions to himself and his fellow-believers.

Shown "in _kindness_ toward us," he says,--in a condescending

fatherliness, that forgets its anger and softens its old severity into

comfort and endearment. God's kindness is the touch of His hand, the

accent of His voice, the cherishing breath of His Spirit. Finally, this

generosity of the Divine grace, this infinite goodwill of God toward

men, takes expression in _the gift_--the gift of Christ, the gift of

righteousness (Rom. v. 15-18), the gift of eternal life (Rom. vi. 23);

or--regarded, as it is here, in the light of experience and

possession--_the gift of salvation_.

The opposition of _gift_ and _debt_, of gratuitous salvation through

faith to salvation earned by works of law, belongs to the marrow of St

Paul's divinity. The teaching of the great evangelical epistles is

condensed into the brief words of verses 8 and 9. The reason here

assigned for God's dealing with men by way of gift and making them

absolutely debtors--"lest any one should boast"--was forced upon the

apostle's mind by the stubborn pride of legalism; it is stated in terms

identical with those of the earlier letters. Men will glory in their

virtues before God; they flaunt the rags of their own righteousness, if

any such pretext, even the slightest, remains to them. We sinners are a

proud race, and our pride is oftentimes the worst of our sins. Therefore

God humbles us by His compassion. He makes to us a free gift of His

righteousness, and excludes every contribution from our store of merit;

for if we could supply anything, we should inevitably boast as though

all were our own. We must be content to receive mercy, love, grace,

kindness--everything, without deserving the least fraction of the

immense sum. How it strips our vanity; how it crushes us to the

dust--"the weight of pardoning love!"

Concerning the office of _faith_ in salvation we have already spoken in

Chapter IV.[83] It is on the objective fact rather than the subjective

means of salvation that the apostle lays stress in this passage. His

readers do not seem to have realized sufficiently what God has given

them and the greatness of the salvation already accomplished. They

measured inadequately the power which had touched and changed their

lives (i. 19). St Paul has shown them the depth to which they were

formerly sunk, and the height to which they have been raised (vv. 1-6).

He can therefore assure them, and he does it with redoubled emphasis:

"You _are saved_; By grace you are saved men!"[84] Not, "You will be

saved"; nor, "You were saved"; nor, "You are in course of

salvation,"--for salvation has many moods and tenses,--but, in the

perfect passive tense, he asserts the glorious accomplished _fact_. With

the same reassuring emphasis in chapter i. 7 he declared, "We have

redemption in His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses."

Here is St Paul's doctrine of Assurance. It was laid down by Christ

Himself when He said: "He that believeth on the Son of God hath eternal

life." This sublime confidence is the ruling note of St John's great

epistle: "We know that we are in Him.... We know that we have passed out

of death into life.... This is the victory that overcometh the world,

even our faith." It was this confidence of present salvation that made

the Church irresistible. With its foundation secure, the house of life

can be steadily and calmly built up. Under the shelter of the full

assurance of faith, in the sunshine of God's love felt in the heart, all

spiritual virtues bloom and flourish. But with a faith hesitant,

distracted, that is sure of no doctrine in the creed and cannot plant a

firm foot anywhere, nothing prospers in the soul or in the Church. Oh

for the clear accent, the ringing, joyous note of apostolic assurance!

We want a faith not loud, but deep; a faith not born of sentiment and

human sympathy, but that comes from the vision of the living God; a

faith whose rock and corner-stone is neither the Church nor the Bible,

but Christ Jesus Himself.

Greatly do we need, like the Asian disciples of Paul and John, to

"assure our hearts" before God. With death confronting us, with the

hideous evil of the world oppressing us; when the air is laden with the

contagion of sin; when the faith of the strongest wears the cast of

doubt; when the word of promise shines dimly through the haze of an

all-encompassing scepticism and a hundred voices say, in mockery or

grief, Where is now thy God? when the world proclaims us lost, our faith

refuted, our gospel obsolete and useless,--then is the time for the

Christian assurance to recover its first energy and to rise again in

radiant strength from the heart of the Church, from the depths of its

mystic life where it is hid with Christ in God.

_You are saved!_ cries the apostle; not forgetting that his readers have

their battle to fight, and many hazards yet to run (vi. 10-13). But they

hold the earnest of victory, the foretaste of life eternal. In spirit

they sit with Christ in the heavenly places. Pain and death, temptation,

persecution, the vicissitudes of earthly history, by these God means to

perfect that which He has begun in His saints--"if you continue in the

faith, grounded and firm" (Col. i. 23). That condition is expressed, or

implied, in all assurance of final salvation. It is a condition which

excites to watchfulness, but can never cause misgiving to a loyal heart.

God is for us! He justifies us, and counts us His elect. Christ Jesus

who died is risen and seated at the right hand of God, and there

intercedes for us. _Quis separabit?_[85]

* * * * *

This is the epistle of the Church and of humanity. It dwells on the

grand, objective aspects of the truth, rather than upon its subjective

experiences. It does not invite us to rest in the comforts and delights

of grace, but to lift up our eyes and see whither Christ has translated

us and what is the kingdom that we possess in Him. God "quickened us

together with the Christ": He "raised us up, He made us to sit _in the

heavenly places in Christ Jesus_." Henceforth "our citizenship is in

heaven" (Phil. iii. 20).

This is the inspiring thought of the third group of St Paul's epistles;

we heard it in the first note of his song of praise (i. 3). It supplies

the principle from which St Paul unfolds the beautiful conception of the

Christian life contained in the third chapter of the companion letter to

the Colossians: "Your life is hid with the Christ in God"; therefore

"seek the things that are above, where He is." We live in two worlds at

once. Heaven lies about us in this new mystic childhood of our spirit.

There our names are written; thither our thoughts and hopes resort. Our

treasure is there; our heart we have lodged there, with Christ in God.

_He_ is there, the Lord of the Spirit, from whom we draw each moment

the life that flows into His members. In the greatness of His love

conquering sin and death, time and space, He is with us to the world's

end. May we not say that we, too, are with Him and shall be with Him

always? So we reckon in the logic of our faith and at the height of our

high calling, though the soul creeps and drudges upon the lower levels.

"With Him we are gone up on high,

Since He is ours and we are His;

With Him we reign above the sky,

We walk upon our subject seas!"

In his lofty flights of thought the apostle always has some practical

and homely end in view. The earthly and heavenly, the mystical and the

matter-of-fact were not distant and repugnant, but interfused in his

mind. From the celestial heights of the life hidden with Christ in God

(ver. 6), he brings us down in a moment and without any sense of

discrepancy to the prosaic level of "good works" (ver. 10). The love

which viewed us from eternity, the counsels of Him who works all things

in all, enter into the humblest daily duties.

Grace, moreover, sets us great tasks. There should be something to show

in deed and life for the wealth of kindness spent upon us, some visible

and commensurate result of the vast preparations of the gospel plan. Of

this result the apostle saw the earnest in the work of faith wrought by

his Gentile Churches.

St Paul was the last man in the world to undervalue human effort, or

disparage good work of any sort. It is, in his view, the end aimed at in

all that God bestows on His people, in all that He Himself works in

them. Only let this end be sought in God's way and order. Man's doings

must be the fruit and not the root of his salvation. "Not _of_ works,"

but "_for_ good works" were believers chosen. "This little word _for_"

says Monod, "reconciles St Paul and St James better than all the

commentators." God has not raised us up to sit idly in the heavenly

places lost in contemplation, or to be the useless pensioners of grace.

He sends us forth to "walk in the works, prepared for us,"--equipped to

fight Christ's battles, to till His fields, to labour in the service of

building His Church.

The "workmanship" of our Version suggests an idea foreign to the

passage. The apostle is not thinking of the Divine art or skill

displayed in man's creation; but of the simple fact that "God made man"

(Gen. i. 27). "We are His _making_, created in Christ Jesus." The

"preparation" to which he refers in verse 10 leads us back to that

primeval election of God's sons in Christ for which we gave thanks at

the outset (i. 3). There are not two creations, the second formed upon

the ruin and failure of the first; but one grand design throughout.

Redemption is creation re-affirmed. The new creation, as we call it,

restores and consummates the old. When God raised His Son from the dead,

He vindicated His original purpose in raising man from the dust a living

soul. He has not forsaken the work of His hands nor forgone His original

plan, which took account of all our wilfulness and sin. God in making us

meant us to do good work in His world. From the world's foundation down

to the present moment He who worketh all in all has been working for

this end--most of all in the revelation of His grace in Jesus Christ.

Far backward in the past, amid the secrets of creation, lay the

beginnings of God's grace to mankind. Far onward in the future shines

its lustre revealed in the first Christian age. The apostle has gained

some insight into those "times and seasons" which formerly were veiled

from him. In his earliest letters, to the Thessalonians and Corinthians,

St Paul echoes our Lord's warning, never out of season, that we should

"watch, for the hour is at hand." _Maran atha_ is his watchword: "Our

Lord cometh; the time is short." Nor does that note cease to the end.

But when in this epistle he writes of "the ages that are coming on," and

of "all the generations of the age of the ages" (iii. 21), there is

manifestly some considerable period of duration before his eyes. He sees

something of the extent of the world's coming history, something of the

magnitude of the field that the future will afford for the unfolding of

God's designs.

In those approaching aeons he foresees that the apostolic dispensation

will play a conspicuous part. Unborn ages will be blessed in the

blessing now descending upon Jews and Gentiles through Christ Jesus. So

marvellous is the display of God's kindness toward them, that all the

future will pay homage to it. The overflowing wealth of blessing poured

upon St Paul and the first Churches had an end in view that reached

beyond themselves, an end worthy of the Giver, worthy of the magnitude

of His plans and of His measureless love. If all this was theirs--this

fulness of God exceeding the utmost they had asked or thought--it is

because God means to convey it through them to multitudes besides! There

is no limit to the grace that God will impart to men and to Churches who

thus reason, who receive His gifts in this generous and communicative

spirit. The apostolic Church chants with Mary at the Annunciation:

"For, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed!"

Never was any prediction better fulfilled. This spot of history shines

with a light before which every other shows pale and commonplace. The

companions of Jesus, the humble fraternities of the first Christian

century have been the object of reverent interest and intent research on

the part of all centuries since. Their history is scrutinized from all

sides with a zeal and industry which the most pressing subjects of the

day hardly command. For we feel that these men hold the secret of the

world's life. The key to the treasures we all long for is in their

hands. As time goes on and the stress of life deepens, men will turn

with yet fonder hope to the age of Jesus Christ. "And many nations will

say: Come, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of

the God of Jacob. And He will teach us of His ways; and we will walk in

His paths."

The stream will remember its fountain; the children of God will gather

to their childhood's home. The world will hear the gospel in the

recovered accents of its prophets and apostles.

FOOTNOTES:

[80] Rom. xii. 1; 2 Cor. i. 3; Phil. i. 8, ii. 1; comp. Luke i. 78. The

=oiktirmoi tou Theou, splanchna kai oiktirmoi=, rendered in our Version

"mercies of God," denotes something even more affecting,--God's sense of

the woefulness of human life,--"the pitying tenderness Divine."

[81] Comp. Rom. ix. 22, 23.

[82] On _grace_, comp. _The Epistle to the Galatians_ (Expositor's

Bible), Chapter X.

[83] Compare also, on Faith, _The Epistle to the Galatians_ (Expositor's

Bible), Chapters X.-XII. and XV.

[84] =Este sesôsmenoi=: for the peculiar emphasis of this form of the

verb, implying a settled fact, an assured state, compare ver. 12, =ête

... apêllotriômenoi=; Col. ii. 10; Gal. ii. 11, iv. 3; 2 Cor. iv. 3,

etc.

[85] Rom. viii. 31-39; comp. vv. 9-17; also 1 Thess. v. 23, 24; 2 Thess.

iii. 3-5; 1 Cor. i. 4-9; Phil. i. 6, iii. 13, 14; 2 Tim. i. 12, iv. 18,

for St Paul's doctrine of Assurance.

CHAPTER IX.

_THE FAR AND NEAR._

"Wherefore remember, that aforetime ye, the Gentiles in the flesh,

who are called Uncircumcision by that which is called Circumcision

in the flesh, made by hands; that ye were at that time separate from

Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers

from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in

the world: but now in Christ Jesus ye who sometime were far off are

made nigh in the blood of Christ."--EPH. ii. 11-13.

The apostle's _Wherefore_ sums up for his readers the record of their

salvation rehearsed in the previous verses. "You were buried in your

sins, sunk in their corruption, ruined by their guilt, living under

God's displeasure and in the power of Satan. All this has passed away.

The almighty Hand has raised you with Christ into a heavenly life. God

has become your Father; His love is in your heart; by the strength of

His grace you are enabled to walk in the way marked out for you from

your creation. _Wherefore remember_: think of what you were, and of what

you are!"

To such recollections we do well to summon ourselves. The children of

grace love to recall, and on fit occasions recount for God's glory and

the help of their fellows, the way in which God led them to the

knowledge of Himself. In some the great change came suddenly. He "made

speed" to save us. It was a veritable resurrection, as signal and

unlooked for as the rising of Christ from the dead. By a swift passage

we were "translated from the power of darkness into the kingdom of the

Son of His love." Once living without God in the world, we were arrested

by a strange providence--through some overthrow of fortune or shock of

bereavement, or by a trivial incident touching unaccountably a hidden

spring in the mind--and the whole aspect of life was altered in a

moment. We saw revealed, as by a lightning flash at night, the emptiness

of our own life, the misery of our nature, the folly of our unbelief,

the awful presence of _God_--God whom we had forgotten and despised! We

sought, and found His mercy. From that hour the old things passed away:

we lived who had been dead,--made alive to God through Jesus Christ.

This instant conversion, such as Paul experienced, this sharp and abrupt

transition from darkness to light, was common in the first generation of

Christians, as it is wherever religious awakening takes place in a

society that has been largely dead to God. The advent of Christianity in

the Gentile world was much after this fashion,--like a tropical sunrise,

in which day leaps on the earth full-born. This experience gives a stamp

of peculiar decision to the convictions and character of its subjects.

The change is patent and palpable; no observer can fail to mark it. And

it burns itself into the memory with an ineffaceable impression. The

violent throes of such a spiritual birth cannot be forgotten.

But if our entrance into the life of God was gradual, like the dawn of

our own milder clime, where the light steals by imperceptible advances

upon the darkness--if the glory of the Lord has thus risen upon us, our

certainty of its presence may be no less complete, and our remembrance

of its coming no less grateful and joyous. One leaps into the new life

by a single eager bound; another reaches it by measured, thoughtful

steps: but both are _there_, standing side by side on the common ground

of salvation in Christ. Both walk in the same light of the Lord, that

floods the sky from east to west. The recollections which the latter has

to cherish of the leading of God's kindly light--how He touched our

childish thought, and checked gently our boyish waywardness, and mingled

reproof with the first stirrings of passion and self-will, and wakened

the alarms of conscience and the fears of another world, and the sense

of the beauty of holiness and the shame of sin,--

"Shaping to truth the froward will

Along His narrow way,"--

such remembrances are a priceless treasure, that grows richer as we grow

wiser. It awakens a joy not so thrilling nor so prompt in utterance as

that of the soul snatched like a brand from the burning, but which

passes understanding. Blessed are the children of the kingdom, those who

have never roamed far from the fold of Christ and the commonwealth of

Israel, whom the cross has beckoned onwards from their childhood. But

however it was--by whatever means, at whatever time it pleased God to

call you from darkness to His marvellous light, _remember_.

* * * * *

But we must return to Paul and his Gentile readers. The old death in

life was to them a sombre reality, keenly and painfully remembered. In

that condition of moral night out of which Christ had rescued them,

Gentile society around them still remained. Let us observe its features

as they are delineated in contrast with the privileges long bestowed on

Israel. The Gentile world was _Christless_, _hopeless_, _godless_. It

had no share in the Divine polity framed for the chosen people; the

outward mark of its uncircumcision was a true symbol of its irreligion

and debasement.

Israel had a _God_. Besides, there were only "those who are called

gods." This was the first and cardinal distinction. Not their race, not

their secular calling, their political or intellectual gifts, but their

faith formed the Jews into a nation. They were "the people of God," as

no other people has been--of _the_ God, for theirs was "the true and

living God"--Jehovah, the I AM, the One, the Alone. The monotheistic

belief was, no doubt, wavering and imperfect in the mass of the nation

in early times; but it was held by the ruling minds amongst them, by the

men who have shaped the destiny of Israel and created its Bible, with

increasing clearness and intensity of passion. "All the gods of the

nations are idols--vapours, phantoms, nothings!--but Jehovah made the

heavens." It was the ancestral faith that glowed in the breast of Paul

at Athens, amidst the fairest shrines of Greece, when he "saw the city

wholly given to idolatry"--man's highest art and the toil and piety of

ages lavished on things that were no gods; and in the midst of the

splendour of a hollow and decaying Paganism he read the confession that

God was "unknown."

Ephesus had her famous goddess, worshipped in the most sumptuous pile of

architecture that the ancient world contained. Behold the proud city,

"temple-keeper of the great goddess Artemis," filled with wrath!

Infuriate Demos flashes fire from his thousand eyes, and his brazen

throat roars hoarse vengeance against the insulters of "her

magnificence, whom all Asia and the world worshippeth"! Without

God--_atheists_, in fact, the apostle calls this devout Asian

population; and Artemis of Ephesus, and Athené, and Cybelé of Smyrna,

and Zeus and Asclepius of Pergamum, though all the world worship them,

are but "creatures of art and man's device."

The Pagans retorted this reproach. "Away with _the atheists_!" they

cried, when Christians were led to execution. Ninety years after this

time the martyr Polycarp was brought into the arena before the

magistrates of Asia and the populace gathered in Smyrna at the great

Ionic festival. The Proconsul, wishing to spare the venerable man, said

to him: "Swear by the Fortune of Caesar; and say, Away with the

atheists!" But Polycarp, as the story continues, "with a grave look

gazing on the crowd of lawless Gentiles in the stadium and shaking his

hand against them, then groaning and looking up to heaven, said, _Away

with the atheists_!" Pagan and Christian were each godless in the eyes

of the other. If visible temples and images, and the local worship of

each tribe or city made a god, then Jews and Christians had none: if God

was a Spirit--One, Holy, Almighty, Omnipresent--then polytheists were in

truth atheists; their many gods, being many, were no gods; they were

idols,--_eidola_, illusive shows of the Godhead.

The more thoughtful and pious among the heathen felt this already. When

the apostle denounced the idols and their pompous worship as "these

vanities," his words found an echo in the Gentile conscience. The

classical Paganism held the multitude by the force of habit and local

pride, and by its sensuous and artistic charms; but such religious power

as it once had was gone. In all directions it was undermined by mystic

Oriental and Egyptian rites, to which men resorted in search of a

religion and sick of the old fables, ever growing more debased, that had

pleased their fathers. The majesty of Rome in the person of the Emperor,

the one visible supreme power, was seized upon by the popular instinct,

even more than it was imposed by state policy, and made to fill the

vacuum; and temples to Augustus had already risen in Asia, side by side

with those of the ancient gods.

In this despair of their ancestral religions many piously disposed

Gentiles turned to Judaism for spiritual help; and the synagogue was

surrounded in the Greek cities by a circle of earnest proselytes. From

their ranks St Paul drew a large proportion of his hearers and converts.

When he writes, "Remember that you were at that time _without God_," he

is within the recollection of his readers; and they will bear him out in

testifying that their heathen creed was dead and empty to the soul. Nor

did philosophy construct a creed more satisfying. Its gods were the

Epicurean deities who dwell aloof and careless of men; or the supreme

Reason and Necessity of the Stoics, the _anima mundi_, of which human

souls are fleeting and fragmentary images. "Deism finds God only in

heaven; Pantheism, only on earth; Christianity alone finds Him both in

heaven and on earth" (Harless). The Word made flesh reveals _God in the

world_.

When the apostle says "without God _in the world_," this qualification

is both reproachful and sorrowful. To be without God in the world that

He has made, where His "eternal power and Godhead" have been visible

from creation, argues a darkened and perverted heart.[86] To be without

God in the world is to be in the wilderness, without a guide; on a

stormy ocean, without harbour or pilot; in sickness of spirit, without

medicine or physician; to be hungry without bread, and weary without

rest, and dying with no light of life. It is to be an orphaned child,

wandering in an empty, ruined house.

In these words we have an echo of Paul's preaching to the Gentiles, and

an indication of the line of his appeals to the conscience of the

enlightened pagans of his time. The despair of the age was darker than

the human mind has known before or since. Matthew Arnold has painted it

all in one verse of those lines, entitled _Obermann once more_, in which

he so perfectly expresses the better spirit of modern scepticism.

"On that hard Pagan world disgust

And secret loathing fell;

Deep weariness and sated lust

Made human life a hell."

The saying by which St Paul reproved the Corinthians, "Let us eat and

drink, for to-morrow we die," is the common sentiment of pagan epitaphs

of the time. Here is an extant specimen of the kind: "Let us drink and

be merry; for we shall have no more kissing and dancing in the kingdom

of Proserpine. Soon shall we fall asleep, to wake no more." Such were

the thoughts with which men came back from the grave-side. It is

needless to say how depraving was the effect of this hopelessness. At

Athens, in the more religious times of Socrates, it was even considered

a decent and kindly thing to allow a criminal condemned to death to

spend his last hours in gross sensual indulgence. There is no reason to

suppose that the extinction of the Christian hope of immortality would

prove less demoralizing. We are "saved by hope," said St Paul: we are

ruined by despair. Pessimism of creed for most men means pessimism of

conduct.

Our modern speech and literature and our habits of feeling have been for

so many generations steeped in the influence of Christ's teaching, and

it has thrown so many tender and hallowed thoughts around the state of

our beloved dead, that it is impossible even for those who are

personally without hope in Christ to realize what its general decay and

disappearance would mean. To have possessed such a treasure, and then to

lose it! to have cherished anticipations so exalted and so dear,--and to

find them turn out a mockery! The age upon which this calamity fell

would be of all ages the most miserable.

The hope of Israel which Paul preached to the Gentiles was a hope for

the world and for the nations, as well as for the individual soul. "The

commonwealth [or _polity_] of Israel" and "the covenants of promise"

guaranteed the establishment of the Messianic kingdom upon earth. This

expectation took amongst the mass of the Jews a materialistic and even a

revengeful shape; but in one form or other it belonged, and still

belongs to every man of Israel. Those noble lines of Virgil in his

fourth Eclogue[87]--like the words of Caiaphas, an unintended Christian

prophecy--which predicted the return of justice and the spread of a

golden age through the whole world under the rule of the coming heir of

Caesar, had been signally belied by the imperial house in the century

that had elapsed. Never were human prospects darker than when the

apostle wrote as Nero's prisoner in Rome. It was an age of crime and

horror. The political world and the system of pagan society seemed to be

in the throes of dissolution. Only in "the commonwealth of Israel" was

there a light of hope and a foundation for the future of mankind; and of

this in its wisdom the world knew nothing.

The Gentiles were "alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,"--that is

to say, treated as aliens and made such by their exclusion. By the very

fact of Israel's election, the rest of mankind were shut out of the

visible kingdom of God. They became mere _Gentiles_, or _nations_,--a

herd of men bound together only by natural affinity, with no "covenant

of promise," no religious constitution or destiny, no definite

relationship to God, Israel being alone the acknowledged and organized

"_people_ of Jehovah."

These distinctions were summed up in one word, expressing all the pride

of the Jewish nature, when the Israelites styled themselves "the

Circumcision." The rest of the world--Philistines or Egyptians, Greeks,

Romans, or Barbarians, it mattered not--were "the Uncircumcision." How

superficial this distinction was in point of fact, and how false the

assumption of moral superiority it implied in the existing condition of

Judaism, St Paul indicates by saying, "those who are _called_

Uncircumcision by that which is _called_ Circumcision, in flesh, wrought

by human hands." In the second and third chapters of his epistle to the

Romans he exposed the hollowness of Jewish sanctity, and brought his

fellow-countrymen down to the level of those "sinners of the Gentiles"

whom they so bitterly despised.

The destitution of the Gentile world is put into a single word, when the

apostle says: "You were at that time _separate from Christ_"--without a

Christ, either come or coming. They were deprived of the world's one

treasure,--shut out, as it appeared, for ever[88] from any part in Him

who is to mankind all things and in all.--_Once far off!_

* * * * *

"But now in Christ Jesus ye were _made nigh_." What is it that has

bridged the distance, that has transported these Gentiles from the

wilderness of heathenism into the midst of the city of God? It is "the

blood of Christ." The sacrificial death of Jesus Christ transformed the

relations of God to mankind, and of Israel to the Gentiles. In Him God

reconciled not a nation, but "a world" to Himself (2 Cor. v. 19). The

death of the Son of man could not have reference to the sons of Abraham

alone. If sin is universal and death is not a Jewish but a human

experience, and if one blood flows in the veins of all our race, then

the death of Jesus Christ was a universal sacrifice; it appeals to every

man's conscience and heart, and puts away for each the guilt which comes

between his soul and God.

When the Greeks in Passion week desired to see Him, He exclaimed: "I, if

I be lifted up from the earth, will draw _all_ unto me." The cross of

Jesus was to draw humanity around it, by its infinite love and sorrow,

by the perfect apprehension there was in it of the world's guilt and

need, and the perfect submission to the sentence of God's law against

man's sin. So wherever the gospel was preached by St Paul, it won

Gentile hearts for Christ. Greek and Jew found themselves weeping

together at the foot of the cross, sharing one forgiveness and baptized

into one Spirit.

The union of Caiaphas and Pilate in the condemnation of Jesus and the

mingling of the Jewish crowd with the Roman soldiers at His execution

were a tragic symbol of the new age that was coming. Israel and the

Gentiles were accomplices in the death of the Messiah--the former of the

two the more guilty partner in the counsel and deed. If this Jesus whom

they slew and hanged on a tree was indeed the Christ, God's chosen, then

what availed their Abrahamic sonship, their covenants and law-keeping,

their proud religious eminence? They had killed their Christ; they had

forfeited their calling. His blood was on them and on their children.

Those who seemed nigh to God, at the cross of Christ were found far

off,--that both together, the far and the near, might be reconciled and

brought back to God. "He shut up all unto disobedience, that He might

have mercy upon all."

FOOTNOTES:

[86] Rom. i. 19-23; comp. John i. 10: "He [the true Light] was _in the

world_, and the world knew Him not."

[87]

Magnus ab integro saeclorum nascitur ordo.

Jam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna;

Jam nova progenies coelo demittitur alto.

Tu modo nascenti puero, quo ferrea primum

Desinet, ac toto surget gens aurea mundo,

Casta, fave, Lucina.

[88] Observe the perfect participle =apêllotriômenoi=, which signifies

an abiding fact or fixed condition. Similar is the turn of expression in

ch. iii. 9, and in Col. i. 26, Rom. xvi. 25, Matt. xiii. 35.

CHAPTER X.

_THE DOUBLE RECONCILIATION._

"For He is our peace, who made both one, and brake down the middle

wall of partition, having abolished in His flesh the enmity, _even_

the law of commandments _contained_ in ordinances, that He might

create in Himself of the twain one new man, _so_ making peace; and

might reconcile them both in one body unto God through the cross,

having slain the enmity thereby: and He came and preached good

tidings of peace to you that were far off, and peace to them that

were nigh: for through Him we both have our access in one Spirit

unto the Father."--EPH. ii. 14-18.

_Peace, peace--to the far off, and to the near!_ Such was God's promise

to His scattered people in the times of the exile (Isai. lvii. 19). St

Paul sees that peace of God extending over a yet wider field, and

terminating a longer and sadder banishment than the prophet had

foreseen. Christ is "our peace"--not for the divided members of Israel

alone, but for all the tribes of men. He brings about a universal

pacification.

There were two distinct, but kindred enmities to be overcome by Christ,

in preaching to the world His good tidings of peace (ver. 17). There was

the hostility of Jew and Gentile, which was removed in its cause and

principle when Christ "in His flesh" (by His incarnate life and death)

"abolished the law of commandments in decrees"--_i.e._, the law of Moses

as it constituted a body of external precepts determining the way of

righteousness and life. This abolition of the law by the evangelical

principle "dissolved the middle wall of partition." The occasion of

quarrel between Israel and the world was destroyed; the barrier

disappeared that had for so long fenced off the privileged ground of the

sons of Abraham (vv. 14, 15). But behind this human enmity, underneath

the feud and rancour existing between the Jews and the nations, there

lay the deeper quarrel of mankind with God. Both enmities centred in the

law; both were slain by one stroke, in the reconciliation of the cross

(ver. 16).

The Jewish and Gentile peoples formed two distinct types of humanity.

Politically, the Jews were insignificant and had scarcely counted

amongst the great powers of the world. Their religion alone gave them

influence and importance. Bearing his inspired Scriptures and his

Messianic hope, the wandering Israelite confronted the vast masses of

heathenism and the splendid and fascinating classical civilization with

the proudest sense of his superiority. To his God he knew well that one

day every knee would bow and every tongue confess. The circumstances of

the time deepened his isolation and aggravated to internecine hate his

spite against his fellow-men, the _adversus omnes alios hostile odium_

stigmatized by the incisive pen of Tacitus. Within three years of the

writing of this letter the Jewish war against Rome broke out, when the

enmity culminated in the most appalling and fateful overthrow recorded

in the pages of history. Now, it is this enmity at its height--the most

inveterate and desperate one can conceive--that the apostle proposes to

reconcile; nay, that he sees already slain by the sacrifice of the

cross, and within the brotherhood of the Christian Church. It was slain

in the heart of Saul of Tarsus, the proudest that beat in Jewish

breast.

In his earlier writings the apostle has been concerned chiefly to guard

the position and rights of the two parties within the Church. He has

abundantly maintained, especially in the epistle to the Galatians, the

claims of Gentile believers in Christ against Judaic assumptions and

impositions. He has defended the just prerogative of the Jew and his

hereditary sentiments from the contempt to which they were sometimes

exposed on the part of the Gentile majority.[89] But now that this has

been done, and that Gentile liberties and Jewish dignity have been

vindicated and safeguarded on both sides, St Paul advances a step

further: he seeks to amalgamate the Jewish and Gentile section of the

Church, and to "make of the twain one new man, so making peace." This,

he declares, was the end of Christ's mission; this a chief purpose of

His atoning death. Only by such union, only through the burying of the

old enmity slain on the cross, could His Church be built up to its

completeness. St Paul would have Gentile and Jewish believers everywhere

forget their differences, efface their party lines, and merge their

independence in the oneness of the all-embracing and all-perfecting

Church of Jesus Christ, God's habitation in the Spirit. Instead of

saying that a catholic ideal like this belongs to a later and

post-apostolic age, we maintain, on the contrary, that a catholic mind

like St Paul's, under the conditions of his time, could not fail to

arrive at this conception.

It was his confidence in the victory of the cross over all strife and

sin that sustained St Paul through these years of captivity. As he

looks out from his Roman prison, under the shadow of Nero's palace, the

future is invested with a radiance of hope that makes the heart of the

chained apostle exult within him. The world is lost, to all outward

seeming: he knows it is saved! Jew and Gentile are about to close in

mortal conflict: he proclaims peace between them, assured of their

reconcilement, and knowing that in their reunion the salvation of human

society is assured.

The enmity of Jew and Gentile was representative of all that divides

mankind. In it were concentrated most of the causes by which society is

rent asunder. Along with religion, race, habits, tastes and culture,

moral tendencies, political aspirations, interests of trade, all helped

to widen the breach. The cleavage ran deep into the foundations of life;

the enmity was the growth of two thousand years. It was not a case of

local friction, nor a quarrel arising from temporary causes. The Jew was

ubiquitous, and everywhere was an alien and an irritant to Gentile

society. No antipathy was so hard to subdue. The grace that conquers it,

can and will conquer all enmities.

St Paul's view embraced, in fact, a world-wide reconcilement. He

contemplates, as the Hebrew prophets themselves did, the fraternization

of mankind under the rule of the Christ. After this scale he laid down

the foundation of the Church, "wise master-builder" that he was. It was

destined to bear the weight of an edifice in which all the races of men

should dwell together, and every order of human faculty should find its

place. His thoughts were not confined within the Judaic antithesis.

"There is no Jew and Greek," he says in another place; yes, and "no

barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman, male or female. Ye are all one in

Christ Jesus."[90] Birth, rank, office in the Church, culture, even sex

are minor and subordinate distinctions, merged in the unity of redeemed

souls in Christ. That which He "creates in Himself of the twain" is _one

new man_--one incorporate humanity, neither Jew nor Gentile, Englishman

nor Hindu, priest nor layman, male nor female; but simply _man_, and

_Christian_.

At the present time we are better able to enter into these views of the

apostle than at any intervening period of history. In his day almost the

whole visible world, lying round the Mediterranean shores, was brought

under the government and laws of Rome. This fact made the establishment

of one religious polity a thing quite conceivable. The Roman empire did

not, as it proved, allow Christianity to conquer it soon enough and to

leaven it sufficiently to save it. That huge construction, the mightiest

fabric of human polity, fell and covered the earth with its ruins. In

its fall it reacted disastrously upon the Church, and has bequeathed to

it the corrupt and despotic unity of Papal Rome. Now, in these last

days, the whole world is opened to the Church, a world stretching far

beyond the horizon of the first century. Science and Commerce, those two

strong-winged angels and giant ministers of God, are swiftly binding the

continents together in material ties. The peoples are beginning to

realize their brotherhood, and are feeling their way in many directions

towards international union; while in the Churches a new, federal

catholicity is taking shape, that must displace the false catholicism of

external uniformity and the disastrous absolutism inherited from Rome.

The spread of European empire and the marvellous expansion of our

English race are carrying forward the world's unification with enormous

strides,--towards some end or other. What end is this to be? Is the

kingdom of the world about to become the kingdom of our Lord and His

Christ? and are the nations preparing to be "reconciled in one body unto

God"?

If Christendom were worthy of her Master and her name, this question

would be answered with no doubtful affirmative. The Church is well able,

if she were prepared, to go up and possess the whole earth for her Lord.

The way is open; the means are in her hand. Nor is she ignorant, nor

wholly negligent of her opportunity and of the claims that the times

impose upon her. She is putting forth new strength and striving to

overtake her work, notwithstanding the weight of ignorance and sloth

that burdens her. Soon the reconciling cross will be planted on every

shore, and the praises of the Crucified sung in every human language.

But there are dark as well as bright auguries for the future. The

advance of commerce and emigration has been a curse and not a blessing

to many heathen peoples. Who can read without shame and horror the story

of European conquest in America? And it is a chapter not yet closed.

Greed and injustice still mark the dealings of the powerful and

civilized with the weaker races. England set a noble example in the

abolition of negro slavery; but she has since inflicted, for purposes of

gain, the opium curse on China, putting poison to the lips of its vast

population. Under our Christian flags fire-arms are imported, and

alcohol, amongst tribes of men less able than children to resist their

evils. Is this "preaching peace to those far off"? It is likely that

the commercial profits made in the destruction of savage races as yet

exceed all that our missionary societies have spent in saving them. One

of these days Almighty God may have a stern reckoning with modern Europe

about these things. "When He maketh inquisition for blood, He will

remember."

And what shall we say of ourselves at home, in our relation to this

great principle of the apostle? The old "middle wall of partition," the

temple-barrier that sundered Jew and Gentile, is "broken down,"--visibly

levelled by the hand of God when Jerusalem fell, as it had been

virtually and in its principle destroyed by the work of Christ. But are

there no other middle walls, no barriers raised within the fold of

Christ? The rich man's purse, and the poor man's penury; aristocratic

pride, democratic bitterness and jealousy; knowledge and refinement on

the one hand, ignorance and rudeness on the other--how thick the veil of

estrangement which these influences weave, how high the party walls

which they build in our various Church communions!

It is the duty of the Church, as she values her existence, with gentle

but firm hands to pull down and to keep down all such partitions. She

cannot abolish the natural distinctions of life. She cannot turn the Jew

into a Gentile, nor the Gentile into a Jew. She will never make the poor

man rich in this world, nor the rich man altogether poor. Like her

Master, she declines to be "judge or divider" of our secular

inheritance. But she can see to it that these outward distinctions make

no difference in her treatment of the men as men. She can combine in her

fellowship all grades and orders, and teach them to understand and

respect each other. She can soften the asperities and relieve many of

the hardships which social differences create. She can diffuse a

healing and purifying influence upon the contentions of society around

her.

Let us labour unweariedly for this, and let our meeting at the Lord's

table be a symbol of the unreserved communion of men of all classes and

conditions in the brotherhood of the redeemed sons of God. "_He_ is our

peace"; and if He is in our hearts, we must needs be sons of peace.

"Behold the secret of all true union! It is not by others coming to us,

nor by our going over to them; but it is by both them and ourselves

coming to Christ" that peace is made (Monod).

Thus within and without the Church the work of atonement will advance,

with Christ ever for its preacher (ver. 17). He speaks through the words

and the lives of His ten thousand messengers,--men of every order, in

every age and country of the earth. The leaven of Christ's peace will

spread till the lump is leavened. God will accomplish His purpose of the

ages, whether in our time, or in another worthier of His calling. His

Church is destined to be the home of the human family, the universal

liberator and instructor and reconciler of the nations. And Christ shall

sit enthroned in the loyal worship of the federated peoples of the

earth.

* * * * *

But the question remains: What is the foundation, what the warrant of

this grand idealism of the apostle Paul? Many a great thinker, many an

ardent reformer before and since has dreamed of some such millennium as

this. And their enthusiastic plans have ended too often in conflict and

destruction. What surer ground of confidence have we in Paul's

undertaking than in those of so many gifted visionaries and

philosophers? The difference lies here: his expectation rests on the

word and character of God; his instrument of reform is the cross of

Jesus Christ.

God is the centre of His own universe. Any reconciliation that is to

stand, must include Him first of all. Christ reconciled Jew and Gentile

"both in one body _to God_." There is the meeting point, the true focus

of the orbit of human life, that can alone control its movements and

correct its wild aberrations. Under the shadow of His throne of justice,

in the arms of His fatherly love, the kindreds of the earth will at last

find reconciliation and peace. Humanitarian and secularist systems make

the simple mistake of ignoring the supreme Factor in the scheme of

things; they leave out the All in all.

"Be ye _reconciled to God_," cries the apostle. For Almighty God has had

a great quarrel with this world of ours. The hatred of men towards each

other is rooted in the "carnal mind which is enmity against God." The

"law of commandments contained in ordinances," in whose possession the

Jew boasted over the lawless and profane Gentile, in reality branded

both as culprits.

The secret disquiet and dread lurking in man's conscience, the pangs

endured in his body of humiliation, the groaning frame of nature declare

the world unhinged and out of course. Things have gone amiss, somehow,

between man and his Creator. The face of the earth and the field of

human history are scarred with the thunderbolts of His displeasure. God,

the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and the King of the ages, is not the

amiable, almighty Sentimentalist that some pious people would make Him

out to be. The men of the Bible felt and realized, if we do not, the

grave and tremendous import of the Lord's controversy with all flesh. He

is unceasingly at war with the sins of men. "God is _love_"--oh yes;

but then He is also "a consuming fire"! There is no anger so crushing as

the anger of love, for there is none so just; no wrath to be feared like

"the wrath of the Lamb." God is not a man, weak and passionate, whom a

spark of anger might set all on fire, burning out His justice and

compassion. "In His wrath He remembers mercy." Within that infinite

nature there is room for an absolute loathing and resentment towards

sin, in consistence with an immeasurable pity and yearning towards His

sinful children. Hence the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Look at it from what side you will (and it has many sides), propound it

in what terms you may (and it translates itself anew into the dialect of

every age), you must not explain the cross of Christ away nor cause its

offence to cease. "The atonement has always been a scandal and a folly

to those who did not receive it; it has always contained something which

to formal logic is false and to individualistic ethics immoral; yet in

that very element which has been branded as immoral and false, has

always lain the seal of its power and the secret of its truth." The Holy

One of God, the Lamb without spot and blemish, He died by His own

consent a sinner's death. That sacrifice, undergone by the Son of God

and Son of man dying as man for men, in love to His race and in

obedience to the Divine will and law, gave an infinite satisfaction to

God in His relation to the world, and there went up to the Divine throne

from the anguish of Calvary a "savour of sweet smell." The moral glory

of the act of Jesus Christ in dying for His guilty brethren outshone its

horror and disgrace; and it redeemed man's lost condition, and clothed

human nature with a new character and aspect in the eyes of God

Himself. "Now therefore there is no more condemnation to them that are

in Christ Jesus." The mercy of God, if we may so say, is set free to act

in forgiveness and restoration, without any compromise of justice and

inflexible law. No peace without this: no peace that did not _satisfy

God_, and satisfy that law, deep as the deepest in God, that binds

suffering to wrong-doing and death to sin.

Perhaps you say: This is immoral, surely, that the just should suffer

for the unjust; that one commits the offence, and another bears the

penalty.--Stay a moment: that is only half the truth. We are more than

individuals; we are members of a race; and vicarious suffering runs

through life. Our sufferings and wrong-doings bind the human family

together in an inextricable web. We are _communists in sin and death_.

It is the law and lot of our existence. And Christ, the Lord and centre

of the race, has come within its scope. He bound Himself to our sinking

fortunes. He became co-partner in our lost estate, and has redeemed it

to God by His blood. If He was true and perfect man, if He was the

creative Head and Mediator of the race, the eternal Firstborn of many

brethren, He could do no other. He who alone had the right and the

power,--"_One_ died for all." He took upon His Divine heart the sin and

curse of the world, He fastened it to His shoulders with the cross; and

He bore it away from Caiaphas' hall and Pilate's judgement-seat, away

from guilty Jerusalem; He took away the sin of the world, and expiated

it once for all. He quenched in His blood the fires of wrath and hate it

kindled. He slew _the enmity_ thereby.

* * * * *

Still, we are individuals, as you said, not lost after all in the

world's solidarity. Here your personal right and will must come in. What

Christ has done for you is yours, so far as you accept it. He has died

your death beforehand, trusting that you would not repudiate His act,

that you would not let His blood be spilt in vain. But He will never

force His mediation upon you. He respects your freedom and your manhood.

Do you now endorse what Jesus Christ did on your behalf? Do you renounce

the sin, and accept the sacrifice? Then it is yours, from this moment,

before the tribunal of God and of conscience. By the witness of His

Spirit you are proclaimed a forgiven and reconciled man. Christ

crucified is yours--if you will have Him, if you will identify your

sinful self with the sinless Mediator, if as you see Him lifted up on

the cross you will let your heart cry out, "Oh my God, He dies for

_me_!"

Coming "in one Spirit to the Father," the reconciled children join hands

again with each other. Social barriers, caste feelings, family feuds,

personal quarrels, national antipathies, alike go down before the virtue

of the blood of Jesus.

"Neither passion nor pride

His cross can abide,

But melt in the fountain that streams from His side!"

"Beloved," you will say to the man that hates or has wronged you

most,--"Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another."

In these simple words of the apostle John lies the secret of universal

peace, the hope of the fraternization of mankind. Nations will have to

say this one day, as well as men.

FOOTNOTES:

[89] See to this effect such passages as Rom. i. 16 (_to the Jew

first_), ix. 4, 5; and especially xi. 13-32.

[90] Gal. iii. 28; Col. iii. 11. Comp. John x. 16, xi. 52. See _The

Epistle to the Galatians_ (Expositor's Bible), Chapter XV.

CHAPTER XI.

_GOD'S TEMPLE IN HUMANITY._

"So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are

fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God, being

built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus

Himself being the chief corner stone; in whom each several building,

fitly framed together, groweth into a holy temple in the Lord; in

whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the

Spirit."--EPH. ii. 19-22.

Not unfrequently it is the last word or phrase of the paragraph that

gives us the clue to St Paul's meaning and discloses the point at which

he has aimed all along. So in this instance. "For a habitation of God in

the Spirit": behold the goal of God's ways with mankind! For this end

the Divine grace has wrought through countless ages and has made its

great sacrifice. For this end Jew and Gentile are being gathered into

one and compacted into a new humanity.

I. The Church is a house built for an _Occupant_. Its quality and size,

and the mode of its construction are determined by its destination. It

is built to suit the great Inhabitant, who says concerning the new Zion

as He said of the old in figure: "This is my rest for ever! Here will I

dwell, for I have desired it." God, who is spirit, cannot be satisfied

with the fabric of material nature for His temple, nor does "the Most

High dwell in houses made by men's hands." He seeks our spirit for His

abode, and

"Doth prefer

Before all temples the upright heart and pure."

In the collective life and spirit of humanity God claims to reside, that

He may fill it with His glory and His love. "Know you not," cries the

apostle to the once debased Corinthians, "that you are God's temple, and

that the Spirit of God dwells in you?"

Nothing that is bestowed upon man terminates in himself. The deliverance

of Jewish and Gentile believers from their personal sins, their

re-instatement into the broken unity of mankind and the destruction in

them of their old enmities, of the antipathies generated by their common

rebellion against God--these great results of Christ's sacrifice were

means to a further end. "Hallowed be Thy name" is our first petition to

the Father in heaven; "Glory to God in the highest" is the key-note of

the angels' song, that runs through all the harmonies of "peace on

earth," through every strain of the melody of life. Religion is the

mistress, not the handmaid in human affairs. She will never consent to

become a mere ethical discipline, an instrument and subordinate stage in

social evolution, a ladder held for men to climb up into their

self-sufficiency.

The old temptation of the Garden, "Ye shall be as gods," has come upon

our age in a new and fascinating form, "You shall be as gods," it is

whispered: "nay, you _are_ God, and there is no other. The supernatural

is a dream. The Christian story is a fable. There is none to fear or

adore above yourselves!" Man is to worship his collective self, his own

humanity. "I am the Lord thy God," the great idol says, "that brought

thee up out of animalism and savagery, and me only shalt thou

serve!--Love and faithful service to one's kind, a holy passion for the

welfare of the race, for the relief of human ignorance and poverty and

pain, this is the true religion; and you need no other. Its obligation

is instinctive, its benefits immediate and palpable; and it gives a

consecration to individual life that dignifies and chastens, while it

calls into exercise all our faculties."

Yes, we willingly admit, such human service is "religion pure and

undefiled, _before our God and Father_." If service is rendered to our

kind as worship to the Father of men; if we reverence in each man the

image of God and the shrine of His Spirit; if we are seeking to cleanse

and adorn in men the temple where the Most High shall dwell, the

humblest work done for our fellows' good is done for Him. The best human

charity is rendered for the love of God. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy

God with all thy heart, mind, soul, and strength. This," said Jesus, "is

the first and great commandment. And the second is _like unto it_: Thou

shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all

the law and the prophets." On these two hangs the welfare of men and

nations.

But the first commandment must come first. The second law of Jesus never

has been or will be kept to purpose without the first. Humanitarian

sentiments, dreams of universal brotherhood, projects of social reform,

may seem for the moment to gain by their independence of religion a

certain zest and emphasis; but they are without root and vitality. Their

energy fails, or spends itself in revolt; their glow declines, their

purity is stained. The leaders and first enthusiasts trained in the

school of Christ, whose spirit, in vain repudiated, lives on in them,

find themselves betrayed and alone. The coarse selfishness and

materialism of the human heart win an easy triumph over a visionary

altruism. "Without me," says Jesus Christ, "ye can do nothing."

In the light of God's glory man learns to reverence his nature and

understand the vocation of his race. The love of God touches the deep

and enduring springs of human action. The kingdom of Christ and of God

commands an absolute devotion; its service inspires unfaltering courage

and invincible patience. There is a grandeur and a certainty, of which

the noblest secular aims fall short, in the hopes of those who are

striving together for the faith of the gospel, and who work to build

human life into a dwelling-place for God.

II. God's temple in the Church of Jesus Christ, while it is one, is also

manifold. "In whom _each several building_ [or _every part of the

building_[91]], while it is compacted together, grows into a holy temple

in the Lord."

The image is that of an extensive pile of buildings, such as the ancient

temples commonly were, in process of construction at different points

over a wide area. The builders work in concert, upon a common plan. The

several parts of the work are adjusted to each other; and the various

operations in process are so harmonized, that the entire construction

preserves the unity of the architect's design. Such an edifice was the

apostolic Church--one, but of many parts--in its diverse gifts and

multiplied activities animated by one Spirit and directed towards one

Divine purpose.

Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Corinth, Rome--what a various scene of

activity these centres of Christian life presented! The Churches

founded in these great cities must have differed in many features. Even

in the communities of his own province the apostle did not, so far as we

can judge, impose a uniform administration. St Peter and St Paul carried

out their plans independently, only maintaining a general understanding

with each other. The apostolic founders, inspired by one and the

self-same Spirit, could labour at a distance, upon material and by

methods extremely various, with entire confidence in each other and with

an assurance of the unity of result which their teaching and

administration would exhibit. The many buildings rested on the one

foundation of the apostles. "Whether it were I or they," says our

apostle, "so we preach, and so you believed." Where there is the same

Spirit and the same Lord, men do not need to be scrupulous about visible

conformity. Elasticity and individual initiative admit of entire harmony

of principle. The hand may do its work without irritating and

obstructing the eye; and the foot run on its errands without mistrusting

the ear.

Such was the catholicism of the apostolic age. The true reading of verse

21, as it is restored by the Revisers, is an incidental witness to the

date of the epistle. A churchman of the second century, writing under

Paul's name in the interests of catholic unity as it was then

understood, would scarcely have penned such a sentence without attaching

to the subject the definite article: he must have written "all the

building," as the copyists from whom the received text proceeds very

naturally have done. From that time onwards, as the system of the

ecclesiastical hierarchy was developed, external unity was more and more

strictly imposed. The original "diversity of operations" became a rigid

uniformity. The Church swallowed up the Churches. Finally, the spiritual

bureaucracy of Rome gathered all ecclesiastical power into one centre,

and placed the direction of Western Christendom in the hands of a single

priest, whom it declared to be the Vicar of Jesus Christ and endowed

with the Divine attribute of infallibility.