mind. Be that as it may, at all events faith is here represented as the
means or condition through which this dwelling takes effect. You have
but to believe in Him and He comes, drawn from heaven, floating down on
a sunbeam, as it were, and enters into the heart and abides there.

Trust, which is faith, is self-distrust. 'I dwell in the high and holy
place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit.' Rivers do
not run on the mountain tops, but down in the valleys. So the heart that
is lifted up and self-complacent has no dew of His blessing resting upon
it, but has the curse of Gilboa adhering to its barrenness; but the low
lands, the humble and the lowly hearts, are they in which the waters
that go softly scoop their course and diffuse their blessings. Faith is
self-distrust. Self-distrust brings the Christ.

Faith is desire. Never, never in the history of the world has it been or
can it be that a longing towards Him shall be a longing thrown back
unsatisfied upon itself. You have but to trust, and you possess. We open
the door for the entrance of Christ by the simple act of faith, and
blessed be His name! He can squeeze Himself through a very little chink,
and He does not require that the gates should be flung wide open in
order that, with some of His blessings, He may come in.

Mystical Christianity of the false sort has much to say about the
indwelling of God in the soul, but it spoils all its teaching by
insisting upon it that the condition on which God dwells in the soul is
the soul's purifying itself to receive Him. But you cannot cleanse your
hearts so as to bring Christ into them, you must let Him come and
cleanse them by the process of His coming, and fit them thereby for His
own indwelling. And, assuredly, He will so come, purging us from our
evil and abiding in our hearts.

But do not forget that the faith which brings Christ into the spirit
must be a faith which works by love, if it is to keep Christ in the
spirit. You cannot bring that Lord into your hearts by anything that you
do. The man who cleanses his own soul by his own strength, and so
expects to draw God into it, has made the mistake which Christ pointed
out when He told us that when the unclean spirit is gone out of a man he
leaves his house empty, though it be swept and garnished. Moral
reformation may turn out the devils, it will never bring in God, and in
the emptiness of the swept and garnished heart there is an invitation to
the seven to come back again and fill it.

And whilst that is true, remember, on the other hand, that a Christian
man can drive away his Master by evil works. The sweet song-birds and
the honey-making bees are said always to desert a neighbourhood before a
pestilence breaks out in it. And if I may so say, similarly quick to
feel the first breath of the pestilence is the presence of the Christ
which cannot dwell with evil. You bring Christ into your heart by faith,
without any work at all; you keep Him there by a faith which produces
holiness.

III. And the last point is the gifts of this indwelling Christ,--'ye
being,' or as the words might more accurately be translated, 'Ye having
been rooted and grounded in love.'

Where He comes He comes not empty-handed. He brings His own love, and
that, consciously received, produces a corresponding and answering love
in our hearts to Him. So there is no need to ask the question here
whether 'love' means Christ's love to me, or my love to Christ. From the
nature of the case both are included--the recognition of His love and
the response by mine are the result of His entering into the heart. This
love, the recognition of His and the response by mine, is represented in
a lovely double metaphor in these words as being at once the soil in
which our lives are rooted and grow, and the foundation on which our
lives are built and are steadfast.

There is no need to enlarge upon these two things, but let me just touch
them for a moment. Where Christ abides in a man's heart, love will be
the very soil in which his life will be rooted and grow. That love will
be the motive of all service, it will underlie, as its productive cause,
all fruitfulness. All goodness and all beauty will be its fruit. The
whole life will be as a tree planted in this rich soil. And so the life
will grow not by effort only, but as by an inherent power drawing its
nourishment from the soil. This is blessedness. It is heaven upon earth
that love should be the soil in which our obedience is rooted, and from
which we draw all the nutriment that turns to flowers and fruit.

Where Christ dwells in the heart, love will be the foundation upon which
our lives are builded steadfast and sure. The blessed consciousness of
His love, and the joyful answer of my heart to it, may become the basis
upon which my whole being shall repose, the underlying thought that
gives security, serenity, steadfastness to my else fluctuating life. I
may so plant myself upon Him, as that in Him I shall be strong, and
then my life will not only grow like a tree and have its leaf green and
broad, and its fruit the natural outcome of its vitality, but it will
rise like some stately building, course by course, pillar by pillar,
until at last the shining topstone is set there. He that buildeth on
that foundation shall never be confounded.

For, remember that, deepest of all, the words of my text may mean that
the Incarnate Personal Love becomes the very soil in which my life is
set and blossoms, on which my life is founded.

    'Thou, my Life, O let me be
     Rooted, grafted, built in Thee.'

Christ is Love, and Love is Christ. He that is rooted and grounded in
love has the roots of his being, and the foundation of his life fixed
and fastened in that Lord.

So, dear brethren, go to Christ like those two on the road to Emmaus;
and as Fra Angelico has painted them on his convent wall, put out your
hands and lay them on His, and say, 'Abide with us. Abide with us!' And
the answer will come:--'This is my rest for ever; here'--mystery of
love!--'will I dwell, for I have desired it,' even the narrow room of
your poor heart.

LOVE UNKNOWABLE AND KNOWN

     'That ye ... may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the
      breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of
      Christ, which passeth knowledge.'--Eph. iii. 18, 19.

This constitutes the third of the petitions in this great prayer of
Paul's, each of which, as we have had occasion to see in former sermons,
rises above, and is a consequence of the preceding, and leads on to,
and is a cause or occasion of the subsequent one.

The two former petitions have been for inward strength communicated by a
Divine Spirit, in order that Christ may dwell in our hearts, and so we
may be rooted and grounded in love. The result of these desires being
realised in our hearts is here set forth in two clauses which are
substantially equivalent in meaning. 'To comprehend' may be taken as
meaning nearly the same as 'to know,' only that perhaps the former
expresses an act more purely intellectual. And, as we shall see in our
next sermon, 'the breadth and length and depth and height' are the
unmeasurable dimensions of the love which in the second clause is
described as 'passing knowledge.' I purpose to deal with these measures
in a separate discourse, and, therefore, omit them from consideration
now.

We have, then, mainly two thoughts here, the one, that only the loving
heart in which Christ dwells can know the love of Christ; and the other
that even that heart can _not_ know the love of Christ. The paradox is
intentional, but it is intelligible. Let me deal then, as well as I can,
with these two great thoughts.

I. First, we have this thought that only the loving heart can know
Christ's love.

Now the Bible uses that word _know_ to express two different things; one
which we call mere intellectual perception; or to put it into plainer
words, mere head knowledge such as a man may have about any subject of
study, and the other a deep and living experience which is possession
before it is knowledge, and knowledge because it is possession.

Now the former of these two, the knowledge which is merely the work of
the understanding, is, of course, independent of love. A man may know
all about Christ and His love without one spark of love in his heart.
And there are thousands of people who, as far as the mere intellectual
understanding is concerned, know as much about Jesus Christ and His love
as the saint who is closest to the Throne, and yet have not one trace of
love to Christ in them. That is the kind of people that a widely
diffused Christianity and a habit of hearing sermons produce. There are
plenty of them, and some of us among them, who, as far as their heads
are concerned, know quite as much of Jesus Christ and His love as any of
us do, and could talk about it and argue about it, and draw inferences
from it, and have the whole system of evangelical Christianity at their
fingers' ends. Ay! It is at their fingers' _ends_, it never gets any
nearer them than that.

There is a knowledge with which love has nothing to do, and it is a
knowledge that for many people is quite sufficient. 'Knowledge puffeth
up,' says the Apostle; into an unwholesome bubble of self-complacency
that will one day be pricked and disappear, but 'love buildeth up'--a
steadfast, slowly-rising, solid fabric. There be two kinds of knowledge:
the mere rattle of notions in a man's brain, like the seeds of a
withered poppy-head; very many, very dry, very hard; that will make a
noise when you shake them. And there is another kind of knowledge which
goes deep down into the heart, and is the only knowledge worth calling
by the name; and that knowledge is the child, as my text has it, of
love.

Now let us think about that for a moment. Love, says Paul, is the parent
of all knowledge. Well, now, can we find any illustrations from similar
facts in other regions? Yes! I think so. How do we know, really know,
any emotions of any sort whatever? Only by experience. You may talk for
ever about feelings, and you teach nothing about them to those who have
not experienced them. The poets of the world have been singing about
love ever since the world began. But no heart has learned what love is
from even the sweetest and deepest songs. Who that is not a father can
be taught paternal love by words, or can come to a perception of it by
an effort of mind? And so with all other emotions. Only the lips that
have drunk the cup of sweetness or of bitterness can tell how sweet or
how bitter it is, and even when they, made wise by experience, speak out
their deepest hearts, the listeners are but little the wiser, unless
they too have been scholars in the same school. Experience is our only
teacher in matters of feeling and emotion, as in the lower regions of
taste and appetite. A man must be hungry to know what hunger is; he must
taste honey or wormwood in order to know the taste of honey or wormwood,
and in like manner he cannot know sorrow but by feeling its ache, and
must love if he would know love. Experience is our only teacher, and her
school-fees are heavy.

Just as a blind man can never be made to understand the glories of
sunrise, or the light upon the far-off mountains; just as a deaf man may
read books about acoustics, but they will not give him a notion of what
it is to hear Beethoven, so we must have love to Christ before we know
what love to Christ is, and we must consciously experience the love of
Christ ere we know what the love of Christ is. We must have love to
Christ in order to have a deep and living possession of love of Christ,
though reciprocally it is also true that we must have the love of Christ
known and felt by our answering hearts, if we are ever to love Him back
again.

So in all the play and counterplay of love between Christ and us, and in
all the reaction of knowledge and love this remains true, that we must
be rooted and grounded in love ere we can know love, and must have
Christ dwelling in our hearts, in order to that deep and living
possession which, when it is conscious of itself, is knowledge, and is
for ever alien to the loveless heart.

    'He must be loved, ere that to you
     He will seem worthy of your love.'

If you want to know the blessedness of the love of Christ, love Him, and
open your hearts for the entrance of His love to you. Love is the parent
of deep, true knowledge.

Of course, before we can love an unseen person and believe in his love,
we must know about him by the ordinary means by which we learn about all
persons outside the circle of our sight. So before the love which is
thus the parent of deep, true knowledge, there must be the knowledge by
study and credence of the record concerning Christ, which supplies the
facts on which alone love can be nourished. The understanding has its
part to play in leading the heart to love, and then the heart becomes
the true teacher. He that loveth, knoweth God, for God is love. He that
is rooted and grounded in love because Christ dwells in his heart, will
be strengthened to know the love in which he is rooted. The Christ
within us will know the love of Christ. We must first 'taste,' and then
we shall 'see' that the Lord is good, as the Psalmist puts it with deep
truth. First, the appropriation and feeding upon God, then the clear
perception by the mind of the sweetness in the taste. First the
enjoyment; then the reflection on the enjoyment. First the love; and
then the consciousness of the love of Christ possessed and the love to
Christ experienced. The heart must be grounded in love that the man may
know the love which passeth knowledge.

Then notice that there is also here another condition for this deep and
blessed knowledge laid down in these words, 'That ye may be able to
comprehend _with all saints_.' That is to say, our knowledge of the love
of Jesus Christ depends largely on our sanctity. If we are pure we shall
know. If we were wholly devoted to Him we should wholly know His love to
us, and in the measure in which we are pure and holy we shall know it.
This heart of ours is like a reflecting telescope, the least breath upon
the mirror of which will cause all the starry sublimities that it should
shadow forth to fade and become dim. The slightest moisture in the
atmosphere, though it be quite imperceptible where we stand, will be
dense enough to shut out the fair, shining, snowy summits that girdle
the horizon and to leave nothing visible but the lowliness and
commonplaceness of the prosaic plain.

If you want to know the love of Christ, first of all, that love must
purify your souls. But then you must keep your souls pure, assured of
this, that only the single eye is full of light, and that they who are
not 'saints' grope in the dark even at midday, and whilst drenched by
the sunshine of His love, are unconscious of it altogether. And so we
get that miserable and mysterious tragedy of men and women walking
through life, as many of you are doing, in the very blaze and focus of
Christ's love, and never beholding it nor knowing anything about it.

Observe again the beginning of this path of knowledge, which we have
thus traced. There must be, says my text, an indwelling Christ, and so
an experience, deep and stable, of His love, and then we shall know the
love which we thus experience. But how comes that indwelling? That is
the question for us. The knowledge of His love is blessedness, is peace,
is love, is everything; as we shall see in considering the last stage of
this prayer. That knowledge arises from our fellowship with and our
possession of the love of God, which is in Jesus Christ. How does that
fellowship with, and possession of the love of God in Jesus Christ,
come? That is the all-important question. What is the beginning of
everything? 'That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.' There is
the gate through which you and I may come, and by which we must come if
we are to come at all into the possession and perception of Christ's
great love. Here is the path of knowledge. First of all, there must be
the simple historical knowledge of the facts of Christ's life and death
for us, with the Scripture teaching of their meaning and power. And then
we must turn these truths from mere notions into life. It is not enough
to know the love that God has to us, in that lower sense of the word
'knowledge.' Many of you know that, who never got any blessing out of it
all your days, and never will, unless you change. Besides the 'knowing'
there must be the 'believing' of the love. You must translate the notion
into a living fact in your experience. You must pass from the simple
work of understanding the Gospel to the higher act of faith. You must
not be contented with knowing, you must trust. And if you have done that
all the rest will follow, and the little, narrow, low doorway of humble
self-distrusting faith, through which a man creeps on his knees,
leaving outside all his sin and his burden, opens out into the temple
palace--the large place in which Christ's love is imparted to the soul.

Brethren, this doctrine of my text ought to be for every one of us a joy
and a gospel. There is no royal road into the sweetness and the depth of
Christ's love, for the wise or the prudent. The understanding is no more
the organ for apprehending the love of Christ than the ear is the organ
for perceiving light, or the heart the organ for learning mathematics.
Blessed be God! the highest gifts are not bestowed upon the clever
people, on the men of genius and the gifted ones, the cultivated and the
refined, but they are open for all men; and when we say that love is the
parent of knowledge, and that the condition of knowing the depths of
Christ's heart is simple love which is the child of faith, we are only
saying in other words what the Master embodied in His thanksgiving
prayer, 'I thank Thee, Father! Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou
hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them
unto babes.'

And that is so, not because Christianity, being a foolish system, can
only address itself to fools; not because Christianity, contradicting
wisdom, cannot expect to be received by the wise and the cultured, but
because a man's brains have as little to do with his trustful acceptance
of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a man's eyes have to do with his
capacity of hearing a voice. Therefore, seeing that the wise and
prudent, and the cultured, and the clever, and the men of genius are
always the minority of the race, let us vulgar folk that are neither
wise, nor clever, nor cultured, nor geniuses, be thankful that all that
has nothing to do with our power of knowing and possessing the best
wisdom and the highest treasures, but that upon this path the wayfaring
man though a fool shall not err, and all narrow foreheads and limited
understandings, and poor, simple uneducated people as well as
philosophers and geniuses have to learn love by their hearts and not by
their heads, and by a sense of need and a humble trust and a daily
experience have to appropriate and suck out the blessing that lies in
the love of Jesus Christ. Blessed be His name! The end of all
aristocracies of culture and superciliousness of intellect lies in that
great truth that we possess the deepest knowledge and highest wisdom
when we love and by our love.

II. Now a word in the next place as to the other thought here, that not
even the loving heart can know the love of Christ.

'It passeth knowledge,' says my text. Now I do not suppose that the
paradox here of knowing the love of Christ which 'passeth knowledge' is
to be explained by taking 'know' and 'knowledge' in the two different
senses which I have already referred to, so as that we may experience,
and know by conscious experience, that love which the mere understanding
is incapable of grasping. That of course is an explanation which might
be defended, but I take it that it is much truer to the Apostle's
meaning to suppose that he uses the words 'know' and 'knowledge' both
times in the same sense. And so we get familiar thoughts which I touch
upon very briefly.

Our knowledge of Christ's love, though real, is incomplete, and must
always be so. You and I believe, I hope, that Christ's love is not a
man's love, or at least that it is more than a man's love. We believe
that it is the flowing out to us of the love of God, that all the
fulness of the divine heart pours itself through that narrow channel of
the human nature of our Lord, and therefore that the flow is endless and
the Fountain infinite.

I suppose I do not need to show you that it is possible for people to
have, and that in fact we do possess a real, a valid, a reliable
knowledge of that which is infinite; although we possess, as a matter of
course, no adequate and complete knowledge of it. But I only remind you
that we have before us in Christ's love something which, though the
understanding is not by itself able to grasp it, yet the understanding
led by the heart can lay hold of, and can find in it infinite treasures.
We can lay our poor hands on His love as a child might lay its tiny palm
upon the base of some great cliff, and hold that love in a real grasp of
a real knowledge and certitude, but we cannot put our hands round it and
feel that we _com_prehend as well as _ap_prehend. Let us be thankful
that we cannot.

His love can only become to us a subject of knowledge as it reveals
itself in its manifestations. Yet after even these manifestations it
remains unuttered and unutterable even by the Cross and grave, even by
the glory and the throne. 'It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?
deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer
than the earth, and broader than the sea.'

We have no measure by which we can translate into the terms of our
experience, and so bring within the grasp of our minds, what was the
depth of the step, which Christ took at the impulse of His love, from
the Throne to the Cross. We know not what He forewent; we know not, nor
ever shall know, what depths of darkness and soul-agony He passed
through at the bidding of His all-enduring love to us. Nor do we know
the consequences of that great work of emptying Himself of His glory. We
have no means by which we can estimate the darkness and the depth of the
misery from which we have been delivered, nor the height and the
radiance of the glory to which we are to be lifted. And until we can
tell and measure by our compasses both of these two extremes of possible
human fate, till we have gone down into the deepest abyss of a
bottomless pit of growing alienation and misery, and up above the
highest reach of all unending progress into light and glory and
God-likeness, we have not stretched our compasses wide enough to touch
the two poles of this great sphere, the infinite love of Jesus Christ.
So we bow before it, we know that we possess it with a knowledge more
sure and certain, more deep and valid, than our knowledge of ought but
ourselves; but yet it is beyond our grasp, and towers above us
inaccessible in the altitude of its glory, and stretches deep beneath us
in the profundity of its condescension.

And, in like manner, we may say that this known love passes knowledge,
inasmuch as our experience of it can never exhaust it. We are like the
settlers on some great island continent--as, for instance, on the
Australian continent for many years after its first discovery--a thin
fringe of population round the seaboard here and there, and all the
bosom of the land untraversed and unknown. So after all experiences of
and all blessed participation in the love of Jesus Christ which come to
each of us by our faith, we have but skimmed the surface, but touched
the edges, but received a drop of what, if it should come upon us in
fulness of flood like a Niagara of love, would overwhelm our spirits.

So we have within our reach not only the treasure of creatural
affections which bring gladness into life when they come, and darkness
over it when they depart; we have not only human love which, if I may so
say, is always lifting its finger to its lips in the act of bidding us
adieu; but we may possess a love which will abide with us for ever. Men
die, Christ lives. We can exhaust men, we cannot exhaust Christ. We can
follow other objects of pursuit, all of which have limitation to their
power of satisfying and pall upon the jaded sense sooner or later, or
sooner or later are wrenched away from the aching heart. But here is a
love into which we can penetrate very deep and fear no exhaustion; a sea
into which we can cast ourselves, nor dread that like some rash diver
flinging himself into shallow water where he thought there was depth, we
may be bruised and wounded. We may find in Christ the endless love that
an immortal heart requires. Enter by the low door of faith, and your
finite heart will have the joy of an infinite love for its possession,
and your mortal life will rise transfigured into an immortal and growing
participation in the immortal Love of the indwelling and inexhaustible
Christ.

THE PARADOX OF LOVE'S MEASURE

     'The breadth, and length, and depth, and height.'--Eph. iii. 18.

Of what? There can, I think, be no doubt as to the answer. The next
clause is evidently the continuation of the idea begun in that of our
text, and it runs: 'And to know the _love of Christ_ which passeth
knowledge.' It is the immeasurable measure, then; the boundless bounds
and dimensions of the love of Christ which fire the Apostle's thoughts
here. Of course, he had no separate idea in his mind attaching to each
of these measures of magnitude, but he gathered them together simply to
express the one thought of the greatness of Christ's love. Depth and
height are the same dimension measured from opposite ends. The one
begins at the top and goes down, the other begins at the bottom and goes
up, but the distance is the same in either case. So we have the three
dimensions of a solid here--breadth, length, and depth.

I suppose that I may venture to use these expressions with a somewhat
different purpose from that for which the Apostle employs them; and to
see in each of them a separate and blessed aspect of the love of God in
Jesus Christ our Lord.

I. What, then, is the breadth of that love?

It is as broad as humanity. As all the stars lie in the firmament, so
all creatures rest in the heaven of His love. Mankind has many common
characteristics. We all suffer, we all sin, we all hunger, we all
aspire, hope, and die; and, blessed be God! we all occupy precisely the
same relation to the divine love which lies in Jesus Christ. There are
no step-children in God's great family, and none of them receives a more
grudging or a less ample share of His love and goodness than every
other. Far-stretching as the race, and curtaining it over as some great
tent may enclose on a festal day a whole tribe, the breadth of Christ's
love is the breadth of humanity.

And it is universal because it is divine. No human mind can be stretched
so as to comprehend the whole of the members of mankind, and no human
heart can be so emptied of self as to be capable of this absolute
universality and impartiality of affection. But the intellectual
difficulties which stand in the way of the width of our affections, and
the moral difficulties which stand still more frowningly and
forbiddingly in the way, have no power over that love of Christ's which
is close and tender, and clinging with all the tenderness and closeness
and clingingness of a human affection and lofty and universal and
passionless and perpetual, with all the height and breadth and calmness
and eternity of a divine heart.

And this broad love, broad as humanity, is not shallow because it is
broad. Our love is too often like the estuary of some great stream which
runs deep and mighty as long as it is held within narrow banks, but as
soon as it widens becomes slow and powerless and shallow. The intensity
of human affection varies inversely as its extension. A universal
philanthropy is a passionless sentiment. But Christ's love is deep
though it is wide, and suffers no diminution because it is shared
amongst a multitude. It is like the great feast that He Himself spread
for five thousand men, women, and children, all seated on the grass,
'and they did all eat and were filled.'

The whole love is the property of each recipient of it. He does not love
as we do, who give a part of our heart to this one and a part to that
one, and share the treasure of our affections amongst a multitude. All
this gift belongs to every one, just as all the sunshine comes to every
eye, and as every beholder sees the moon's path across the dark waters,
stretching from the place where He stands to the centre of light.

This broad love, universal as humanity, and deep as it is broad, is
universal because it is individual. You and I have to generalise, as we
say, when we try to extend our affections beyond the limits of
household and family and personal friends, and the generalising is a
sign of weakness and limitation. Nobody can love an abstraction, but
God's love and Christ's love do not proceed in that fashion. He
individualises, loving each and therefore loving all. It is because
every man has a space in His heart singly and separately and
conspicuously, that all men have a place there. So our task is to
individualise this broad, universal love, and to say, in the simplicity
of a glad faith, 'He loved me and gave Himself for me.' The breadth is
world-wide, and the whole breadth is condensed into, if I may so say, a
shaft of light which may find its way through the narrowest chink of a
single soul. There are two ways of arguing about the love of Christ,
both of them valid, and both of them needing to be employed by us. We
have a right to say, 'He loves all, therefore He loves me.' And we have
a right to say, 'He loves me, therefore He loves all.' For surely the
love that has stooped to me can never pass by any human soul.

What is the breadth of the love of Christ? It is broad as mankind, it is
narrow as myself.

II. Then, in the next place, what is the length of the love of Christ?

If we are to think of Him only as a man, however exalted and however
perfect, you and I have nothing in the world to do with His love. When
He was here on earth it may have been sent down through the ages in some
vague way, as the shadowy ghost of love may rise in the heart of a great
statesman or philanthropist for generations yet unborn, which He dimly
sees will be affected by His sacrifice and service. But we do not call
that love. Such a poor, pale, shadowy thing has no right to the warm
throbbing name; has no right to demand from us any answering thrill of
affection. Unless you think of Jesus Christ as something more and other
than the purest and the loftiest benevolence that ever dwelt in human
form, I know of no intelligible sense in which the length of His love
can be stretched to touch you.

If we content ourselves with that altogether inadequate and lame
conception of Him and of His nature, of course there is no present bond
between any man upon earth and Him, and it is absurd to talk about His
present love as extending in any way to me. But we have to believe,
rising to the full height of the Christian conception of the nature and
person of Christ, that when He was here on earth the divine that dwelt
in Him so informed and inspired the human as that the love of His man's
heart was able to grasp the whole, and to separate the individuals who
should make up the race till the end of time; so as that you and I,
looking back over all the centuries, and asking ourselves what is the
length of the love of Christ, can say, 'It stretches over all the years,
and it reached then, as it reaches now, to touch me, upon whom the ends
of the earth have come.' Its length is conterminous with the duration of
humanity here or yonder.

That thought of eternal being, when we refer it to God, towers above us
and repels us; and when we turn it to ourselves and think of our own
life as unending, there come a strangeness and an awe that is almost
shrinking, over the thoughtful spirit. But when we transmute it into the
thought of a love whose length is unending, then over all the shoreless,
misty, melancholy sea of eternity, there gleams a light, and every
wavelet flashes up into glory. It is a dreadful thing to think, 'For
ever, Thou art God.' It is a solemn thing to think, 'For ever I am to
be'; but it is life to say: 'O Christ! Thy love endureth from
everlasting to everlasting; and because it lives, I shall live
also'--'Oh! give thanks unto the Lord, for He is good, for His mercy
endureth for ever.'

There is another measure of the length of the love of Christ. 'Master!
How often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him?--I say not
unto thee until seven times, but until seventy times seven.' So said the
Christ, multiplying perfection into itself twice--two sevens and a
ten--in order to express the idea of boundlessness. And the law that He
laid down for His servant is the law that binds Himself. What is the
length of the love of Christ? Here is one measure of it--howsoever long
drawn out my sin may be, this is longer; and the white line of His love
runs out into infinity, far beyond the point where the black line of my
sin stops. Anything short of eternal patience would have been long ago
exhausted by your sins and mine, and our brethren's. But the pitying
Christ, the eternal Lover of all wandering souls, looks down from heaven
upon every one of us; goes with us in all our wanderings, bears with us
in all our sins, in all our transgressions still is gracious. His
pleadings sound on, like some stop in an organ continuously persistent
through all the other notes. And round His throne are written the divine
words which have been spoken about our human love modelled after His:
'Charity suffereth long and is kind; is not easily provoked, is not soon
angry, beareth all things.' The length of the love of Christ is the
length of eternity, and outmeasures all human sin.

III. Then again, what is the depth of that love?

Depth and height, as I said at the beginning of these remarks, are but
two ways of expressing the same dimension. For the one we begin at the
top and measure down, for the other we begin at the bottom and measure
up. The top is the Throne; and the downward measure, how is it to be
stated? In what terms of distance are we to express it? How far is it
from the Throne of the Universe to the manger of Bethlehem, and the
Cross of Calvary, and the sepulchre in the garden? That is the depth of
the love of Christ. Howsoever far may be the distance from that
loftiness of co-equal divinity in the bosom of the Father, and radiant
with glory, to the lowliness of the form of a servant, and the sorrows,
limitations, rejections, pains and death--that is the measure of the
depth of Christ's love. We can estimate the depth of the love of Christ
by saying, 'He came from above, He tabernacled with us,' as if some
planet were to burst from its track and plunge downwards in amongst the
mist and the narrowness of our earthly atmosphere.

A well-known modern scientist has hazarded the speculation that the
origin of life on this planet has been the falling upon it of the
fragments of a meteor, or an aerolite from some other system, with a
speck of organic life upon it, from which all has developed. Whatever
may be the case in regard to physical life, that is absolutely true in
the case of spiritual life. It all originates because this
heaven-descended Christ has come down the long staircase of Incarnation,
and has brought with Him into the clouds and oppressions of our
terrestrial atmosphere a germ of life which He has planted in the heart
of the race, there to spread for ever. That is the measure of the depth
of the love of Christ.

And there is another way to measure it. My sins are deep, my helpless
miseries are deep, but they are shallow as compared with the love that
goes down beneath all sin, that is deeper than all sorrow, that is
deeper than all necessity, that shrinks from no degradation, that turns
away from no squalor, that abhors no wickedness so as to avert its face
from it. The purest passion of human benevolence cannot but sometimes be
aware of disgust mingling with its pity and its efforts, but Christ's
love comes down to the most sunken. However far in the abyss of
degradation any human soul has descended, beneath it are the everlasting
arms, and beneath it is Christ's love. When a coalpit gets blocked up by
some explosion, no brave rescuing party will venture to descend into the
lowest depths of the poisonous darkness until some ventilation has been
restored. But this loving Christ goes down, down, down into the
thickest, most pestilential atmosphere, reeking with sin and corruption,
and stretches out a rescuing hand to the most abject and undermost of
all the victims. How deep is the love of Christ! The deep mines of sin
and of alienation are all undermined and countermined by His love. Sin
is an abyss, a mystery, how deep only they know who have fought against
it; but

    'O love! thou bottomless abyss,
     My sins are swallowed up in thee.'

'I will cast all their sins into the depths of the sea.' The depths of
Christ's love go down beneath all human necessity, sorrow, suffering,
and sin.

IV. And lastly, what is the height of the love of Christ?

We found that the way to measure the depth was to begin at the Throne,
and go down to the Cross, and to the foul abysses of evil. The way to
measure the height is to begin at the Cross and the foul abysses of
evil, and to go up to the Throne. That is to say, the topmost thing in
the Universe, the shining apex and pinnacle, glittering away up there in
the radiant unsetting light, is the love of God in Jesus Christ. Other
conceptions of that divine nature spring high above us and tower beyond
our thoughts, but the summit of them all, the very topmost as it is the
very bottommost, outside of everything, and therefore high above
everything, is the love of God which has been revealed to us all, and
brought close to us sinful men in the manhood and passion of our dear
Christ.

And that love which thus towers above us, and gleams like the shining
cross on the top of some lofty cathedral spire, does not flash up there
inaccessible, nor lie before us like some pathless precipice, up which
nothing that has not wings can ever hope to rise, but the height of the
love of Christ is an hospitable height, which can be scaled by us. Nay,
rather, that heaven of love which is 'higher than our thoughts,' bends
down, as by a kind of optical delusion the physical heaven seems to do
towards each of us, only with this blessed difference, that in the
natural world the place where heaven touches earth is always the
furthest point of distance from us: and in the spiritual world the place
where heaven stoops to me is always right over my head, and the nearest
possible point to me. He has come to lift us to Himself, and this is the
height of His love, that it bears us, if we will, up and up to sit upon
that throne where He Himself is enthroned.

So, brethren, Christ's love is round about us all, as some sunny
tropical sea may embosom in its violet waves a multitude of luxuriant
and happy islets. So all of us, islanded on our little individual lives,
lie in that great ocean of love, all the dimensions of which are
immeasurable, and which stretches above, beneath, around, shoreless,
tideless, bottomless, endless.

But, remember, this ocean of love you can shut out of your lives. It is
possible to plunge a jar into mid-Atlantic, further than soundings have
ever descended, and to bring it up on deck as dry inside as if it had
been lying on an oven. It is possible for men and women--and I have them
listening to me at this moment--to live and move and have their being in
that sea of love, and never to have let one drop of its richest gifts
into their hearts or their lives. Open your hearts for Him to come in,
by humble faith in His great sacrifice for you. For if Christ dwell in
your heart by faith, then and only then will experience be your guide;
and you will be able to comprehend the boundless greatness, the endless
duration, and absolute perfection, and to know the love of Christ which
passeth knowledge.

THE CLIMAX OF ALL PRAYER

     'That ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.'--Eph.
     iii. 19.

The Apostle's many-linked prayer, which we have been considering in
successive sermons, has reached its height. It soars to the very Throne
of God. There can be nothing above or beyond this wonderful petition.
Rather, it might seem as if it were too much to ask, and as if, in the
ecstasy of prayer, Paul had forgotten the limits that separate the
creature from the Creator, as well as the experience of sinful and
imperfect men, and had sought to 'wind himself too high for mortal life
beneath the sky.' And yet Paul's prayers are God's promises; and we are
justified in taking these rapturous petitions as being distinct
declarations of God's desire and purpose for each of us; as being the
end which He had in view in the unspeakable gift of His Son; and as
being the certain outcome of His gracious working on all believing
hearts.

It seems at first a paradoxical impossibility; looked at more deeply and
carefully it becomes a possibility for each of us, and therefore a duty;
a certainty for all the redeemed in fullest measure hereafter; and,
alas! a rebuke to our low lives and feeble expectations. Let us look,
then, at the petition, with the desire of sounding, as we may, its
depths and realising its preciousness.

I. First of all, think with me of the significance of this prayer.

'The fulness of God' is another expression for the whole sum and
aggregate of all the energies, powers, and attributes of the divine
nature, the total Godhead in its plenitude and abundance.

'God is love,' we say. What does that mean, but that God desires to
impart His whole self to the creatures whom He loves? What is love in
its lofty and purest forms, even as we see them here on earth; what is
love except the infinite longing to bestow one's self? And when we
proclaim that which is the summit and climax of the revelation of our
Father in the person of His Son, and say with the last utterances of
Scripture that 'God is love,' we do in other words proclaim that the
very nature and deepest desire and purpose of the divine heart is to
pour itself on the emptiness and need of His lowly creatures in floods
that keep back nothing. Lofty, wonderful, incomprehensible to the mere
understanding as this thought may be, clearly it is the inmost meaning
of all that Scripture tells us about God as being the 'portion of His
people,' and about us, as being by Christ and in Christ 'heirs of God,'
and possessors of Himself.

We have, then, as the promise that gleams from these great words, this
wonderful prospect, that the divine love, truth, holiness, joy, in all
their rich plenitude of all-sufficient abundance, may be showered upon
us. The whole Godhead is our possession; for the fulness of God is no
far-off remote treasure that lies beyond human grasp and outside of
human experience. Do not we believe that, to use the words of this
Apostle in another letter, 'it pleased the Father that in Him should all
the fulness dwell'? Do we not believe that, to use the words of the same
epistle, 'In Christ dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily'? Is
not that abundance of the resources of the whole Deity insphered and
incarnated in Jesus Christ our Lord, that it may be near us, and that we
may put out our hand and touch it? This may be a paradox for the
understanding, full of metaphysical puzzles and cobwebs, but for the
heart that knows Christ, most true and precious. God is gathered into
Jesus Christ, and all the fulness of God, whatever that may mean, is
embodied in the Man Christ Jesus, that from Him it may be communicated
to every soul that will.

For, to quote other words of another of the New Testament teachers, 'Of
His fulness have all we received, and grace for grace,' and to quote
words in another part of the same epistle, we may 'all come to a perfect
man, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.' High
above us, then, and inaccessible though that awful thought, 'the fulness
of God,' may seem, as the zenith of the unscaleable heavens seems to us
poor creatures creeping here upon the flat earth, it comes near, near,
near, ever nearer, and at last tabernacles among us, when we think that
in Him all the fulness dwells, and it comes nearer yet and enters into
our hearts when we think that 'of His fulness have we all received.'

Then, still further, observe another of the words in this
petition:--'That ye may be filled.' That is to say, Paul's prayer and
God's purpose and desire concerning us is, that our whole being may be
so saturated and charged with an indwelling divinity as that there shall
be no room in our present stature and capacity for more, and no sense of
want or aching emptiness.

Ah, brethren! when we think of how eagerly we have drunk at the stinking
puddles of earth, and how after every draught there has yet been left a
thirst that was pain, it is something for us to hear Him say:--'The
water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up
into everlasting life,'--and 'he that drinketh of this water shall never
thirst.' Our empty hearts, with their experiences of the insufficiency
and the vanity of all earthly satisfaction, stand there like the
water-pots at the rustic marriage, and the Master says, 'Fill them to
the brim.' And then, by His touch, the water of our poor savourless,
earthly enjoyments is transmuted and elevated into the new wine of His
Kingdom. We may be filled, satisfied with the fulness of God.

There is another point as to the significance of this prayer, on which I
must briefly touch. As our Revised Version will tell you, the literal
rendering of my text is, 'filled _unto_' (not exactly _with_) 'all the
fulness of God'; which suggests the idea not of a completed work but of
a process, and of a growing process, as if more and more of that great
fulness might pass into a man. Suppose a number of vessels, according to
the old illustration about degrees of glory in heaven; they are each
full, but the quantity that one contains is much less than that which
the other may hold. Add to the illustration that the vessels can grow,
and that filling makes them grow; as a shrunken bladder when you pass
gas into it will expand and round itself out, and all the creases will
be smoothed away. Such is the Apostle's idea here, that a process of
filling goes on which may satisfy the then desires, because it fills us
up to the then capacities of our spirits; but in the very process of so
filling and satisfying makes those spirits capable of containing larger
measures of His fulness, which therefore flow into it. Such, as I take
it, in rude and faint outline, is the significance of this great prayer.

II. Now turn, in the next place, to consider briefly the possibility of
the accomplishments of this petition.

As I said, it sounds as if it were too much to desire. Certainly no wish
can go beyond this wish. The question is, can a sane and humble wish go
as far as this; and can a man pray such a prayer with any real belief
that he will get it answered here and now? I say yes!

There are two difficulties that at once start up.

People will say, does such a prayer as this upon man's lips not forget
the limits that bound the creature's capacity? Can the finite contain
the Infinite?

Well, that is a verbal puzzle, and I answer, yes! The finite can contain
the Infinite, if you are talking about two hearts that love, one of them
God's and one of them mine. We have got to keep very clear and distinct
before our minds the broad, firm line of demarcation between the
creature and the Creator, or else we get into a pantheistic region where
both creature and Creator expire. But there is a Christian as well as an
atheistic pantheism, and as long as we retain clearly in our minds the
consciousness of the personal distinction between God and His child, so
as that the child can turn round and say, 'I love Thee' and God can look
down and say, 'I bless thee'; then all identification and mutual
indwelling and impartation from Him of Himself are possible, and are
held forth as the aim and end of Christian life.

Of course in a mere abstract and philosophical sense the Infinite cannot
be contained by the finite; and attributes which express infinity, like
omnipresence and omniscience and omnipotence and so on, indicate things
in God that we can know but little about, and that cannot be
communicated. But those are not the divinest things in God. 'God is
love.' Do you believe that that saying unveils the deepest things in
Him? God is light, 'and in Him is no darkness at all.' Do you believe
that His light and His love are nearer the centre than these attributes
of power and infinitude? If we believe that, then we can come back to my
text and say, 'The love, which is Thee, can come into me; the light,
which is Thee, can pour itself into my darkness; the holiness, which is
Thee, can enter into my impurity. The heaven of heavens cannot contain
Thee. Thou dwellest in the humble and in the contrite heart.'

So, dear brethren, the old legends about mighty forms that contracted
their stature and bowed their divine heads to enter into some poor man's
hut, and sit there, are simple Christian realities. And instead of
puzzling ourselves with metaphysical difficulties which are mere
shadows, and the work of the understanding or the spawn of words, let us
listen to the Christ when He says, 'We will come unto him and make our
abode with him' and believe that it was no impossibility which fired the
Apostle's hope when he prayed, and in praying prophesied, that we might
be filled with all the fulness of God.

Then there is another difficulty that rises before our minds; and
Christian men say, 'How is it possible, in this region of imperfection,
compassed with infirmity and sin as we are, that such hopes should be
realised for us here?' Well, I would rather answer that question by
retorting and saying: 'How is it possible that such a prayer should have
come from inspired lips unless the thing that Paul was asking might be?'
Did he waste his breath when he thus prayed? Are we not as Christian men
bound, instead of measuring our expectations by our attainments, to try
to stretch our attainments to what are our legitimate expectations, and
to hear in these words the answer to the faithless and unbelieving doubt
whether such a thing is possible, and the assurance that it is possible.

An impossibility can never be a duty, and yet we are commanded: 'Be ye
perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.' An impossibility can
never be a duty, and yet we are commanded to let Christ abide in our
hearts.

Oh! if we believed less in the power of our sin it would have less power
upon us. If we believed more in the power of an indwelling Christ He
would have more power within us. If we said to ourselves, 'It is
possible,' we should make it possible. The impossibility arises only
from our own weakness, from our own sinful weakness; and though it may
be true, and is true, that none of us will live without sin as long as
we abide here, it is also true that each moment of interruption of our
communion with Christ and therefore each moment of interruption of that
being 'filled with the fulness of God,' might have been avoided. We know
about every such time that we could have helped it if we had liked, and
it is no use bringing any general principles about sin cleaving to men
in order to break the force of that conviction. But if that conviction
be a real one, and if whenever a Christian man loses the consciousness
of God in his heart, making him blessed, he is obliged to say: 'It was
my own fault and Thou wouldst have stayed if I had chosen,' then there
follows from this, that it is possible, notwithstanding all the
imperfection and sin of earth, that we may be 'filled with all the
fulness of God.'

So, dear brethren, take you this prayer as the standard of your
expectations; and oh! take it as we must all take it, as the sharpest of
rebukes to our actual attainments in holiness and in likeness to our
Master. Set by the side of these wondrous and solemn words--'filled with
the fulness of God,' the facts of the lives of the average professing
Christians of this generation, and of this congregation; their
emptiness, their ignorance of the divine indwelling, their want of
anything in their experience that corresponds in the least degree to
such words as these. Judge whether a man is not more likely to be bowed
down in wholesome sense of his own sinfulness and unworthiness, if he
has before him such an ideal as this of my text, than if it, too, has
faded out of his life. I believe, for my part, that one great cause of
the worldliness and the sinfulness and mechanical formalities that are
eating the life out of the Christianity of this generation is the fact
of the Church having largely lost any real belief in the possibility
that Christian men may possess the fulness of God as their present
experience. And so, when they do not find it in themselves they say:
'Oh! it is all right; it is the necessary result of our imperfect
fleshly condition.' No! It is all wrong; and His purpose is that we
should possess Him in the fulness of His gladdening and hallowing power,
at every moment in our happy lives.

III. One word to close with, as to the means by which this prayer may be
fulfilled.

Remember, it comes as the last link in a chain. I shall have wasted my
breath for a month, as far as you are concerned, if you do not feel that
the preceding links are needful before this can be attained.

But I only touch upon the nearest of them and remind you that it must be
Christ dwelling in our hearts, that fills them with the fulness of God.
Where He comes God comes. And where does He come? He comes where faith
opens the door for Him. If you will trust Jesus Christ, if you will
distrust yourselves, if you will turn your thoughts and your hearts to
Him, if you will let Him come into your souls, and not shut Him out
because your souls are so full that there is no room for Him there, then
when He comes He will not come empty-handed, but will bring the full
Godhead with Him.

There must be the emptying of self, if there is to be the filling with
God. And the emptying of self is realised in that faith which forsakes
self-confidence, self-righteousness, self-dependence, self-control,
self-pleasing, and yields itself wholly to the dear Lord.

There is another condition that is required, and that is the previous
link in this braided chain. The conscious experience of the love which
is in Christ will bring to us 'the fulness of God.' Love is power; love
is God; and when we live in the sense and experience of God's love to us
then we have the power and we have the God. It is as in some of these
petrifying streams, the water is charged with particles which it
deposits upon everything that is laid in its course. So, if we plunge
our hearts into that fountain of the love of Christ, as it flows it will
clothe us with all the divine energies which are held in solution in the
divinest thing in God--His own love. Plunged into the love we are filled
with the fulness.

Then keep near your Master. It all comes to that. Meditate upon Him; do
not let days pass, as they do pass, without a thought being turned to
Him. Do not go about your daily work without a remembrance of Him. Keep
yourselves in Christ. Seek to experience His love, that love which
passeth knowledge, and is only known by them who possess it. And then,
as the old painters with deep truth used to paint the Apostle of Love
with a face like his Master, living near Christ and looking upon Him you
will receive of His fulness, and 'we all, with open face, beholding the
glory, shall be changed into the glory.'

MEASURELESS POWER AND ENDLESS GLORY

     'Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all
     that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us,
     21. Unto Him be glory in the Church by Christ Jesus throughout all
     ages, world without end. Amen.'--Eph. iii. 20, 21.

One purpose and blessing of faithful prayer is to enlarge the desires
which it expresses, and to make us think more loftily of the grace to
which we appeal. So the Apostle, in the wonderful series of
supplications which precedes the text, has found his thought of what he
may hope for his brethren at Ephesus grow greater with every clause. His
prayer rises like some songbird, in ever-widening sweeps, each higher in
the blue, and nearer the throne; and at each a sweeter, fuller note.

'Strengthened with might by His Spirit'; 'that Christ may dwell in your
hearts by faith'; 'that ye may be able to know the love of Christ';
'that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.' Here he touches
the very throne. Beyond that nothing can be conceived. But though that
sublime petition may be the end of thought, it is not the end of faith.
Though God can give us nothing more than it is, He can give us more than
we think it to be, and more than we ask, when we ask this. Therefore the
grand doxology of our text crowns and surpasses even this great prayer.
The higher true prayer climbs, the wider is its view; and the wider is
its view, the more conscious is it that the horizon of its vision is far
within the borders of the goodly land. And as we gaze into what we can
discern of the fulness of God, prayer will melt into thanksgiving and
the doxology for the swift answer will follow close upon the last words
of supplication. So is it here; so it may be always.

The form of our text then marks the confidence of Paul's prayer. The
exuberant fervour of his faith, as well as his natural impetuosity and
ardour, comes out in the heaped-up words expressive of immensity and
duration. He is like some archer watching, with parted lips, the flight
of his arrow to the mark. He is gazing on God confident that he has not
asked in vain. Let us look with him, that we, too, may be heartened to
expect great things of God. Notice then--

I. The measure of the power to which we trust.

This epistle is remarkable for its frequent references to the divine
rule, or standard, or measure, in accordance with which the great facts
of redemption take place. The 'things on the earth'--the historical
processes by which salvation is brought to men and works in men--are
ever traced up to the 'things in heaven'; the divine counsels from which
they have come forth. That phrase, 'according to,' is perpetually
occurring in this connection in the epistle. It is applied mainly in two
directions. It serves sometimes to bring into view the ground, or
reason, of the redemptive facts, as, for instance, in the expression
that these take place 'according to His good pleasure which He hath
purposed in Himself' It serves sometimes to bring into view the measure
by which the working of these redemptive facts is determined; as in our
text, and in many other places.

Now there are three main forms under which this standard, or measure, of
the Redeeming Power is set forth in this epistle, and it will help us to
grasp the greatness of the Apostle's thought if we consider these.

Take, then, first, that clause in the earlier portion of the preceding
prayer, 'that He would grant you according to the riches of His glory.'
The measure, then, of the gift that we may hope to receive is the
measure of God's own fulness. The 'riches of His glory' can be nothing
less than the whole uncounted abundance of that majestic and far-shining
Nature, as it pours itself forth in the dazzling perfectness of its own
Self-manifestation. And nothing less than this great treasure is to be
the limit and standard of His gift to us. We are the sons of the King,
and the allowance which He makes us even before we come to our
inheritance is proportionate to our Father's wealth. The same stupendous
thought is given us in that prayer, heavy with the blessed weight of
unspeakable gifts, 'that ye might be filled with all the fulness of
God.' This, then, is the measure of the grace that we may possess. This
limitless limit alone bounds the possibilities for every man, the
certainties for every Christian.

The effect must be proportioned to the cause. And what effect will be
adequate as the outcome of such a cause as 'the riches of His glory'?
Nothing short of absolute perfectness, the full transmutation of our
dark, cold being into the reflected image of His own burning brightness,
the ceaseless replenishing of our own spirits with all graces and
gladnesses akin to His, the eternal growth of the soul upward and
Godward. Perfection is the sign manual of God in all His works, just as
imperfection and the falling below our thought and wish is our 'token in
every epistle' and deed of ours. Take the finest needle, and put it
below a microscope, and it will be all ragged and irregular, the fine,
tapering lines will be broken by many a bulge and bend, and the point
blunt and clumsy. Put the blade of grass to the same test, and see how
regular its outline, how delicate and true the spear-head of its point.
God's work is perfect, man's is clumsy and incomplete. God does not
leave off till He has finished. When He rests, it is because, looking on
His work, He sees it all 'very good.' His Sabbath is the Sabbath of an
achieved purpose, of a fulfilled counsel. The palaces which we build
are ever like that one in the story, where one window remains dark and
unjewelled, while the rest blaze in beauty. But when God builds, none
can say, 'He was not able to finish.' In His great palace He makes her
'windows of agates' and _all_ her 'borders of pleasant stones.'

So we have a right to enlarge our desires and stretch our confidence of
what we may possess and become to this, His boundless bound--'The riches
of glory.'

But another form in which the standard, or measure, is stated in this
letter is: 'The working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ,
when He raised Him from the dead' (i. 19, 20); or, as it is put with a
modification, 'grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ'
(iv. 7). That is to say, we have not only the whole riches of the divine
glory as the measure to which we may lift our hopes, but lest that
celestial brightness should seem too high above us, and too far from us,
we have Christ in His human-divine manifestation, and especially in the
great fact of the Resurrection, set before us, that by Him we may learn
what God wills we should become. The former phase of the standard may
sound abstract, cloudy, hard to connect with any definite anticipations;
and so this form of it is concrete, historical, and gives human features
to the fair ideal. His Resurrection is the high-water mark of the divine
power, and to the same level it will rise again in regard to every
Christian. The Lord, in the glory of His risen life, and in the riches
of the gifts which He received when He ascended up on high, is the
pattern for us, and the power which fulfils its own pattern. In Him we
see what man may become, and what His followers must become. The limits
of that power will not be reached until every Christian soul is
perfectly assimilated to that likeness, and bears all its beauty in its
face, nor till every Christian soul is raised to participation in
Christ's dignity and sits on His throne. Then, and not till then, shall
the purpose of God be fulfilled and the gift which is measured by the
riches of the Father's glory, and the fulness of the Son's grace, be
possessed or conceived in its measureless measure.

But there is a third form in which this same standard is represented.
That is the form which is found in our text, and in other places of the
epistle: 'According to the power that worketh in us.'

What power is that but the power of the Spirit of God dwelling in us?
And thus we have the measure, or standard, set forth in terms
respectively applying to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. For
the first, the riches of His glory; for the second, His Resurrection and
Ascension; for the third, His energy working in Christian souls. The
first carries us up into the mysteries of God, where the air is almost
too subtle for our gross lungs; the second draws nearer to earth and
points us to an historical fact that happened in this everyday world;
the third comes still nearer to us, and bids us look within, and see
whether what we are conscious of there, if we interpret it by the light
of these other measures, will not yield results as great as theirs, and
open before us the same fair prospect of perfect holiness and conformity
to the divine nature.

There is already a Power at work within us, if we be Christians, of
whose workings we may be aware, and from them forecast the measure of
the gifts which it can bestow upon us. We may estimate what will be by
what we know has been, and by what we feel is. That is to say, in other
words, the effects already produced, and the experiences we have already
had, carry in them the pledge of completeness.

I suppose that if the mediæval dream had ever come true, and an
alchemist had ever turned a grain of lead into gold, he could have
turned all the lead in the world in time, and with crucibles and
furnaces enough. The first step is all the difficulty, and if you and I
have been changed from enemies into sons, and had one spark of love to
God kindled in our hearts, that is a mightier change than any that
remains to be effected in order to make us perfect. One grain has been
changed, the whole mass will be so in due time.

The present operations of that power carry in them the pledge of their
own completion. The strange mingling of good and evil in our present
nature, our aspirations so crossed and contradicted, our resolution so
broken and falsified, the gleams of light, and the eclipses that
follow--all these in their opposition to each other, are plainly
transitory, and the workings of that Power within us, though they be
often overborne, are as plainly the stronger in their nature, and meant
to conquer and to endure. Like some half-hewn block, such as travellers
find in long abandoned quarries, whence Egyptian temples, that were
destined never to be completed, were built, our spirits are but partly
'polished after the similitude of a palace,' while much remains in the
rough. The builders of these temples have mouldered away and their
unfinished handiwork will lie as it was when the last chisel touched it
centuries ago, till the crack of doom; but stones for God's temple will
be wrought to completeness and set in their places. The whole threefold
divine cause of our salvation supplies the measure, and lays the
foundation for our hopes, in the glory of the Father, the grace of the
Son, the power of the Holy Ghost. Let us lift up our cry: 'Perfect that
which concerneth me, forsake not the works of thine own hands,' and we
shall have for answer the ancient word, fresh as when it sounded long
ago from among the stars to the sleeper at the ladder's foot, 'I will
not leave thee, until I have done that which I have spoken to thee of.'

II. Notice the relation of the divine working to our thoughts and
desires.

The Apostle in his fervid way strains language to express how far the
possibility of the divine working extends. He is able, not only to do
all things, but 'beyond all things'--a vehement way of putting the
boundless reach of that gracious power. And what he means by this
'beyond all things' is more fully expressed in the next words, in which
he labours by accumulating synonyms to convey his sense of the
transcendent energy which waits to bless: 'exceeding abundantly above
what we ask.' And as, alas! our desires are but shrunken and narrow
beside our thoughts, he sweeps a wider orbit when he adds 'above what we
_think_.' He has been asking wonderful things, and yet even his
farthest-reaching petitions fall far on this side of the greatness of
God's power. One might think that even it could go no further than
filling us 'with all the fulness of God.' Nor can it; but it may far
transcend our conceptions of what that is, and astonish us by its
surpassing our thoughts, no less than it shames us by exceeding our
prayers.

Of course, all this is true, and is meant to apply, only about the
inward gifts of God's grace. I need not remind you that, in the outer
world of Providence and earthly gifts, prayers and wishes often surpass
the answers; that there a deeper wisdom often contradicts our thoughts
and a truer kindness refuses our petitions, and that so the rapturous
words of our text are only true in a very modified and partial sense
about God's working _for_ us in the world. It is His work _in_ us
concerning which they are absolutely true.

Of course we know that in all regions of His working He is _able_ to
surpass our poor human conceptions, and that, properly speaking, the
most familiar, and, as we insolently call them, 'smallest' of His works
holds in it a mystery--were it none other than the mystery of
Being--against which Thought has been breaking its teeth ever since men
began to think at all.

But as regards the working of God on our spiritual lives, this passing
beyond the bounds of thought and desire is but the necessary result of
the fact already dealt with, that the only measure of the power is God
Himself, in that Threefold Being. That being so, no plummet of our
making can reach to the bottom of the abyss; no strong-winged thought
can fly to the outermost bound of the encircling heaven. Widely as we
stretch our reverent conceptions, there is ever something beyond. After
we have resolved many a dim nebula in the starry sky, and found it all
ablaze with suns and worlds, there will still hang, faint and far before
us, hazy magnificences which we have not apprehended. Confidently and
boldly as we may offer our prayers, and largely as we may expect, the
answer is ever more than the petition. For indeed, in every act of His
quickening grace, in every God-given increase of our knowledge of God,
in every bestowment of His fulness, there is always more bestowed than
we receive, more than we know even while we possess it. Like some gift
given in the dark, its true preciousness is not discerned when it is
first received. The gleam of the gold does not strike our eye all at
once. There is ever an unknown margin felt by us to be over after our
capacity of receiving is exhausted. 'And they took up of the fragments
that remained, twelve baskets full.'

So, then, let us remember that while our thoughts and prayers can never
reach to the full perception, or reception either, of the gift, the
exuberant amplitude with which it reaches far beyond both is meant to
draw both after it. And let us not forget either that, while the grace
which we receive has no limit or measure but the fulness of God, the
working limit, which determines what we receive of the grace, is these
very thoughts and wishes which it surpasses. We may have as much of God
as we can hold, as much as we wish. All Niagara may roar past a man's
door, but only as much as he diverts through his own sluice will drive
his mill, or quench his thirst. God's grace is like the figures in the
Eastern tales, that will creep into a narrow room no bigger than a
nutshell, or will tower heaven high. Our spirits are like the magic tent
whose walls expanded or contracted at the owner's wish--we may enlarge
them to enclose far more of the grace than we have ever possessed. We
are not straitened in God, but in ourselves. He is 'able to do exceeding
abundantly above what we ask or think.' Therefore let us stretch desires
and thoughts to their utmost, remembering that, while they can never
reach the measure of His grace in itself, they make the practical
measure of our possession of it. 'According to thy faith' is the real
measure of the gift received, even though 'according to the riches of
His glory' be the measure of the gift bestowed. Note, again,

III. The glory that springs from the divine work.

'The glory of God' is the lustre of His own perfect character, the
bright sum total of all the blended brilliances that compose His name.
When that light is welcomed and adored by men, they are said to 'give
glory to God,' and this doxology is at once a prophecy that the working
of God's power on His redeemed children will issue in setting forth the
radiance of His Name yet more, and a prayer that it may. So we have here
the great thought expressed in many places of Scripture, that the
highest exhibition of the divine character for the reverence and
love--of the whole universe, shall we say?--lies in His work on
Christian souls, and the effect produced thereby on them. God takes His
stand, so to speak, on this great fact in His dealings, and will have
His creatures estimate Him by it. He reckons it His highest praise that
He has redeemed men, and by His dwelling in them fills them with His own
fulness. And this chiefest praise and brightest glory accrues to Him 'in
the Church in Christ Jesus.' The weakening of the latter word into _by_
Christ Jesus,' as in the English version, is to be regretted, as
substituting another thought, Scriptural no doubt and precious, for the
precise shade of meaning in the Apostle's mind here. As has been well
said, 'the first words denote the outward province; the second, the
inward and spiritual sphere in which God was to be praised.' His glory
is to shine in the Church, the theatre of His power, the standing
demonstration of the might of redeeming love. By this He will be judged,
and this He will point to if any ask what is His divinest work, which
bears the clearest imprint of His divinest self. His glory is to be set
forth by men on condition that they are 'in Christ,' living and moving
in Him, in that mysterious but most real union without which no fruit
grows on the dead branches, nor any music of praise breaks from the dead
lips.

So, then, think of that wonder that God sets His glory in His dealings
with us. Amid all the majesty of His works and all the blaze of His
creation, this is what He presents as the highest specimen of His
power--the Church of Jesus Christ, the company of poor men, wearied and
conscious of many evils, who follow afar off the footsteps of their
Lord. How dusty and toil-worn the little group of Christians that landed
at Puteoli must have looked as they toiled along the Appian Way and
entered Rome! How contemptuously emperor and philosopher and priest and
patrician would have curled their lips, if they had been told that in
that little knot of Jewish prisoners lay a power before which theirs
would cower and finally fade! Even so is it still. Among all the
splendours of this great universe, and the mere obtrusive tawdrinesses
of earth, men look upon us Christians as poor enough; and yet it is to
His redeemed children that God has entrusted His praise, and in their
hands that He has lodged the sacred deposit of His own glory.

Think loftily of that office and honour, lowly of yourselves who have it
laid upon you as a crown. His honour is in our hands. We are the
'secretaries of His praise.' This is the highest function that any
creature can discharge. The Rabbis have a beautiful bit of teaching
buried among their rubbish about angels. They say that there are two
kinds of angels--the angels of service and the angels of praise, of
which two orders the latter is the higher, and that no angel in it
praises God twice, but having once lifted up his voice in the psalm of
heaven, then perishes and ceases to be. He has perfected his being, he
has reached the height of his greatness, he has done what he was made
for, let him fade away. The garb of legend is mean enough, but the
thought it embodies is that ever true and solemn one, without which life
is nought--'Man's chief end is to glorify God.'

And we can only fulfil that high purpose in the measure of our union
with Christ. 'In Him' abiding, we manifest God's glory, for in Him
abiding we receive God's grace. So long as we are joined to Him, we
partake of His life, and our lives become music and praise. The electric
current flows from Him through all souls that are 'in Him' and they glow
with fair colours which they owe to their contact with Jesus. Interrupt
the communication, and all is darkness. So, brethren, let us seek to
abide in Him, severed from whom we are nothing. Then shall we fulfil the
purpose of His love, who 'hath shined in our hearts' that we might give
to others 'the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of
Jesus Christ' Notice, lastly,

IV. The eternity of the work and of the praise.

As in the former clauses the idea of the transcendent greatness of the
power of God was expressed by accumulated synonyms, so here the kindred
thought of its eternity, and consequently of the ceaseless duration of
the resulting glory, is sought to be set forth by a similar aggregation.
The language creaks and labours, as it were, under the weight of the
great conception. Literally rendered, the words are--'to all
generations of the age of the ages'--a remarkable fusing together of two
expressions for unbounded duration, which are scarcely congruous. We can
understand 'to all generations' as expressive of duration as long as
birth and death shall last. We can understand 'the age of the ages' as
pointing to that endless epoch whose moments are 'ages'; but the
blending of the two is but an unconscious acknowledgment that the speech
of earth, saturated, as it is, with the colouring of time, breaks down
in the attempt to express the thought of eternity. Undoubtedly that
solemn conception is the one intended by this strange phrase.

The work is to go on for ever and ever, and with it the praise. As the
ages which are the beats of the pendulum of eternity come and go, more
and more of God's power will flow out to us, and more and more of God's
glory will be manifested in us. It must be so; for God's gift is
infinite, and man's capacity of reception is indefinitely capable of
increase. Therefore eternity will be needful in order that redeemed
souls may absorb all of God which He can give or they can take. The
process has no limits, for there is no bound to be set to the possible
approaches of the human spirit to the divine, and none to the exuberant
abundance of the beauty and glory which God will give to His child.
Therefore we shall live for ever: and for ever show forth His praise and
blaze out like the sun with the irradiation of His glory. We cannot die
till we have exhausted God. Till we comprehend all His nature in our
thoughts, and reflect all His beauty in our character; till we have
attained all the bliss that we can think, and received all the good that
we can ask; till Hope has nothing before her to reach towards, and God
is left behind: we 'shall not die, but live, and declare the works of
the Lord.'

Let His grace work on you, and yield yourselves to Him, that His fulness
may fill your emptiness. So on earth we shall be delivered from hopes
which mock and wishes that are never fulfilled. So in heaven, after
'ages of ages' of growing glory, we shall have to say, as each new wave
of the shoreless, sunlit sea bears us onward, 'It doth not yet appear
what we shall be.'

THE CALLING AND THE KINGDOM

     'I beseech you, that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye
      are called.'--Eph. iv. 1.

     'They shall walk with Me in white; for they are worthy.'--Rev.
      iii. 4.

The estimate formed of a centurion by the elders of the Jews was, 'He is
worthy for whom Thou shouldst do this' and in contrast therewith the
estimate formed by himself was, 'I am not worthy that Thou shouldst come
under my roof.' From these two statements we deduce the thought that
merit has no place in the Christian's salvation, but all is to be traced
to undeserved, gracious love. But that principle, true and all-important
as it is, like every other great truth, may be exaggerated, and may be
so isolated as to become untrue and a source of much evil. And so I
desire to turn to the other side of the shield, and to emphasise the
place that worthiness has in the Christian life, and its personal
results both here and hereafter. To say that character has nothing to do
with blessedness is untrue, both to conscience and to the Christian
revelation; and however we trace all things to grace, we must also
remember that we get what we have fitted ourselves for.

Now, my two texts bring out two aspects which have to be taken in
conjunction. The one of them speaks about the present life, and lays it
as an imperative obligation on all Christian people to be worthy of
their Christianity, and the other carries us into the future and shows
us that there it is they who are 'worthy' who attain to the Kingdom. So
I think I shall best bring out what I desire to emphasise if I just take
these two points--the Christian calling and the life that is worthy of
it, and the Christian heaven and the life that is worthy of it.

I. The Christian calling and the life that is worthy of it.

'I beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are
called.' Now, that thought recurs in other places in the Apostle's
writings, somewhat modified in expression. For instance, in one passage
he speaks of 'walking worthily of the God who has called us to His
kingdom and glory,' and in another of the Christian man's duty to 'walk
worthily of the Lord unto all pleasing.' There is a certain vocation to
which a Christian man is bound to make his life correspond, and his
conduct should be in some measure worthy of the ideal that is set before
it. Now, we shall best understand what is involved in such worthiness if
we make clear to ourselves what the Apostle means by this 'calling' to
which he appeals as containing in itself a standard to which our lives
are to be conformed.

Suppose we try to put away the technical word 'calling' and instead of
'calling' say 'summons,' which is nearer the idea, because it conveys
the notions more fully of the urgency of the voice, and of the
authority of the voice, which speaks to us. And what is that summons?
How do we hear it? One of the other Apostles speaks of God as calling us
'by His own glory and virtue,' that is to say, wherever God reveals
Himself in any fashion, and by any medium, to a man, the man fails to
understand the deepest meaning of the revelation unless his purged ear
hears in it the great voice saying, 'Come up hither.' For all God's
self-manifestation, in the creatures around us, in the deep voice of our
own souls, in the mysteries of our own personal lives, and in the slow
evolution of His purpose through the history of the world, all these
revelations of God bear in them the summons to us that hear and see them
to draw near to Him, and to mould ourselves into His likeness. And thus,
just as the sun by the effluence of its beams gathers all the
ministering planets, as it were, round its feet, and draws them to
itself, so God, raying Himself out into the waste, fills the waste with
magnetic influences which are meant to draw men to nobleness, goodness,
God-pleasingness, and God-likeness.

But in another place in this Apostle's writings we read of 'the high
calling of God in Christ Jesus.' Yes, there, as focussed into one strong
voice, all the summonses are concentrated and gathered. For in Jesus
Christ we see the possibilities of humanity realised, and we have the
pattern of what we ought to be, and are called thereby to be. And in
Christ we get the great motives which make this summons, as it comes
mended from His lips, no longer the mere harsh voice of an authoritative
legislator, but the gentle invitation, 'Come unto Me, ... and ye shall
find rest unto your souls.' The summons is honeyed, sweetened, and made
infinitely mightier when we hear it from His gracious lips. It is the
blessed peculiarity of the Christian ideal, that the manifestation of
the ideal carries with it the power to realise it. And just as the
increasing strength of the spring sunshine summons the buds from out of
their folds, and the snowdrops hear the call and force themselves
through the frozen soil, so when Christ summons He inclines the ears
that hear, and enables the men that own them to obey the summons, and to
be what they are commanded. And thus we have 'the high calling of God in
Christ Jesus.'

Now, if that is the call, if the life of Christ is that to which we are
summoned, and the death of Christ is that by which we are inclined to
obey the summons, and the Spirit of Christ is that by which we are
enabled to do so, what sort of a life will be worthy of these? Well, the
context supplies part of the answer. 'I beseech you that ye walk worthy
of the vocation ... with all meekness and lowliness, with
long-suffering, forbearing one another in love.' That is one side of the
vocation, and the life that is worthy of it will be a life emancipated
from the meanness of selfishness, and delivered from the tumidities of
pride and arrogance, and changed into the sweetness of gentleness and
the royalties of love.

And then, on the other side, in one of the other texts where the same
general set of ideas is involved, we get a yet more wondrous exhibition
of the life which the Apostle considered to be worthy. I simply
signalise its points of detail without venturing to dwell upon them.
'Unto all pleasing'; the first characteristic of life that is 'worthy of
our calling' and to which, therefore, every one of us Christian people
is imperatively bound, is that it shall, in all its parts, please God,
and that is a large demand. Then follow details: 'Fruitful in every good
work'--a many-sided fruitfulness, an encyclopædiacal beneficent
activity, covering all the ground of possible excellence; and that is
not all; 'increasing in the knowledge of God,'--a life of progressive
acquaintance with Him; and that is not all:--'strengthened with all
might unto all patience and long-suffering'; nor is that all, for the
crown of the whole is 'giving thanks unto the Father.' So, then, 'ye see
your calling, brethren.' A life that is 'worthy of the vocation
wherewith ye are called' is a life that conforms to the divine will,
that is 'fruitful in all good,' that is progressive in its acquaintance
with God, that is strengthened for all patience and long-suffering, and
that in everything is thankful to Him. That is what we are summoned to
be, and unless we are in some measure obeying the summons, and bringing
out such a life in our conduct, then, notwithstanding all that we have
to say about unmerited mercy, and free grace, and undeserved love, and
salvation being not by works but by faith, we have no right to claim the
mercy to which we say we trust.

Now, this necessity of a worthy life is perfectly harmonious with the
great truth that, after all, every man owes all to the undeserved mercy
of God. The more nearly we come to realise the purpose of our calling,
the more 'worthy' of it we are, the deeper will be our consciousness of
our unworthiness. The more we approximate to the ideal, and come closer
up to it, and so see its features the better, the more we shall feel how
unlike we are to it. The law for Christian progress is that the sense of
unworthiness increases in the precise degree in which the worthiness
increases. The same man that said, 'Of whom (sinners) I am chief,' said
to the same reader, 'I have kept the faith, henceforth there is laid up
for me a crown of righteousness.' And so the two things are not
contradictory but complementary. On the one side 'worthy' has nothing to
do with the outflow of Christ's love to us; on the other side we are to
'walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called.'

II. And now, let us turn to the other thought, the Christian heaven and
the life that is worthy of it.

Some of you, I have no doubt, would think that that was a tremendous
heresy if there were not Scriptural words to buttress it. Let us see
what it means. My text out of the Revelation says, 'They shall walk with
Me in white, for they are worthy.' And the same voice that spake these,
to some of us, astounding, words, said, when He was here on earth, 'They
which shall be counted worthy to attain to the life of the resurrection
from the dead,' etc. The text brings out very clearly the continuity and
congruity between the life on earth and the life in heaven. Who is it of
whom it is said that 'they are worthy' to 'walk in white'? It is the
'few names even in Sardis which have not defiled their garments.' You
see the connection; clean robes here and shining robes hereafter; the
two go together, and you cannot separate them. And no belief that
salvation, in its incipient germ here, and salvation in its fulness
hereafter, are the results 'not of works of righteousness which we have
done, but of His mercy,' is to be allowed to interfere with that other
truth that they who are worthy attain to the Kingdom.

I must not be diverted from my main purpose, tempting as the theme would
be, to say more than just a sentence about what is included in that
great promise, 'They shall walk with Me in white' And if I do touch
upon it at all, it is only in order to bring out more clearly that the
very nature of the heavenly reward demands this worthiness which the
text lays down as the condition of possessing it. 'They shall
walk'--activity on an external world. That opens a great door, but
perhaps we had better be contented just with looking in. 'They shall
walk'--progress; 'with me'--union with Jesus Christ; 'in
white'--resplendent purity of character. Now take these four
things--activity on an outward universe, progress, union with Christ,
resplendent purity of character, and you have almost all that we know of
the future; the rest is partly doubtful and is mostly symbolical or
negative, and in any case subordinate. Never mind about 'physical
theories of another life'; never mind about all the questions--to some
of us how torturing they sometimes are!--concerning that future life.
The more we keep ourselves within the broad limits of these promises
that are intertwined and folded up together in that one saying, 'They
shall walk with Me in white,' the better, I think, for the sanity and
the spirituality of our conception of a future life.

That being understood, the next thing clearly follows, that only those
who in the sense of the word as it is used here, are 'worthy,' can enter
upon the possession of such a heaven. From the nature of the gift it is
clear that there must be a moral and religious congruity between the
gift and the recipient, or, to put it into plainer words, you cannot get
heaven unless your nature is capable of receiving these great gifts
which constitute heaven. People talk about the future state as being 'a
state of retribution.' Well! that is not altogether a satisfactory form
of expression, for retribution may convey the idea, such as is
presented in earthly rewards and punishments, of there being no natural
correspondence between the crime and its punishment, or the virtue and
its reward. A bit of bronze shaped into the form of a cross may be the
retribution 'For Valour,' and a prison cell may be the retribution by
legal appointment for a certain crime. But that is not the way that God
deals out rewards and punishments in the life which is to come. It is
not a case of retribution, meaning thereby the arbitrary bestowment of a
certain fixed gift in response to certain virtues, but it is a case of
_outcome_, and the old metaphor of sowing and reaping is the true one.
We sow here and we reap yonder. We pass into that future, 'bringing our
sheaves with us,' and we have to grind the corn and make bread of it,
and we have to eat the work of our own hands. They drink as they have
brewed. 'Their works do follow them,' or they go before them and
'receive them into everlasting habitations.' Outcome, the necessary
result, and not a mere arbitrary retribution, is the relation which
heaven bears to earth.

That is plain, too, from our own nature. We carry ourselves with us
wherever we go. The persistence of character, the continuity of personal
being, the continuity of memory, the _unobliterable_--if I may coin a
word--results upon ourselves of our actions, all these things make it
certain that what looks to us a cleft, deep and broad, between the
present life and the next, is to those that have passed it, and see it
from the other side, but a little crack in the soil scarcely observable,
and that we carry on into another world the selves that we have made
here. Whatever death does--and it does a great deal that we do not know
of--it does not alter, it only brings out, and, as I suppose,
intensifies, the main drift and set of a character. And so they who
'have not defiled their garments shall walk with Me in white, for they
are worthy.'

Ah, brethren! how solemn that makes life; the fleeting moment carries
Eternity in its bosom. It passes, and the works pass, but nothing human
ever dies, and we bear with us the net results of all the yesterdays
into that eternal to-day. You write upon a thin film of paper and there
is a black leaf below it. Yes, and below the black leaf there is another
sheet, and all that you write on the top one goes through the dark
interposed page, and is recorded on the third, and one day that will be
taken out of the book, and you will have to read it and say, 'What I
have written I have written.'

So, dear friends, whilst we begin with that unmerited love, and that
same unmerited love is the sole ground on which the gates of the kingdom
of heaven are by the Death and Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus
Christ opened to believers, their place there depends not only on faith
but on the work which is the fruit of faith. There is such a thing as
being 'saved yet so as by fire,' and there is such a thing as 'having an
entrance ministered abundantly unto us'; we have to make the choice.
There is such a thing as the sore punishment of which they are thought
worthy who have rejected the Son of God, and counted the blood of the
Covenant an unholy thing; and there is such a thing as a man saying, 'I
am not worthy that Thou shouldest come unto me,' and Christ answering,
'He shall walk with Me in white, for he is worthy' and we have to make
that choice also.

THE THREEFOLD UNITY

     'One Lord, one faith, one baptism.'--Eph. iv. 5.

The thought of the unity of the Church is very prominent in this
epistle. It is difficult for us, amidst our present divisions, to
realise how strange and wonderful it then was that a bond should have
been found which drew together men of all nations, ranks, and
characters. Pharisee and philosopher, high-born women and slaves, Roman
patricians and gladiators, Asiatic Greeks and Syrian Jews forgot their
feuds and sat together as one in Christ. It is no wonder that Paul in
this letter dwells so long and earnestly on that strange fact. He is
exhorting here to a unity of spirit corresponding to it, and he names a
seven-fold oneness--one body and one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one
faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. The outward institution
of the Church, as a manifest visible fact, comes first in the catalogue.
One Father is last, and between these there lie the mention of the one
Spirit and the one Lord. The 'body' is the Church. 'Spirit, Lord, God,'
are the triune divine personality. Hope and faith are human acts by
which men are joined to God; Baptism is the visible symbol of their
incorporation into the one body. These three clauses of our text may be
considered as substantially including all the members of the series. We
deal with them quite simply now, and consider them in the order in which
they stand here.

I. The one Lord.

The deep foundation of Christian unity is laid in the divine Christ.
Here, as generally in the New Testament, the name 'Lord' designates
Christ in His authority as ruler of men and in His divinity as
Incarnation of God. It would not be going too far to suggest that we
have in the name, standing as it does, for the most part, in majestic
simplicity, a reference to the Old Testament name of Jehovah, which in
the Greek translation familiar to Paul is generally rendered by this
same word. Nor can we ignore the fact that in this great catalogue of
the Christian unities the Lord stands in the centre of the three
personalities named, and is regarded as being at once the source of the
Spirit and the manifestation of the Father. The place which this name
occupies in relation to the Faith which is next named suggests that the
living personal Christ is the true uniting principle amongst men. The
one body realises its oneness in its common relation to the one Lord. It
is one, not because of identity in doctrine, not because of any of the
bonds which hold men together in human associations, precious and sacred
as many of these are, but 'we being many are one bread, for we are all
partakers of that one bread.' The magnet draws all the particles to
itself and holds them in a mysterious unity.

II. One faith.

The former clause set forth in one great name all the objective elements
of the Church's oneness; this clause sets forth, with equally
all-comprehending simplicity, the subjective element which makes a
Christian. The one Lord, in the fulness of His nature and the
perfectness of His work, is the all-inclusive object of faith. He, in
His own living person, and not any dogmas about Him, is regarded as the
strong support round which the tendrils of faith cling and twine and
grow. True, He is made known to us as possessing certain attributes and
as doing certain things which, when stated in words, become doctrines,
and a Christ without these will never be the object of faith. The
antithesis which is so often drawn between Christ's person and Christian
doctrines is by no means sound, though the warning not to substitute the
latter for the former is only too necessary at all times.

The subjective act which lays hold of Christ is faith, which in our text
has its usual meaning of saving trust, and is entirely misconceived if
it is taken, as it sometimes is, to mean the whole body of beliefs which
make up the Christian creed. That which unites us to Jesus Christ is an
infinitely deeper thing than the acceptance of any creed. A man may
believe thirty-nine or thirty-nine hundred articles without having any
real or vital connection with the one Lord. The faith which saves is the
outgoing of the whole self towards Christ. In it the understanding, the
emotions, and the will are all in action. The New Testament _faith_ is
absolutely identical with the Old Testament _trust_, and the prophet who
exhorted Israel, 'Trust ye in the Lord for ever, for in the Lord Jehovah
is everlasting strength,' was preaching the very same message as the
Apostle who cried, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be
saved.'

That 'saving faith' is the same in all Christians, however different
they may be in condition and character and general outlook and opinion
upon many points of Christian knowledge. The things on which they differ
are on the surface, and sometimes by reason of their divergencies
Christians stand like frowning cliffs that look threateningly at one
another across a narrow gorge, but deep below ground they are continuous
and the rock is unbroken. In many and melancholy ways 'the unity of
faith and knowledge' is contradicted in the existing organisations of
the Church, and we are tempted to postpone its coming to the day of the
new Jerusalem which is compact together; but the clarion note of this
great text may encourage us to hope, and to labour in our measure for
the fulfilment of the hope, that all, who by one faith have been joined
to the one Lord, may yet know themselves to be one in Him, and present
to the world the fair picture of one body animated by one spirit.

III. One baptism.

Obviously in Paul's mind baptism here means, not the baptism with the
Spirit, but the rite, one and the same for all, by which believers in
Christ enter into the fellowship of the Church. It was then a perpetual
rite administered as a matter of course to all who professed to have
been joined to the one Lord by their one faith. The sequence in the
three clauses of our text is perfectly clear. Baptism is the expression
and consequence of the faith which precedes it. Surely there is here a
most distinct implication that it is a declaration of personal faith.
Without enlarging on the subject, I venture to think that the order of
the Apostle's thought negatives other conceptions of Christian baptism,
such as, that it is a communication of Grace, or an expression of the
feelings and desires of parents, or a declaration of some truth about
redeemed humanity. Paul's order is Christ's when He said, 'He that
believeth and is baptized shall be saved.'

It is very remarkable and instructive that whilst thus our text shows
that baptism was a matter of course and universally practised, the
references to it in the epistles are so few. The inference is not that
it was neglected, but that, as being a rite, it could not be as
important as were Christian truths and Christian character. May we, in a
word, suggest the contrast between the frequency and tone of the
Apostolic references to baptism and those which we find in many quarters
to-day?

It is remarkable that here the Lord's Supper is not mentioned, and all
the more so, that in Paul's letter to the Corinthians, the passage which
we have already quoted does put emphasis upon it as a token of Christian
unity. The explanation of the omission may be found in the fact that, in
these early days, the Lord's Supper was not a separate rite, but was
combined with ordinary meals, or perhaps more probably in the
consideration that baptism was what the Lord's Supper was not--an
initial rite which incorporated the possessors of one faith into the one
body.

'THE MEASURE OF GRACE'

     'But unto each one of us was the grace given according to the
      measure of the gift of Christ.'--Eph. iv. 7 (R.V.).

The Apostle here makes a swift transition from the thought of the unity
of the Church to the variety of gifts to the individual. 'Each' is
contrasted with 'all.' The Father who stands in so blessed and gracious
a relationship to the united whole also sustains an equally gracious and
blessed relationship to each individual in that whole. It is because
each receives His individual gift that God works in all. The Christian
community is the perfection of individualism and of collectivism, and
this rich variety of the gifts of grace is here urged as a reason
additional to the unity of the one body, for the exhortation to the
endeavour to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.

I. Each Christian soul receives grace through Christ.

The more accurate rendering of the Revised Version reads '_the_ grace,'
and the definite article points to it as a definite and familiar fact in
the Ephesian believers to which the Apostle could point with the
certainty that their own consciousness would confirm his statement. The
wording of the Greek further implies that the grace was given at a
definite point in the past, which is most naturally taken to have been
the moment in which each believer laid hold on Jesus by faith. It is
further to be noted that the content of the gift is the grace itself and
not the graces which are its product and manifestation in the Christian
life. And this distinction, which is in accordance with Paul's habitual
teaching, leads us to the conclusion, that the essential character of
the grace given through the act of our individual faith is that of a new
vital force, flowing into and transforming the individual life. From
that unspeakable gift which Paul supposed to be verifiable by the
individual experience of every Christian, there would follow the graces
of Christian character in which would be included the deepening and
purifying of all the natural capacities of the individual self, and the
casting out from thence of all that was contrary to the transforming
power of the new life.

Such an utterance as this, so quietly and confidently taking for granted
that the experience of every believer verifies it in his own case, may
well drive us all to look more earnestly into our own hearts, to see
whether in them are any traces of a similar experience. If it be true,
that to every one of us is given _the_ grace, how comes it that so many
of us dare not profess to have any vivid remembrance of possessing it,
of having possessed it, or of any clear consciousness of possessing it
now? There may be gifts bestowed upon unconscious receivers, but surely
this is not one of these. If we do not know that we have it, it must at
least remain very questionable whether we do have it at all, and very
certain that we have it in scant and shrivelled fashion.

The universality of the gift was a startling thing in a world which, as
far as cultivated heathenism was concerned, might rightly be called
aristocratic, and by the side of a religion of privilege into which
Judaism had degenerated. The supercilious sarcasm in the lips of
Pharisees, 'This people which knoweth not the law are cursed,' but too
truly expresses the gulf between the Rabbis and the 'folk of the earth'
as the masses were commonly and contemptuously designated by the former.
Into the midst of a society in which such distinctions prevailed, the
proclamation that the greatest gift was bestowed upon all must have come
with revolutionary force, and been hailed as emancipation. Peter had
penetrated to grasp the full meaning and wondrous novelty of that
universality, when on Pentecost he pointed to 'that which had been
spoken by the prophet Joel' as fulfilled on that day, 'I will pour forth
of my Spirit upon all flesh ... Yea, and on my servants and handmaidens
... will I pour forth of my Spirit.' The rushing, mighty wind of that
day soon dropped. The fiery tongues ceased to quiver on the disciples'
heads, and the many voices that spoke were silenced, but the gift was
permanent, and is poured out now as it was then, and now, as then, it is
true that the whole company of believers receive the Spirit, though
alas! by their own faults it is not true that 'they are all _filled_
with the Holy Spirit.'

Christ is the giver. He has 'power over the Spirit of Holiness' and as
the Evangelist has said in his comment on our Lord's great words, when
'He stood and cried,' 'If any man thirst let him come unto Me and
drink,' 'This spake He of the Spirit which they that believed on Him
were to receive.' We cannot pierce into the depth of the mutual
relations of the three divine Persons mentioned in the context, but we
can discern that Christ is for us the self-revealing activity of the
divine nature, the right arm of the Father, or, to use another metaphor,
the channel through which the else 'closed sea' of God flows into the
world of creatures. Through that channel is poured into believing hearts
the river of the water of life, which proceeds out of the one 'throne of
God and of the Lamb.' This gift of the Spirit of Holiness to all
believers is the deepest and truest conception of Christ's gifts to His
Church. His past work of sacrifice for the sins of the world was
finished, as with a parting cry He proclaimed on Calvary, and the power
of that sacrifice will never be exhausted, but the taking away of the
sins of the world is but the initial stage of the work of Christ, and
its further stages are carried on through all the ages. He 'worketh
hitherto,' and His present work, in so far as believers are concerned,
is not only the forthputting of divine energy in regard to outward
circumstances, but the imparting to them of the Divine Spirit to be the
very life of their lives and the Lord of their spirits. Christian people
are but too apt to give undue prominence to what Christ did for them
when He died, and to lose sight, in the overwhelming lustre of His
unspeakable sacrifice, of what He is doing for them whilst He lives. It
would tend to restore the proportions of Christian truth and to touch
our hearts into a deeper and more continuous love to Him, if we more
habitually thought of Him, not only as the Christ who died, but also as
the Christ who rather is risen again, who is even at the right hand of
God, who also maketh intercession for us.

II. The gift of this grace is in itself unlimited.

Our text speaks of it as being according to the measure of the gift of
Christ, and that phrase may either mean the gift which Christ receives
or that which He gives. Probably the latter is the Apostle's meaning
here, as seems to be indicated by the following words that 'when He
ascended on high, He gave gifts unto men,' but what He gives is what He
possesses, and the Apostle goes on to point out that the ultimate issue
of His giving to the Church is that it attains to the measure of the
stature of the fulness of Christ.

It may cast some light on this point if we note the remarkable variety
of expressions in this epistle for the norm or standard or limit of the
gift. In one place the Apostle speaks of the gift bestowed upon
believers as being according to the riches of the Father's glory; then
it has no limit short of a participation in the divine fulness. God's
glory is the transcendent lustre of His own infinite character in its
self-manifestation. The Apostle labours to flash through the dim medium
of words the glory of that light by blending incongruously, but
effectively, the other metaphor of riches, and the two together suggest
a wonderful, though vague thought of the infinite wealth and the
exhaustless brightness which we call Abba, Father. The humblest child
may lift longing and confident eyes and believe that he has received in
very deed, through his faith in Jesus Christ, a gift which will increase
in riches and in light until it makes him perfect as his Father in
heaven was perfect. It was an old faith, based upon insight far inferior
to ours, which proclaimed with triumph over the frowns of death. 'I
shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness.' Would that those
who have so much more for faith to build on, built as nobly as did
these!

The gift has in itself no limit short of participation in the likeness
of Christ. In another place in this letter the measure of that might
which is the guarantee of Christian hope is set forth with an abundance
of expression which might almost sound as an unmeaning accumulation of
synonyms, as being 'according to the working of the strength of His
might which He wrought in Christ'; and what is the range of the working
of that might is disclosed to our faith in the Resurrection of Jesus,
and the setting of Him high above all rule and authority and power and
lordship and every creature in the present or in any future. Paul's
continual teaching is that the Resurrection of Jesus Christ was wrought
in Him, not as a mere human individual but as our head and
representative. Through Him we rise, not only from an ethical death of
sin and separation from God, but we shall rise from physical death, and
in Him the humblest believer possessing a vital union with the Lord of
life has a share in His dominion, and, as His own faithful word has
promised, sits with Him on His throne, even as He is set down with the
Father on His throne.

That gift has in itself no limit short of its own energy. In another
part of this epistle the Apostle indicates the measure up to which our
being filled is to take effect, as being 'all the fulness of God' and in
such an overwhelming vision breaks forth into fervent praise of Him who
is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, and
then supplies us with a measure which may widen and heighten our
petitions and expectations when He tells us that we are to find the
measure of God's working for us, not in the impoverishment of our
present possessions, but in the exceeding riches of the power that
worketh in us--that is to say, that we are to look for the limit of the
limitless gift in nothing short of the boundless energy of God Himself.
In the Epistle to the Colossians Paul uses the same illustration with an
individual reference to his own labours. In our text he associates with
himself all believers, as being conscious of a power working in them,
which is really the limitless power of God, and heartens them to
anticipate that whatever limitless power can effect in them will
certainly be theirs. God does not leave off till He has done and till He
can look upon His completed work and pronounce it very good.

III. This boundless grace is in each individual case bounded for the
time by our own faith.

When I lived near the New Forest I used to hear much of what they called
'rolling fences.' A man received or took a little piece of Crown land on
which he built a house and put round it a fence which could be
judiciously and silently pushed outwards by slow degrees and enclosed,
year by year, a wider area. We Christian people have, as it were, our
own small, cultivated plot on the boundless prairie, the extent of which
we measure for ourselves and which we can enlarge as we will. We have
been speaking of the various aspects under which the boundlessness of
the gift is presented by the Apostle, but there is another 'according
to' in Christ's own words, 'According to your faith be it unto you,' and
that statement lays down the practical limits of our present possession
of the boundless gift. We have as much as we desire; we have as much as
we take; we have as much as we use; we have as much as we can hold. We
are admitted into the treasure house, and all around us lie ingots of
gold and vessels full of coins; we ourselves determine how much of the
treasure should be ours, and if at any time we feel like empty-handed
paupers rather than like possible millionaires, the reason lies in our
own slowness to take that which is freely given to us of God. His word
to us all is, 'Ye are not straitened in Me, ye are straitened in
yourselves.' It is well for us to keep ever before us the boundlessness
of the gift in itself and the working limit in ourselves which
conditions our actual possession of the riches. For so, on the one hand,
should we be encouraged to expect great things from God, and, on the
other hand, be humbled by the contrast between what we might be and what
we are. The river that rushes full of water from the throne can send but
a narrow and shallow trickle through the narrow channel choked with much
rubbish, which we provide for it. It is of little avail that the sun in
the heavens pours down its flood of light and warmth if the windows of
our hearts are by our own faults so darkened that but a stray beam,
shorn of its brightness and warmth, can find its way into our darkness.
The first lesson which we have to draw from the contrast between the
boundlessness of the gift and the narrow limits of our individual
possession and experience of it, is the lesson of penitent recognition
and confession of the unbelief which lurks in our strongest faith. 'Lord
I believe, help Thou mine unbelief,' should be the prayer of every
Christian soul.

Not less surely will the recognition that the form and amount of the
grace of God, which is possessed by each, is determined by the faith of
each, lead to tolerance of the diversity of gifts. We have received our
own proper gift of God, that which the strength and purity of our faith
is capable of possessing, and it is not for us to carp at our brethren,
either at those in advance of us or at those behind us. We have to
remember that as it takes all sorts of people to make up a world, so it
takes all varieties of Christian character to make a church. It is the
body and not the individual members which represents Christ to the
world. The firmest adherence to our own form of the universal gift will
combine with the widest toleration of the gifts of others. The white
light appears when red, green, and blue blend together, not when each
tries to be the other. 'Every man hath his own proper gift of God, one
after this fashion and another after that,' and we shall be true to the
boundlessness of the gift and to the limitations of our own possession
of it, in the measure of which we combine obedience to the light which
shines in us, with thankful recognition of that which is granted to
others.

The contrast between these two must be kept vivid if we would live in
the freedom of the hope of the glory of God, for in the contrast lies
the assurance of endless growth. A process is begun in every Christian
soul of which the only natural end is the full possession of God in
Christ, and that full possession can never be reached by a finite
creature, but that does not mean that the ideal mocks us and retreats
before us like the pot of gold, which the children fancy is at the end
of the rainbow. Rather it means a continuous succession of our
realisations of the ideal in ever fuller and more blessed reality. In
this life we may, on condition of our growth in faith, grow in the
possession of the fulness of God, and yet at each moment that possession
will be greater, though at all moments we may be filled. In the
Christian life to-morrow may be safely reckoned as destined to be 'as
yesterday and much more abundant,' and when we pass from the
imperfections of the most perfect earthly life, there will still remain
ever before us the glory, which, according to the measure of our
capacity, is also in us, and we shall draw nearer and nearer to it, and
be for ever receiving into our expanding spirits more and more of the
infinite fulness of God.

THE GOAL OF PROGRESS

     'Till we all attain unto the unity of the faith and of the
      knowledge of the Son of God, unto a full grown man, unto the
      measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.'--Eph. iv. 13
      (R.V.).

The thought of the unity of the Church is much in the Apostle's mind in
this epistle. It is set forth in many places by his two favourite
metaphors of the body and the temple, by the relation of husband and
wife and by the family. It is contemplated in its great historical
realisation by the union of Jew and Gentile in one whole. In the
preceding context it is set forth as already existing, but also as lying
far-off in the future. The chapter begins with an earnest exhortation to
preserve this unity and with an exhibition of the oneness which does
really exist in body, spirit, hope, lord, faith, baptism. But the
Apostle swiftly passes to the corresponding thought of diversity. There
are varieties in the gifts of the one Spirit; whilst each individual in
the one whole receives his due portion, there are broad differences in
spiritual gifts. These differences do not break the oneness, but they
may tend to do so; they are not causes of separation and do not
necessarily interfere with unity, but they may be made so. Their
existence leaves room for brotherly helpfulness, and creates a
necessity for it. The wiser are to teach; the more advanced are to lead;
the more largely gifted are to encourage and stimulate the less richly
endowed. Such outward helps and brotherly impartations of gifts is, on
the one hand, a result of the one gift to the whole body, and is on the
other a sign of, because a necessity arising from, the imperfect degree
in which each individual has received of Christ's fulness; and these
helps of teaching and guidance have for their sole object to make
Christian men able to do without them, and are, as the text tells us, to
cease when, and to last till, we all attain to the fulness of Christ. To
Paul, then, the manifest unity of the Church was to be the end of its
earthly course, but it also was real, though incomplete, in the present,
and the emphasis of our text is not so much laid on telling us when this
oneness was to be manifested as in showing us in what it consists. We
have here a threefold expression of the true unity, as consisting in a
oneness of relation to Christ, a consequent maturity of manhood and a
perfect possession of all which is in Christ.

I. The true unity is oneness of relation to Christ.

The Revised Version is here to be preferred, and its 'attain unto'
brings out the idea which the Authorised Version fails to express, that
the text is intended to point to the period at which Christ's provision
of helpful gifts to the growing Church is to cease, when the individuals
composing it have come to their destined unity and maturity in Him. The
three clauses of our text are each introduced by the same preposition,
and there is no reason why in the second and third it should be rendered
'unto' and in the first should be watered down to 'in.'

There are then two regions in which this unity is to be realised. These
are expressed by the great words, 'the unity of the faith and knowledge
of the Son of God.' These words are open to a misunderstanding, as if
they referred to a unity as between faith and knowledge; but it is
obvious to the slightest reflection that what is meant is the unity of
all believers in regard to their faith, and in regard to their
knowledge. It is to be noted that the Apostle has just said that there
is one faith, now he points to the realisation of that oneness as the
very end and goal of all discipline and growth. I suppose that we have
to think here of the manifold and sad differences existing in Christian
men, in regard to the depth and constancy and formative power of their
faith. There are some who have it so strong and vigorous that it is a
vision rather than a faith, a trust, deep and firm and settled, to which
the present is but the fleeting shadow, and the unseen the eternal and
only reality; but, alas! there are others in whom the light of faith
burns feebly and flickers. Nor are these differences the attributes of
different men, but the same man varies in the power of his faith, and we
all of us know what it is to have it sometimes dominant over our whole
selves, and sometimes weak and crushed under the weight of earthly
passions. To-day we may be all flame, to-morrow all ice. Our faith may
seem to us to be strong enough to move mountains, and before an hour is
past we may find it, by experience, to be less than a grain of mustard
seed. 'Action and reaction are always equal and contrary,' and that law
is as true in reference to our present spiritual life as it is true in
regard to physical objects. We have, then, the encouragement of such a
word as that of our text for looking forward to and straining towards
the reversal of these sad alterations in a fixed and continuous faith
which should grasp the whole Christ and should always hold Him. There
may still be diversities and degrees, but each should have his measure
always full. 'Thy Sun shall no more go down'; there will no longer be
the contrast between the flashing waters of a flood-tide and the dreary
mud-banks disclosed at low water. We shall stand at different points,
but the faces of all will be turned to Him who is the Light of all, and
every face will shine with the likeness of His, when we see Him as He
is.

But our text points us to another form of unity--the oneness of the
knowledge of the Son of God.

The Apostle uses an emphatic term which is very familiar on his lips to
designate this knowledge. It means not a mere intellectual apprehension,
but a profound and vital acquaintance, dependent indeed upon faith, and
realised in experience. It is the knowledge for which Paul was ready to
'count all things but loss' that he might know Jesus, and winning which
he would count himself to 'have apprehended.' The unity in this deep and
blessed knowledge has nothing to do with identity of opinion on the
points which have separated Christians. It is not to be sought by
outward unanimity, nor by aggregation in external communities. The
Apostle's great thought is made small and the truth of it is falsified
when it is over-hastily embodied in institutions. It has been sought in
a uniformity which resembles unity as much as a bundle of faggots, all
cut to the same length, and tied together with a rope, resemble the tree
from which they were chopped, waving in the wind and living one life to
the tips of its furthest branches. Men have made out of the Apostle's
divine vision of a unity in the faith and knowledge of the Son of God 'a
staunch and solid piece of framework as any January could freeze
together,' and few things have stood more in the way of the realisation
of his glowing anticipations than the formation of the great
Corporation, imposing from its bulk and antiquity, to part from which
was branded as breaking the unity of the spirit.

Paul gives no clear definition here of the time when the one body of
Christian believers should have attained to the unity of the faith and
knowledge of the Son of God, and the question may not have presented
itself to him. It may appear that in view of the immediate context he
regards the goal as one to be reached in our present life, or it may be
that he is thinking rather of the Future, when the Master 'should bring
together every joint and member and mould them into an immortal feature
of loveliness and perfection.' But the time at which this great ideal
should be attained is altogether apart from the obligation pressing upon
us all, at all times, to work towards it. Whensoever it is reached it
will only be by our drawing 'nearer, day by day, each to his brethren,
all to God,' or rather, each to God and so all to his brethren. Take
twenty points in a great circle and let each be advanced by one half of
its distance to the centre, how much nearer will each be to each? Christ
is our unity, not dogmas, not polities, not rituals: our oneness is a
oneness of life. We need for our centre no tower with a top reaching to
heaven, we have a living Lord who is with us, and in Him, we being many,
are one.

II. Oneness in faith and knowledge knits all into a 'perfect man.'

'Perfect,' the Apostle here uses in opposition to the immediately
following expression in the next verse, of 'children.' It therefore
means not so much moral perfection as maturity or fulness of growth. So
long as we fall short of the state of unity we are in the stage of
immaturity. When we come to be one in faith and knowledge we have
reached full-grown manhood. The existence of differences belongs to the
infancy and boyhood of the Church, and as we grow one we are putting
away childish things. What a contrast there is between Paul's vision
here and the tendency which has been too common among Christians to
magnify their differences, and to regard their obstinate adherence to
these as being 'steadfastness in the faith'! How different would be the
relations between the various communities into which the one body has
been severed, if they all fully believed that their respective
shibboleths were signs that they had not yet attained, neither were
already perfect! When we began to be ashamed of these instead of
glorying in them we should be beginning to grow into the maturity of our
Christian life.

But the Apostle speaks of 'a perfect man' in the singular and not of
'men' in the plural, as he has already described the result of the union
of Jew and Gentile as being the making 'of twain one new man.' This
remarkable expression sets forth, in the strongest terms, the vital
unity which connects all members of the one body so closely that there
is but one life in them all. There are many members, but one body. Their
functions differ, but the life in them all is identical. The eye cannot
say to the hand, 'I have no need of thee,' nor again the head to the