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 THE AVERA 
 
 Bible Collection. 
 
 Library of Trinity College, 
 DURHAM, N. C. 
 
 , AY 12 10N7 
 Received MAY bs 
 
 
 

 
 
 
vy 
 
 
 

 

 

 
 
 
 THE 
 PRACTICAL COMMENTARY 
 
 on the 
 
 
 
 
 New Testament 
 
 
 
 
 Edited by 
 
 
 
 
 Ww. Robertson Nicoll 
 M.A., LL.D. - 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 - 
 ‘ 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 The 
 PRAC FICAL 
 COMMENTARY 
 
 On the New Testament 
 
 Edited by 
 
 W.ROBERTSON NICOLL, LL.D., D.D. 
 Editor of ‘‘ The Expositor’s Bible’ 
 
 Volume I. Colossians and Thessalonians, 
 Jos—EpH PARKER, D.D. 
 
 Volume II. Ephesians, JosEPpH Parker, D.D. 
 Volume III. Peter, | Pe ist: Jowett 
 Volume IV. Mark, G. H. Morrison 
 
 Others to be announced. 
 
 These volumes are the first to be announced of a 
 great new undertaking similar to the universally 
 known Expositor’s Bible. It will be under the direc- 
 tion of the editor of that great work, Dr. W. Robert- 
 son Nicoll, editor of the British Weekly, and its 
 volumes will be the work of the foremost living theo- 
 logians. Thoroughly alive to the necessity of taking 
 advantage of every help that modern scholarship ~ 
 offers, this commentary will at the same time retain 
 a healthy conservatism of judgment, and its field of 
 usefulness will therefore be as large as its great fore- 
 runner, “ The Expositor’s Bible.” 
 
 Every volume of this set will be printed on spe- 
 cially made paper, handsomely and strongly bound in 
 extra cloth, size crown octavo. 
 
 Price per volume, $1.25, Net 
 
THE EPISTLE TO THE 
 
 EPHESIANS 
 
 By 
 JOSEPH PARKER, D.D. 
 
 ae 
 
 NEW YORK 
 A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 
 3&5 West 182 Srreer, NEAR 5t2 AVENUE 
 19 
 
 
 

 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CHAPTER I : ° : : ° ° . 1 
 CHAPTER II : j - : 5 . . ae Ss 
 CHAPTER III ‘ : - : : 5 A oO 
 CHAPTER IV : . ; : : : : Econ 
 CHAPTER V : : : : * . : . 149 
 
 SHABERES- VECo a ok soc Cah Aeon 
 
 2264 
 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 EPHESIANS Ss 
 

 
CHAPTER I 
 
 HE first striking term which I observe 
 : in this eloquent letter is in chapter i. 
 
 22, 23—‘‘the Church, which is His body.” 
 We have lived so much downwards and back- 
 wards that we need to be reminded what the 
 Apostle meant when he used the two words 
 “the Church.” Is it magnifying unduly the 
 ignorance of a country in which Bible-reading 
 is well-nigh obsolete to suggest that not one 
 man in ten could say definitively and with 
 the authority of Holy Scripture what the 
 expression “the Church” means? Such 
 ignorance would stupefy and dishearten the 
 most zealous and optimistic teacher of reli- 
 gion. Christians themselves so rarely know 
 what is meant by the designation “the 
 Church ”—so great that it needs no defining 
 epithet. We have hung all manner of false 
 jewellery upon the neck of this darling of 
 
 1 
 
D) THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 God: we, who abhor idolatry, are amongst 
 the greatest idolators of all. Roman Church, 
 Anglican Church, Nonconformist Church | all 
 manner of little patchy, discrediting, and 
 unworthy adjectives have we attached to 
 the great word Church. Yea, and there be 
 those who would say, if you uttered that word 
 simply, “‘To what church do you refer?” 
 Why, there is only one Church. God makes 
 no reference to any other church. It is the 
 Church which Christ purchased with His 
 own blood. That Church He declares to be 
 His incarnation, His body, His visibleness ; 
 and we, having nothing to do—idle dogs !— 
 have invented adjectives and terms of 
 limitation. which we have attached to the 
 word Church. What higher, nobler defini- 
 tion could be found than that which the 
 Apostle himself supplies—the body of Christ, 
 the new incarnation, the multifold per- 
 sonality ? But we thought the Church was 
 an institution. Only in a very limited sense 
 is that true. It is Christ—His own very 
 self. Do not go to the worst instances you 
 can find of personal Church-membership so- 
 called, and ask, in bantering and satiric 
 
THE EPHESIANS 3 
 
 tones, whether such instances are to be 
 regarded as the body of Christ. That is 
 unjust criticism; that is unpardonable ig- 
 norance: it is not a standard to which you 
 would like to submit your own character. 
 This is not a question of instances of 
 infirmity, mutilation, incompleteness, and 
 the like. There is a nerve running through 
 the whole conception symbolised by the 
 word Church, which lifts it into a new 
 definition and a complete and permanent 
 influence. Are we to be taken in our very 
 lowest moods, and to be judged when we 
 are hardly men, so borne down by infirmity, 
 so swallowed up of sorrow, so given away 
 to evil passion, envy, jealousy, malice, and 
 all uncharitableness? And when we are at 
 that zero would it be right for even the 
 devil to say, “‘ These indicate what a miserable 
 and worthless creature you are”? It is not 
 so that God judges. He takes us at our 
 best and highest and sweetest, and inter- 
 prets us by the poetry and the music of 
 love into the body of Christ. Sometimes 
 ideality is taken as the ultimate fact; not 
 what we are, but what we are meant to be, 
 
4 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 and what we will be by the grace and love 
 of God and the energy of His Spirit, must 
 be regarded as the fact if we would be just 
 to the kingdom of God. 
 
 Think, therefore, of the Church as the 
 continued Christ. Do not look wildly round 
 and ask where the Christ of nineteen centuries 
 is; do not say, ‘‘ Lo, He will come in this form 
 or in that form, from this place or from that 
 place.” The apostolic conception authorises 
 us to say that Jesus Christ is here, and is 
 made visible in His Church, and that He 
 regards the Church not in its actual or tran- 
 sitory condition, but in its idealistic meaning, 
 its final completeness, its heavenly music. 
 We know that at present it is in many 
 respects a poor Church; but God sees some- 
 thing within the poverty, and beyond the 
 poverty; and, recognising that something, 
 Jesus Christ is already satisfied with the 
 travail of His soul. Blessed be God for the 
 telescope! the great spiritual instrument that 
 enables us to see through the clouds and 
 beyond the stars to the finished heavens 
 where the morning star burns for ever. 
 
 A beautiful word we also find in chapter ii. 
 
THE EPHESIANS 5 
 
 5—the word “grace.” ‘ By grace ye are 
 saved’; “the riches of his grace” (verse 7). 
 What does “ grace”’ mean? Is it too much 
 to say that not one man in fifty really knows 
 the meaning of the word “grace,” except in 
 some narrow and superficial dictionary sense P 
 Theword “grace” is the Gospel in one syllable ; 
 the word “ grace ’—beautiful as a dewdrop, 
 perfect as a star—holds within it all God’s 
 eternity, all God’s redeeming purpose. If we 
 could explain the word “grace” we should 
 drive off much irreligion and recover much 
 lost ground, and establish in confidence many 
 a weary and divided mind. I know the word 
 is a Bible word; that is not enough. We 
 are sure the word “ grace”’ can be found in the 
 New Testament ; that is far from enough— 
 in fact, that amounts to next to nothing. 
 The word “grace”’ is not only to be found in 
 the Holy Book; it is to be found in human 
 life, in human intercourse, in the family, in 
 the market-place—everywhere. It is grace 
 that triumphs over law. How far could this 
 be explained to the slowest and darkest mind ? 
 If it could be explained, the explanation 
 would be a revelation. We must not keep 
 
6 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 within theological limitations if we are to 
 explain such a word, so that the most plebeian 
 mind can catch the light of its fire; we must. 
 go into common places, into the resorts of 
 men, and even into the household life of the 
 people. Would God they could see it! “By 
 grace ye are saved”; not by law, not by 
 works, but by pure favour, love, condescen- 
 sion, pity, and divine help. But how can 
 it be made clear to the people who do not 
 want to have it clarified—to the English 
 heathen? Let me suppose that you have 
 forfeited the confidence of an employer, a 
 father, a friend, a state. You do not deny 
 the forfeiture of the confidence. You reply, 
 ‘“T am unable to make any such denial; I 
 have done the things I ought not to have 
 done.”” Have you broken the commandments ? 
 Yes. Have you been dishonest? I have. 
 Do you wish to be restored? I do. Will 
 law ever restore you? Never; law has done 
 with me, the law has condemned me, the law 
 has marked me with its black stigma—black 
 as the soot of hell. Then what is to be done ? 
 I have no idea what is to be done; I know 
 that I have done the things that I ought not 
 
THE EPHESIANS 7 
 
 to have done, there is no health in me; I dare 
 not open the Book of the law, it would be 
 like opening a great furnace door and letting 
 the scorching fire out upon my very face. 
 The thing to be done is this: as your pastor, 
 teacher, or friend, I will go with you, and 
 we will see the employer or friend whose 
 confidence you have forfeited. That is the 
 only way. We go to him and say, ‘* Wrong 
 has been done to you, a grievous wrong ; 
 we have no defence, we have no explanation, 
 but the offender is broken-hearted about it— 
 he falls down before you and begs you to 
 forgive him and restore him; he has no 
 defence; we say that again and again with 
 the utmost emphasis and clearness; I have 
 come with him to say this for him, for he 
 is so choked with grief he can hardly say 
 it for himself”; now let me say to you, “ Be 
 Godlike, and on the basis of the man’s 
 repentance forgive him—on the basis of his 
 broken-hearted penitence give him another 
 chance. What is your answer? Never has 
 man so grand an opportunity as when he 
 has an opportunity of forgiving some other 
 man on the basis of penitence.” And the 
 
8 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 employer or friend feels the pathos of the 
 occasion, acknowledges that there is no appeal 
 to the law—the law is cast iron, absolutely 
 inflexible—and says, “On that ground I 
 cannot look at this offender; but if he is 
 broken-hearted and penitent, who am I that 
 I should stand out against him? One day I 
 may have need of forgiveness myself; in the 
 name of God I forgive thee, and ask thee 
 to re-establish thyself by faithful service.” 
 What brought about that conclusion? Law ? 
 Never: law could not do it. What, then, 
 brought it about? Grace, free grace, nothing 
 but grace. That is the Gospel case so far as 
 some poor human parallel can dimly indicate 
 it. That is the position in which we stand 
 to the law. The law cannot accommodate 
 itself; the law cannot feel; the law has no . 
 compassionate heart. The law is definite, 
 distinct, inflexible, final. But there is a 
 higher power; there is grace, there is pity, 
 there is condescending love. And so it is 
 with the Gospel of Christ; and we shall 
 one day come back to the sweet, sweet old 
 hymn, ‘“ Free grace and dying love.” That 
 is the Gospel; other gospel there is none 
 
THE EPHESIANS 9 
 
 that is effective to the salvation of the soul. 
 What wonder, therefore, that the Apostle 
 Paul seemed to make a special jewel of the 
 word “ grace,” and to wear it as the crown 
 star on his grateful heart ? 
 
 A wonderful expression occurs in chapter 
 ii. 7—“ that in the ages to come.” What a 
 grip of things these men had! They are 
 not occupied with frivolous subjects, with 
 current topics, with the anecdote of the day; 
 they see far, they have insight as well as 
 foresight, and they measure the divine move- 
 ment by ages as well as by moments. This 
 is the only true measurement of the con- 
 ception of the kingdom of heaven. This is 
 the only conception of a nation’s develop- 
 ment and progress; not what it is at one 
 particular moment or under one special set 
 of circumstances, but what it is in its 
 diameter, in its circumference, in the accre- 
 tions and traditions of a thousand years. 
 Jesus Christ, therefore, is in a sense waiting ; 
 He is looking for the restoration of things, 
 and working towards it. We must not in- 
 terrupt divine processes; a semicolon is not 
 a fullstop ; the literature of God is written 
 
10 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 by the hand of God, and He must punctuate 
 His own poetry. Let us, therefore, not be 
 impatient, and thus show our ignorance. 
 Do not let us rush in with explanations, 
 and thus show our imperfectness and im- 
 maturity of mind. This Gospel belongs to 
 ages—ages past, ages to come; stretching 
 from the unbeginning beginning to the end- 
 less end. 
 
 What a beautiful expression is in chapter 
 ii. 16—“‘ reconcile.” What does “ reconcile” 
 mean? Bringing things that were at vari- 
 ance into union; bringing voices that were 
 out of tune into perfect accord; bringing 
 hearts that were mutually hostile into a 
 common understanding. How can this re- 
 conciliation— accepting it as a Bible word— 
 be brought about P Only by grace. Recon- 
 ciliations that are based on compromise 
 are very temporary conveniences-—there is 
 nothing in them. It is not enough to say, 
 “Let it be dropped, let the quarrel cease, say 
 nothing more about the enmity.” You have 
 not extinguished the enmity when you have 
 given it an opiate and plunged it into 
 a narcotic sleep. Reconciliation must be 
 
THE EPHESIANS 11 
 
 fundamental; it must go through and 
 through the very heart, tissue, and substance 
 of things; and it is by Christ that we have 
 received the reconciliation. 
 
 A wondrous word is in chapter ili, 3— 
 “revelation.”” We now call it “ discovery.” 
 In the old, old time men called it ‘ revela- 
 
 _tion.” When the old prophets saw the inner 
 meaning of things they said, ‘‘' Thus saith the 
 Lord’; and that is as true in geometry as 
 it is in theology. Do not let us be atheistic 
 in mathematics, and partially pious when 
 we are singing hymns. If you can establish 
 as an axiom any mathematical truth you 
 would be perfectly justified in saying, ‘“‘ Thus 
 saith the Lord.” You could call it “a dis- 
 covery,” and give no social offence; or you 
 could call it ‘‘a revelation,” and be set down 
 as a fanatic. Choose your own word. The 
 Apostle Paul never scrupled to use the word 
 “revelation.” It implies that God trained 
 his vision to bear a certain light ; it therefore 
 implies that a certain light was granted to 
 the Apostle at a definite time, and it also 
 promises to the whole redeemed Church of 
 Christ continual growth in the knowledge 
 
12 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 of Christ as well as in His grace. We ought 
 not to be shocked when we hear that a man 
 of prayer—of deepest, highest, truest faith— 
 has had a revelation from God. Why should 
 it be thought a thing incredible indeed 
 that God should speak to those who sleep 
 on the soft bosom of His love? If we had 
 greater expectations we should have greater 
 realisations ; we have only lost the revelation 
 because we have lost the child-heart. 
 Notice how wonderfully the Apostle keeps 
 almost throughout the whole epistle to the 
 house idea—to the family conception. Hence 
 we have such words as “household,” “ the 
 whole family in heaven and in earth”— 
 husbands, wives, parents, children, servants. 
 This Gospel goes through the whole house, 
 omitting not a single chamber, creating a 
 right atmosphere, and bringing all things 
 into a harmony too deep for explanation, too» 
 grand for verbal discussion. You cannot 
 be hanging little mottoes round the house 
 to teach one another how good you ought 
 to be to somebody else. This can only 
 be done—this great mystery of reconcilia- 
 tion—by all being rooted in Christ, by all 
 
THE EPHESIANS 13 
 
 drawing the living water from the same 
 living fountain; and then there will be no 
 need of explanations and concessions and 
 compromises, and sighings about what I 
 have to bear and what I have to endure. 
 If you talk so, join the atheists; we do 
 not want you at the table of the Lord. 
 They who are really in Christ Jesus do not 
 arrange a household life of compromise; 
 they fall into each other’s arms and hearts 
 and ways by a mysterious, by a divine 
 sympathy and trust. 
 
 The Apostle has a special word in chapter 
 vi. 9—“ Neither is there respect of persons 
 with Him”; that is, with God or Christ, 
 or, as He is called in the text, ‘“‘ the Master.” 
 But there must be respect of persons with 
 God. But he says there is no respect of 
 persons with God. Neither is there. But 
 how can these statements both be right? 
 Easily. What does the word “person” 
 mean here? Have you traced the meaning 
 of the word ‘person’ through the New 
 Testament Greek? Have you the shadow 
 of an idea as to what “‘ person ’”’ means in this 
 particular relation? The word “person” is a 
 
14 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 common word in the New Testament. God 
 loves some persons. Yes. Therefore He does 
 not love some other persons. Quite right. 
 But it is said He is no respecter of persons. 
 Perfectly so. The word “ person” isa peculiar 
 word in Paul and in James, and perhaps in 
 other places. Persona, as we should say 
 in modern times—a persona grata. My lord, 
 what is that? Next to nothing. What then 
 does “‘ person”? mean in this particular text ? 
 Mask. The Lord is no respecter of masks. 
 There is a personality of mere estate, fortune, 
 position, environment ; the Lord cares nothing 
 for such persons. There is a personality of 
 soul, character, mind, the inner selfhood ; 
 there God distinguishes between the right 
 and the wrong, between the good and the 
 bad, between those who know Him and those 
 who know Him not. We are living in an 
 outside age, we have enlarged the shop 
 window; and the Lord cares nothing for 
 your masks, vizors, shells; He wants to 
 know about the kernel, the soul, the charac- 
 ter; that is the man. Outside selves soon 
 fall away. It is with nations as it is with 
 men. When the individual man becomes a 
 
THE EPHESIANS 15 
 
 mere mask there will be found nothing in 
 him at the last. When a nation becomes a 
 mere mask it will lose all its battles, and 
 IT am glad of it. When a nation gives up 
 its Bible-reading it gives up its soldiering 
 as well. You cannot have soldiers where 
 the national discipline is neglected or im- 
 perfect ; your soldiers will be no better than 
 your nations. Of course, now and again we 
 shall all be delighted because a few soldiers 
 have got on the top of a little hill; that 
 ascent of a cock to a barren dunghill will 
 be telegraphed all over, and will amount to 
 nothing. It would be amusing, if it were 
 not tragical and heartrending, to see how 
 greatly excited we are because somebody has 
 got to the top of the stairs and found nobody 
 else on the landing. When the nation loses 
 its Bible, it loses its fighting power. You 
 cannot reject God, and be good fighters. 
 People who are Bible-reading and psalm- 
 singing will pound the atheistic nation to 
 dust. They will be laughed at as snuffling, 
 fanatical. Cromwells; but Cromwell did not 
 lose much. When you lose God you lose 
 your generals. When you have scorned the 
 
16 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 marriage bond, and marry for convenience, 
 for social purposes of a minor nature—when 
 the sacred household altar is turned into a 
 mere stool of penitence—the nation has gone 
 down. When the highest parts of any capital 
 —its most wealthy, educated, and supposedly 
 refined parts, sections, and neighbourhoods— 
 have gone down in moral character; when 
 in the middle of such society there is nothing 
 but a bed of lust; the nation has gone 
 down, and all its battles will end in smoke, 
 disappointment, and disorder. Families and 
 nations are only finally kept together by 
 discipline, by love of work, by service, by 
 early rising, by self-denial, by trust in God, 
 by sevenfold daily prayer. You can try the 
 other policy if you will, and God will find His 
 vindication in the history of His own world. 
 Men cannot lose religion without losing a 
 great deal more. No man can give up Bible- 
 reading and all that Bible-reading implies 
 and necessitates without robbing somebody, 
 or dishonouring somebody, or falsifying some 
 sacred trust. You cannot take the keystone 
 out of the bridge and leave the bridge as 
 strong as it was before. And now some 
 
THE EPHESIANS dt; 
 
 fanatical idlers have proposed that we should 
 have a day of humiliation and prayer. No! 
 We do not want a day of humiliation and 
 prayer; we want a life of humiliation and 
 prayer. This is not an opportunity for occa- 
 sional piety, for the fasting that eats more 
 than ever, for the humiliation that loses 
 nothing of its pride. These are occasions 
 for life-long fasting, penance, discipline, 
 companionship with Christ, and identification 
 with the spirit of the Cross, 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 WOULD like to read to you in the 
 
 second chapter of Paul’s Epistle to 
 the Ephesians. Would you like to hear 
 the reading? We must stop now and 
 then to modernise and apply the deep, 
 sweet meaning. 
 
 The Apostle Paul is not always just the 
 same. He is consistent, but never mono- 
 tonous. He is a sevenfold man; his epistles 
 are his truest photograph. Have you ever 
 read the epistles in the light of that sugges- 
 tion ?>—not only to find out what the epistles 
 are, but what their author was. He never 
 wearies us, because he has a great gift of 
 escaping monotony. He is rugged, incohe- 
 rent, sometimes almost verbally self-contra- 
 dictory ; he is full of parentheses, he makes 
 
 great use of bracketings and asides and 
 18 
 
EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 19 
 
 literary diversions, yet all the while there 
 is a wholeness which eyes that love him 
 can perfectly discern. In some epistles he 
 is argumentative, almost contentious; he 
 is pushing a point upon the attention of 
 his correspondents, and he wants to establish 
 a plea. He is not so enjoyable in such 
 epistles. He sometimes elicits pity for the 
 other man. He is heroic in his logic and 
 destructive in his conclusions ; then I some- 
 times prefer to turn over a page. To the 
 Colossians, the Ephesians, he is as it were 
 in another sense more vividly and tenderly 
 and approachably the Apostle of the grace 
 of God. In the Galatians he talks to the 
 Galatians; in the Corinthians he talks to 
 the Corinthians; they have their local dis- 
 putes and matters to adjust and to determine. 
 But to the Ephesians and the Colossians he 
 speaks universals, he reveals solar systems; 
 his strides are constellations; they are infi- 
 nitely wondrous in intellectual conception, in 
 imaginative and ideal colour and emphasis— 
 catholic epistles in very deed; addressed 
 to one church, but meant for all men and 
 all ages. 
 
20 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 We need such epistles many a time in tra- 
 versing the hills and the dales of life. There 
 are times when we are impatient with special 
 messages to special people, with letters of 
 explanation and contention; we want some- 
 thing more—we feel as if we could receive 
 all the sunshine and breathe all the air 
 and accommodate all the sparkling, flashing 
 fountains of living water. When we are in 
 such spiritual mood, we find all we want in 
 the great father-mother-brother-sister letters 
 to the Ephesians and to the Colossians. It 
 would be the soul’s fortune in the sterling 
 gold of heaven if our memories could charge 
 themselves with all the philosophy, theology, 
 and poetry of the two epistles to the Colos- 
 sians and to the Ephesians. They are great 
 banqueting-tables; if we change the figure, 
 they are great highland scenes with wondrous 
 panoramas of light and colour and mystery 
 and consolation. There are, I repeat, times 
 when we need every word of them—times 
 when we need the whole Godhead; for we 
 are poor, alone, sad, and lost, and God Him- 
 self is hardly enough to satisfy the creature 
 He has created. Who knows the epistles 
 
THE EPHESIANS 21 
 
 to the Ephesians and the Colossians? He 
 who knows them has bread to eat that the 
 world knows not of. Yet these very 
 epistles, so deep in their theology, so 
 wide in their outlook, so piercing in their 
 appeals, are full of ethical teaching and 
 moral reminiscence and penetrating rebuke. 
 Paul preached a full-orbed Gospel; he 
 went around the entire circle of divine 
 thought in so far as it is revealed to 
 human imagination. 
 Take the first verse as an example: 
 
 “And you hath He quickened, who were dead 
 in trespasses and sins.” 
 
 That verse is theology in one sentence: 
 you need no more. As we found in Gen. i. 1 
 all the Bible, so we find in Eph. ii. 1 
 the whole scheme of God and the whole 
 revelation of human history. You—dead, 
 quickened; you—alive, brought from the 
 dead. There are moral resurrections as well 
 as physical. How we boggle over some poor 
 little miracle in bodily resurrection, and for- 
 get the infinitely grander and greater miracle 
 of spiritual resurrection—the awakening 
 
22 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 of the soul, the calling back of strange 
 thoughts, whispering into the ear of moral 
 death, blowing some silver trumpet over 
 the grave of conscience, and awakening ~ 
 conscience to newness of life. But it is 
 the trick of man to worry himself over the 
 lowest points of things, to make a great 
 stir about minor quantities and subsidiary 
 agencies and applications; it is the nature 
 of the creature when he is left to himself. 
 He is greatly excited about the coming again 
 of a poor body that is not worth while 
 bringing back from the dust, but he passes 
 over in silence the bringing back of a dead 
 soul, the quickening of an inspired conscience, 
 the reconstruction of a moral temple: that 
 he cares not for. He says, “ With what 
 body will the dead come?” Poor worrying 
 creature! always wasting himself at the 
 wrong points and waiting midnight after 
 midnight at the wrong door. If God has 
 quickened man, He will see to all the rest. 
 Recall our lessons upon words that teach 
 by implication. We have seen that created 
 means provided; that provided means re- 
 deemed; that redeemed means ultimate 
 
THE EPHESIANS 23 
 
 sanctification and perfectness of manhood. 
 So with the word “quickened”; it carries 
 all the other evolution along with it; the 
 oak is in the acorn. 
 
 Verse 2: “ Wherein in time past ye walked accord- 
 ing to the course of this world, according to the 
 prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now 
 worketh in the children of disobedience.” 
 
 There is the world for you in one gloomy 
 sentence. This is Paul’s reading of moral 
 history. Paul was no fancy lecturer; Paul 
 did not write out a course of dreams and 
 call them a course of lectures: Paul recog- 
 nised that the air is full of the devil. The 
 devil has hardly left room for the summer 
 in all that air which he breathes and poisons. 
 He would edge out the summer if he could; 
 he tempts the spring; he says to that sweet 
 young thing, the vernal spirit, Blight, O 
 blossoms! Arise, O East Wind, and kill 
 the buds! choke those little birds in their 
 homely nest! It is the devil. Do not 
 attempt to argue him out of existence. 
 Some people try to argue him into exist- 
 ence; they have a devil on paper and in 
 
2A, THE EPISTLE TO . 
 
 the middle of a sealed creed which they feel 
 themselves to be at liberty to take into the 
 Court of Chancery to have the deed gram- 
 matically interpreted by a man who is learned 
 in the analysis of letters. But the Apostle 
 Paul assumed the devil, revealed him, de- 
 clared him, took him into account, lectured 
 upon him, defied him, sometimes was rebuffed 
 by him—* Satan hath hindered us.” There 
 is probably no way of getting the idea so 
 thoroughly into our dense minds as by repre- 
 senting the air, the whole atmosphere, as in 
 some mysterious and inexplicable sense the 
 sphere of the devil’s ministry. You can for 
 yourselves see what difficulty the sun has 
 with the atmosphere, the fog, the rain, the 
 east wind, the sea tormented, the crops 
 blighted, the fields naked when they should 
 be clothed with verdure. All this is but 
 for a time. Never undervalue the enemy ; 
 never underestimate his resources; take it 
 for granted that, whether you are fighting 
 spiritually or physically, you have a great 
 enemy to meet, and prepare yourselves ac- 
 cordingly, or you will lose the battle, and 
 you will deserve to lose it. 
 
THE HPHESIANS 25 
 
 Verse 3: “Among whom also we all had our 
 conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, 
 fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; 
 and were by nature the children of wrath, even as 
 others.” 
 
 That is not modern talk. We have schooled 
 ourselves by false schooling out of these great, 
 solemn, bedrock verities. The Apostle never 
 would have suffered for our poor superficial 
 theories; the Apostle would not have endured 
 suffering and gloried in tribulation because 
 he had received into his fancy some cobweb 
 theory of creation, its evolution and its destiny. 
 Not for such things did men preach in sorrow 
 and seal in blood. If we have little con- 
 ceptions about man and God, we shall have 
 a little crumbling church, always at war with 
 itself, and always losing the sham fights 
 which it challenges and invites. Marvellous 
 master was Paul! What deftness! what 
 magnanimity! what wondrous subtlety of 
 persuasiveness! “We all had our conversa- 
 tion.” This is no pedantic priest coming with 
 ferrule or rod to scourge some minor genera- 
 tion of men; this is a brother soul, this is a 
 kindred experience: I know it, I have suffered 
 
\ 
 i 
 
 ri 
 
 ~ 
 
 3 a THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 it, I recall the darkness, I remember the 
 mercy. It is preaching of Paul’s kind that 
 will reconstruct the Church. The Church of 
 Christ does not need reform. We have chosen 
 that little milk-and-water word, and we carry 
 it about with us as a kind of evening-party 
 
 trick or toy. We say, This or That must be 
 
 reformed. Jesus Christ never said so; He 
 did not like diluted terms; He never spake 
 a pale hesitant language into which you could 
 thrust a thousand qualifying parentheses. He 
 said, Repent! ye must be born again: make 
 the tree good; do not paint the branches— 
 hew down to the root and get the poison out. 
 We do not want a reformed Church: we 
 want a regenerated Church, a reconstructed 
 ‘Church, a Church of the Holy Ghost; not 
 a framework, scaffolding, or apparatus of 
 our own hired ecclesiastical imagination ; 
 we want a regenerated Church, every fibre, 
 every filament made pure, made chaste with 
 the sanctity of God. Beware of these little 
 church-jobbers who are going about reform- 
 ing any institution. When an institution 
 needs reforming it needs destroying, that 
 destruction may precede reconstruction; and 
 
THE EPHESIANS 27 
 
 that sense of inadequacy or unfaithfulness 
 may lead to a cry for the baptism of 
 regeneration. 
 
 Verses 4-6: “ But God, who is rich in mercy, for 
 His great love wherewith He loved us, even when we 
 were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with 
 Christ, (by grace ye are saved ;) and hath raised us 
 up together, and made us sit together in heavenly 
 places in Christ Jesus.” 
 
 “Us,” “us,” always “us ’—a priest who 
 invokes a benediction upon himself as well 
 as his people. That is brotherhood, that 
 is holy masonry. “God, who is rich in 
 mercy ’—not rich in thunderbolts only, not 
 rich in lightnings and tempests and great 
 whirlwinds. Mercy is the greater part of 
 Him: if we could but see it, His wrath is 
 sometimes an aspect of His mercy; He slays 
 the sinner that He may save him; He strips 
 me naked that He may clothe me with a 
 finer linen; He tears my nest to pieces that 
 He may show me how to find a larger and 
 warmer in some tree I had never thought 
 of. “Rich in mercy,” so that we may go 
 to Him at all times, and we see Him most 
 when we cannot see Him at all because 
 
28 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 of the burning tears of our unquenchable 
 grief. Put God’s mercy to the test; He 
 can bear a greater pressure still; lean hard, 
 harder, hardest, again; you cannot fatigue 
 Omnipotence. It was “when we were dead 
 in sins” that God showed the richness of 
 His mercy. It wes not when we were partly 
 recovering ourselves; it was actually when 
 we were dead in sins, and, being dead, 
 helpless, lost; it was then that the Sun of 
 Righteousness arose with healing in His 
 wings. God makes us now sit in heavenly 
 places—that is, in the heavenlies, in the 
 world above the world, in the unseen king- 
 dom. We trust the naked eye, and therefore 
 miss the grand astronomy. We call our eyes 
 of the body instruments of vision: whereas 
 they are only instruments of deception or 
 misinterpretation. True seeing is of the soul. 
 Every son of man is in heaven while he is 
 on the earth. This is a great mystery, but 
 I speak concerning Christ and His Church. 
 They who go about with a made candle 
 lighted by a made match will sometimes 
 come into passages where the swirling wind 
 will blow the lighted tallow out. What 
 
THE EPHESIANS 29 
 
 then? Live in the eternal, live in the 
 heavenlies; have a throne spiritual, a crown 
 imperishable, beauteously called “a crown 
 of life.’ © man, why be but a little higher 
 than the brutes when thou mightest be but 
 a little lower than the angels? 
 
 Verses 7,8: “That in the ages to come He might 
 show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kind- 
 ness toward us through Christ Jesus. For by grace 
 are ye saved through faith; and that not of your- 
 selves; it is the gift of God.” 
 
 Salvation is not by intellect, knowledge— 
 because then heaven would be full, if full 
 at all, of grammarians. I question whether 
 any grammarian can enter the kingdom of 
 heaven. I am now speaking of him in his 
 purely pedantic relationship. He must be 
 more than a grammarian: a grammarian he 
 may be, and a great grammarian, and a 
 grammarian of whom his fellows are justly 
 proud; but in relation to the kingdom of 
 heaven he must be something other, greater, 
 wiser—he must have a faculty within a 
 faculty that can see Jesus Christ as a little 
 child might see Him. If salvation were not 
 as the Apostle has placed it here, it would be 
 
30 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 an intellectual feat, perhaps sometimes degrad- 
 ing itself into an intellectual trick. But it 
 is of grace—‘‘ by grace are ye saved through 
 faith.” The world never invented these two 
 great words; the world does not understand 
 either of them. “ Grace,” ‘‘ faith ”—that is a 
 foreign tongue. It is! it is heaven’s tongue; 
 it is the tongue of the Infinite Love. Grace 
 means favour, pleasure, kindness, pure simple 
 love, appreciation ; it is a gift, not a bargain ; 
 it has no equivalent; the number stands 
 alone, and the sign of equal-to never follows 
 it. It is above algebra, above grammar. 
 
 Verse 9: “Not of works, lest any man should 
 boast.” 
 
 That is the very point. There must be no 
 boasting ; we must simply stand out and say, 
 It is the Lord’s doing, and marvellous in our 
 eyes. ‘‘ Not by works of righteousness which 
 we have done, but according to His mercy 
 hath He saved us, by the washing of re- 
 generation, and the renewing of the Holy 
 Ghost.” We have nothing to do with our 
 own making. We have nothing to do with 
 our physical birth; we have nothing to do 
 
THE EPHESIANS 31 
 
 with our superior or spiritual birth. For the 
 next verse says: 
 
 Verse 10: “ For we are His workmanship, created 
 in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath 
 before ordained that we should walk in them.” 
 
 Into what beautiful English might this be 
 rendered! Instead of saying “workmanship ”’ 
 speak the word that is almost Greek in its 
 very form—‘“ we are God’s poems.” God is 
 the Poet—we are the poems; He makes us 
 now in this measure, now in that measure; 
 now sublime, now more friendly and ap- 
 proachable, but always pregnant with thought 
 and love and music and mercy. Our souls, 
 like our bodies, are all dissimilar, yet each 
 soul is the poem of God. How so, Master— 
 how so? Through Christ Jesus, in Christ 
 Jesus, by the power of Jesus: the mystery 
 of the Cross. Man, if thou knowest not these 
 things in thy soul, and only through some 
 worm-eaten book of man’s writing, thou canst 
 not discuss this high theme, thou art not in 
 this great encounter with evil. Thou art 
 an outsider, ill-fed, ill-nourished, self-exiled. 
 Come in, and learn the language of the house, 
 the home! 
 
52 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Verse 11: ‘Wherefore remember, that ye being 
 in time past Gentiles in the flesh, who are called 
 Uncircumcision by that which is called the Cir- 
 cumcision in the flesh made by hands,” 
 
 Paul is now in the midst of one of his 
 characteristically tumultuous sentences. He 
 will come out of it all right; we must give 
 him time. Observe how urgent he is that 
 people should get a full view of things; how 
 specially anxious he always is that students 
 of the Christian revelation should not be 
 occupied by isolated phases and aspects, but 
 should get a whole view of Christ’s purpose 
 in addressing Himself to man’s condition. 
 Hence the Apostle says, “‘ Wherefore remem- 
 ber”; do not let yesterday escape without 
 record, or the long yesterday of the heathenish 
 state, but recall it, interrogate it, consider 
 exactly what it is and what is its relation to 
 your present condition and to the total idea of 
 the kingdom of God! Do not let us think 
 in detached days; do not let us break up the 
 great calendar of life into the little calendar 
 which is called a diary. History is a unity; 
 individual history is an integrity, complete 
 in itself in a certain well-understood sense. 
 
THE EPHESIANS 30 
 
 “Wherefore remember”: bring yesterday 
 to help to-day; bring yourselves as you 
 were a quarter of a century ago to interpret 
 your present sacrament of eating and drink- 
 ing; keep yourselves well together, focus the 
 mind, do not be led away by an anecdote, 
 but be instructed and illumined by a philo- 
 sophy. There is a right remembrance, and 
 there is a memory which is tormenting, and 
 which Jesus Christ gives us no permission 
 to cherish. We must therefore distinguish 
 between these acts of memory. We may so 
 remember the past as to be consolidated in 
 our faith and greatly cheered in our Christian 
 progress and spiritual development; or we 
 may be so affected by the past as to be utterly 
 depressed and disheartened, and be led to say, 
 by some seductive spirit, that it is no use 
 trying any more, for, batter on the kingdom 
 of heaven as we may, there is a door through 
 which our appeal cannot be heard. That is 
 fa degraded memory ; that is a false and mis- 
 chievous remembrance. The great memory 
 of the past is this, “‘ Where sin abounded 
 grace did much more abound.” You are not 
 to stop by the little muddled pool of your 
 
 3 
 
84 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 own sinfulness, but get away to the sea of 
 the infinite love. Thus keep memory in its 
 right place, have it always near at hand so 
 as to call it when needful, but have it so 
 thoroughly under control that memory itself 
 shall never become a spiritual temptation. 
 Do not carry about your dead self as a burden, 
 but catch some shadow of it that may be 
 useful in chastening the right moment and 
 in discouraging you from trusting too much 
 to your own good works and your own 
 self-righteousness. 
 
 You were ‘ called Uncircumeision by that 
 which is called the Circumcision in the flesh 
 made by hands.” You had a nickname. 
 The Christian sects are fond of nicknaming 
 one another. Sometimes they seem to have 
 nothing else to do; they think it is an 
 increase of their own piety to question the 
 piety of other people. They insist that 
 everybody shall do exactly as they do, or 
 they cannot be within the divine circle. So 
 the Gentiles were called Uncircumcision; 
 the knife had never cut them; they were 
 outside the pale. Whereas those who taunted 
 the Gentiles so were only circumcised in the 
 
THE EPHESIANS 35 
 
 flesh, cut in the body that is made for the 
 tomb—a poor circumcision, a cutting that 
 never touched the heart. So the Apostle 
 comes to the aid of those who have been 
 suffering from religious banter and mockery 
 and spite and contempt. He would say, in 
 effect, ‘‘ Never mind; they do call you the 
 Uncircumcision, but they themselves are not 
 really circumcised. That is the true circum- 
 cision which touches the heart, which brings 
 the scalpel or the penetrating knife to bear 
 upon the motive and the conscience and the 
 soul; he is a Jew who is one inwardly.” So 
 we must expect sometimes to be the subjects 
 of banter and mockery. It is a great pity 
 that persons should make little banners to 
 wave over their own heads, as if they were 
 elect and chosen to the exclusion of everybody 
 else. There is a circumcision made by hands ; 
 there is a poor evaporating baptism of water, 
 a miserable trick; there is a circumcision 
 made with a spiritual knife; there is a 
 baptism made by fire of the Holy Ghost, 
 that never evaporates, and it proves itself 
 by the fervour of the character, the noble- 
 ness of the manhood. 
 
36 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Verse 12: “That at that time ye were without 
 Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, 
 and strangers from the covenants of promise, having 
 
 no hope, and without God in the world.” 
 Remember that condition. The story of 
 heathenism has its part in our own spiritual 
 or Christian education. There was a time 
 when we were without Christ: did we put 
 ourselves into Christ? Never. How then 
 did we come to be in Christ? ‘“ We love 
 Him because He first loved us.” Does the 
 branch put itself into the vine? It either 
 grows out of the vine or it is grafted into 
 the vine by the husbandman who knows the 
 culture of the vine and can treat it accord- 
 ingly. “Not of works,” as we have read 
 in verse 9, “lest any man should boast.” No 
 branch should say, ‘“‘ I put myself into Christ, 
 I inserted myself into the Vine and caught 
 the holy wine of its living juice, and there- 
 fore I am as good as any other of the 
 branches.” All the vine must say, “ We are 
 of Christ”; all the branches must say, ‘‘ We 
 grow in Christ and out of Christ and by 
 Christ, and from beginning to end it is all 
 Christ.” “Not of works, lest any man 
 should boast,” pointing to his own little 
 
THE EPHESIANS 37 
 
 circumcisions and his own little miserable 
 arrangements, conjectures, and guesses ; 
 his own clever intellectual inventions and 
 theories, which will be scorched by the sun 
 -and vanish in smoke. “ Aliens from the com- 
 monwealth of Israel’: literally, Alienated 
 from the commonwealth of Israel; not aliens 
 in the sense of never being in it or never 
 being intended to be in it—worthless little 
 loose things that had no connection with the 
 universe, the mere rubbish of creation. That 
 is not the meaning, but, being alienated ; 
 as it were, self-alienated, self-expatriated 
 from the dear summer country in which God 
 meant us to live and to bear fruit; being 
 alienated, seduced, self-expelled ; always in- 
 cluded in the love and the purpose of God, 
 but self-excluded by reason of our falling 
 to the tempter when he seduced our souls. 
 There are souls that are outside the kingdom 
 of heaven; they have no right to be there, 
 because they are souls in the Biblical sense 
 of that term—they ought to be inside the 
 circle of the redeemed and the blessed. They 
 are outside, they are alienated; but inasmuch 
 as they are men, we go out after them in 
 
38 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 the name and in the power of the divine 
 grace, and say, *‘ Come in ; there is redemption 
 wrought for you ; come, come because you are 
 men, come because you are men redeemed— 
 come!” Let the missionary, the evangelist, 
 the holy, truly ordained propagandist go out 
 and say to those who are alienated and far off 
 and counted contemptible by the superficial 
 Circumcision, ‘‘Come in. God waits for 
 you, God has saved you; the worst first, 
 come!’ When the Gospel loses that tone of 
 welcome and of hospitality, it has ceased to 
 be a gospel: it is like a withered leaf blown 
 by the chill autumnal wind. What is the 
 case of most persons who are outside? They 
 are without Christ, and they have no hope, 
 and they are without God in the world. 
 They live, and yet do not live; they have 
 a name to live, and are yet dead; they are 
 not in the churches, they are but too willing 
 to blame the churches. We may be unjust 
 even to churches. It is for the churches 
 to fall back upon the awful process of self- 
 examination and pass the tribulum that they 
 may see what they are when they are torn 
 to pieces as it were by iron teeth. We are 
 
THE EPHESIANS 39 
 
 ~ not always to accept the verdict of those 
 who are outside upon those who are according 
 to their lights doing their best inside. For 
 my own part, I belong to all the denomi- 
 nations. I would not belong to any one 
 denomination, because it does not give me 
 room enough. I want the sky, not the 
 ceiling; I want the whole firmament of the 
 divine purpose, and not some little academic 
 or sectarian construction of the divine purpose 
 in creating and redeeming the world. There- 
 fore, belonging to all denominations in the 
 spirit of charity and appreciation, believing 
 that no one denomination is the total Church, 
 I can see good in all the communions, and 
 I see good where I strongly differ in opinion. 
 But what is opinion? where did it come 
 from ? who has any exclusive freehold rights 
 in opinion? We may be one in a great 
 purpose, united in a sublime loyalty. We 
 are of different politics, but we are of the 
 same patriotism. So in the Church of Christ 
 we have all these differences and conflicts, 
 and yet sometimes, blessed be God! there 
 are summer mornings so bright that we can 
 see through all the conflict and acknowledge 
 
40 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 that the spirit of the living Christ is in every 
 true heart, and that some people are of the 
 Christian disposition who have not yet groped 
 their way to the acceptance of the Christian 
 dogma. Charity is the best critic; love is a 
 judge that seldom errs. Let us therefore look 
 upon those who are outside in a philanthropic 
 spirit, and show them that we value them ; 
 they are not lost on the turnpikes of time, 
 but they are sought out, inquired for, and 
 earnestly yearned over by the spirit of re- 
 deeming love. That would give us a new 
 interest in missions, home and foreign. There 
 are those delightful English people so broad- 
 minded that they would let the heathen 
 alone. Where did these delightful, large- 
 minded Christians come from ? From heathen- 
 dom; there was a time when their ancestors 
 painted themselves blue, and did not wear 
 any clothes worth mentioning, and were not 
 indisposed to eat one another when circum- 
 stances seemed to point in the direction of 
 that kind of gruesome festival. Yet these 
 people who have come from heathenism 
 gather their fur cloaks around them, and 
 say that perhaps it would be just as well 
 
THE EPHESIANS 41 
 
 to let the heathen alone. Persons who talk 
 so never saw Christ, never felt the power of 
 His love, have absolutely nothing whatever 
 to do with Christ; and when they touch the 
 cup of His blood they bring their blasphemy 
 to a culmination. 
 
 Verse 13: “But now in Christ Jesus ye who 
 sometimes were far off are made nigh by the blood 
 of Christ.” 
 
 Verse 11, ‘‘ Wherefore remember” ; verse 18, 
 * But now.” ‘The influence of the past upon 
 the present, the uses of history as giving 
 a foil to present privileges and delights and 
 ineffable joys. We should not enjoy the 
 banquet so much if we did not remember 
 the days of hunger. There was a time when 
 we had no food, when we had no home, when 
 we were alienated from the commonwealth— 
 vagrants, outcasts, nomads—having nothing 
 to eat but what we took by thievery. ‘ But 
 now”! Who could value the gift of sight, 
 the man who has always had it, or the man 
 whose eyes have just been opened ? and, as 
 Sydney Smith says, the first thing the blind 
 man saw was his Creator—all sights in one. 
 
42 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 And we who have had our bodily sight all 
 this time have never seen the Creator at all. 
 Remember these musical words used by the 
 Apostle, “But now.” How different to-day ! 
 but now the summer warmth is round about 
 us, but now the sea has ceased to trouble, 
 and has become a uniting force binding 
 nation to nation. ‘Ye who sometimes were 
 far off.” What a picture this is of distance; 
 what an idea it is to bring the fact of distance 
 as a spiritual illustration and indeed an inter- 
 pretation given to the heart which the heart 
 can hardly resist! Now we who were far 
 off—on the other shore, in the unmeasured 
 wilderness, having no ideas, sympathies, 
 aspirations of a noble, pure, charitable, and 
 divine quality. “But now”! There is a 
 tone of suddenness in the exclamation. In 
 a certain sense conversion must always be 
 sudden: we see what we never saw before. 
 In a certain sense every sunrise is a novelty: 
 the sun can never be anticipated. We say 
 in our ignorance, looking on a landscape 
 dimly, through some murky atmosphere, ‘‘ We 
 can imagine what this landscape will be 
 when the sun is onit.”” No! light can never 
 
THE EPHESIANS 43 
 
 be imagined ; we imagine some poor aspect 
 or degree of it, but light is a daily surprise— 
 light looked at with wise eyes is a continual 
 miracle. We have seen the noonday light; 
 aye, but there is a light above the brightness 
 of the sun. No painters have imagined 
 that. They have painted the driven snow 
 and given some idea of white light on the 
 canvas; but the mystery is beyond the brush, 
 that any light can be above the brightness 
 of the sun—God’s symbol to us down here of 
 what He is if we could but see Him through 
 the meaning of the symbolism. You are 
 poor interpreters of nature if you are not 
 symbolical, if you are mere literalists; 
 everything should have a meaning to you, 
 and it is in the meaning that the thing is 
 defensible, if defensible at all. Why, the 
 very livery of the servant is a symbol; it 
 may mean what the servant never dreamed 
 it meant; every colour, every thread, every 
 button may have a symbolical meaning. 
 Certainly all nature is a grand parable; the 
 lily has not been itself in all its virgin 
 whiteness until it has lifted you out of 
 your despair and made you pray to Him 
 
dt. THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 who made the lily fairer than the robe of 
 Solomon. 
 
 Weare “ made nigh by the blood of Christ.” 
 Many persons have a great objection to the 
 word “blood,” and I have a great objection 
 to those persons. If we take out the blood of 
 Christ we leave the New Testament without 
 a theme and without a purpose. There are 
 those who cannot see the symbolical aspect 
 of the blood. To them blood is but red fiuid 
 that flows through living veins of man or 
 bird or dog. Blood is life; blood is love; 
 blood is the reality and spiritual meaning 
 of things; blood is the Gospel. Do not be 
 frightened by those persons who only take 
 the common and degraded interpretation of 
 the word “blood.” They are not worthy of 
 a place in your house, much less worthy of 
 a place in your confidence. They will 
 degrade everything. They can hear nothing 
 in the nightingale, they can see nothing in 
 the rose. Religion is only a mantle to them— 
 not an angel, not a spirit, not a symbol. 
 When we get back to the right conception 
 of the Atonement of Christ we shall get 
 back the Church, we shall get back the 
 
THE EPHESIANS | AD 
 
 Resurrection, and we shall recover, so to say, 
 the Holy Ghost; and Christ’s Church shall 
 no longer be one of the institutions—she will 
 rule all the institutions. How poor is the 
 conception that anybody can rule the Church 
 except the Church herself, in obedience to 
 the daily inspiration of her living Lord! 
 Rule the Church? Rule the dawn! Go to 
 the hills and say when the sun must come; 
 stop him until you are ready to receive 
 him. Go to the sea and say, “ Back! a 
 higher than Canute commands thee. Back, 
 thou encroaching flood!’’ Go and do that, 
 and then come, ye poor stipendiary, or non- 
 paid magistrates, and tell God’s Church what 
 she is to do. She isa living soul—she lives 
 with her Lord, she confers with Him every 
 moment; and, instead of the State ruling the 
 Church, the Church must rule, sanctify, 
 ennoble, and inspire the State. 
 
 Verse 14: “For He is our peace, who made 
 both one, and brake down the middle wall of 
 partition.” 
 
 Jesus Christ is a breaker-down, and Jesus 
 Christ is alsoa builder-up. The literal render- 
 ing of this ‘‘ middle wall of partition” would 
 
46 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 amount to some such word as “hedge.” There 
 has been a hedge between one garden and 
 another, and that hedge has meant indi- 
 viduality and separation and exclusiveness. 
 Jesus Christ comes and, so to say, eradicates 
 the hedge; that is, takes it up by the roots, 
 ploughs under the roots, and casts the roots 
 up, where the sun can smite them unto death. 
 It is the business of Christ to unite men. 
 He does not find out the points of their 
 differences and magnify them; He finds out 
 the points of union, and He magnifies those 
 points, and He says to contending men, 
 “Whatever may be the little anecdote or 
 incident you are fighting about, you are both 
 men. I see the image of God in both of 
 you; go back into the innermost sanctuary 
 of the meaning of humanity, and cease your 
 little fray.” He is the Hope of nations; 
 He will bring mankind into brotherhood. 
 Nothing but the Gospel of Christ can destroy 
 alienation and separation and bitterness, and 
 bring contending forces to understand that 
 the sword never did anything really beneficial 
 and permanent, unless its action was fol- 
 lowed up by another mode of life and a 
 
THE EPHESIANS A] 
 
 higher and diviner conception of the purpose 
 of being. 
 
 Verses 15-17: “ Having abolished in His flesh the 
 enmity, even the law of commandments contained 
 in ordinances; that He might create in Himself 
 of the twain one new man, so making peace; 
 and might reconcile them both in one body unto 
 God through the cross, having slain the enmity 
 thereby: and He came and preached peace to 
 you that were far off, and peace to them that were 
 nigh.” 
 
 That is His great work in the world—to 
 slay, yet to heal; to slay the enmity, that 
 He may build up the friendship. The devil 
 must be fought; only one Soldier can fight 
 him, and that one Soldier is the Captain of 
 - our salvation. Forth, thou Son of God, and 
 slay Apollyon, the evil spirit that is cruel 
 to the hearts of men! Jesus Christ will 
 accomplish this warfare; Jesus Christ 
 will drive out all things evil. The process 
 is long, the process is even severe, often 
 rising to an agony of pain and often darken- 
 ing the soul as with a heavy cloud of despair ; 
 but the process goes on, and it will emerge 
 in One being enthroned King of kings and 
 Lord of lords. 
 
48 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Verse 18: “ For through Him we both have access 
 by one Spirit unto the Father.” 
 
 We all pray in the same spirit; we may 
 use different words: what of that? You can 
 pray better in one way and I can pray better 
 in another way, but there is no prayer outside 
 Christ ; it is the name of Christ that makes 
 our petition effectual. Prayer is the mystery 
 of the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Any prayer 
 without an appeal to Him or an appeal to God 
 for His sake falls back like a bird lightning- 
 struck. The humblest prayer, sanctified by 
 His name and made vital by His blood, finds 
 its way through all difficulties and infirmities 
 of grammar and composition into the ear of 
 the Father, and, as it were, brings back its 
 own answer, as if a bird had been sent from 
 paradise with some branchlet in its mouth to 
 say that the Father is well pleased. 
 
 Verses 19-22 : “So then ye are no more strangers 
 and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the 
 saints, and of the household of God, being built upon 
 the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ 
 Jesus Himself being the chief corner-stone ; in whom 
 each several building, fitly framed together, groweth 
 into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom ye also 
 are builded together for a habitation of God in the 
 Spirit.” 
 
THE EPHESIANS 49 
 
 What conceptions, what intellectual virility, 
 what a noble outlook, what a grasp of things | 
 There are no little-minded Christians ; if they 
 be Christians growing in Christ, they are 
 erowing towards perfectness of knowledge 
 and completeness of character. And as for 
 the Apostle’s mixed metaphors, they would 
 kill our poor little withering reputation ; 
 but he handles them all as a master might 
 do. Here is citizenship, and temple-building, 
 and growing, and reintroduction into the tree, 
 the vine. A building, a growth, a citizenship 
 —a wondrous masonry. Each mind will take 
 out of the metaphor exactly its own meaning, 
 and will be just to every other meaning. Re- 
 member, the Apostle Paul never refers to any- 
 thing as dead and finished. If it is a temple, 
 it is growing, it is being built up into some 
 completer significance: and if it is a citizen- 
 ship, it is a citizenship built on the central 
 idea of household or home. And you who 
 care for Citizen Sunday, care for home Sunday, 
 be right in your own house, among your own 
 
 children, and out of that will come all that 
 is best in citizenship. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Verses 1-4: “For this cause I Paul, the prisoner 
 of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles, if ye have heard of 
 the dispensation of the grace of God which is given 
 me to you-ward: how that by revelation He made 
 known unto me the mystery; (as I wrote afore in 
 few words, whereby, when ye read, ye may understand 
 my knowledge in the mystery of Christ).” 
 
 ri AUL was more a talker than a writer. 
 We have in many instances illustrations 
 
 of his sometimes rough and incoherent method, 
 the rapid action, the tumultuous action, of his 
 most energetic and motion-like mind; and we 
 must not judge him by the little carpenter’s 
 rules of rhetoric and continuity which we 
 ourselves have fashioned and marked in 
 plain figures. It takes a Paul to under- 
 stand a Paul, but here and there we can 
 come squarely down upon his meaning, and, 
 touching him thus broadly and sympatheti- 
 cally, we can, when he is away from us, trust 
 
 him to come back again in due time and to 
 50 
 
EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 51 
 
 bring with him odours of the Paradise beyond 
 the morning. 
 
 It is natural to inquire into a man’s cre- 
 dentials. Paul sometimes offers apparently 
 a species of that most disastrous of all written 
 instruments, a testimonial. At other times 
 he says, in effect, “‘ We have no written testi- 
 monials; we have the people, those who have 
 believed our words, the saints who have grown 
 in grace and in the beauty of holiness; they 
 are our testimonials.” 
 
 In the first verse of the third chapter Paul 
 presents a testimonial of his own; he says, 
 ** Behold the baton, the mace, the thin leafy 
 gold, the mitre, the crosier, the certificate 
 with the broad seal upon it stamped with 
 diverse effigies and omens.” That would not 
 be the New Testament reading; all these 
 words I could find in some part of the English 
 language, but not in Paul’s epistles. In 
 what guise, then, does he come? A “ pri- 
 soner.” We chain Paul to our pulpits a 
 prisoner. Paul was a prisoner of the Lord— 
 a prisoner for the sake of the Gospel. His 
 gospel got him into a prison, mine has got 
 me into a palace. There is a suspicious 
 
52 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 evolution. We ought to smite ourselves 
 with many a question regarding the kind of 
 evolution through which we have personally 
 and officially passed. Paul is in prison, but 
 his apostleship is free. He says, “‘ My environ- 
 ment is not altogether inviting to those who 
 are looking out for poetry and beauty and 
 garden glory; I ama prisoner, I am chained 
 to another man, and I have to take my step 
 from his step; but, Gentiles, I am your 
 Apostle, designated as your missionary—I 
 am coming.” It is one of two things with 
 a man’s human relations: either he will 
 crush them or they will crush him. You 
 may know a man’s quality by the way in 
 which he handles what is pompously called 
 “his environment.” The Apostle Paul made 
 no apologies. He did not see the little 
 limited creature which bore his own name; 
 he saw the great Apostles, the archangels of 
 the earth—the Apostles of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ. ‘ But,” said he, “I have another 
 testimonial, beyond the fact of my being a 
 prisoner of Jesus Christ; I have a ‘dis- 
 pensation of the grace of God which is 
 given me to you-ward’: I long to read 
 
THE EPHESIANS 53 
 
 my certificate to you, I have some deep 
 things I want to tell you the very moment 
 I come into your society; I have realised 
 a special stewardship.” ‘“‘My gospel’ is a 
 phrase I am not afraid of,’ Paul said in 
 effect. Every man has his own gospel, his 
 own God, his own conception of the universe ; 
 ‘these entitle him to speak. Within their 
 own limits, Paul had his text and sermon 
 and testimony and revelation, and the whole 
 apparatus of a divinely consecrated ministry, 
 and he said, “I long to be with you; I have 
 no time to smooth my words into rhythm, 
 I want to beat out this love into thunder- 
 tones, that all the Gentiles over all the sea 
 may hear the music of the divine love.” Did 
 you discover all this yourself, Paul? ‘‘ Nay,” 
 said he, “have you not heard that ‘by 
 revelation He made known unto me the 
 mystery’?” It is a favourite word of the 
 Apostle’s—the mystery, the hidden mystery, 
 the secret enwrapped sevenfold; but I see 
 it, feel it, it imparts its own throb to my 
 often fainting heart, and then I am strong 
 with the strength of giants. This is the 
 secret of a powerful ministry: suffering, the 
 
54 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 grace of God, a special dispensation, a revela- 
 tion, God making known to the heart of man 
 what is in His own heart. We can do much 
 in the schools, but we cannot communicate 
 the mystery of God. There are some things 
 which are to be learned only by experience, 
 especially by suffering, by disappointment, 
 by burying in a great cemetery ten thousand 
 dead trusts, once beautiful flowers that we 
 wore on the heart, and from which we re- 
 ceived what we thought was heavenly odour ; 
 yet one by one we have had to surrender 
 them, and the cemetery is full of dead hopes 
 and withered ambitions. When such a man 
 speaks to us we should not be mindful of 
 his manner or his mere method; we should 
 let him talk to us in his own way, and if 
 now and then we can pick up a diamond or 
 a pearl and have some right to it because 
 of our appreciating love, then truly shall we 
 be edified by the Apostle of the Cross. 
 
 Verses 5,6: “ Which in other ages was not made 
 known unto the sons of men, as it is now revealed 
 unto His holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit ; 
 that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs, and of the 
 same body, and partakers of His promise in Christ by 
 the gospel.” 
 
THE EPHESIANS 55 
 
 We must not judge other ages by our 
 own. We live in a great noonday; the sun 
 would seem to be at the zenith, as if he 
 were giving us every beam contained in 
 his horn of light. How prone we are to go 
 back far away into the paths of history and 
 to judge men by our own standard of 
 morality! Thus we make havoc of the Old 
 Testament; we do not live ourselves back to 
 the standpoint of those whom we criticise. 
 We must not take down our electric lamp, 
 and judge the little tinder spark that was 
 the only spark possible centuries ago. Our 
 Christianity has taught us but a poor lesson 
 if it has only taught us to hold in contempt 
 the men who laid the foundations of history. 
 Know the refined man by his not remarking 
 on the vulgarity of other people. Know the 
 true saint of God who, reading the early 
 stories of the Bible, can yet see the plasm 
 or beginning of God’s final idea of conduct, 
 character, spiritual personality. Yet even 
 in the Old Testament we have men as great 
 as Paul. True, they were only exceptional 
 cases, but they shrink from no comparison of 
 stature, from no standard of quality; they 
 
56 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 are not men who need to apologise when 
 their names are mentioned; they saw the 
 morning afar off, they caught the white 
 light ere it shone upon the night-clouded 
 hills. At the same time there were others 
 in violent contrast to the prophets and 
 minstrels of the Church, elect, ordained, 
 and crowned of God for special ministry 
 and trusteeship in spiritual dispensations. 
 Even such contrastive characters we must 
 judge as net having had all the privileges 
 and benedictions which have almost nauseated 
 our age to the point of satiety. We may 
 have too many privileges: if we cannot 
 digest them and assimilate them, they are 
 but burdens to us. We shall either be 
 lifted up or crushed down by the privileges, 
 the honours, and the benedictions which we 
 are given to enjoy. Let every man hear 
 this in the innermost chamber of his heart. 
 Privileges are not given to us to stand 
 outside us; they are given to us for assimi- 
 lation—growth—and then how can we have 
 too many of them, when by the grace of 
 God we turn them all into spiritual strength 
 —into sublime and beneficent character? 
 
THE EPHESIANS 57 
 
 Revelation is progressive. We think we 
 are far advanced, we call this noonday ; 
 centuries hence we may call up these poor 
 grey days, and speak of them as the com- 
 paratively dark ages of the soul. We have 
 often been taught that we cannot imagine 
 light; it is easier to imagine darkness than to 
 imagine glory. The sun has a way of kissing 
 every little weed and every small, frail, 
 trembling leaf into significance and almost 
 personality. A great engraver is the sun; 
 he plants the image of God on a grass-blade 
 or works it into a dewdrop. What we do 
 in regard to the old Scriptures we must 
 do in regard to many venerable characters ; 
 we must remember in their case, too, that 
 they had not our privileges. Yet amongst 
 the characters of the olden centuries there 
 are men who would put us to blushing 
 shame. They lived with God, so to say; 
 it was sometimes hard to distinguish which 
 was the man and which the supphant and 
 which the saint; there was a curious in- 
 working and interworking of agency and 
 ministry and experience and consciousness, 
 until the men themselves became living 
 
58 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 mysteries, not to be read by the publie eye, 
 but only to be understood by an indescribable 
 and incommunicable masonry of soul, so that 
 hand clasped hand and passed the password 
 without the opening of lips. 
 
 Verse 7: “ Whereof I was made a minister, accord- 
 ing to the gift of the grace of God given unto me by 
 the effectual working of His power.” 
 
 That is the true education of the ministry. 
 It does not exclude other education, but 
 all other education must of necessity be 
 secondary, auxiliary, co-operative. The great 
 education is the education of the soul, the 
 implanting in the soul of “the gift of the 
 grace of God.” What does it mean? No 
 man can tell you in words; every man can 
 feel it in power. What is it that makes 
 the poet? No man can tell; the poetry is 
 its own revelation, and this is probably the 
 only explanation we shall ever get. When 
 we hear the true poetry we seem always to 
 have heard it; it does not startle us by its 
 originality so much as remind us that some- 
 where, on the shore of some great sea, 
 under the shadow of some great temple 
 forest, we have heard these wondrous tones 
 
THE EPHESIANS 59 
 
 and notes before. The true poetry belongs 
 to every soul, as the light belongs to every 
 child. It is to us that the Gospel must 
 manifest, expound, and vindicate itself. But 
 not in vocables ; the Gospel is not some trick 
 in grammar, it is not some expert way of 
 shuffling the rules of syntax and prosody ; 
 it is an inner experience, within another 
 experience, refined and sublimed into an 
 inexplicable consciousness of the nearness 
 and the power of God, the sweetness of the 
 love of the Cross. 
 
 Verses 8-12: “Unto me, who am less than the 
 least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should 
 preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of 
 Christ ; and to make all men see what is the fellow- 
 ship of the mystery, which from the beginning of the 
 world hath been hid in God, who created all things 
 by Jesus Christ: to the intent that now unto the 
 principalities and powers in heavenly places might be 
 known by the church the manifold wisdom of God, 
 according to the eternal purpose which He purposed 
 in Christ Jesus our Lord: in whom we have boldness 
 and access with confidence by the faith of Him.” 
 
 Was this some false pride on the part of 
 the Apostle? By no means. How, then, 
 is he thrown into this minority of quality; 
 how, then, is he put down the very lowest 
 
60 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 on the list? Because of the marvellous 
 view which for the moment he has had of 
 the unsearchable riches of grace, the fellow- 
 ship of the mystery which from the beginning 
 of the world hath been hid in God. The 
 Apostle saw such wondrous things outside 
 of him and beyond him that he himself 
 shrank into nothingness. The candle is a 
 very useful little light, but it will not even 
 mention its own name when the sun bursts 
 upon it in his great glory; if we could 
 hear the candle, it would say, * Put me out, 
 take me away; in the eye of that glory I 
 perish!” So Paul oftentimes got such great 
 and overpowering views of the grace, the 
 mystery, the love, the future, that he was 
 less than the least; he shed his individuality 
 and became as the nothing of nothingness 
 because of the ineffable revelation which 
 extinguished our poor little mornings and 
 our frail, transitory, struggling summers. 
 Woe to the man who is greater than his 
 text! woe to any preacher who is not 
 abased and humbled and destroyed in the 
 presence of the Cross he preaches! When 
 the Apostle compared himself with other 
 
THE EPHESIANS 61 
 
 men he used no such language as this; he 
 was head of them all, he was not a whit 
 behind the chiefest of the Apostles. But 
 then he was walking upon a purely human 
 plane; in the passage before us he is walk- 
 ing upon a plane that seems to run right 
 through the very noontide of heaven’s own 
 glory; hence his self-depreciation. And 
 this will be the experience of every man 
 who is living, moving, and having his being 
 in God. We must get away from the world 
 of anecdote and circumstance and petty 
 conception; we must sail the _ shoreless 
 oceans; we must bathe in the infinite glory 
 of heaven’s own vision of light. 
 
 Verse 13: “ Wherefore I desire that ye faint not 
 at my tribulations for you, which is your glory.” 
 
 You must and will by and by get the 
 right view of tribulations. “Shall I tell 
 you where I am by the grace of God?” 
 said Paul. Why, by the grace of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ we glory in tribulations also; 
 we have taken up crowns of thorns and 
 pressed them into our heads, until by the 
 succour of our blood they have blossomed 
 
62 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 into coronals. You may touch a tribulation 
 too lightly. Like the nettle, it will sting 
 timidity; you may grasp it and defy its 
 poison. There are times in Christian ex- 
 perience when we talk about our tribula- 
 tions and our great distresses and our 
 intolerable misery ; and all such threnody is 
 perfectly right up to the moment of its 
 being wailed in the circling wind. And 
 we will talk about these same experiences 
 more and more, and as we talk about them 
 the grace of God will fill in all the spaces 
 and create a new energy, and exercise a 
 new distributive influence amid all the 
 actions and energies of the life. Then, 
 when we speak about our tribulations a 
 third time, a certain note will drop out of 
 our voice and another note will come into 
 the voice, and we shall be able in the long 
 run to say, “Tribulation! we glory in it; 
 our loss is gain, our grief is a sacrament of 
 love, a seal of election.” 
 
 Now the Apostle utters one of his grand 
 prayers: 
 
 Verses 14-21: “For this cause I bow my knees 
 unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom 
 
THE EPHESIANS 63 
 
 the whole family in heaven and earth is named, that 
 He would grant you, according to the riches of His 
 glory, to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in 
 the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts 
 by faith ; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, 
 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, 
 that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God. 
 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, unto Him be glory in the church 
 by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without 
 end. Amen.” 
 
 Oh, what an outpouring of the river of 
 love and grace and faith from the heart of 
 this chained prisoner! His body may be in 
 durance vile, but his soul is on wings. 
 He passes from this dark environment into 
 the very temple and sanctuary of divine 
 grace, and pours out one of those grand 
 prayers that stand absolutely unrivalled in 
 the liturgies of the Church. How tender is 
 thisman! He shames almost the tenderness 
 of John; he was in all respects a greater 
 man than John. He was a man of immense 
 intellectual capacity, intense spiritual fervour, 
 great mental tenacity, and power of con- 
 tinuity—gifted with that singular power of 
 
 penetration that bores the rocks and the 
 
64 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 mountains, and carries the highway of God 
 through their darkest places. Yet did ever 
 man bring such lovely fragrant flowers to 
 lay upon the altar of the Church? This is 
 the man who wrote the poem of love; this 
 is the man who said to the Philippians, “I 
 have you in my heart.” A sevenfold man 
 was Paul; he will probably be the mystery 
 of the Church “until the day break, and 
 the shadows flee away.” He is sometimes 
 so simple that he sends a message to the 
 man and the woman in the little house, and 
 has a word for the little child, and delivers 
 by the hands of his helpers all sorts of 
 blessings and salutations to people unknown 
 to fame, but known to Paul; and Paul could 
 give fame—to have one’s name spoken by 
 Paul would be renown. He was never 
 ashamed of any man, woman, or child who 
 had helped him; he never forgot a name; 
 he carried names from city to city, and sent 
 them back again, as it were, on wings of 
 love, touched as with a father’s fingers of 
 benediction and holy sealing. These are the 
 great men who have blessed the ages—the 
 men who have sent up to heaven for country 
 
THE EPHESIANS 65 
 
 and home and Church these great noble 
 prayers that have taken the kingdom of 
 heaven with violence. There is no per- 
 sonality so utterly contemptible as the man 
 who edges himself into the Church for the 
 purpose of pronouncing upon prayer, who 
 has never fathomed the meaning of such 
 sublime heart-risings and holy aspirations 
 and benevolent desires as those which cha- 
 racterise the great prayers of the greatest 
 heart that Christ has ever captured by His 
 spear. Enter the sanctuary of such prayers, 
 and do not answer the caviller, but despise 
 him. He knows not the tongue of this land; 
 its grammar is an unknown music to him. 
 The man who could breathe such prayers 
 will confirm his own saintliness by his death. 
 A man of this quality is never killed mid- 
 way; there is too much of him to perish by 
 the roadside; he must fulfil his course, 
 fight the fight out to the end. It was all 
 in the prayer—in its vastness, its depth, its 
 tender saintliness. He who can see into 
 the true quality of that prayer can see 
 gleaming beyond it a crown of life. Blessed 
 be God for the man who desired for us to 
 5 
 
66 EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 
 
 know that which cannot be known—to know 
 the love that passeth knowledge! Such 
 paradoxes are part of the divine revelation. 
 To know that we cannot know may be the 
 beginning of knowledge. To know that 
 which passeth knowledge is to have a great 
 possession—yea, an inexhaustible and im- 
 perishable inheritance. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 Verse 1: “I therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, 
 beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation 
 wherewith ye are called.” 
 
 HAVE already written that I, Paul, am 
 
 the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you 
 Gentiles; I must repeat the fact. There 
 are some experiences that burn themselves 
 into our souls, so that repetition becomes a 
 natural necessity. I lay before you no 
 printed letters, no sealed certificates, no 
 proud but worthless pedigrees; for I, too, 
 have a pedigree, or had until I burned it. 
 I come before you with a chain, with a 
 stigma, a brand ; and if that does not impress 
 you, no amount of sealed parchment would 
 worthily beget your confidence or your 
 admiration. I am a poor prisoner, another 
 man keeps the key of the gaol—I am on the 
 inside of the gloomy door; but, though a 
 
 67 
 
a 
 
 68 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 prisoner, I invite you to freedom—to an ever- 
 widening franchise in the kingdom of light— 
 and I send to you all the available tokens of 
 love. Remember that you are called “men” ; 
 you are not toys of man’s making—you are 
 twice over the creation of God. There is a 
 great voice in you; it calls you to liberty 
 and service, to patience and hope. Every 
 Christian soul is called; he is not in the 
 kingdom of God at his own bidding—he has 
 accepted an invitation, he banquets at the 
 Lord’s table by right of electing grace. Let 
 no man whisper in your ear one solitary word 
 that would lead you to contract or to under- 
 value your sublime and imperishable vocation. 
 Men, you are answering a cry, you are re- 
 sponding to a voice; hear it, and spring 
 forward with the alacrity of spontaneous 
 and obedient love. 
 How was this to be done? The Apostle 
 answers thus: 
 Verses 2, 3: “ With all lowliness and meekness, 
 with longsuffering, forbearing one another in love; 
 
 endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the 
 bond of peace.” 
 
 Do not chide one another, do not seek to 
 
THE EPHESIANS 69 
 
 prove your earnestness by rebuking the 
 languor of souls that are not equal in 
 vitality to your own. We cannot all walk 
 at the same pace; stop for the slow man— 
 for the soul that would be quicker if it 
 could—and show that you have entered into 
 the gentleness and patience of Christ by wait- 
 ing until infirmity has had time to gather 
 itself together. ‘‘ Forbearing one another 
 in love.” We are wondrously one, yet more 
 wondrously, for the time being at least, more 
 than one—multitudinous, innumerable; all 
 the human fractions being required to make 
 up the total integer of God’s image and God’s 
 purpose in creation and in redemption. There 
 is not a word here about mastery, domination, 
 superiority, or even flaunting, ambitious, and 
 insane energy. The words are of a different 
 temperature; they would not hurt a little 
 child in the nursery, they might soothe 
 affliction in its hottest pain, they might 
 encourage those who have no confidence in 
 themselves. The words are like beautiful 
 pearls, and pearls must ever stand alone in 
 gracious solitude; not needing a companion, 
 yet wanting all the other pearls to make 
 
70 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 up some circlet of grace, some sign of inner- 
 most beauty. These are the pearls of God: 
 lowliness, meekness, longsuffering, forbear- 
 ance, love. What precious stones are in the 
 casket of God! Surely we might come in 
 somewhere and say, “Lord of the casket, 
 may this pearl be mine, or that, or yonder 
 diamond that holds the glory of the morn- 
 ing?” See how universal are all these 
 attributes. There is nothing here of the 
 nation, the parish, the mother tongue, the 
 narrow locality: these words belong to all 
 languages, and they grow in the sand and 
 in the richest soil of Paradise—they belong 
 to the music of the winds. Lowliness and 
 meekness, and longsuffering and forbearance, ~ 
 and everything done in the spirit of tender 
 and sympathetic love. Paul says in effect, 
 “Gentiles, this is the calling with which 
 you are called”; God never addressed a 
 more thrilling appeal to all the men of all 
 the centuries. ‘“ Endeavouring to keep the 
 unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” 
 There is a spirit and there is a letter. Let 
 Paul himself tell us how the case stands 
 herein : 
 
THE EPHESIANS 71 
 
 Verses 4-6: “There is one body, and one Spirit, 
 even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; 
 one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father 
 a all, who is above all, and through all, and in you 
 
 That is the true unity. One Faith, a 
 thousand creeds. Man loves to make little 
 creeds. Ever since man discovered the art 
 of writing he has been trying in vain to 
 thumbnail the revelation of God, and to 
 carry it about with him as a kind of private 
 property. Man will not recognise the differ- 
 ence between faith, which is atmosphere or 
 climate, and creed, which is to-day’s weather, 
 showery or shiny as the case may be. Men will 
 confuse weather with climate, and think that 
 they must live up to the day, and have some 
 umbrella creed to suit the day of rain, and 
 some other adornment to suit the noonday 
 of summer sunshine. Poor man! He must 
 have tools; he sells tools in boxes; he is 
 particularly fascinated by two-edged tools; 
 he cuts himself, and thinks that the drawing 
 of his own blood in small red spots will bring 
 to him the sympathy of somebody surely, and 
 that thus he will become an object of at least 
 momentary and transient attention. There 
 
72 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 is one faith; it includes all the creeds, as 
 the great astronomic movement carries with 
 it the mountains and the valleys, the seas 
 and the forests, and rolls them into one 
 sphere of unity and beauty and gladness. 
 “One body ’’—spiritual, mystical, imex- 
 plicable; an experience without language ; 
 an emotion that scorns even the help of 
 music. ‘ One faith, one baptism.” But we 
 have made little pools and puddles, and have 
 dabbled ourselves and half washed ourselves 
 in many a tank of the plumber’s making. 
 That is not baptism. Why accept a little, 
 narrow interpretation, when the great inter- 
 pretation is offered to us in the love of God? 
 “One baptism” of enthusiasm, inspiration, 
 fire. But some people like to go about the 
 world dripping and dropping more or less 
 under the impression that they are baptized. 
 No man is baptized that is not baptized with 
 fire. “One God and Father of all.” One 
 colour, though there are seven; but the seven 
 make the one, and the one permits itself to 
 be divided into the seven. The seven spirits 
 of God become a great common inspiration 
 in the history of mankind. ‘ One God,” not 
 
THE EPHESIANS 73 
 
 the solitary God. Some people do not under- 
 stand what the word “one” means; they 
 think one is a stroke. But they do not know 
 what a stroke is; a stroke may be a million 
 points. There is no stroke—there is only a 
 seeming unity of points; the microscope 
 would divide your stroke into points, atoms, 
 little isolated pieces of pencil or of chalk 
 or of coloured ink. No man can define 
 the word “one.” ‘There is no “one” until 
 there is much more than one. One does 
 not mean solitude, it means completeness, 
 companionship, sphering out the first plasmic 
 purpose. The tree is one, yet every acorn 
 that hangs upon it is a Bashan in possi- 
 bility. 
 
 When we are more anxious about the 
 faith than about the creed we shall have a 
 real Church in the country. Oftentimes we 
 have heard men pray, and we could not 
 detect one controversial tone in all the holy 
 adoration and petition; but the moment they 
 have stood up to preach we have contradicted 
 them, if not audibly, yet mentally; because 
 preaching has latterly, in these few later 
 centuries, become a sack of opinions, which 
 
74 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 a man, taking by the two bottom corners, 
 shakes out in presence of the congregation, 
 and supposes that he is preaching the Gospel. 
 It is very sad, even to groaning and to the 
 shedding of many hot tears! ‘One faith ”— 
 not to be defined. Faith is never to be 
 written down. You have a pocketful of 
 creeds; you cannot put your faith in your 
 pocket, nor can you write it, nor can you 
 tell it; you can hint at it, you can breathe 
 it, you can live in its holy and inspiring 
 spirit. Faith is possible to a little child— 
 trusting, clinging, depending, mute, looking 
 up into the mother’s face. That is faith, and 
 the angels have got no further on; they are 
 still at the same monosyllable. It will take 
 us eternity to spell it, and to pronounce it, 
 and to realise it. All the Churches have 
 faith in the decree that they are true. We 
 express our faith in many ways. Some 
 people must have a written faith—a faith 
 which they can run into the dimensions of 
 a placard. But that is not faith; it is only 
 a creed, a symbol, an index. Faith never 
 comes out of the soul to chatter the language 
 of the day ; it abides in the heart—enlarging, 
 
THE EPHESIANS 75 
 
 expanding, warming, uplifting, and gladden- 
 ing the heart. The Roman Catholic and the 
 Salvationist both live in faith, though they 
 would fight twenty-four hours round by the 
 clock every day if they had the unholy 
 chance ; and the silent Quaker and the non- 
 silent Methodist both have faith, but they 
 have such different creeds, and such different 
 pocket volumes which they carry about with 
 them to prove that the other party is wrong! 
 Why do we not get down to or up to a 
 right conception of faith ?—the soul at its 
 best, the soul in unspeakable delight and 
 in unutterable confidence in the love of God. 
 Emerson said that when Dr. Lyman Beecher 
 got to heaven, and found Dr. Channing 
 there, he would say, ‘‘Why, Channing, are 
 you here?”? And Channing would answer, 
 “Why, Beecher, are you here?” There is 
 one faith, and until we realise the faith, 
 rather than the creed, we shall have divisions 
 and alienations and controversies, out of 
 which livelihoods are made. 
 
 In view of all this massive unity—one 
 body, one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, 
 one baptism, one God and Father of all—are 
 
76 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 we called upon to live in vague incoherence ? 
 
 or has our very individuality an organic 
 
 relation to the unspeakable Unity? Let 
 Paul himself reply: 
 
 Verses 7 and 11: “But unto every one of usis 
 
 given grace according to the measure of the gift of 
 
 Christ. And He gave some, apostles; and some, 
 
 prophets ; and some, evangelists ; and some, pastors 
 and teachers.” 
 
 So we have diversity as well as unity; we 
 have the seven colours in one white, and 
 we have the one white spreading itself over 
 the seven prismatic representations of its 
 ineffable beauty. God never quenches indi- 
 viduality ; He never magnifies unity at the 
 expense of individual gift and responsibility. 
 Though we are all one, yet we are in another 
 sense one as if we were all, as if we repre- 
 sented the race; we have in us more than 
 belongs to our mere or narrow individuality. 
 Having come up through millions of cen- 
 turies, we have in us the dog and the tiger, 
 the fish and the bird, with some streak of 
 angelhood, and some mixture of music and 
 poetry and light. Sometimes we are greater 
 mysteries to ourselves than God is to our 
 
THE EPHESIANS 77 
 
 souls. We are so many, so different; seven 
 different men in one day—crawling with the 
 beast in the dust, flying with the angel in 
 the heavens. We have not, therefore, to run 
 ourselves into some wild socialism; we must 
 always realise the individual gift and the 
 individual responsibility. The Apostle must 
 not envy the prophet, the prophet must not 
 contemn the evangelist, and the evangelist 
 must not undervalue the pastor or the 
 teacher. We belong to one another; every 
 man has his own distinct calling of God. 
 Why do we not recognise this? Why compare 
 one man with another to the disadvantage 
 of either? Who would go forth into the 
 meadow and pluck a handful of grass-blades, 
 and compare the one with the other, as if 
 they were created by different creators? or 
 who would take a tuft of grass and compare 
 it with a bunch of grapes or a pound of 
 apples? Why not recognise the poet, and 
 make room for him? and why not ask the 
 arithmetician to go sometimes and sit down 
 by the side of the poet? and why not ask 
 the singer and the speaker to hold festival 
 together P and why admit into the banqueting 
 
78 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 hall, the commonwealth, by one low, narrow 
 door? Why not recognise that we are all 
 required to make up one manhood, and be 
 thankful for each other’s gifts? To that 
 are we called in Christ. 
 
 For what purpose did Christ institute all 
 these ministries in His Church? The Apostle 
 tells us in the twelfth verse: 
 
 “For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of 
 the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ.” 
 
 You would think there are three things 
 mentioned here, but there are not; the pune- 
 tuation misleads us. After the word “ saints” 
 is a little comma which interferes with the 
 Apostle’s sense, and in fact destroys it. 
 Obliterate the comma, and read the sentence 
 thus: “For the perfecting of the saints for 
 the work of the ministry”; getting the 
 saints ready to minister; taking them in as 
 apprentices, and turning them out journey- 
 men. For the perfecting of the saints to 
 do work, so that when they leave the 
 process of education which is possible to 
 them here and now, they may take with 
 them a certificate for the perfecting of the 
 
THE EPHESIANS 79 
 
 saints for the work of the ministry—getting 
 them all ready to execute this sacred 
 ministry. Why, it is like training a number 
 of servants? Exactly; you have struck 
 upon the image precisely. It is a training- 
 house for servants? Yes! the perfecting of 
 the saints for the work of the ministry. We 
 teach painters and artists of many names; 
 we distribute the professions. Let us look in, 
 if you please, upon this man who is keep- 
 ing a school for the training of musicians. 
 How he explains the notes, their combina- 
 tions, their different values; how he lectures 
 upon the production of the voice, and does 
 it in a voice which shows that he has never 
 studied the art himself; and how he puts 
 all these unhappy pupils through divers 
 exercises, himself being happy in the degree 
 in which he makes them unhappy; and we 
 say to him—if we dare speak to such a man— 
 “What are you training these young souls 
 for?” ‘For the ministry of music, for the 
 perfecting of the pupils for the platform, 
 for the orchestra, for public execution, and 
 for the charming and delighting of public 
 audiences.” That is the meaning of the 
 
80 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Apostle, in so far as a spiritual analogy 
 can accommodate itself to one less spiritual. 
 “For the perfecting of the saints for the 
 work of the ministry”; for the training of 
 the servants that they may do the Master’s 
 work. It is like getting a ship ready in 
 port. What are you doing to this ship? 
 Getting it ready for the sea. You seem 
 to be trying the timbers, and trying 
 the iron, and trying the joints, and 
 trying the masts, and to be making every 
 possible criticism upon the whole pur- 
 pose and construction. What is your idea 
 in doing this? Getting the ship ready 
 for sea, fully equipped, ready for the waves. 
 And so Jesus Christ, in establishing all these 
 orders of ministry, is seeking as His object 
 the perfecting of the saints for service, train- 
 ing every man to do some work, to do it 
 well, to do it to the best of his ability, to 
 do it without ever looking at the clock. 
 Love has no clock. 
 
 Verse 13: “ Till we all come ——” 
 
 The immediate point is not what we are 
 coming to, but the fact that we are coming, 
 
THE EPHESIANS 81 
 
 and that something is coming to us, and 
 that this double action is the secret of the 
 inspiration, the culture, the strengthening 
 of our innermost life. The text therefore 
 is “till . . . until’—the something that 
 says, You have not finished yet; there is 
 another hill to climb, and then you will see 
 it; there is another stream to ford, and on 
 the other bank of that stream you will see 
 what flowers can grow, and how mean are 
 all the plants on this side the river. Till 
 the sunshine comes, till the heavenly band 
 appears and sends its thundering anthem 
 through the quivering sky; till then hope 
 on! You have not yet arrived, but you are 
 proceeding, you are on the right road, and 
 you have this little singing word to cheer 
 you in all your climbing and in all your 
 descending and in all your fighting and in 
 all your sorrow “until—!” It would be a 
 most profitable study to collate all the main 
 passages in which we have the music of this 
 “till and until,’ and we should rise from the 
 perusal of the oracles satisfied that though 
 we have yet much to do there is a climacteric 
 point, there is a just-now-rising dawn, the 
 6 
 
82 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 many tints of which can just be seen over 
 the highest hill. Blessed are the prophets, 
 forerunners who catch the first gleam of that 
 morning light! They cannot keep the in- 
 telligence to themselves; there are some 
 gospels that must be preached. When a 
 man who is out far beyond us sees the first 
 rising of the light which the ages have been 
 waiting for he will cry, “ Come! the day has ~ 
 risen.” Even selfishness could not stifle that 
 gospel, mayhap because selfishness could 
 never receive it. The reason that people do 
 not receive the Gospel is because they do 
 not know it, nor do they feel it; it is at 
 present but an intellectual conception or a 
 moral conjecture; it is a mere study in ethics. 
 When the Gospel itself, with all the heat of 
 its own red blood, gets into any of us we must 
 preach the Gospel to every creature. Let 
 us be thankful for the men who have gone 
 ahead—the men who first saw the morning. 
 How long we have been waiting for it! It 
 seems century after century as if the slum- 
 berer would never awake; yet now and 
 again, from Genesis to Revelation, there 
 comes a voice which says, ‘ Until!” It may 
 
THE EPHESIANS 83 
 
 be to-morrow, it may bea century hence—but 
 it will come; and what we have to do is to hold 
 on until the dayspring break in all its soft 
 radiance and its implied eternities of summer 
 on the earth that has been so long moaning, 
 waiting, and mingling its prayers with a large 
 share of dejection and despondency. 
 
 The keyword, therefore, is “till” or 
 “until”; the same word—the same idea— 
 and that. idea one of encouragement and 
 assurance, a word to hide in the heart and to 
 listen to in the darkness when there seems to 
 be no “‘until”—when there seems to be but 
 one settled frown on the brow of time. Yet 
 the custodians of God’s decrees—the divinely 
 appointed priests of the eternal ark—are 
 enabled to hear the sweet word “until”; and 
 such men—unknown, mayhap despised—have 
 kept the world alive. 
 
 Where does this word “till” or “until” 
 occur? Where all the great words occur, as 
 I have told you a thousand times. Where 
 do all the great words occur? In the Book 
 of Genesis; and you have never read it! I 
 speak not to the few who are familiar with 
 the Divine Word, but to the many who never 
 
84 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 read it. You do not read the Divine Word 
 when you only read it in the letter. The 
 Divine Word is not a letter, but a spirit; it 
 is not written music, but music sung and 
 music brayed out from brass and throbbed 
 as it were on living drums. We must go to 
 Genesis for our first grand “ until” (chapter 
 xlix. 10). Jacob is dying, he knows that his 
 life is slowly but certainly trickling away; 
 he calls all his sons around him, and makes 
 such speeches as mortal man never made 
 either before or since; and most of you have 
 never read them! never was such eloquence 
 heard before; there are no forged climaxes, 
 no mechanically built periods, no half-for- 
 gotten and hesitant recitations; but great, 
 grand, flowing eloquence. When the patri- 
 arch came to his son Judah he waxed almost 
 as eloquent as when he came to his son 
 Joseph, but not altogether as eloquent. The 
 old man was at his best when his hands as 
 it were groped for the head of Joseph, but 
 he was beautiful when he spake to Judah— 
 Judah who bore an awful scar of unfaith- 
 fulness and badness, but which was much 
 covered up, if not wholly healed, by processes 
 
THE EPHESIANS 85 
 
 of grace which only experienced souls under- 
 stand. Said Jacob, “The sceptre shall not 
 depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from 
 between his feet, until Shiloh come.” There 
 is the “till” or the “until,” the word of 
 promise, the gleam of hope, the pledged 
 morning. No man can tell us what “Shiloh” 
 . means; we have had the word in Hebrew 
 and in Greek, and we have called around it a 
 whole market-place of expositors, a whole 
 gallery and Sanhedrim of learned men, but 
 they can make nothing really final out con- 
 cerning all the wells and fountains and 
 springs that are hidden in this word Shiloh. 
 But there is a Christian acceptation of the 
 term which is sufficient for us. The ancient 
 Jews, indeed, associated the name Messiah 
 with the word Shiloh, and regarded them 
 as practically interchangeable terms; but 
 the ancient Jews did not know Messiah as 
 we know Him; therefore we must attach 
 a Christian interpretation to Shiloh, and find 
 him in Bethlehem, and on Calvary, and on 
 Olivet, and away yonder in the city of the 
 temple of intercession. Enough for the pre- 
 sent exposition that there was a promised 
 
‘ 
 
 86 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Man, soul, light, song, something away in 
 the ages beckoning on the human race and 
 feeding it with corn of heaven. You cannot 
 empty the ages, you cannot deplete the 
 future. The future itself seems to be a 
 term of welcome and hospitality and most 
 generous promise. We can look at it from 
 any point of view we choose, and yet the 
 human heart says, Your hope is in the 
 future; to-morrow there may be One blessed 
 among women who will give the world 
 a Saviour, and you cannot shut out that 
 “until”; you can modify it, mutilate it, 
 pervert it—but there is the “until.” There 
 shall be an evil reign until He come whose 
 right it is to sit upon the uppermost throne. 
 This song of faith also sings in each indi- 
 vidual heart. It is to-morrow that Shiloh 
 will be here, it is in a week or two that we 
 shall hear from the far-away places that which 
 will make us glad. Why, in one little month 
 we shall hear tidings that will more than 
 compensate us for all our sorrow and dis- 
 may and self-accusation. In a century the 
 world will grow greener grass and the heaven 
 will be clothed with a diviner blue. In five 
 
THE EPHESIANS 87 
 
 centuries who knows what the old earth will 
 be? In a thousand years there may not be 
 a grave in all the mould of the globe. It 
 is because we have these great shining, sing- 
 ing promises that we are able to suffer the 
 present ; if this were all, we could not live 
 another day. There are points of agony and 
 of misery which would end our poor feeble 
 existence if there were nothing beyond, if no 
 Shiloh were preparing to come, if no sweet 
 spring with vernal flowers were lingering by 
 the blue Tyrrhenian sea. It is because we 
 know that the Shiloh spring is coming that 
 we can bear the darkness of these December 
 days, which are hardly worthy to be called 
 days at all. June and December could never 
 talk about days, they would not understand 
 one another; June has one lexicon and 
 December another, which his dim _ eyes 
 can hardly read. It is the Shiloh that is 
 coming that keeps the world alive, and all 
 the atheists and agnostics and scorners and 
 mockers cannot keep out of view or out of 
 the sphere of holy, happy influence this grand 
 Shiloh idea. The child will be born, the man 
 will grow, the king will ascend the throne, 
 
88 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 and then we shall know why the universe 
 was created, and the explanation will be 
 grand, solemn, sufficient. 
 
 Another “until’’ we find in Psalm Ixxiii. 
 17, “ Until I went into the sanctuary.” Then 
 I saw all about it. The sanctuary is the only 
 place where you can see everything, Church 
 or State, just as it is. You see nothing 
 really until you see it from the point of 
 view of the altar. The religious soul—the 
 soul that bathes itself in the stream of 
 the divine wisdom and the divine light—is 
 the greatest soul under heaven. All other 
 souls are little pedlars compared with the 
 religious soul that has the key of heayen— 
 the entrée of the hospitable skies. A poor 
 man was sadly troubled because wicked 
 people were prospering exceedingly: their 
 gardens were full of flowers, and they had 
 roses with next to no thorns on them, and 
 they had herbs and oliveyards and vineyards 
 and all manner of increase, yet they never 
 sang a psalm—they never laid a tribute on 
 God’s altar. Their eyes were standing out 
 with fatness, they had more than heart could 
 wish; God was excluded from their whole 
 
THE EPHESIANS 89 
 
 imagination; and yet as to banking—as we 
 should modernly call it—and commerce and 
 prosperity, they had it all; and poor Asaph 
 was hardly strong enough to carry his own 
 harp. When he saw these almost beasts— 
 certainly these minus men—his feet well- 
 nigh slipped, he was as nearly down flat on 
 his back as ever a man was on treacherous 
 ice. And then, having just strength enough 
 - to crawl into the sanctuary, he said in effect, 
 “What are all these lights? what is this I 
 hear? what are these explanations that are 
 rising in my mind ? who speaks ? who makes 
 the night dead?” if there was any audible 
 voice able to make him hear this music be- 
 yond the merest outline and beginning But 
 thought came on thought, reflection followed 
 upon reflection ; Asaph put this together with 
 that, and finally he said, “I see it! behold, 
 it was they who were set in slippery places, 
 it was they who were as bullocks fattening 
 in a succulent pasture: aye, thou didst train 
 them and fat them for the knife: I see it 
 now!” We should see all things if we went 
 into the sanctuary in their right proportion, 
 because in their right perspective and their 
 
90 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 right light. We are so meddlesome, and we 
 will discuss daily details, and we are first 
 troubled by one man and then we are troubled 
 by another, and then in the middle of the 
 day there is a sure and certain lie that comes 
 and perplexes us more than ever as to what 
 we heard yesterday and heard this morning. 
 Why can we not leave the detail alone? and 
 why does every washerwoman suppose that 
 she could settle better than any statesman 
 what ought to have been done in certain 
 great national crises? Only in the sanctuary 
 can we get the solution of all things. Some- 
 times that solution comes in the form of 
 increased patience—a deepening sense of our 
 dependence upon the living God. We do 
 not always get an explanation in words and 
 in grammatical phrases skilfully and me- 
 chanically piled into paragraphs which we 
 can measure and understand. It is not 
 always so that God works. Somehow in the 
 sanctuary there is an atmosphere, as there 
 is in the chamber of death. Tell me what 
 is that weird, wondrous atmosphere that gets 
 around the soul in the sight of the dead 
 body. You are then really in the sanctuary, 
 
THE EPHESIANS 91 
 
 though not nominally so. The chamber of 
 sickness may be a sanctuary; the chamber 
 of your own closet, where you offer secret 
 prayer to God and commune silently with 
 the Spirit, may be the sanctuary. But in the 
 ordinary signification of the term the sanc- 
 tuary points to fellowship in worship, to a 
 commonwealth of praise, to a common in- 
 heritance of grace—a great mystery, no 
 doubt, but known well to those to whom 
 God has given keys and promises and a 
 sure word of prophecy. It is the religious 
 man who should govern the State; it is the 
 Church that should rule the empire. We 
 have inverted things, and have gone to the 
 market-place to understand what can only 
 be explained in the sanctuary. But the day 
 is coming when the sanctuary—the holy, re- 
 deemed, blood-bought Church of Christ—shall 
 tell the world what to do. 
 
 We might call on our way at the house 
 of Canticles—the house of the love-dreams— 
 and there in chapter ii. 17 we shall read, 
 “Until the day break, and the shadows 
 flee away.” That is a grand “until.” Is 
 
92 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 it possible that the sun can find his way 
 through all the grey cold clouds of Decem- 
 ber? Is there a day promised? Will the 
 day break? Who ever heard the gates of 
 the morning creak as they swung back on 
 their golden hinges? Who ever heard a 
 tramping army bringing up the sun as if 
 by strength of muscle? Who ever heard 
 the stars make a noise? Yet through all 
 this wondrous ‘‘ process of the suns” there 
 is a silent march, a silent incoming of the 
 Messianic period, and when the day breaks 
 upon the grave, the grave shall be as a 
 cradle; and when the day breaks on sorrow 
 and sickness, failure, disappointment, and 
 manifold misery, we shall see the whole 
 sphere of life in its proper colours, relations, 
 and proportions, and find that God has been 
 busy in the darkness. God does wonderful 
 things in the night time; what He has done 
 in the sanctuary of densest darkness we shall 
 never know till the shadows flee away; then 
 we shall find that all the while He has been 
 building a palace for us—a right glorious 
 and royal house—and making things ready 
 for our souls away beyond the humble paths 
 
THE EPHESIANS 93 
 
 of the stars which now we think a long way 
 off, but we shall think them a longer way off 
 still when we get above them and look down 
 on them with a kind of gracious contempt 
 for their twinkling and quivering lamps. 
 Hope on! There is a word in the wintry 
 air, a song in the wintry night—“ Until!” 
 
 Paul’s idea of “until” was a coming to 
 the measure of the stature of perfect men 
 in Christ Jesus. ‘“ Perfect’ does not mean 
 what it is often supposed to mean and what 
 people get up more or less futile and senseless 
 meetings for the purpose of promoting. There 
 are no perfect. men in that narrow sense. 
 There is probably no sin greater in its possible 
 implications than sinlessness as it is narrowly 
 and imperfectly understood. Not until resur- 
 rection has done for the body what regenera- 
 tion has done for the soul shall we know 
 the meaning of “ perfect” in its moral and 
 spiritual sense. Meanwhile, it may signify 
 the culmination of a new period, the advance- 
 ment, chapter after chapter, of a new book, 
 promotion after promotion to school after 
 school in the higher academies of creation ; 
 
94 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 it may mean as much as can be done here 
 and now, but not perfection except as the 
 end is the beginning of another period. The 
 Bible ends, Revelation can only begin. Some- 
 times we have heard our dear little children 
 say that they have finished school. We 
 know the sense in which those dear little 
 hearts use the word “ school.” We can never 
 get beyond the school of God, but we may 
 go from class to class, from grade to grade, 
 and at the conclusion of each grade we may 
 say, “So much is perfect; that is done, but 
 it is only done as a pedestal is done on 
 which the statue is to stand, or is only 
 perfect in the sense in which a field has 
 been sowed with good seed which will come 
 up thirty, sixty, or a hundredfold.” And so, 
 as experience is multiplied by experience, 
 and as consciousness is added to conscious- 
 ness, we may seem at each particular crisis 
 to be so far perfect. But the perfection is 
 away beyond the sanctuary of the sun—away 
 in the city which has no temple—because the 
 whole city itself is but a temple: no paradox 
 in words. We must die to see it, and we 
 shall see no temple, because the whole heaven 
 
THE EPHESIANS 95 
 
 is one vast radiant house of God. Brothers, 
 let us cheer ourselves with this “till”? and 
 “until.” Do not let us rush at hasty 
 judgments; let us practise a religion of 
 repose, let us exemplify the piety of rest. 
 And when people ask us the vain question 
 when shall we reach the last perfection, we 
 shall say, ‘The hour is hidden with God, 
 but the promise is that we are to wait until 
 Shiloh come.’ 
 
 Let us continue as far as possible the 
 discourse which we began on ‘Thursday, 
 studying the “Till” and the “ Until” of 
 prophecy and providence and soul-sustaining 
 promise. We swept over considerable space 
 on Thursday ; there remains some ground yet 
 to be traversed: the “till” and the “until” 
 of time—the point that seems to go beyond 
 time, to anticipate ages that are hardly yet 
 reckonable within the four corners of the 
 calendar of time. We could not live without 
 the “ till” and the “ until” of the Divine Book. 
 Sometimes the period is far off; sometimes 
 it is to-morrow; yet we could not live 
 without it, though it be ages away beyond 
 
96 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 the arithmetic of counted centuries. Nor 
 could we live without that event which is 
 going to take place in the to-morrow of 
 imagination. “Day” seems to mean, if 
 strictly limited to itself, despair, then suicide 
 —then we see a light just on the mountain 
 top; it may be but a candle-gleam, but it 
 is a gleam; meanwhile, all light is poetry 
 and liberty and strength. When naturalists 
 have written all they have to write about 
 the great mystery and action of light, they 
 have only written a preface to a course of 
 sermons. There are moral uses of light, 
 poetries of light, paradises in every star-ray 
 and in every blink of the sun. 
 
 Let us add to our list of “ untils.” Ezekiel 
 has a grand “until” or “till ”’—the words are 
 the same in meaning. “Until He come ~ 
 whose right it is”—to save, to reign, to 
 direct, to take all the ribbons into His own 
 hands and drive the chariot of the universe 
 as He pleases. What a word. of cheer, 
 solace, strengthening encouragement, and 
 most blessed and inspiring assurance! There 
 
THE EPHESIANS 97 
 
 is always One coming “ whose right itis.” He 
 does not come in an apologetic attitude, with 
 a compromise from some threatened power, 
 with a proposition that this and that should 
 be divided between light and darkness; He 
 comes with right. Nothing is settled until 
 it is settled rightly. Do not believe that hush 
 is peace; do not believe in any peace that 
 is not built on righteousness. Understand, 
 however, the largeness of that word “ right- 
 eousness”’; it is not my right, your right, 
 the right of some third or unknown party, a 
 selfish and limited right; it is a righteous- 
 ness that involves the very nature and 
 essence of the Deity. What is a crooked 
 plumb line? Nothing, worse than nothing. 
 What if we trifle with the joint of the square 
 and give it a little tip to a hardly measur- 
 able angle? Will it still bea square? No. 
 You killed the square when you changed the 
 angle. Geometry is sensitive; mathematics 
 will not bear to be affronted; mathematics 
 will have an avenging visitation upon those 
 who trifle with rectitude. The arithmeticians 
 say that figures—poor, plain figures—have 
 affections. Who could have thought that 
 7 
 
98 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 an arithmetician would have dreamed so 
 deeply? He looks as if he himself were 
 but a superficies, and sometimes he gets into 
 such ecstasies as to speak about the passions 
 of numbers and the affections of numbers; 
 then he becomes religious, and builds what 
 small altar he can with his brickdust. On 
 what do the ages feed? On the promise 
 that One is coming who will bring right 
 with Him, and who will reign because He 
 is right: who will sit upon a throne that 
 cannot be torn down, because it fits into the 
 whole scheme of things and is the part and 
 the coronation of processes immeasurable 
 and inconceivable. This will get rid of many 
 paltry, petty, and insufficient teachings of 
 compromise and balancing and settled cove- 
 nantings and perfidious double commissions— 
 taking alike from the buyer and the seller— 
 and considering that all is going well because 
 nobody knows anything about it. Nothing 
 goes well that is in itself wrong. There is 
 a tumbling day—a day of upset and ruin. 
 “Be sure your sin will find you out!” 
 thunders through the universe, and no man 
 can cough it down. If we could get rid of 
 
THE EPHESIANS 99 
 
 the notion that we have to handle and to settle 
 things we should be greatly strengthened 
 and greatly relieved. There is next to 
 nothing that we have to handle. Some 
 people can scarcely handle their own raiment; 
 some persons need trainbearers to carry their 
 poor skirts; and men are soon bereaved, 
 stripped, and depleted of every high ambition 
 and crafty cunning policy, and are left on 
 the roadside with coronets that never ruled 
 and with ambitions that were but decorated 
 abortions. Those who live by faith live in 
 peace ; they are perfectly sure that “ all things 
 work together for good to them that love 
 God”; and nobody loves God who does not 
 love the right—who does not love righteous- 
 ness—and who takes a little, narrow, paro- 
 chial, selfish view of things. We are so soon 
 overdone: we write fables and draw pictures 
 about a man who tried to carry a globe on 
 his shoulders. Why, it is but a poor bean— 
 nay, it is but a poorer pea—which he carries, 
 and not at all worth mentioning in any 
 catalogue of the stars. We are tempted to 
 -think that nearness is bigness, and we 
 forget that there is One coming—coming 
 
100 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 with the clouds, coming with the morning, 
 coming after the shortest day has had its 
 little dark reign; coming, and coming 
 to remain by force of right. I wish men 
 would not tinker with things; that they 
 would simply know their limitations; that 
 they would go into the sanctuary of God, 
 and sit there; and if they cannot speak they 
 can be silent, and if they cannot sing they 
 can speak, and if they can neither sing 
 nor speak they can have wrought in them 
 by the mighty power of the Holy Ghost the 
 miracle of patience. Is it nothing to have 
 had all these men about us who have said 
 till,” ‘‘ until’’—the men of eyes who have 
 seen the far-off light and interpreted it to 
 those of us who dwell in the shady valley? 
 
 There are wondrous instances of “till” 
 and “until” in the New Testament. For 
 example, in Matthew ii. 138, “until I bring 
 thee word.” That is a new scheme of 
 lodgment. How long have I to remain 
 here? and the angel says, Until I come 
 back. I want to be moving. Sit still! I 
 do not see why I cannot proceed further. 
 
THE EPHESIANS 101 
 
 Wait until I bring thee word in thy little 
 business, thy little household environment, 
 thy limited village or limited circumstances ; 
 lodge there until I bring thee word: I will 
 not forget thee: God knows the address—He 
 never forgets an address, He never mixes in 
 indiscriminate confusion the dwellings of 
 those who love Him with the dwellings of 
 those who despise Him: wait “until!’’ Thank 
 God for that “until”! It is itself a limi- 
 tation. Whilst it appears to be the indication 
 of a great space or of great time, it fixes a 
 point of return, of deliverance, of liberty, of 
 light. Oh, it is so long! So it is; but the 
 length of the waiting is part of the education 
 of the soul. When shall I see him, see her, 
 again ? could I not see for one little golden 
 hour in the week? I ask no more. And 
 the angel said, Remain until I bring thee 
 word ; I watch all the dressing and prepara- 
 tion and equipment; I know when spirit 
 should meet spirit, when alliances should 
 be completed or renewed; when the veil 
 should be blown to pieces or withdrawn like a 
 curtain of film; I understand the counsel of 
 God in this matter ; stop until—until—until. 
 
102 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 The Apostles were not men much given to 
 a very high order of patience. Like ourselves, 
 they always wanted to be doing something. 
 Some men cannot be really happy unless 
 they are doing a little; it may be only 
 opening and shutting an umbrella, but they 
 must be at it, they cannot keep their hands 
 off it. Well, they were made so, and God 
 will read such riddles to us when we have 
 nothing better to do than to listen to their 
 reading. The Apostles were men of this 
 sort: Wilt Thou at this time restore the 
 kingdom unto Israel? Wait; it is not for 
 you to know the times and the seasons. 
 What shall we do when we are bereaved of 
 our Lord? ‘Tarry in Jerusalem. How long? 
 Until ye be endued with power from on 
 high. What are we to do in the mean- 
 time? Do nothing. We think we can be 
 doing something. You think wrongly. Do 
 not do anything in your own strength, 
 because you will only live to apologise for 
 having done it. Do not imagine that you 
 see anything as it really is; the secret of 
 the centuries is with God. ‘Tarry ye in 
 Jerusalem until you get the power. There 
 
THE EPHESIANS 108 
 
 is no mistaking power. The difference be- 
 tween one man and another often is that 
 one man can do it, and another man cannot 
 do it; and the great mischief is that the 
 man who cannot do it is tempted of the 
 devil to believe that he can do it as well 
 as the other man. We have to wait until 
 there is a great flood-tide of power, a con- 
 scious access or accession of strength; when 
 that mighty power comes upon us, then we 
 may go forth and do the Lord’s will. Waiting 
 is education. We are taking in elements of 
 strength when we hardly know that we are 
 doing so. But one clear day at the seaside, 
 when the wind is coming over the sea, some- 
 times makes an old man young again. What 
 has he been doing? Nothing; and doing 
 everything by doing that nothing: putting 
 himself into right relation, waiting for proper 
 opportunities—lying sweetly, softly, dreamily 
 in the arms of God, the Father-Mother; next 
 day he enters upon a renewed inheritance of 
 energy; all the time the kindly wind was 
 breathing into him new power and displacing 
 old weakness. Tarry ye until you are con- 
 scious of power—not of power only, but of 
 
104 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 power from on high; that is, not only a 
 certain degree of power, but a certain 
 quality of strength; then go forth, and no 
 man shall be able to stand against the hosts 
 of the Lord. Oh! this neglect of the Spirit, 
 this disregard of the Fountain of energy, 
 this broken and _ hesitating companionship 
 with the angel powers of the universe, who 
 are waiting to nourish us and cherish us and 
 nurse us out of-our infirmity into God’s own 
 true strength. We think we are making 
 progress when we are only going round and 
 round in a circle. You cannot teach the right 
 idea of progress to some persons. A man 
 does not go across the Atlantic by walking 
 round and round the mainmast; that is not 
 the action which is progress; there is an 
 action that has no forwardness in it. God 
 Himself takes us through the right exercises 
 and keeps us on the right line. But we 
 cannot wait for the power. We think we 
 have the power, and therein we become 
 weak as other men. Where the power is 
 really given there is no mistake about its 
 quality. You cannot explain it; all power 
 is a mystery, except the merely mechanical 
 
THE EPHESIANS 105 
 
 power; but the dynamic power—the inside, 
 or what we may term the almost spiritual 
 power—who can understand or interpret? 
 Yet there is no mistaking its effects; its 
 energy is indescribable, but patent and in- 
 disputable. The Church will not wait for 
 power; the Church wants to mechanise its 
 own strength, to get up its own new little 
 programme of progress: and the Lord Himself 
 watches such poor little paper kingdoms take 
 fire—go up into smoke, and fall back into 
 dust. The Church of Christ to-day and every 
 day ought to be the mightiest force in the 
 world. It has all the elements, all the pro- 
 mises ; it has not the faith. It proposes and 
 compromises and begs pardon of the devil, 
 and hopes he is not unduly inconvenienced. 
 What becomes of such a Church? Wreck, 
 ruin, oblivion, or contempt. 
 
 The Apostle frequently uses the words 
 “till” and “until”; notably in 1 Corin- 
 thians xi. 26, “show the Lord’s death till 
 He come.” ‘There are so many double sen- 
 tences in Holy Scripture, and so many people 
 have never noticed them. ‘They are too busy 
 
106 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 with their Christmas beef to read the Word 
 of the living God. These Biblical double 
 sentences are great jewels, and we are not 
 forbidden to decorate with such ornaments. 
 Hear David, the greatest master of plaintive 
 poetry that the world ever knew; saith he: 
 *T shall go to him, he shall not return to 
 me.” There is the double action. I always 
 want to reverse that sentence, that I may 
 feel more acutely the tenderness of its 
 meaning: “ He shall not return to me, but I 
 shall go to him.” The assurance that I shall 
 go to him makes him live in the very 
 grave; I am moving in a curve unknown 
 to geometry—we shall come face to face in 
 the by-and-by. So when Paul tells me about 
 my Lord’s death he hardly gets the word out 
 of his mouth before he says, “ till He come.” 
 That is the true rhetoric, the divine eloquence, 
 the substantial and indestructible logic. We 
 do indeed show forth a death, but we only 
 show it forth until it be turned into life, 
 until it be forgotten and the grave is destined 
 to be forgotten, and one day the new earth 
 may not remember that ever a grave was 
 cut in the old earth. If in that day we 
 
THE EPHESIANS 107 
 
 should ask for reminiscences of the grave, 
 the new earth will be stupefied by our very 
 inquiry, it will not know what language we 
 are speaking. Death, grave, loss, pain—is 
 there any interpreter who will tell me, poor 
 old earth, what these words mean? And lo, 
 there shall be no interpreter. The language 
 was only invented that it might be forgotten. 
 
 We are reading in Paul’s Epistle to the 
 Ephesians. It is more like walking through 
 a forest than dallying in a garden. We 
 must in many a case give up his grammar 
 and acquaint ourselves with the music of 
 his soul. Paul did not write much; when 
 he did write he wrote as a blind man might 
 be supposed to write—in large capital letters 
 —saying, ‘‘ Ye see how large a letter I have 
 written unto you with mine own hand.” 
 Poor weak-eyed man, he could hardly see 
 the boldest capitals which he inscribed upon 
 his paper; and as a tired man he thought 
 he had done more than he really had done; 
 he thought it was a large letter because it 
 took so much out of him. There are many 
 standards of measurement. 
 
108 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 This Epistle to the Ephesians must be true 
 in its divinity because it is so palpably—and 
 shall I say glaringly >—true in its humanity. 
 Where the one thing which we can test is 
 so true, the probability is that that which 
 is beyond the present metaphysic—that which 
 is spiritual and transcendental—is also true. 
 What a grasp of human nature the Apostle 
 always has! He seems to lay a great grip 
 upon us and explain us to ourselves. We 
 are not dealing with a posture-master, nor 
 are we in commerce with a man who gives 
 small rules in etiquette and superficial inter- 
 pretations in religious ceremony; we feel a 
 great grip on the soul, and a man telling 
 us through the ear of the body into the ear 
 of the spirit what we are by nature, by 
 conduct, under whose dominion we live; and 
 we confirm his testimony, saying a great, 
 tearful, terrible Amen. It is as thou hast 
 spoken. What a delight it is to have con- 
 fidence in the teacher! How exceedingly 
 disquieting it is to walk through perilous 
 places with a man who is himself afraid! 
 His fear doubles the peril. If we were 
 within the shadow of a great strong man— 
 
THE EPHESIANS 109 
 
 within hearing of a man who could speak 
 great, sure words to us—we should feel that 
 “well begun is half done,” we should make 
 a temple of his confidence and rest in it, 
 yea, and sometimes fall to singing as if we 
 were the happier for the danger. It is so 
 we feel when we are in the companionship 
 of the Apostle Paul. His benedictions are 
 inspirations ; his instructions are battles; his 
 battles are victories 
 
 We have come to the fourteenth verse of 
 the fourth chapter: 
 
 “That we henceforth be no more children, tossed 
 to and fro, and carried about with every wind of 
 doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, 
 whereby they le in wait to deceive.” 
 
 Yet we must always be children. Children 
 are so good that we baptize them; we receive 
 them into our arms with this certificate, 
 written in light and perfumed in the incense 
 of the morning, “Of such is the kingdom 
 of God,” and we baptize them with the dew 
 of the morning. Yet we must in another 
 sense no longer be children, we must not 
 tarry in the cradle; he would be a monster, 
 
110 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 not a man, who at thirty years of age still 
 needed to be rocked to sleep in his cradle. 
 It is in these things that we are not to be 
 children; not in the child-sense, the child- 
 like sense, the little clinging, trustful, child- 
 sense ; always that; in that sense the heavens 
 are full of cradles. To God we must always 
 be beginning; to the Infinite we must 
 always be little sparklets, mere specks and 
 blossoms of things, holding within us great 
 and solemn possibilities. In another sense 
 we are not to be childish, foolish, receiving 
 instruction and letting it fall out of the 
 mind as soon as it gets into it; in that sense 
 let us be no more children, tossed to and 
 fro, carried about by every wind; that is 
 the children’s little game, and for children 
 it is natural and it is pleasant. What is 
 the child going to be? Ask the little 
 creature to tell you on Monday what it is 
 going to be, and the child has a Monday 
 answer; on Tuesday, “What are you going 
 to be?” Something other than was said on 
 Monday. It is the privilege of little boys 
 to be one thing one day and another another, 
 and seven different things every week: that 
 
THE EPHESIANS HSE 
 
 is natural and beautiful; but there comes a 
 time when all this uncertainty and movable- 
 ness of mind must end—a decision must be 
 come to, we must make an election or a 
 choice; henceforth we must be men with a 
 definite programme, an assured purpose, 
 a worthy scheme of life. The mischief is 
 that some people have no plan of existence; 
 they live from hand to mouth, and generally 
 at other people’s expense; most of them have 
 an idea that they could be something very 
 great, which is a certain sign that they will 
 never mount the ladder. The Apostle would 
 have us fix upon a scheme, plan, or thought 
 of life, and keep to it. Persistence is success. 
 If you are seven different things on the seven 
 different days of the week, what can you 
 possibly come to? If a man shall be a 
 lecturer, a politician, an adventurer, a painter, 
 and a preacher, he will be a poor preacher. 
 You cannot be all that, and a preacher. A 
 preacher is never thrown in; he is never 
 mixed up under the indefinite designation 
 _ of an “et cetera.”’ That is the reason why 
 I have seen some men fail in the pulpit. 
 They were so much more eager to get up 
 
112 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 on Monday morning to go to the picture 
 gallery than they were to get up on Sunday 
 morning to go to the pulpit; they deserved 
 to fail. That is why I have seen other men 
 succeed with but moderate talents; they 
 have been faithful to their call—defin iteand 
 certain in their convictions; patiently and 
 lovingly they have continued at their work; 
 and patient continuance in well-doing means 
 a diadem at the last, a “ Well done” that is 
 more golden than a golden crown. The 
 Apostle Paul, therefore, insists that there 
 must be a period put to childishness, and 
 he further insists that we must begin with 
 a meaning and work with a purpose and 
 light our way through the wilderness with 
 the lamp of hope. 
 
 Look what an image of human nature is 
 given in these words—“ alienated from the 
 life of God.” The whole of the eighteenth 
 verse is a great nocturne, it is a picture 
 struck out of a cloud, it is a statue hewn out 
 of sevenfold midnight. ‘“‘ Having the under- 
 standing darkened, being alienated from the 
 life of God through the ignorance that is in 
 
THE EPHESIANS 115 
 
 them.” ‘ Alienated from the life of God ”’— 
 oh, how shall we represent that isolation, that 
 desolated orphanage? Shall we imagine a 
 tree taking its roots out of the earth and 
 placing itself upon the face of a rock that 
 it may have no more connection with the 
 soil ?>—for the soil is full of light, the soil 
 is full of dew; though there be no rain on 
 the surface, there is dew at the core. We 
 dig down to dew, and in all the strata 
 through which we dig we are cutting sun- 
 shine to pieces; the earth is a store of 
 morning—a gallery piled with sunshine. 
 Shall we imagine the poor tree saying, I 
 will have none of it, I will tear myself out 
 of this place, and instead of seeking to plant 
 myself in another part of the soil I will lay 
 myself down on the rock and turn my roots 
 to the morning sun? It cannot be; for a 
 day or two it may seem as though it were 
 a possibility and even a fact, but only for a 
 day or two; the tree must be rooted in the 
 earth as the earth is rooted in God, where 
 all things grow harmonically, proportionately, 
 sympathetically, and tree waves to tree as 
 hymn might sing to hymn. There is a dread 
 8 
 
114 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 possibility of a man taking himself out of 
 the current of things. The soul that takes 
 itself out of the appointed currents shall 
 die. No institution has a right to set itself 
 outside the law of evolution. Evolution 
 means purpose, scheme, predestination, sove- 
 reignty of God, the outworking of a grand 
 beneficent plan; and no man has a right 
 to set himself outside the law and to let 
 the law roll past him; if so, he does but 
 make himself a nameless, hapless grave. 
 Hence the folly of those persons who are 
 always wanting to build themselves on a 
 narrow interpretation of antiquity. We are 
 thankful that “antiquity” is a word in the 
 English language, because it has sometimes 
 a kind of soothing and quieting effect upon 
 a given species of mental adolescence and 
 incompleteness. But the true antiquity is 
 to-day; time has never been so old as it is 
 at this moment; the hoar of the ages rested 
 upon to-day as it was born into history. Let 
 us, therefore, believe in spiritual evolution; 
 let us get away from the nakedness of sin 
 into the white linen of the saints, the purple 
 and the true luxury of the divine sonship. 
 
THE EPHESIANS 115 
 
 Many persons are trying to live without 
 God; they are alienated from the life of 
 God through the ignorance that is in them. 
 They do not know that other people are 
 praying for them, they do not understand 
 the philosophy of intercession. We know 
 not who may be praying for us in the general 
 assembly and Church of the firstborn; but 
 we know that Jesus Christ Himself ever 
 liveth to make intercession for us. It would 
 be like human nature to take favours from 
 God, and to smite the hand that gives them. 
 There may be atheists; I never met one; I 
 have met not a few who have professed 
 atheism ; the word was greater than their 
 understanding of it; the little boy who 
 carries his yard of string in his pocket 
 really cannot, however ambitious his inten- 
 tion, fathom the Atlantic. 
 
 There is another expression in the eighteenth 
 verse that is so true—“ the blindness of their 
 heart.” Do not pity the blind man on the 
 streets with his little dog and his mendicant’s 
 little tin; that is not the man to pity; the 
 man to pity may be the man who is pitying 
 
116 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 him ; for the one man has lost only the eyes of 
 the body, the other may be blind in his heart; 
 he does not see moral distinctions, he does not 
 recognise spiritual differences; he takes the 
 right for the wrong, and the right for the 
 left, and he goes up under the impression 
 that he is going down, and he goes down 
 under the impression that he is going up, 
 and he lives in mental and moral confusion. 
 There are moral lunatics; do not go to the 
 lunatic asylum and say concerning the in- 
 mates, “ Poor creatures! how sad to have lost 
 reason and understanding!” It is a poor 
 speech ; the real lunatic may be outside the 
 asylum. He is a lunatic who does not under- 
 stand anything of God, truth, light, beauty, 
 goodness. The first shall be last, and the last 
 shall be first. What if we who pity the blind 
 and the unseen should ourselves be blind in 
 heart and darkened in understanding ? Fool! 
 I would say to my poor soul sometimes, 
 Thou art the blind, thou art the insane, 
 for the King passed and thou didst not see 
 Him; the whole universe is an argument 
 in parable, and thou didst not understand 
 the sun. 
 
THE EPHESIANS 117 
 
 In the nineteenth verse there is an expres- 
 sion more terrible, if possible, than we have 
 yet come upon. “ Past feeling.” Read the 
 whole verse : 
 
 “Who being past feeling have given themselves 
 over unto lasciviousness, to work all uncleanness with 
 greediness.” 
 
 “Past feeling.’ Is not he past feeling 
 who for thirty years has heard the Gospel 
 preached with simplicity and pathos and 
 power, and is to-day a worm of the earth, 
 a groveller in the mud? “Past feeling” : 
 the spring comes without being hailed and 
 saluted, and the summer is allowed to pass 
 by without a smile of recognition, and the 
 golden autumn is only regarded as a con- 
 tribution to the market-place, and all the 
 jewellery of frost and all the spotless linen 
 of the mountain snow go for nothing, because 
 he who was made in the image and likeness 
 of God has lost sensibility and power of 
 response to all poetic and ideal and spiritual 
 appeals. On some people everything is lost ; 
 on some hearts we waste our kindness; on 
 some lives fathers and mothers have thrown 
 themselves away, their generous love being 
 
118 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 regarded as a commonplace that comes 
 without appreciation or response. It is 
 possible to be overfed religiously; it is pos- 
 sible to hear too much good preaching; it 
 is possible to hear it under the impression - 
 that it comes as a mere matter of course; 
 not knowing that every sentence is a blood- 
 drop, every cry of the appealing heart a 
 loss of nervous energy. To preach to people 
 who are “past feeling,” that must be soli- 
 tude and desolation and unutterable misery. 
 Given over, given themselves over to work - 
 with greediness all manner of badness—to 
 work with the right hand, with the left 
 hand, and work with both the hands, and 
 love it, and kiss it, and work it over and 
 over again, and roll it under the tongue as 
 a sweet morsel; and then say they have been 
 to church. To hell! 
 
 In all this magnificent portrayal of human 
 nature there are top-lights, half-lights, bright 
 lights, gleaming above the brightness of the 
 sun. For example, Paul talks about coming 
 “unto a perfect man.” He will not despair 
 at all the rubbish which he has been 
 
THE EPHESIANS 119 
 
 portraying and pathetically describing; he 
 sees the possibility of growth. “A perfect 
 man” means “a mature man,” a full-grown 
 man who has reached the highest inch of his 
 possible stature—not a perfect man in any 
 merely sentimental and pietistic sense, but 
 full grown. The orchard is perfect when 
 the apples are ready for plucking; the acres 
 are perfect when the golden grain swings 
 in the gentle breeze, and says without words, 
 I am ready to be cut down and to be turned 
 into bread. 
 
 And what a beautiful expression we find in 
 the fifteenth verse—“ speaking the truth in 
 love’’: truthing it in love, doing everything 
 ‘in love; growing up into Him in all things 
 
 -_ in love; finding our duty in love. If we lose 
 
 this power of love we cannot do any duty, 
 we cannot be our best selves. It is motive 
 that gives a man the true self-possession. 
 His mere taste or his mere sense of duty 
 might shrink from certain tasks and efforts. 
 To mere duty the day is so long; to love, 
 the longest day that June can show us is 
 but a flash of light. If we go to church 
 
120 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 because it is our duty we shall never get 
 there ; we may get there in the body, a ton 
 weight of stupidity; but if we go because 
 we have been hungering and thirsting after 
 the holy exercise, we heed nor rain nor snow 
 nor burning sun nor long distance over the 
 city streets; we fly in great expectation and 
 with great warmth and glow of love. It is 
 the same with everything else ; with painting, 
 with music, with writing books, with daily 
 drudgery, with household tasks. If we do 
 these things when we do not want to do 
 them we shall be burdened and utterly dis- 
 tressed ; but if we work in the spirit of love, 
 then let work come, and more and more of — 
 it—it does but multiply the acreage of a 
 sunny and gladsome field. And then, in 
 another sense, we are to be filled with a 
 spirit of love that makes increase, love that 
 edifies itself in love, love that doubles itself, 
 love that says to the labourer, ‘‘ I will love 
 you still more ; if you will work another hour 
 I will bring to your hands all you want, and 
 we will both do it together.’’ Love building 
 itself up in love—tautology to the gram- 
 marian, poetry to the poet. 
 
THE EPHESIANS 121 
 
 And how is all this to be doneP By being 
 renewed in the spirit of our mind, according 
 to verse 23. ‘‘ Renewed,” that is great; “in 
 the spirit,” that is great; “in the spirit of 
 your mind’’—oh, that is getting to a very 
 inward part of the soul, piercing through 
 fold after fold, until the light—the grace of 
 God—gets into the very beginning of man- 
 hood and renews it. That is regeneration ; 
 not a new notion, a new opinion, a new 
 theory in morals, in theology, in politics, in 
 patriotism; no, but a new man. Many 
 “persons are renewed in their opinions who 
 are not renewed in the spirit of their mind. 
 The Word of God is sharper than a two- 
 edged sword, it pierces to the dividing 
 asunder of the joints and marrow, and is a 
 discerner of the thoughts and intents of the 
 heart; and until we are cleansed in there, 
 in that central centre, we do not know the 
 meaning of the kingdom of God ; and nothing 
 can get in there with cleansing power but 
 one thing—the blood of Jesus Christ. Pre- 
 cious Saviour, mighty Saviour, send Thy 
 cleansing blood through the innermost cur- 
 rents of my heart, that I may be without 
 
122 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 spot or wrinkle or taint or stain—holy after 
 the quality of the divine purity! 
 
 Up to this time the Apostle has been talk- 
 ing great words and greater thoughts to the 
 Ephesian Church. He has never been so 
 verbally magnificent or so spiritually sublime. 
 We thought, He will surely keep upon this 
 level to the end: who can come down from the 
 stars—from the golden clouds—to speak about 
 common things? But the Apostle had this 
 rare and great gift. It was never more than 
 a step from t e sublimest contemplations to 
 the simplest household duties, and it was 
 never more than a step from the simplest 
 household duties to the most magnificent 
 spiritual conceptions that could warm the 
 imagination and lift up the whole life of the 
 soul to heavenly visions and celestial har- 
 monies. We have read his grand words, let 
 us now read some of his simpler ones. 
 
 Verse 25 startles us. We must have time 
 to recover our breath. He addresses an ex- 
 hortation to the Ephesian Church that from 
 some aspects appears to be ridiculous. After 
 
THE EPHESIANS 123 
 
 what we have heard of foresight, fore-ordi- 
 nation, calling, election, condescension, it 
 seems to be an anticlimax to say, 
 
 “ Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man 
 truth with his neighbour: for we are members one 
 of another.” 
 
 For a moment we had been lost in transcen- 
 dental visions and possibilities, and suddenly 
 we are told not to tell any more lies! Who 
 but Paul could take such liberties, as we 
 should deem them, with coherence and se- 
 quence and natural climacteric logic? But 
 Paul will have his way—his soul speaks as 
 it thinks ; we hear, as it were, the very going 
 of his soul’s thought. If any preacher or 
 teacher were to follow this course we should 
 blame him, because we go by little logic 
 books and rhetoric books and examples of 
 verbal propriety; and thus we kill ourselves 
 with wooden knives. It is very sad to shut 
 the soul up within a cage of prescribed rules. 
 Oh for the mountain air, for the open-air 
 preacher, for the man on the mount that talks 
 as the winds blow, now in breezes, in tempests 
 _ always laden with fragrance from the summer 
 
124 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 land! ‘Wherefore putting away lying, speak 
 every man truth with his neighbour.” If 
 this were the rule of statesmanship and 
 diplomacy and commerce, life would be ended 
 almost abruptly. Could the world live one 
 day if every man spake truth with his neigh- 
 bour? That gun of verity would blow the 
 fortifications of society into splinters and 
 ashes. Does a man always speak truth to 
 himself? That is the first great lesson in 
 certain departments of spiritual life and edu- 
 cation. Really and truly to tell a man what 
 he knows himself to be, and to speak every 
 word slowly, deliberately, and to thrust it 
 into the soul as a naked sword—who could 
 live? Yet how pious we are, and how ex- 
 ceedingly punctual and regular and methodical 
 in all our religious habitudes! Yet possibly 
 the most regular and the most admirable, 
 from a mechanical point of view, may be the 
 man who dare not look in upon himself and 
 say to his soul, You are a villain! When 
 man talks so he will need the Cross; so long 
 as he tells lies to himself, what need of re- 
 deeming blood and divine priesthood ? They 
 are mistakes, exaggerations, out of keeping 
 
THE EPHESIANS 125 
 
 with the tone of daily conduct and habitude. 
 The Apostle gives us his reason for speaking 
 truth to one another— For we are members 
 one of another”; that we belong to one 
 another ; that truth-speaking is social justice ; 
 that to be plain, candid, and straightforward 
 is a debt we owe, and that we ought to lay 
 down the golden words—sterling metal as it 
 were—on the counter of righteousness. Who 
 could live? ‘Truly the Word of God is sharp 
 and powerful, piercing asunder to the dividing 
 of the joints and marrow, and to be holy is no 
 holiday, to be holy is no matter of intellectual 
 entertainment or frivolity; it is first of all, 
 midst of all, last of all, self-slaughter. Where 
 are the Christians P 
 
 Then the Apostle proceeds to give us 
 another instruction : 
 
 Verse 26: “ Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the 
 sun go down upon your wrath.” 
 
 But Paul has been talking about election 
 and fore-ordination and the glory of the 
 Church, and the vocation wherewith the 
 people of God are called, and he has been 
 
126 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 almost lost in the mazes of his own ineffable 
 eloquence ; now he comes back to the common 
 turnpike of life, and says, “When you are 
 angry, see that you do not drive the passion 
 of anger too far; know when to stop. Self- 
 control is one of the highest elements in holy 
 anger. It is right to be angry, it is right to 
 get into a tempestuous rage in relation to evil 
 and evil suggestion and evil approach; but 
 when it comes to being angry as between man 
 and man, see that you do not turn your anger 
 into a positive luxury on your own side, revel- 
 ling in your anger, and rejoicing because your 
 passion is so hot. I repeat,” the Apostle says 
 in effect, “know just where to stop, because 
 evil may become sin.” We have read of the 
 old teacher Pythagoras, who had a school of 
 rhetoric, dialectic, and general disputation. 
 All the scholars in the school, we read, used 
 to spring at one another, so to say, and in hot 
 dispute chase the hours of the day; but their 
 habit was, when the shadows gathered and the 
 school was done, to fall upon each other and 
 with a kiss of peace and brotherhood to close 
 the intellectual fray. This is surely a very 
 beautiful picture! It is only Christians of a 
 
THE EPHESIANS 127 
 
 certain type that can carry over anger until 
 to-morrow. The only Christianity some people 
 seem to have is the power of nursing their 
 wrath “to keep it warm.” I quote from a 
 Scotch poet, but indeed he speaks the mother 
 tongue of the world when he speaks so broad 
 and true a sentiment. If you carry over 
 your anger until to-morrow you lose your 
 Christianity in the dark river of the night 
 time. You must not remember yesterday’s 
 anger. And who are you, that you should 
 keep up the anger of the world? Know, O 
 thou foolish man! that thou thyself needest 
 forgiveness very much. It is audacity, obsti- 
 nacy—utter badness on our part—to keep up 
 the memory and the challenge of evil. If 
 you have done wrong to any man, say so; and 
 in the degree in which he is a Christian man 
 his forgiveness will be uttered before your 
 confession is complete. But there must be 
 confession, or there cannot be forgiveness ; 
 this is the divine plan—it is the plan of reason 
 and sense and justice, and the only plan that 
 can stand the strain of time. 
 
 How shall we lower ourselves to bring our 
 
128 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 conduct under the fire of the twenty-eighth 
 verse P 
 “Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let 
 him labour, working with his hands the thing which 
 is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.” 
 What an impossible conception! We have 
 been told that in Christ Jesus we are called, 
 we have been challenged, to comprehend with 
 all the saints what is the breadth and length 
 and depth and height, and to know the love 
 of Christ which passeth knowledge, that we 
 might be filled with all the fulness of God. 
 Now this ruthless, incalculable Apostle turns 
 round upon us and says, “ Do not steal any 
 more.” What violent alternations! Whata 
 swing has this man’s arm! We are on the 
 top of the mountain, and he throws us down 
 into the valley; he finds us in the valley, 
 lifts us up on to the top of the mountain; 
 he whirls us round the glowing horizon. 
 Who can follow him? Yet there may be 
 coherence where we little suspected it; we 
 may need in our spiritual education just 
 those changes to arrest our attention and to 
 give the slowest of us something to think 
 about. But to have an eye upon us which 
 
THE EPHESIANS 129 
 
 sees our thieving! We do not go to church 
 to hear moral lessons, do we? We do not 
 go to church to have weights and scales 
 tested ? Wedo not go to church to have a 
 sort of spiritual excise officer hunting up all 
 our little methods and schemes, and following 
 us into the cellars of our lives, that under- 
 ground work and possession may be brought 
 to a certain divine standard? We go to 
 church to pray and sing and to be told how 
 good we are! Paul does not minister in 
 that church. Paul could be rich in poverty, 
 or he would soon be a pastor without a 
 charge; Paul could live on next to nothing 
 if he asked a blessing upon it, otherwise 
 what a poor congregation he would have! 
 We do not steal! The Apostle Paul says, 
 “Wait a moment, and be quite sure before 
 you speak ; ‘stealing’ is a larger word than 
 it looks. A man who takes off five minutes 
 from his employer’s time is a thief, though 
 he may sing many hymns and be able to 
 find fault with the way in which other 
 people sing them. The man that takes 
 away five minutes from his servant’s time 
 without recognising it is a thief.” Is the 
 9 
 
130 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 law so impartial as that? Yes! that is 
 Christianity reduced to practice. He who 
 bears false witness against his neighbour 
 is a thief. He who keeps back the»one 
 sweet word that would have turned a diffi- 
 cult message into music is a thief. The 
 Apostle says to the vulgar thief and to the 
 refined or intellectual thief, “ Let him that 
 stole steal no more.”” His eyes were evidently 
 fastened suspiciously upon the men who made 
 stealing a kind of livelihood. Can the Apostle, 
 who has been speaking about election, fore- 
 ordination, and all the transcendental wisdom 
 and mystery of the kingdom of God, con- 
 descend to speak to a common thief? That 
 is what Christianity does—that is what is done 
 by the two commandments on which “ hang 
 all the law and the prophets.’”’ What is the 
 thief to do? Some men seem to be born 
 thieves. The Apostle has the answer; he 
 says, “Let him work, let him labour.” 
 How? “With his hands.” That is bring- 
 ing down the instruction to a fine point. 
 Not only ‘“ Let him labour with his hands,” 
 but, “Let him labour with his hands for a 
 purpose, that he may have something to give 
 
THE EPHESIANS 131 
 
 to the other man.” Why, Christianity is most 
 practical, and yet some people are leaving 
 the Church because they want to do some- 
 thing that is according to their own inter- 
 pretation of the term “practical”! They 
 need not leave the Church to do that. He 
 who keeps company with the ten command- 
 ments need not go from home to warm his 
 hands; he who keeps within the shadow of 
 the Cross need not go to some other camp 
 to know the meaning of “discipline.” And 
 discipline is the proof of Christianity. Do 
 not be confused over metaphysical terms 
 which will be understood here and now, but 
 enter into what is the more obviously prac- 
 tical gate of the kingdom, and you will find 
 that as you work away with diligence and 
 industrious care you will little by little get 
 into all the metaphysics you need. Mean- 
 while, no lying, no thieving, but truth-speak- 
 ing, hand-working; your hands were made 
 to labour, and he is the independent man 
 who can work with his fingers. His inde- 
 pendence will be a small paltry god not 
 worth worshipping; he must so labour that 
 he can save something, and so save something 
 
ae 
 132 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 that he may have something to give away. 
 
 That will keep him right by the Spirit and 
 the grace and the blood of Christ. 
 
 Verse 29: “Let no corrupt communication pro- 
 
 ceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the 
 
 use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the 
 hearers.” 
 
 Keep your mouth right. Oh the blessing 
 of a sweet breath! I speak of it in the first 
 instance as the natural breath. It is not 
 given to all persons. What a treasure it 
 is to have sweet breath, balmy breath, the 
 breath of the summer morning, the breath 
 of the sea-breeze, the breath of singing birds! 
 No man can ever be thankful enough for 
 having had parents whose natural breath 
 was sweet; it is life, it is health, it is bene- 
 diction. The Apostle says, Let the soul 
 be sweet-breathed. ‘‘ Let no corrupt ”—that 
 is, “no putrid or rotten ”—‘‘ communication 
 proceed out of your mouth”: your words 
 are your soul’s breath—let them be sweet, 
 pure, healthy; let all persons who come 
 within the range of your influence and 
 ministry of life feel that they are in 
 good company. You may trust your 
 
THE EPHESIANS 183 
 
 child to the good man; the child will be 
 the better for spending a day with the 
 soul that is good. There is a_ breath 
 that withers flowers; there is a breath that 
 keeps them alive. Trust your girl to the 
 man whose soul’s breath is sweet. Trust 
 your children to those schools where the 
 atmosphere is morally pure and exhilarating. 
 Do not listen- to any man who speaks bad 
 words in a bad breath. We thought when 
 we began these readings that we were to 
 walk mountains high, yea, to pass from 
 mountain to cloud, and from cloud to star, 
 and to know no more the language of the 
 market-place or even the language of the 
 common school. Yet suddenly, after having 
 these long morning walks up in the higher 
 air, we are brought down to the earth to 
 love our neighbour as ourselves. 
 Verses 30-32: “And grieve not the holy Spirit of 
 God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemp- 
 tion. Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and 
 clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with 
 all malice: and be ye kind one to another, tender- 
 
 hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for 
 Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” 
 
 99 
 
 “Grieve not the holy Spirit.” How can 
 
134 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 we then doubt the Trinity—the threefold, ~ 
 inexplicable constitution of the Godhead ? 
 The holy Spirit of God is not referred to 
 here as an influence, an idealism, a feat of 
 the religious imagination ; you cannot grieve — 
 an influence, you cannot pierce and wound 
 an idealism; the terms are wasted, and 
 worse than wasted, if they do not indicate 
 a distinct and sensitive personality. Notice 
 the relation of the holy Spirit to the believing — 
 heart. That relation is personal; the holy 
 Spirit has sealed the believing soul and re- 
 served it under every manifestation and proof 
 of security to the day of redemption. It is 
 not only a personal relation in a general 
 sense, but personal in an individual sense, as 
 if each particular heart were under the special 
 ministry and care of the Third Person of 
 the holy and ever blessed Trinity: to which 
 Trinity be the homage of the universe! which 
 is the footstool of God. The peculiarity of 
 the relationship is in the fact that He is 
 wounded by everything in our human thought 
 that is opposed to the quality of His own 
 purity. He cannot live with the unholy; 
 it is not an intellectual vexation to Him, 
 
THE EPHESIANS 135 
 
 for who could pity with fuller sympathy 
 and completer understanding of human in- 
 firmity >—it is a moral or spiritual grief to 
 the Holy Ghost. If we sin we please the 
 devil and we wound the Spirit of God. 
 Holiness is always sensitive. Purity grows 
 in sensitivity; what things we could once 
 do with comparative indifference or impunity 
 we cannot do to-day; they are the same 
 things, but we are not the same men; we 
 have grown to a fuller stature, we are called 
 to the breathing of a purer atmosphere ; now 
 we see things more clearly, so that what was 
 once, it may be, little more than trifling and 
 hardly to be considered, is now like dust in 
 the eyes. We feel the sinfulness of sin just 
 in proportion as we grow in the holiness of 
 God. It is only in that sense that we have 
 got away from the commandments of Sinai; 
 the commandments are still there, and still 
 in force, clothed with all their old dignity 
 and imperishable authority; but we have 
 erown away from them into a more spiritual 
 interpretation of their purpose, so that now 
 we are in daily communion with the holy 
 Spirit of God. The killing letter is still 
 
1386 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 
 
 there, and still there are the rocks of Sinai; 
 but there is a spirit of holiness, purity, and 
 appreciation of all things divinely lovely, 
 and it is in that higher experience that we 
 develop a keener and more responsive sensi- 
 tiveness. 
 
 The thirty-first verse would seem surely 
 to be quite superfluous when addressed to 
 those who are believers in Christ Jesus: 
 
 “Tet all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and 
 clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, 
 with all malice.” 
 
 These are not only elementary truths, they 
 ought to be impossible facts. If we have 
 seen the kingdom of God at all, and have 
 been called within the divine circle of light 
 and vital progress, these words of the thirty- 
 first verse ought to be left outside as terms too 
 vulgar and demoralised even to be permitted 
 expression in the air that has been made 
 balmy and blessed by psalms and hymns and 
 spiritual songs. Yet sometimes it is well 
 for us to be reminded how small a course 
 we have made in Christian progress; it is 
 well that we should hear the baying of the 
 
THE EPHESIANS 137 
 
 old cruel hounds from which we thought 
 we had escaped ; they are still within hearing 
  distance—their names are bitterness, and 
 wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil- 
 speaking, and malice, and they bark and 
 bay as if they would once more spring upon 
 our poor lives and drag us down and devour 
 us like spirits of fury. We are inclined 
 falsely to measure the progress which we 
 suppose ourselves to have made: we think, 
 after singing holy hymn and psalm, that 
 surely we cannot be far from the gates of 
 heaven; we have been lifted up to trans- 
 figuration heights, we have heard in the 
 spirit the voices of Moses and Elijah, the 
 law and the prophets, the testimonies of 
 old history and the prophecies of the richest 
 experience; and lo, we are offended, dis- 
 appointed, insulted, and in a moment the 
 old nature rises, and there rush up the trans- 
 figuration mount the old cruel hounds called 
 bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, 
 and evil-speaking, and malice, and if God 
 do not protect us we shall even yet, though 
 we have been on Tabor’s morning mountain, 
 be devoured and destroyed by the enemy. 
 
138 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 * Let all bitterness ’’—that is, sharpness, 
 acerbity of temper, acidity, sourness—‘ be 
 done away.’ But so unwrought is that 
 acerbity that, if it be taken out of us, 
 what would there be left? We are so 
 glutted with evil things that if we give 
 them up who could see the cellular phantom 
 that would be left—the phantom-self, the 
 ghost not visible? So we have to be called 
 back again and again to be reminded that 
 we are in the body, that we are children of 
 dust and of time, that only by patient con- 
 tinuance in well-doing and earnest clinging 
 to Christ, heart to heart, can we be lifted 
 up into sonship and be conscious of immor- 
 tality and the spirit of final triumph. It 
 is.a hard run—it is a race over rough places; 
 our feet bleed as they run over the flinty 
 rocks. Yet there is a voice sounding to us 
 far away yet near at hand, saying, “ Follow 
 me; proceed, advance, never stand still”; 
 and it is in obedience to that inspiring and 
 exhilarating voice that we are enabled to 
 keep going on still, saying, as the great 
 night closes within us, “ Faint, yet pur- 
 suing.” 
 
THE EPHESIANS 139 
 
 The evil things that are mentioned in 
 verse 31 remind us of what may in some 
 sense be still grosser things from which pro- 
 bably the most of nominal Christians have 
 to a large extent escaped. Sins are distri- 
 butable into two classes, and yet both the 
 classes may be traced back to the same root. 
 Sin is the same always, everywhere, and yet 
 it hath a cunning of its own, a terrible de- 
 ceitfulness, and a wondrous magical power of 
 metamorphosis, so that it can change its aspect 
 and drop its old name, and assume new titles 
 and designations, and impersonate virtue and 
 catch some semblance of the angels of light. 
 We must watch it, we must beware of it; 
 it isa cunning foe. We have got rid of its 
 rougher aspects: are we not still under the 
 dominion of its more spiritual potency? 
 That is the question, and the Christian must 
 face it, though he die in the facing of it. 
 We have outgrown all the vulgarities of sin. 
 We are not drunken, we are not guilty of 
 common theft, we do not tell wilful and 
 provable lies ; when the commandment comes 
 to us saying, “Thou shalt not kill,” we 
 answer with a kind of religious cheerfulness 
 
140 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 that we never thought of doing so; “ Thou 
 shalt not commit adultery,” and we rise in 
 a kind of anger to repel the mean suggestion. 
 All that looks well, but what is it under 
 spiritual analysis? when the criticism of 
 God is brought to bear upon it, what does 
 it amount to? does it amount to anything 
 more than outward respectability, social dis- 
 tinction as between the lowest and the — 
 highest ? Is there any real religious signi- 
 ficance and value in it? Is there not a 
 voice penetrating the self-applauding soul, 
 saying, “What do ye more than others? 
 Do not even sinners the same?” Except 
 your righteousness exceed the righteousness 
 of the Scribes and Pharisees, ye cannot enter 
 into the kingdom of heaven; be ye holy 
 as your Father in heaven is holy. Then 
 are we no longer on Sinai? We ought to 
 be miles higher than Sinai ever reached ; 
 it was an elementary school, it was but an 
 alphabetic tuition; we ought to have passed 
 into the heavenlies and the spiritualities, 
 and to be able to interpret the command- 
 ments into their brightest significance. We 
 have escaped drunkenness and theft and 
 
THE EPHESIANS 141 
 
 lying and murder and adultery: are we 
 therefore good? No, not “therefore”; 
 unless we can go further, we may fall more 
 disastrously backward. 
 
 What about pride, jealousy, readiness to 
 take offence; what about evil-speaking ?— 
 these were not mentioned on Sinai. To these 
 heights we must slowly climb, the heights 
 where we escape all these disennobling and 
 disastrous ministries, suggestions, and in- 
 fluences. Why, there are those who take a 
 pride in pride; not knowing that they are 
 grieving the holy Spirit of God. A man 
 will exclaim that he is “very proud,” not 
 knowing that he is wounding the Christ— 
 cutting the Son of God with a sharp sword. 
 There is more said in the Bible against pride 
 than there is said against murder; and yet 
 people seem to imagine that they are 
 acquiring a species of dignity by being 
 proud! The Lord beholdeth the proud afar 
 off; and how far off soever it may be, it is 
 too near Him. The Lord never spake kindly 
 to pride, the Lord never encouraged the 
 proud heart; the self-righteous He drove 
 out of His presence. There is no salvation for 
 
142 ' THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 the proud. The thief, the liar, the murderer, 
 the adulterer, being penitent, may be saved— 
 the proud soul never. But if it repent, then 
 it is no longer proud; penitence is self- 
 abasement, penitence is the throwing off of the 
 old man with his plumed, rotten pride. Self- 
 righteousness cannot even hear the Gospel, 
 self-righteousness represents the deafness that 
 never heard the brazen trumpet or the roar- 
 ing thunder or any of the sounds that make 
 up the music of the universe. Only the 
 broken heart can hear with intelligence and 
 profit about the Cross. To self-righteousness 
 there is no Calvary; on the map of self- 
 righteousness there is no place called Gol- 
 gotha, nor is there a garden of Eden, nor 
 is there a praying place. Think of it, be 
 terrified by it; I have no comfort for the 
 soul that dwells in the castle of its own self- 
 approval. 
 
 What about readiness to take offence? 
 That readiness grieves the holy Spirit of God. 
 Who am I that I should be offended P—I 
 who have trampled the holy Ten under my 
 feet and grieved the holy Spirit and en- 
 couraged bitterness of feeling towards some 
 
THE EPHESIANS 143 
 
 other poor soul, who in a moment of forget- 
 fulness may have done me even an intentional 
 injury. If I were really in Christ I should 
 love him as it were even the more because he 
 has done me that injury—‘* While we were 
 yet sinners, Christ died for us”’; and to drink 
 His blood, even in symbol, and then not to 
 forgive those who have sinned against us, 
 that is blasphemy. Who then can be saved ? 
 What about evil-speaking ? Remember that 
 bitterness and readiness to take offence and 
 evil-speaking and malice belong to the more 
 spiritual section or region of our lives. We 
 have no bloody gully with which we have 
 cut the throats of men, but have we not cut 
 their hearts by bitter speeches, bitter thoughts, 
 unholy desires? Let the butcher take his 
 gully away—it is a symbol of the utterest 
 vulgarity—whilst I look into my soul to find 
 whether I have not a still bloodier weapon 
 which is invisible and which cannot be traced 
 to any manufacturing hand—a spirit of unfor- 
 giveness and hardness and jealousy. Am I 
 jealous when my brother goes to an office that 
 is higher than mine? When his book circu- 
 lates more widely than mine has circulated do 
 
144 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 I hate him and speak evil about him, and 
 then go and drink a cup, full of redness, 
 called ‘‘the crimson blood of Christ,” and pro- 
 claim myself orthodox? Oh the shame of it! 
 oh the hell that burns like a hot cinder in the | 
 heart of it! The magistrate cannot lay hands 
 upon us; we do not subject ourselves to the 
 magistrate—we only wound the Lord, 
 
 So much for the dark side of this apostolic 
 exhortation: are there no bright spots—no 
 lights that kindle from afar, and shed their 
 genial, welcome radiance upon the page of 
 life? Hear the Apostle: 
 
 Verse 32: “ And be ye kind one to another, tender- 
 hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s 
 sake hath forgiven you.” 
 
 We can only displace the negative by the 
 positive. It is not enough to lay down our 
 weapons of warfare—we must fill our hands 
 with palms and branches and blossoms and 
 fruits of kindness; we must not let our hands 
 be empty—we must fill those hands with all 
 the kindness of God; then, when the demon 
 returns to reoccupy the hands out of which 
 he has been cast, he will find that he cannot 
 
THE EPHESIANS 145 
 
 return, for those same hands are full of the 
 business of the Lord. ‘“ Tender-hearted !”’ 
 sometimes the adjective weakens a word, 
 often it splits up and dissipates the meaning 
 of the substantive; but here is a hyphen that 
 connects “ tender” with ‘‘ hearted,” and the 
 two together make up a beautiful little poem. 
 *Tender-hearted ! ”’ feeling so sensitive as to 
 be utterly unable to hurt another man. We 
 often forget when we say we are very sensi- 
 tive that we may be wounding the sensitive- 
 ness of another soul. He is the refined man 
 who never remarks upon another’s vulgarity, 
 and he is the sensitive man who remembers 
 that by a word he may hurt some soul that is.. 
 groping for the light or whispering if haply 
 the air may catch the undertone and carry 
 it away until it swells into a spoken and a 
 prevailing prayer. ‘“ Forgiving one another.” 
 The meaning is that we all have occasion to 
 forgive. What man is there who liveth and 
 sinneth not? What man is there who does 
 not require to say almost every day to those 
 who labour with him, “ Pity me, I am weak; 
 forgive me, I spoke in a moment of fever, and 
 I was unjust to you; but I am sorry, pardon 
 10 
 
146 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 me”? ‘That is the Christian atmosphere. 
 There are some Christians who find it almost 
 impossible to forgive. They can persecute 
 finely, they can stand up for orthodoxy six 
 feet high ; but to forgive—that is the supreme 
 miracle of grace. And we, poor insect things, 
 say we may forgive, but we cannot forget. 
 Then you can never enter the kingdom of 
 heaven; and do go and join the infidels—go to 
 your own sect; do not stain the sacramental 
 cup with lips livid with the anger of the 
 devil. Our forgiveness will prove our ortho- 
 doxy. Some people think that Christianity 
 is a creed, whereas it is a disposition, a 
 temper, a condition of the soul—broken- 
 heartedness, readiness to forgive even the 
 most rude and callous offender. 
 
 Has the Apostle nothing but exhortation 
 to offer us upon this point? The answer is 
 sublime; he does not offer us exhortation, he 
 offers us the reason which underlies all his 
 arguments and all his appealing entreaty— 
 “even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven 
 you.” ‘Thus we are called to be followers of 
 God; thus we are summoned to follow Christ; 
 
 thus we have the true standard put into our © 
 
THE EPHESIANS 147 
 
 possession by which we are to measure every- 
 thing. Be ye holy, as God in Heaven; be ye 
 perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is 
 perfect. Does that mean that I am to be as 
 holy as God in moral excellence, as perfect 
 as God in spiritual purity? No! but it 
 means that I am to follow on to know the 
 Lord, to move in a certain direction, and 
 under the impulse and sway of a certain 
 encouragement. How is God perfect and 
 tender and forgiving? 4He is kind to the 
 unthankful and to the evil; He sends His 
 rain and sunshine upon the just and upon the 
 unjust ; and Jesus Christ, having told us this, 
 says, “‘ Be ye perfect as your Father in Heaven 
 is perfect”; be larger, nobler, bring in a 
 wider circle of those who need pity and 
 sympathy and forgiveness and assistance. Is 
 the Lord kind? No, not kind only, but this 
 is a word which will bear an interpreting 
 epithet; that epithet was discovered by the 
 sweetest of all singers—the minstrel of the 
 ages; he spake of kindness, and went on to 
 speak of lovingkindness—made one massive 
 _ word of it. Is God merciful? Nay, more 
 than merciful: the same great singer invented 
 
148 EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 
 
 or attached another epithet even to mercy, and 
 he called it “ tender’? mercy. Thus we have 
 lovingkindness and tender mercy, and we are 
 called to these high attainments little by 
 little. Not merciful with a grudge, not kind 
 with an upbraiding, but a right royal mercy, 
 forgiveness, and kindness: on the divine 
 scale, and according to the divine inspiration, 
 be ye kind, tender-hearted, helpful, forgiving ; 
 and if you ask me how—“as Christ,” “as 
 God,” “‘as the Cross.” Do not dwarf the 
 opportunity, but enlarge it, and when thou 
 dost forgive, have so much forgiveness left 
 that thou couldst do it seven times again, and 
 then seventy times seven; for thou drawest 
 thy forgiveness from the fountain of the 
 Cross. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 Verse 1: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as 
 dear children.” 
 
 UST like that! There is no lovelier 
 metaphor in all this Book of parables. 
 Why do we seek to change the figure? It 
 means everything. If it is a cup, it is large 
 enough to hold all the wine of God. “As’— 
 then comes the figure. It would seem as if 
 the parable fever warmed all the writers of 
 the New Testament. The kingdom of God 
 is like unto ; the kingdom of heaven is 
 as ; be ye therefore followers as : 
 It is always like something else, and that 
 something else is always so clear and so 
 beautiful that a child may see it. Yet how 
 often have we made confusion of the beauti- 
 ful; how often have we painted it as if we 
 were expressing some resentment against its 
 
 purpose! When all is so clear, why this love 
 149 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
150 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 of blurring and confusion and intermixing, so 
 that the soul misses all that is nutritious in 
 the holy feast? As children, as dear children, 
 as little children—how much further will he 
 carry the figure? He is already touching the ~ 
 living nerve, his fingers are on the chords 
 that thrill with divinest music of response. 
 That is what he means to do—that is what he 
 means to be. But this would drive away so 
 many. No doubt; it would drive away all 
 the wise and intellectually proud and self- 
 conceited, and people who through so-called 
 “culture”’ are finding their way to the devil. 
 Nothing has kept so many people out of 
 heaven as so-called ‘‘ culture.” I never heard 
 a little child use that word; I do not think any 
 little child ever heard it so as to remember it; 
 no little child could spell it—no little child 
 wants to spell it. We are not saved by philo- 
 sophy, by culture, by erudition, by grammar, 
 by high intellectual feats, and by marvellous 
 ability in the guessing of conundrums; that 
 is not the gate that opens on the kingdom 
 of light and loveliness. “As children’’: is 
 there no welcome to philosophers? None. 
 Is there no gate for the learned menP None. 
 
THE EPHESIANS 151 
 
 Philosophy and learning are not condemned, 
 but they are put in their right places; that is 
 all. It is not the philosopher that is saved, 
 but the sinner; not the man of learning, but 
 the man of broken-heartedness. One of the 
 last books that John Bunyan thought of 
 printing bore the title “The Excellence of 
 the Broken Heart.” What a philosophy— 
 without the name, the pretence, or the 
 miserableness of it! It is the broken heart 
 that finds the gate of the kingdom; it is the 
 broken heart that alone can read the Bible 
 and understand the words of Jesus; it is the 
 heart that has renounced itself that can find 
 room in the chamber of its love in which to 
 entertain the Son of God. What a great 
 burning of books there would be! Certainly ; 
 whole libraries would be set ablaze at once, 
 and no wise soul would stir a finger to put 
 the fire out. We must get back to little 
 children, dear children; we must become 
 converted, and become as little children, if 
 we would enter into the kingdom of heaven. 
 We are sometimes permitted to use the word 
 “man” or “men,” but always in a sense that 
 is perfectly consistent with the idea of dear 
 
152 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 children, little children. For what is the 
 oldest of us but a life new burning—a life 
 just arrived from the other side of things; a 
 new interpretation of the light and the beauty 
 of the further house which is the house of the 
 Father? ‘There are no old men except ac- 
 cording to the calendars which we ourselves 
 have made. We are great calendar makers; 
 we make almanacs, and age ourselves ac- 
 cording to their mean lines. We have no 
 business with such poor literature. We come 
 up with God, we were in His thought from 
 the beginning, we engage His solicitude and 
 His love every moment of our breathing. 
 But man laughs at the ridiculous notion. The 
 oak under which he will be buried is centuries 
 older than he was when he breathed his last 
 upon the earth. What, therefore, we have to 
 cultivate is the child-heart. If we have the 
 
 child-heart we can read the Bible with great 
 
 edification and profit. One of the first things 
 we shall know is that God cannot be known. 
 There is no need to know Him here and now; 
 but we see Jesus—we know God’s Son—and 
 His Son is the express image of His person; 
 and Jesus Christ says, “‘ He that hath seen Me 
 
THE EPHESIANS 153 
 
 hath seen the Father.” That is His con- 
 descending way of telling us that if we 
 understand anything that Jesus says we 
 understand just so much about God; for God 
 speaks through His Son, and the words of His 
 Son are written, and we know that they are 
 the Son’s words because they cut us in pieces, 
 they discipline—torture us—stretch us on a 
 cross; therefore they are Christ’s words. Yet 
 there be poor men who examine, collate, and 
 compare divers manuscripts and dates and 
 ages, to see if they can confirm the words. 
 God send that they would accept the discipline, 
 and then they would know whose words they 
 are. No man ever sought to call human 
 nature to God through such a gate as this— 
 through such a process as this—that tears the 
 joints, cuts the heart, pierces to the marrow, 
 and has a calendar of discipline for every 
 moment of the day. I need no literary proofs 
 of my Lord’s words; I know they could not 
 have come from man—I know that no devil 
 ever thought of testing the heart with severest 
 suffering ; I feel that the discipline of Christ 
 is the proof of Christianity. 
 
 If we could but be little children we should 
 
154 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 soon obey the exhortation of the Apostle, 
 * Be ye therefore followers of God.” The 
 literal word is, Be ye therefore imitators, 
 copyists of God; that is to say, being Chris- 
 tianized, Put your feet into the footprints of 
 Jesus Christ—now a short step, now a long 
 one ; now up the hill, now through the thorny 
 places, now down the hill—which is another 
 way of saying “up the hill”; for to go down 
 the hill of time in the right spirit and in the 
 right temper and at the right time is to go up 
 the hill of eternity; the palace road, where 
 _ the King’s house is at the top. Children 
 imitate, children write upon pencil lines, 
 children cannot trust themselves to write 
 without the little railways cut upon the 
 paper by a mother’s tender hand with a well- 
 sharpened pencil; then the little scribe comes 
 and writes between the lines. The little scribe 
 does more than that; the little scribe first 
 writes with a pencil, and through many a 
 blunder stumbles upon the right thing at the 
 last; and then, having done all the pencil 
 work, it takes up the pen and the ink and 
 runs great danger of making such sad blotting 
 when it begins to copy from the pencil in ink, 
 
THE EPHESIANS 155 
 
 Be ye imitators ; do not imagine that you can 
 be great, fluent scribes all at once, writing the 
 literature with a free, expert hand. Some of 
 us have got the letter in our minds, and some 
 of us have got it in pencil; but we dare not 
 just yet begin the ink work, for where there is 
 ink there is danger until the mother draws the 
 lines. And then with what infinite pains and 
 labour we copy the thing, and how ashamed 
 we are when we spell badly—when we spell 
 Heaven without an H—and when we have 
 twice written a letter that should only have 
 been written once; and then sometimes we 
 take the ink copy away and begin another 
 copy and write it without error in spelling or 
 in shape of letters. Who will despise it? 
 What man will frown upon it? Not one; 
 neither will your Father which is in heaven 
 frown upon your poor writing and poor spell- 
 ing and poor grammar. He does not want 
 either the writing or the spelling, either the 
 erammar or the composition; He wants the 
 meaning of the soul—He wants to know what 
 your little child-heart would be at. That is 
 satisfaction ; herein is our Father pleased by 
 the child-likeness and the tenderness, the 
 
156 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 simplicity and the trustfulness of our young 
 hearts. 
 
 Verse 2: “ And walk in love, as Christ also hath 
 loved us, and hath given Himself for us an offer- 
 ing and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling 
 savour.” 
 
 What a wondrous expression of the 
 Christian character! What power of en- 
 couragement the Apostle had! If he had 
 medicine to administer, how he capsuled 
 the pill! When he wanted to say some- 
 thing severe, how he approached us first 
 along the line of recognition and apprecia- 
 tion! After these tender words, I know 
 Paul’s spirit and method so well, I believe 
 he is going to say something morally severe. ~ 
 This is the Pauline way. At present I am 
 not supposed to know what he is going to 
 say, but I never heard him talk like this 
 without his presently saying something that 
 will remind us that we are but men. In 
 the meantime here is the godly and encou- 
 raging exhortation, “Walk in love.” You 
 will never regret having loved one another. 
 I have been present at the closing scene of 
 many a life; I never knew any one say, 
 
THE EPHESIANS 157 
 
 “Tam sorry I did that good deed; I regret 
 my charitableness and magnanimity and 
 forgiveness; I deplore the fact that I was 
 once kind even to an ungrateful man.” That 
 is not the talk of the dying; that is not the 
 talk of a true, healthy, noble piety. When 
 we come to die, the things we regret are: 
 our harsh words, severe dealings, sharp 
 practices, cruel misinterpretations of other 
 men’s expressions. What a dying is that! 
 —that is the second death! The Apostle is 
 going to say something morally severe; I 
 feel quite sure of it, as experienced sailors 
 know that there is an iceberg somewhere 
 by a sudden chill of the air. Meanwhile, 
 he is most gracious: ‘‘ walk in love,” and 
 if you would know what I mean by walking 
 in love I simply mean, Be Christlike; do 
 in your degree what Jesus Christ did in 
 His degree. He loved us, He gave Himself 
 for us an offering and a sacrifice to God 
 for a sweet-smelling savour.  JBrethren, 
 keep near the Christ; do as nearly as 
 possible what He did. Did ever a man 
 come to Jesus and say, “ Lord, I repent,” 
 and Jesus Christ turn him away? Never; 
 
aM i See 
 - 43 oe 
 ., 
 
 . 
 
 4 
 
 158 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 then He would have gone back upon 
 His own words, He would have stultified 
 Himself in His own temple, in the very 
 presence of His own altar: for He said, 
 “Tf thy brother trespass against thee 
 and turn again, saying, ‘I repent,’ forgive 
 him without a grudge—without a reserva- 
 tion; and if he be a hypocrite, let his 
 hypocrisy be his own responsibility; be 
 thou true to the great sovereign law of 
 causing forgiveness to follow penitence.” Be, 
 then, as nearly as possible, just what Jesus 
 Christ was. While we were yet sinners He 
 died for us; the Son of Man is come to seek 
 and to save that which was lost. We have 
 the great Gospel offer made to us, and the 
 great Gospel example set before us, and we 
 are called upon to follow the Lord in all 
 the way at whatever cost. This is not a 
 popular way; this is not the tone of a 
 demagogue; this Man has no acres to pzo- 
 mise, and no fine habitations to offer. He 
 says, ‘Come; whosoever. cometh after Me, 
 let him take up his cross.” Thus are we to 
 be made known to men; that is to say, as 
 crossbearers, aS men who are marked with 
 
THE EPHESIANS 159 
 
 a severe stigma, as men who carry the brand 
 of Christ, as it were, in our very flesh. So 
 to say, we shall be written all over with 
 some kind of wound, so that men may know 
 that we have been with Jesus, and have not 
 only learned of Him, but have suffered with 
 Him. Who, then, can be Christians? None; 
 there is no Christian, if we come to these 
 deeper interpretations and more spiritual 
 tests; but forward amongst the hosts is one 
 whose holy words are full of cheer: “I 
 count not myself to have attained ’—that 
 is right—‘‘but I follow after’—that is 
 right—“ I follow on ”’—that is right. Many, 
 many thousands—millions—are striving after 
 Christ, desiring and panting to be like God, 
 and their shortcomings shall not be reckoned 
 against them, because, though faint, they are 
 pursuing, and though not having yet attained, 
 they are striving after the great heights. Do 
 not let us therefore judge one another severely. 
 Many a man may have more Christianity in 
 his failure than many another man in his 
 apparent success. The nearer we come to 
 Christ the farther we shall sometimes follow 
 Him. We fall short of Him; the colour is 
 
160 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 changing, the light is changing, the very 
 standard within our own souls is changing, 
 so that what we thought good yesterday we 
 despise to-day, and we are hurt by yesterday’s 
 poor virtue. Grow in grace, and by so grow- 
 ing you will come to hate the self of which 
 you were once proud. 
 
 I dare not read aloud what the Apostle 
 now says. I knew it was coming—I was sure 
 of it. We must print verses 3, 4, 5, and let 
 men read them in the secrecy of solitude— 
 a solitude that is red with shame. 
 
 “But fornication, and all uncleanness, or covet- 
 ousness, let it not be once named among you, 
 as becometh saints; neither filthiness, nor foolish 
 talking, nor jesting, which are not convenient: but 
 rather giving of thanks. For this ye know, that no 
 whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, 
 who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the 
 kingdom of Christ and of God.” 
 
 This brings us to one of the great alter- 
 nations which mark the progress of the 
 epistle. We are here and there in this 
 epistle predestinated into the adoption of 
 children chosen before the foundation of the 
 world; we are redeemed by blood; we have 
 received the franchise of pardon; we have 
 
THE EPHESIANS 161 
 
 been dazzled by the riches of His grace. Now 
 the Apostle says to us, “ Watch your lips, 
 that evil words may not pour their poisoned 
 liquid over your faces. There are some things 
 you must not name; you must not know the 
 meaning of some words; you must carefully 
 choose the characters with whom you asso- 
 ciate; and if a bad man shall speak a bad 
 language, you are to look at him as a child 
 might look who had never heard unholy 
 words in his father’s house. The bad men 
 - are skilful speakers, they are fluent in the 
 use of vain words—be not ye therefore par- 
 takers with them; ye were sometime dark- 
 ness, but things have changed, you are now 
 light in the Lord, and you must walk as 
 children of light, and you must have no 
 fellowship with the unfruitful works of 
 darkness; you must by your very silence 
 and the very significance of your look reprove 
 them, and give the bad man to feel that he 
 is in the presence of one who silently judges 
 him and pierces him with the sharp judgment 
 of God.” I knew this exhortation was coming ; 
 we were strengthened for it; we were en- 
 couraged to believe, that we might be dear 
 11 
 
162 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 children of God and that we might be imi- 
 tators of our Father in heaven. Then the 
 Apostle, knowing the atmosphere of this 
 earthly life, said, as it were in another tone 
 —as if he had been talking instead of writing, 
 and probably his tone changed in the act of 
 dictating the epistle—he said, ‘“* But—but— 
 but; there is another side. You are still in 
 the world, and you will hear such words as 
 ‘uncleanness,’ ‘ filthiness,’ ‘foolish talking,’ 
 ‘whoremonger,’ ‘unclean person’: get back into 
 the child state and the child heart and the 
 home language and the better grammar—get 
 away from this devil’s prose into God’s celes- 
 tial poetry.”” He warns the Gentile converts 
 against foolish talking and jesting—words 
 that are often misunderstood. He is re- 
 ferring to that spirit which would make a 
 jest of God; he is not referring to vivacious 
 conversation, kindly and innocent banter 
 even, but to that kind of jesting that would 
 joke at the altar, that miserable sort of 
 jesting that would take the cup of sacra- 
 ment and before partaking of it mock its 
 red contents. That is what the Apostle 
 meant when he wrote to the Corinthians 
 
THE EPHESIANS 163 
 
 about no man drinking the cup unworthily ; 
 not the man being unworthy, for every man 
 is unworthy in the sight of God, but drinking 
 it in an unworthy spirit, drinking it under 
 a false interpretation of its meaning—turning 
 a sacrament into drunkenness and rioting. 
 And so he says, “‘ Where irreverence comes 
 in piety is impossible; where men make a 
 mock at sin there is no salvation for them 
 until they repent of that folly.” How easy 
 to mock the piety of others! Let not young 
 Christians be dismayed because they are 
 laughed at. A most beautiful thing occurred 
 but the other day, when certain vagabonds, 
 outlanders, were associated with a section of 
 the loyal Dutch. The loyal Dutch were 
 Bible-readers, and the vagabond outlanders 
 mocked their hymn-singing and their Bible- 
 reading, and to prevent further friction the 
 loyal Dutch Bible-readers were taken away 
 or went away, saying as they went, “ We are 
 Bible-readers, and God will punish you for 
 your folly.” And these men were punished 
 that same night, and deserved to be. When 
 men can mock Bible-reading they cannot win 
 battles; when men give up the Sabbath Day 
 
164 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 they cannot be victorious soldiers. You 
 cannot give up the Creator-and be great 
 men, great painters, musicians, authors, 
 leaders ; you cannot. The man who reads 
 his Bible in the Biblical spirit and loves it 
 will win every battle. Thank God! And 
 the jesters and the mockers and the banterers 
 and those who offer their vulgar, luxurious 
 jest at the men of God, they shall go down. 
 May no stone mark the sepulchre of such 
 dogs | 
 
 Verses 8-18: “For ye were sometimes darkness, 
 but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children 
 of light : (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness 
 and righteousness and truth ;) proving what is accept- 
 able unto the Lord. And have no fellowship with 
 the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove 
 them. For it is a shame even to speak of those things 
 which are done of them in secret. But all things 
 that are reproved are made manifest by the light: 
 for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Where- 
 fore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise 
 from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. See 
 then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as 
 wise, redeeming the time, because the days are eyil. 
 Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what 
 the will of the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine, 
 wherein is excess ; but be filled with the Spirit.” 
 
 Observe the striking series of contrasts in 
 this marvellous passage. Let us trace the 
 
THE EPHESIANS 165 
 
 series, and learn what we can from these 
 contrastive pictures. The first is in the eighth 
 verse. This word “darkness” is not indica- 
 tive of mere dim or transient fog or incon- 
 venient grading of light; it is a deeper, 
 severer, ghastlier word. ‘‘Ye were sometimes 
 darkness ’’—not dark, but darkness itself, 
 sevenfold night—yea, more than night ever 
 was ; for surely every night must have some- 
 where and somehow its relieving star. It 
 was not so with you in your former state; 
 you were living darkness, without ray or 
 glint or beam of light, as far away from light 
 “as it is possible to be. That is a wonderful 
 conception of human nature and of human 
 condition before the Father of lights. You 
 were not merely broken lights, scattered 
 beams that it was impossible to put together ; 
 there was no beam in you, you had never 
 been illumined, you had never been warmed, 
 you had never even heard of the summer of 
 holiness—you were simply incarnate, embodied 
 darkness. Who could call us out of that 
 state? What matchmaker could strike a 
 little flash that would drive away such 
 gloom? Where the darkness is so dense God 
 
166 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Himself must handle the occasion, or there is 
 nothing for it but fatal night. Sometimes we 
 have said of a great singer, “He is not musical, 
 he is music””—that is to say, he is not a merely 
 mechanical player, a man who has got into 
 his memory what is written in a book, but the 
 music is in him, a well of water springing up 
 into everlasting melody. So, reversing the 
 picture, the Gentiles were not dark, they were 
 darkness—unpenetrated, and but for the 
 divine mercy, impenetrable clouds. Occa- 
 sionally we say of a man, “He is not eloquent, 
 he is eloguence—embodied, incarnate, breath- 
 ing, walking, living eloquence; he has not 
 learned something by rote, he has not recited 
 something of which his memory is in charge, 
 but the holy gift is moving in him like a 
 spirit, a genius, a heavenly choir.” Reverse 
 the picture, and you have the Apostle’s idea. 
 You were not dark, you were darkness—the 
 thing itself, sevenfold night; no imagination 
 could conceive the intensity of the darkness 
 of your condition. 
 
 Then the contrastive “but ’’—‘but now 
 ... light”; not partial light, not a grey 
 light, not a mere hint of light, but as truly as 
 
 ; 
 
THE EPHESIANS 167 
 
 you were once darkness, so truly are you now 
 light. ‘‘ Walk as children of light.” The 
 miracle is as great on the one side as on the 
 other. Chaos was not partial chaos; chaos 
 was not a mere mood or transient phase of 
 disorder; it was utter confusion, without date, 
 without measure, without figure, a tumultu- 
 ousness and disorderliness not to be spoken of 
 in words in any adequate sense or with any 
 adequate fitness. Chaos is not partly order 
 and partly confusion ; the old chaos on which 
 the Holy Spirit brooded was utter chaos, 
 shapelessness, amorphousness, that which could 
 not be ruled into order by any skill created ; 
 but now, since the beginning, chaos has given 
 place to order, proportion, music, perspective, 
 and all the apocalypse and summer of colour. 
 That is the difference. Chaos has no history. 
 People want to know when the creation 
 began. They can never know it. All de- 
 pends upon what you mean by creation. The 
 thing upon which creation operated may be 
 calculable, but the thing out of which creation 
 took its materials may lie back, so to say, in 
 the memory of God alone. Transfer the figure 
 to the Christian life, and then you have first 
 
168 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 the darkness—utter, dense darkness, on which 
 moon and star never shone, not to speak of 
 dawning light and wakening morning; then 
 you have light, glory, midday—points of 
 extreme. Unless we recognise the extremity 
 of the points we shall lose the whole move- 
 ment of the miracle. Let us keep our 
 memories well refreshed with the fact that 
 once we were darkness ; let us pity those who 
 are in darkness still. Do not imagine for a 
 moment that the man on the street can come 
 into the sanctuary of God and partake of it 
 and be as one of the called saints of heaven 
 all in a moment. He cannot; nor can he 
 hear the Gospel, much less understand it. 
 He is in darkness. A great mystery of move- 
 ment must take place in his soul by the 
 power of the Holy Ghost. We want again 
 Genesis, first chapter and first few verses ; we 
 want especially the Spirit brooding over the 
 infinite night, the infinite disorder, with a 
 view to having brought out of it proportion 
 and harmony and rest. 
 
 As to these workers of darkness, verse 11 
 lays down the instruction succinctly and un- 
 mistakably: ‘‘ Have no fellowship.” Do we 
 
THE EPHESIANS 169 
 
 rest there? No; we come upon this remark 
 able “ but,’’ which recurs in the passage quite 
 startlingly : ‘but rather reprove them.” Do 
 you mean rebuke them? No. Do you mean 
 disallow them, or look unfavourably upon 
 them, or look askance at them? No; all 
 that, all that and something more: Convict 
 them. The Holy Ghost shall reprove the 
 world of sin, convict the world of sin. Do 
 not hold any conversation with the unfruitful 
 works of darkness; have nothing to do with 
 them; repel them when they come near you, 
 shrink away from them as if some horrible 
 plague were in the air, and you were afraid of 
 being blighted by the fatal pestilence. Now 
 we have escaped all that, and we have come 
 to the age of toleration, and we call toleration 
 charity, and thus we unwed that holy bride, 
 and tear her away from righteousness and 
 justice, and drive her out into the wilderness 
 to talk an alien tongue. We have now great 
 toleration for people who are of a contrary 
 persuasion to our own; we compromise with 
 the works of darkness; the day says to the 
 night, “‘ Let us say no more about our differ- 
 ences, but let us compromise in a neutral tint 
 
170 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 or tone of colour, and let us lay down the 
 noble democratic doctrine that one thing is 
 as good as another in its own sphere, and 
 if taken in its own atmosphere and in its 
 proper relationships to the universe at large.” 
 So we are feeble, we are a school of cripples, 
 we are a home of incurables ; we have lost the 
 nerve, the muscle, the tremendous energy 
 that moved the world some centuries ago. 
 We now live comfortably with all our oppo- 
 nents, and with regard to divers social prac- 
 tices we have compromised upon them; we 
 come to church in the morning, and receive 
 our friends in the afternoon, and slander the 
 absentees over the cup which cheers but not 
 inebriates. We used to go to church twice a 
 day ; now it is enough to get it over in the 
 morning as early as possible, and then have 
 the whole day—mayhap for “the unfruitful 
 works of darkness.”” Have we lost the sharp- 
 ness of division? I am not now speaking 
 about differences of opinion; opinion goes a 
 short way in this great difference. This is 
 not a matter of intellectual pedantry or 
 ecclesiastical persuasion as to this form or 
 that form—questions upon which men may 
 
THE EPHESIANS 171 
 
 honestly or even profitably differ. I am 
 speaking about moral antagonisms, about God 
 and the devil; and they cannot compromise. 
 We belong to one or the other, we cannot 
 serve God and Mammon—not the “ cannot ”’ 
 of inconvenience, but the “cannot” of a 
 transcendental necessity; the thing cannot 
 be done. The Apostle Paul operated upon 
 this grand doctrine of separation: ‘‘ Come out 
 from among them,” said he, “and be ye sepa- 
 rate”’; and he said he was speaking the word 
 of the Lord; for what fellowship hath light 
 with darkness? So he is consistent with 
 himself in writing to the Ephesians and the 
 Corinthians. Division, separation of a moral 
 and spiritual kind, leaving all our necessary 
 and not wholly unhappy differences of mere 
 opinion to settle themselves; but the moral 
 and immoral cannot sign the same document ; 
 
 they do not serve the same king; their souls 
 are different; they are irreconcilable. 
 
 Then in verse 15 he says, ‘‘not as fools,” 
 then the inevitable “but.” What a series of 
 “not” and “but”! ‘ Not as fools, but as 
 wise.” “ Fools” is a word of many meanings in 
 the Scripture: senseless, nousless, having no 
 
172 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 shrewdness of mind, having no moral sensi- 
 tiveness, confusing things that differ, making 
 mistakes and thinking nothing of them, as to 
 their moral value and their relationship to 
 the remaining links and duties of life. Some- 
 times the ‘‘ fool’ means the withered heart ; 
 the intellect is there, sharp enough, shrewd 
 enough, trying to live upon its own problems 
 and its own rude guesses at life’s conundrums; 
 but the heart is gone. It has faded like a 
 leaf ; it has withered like a leaf that falls 
 from a branch that seems to shake it down > 
 with contempt. ‘ The fool hath said in 
 his heart, There is no God”: not the intel- 
 lectual fool, but the withered heart, the 
 heart that is desiccated, juiceless, pithless, 
 that which is leather which was once flesh— 
 the heart in its withered late autumnal days 
 says, ‘There is no God.” And tothe withered 
 heart what God can there be? Is not the 
 heart the man at his best ? Does it not mean 
 not only sensibility, but tenderness and sym- 
 pathy and all the words that belong to the 
 line of high sentiment ? Is not the heart the 
 home of the man, the innermost sanctuary 
 and altar of the soul? The heart sees, the 
 
THE EPHESIANS 173 
 
 heart becomes the noblest intellect ; the heart 
 under the right conditions will see more of 
 God than the mere brain can ever see. Hear 
 this word that comes through all the winds 
 that blow through the ages, “ Blessed are the 
 pure in heart: for they shall see God.” And 
 sometimes the heart is the whole man; it is 
 so in the first and great commandment of the 
 law : “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
 all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy 
 mind, and with all thy spirit ’”’—with all thy 
 mind: the heart will recover the brain; the 
 heart will go out after the prodigal intellect 
 and bring it back. Some may only be doubters 
 intellectually ; they are not doubters, but 
 believers in the great necessities and sorest 
 agonies of life. Then they suddenly change 
 their creed, and remember that away down in 
 the heart’s deepest places there lives not a 
 creed, but a faith, a creating, redeeming God- 
 appropriating faith, which is itself the very 
 creation of divine grace. 
 
 Yet again, in verse 17, “not unwise,” 
 then the inevitable “ but ”—“‘ but understand- 
 ing what the will of the Lord is.” Getting 
 at the very centre of things; not living the 
 
174 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 little superficial life, but connecting the mind 
 and the heart with the upper fountains and 
 the ever-springing wells of the divine con- 
 ception and the divine purpose. ‘“ Not un- 
 wise’’; living from day to day; not seeing 
 the connection of things, and not noticing 
 that an increasing purpose runs through all 
 the process of suns and stars, of all bodies 
 solar, geologic, and other; not knowing that 
 the whole conception is in the grip of God, 
 that the Lord reigneth, that the fog is but for 
 a moment, that the blue light of the ever- 
 lasting morning will come, and in its glory 
 we shall forget the night and cease to remem- 
 ber that we were once troubled by a cloud. 
 
 To what a great character does the Apostle 
 call us in setting before us this series of not 
 and but! He is talking as only a great 
 spiritual statesman can talk. A passage like 
 this is a great educational lesson to the soul. 
 Everything is balanced, mutually related, and 
 impregnated by the very spirit of humanity 
 and of divinest love. To have read such a 
 passage is to have incurred a great responsi- 
 bility; how much greater does that responsi- 
 bility become when we read the concluding 
 
THE EPHESIANS 175 
 
 or climacteric “not” and “but” in the 
 eighteenth verse !—‘‘ not drunk with wine... 
 but ’’—the same style of argument—“ filled 
 with the Spirit”: drunk with the Spirit, 
 intoxicated and made enthusiastic by divine 
 possession and inspiration. What insight 
 into human nature! “Be not filled with 
 wine, drunk with wine, wherein is excess.” 
 Upon that excess we soon come. First there 
 is exhilaration, and then there is a higher 
 degree of buoyancy, and then there is a taste 
 of bitterness, and then there is a sense of 
 surfeit, and then a sense of revulsion, and an 
 act of revulsion: you have reached the lmit 
 of the wine; wine can go so far and no 
 farther. But as to the Holy Spirit, be drunk 
 with that Spirit, that holy wine ; be intoxi- 
 cated and transported by that high revelry 
 and that noblest ecstasy, in which there is no 
 satiety, no excess, no surfeit; for the mind 
 grows by what it feeds on, and our capacity 
 to receive the Spirit enlarges as we bid Him 
 _ welcome to the hospitality of our love. There 
 is a whole volume of philosophy in that 
 eighteenth verse. All limited things will sur- 
 feit you, only the infinite will never cloy you. 
 
176 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Why? Because you yourselves are meant to 
 be immortal—you are intended to live with 
 God, and in that life there is no monotony, 
 no sense of weariness, but as we company 
 with Christ we increase in desire to have 
 further association still. I speak concerning 
 Christ and His Church; no man can enter 
 into this mystery but the man who lives and 
 moves and has his being in God. He is never 
 alone, he is never satiated; why, the water 
 of Jacob’s well would not be enough for him 
 —he would drink of it and thirst again; 
 but he who drinks of the water that Jesus 
 Christ gives, he who drinks of the Holy Spirit, 
 shall never thirst, and never know the mean- 
 ing of satiety, but will evermore call upon 
 the Lord to increase his faith that he may at 
 once increase his service and his joy. 
 
 These are wonderful contrasts. Now we 
 must go back a little upon our track here and 
 there to pick out some peculiar words that 
 seem to fit this mechanism of expression with 
 exquisite adaptation. To quote a few of these 
 remarkable words. Verse 9, ‘‘ The fruit of the 
 Spirit ’—better translated, as it is in the 
 Revised Version, ‘‘The fruit of light.” “Walk 
 
THE EPHESIANS 177 
 
 as children of light,’ we read in verse 8; 
 in verse 9 the Apostle adopts a connective 
 or logical word, and says, “For (because) 
 the fruit of light is in all goodness and 
 righteousness and truth; showing us what 
 is acceptable unto the Lord.” There is no 
 more any darkness. The apple-trees will not 
 respond to great masses of gloom and cloud ; 
 there is no heroic little bird blithe enough to 
 face the overpowering fog with even one little 
 cheery note; no daisy or violet will come out 
 to see the fog. But light makes all things 
 come out—you cannot stop at home when it 
 is light; light scatters and yet unites; light 
 creates at once a common joy and a common 
 sympathy, and people who never saw one 
 another before are almost inclined to speak 
 when the sun is doing its very best to make 
 the earth merry and glad, as with a new song. 
 So long as we remain in darkness we shall 
 bear no fruit; when we come out by the 
 power of the Spirit into light there will be 
 bud and blossom and shaking fruit. May no 
 blight or cruel wind from the east discourage 
 such buddings and outbursts of the vernal 
 juice | 
 12 
 
ae 
 * ue 
 
 178 THE EPISTLE TO — 
 
 And then we read in the eleventh verse 
 of “the unfruitful works of darkness.” What 
 did they all come to? When we were really 
 bad men what did it come to when it was all 
 totalled up in results? What did it come 
 to? To loss of virility, to loss of reason, to 
 paralysis of will, to the divestment of our 
 best nature; it came to fear and trembling 
 and self-accusation and beasthood—that is 
 what it came to. ‘“‘ What fruit had ye then 
 in those things whereof ye are now ashamed?” 
 The bad man gets nothing. He thinks he 
 makes a good bargain; he utters the fool’s 
 laugh at the devil’s counter; and says what 
 a wonderful arrangement he has made. And 
 then come disappointment, social distrust, 
 newspaper reports, halings before the courts ; 
 and then there may come more wine, a deeper 
 draught of the devil’s fluid to drown the 
 devil’s accusations ; and then, when it is all 
 added up, what does it come to? what is 
 the bill? Hell! 
 
 The Apostle urges us to walk as children 
 of light, making his argument, in verse 13, 
 run according to this line, ‘‘ whatsoever doth 
 make manifest is light,” and light in three 
 
THE EPHESIANS 179 
 
 points, light almost in three qualities: light 
 at the centre, which illumines the whole 
 man ; light that discovers, throws itself upon 
 objects and discovers them. The sun dis- 
 covers, not creates, the dust. You think the 
 room has been well cared for; so it may have 
 been: will you draw up the blind and let the 
 sun be critic? And when he comes in with 
 those eyes of light you are ashamed of the 
 very room you were proud of an hour ago. 
 And then there is a light that reflects—the 
 mirror light, that throws back, so that you 
 can see yourself in the light and abhor your- 
 self, never before having seen your disfigure- 
 ment and your unworthiness and your utter 
 decrepitude and miserable infirmity. 
 
 The Apostle gives the Ephesians a new 
 word in verse 15: “See that ye walk cir- 
 cumspectly.” It is a hard world to walk in 
 at all. We need to have eyes in front and eyes 
 behind and eyes on either side of us; because 
 the enemy is watching us, and we are walking 
 along a very narrow wall. On the top of that 
 wall are sharp points of glass made as if in 
 the cement, and we must walk very carefully 
 or we shall be undone. We walk along a 
 
aD 
 
 180 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 very narrow precipice, we cannot turn round 
 to speak to a companion or fellow-traveller ; 
 
 we say we must be perfectly silent till we get 
 
 across this difficult place. Before you start 
 on the journey look well round, be circum- 
 
 spect—roundabout - lookers—exactly to see _ 
 
 where you are and to what point you are 
 moving. Do not live the careless life or the 
 rootless life or the planless life, taking things 
 just as they come and being unwise, and 
 foolish with exceeding folly; but enter into 
 calculation, relate one thing to another, and 
 be wise in the Spirit of God, and let the word 
 of Christ dwell in you richly that you may 
 know how to answer the enemy, how to light 
 a glory in the darkness, how to sing a song in 
 the wilderness. 
 
 “Redeeming the time.” The day of the 
 Lord was always coming to Paul; the day of 
 the Lord is always coming to us. We are to 
 walk and work, to serve, to suffer, as if the 
 day of the Lord would be to-morrow. He 
 indicated a grand policy. He did not execute 
 an arithmetical exercise ; he did not sit beside 
 the ticking pendulum and say, “ Tell me when 
 the Lord will come.” To that have we brought 
 
THE EPHESIANS 181 
 
 our studies of the Scripture! whereas the 
 Apostle indicates a grand policy. This was a 
 favourite philosophy of his, to get hold of the 
 policy, and let the details relate themselves 
 'to it; and part of the Pauline policy was 
 this, that the Lord may be expected at any 
 moment. And there is no other wise way of 
 living. Ye know not the hour that ye may 
 know it: not to know it is to expect it, not 
 to know it is to be solemnised by it. “The 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand,” said He who 
 began to preach, and then finished by dying 
 that He might afterwards rise from the dead 
 and show how near His kingdom is. But so 
 slow of heart are we that we want to know 
 days and hours; we have our slate and our 
 pencil, and if a prophet but drop a word that 
 is arithmetical, we take him down in a 
 moment, and if an apostle should indicate 
 anything like a day, we begin to calculate 
 and put another figure to it. By figures you 
 can prove everything; by figures you can 
 prove nothing. It is very sad indeed that 
 men who have slates and pencils gave many 
 of us a sleepless week this month by looking 
 for meteors that never came, so far as I am 
 
182 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 aware. Personally, I did not care whether 
 they came or not, but there was a great 
 ‘inroad made upon my sleep. They might be 
 there, and I ought to rise and see if they 
 had come after all. Better redeem the time, 
 better turn the sunshine into labour, better 
 serve the Lord with simplicity and honesty 
 and godly fear, and then we shall be ready 
 for Him when He does come. Convinced am 
 I that this is a policy of the Apostle, and not 
 the indication of an arithmetical expectation. 
 “Ye know not what hour your Lord cometh.” 
 Christ Himself said so. “What I say unto 
 one I say unto all, Watch.” The kingdom of 
 heaven comes every moment to the man who 
 wants it, and asks to see in the coming of his 
 Lord the way to a new opportunity, to suffer 
 bravely, to work wisely, and to serve with 
 the gratitude and the grace of a spiritual 
 obedience. 
 
 Verses 19, 20: “Speaking to yourselves in psalms 
 and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making 
 melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks 
 always for all things unto God and the Father in 
 the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 
 
 Live the thankful life. Let us have no 
 
THE EPHESIANS 183 
 
 more groaning and complaining, but let us 
 have music and psalm and hymn and spiritual 
 song, an inward and outward melody. The 
 Church has forgotten all its exhortations to 
 thankfulness and to music; it has made for 
 itself a series of threnodies very depressing 
 and soul-enslaving, services and tests of dis- 
 cipline and standards of heartless and often 
 hypocritical solemnity. The Apostle says, 
 * Let us have no more of this; there is a 
 sunny side even to Christian faith ; there are 
 whole days, long bright summer days, in 
 which it becomes us to sing one to another 
 in psalm and hymn and spiritual song, and to 
 match the summer with a human melody.” 
 We are not the more pious because we are so 
 depressed; melancholy is not one of the evi- 
 dences of the Christian faith—as well refer 
 to death in proof that we are members of the 
 kingdom of heaven. We have nothing to do 
 with death—it is abolished, sponged out; our 
 subject is the resurrection. When the Church 
 is more cheerful it will depose the world from 
 many a position of social charm and fasci- 
 nation to which it has no right whatsoever. 
 _ Do we contribute towards a cheerful Church ? 
 
184 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Did you ever know any church that was 
 really rationally and consistently vivacious 
 and triumphant because of the nearness of 
 the Saviour and because the air was made 
 balmy by His presence and blessing? Let a 
 cheerful life be added to the evidences of the 
 truth of the Christian religion. Paul was 
 never ashamed of his overflowings of joy; 
 he mingled the cup of life so dexterously 
 and with so sweet and sacred a cunning that 
 no man ever drank such a cup as Paul drank. 
 He said, ‘‘ Yea, we glory in tribulations also.” 
 Nothing could repress him or depress him; 
 his religion forced its way through fog and 
 smoke and storm and pain and loss; he took 
 tribulation with a strong man’s hand, and 
 added it to his wealth. ‘This is the victory 
 that overcometh the world, even our faith.” 
 Always hear the music that is in everything. 
 There is fire in ice. There is music in silence; 
 there is music in the radiance of the face. 
 Music is not a noise; music is an expression, 
 a spiritual emphasis, a force within which 
 makes all outward things palpitate as if in 
 obedience to some fascinating charm. It 
 would be better for us to have psalm and 
 
THE EPHESIANS 185 
 
 hymn and spiritual song than to have groan- 
 ing and unbelief and fear and timidity. The 
 heart should be so full of music as to leave 
 no room for the devil. What the Apostle 
 cautioned the Romans against was a void 
 mind—a mind empty, idle, and either having 
 nothing to do or being unwilling to do any- 
 thing ; that is the devil’s chance! We hear 
 a good deal about our temptations and diffi- 
 culties and struggles. Silence! We want to 
 hear something now about the psalm and 
 hymn and spiritual song, and the triumph 
 and domination in the infinite strength of the 
 infinite grace. We are cautioned not to give 
 way to depressing influences. Our singing 
 spiritually with the right fervour and emphasis 
 will keep the devil at bay. He hates all 
 singing hearts; music tortures the damned 
 spirit. If you had more music you would have 
 less fear. Not mechanical music, not some- 
 thing that can be taught at a certain number 
 of pence per half-hour—that is not the music 
 meant by the Apostle Paul; it is melody in 
 the heart, it is the whole life itself turned to 
 music. The devil does not get very near to 
 the heart that lives in real thankfulness and 
 
186 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 in spiritual melody. When we live in argu- 
 ment, he asks us questions; when we try 
 to sustain the soul on controversy, he puts 
 before us in a most skilful, almost professorial 
 manner the heresies of old centuries, and 
 asks us what we make of them; as if long 
 ago we had not buried them, and lost 
 them, and cursed them! You never should 
 attempt to make an ancient heresy a modern 
 difficulty. There are many temptations to 
 depression. Some of those temptations arise 
 from physical constitution. Some persons 
 never can be otherwise than depressed ; 
 other persons would really be unhappy if 
 they had no depression—they would wonder 
 what had taken place if they felt a little 
 better one morning. These are not our 
 living epistles and letters of commenda- 
 tion. At the same time we are called upon 
 to be patient with people who are consti- 
 tutionally melancholy. We should never 
 marry them; we should live as little as 
 possible with them; but with these two 
 reservations we should be as kind as we 
 can be to them. 
 
 If we have had our psalm and hymn and 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 187 
 
 spiritual song, what then, thou great disci- 
 plinarian of the Church? ‘TI will tell you,” 
 says Paul, “after the song must come the 
 discipline.’ You will find all along the 
 Christian line that song and discipline alter- 
 nate—they seem to balance one another; in 
 that, as in the record of Genesis, the evening 
 balances the morning, and the evening and 
 the morning are the whole day. Discipline 
 succeeds melody : 
 
 Verses 21, 22: “Submitting you:selves one to 
 another in the fear of God. Wives, submit your- 
 selves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” 
 
 We shall miss the whole point of this if we 
 take it out of its connection and make a jest 
 of it. There are no jests in the Bible. The 
 buffoon can find them on the altar, almost on 
 the Cross, but the wise man finds no such 
 thing. Observe the atmosphere in which the 
 Apostle is now writing; take note of the 
 atmosphere which he has created around 
 these Gentile converts. Do not place the 
 Ephesian converts on a level with Christian 
 and experienced nations. When the tempera- 
 ture is at the highest, when joy is at the zenith, 
 
188 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 when all the summer fruits are growing and 
 all the summer birds are singing, he says, 
 “Submit yourselves one to another in the fear 
 of God.”? And in that atmosphere it is easy 
 to do so; in any other atmosphere it is im- 
 possible. That is the exposition. Where the 
 atmosphere is right there will be no difficulty. 
 What a cunning master of fence was this 
 great brother of ours, the leader of the Christ- 
 ian host! Said he, ‘‘Submitting yourselves 
 one to another.” That is the key of all that 
 follows. The submission is never to be on 
 one side only ; and where there is submission 
 on both sides there is no humiliation, there 
 is sympathy, there is union. Everything de- 
 pends upon the point at which we approach 
 difficult subjects or severe trials. The diffi- 
 culty is not so much in the thing itself as in 
 the point from which we proceed towards it 
 and the atmosphere with which we invest it. 
 All things are affected by atmosphere. It is 
 the atmosphere that makes the beauty of the 
 summer day. The sun would be but a clumsy 
 artist painting in white too dazzling if he had 
 not the help of atmosphere; that is where 
 he gets his pictures. And yet we call him the 
 
THE EPHESIANS 189 
 
 ereat artist. In a sense he is the great artist, 
 but he has wonderful appliances. God has 
 given to him very great assistances and 
 auxiliaries; he would be but a poor, glaring, 
 white-faced thing, a merely frightsome thing, 
 in yonder courts of his, if he were not at- 
 tempered and coloured and toned by that 
 which no man ever saw, the air, the atmo- 
 sphere, the mysterious something that clothes 
 the earth hke a garment, a garment invisible 
 and yet full of a strange mystic colour. 
 
 For example, many persons are broken 
 down in mid-life and made cripples of for 
 the rest of their days because of the great 
 difficulty about ‘the miracles. There is no 
 difficulty about the miracles. Yet you were 
 broken down at thirty-five, and have never 
 been yourself since, because some fool of a 
 man suggested to you the difficulty of Jesus 
 Christ walking on the sea, and raising the 
 dead, and giving sight to the blind. That 
 man made you a sort of initial, elementary, 
 and most infantile infidel some thirty years 
 ago. Would God some nobler spirit had been 
 within your calling! The miracles; what 
 are they? Everything depends upon the 
 
190 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 point of view from which they are surveyed, 
 or the point in their own circumference at 
 which they are broken in upon. Here and 
 elsewhere the question is largely one of 
 spiritual atmosphere. A poor little urchin 
 brought up in a very depressing village, 
 reared in a room seven feet by six, with a 
 window in it so high that he was never able 
 to look out of it, is brought up to see some 
 great city; and how affrighted he is, how 
 terrorstruck, how amazed! How will he 
 ever get back again? Here is a youth 
 brought up in a large city, educated upon 
 a liberal scale, companying with persons of 
 culture and travel and large information. 
 How does he regard the city—even the city 
 of London? Without fear; with apprecia- 
 tion. He has come down upon it from a high 
 point; the other visitor struggled up to it 
 from the lowest possible point. Do these 
 people view the city in the same light, and 
 estimate it at the same value? Certainly 
 not. They are two different people; they 
 approach it from two totally different points 
 of view. So if I come down from long 
 companying with the Saviour in heaven; 
 
THE EPHESIANS 191 
 
 if I have spent with Him forty days and 
 forty nights; if we have held long, sweet, 
 deep, vital intercourse, I come down upon 
 the world, and it is but a pebble-lfe; I 
 come down upon its wonders, and do not 
 consider them worth looking at. I have been 
 with the Lord, and everything else must be 
 mean, small, contemptible. If I have made 
 myself, by grace and the holy action of the 
 blessed Spirit, familiar with the purposes of 
 Ckrist, I shall approach the miracles of 
 Christ as very little things, as He Himself 
 approached them. ‘They were never great 
 efforts to Jesus Christ; He came from 
 eternity, and time can never be great to 
 immortality. Jesus Christ said concerning 
 His miracles, in addressing His disciples, 
 “Greater works than these shall ye do, 
 because I go unto the Father: the farther 
 I am from you, the nearer I am to you; 
 the leverage will be greater ; all the apparatus 
 and appliances, spiritual and metaphysical, 
 will be more immediately under My com- 
 mand; I go that I may come; I vanish that 
 I may be seen by the heart.” 
 
 So with this matter of submission. ‘* Sub- 
 
192 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 mitting yourselves one to another.” A man 
 takes refuge in his vanity, in self-exaggera- 
 tion, in overweening and overwhelming self- 
 importance. How do you account for that? 
 Because he has come from a low communion. 
 He has struggled up to this position; he 
 has not come down upon it, as an eagle 
 might alight upon a rock; so he asks why 
 he should submit—he! Was ever little 
 pronoun so loaded with false emphasis, so 
 crushed by misinterpretation ? He—a candle 
 that wind can blow out; he—a leaf that 
 will fall with the winter wind blowing upon 
 it ; he—whose breath is in his nostrils ; he— 
 upon whose brain a cloud may descend at 
 any moment, and he will grope at midday 
 as if it were sevenfold night! He must 
 approach himself from the right standpoint, 
 he must come to himself from communion 
 with God, and then he will understand what 
 Jesus, the ever-blessed One, meant when He 
 said, “ He that is greatest amongst you, let 
 him be the servant of all.” That is sub- 
 mission. Service is submission—help given 
 to others out of a generous, because regene- 
 rated, heart is the sign and is the seal of a 
 
 a 
 nie 
 
THE EPHESIANS 193 
 
 genuine submission. What is this wonderful 
 submission? It is two persons doing the 
 same thing at the same time to one another. 
 Where is the submission? These acts are 
 not consequent one upon another; they are 
 concurrent. You bowed just as I was 
 bowing, I submitted just as you submitted, 
 and the finest mechanical or mathematical 
 instrument ever discovered could not mark 
 the point of coincidence. That is submission. 
 There is nothing here of some high and 
 mighty one waiting until some lowly and 
 inferior one kisses his boots; there is no 
 act of condescension on the part of some 
 foolish person who does not understand him- 
 self or understand the discipline of life ; there 
 is no knavish trick in this. Observe the 
 atmosphere in which we have been trained. 
 We have been brought up to being filled with 
 the Spirit, to singing with one another in 
 hymn, psalm, and spiritual song, as unto the 
 Lord; we have been taught to give thanks 
 always for all things, unto God and the 
 Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ ; 
 then “submitting’”—part of the psalm! 
 It may be the closing note of the rolling, 
 13 
 
+ 7 
 .* % 
 
 ~ 
 
 194 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 the sonorous anthem. But we delight to 
 
 tear these little sentences out of their place 
 and to found theories upon them, so that 
 some poor miserable preacher, of whom his 
 mother might be ashamed, claims to be the 
 head of the wife; a man who can hardly 
 get out of bed in the morning; a man 
 who has great difficulty in making bread 
 enough to sustain his wife and family; a 
 little, miserable, poorly-made toy of a man 
 who is the head of the wife because he could 
 not make himself the head of anything else! 
 That is not Christian teaching. The two 
 are one; they submit themselves one to the 
 other. How to be first in the act of sub- 
 mission is the great problem, the happy, 
 delightful enigma, which both the parties, if 
 filled with the Spirit of Christ, can instantly 
 and sufficiently answer and resolve. 
 
 You cannot lay down little rules upon 
 any such matters of personal or household 
 discipline. What, then, can we do? The 
 Apostle has already told us: “ Be filled with 
 the Spirit.” To rule without ruling, to lead 
 without leading, to drive without cracking 
 the whip, to be a man without being a fool— 
 
THE EPHESIANS 195 
 
 that is only possible when we are filled with 
 the Spirit, when we are breathing the vital 
 atmosphere, when we are one with Christ. 
 There is a sovereign principle which simplifies 
 and sanctifies the whole action, redeeming 
 it from servility, and lifting it up into a 
 sacrament. What is that sovereign prin- 
 ciple? Again and again it asserts itself in 
 all these exhortations—‘‘as unto the Lord,” 
 *‘as Christ,” “even as the Lord of the 
 Church.” Christians, whether men or women, 
 are never asked to do more than Christ did. 
 That will solve everything. ‘Even as the 
 Lord.” Then, again, ‘as Christ,” and again, 
 “as unto the Lord.” It is not some little 
 domestic claim; it is a living Christian 
 principle. Does the wife do nothing, even 
 for the most successful of men? She makes 
 the income quite as much as he does; she 
 sustains him, inspires him, lifts the burden 
 from his shoulder, takes him to see some 
 new vision, drops into his life some new note 
 of music. I would not have a penny that 
 my wife did not share and could not spend. 
 She made it. I, a poor creature easily de- 
 pressed and turned out of the way, whose 
 
196 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 only delight is that he can resign his position ; 
 and she, cheering, gladdening, inspiring, up- 
 lifting. To whom does the property belong ? 
 Toher. When I tolda certain half-grown old 
 gentleman that my wife drew all the cheques 
 without consulting me or troubling me about 
 such documents, he said, *‘ You must have 
 great confidence in your wife.” The wretch |! 
 “Confidence in your wife!” What a life 
 without her! A nightmare—an awful, intoler- 
 able misery. But these things cannot be 
 regulated by little laws and maxims. How, 
 then, can they be regulated? I quote again 
 the wholly sufficient answer, “ Be filled with 
 the Spirit, the Spirit of love.” Love never 
 thinks that anything has been given whilst 
 anything has been withheld. Until, there- 
 fore, we are great in the Christian life, 
 great in the conception of spiritual bless- 
 ings in Christ Jesus, foreordained by the 
 discriminating and loving wisdom of God, 
 settled, rooted, grounded in Christ, we are 
 not fit to have a house, we are not fit to 
 handle the delicate and difficult problem of 
 life. But if the word of Christ be in us 
 and dwell richly in us, there will be no 
 
THE EPHESIANS 197 
 
 difficulty ; there will be music, there will 
 be rest; and we shall say, poor man or 
 great man, “ Be it ever so humble, there is 
 no place like home.” 
 
 Verses 23-33: “For the husband is the head of 
 the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: 
 and He is the saviour of the body. ‘Therefore as 
 the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives 
 be to their own husbands in everything. Husbands, 
 love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, 
 and gave Himself for it; that He might sanctify 
 and cleanse it with the washing of water by the 
 word, that He might present it to Himself a glorious 
 church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such 
 thing; but that it should be holy and without | 
 blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their 
 own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. 
 For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but 
 nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the 
 church : for we are members of His body, of His 
 flesh, and of His bones. For this cause shall a man 
 leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto 
 his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is 
 a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and 
 the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in 
 particular so love his wife even as himself; and the 
 wite see that she reverence her husband.” 
 
 It is a marvellous and beautiful thing that 
 even the Apostle Paul sometimes stood back 
 and said, “I am not quite sure about this, but 
 I think I have the mind of the Lord. I do not 
 put too much stress upon what I am now 
 
198 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 writing to you; I take up this position with 
 some timidity, certainly with some caution. 
 The subject is infinitely delicate ; I will give 
 you my own mind upon it. I do not speak by 
 commandment, but I think I have the mind 
 of the Lord. At all events, this is how the 
 case strikes me.” That is the teacher to 
 believe in. Never believe in the man who 
 knows everything ; have great confidence in 
 any teacher, lecturer, professor, preacher, who 
 says, ‘Now at this point I am as weak as 
 other men, but I will tell you how this most 
 difficult subject presents itself to my mind 
 at this moment.” Paul has been using the 
 greatest words: spiritual blessings in Christ 
 Jesus; eternal purpose which he purposed in 
 Christ Jesus our Lord; the fellowship of the 
 mystery ; the riches of His glory. Oh, I am 
 lost in these ineffable mysteries! Then he 
 comes out from these inner sanctuaries, and 
 says, “I have a doctrine that you can perhaps 
 better understand and apply: wives, husbands, 
 children, servants, masters, I have a word to 
 say to you.” Paul was the man to say it; he 
 came from the right school. He came from the 
 university of the divine communion. He had 
 
THE EPHESIANS 199 
 
 companied long with the living God; and 
 having stepped, so to say, forth out of the 
 sanctuary that is covered with golden clouds, 
 he said, “‘ The application of all these marvel- 
 lous visions with which my soul has been 
 delighted is this: wives, husbands, children, 
 servants, masters, this is the meaning of it 
 all, so far as you are immediately concerned 
 and related.’”” We have already seen that 
 we can only understand these things in the 
 degree in which we have been happily affected 
 by the atmosphere under which and within 
 which they were spoken by this the leader 
 and the chief of the Apostles. He has just, 
 in our own hearing, so to say, called himself 
 the least of the Apostles. Do not presume too 
 much upon that. Paul could suddenly break 
 away at many unexpected points, and startle 
 those who thought they could take some liber- 
 ties with him. Never take liberties with the 
 Apostle Paul. 
 
 There is one grand principle running 
 through all these instructions and exhorta- 
 tions about wives, husbands, children, ser- 
 vants, masters—and that great principle may 
 be represented by these three words, ‘‘ even as 
 
200 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Christ.” Do not dwell upon the little circum- 
 stances, the transient occasions, the change- 
 able conditions of the text, but get at the 
 central and eternal principle— ‘even as 
 Christ.”” Wife and husband, child and parent, 
 master and servant, are only to be treated 
 upon this great holy ground—other ground 
 there is none. You can make a livelihood by 
 inventing other programmes, but the fire will 
 devour them, and the ashes will be nothing 
 worth. ‘ Even as Christ.’’ ‘‘ Even as Christ 
 loved the church.” Even as Christ loved the 
 Father, so are those who are in Christ to love 
 one another. No man can teach us that; we 
 should be in the position of those who dispute 
 with equals. There must be a sovereign voice 
 in this matter. We shall know that voice 
 when we hear it; it comes with authority, 
 because it comes from eternity. Whenever 
 the Apostle Paul, therefore, visits our families, 
 he says, “‘ Order everything even as Christ.” 
 No man or woman is expected to love more 
 than Christ loved ; to obey more than Christ 
 obeyed; to stoop lower than He stooped when 
 He took the towel and washed the feet of men 
 who were unworthy. Why all these little 
 
THE EPHESIANS 201 
 
 disputes about supremacy and priority and 
 dignity and official elevation and the unutter- 
 able insanity of selfishness? The great 
 philosophy of the whole scheme of the 
 commonwealth is “even as Christ.” That 
 is the right bond of society. Other bond 
 there is none to be relied upon; other bonds 
 come and go like changing fashions in rings 
 and colours. ‘The eternal bond is “even as 
 Christ.” 
 
 He makes application of these words to the 
 great subject of marriage. What poor notions 
 many people have of the married life! They 
 think that the priest marries them. Poor 
 priest! many charges are laid at his door, but 
 never lay the charge at any priest’s door that 
 he married you. He performed a ceremony, 
 he discharged a legal duty, he had a fee for 
 doing the least possible thing that could be 
 done in the time; but marry you—no man 
 can do that. You must redefine the word 
 “marriage.” It has become a market-place 
 word—a word to jest at. It is a deep word, 
 full of meaning, full of holy significance ; it 
 is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvellous in our 
 eyes. He marries all couples that are marricd. 
 
202 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 I do not say all couples that are legally 
 united, all couples that have a kind of legal 
 lien upon one another; but all souls that are 
 married the Lord has married. In that sense 
 marriage is the sacrament of life, the great 
 holy oath that binds souls into blessed unity. 
 There are people, so amazingly small as hardly 
 to be worth counting in the census, who some- 
 times want to know where they would like 
 to be married. Hence the great religious 
 ordinance has been degraded. They will be 
 married here because it is near, there because 
 it is fashionable, yonder because many people 
 will be likely to see them, or at another 
 place where they can be married for nothing. 
 These are the fools that hurt the sacraments, 
 that degrade the Church, that make the devil 
 laugh! Marriage is an affair of the soul: 
 two souls meeting without appointment ;— 
 meeting in a way that creates the great 
 surprises of life; meeting as Moses met the 
 burning bush. He did not meet it by ap- 
 pointment; he met it, and wondered, and 
 approached, and heard, and stood forth the 
 leader of the hosts of the Lord. Man is per- 
 haps more peculiar than any other biped; he 
 
THE EPHESIANS 203 
 
 has a wonderful knack of making words that 
 fit his non-religious moods. Do you know 
 that it is a great thing not to be religious ? 
 Do you know that all the great men never go 
 to church ? Are you aware of that astounding 
 fact ? What poor creatures we must be to be 
 in church! How do they treat this great 
 mystery of marriage? They have scientific 
 terms—and what is life without polysyllables ? 
 They speak of natural affinity. That does not 
 sound very comforting. They speak of the 
 survival of the fittest. An excellent doctrine 
 for the fittest! They will not speak in Biblical 
 terms of any great sacrament of life. The 
 Apostle Paul spoke of these great sacraments, 
 and he spoke of them in a language I prefer. 
 I have the two phrases before me—“ natural 
 affinity, survival of the fittest”; and I have 
 the Apostle’s grander words, and I deliber- 
 ately, solemnly, and gratefully adopt the 
 language of the Apostle. He says, “‘ Predesti- 
 nated, elect before the foundation of the 
 world”; and Christ said, ‘‘ From the begin- 
 ning, from the plasm of things, when the 
 universe was less than a film in the purpose 
 of God.” From that point all these things 
 
204 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 were settled. But man likes to think that he 
 invented the words “natural affinity.” Pro- 
 fessor Huxley did most frankly acknowledge 
 that he was the inventor of the word “agnosti- 
 cism.”’ Most of us have Greek enough to have 
 made that word, and many of us have sense 
 enough not to have done so. Do not dispute 
 lightly the words of the Bible; they are the 
 right words, so far as I can discover. I have 
 gone through all the intellectual bazaars that 
 were open to me, and I have looked upon 
 the terms marked in plain figures, and I 
 have never bought one of them—I have 
 enough in the ancient museum of the 
 Bible. ‘‘ Elect according to the foreknow- 
 ledge of God”; predestinated, called, chosen— 
 these are better words; there is more music 
 in them; they appeal to something that is 
 already in the heart. That is the solution 
 of the problem of marriage; not of legal 
 marriage, not of something that is done 
 merely in a civil and political way: I am 
 not using the word ‘‘ marriage” in any of 
 its lighter or more frivolous senses—I am 
 speaking of marriage as expressing the 
 predestined policy of God before the world 
 
THE EPHESIANS 205 
 
 began. If you are married, you were married 
 in eternity; if you are mismarried, it was 
 not the Lord’s doing, it was yourself, your 
 lust, your covetousness, your selfishness, 
 your narrow-sightedness. But if you are 
 married in the real deep sense, you were 
 married before the foundation of the world. 
 This is a great mystery, but I speak 
 concerning Christ and the Church. 
 
 Thus we revert to the great principle, 
 the central, philosophical, and governing 
 principle—*‘ even as Christ.” When we get 
 into this region of things we shed off all 
 little peddling questions about who is first 
 and who is second, and who is superior 
 and who is inferior. Let the dogs bark out 
 that question if they care to do so. Paul 
 was too wise to discuss it; and men and 
 women called of God and bathed in the 
 love of Christ have higher questions and 
 have sublimer themes. Who is the greater ? 
 Both. Is not that bad grammar? Very 
 bad grammar, but excellent truth. Who is 
 to submit first? Both at the same time— 
 “Submitting yourselves one to another”: 
 as we have just said, both doing the same 
 
thing at the same time in the same spirit. 
 Who shall do it first? Both! You must live 
 these great mysteries; the pedagogue cannot 
 explain them by his book, though it be 
 illumined by a candle. You will understand 
 by the simplest illustration what is meant 
 by the climatic influence of atmosphere, 
 even in the higher reaches of life. Let us 
 put the case thus. Did this fruit grow in 
 England? It is very excellent—is it of 
 English culture? “No” is the immediate 
 reply. Why not? ‘The climate of England 
 could not, at this season of the year, grow 
 fruit of this succulence and richness; you 
 never saw this bloom under England’s cold 
 grey skies. Were these flowers grown out-of- 
 doors? No; they were grown in a special 
 place under special conditions ; they express 
 a certain temperature of warmth, they are 
 children of the warm air. Could they not 
 have grown out-of-doors? No. Exactly 
 so is it with the higher qualities and 
 excellencies of the spiritual life. You 
 cannot grow them in the open air, in the 
 wintry time; they are grown in the garden 
 of God. You understan@ the parable? The 
 
 206 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
THE EPHESIANS 207 
 
 finest excellencies of life cannot be grown 
 outside the greatest Christian temple; they 
 are right beautiful, and they are most 
 luscious and cherishing, but they were never 
 grown in coldness, in chilling rain, in 
 freezing snow. It is even so with the great 
 Christian virtues, fruits of the Spirit, as 
 they are detailed in the great Epistle of 
 Paul. They are in very deed fruits of the 
 Spirit, flowers grown in the tropics of His 
 love. There are persons who come to show 
 you some poor half-withered weazened- 
 looking apples, the best that can be grown 
 in such soil at such season. Quite right; 
 but do not let them pretend to be products 
 of the tropics, do not let them attempt to 
 put aside the great luscious fruits which 
 represent summer at its best. That is the 
 difference between your little socialities, and 
 small programmes, and crippled attempts to 
 do something for society under red banners 
 and under the tuck of drums. If you would 
 have right, justice, love, peace, unity, you 
 must conduct your society on this principle, 
 “even as Christ.” 
 
 People who can see all this from the Covent 
 
208 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 Garden point of view can never see it from 
 a religious point of view. The worst of these 
 crab-apple productions is that just by the 
 time you have got to digest them in some 
 poor degree, aided by a small army of doctors, 
 the persons who grew the crabs come and look 
 over your garden wall, and say, “ Don’t eat 
 them, because they are not good for you!” 
 Men do not stand to their own crab-apples, 
 but they sell them to you to-morrow, and 
 then tell you the day after that you ought 
 not to have bought them. What is to be 
 done? If society is to be saved, it can only 
 be saved on the principle, ‘‘ even as Christ.” 
 There you have righteousness, love, mercy, 
 justice, pity, help, balm in Gilead, and a 
 Physician that makes Gilead famous. You 
 can sooner create a new astronomy than you 
 can create a new socialism. Socialism is not 
 left in our hands. Society is as truly the 
 creation of God as is the solar system, and 
 we have no right to interfere with it; inter- 
 ference is meddlesomeness, and meddlesome- 
 ness never comes to any good. You can 
 touch the case at the point of accident, or at 
 some lower level; here and there incidentally 
 
THE EPHESIANS 209 
 
 you may do something that is not other than 
 praiseworthy ; but as to the solar system, it 
 wants none of our patronage and none of our 
 mechanism. And the socialism of God is as 
 independent as His astronomy. I will tell 
 you what I think perhaps we might first do, 
 and after that do something else. I suggest 
 that we should here and now as it were 
 resolve ourselves into a committee to bring 
 the tropics into England. I have a definite 
 proposition to make, and that is that we 
 endeavour to create the tropics by lighting 
 more candles. I have not patented the idea, 
 and you are welcome to it. We could make 
 the place warmer if we lighted two more 
 candles, or two hundred more candles. How 
 does it feel now with regard to tropical 
 warmth? Have we produced any effect upon 
 the grass? does it look fatter and greener 
 and stouter? Light two hundred more, 
 and two thousand more. Now how do 
 things look from a tropical point of view ? 
 Suppose we light a million more? Do 
 candles make tropics? That is what people 
 are trying to do without Christ, without 
 the Book of God, without the sanctuary, by 
 14 
 

 
 
 
 
 rf 
 
 programmes, new schemes, den 
 popular excitements, and BS o 
 
 “« Kven as Christ.” 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 Verses 1-9: “Children, obey your parents in the 
 Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and 
 mother; which is the first commandment with 
 promise; that it may be well with thee, and thou 
 mayest live long on the earth. And, ye fathers, 
 provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them 
 up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. 
 Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters 
 according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in 
 singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with 
 eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of 
 Christ, doing the will of God from the heart ; with 
 good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to 
 men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man 
 doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether 
 he be bond or free. And, ye masters, do the same 
 things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing 
 that your Master also is in heaven ; neither is there 
 respect of persons with Him.” 
 
 “ (NHILDREN.” What is the meaning 
 
 of the word “children”? Is it 
 
 possible that there can be nine different 
 meanings to the word “child” in Holy 
 Scripture? That is certainly so, and our 
 poor English only enables us to render the 
 
 211 
 
212 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 word by the one term, “child,” and that 
 solitary term, “child,” we know next to 
 nothing about. Hence the little carping 
 criticism with which the Apostle is favoured 
 by persons who ought to hold their tongues 
 upon religious subjects, and possibly upon 
 all other subjects. ‘ Obey.” We always 
 associate some idea of discipline—perhaps 
 also some idea of servility—with this word 
 “obey.” Is it possible that there are five 
 different words rendered in the New Testa- 
 ment ‘‘obey”’? that the five different words 
 vary in grade and colour and emphasis? 
 That is actually so as a matter of mere 
 grammar, and yet we have but this poor 
 little vessel named “‘ obey’ in which to carry 
 away the water of life or the wine of God’s 
 love. And yet the Englishman is prone to 
 think that there is only one wise tongue 
 among all the nations and kindreds and 
 peoples and tongues of the earth. ‘“ Obey”: 
 literally, “listen to.” Attention is the first 
 element in obedience; to listen well is the 
 beginning of a good reply. But few men 
 can listen; hence the expression, ‘ He that 
 hath ears to hear, let him hear.’ Every 
 
THE EPHESIANS 213 
 
 man has ears, but not necessarily to hear. 
 We cannot too strongly impress upon our 
 own minds the fact that very few men have 
 cultivated the art and faculty—shall we say 
 the science and wisdom ?—of listening. Yet 
 every man thinks he can hear. Hearing is 
 only possible to the wise; hearing is not the 
 same thing in any two instances; hearing 
 means an attitude of the soul, a specific 
 and high degree of attention, that the very 
 last letter of a word may be heard. There 
 must be no clipping, no shortening; we 
 must hear the last, even dying, cadence of 
 the musical counsel or exhortation. This is 
 a great art, and few men have taken a 
 superior degree in it, though every man 
 thinks that he can hear; whereas he is 
 mentally interrupting the speaker, and if 
 he could audibly interrupt him he would. 
 He never gives the speaker an opportunity 
 of being heard absolutely ; he replies before 
 the sentence is finished. It is a beautiful 
 little lesson, therefore, which the Apostle 
 would send to the children: “ Listen, listen, 
 listen; and not until father or mother is 
 really done attempt to say anything in reply, 
 
214 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 and learn as soon as you can that the less 
 you say in reply the better.” 
 
 We have, therefore, as our great subject 
 religion in the family. The question may 
 be thrown into some such form as this: 
 Here is a family; what would religion do— 
 that is to say, the religion of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ—if it were to be carried out in letter 
 and in spirit within the four corners of the 
 household? That is an interesting inquiry. 
 The Apostle does not pick out any particular 
 room or chamber or section of the house; 
 he has the husband and the wife, and the 
 parent and the child, and the servant and 
 the master; and he has a religion that he 
 thinks at least is adapted to every one of 
 them, whatever the case may be. It is very 
 like the grandeur of Christ’s evangel; he 
 has no little secrets for special persons, no 
 small conceptions which only favourite in- 
 tellects can receive. He says in all things, 
 “Go ye into all the world and preach the 
 gospel to every creature.’ What is the 
 Apostle doing to guarantee the spirit of 
 this blessed injunction? When he comes 
 to husband and wife, and parent and child, 
 
THE EPHESIANS 215 
 
 and master and servant, he is in very deed 
 preaching to every creature. Are there any 
 more creatures in the world than those 
 named or implied by the terms of the text? 
 Probably there is not one. If, therefore, we 
 can profitably study these injunctions, we 
 may get a philosophy that will cover the 
 training of the world, and that philosophy 
 you can get nowhere else. I challenge the 
 enemy; I challenge him by holding him in 
 contempt. Let there be no misreading of 
 these wonderful words. Every one of these 
 injunctions could be spoiled by false emphasis. 
 A man could so preach on this text as to 
 take out of it all the light and all the music, 
 and leave behind nothing but a mocking 
 emptiness. It is so with many of the so- 
 called commands and threatenings of the 
 Scripture. There are no commands in any 
 merely arbitrary and mechanical sense. And 
 God never threatens, in our little, peevish, 
 contemptible sense of threatening, holding a 
 rod before a man or a dog, and saying, in 
 effect, ‘I am stronger than you, and I will 
 beat you if you do not comply with my 
 wish, and do it instantaneously.” We must 
 
216 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 get rid of such criticism of divine words, 
 or we shall never understand the holy and 
 beautiful Book. When the Lord said, “In 
 the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt 
 surely die,” He was not threatening Adam. 
 “Threatening ” is a word then unknown ; there 
 had been nothing of threatening. The words 
 convey a gracious, tender warning; they ex- 
 press a yearning solicitude for the good of 
 the creature: as who should say, “I warn 
 you because I love you. This tree must be 
 just where it is; why it must so be you 
 will understand long ages hence. It will be 
 in every man, in every moral and responsible 
 creature. Do not touch that specified and 
 peculiar tree, because if you do you will 
 lose your manhood, you will forfeit your 
 crown of dominion which I have just given 
 to you over the beasts of the field and the 
 fowls of the air, and whatsoever passeth 
 through the deeps of the sea.” It is not a 
 threatening, it is not a lordling playing tricks 
 with some poor, ignorant, half-developed 
 creature; it is brooding, yearning, redeeming 
 love, as will be proved as the ages come 
 and go and unload their gospels in the 
 
THE EPHESIANS 217 
 
 sanctuaries of time. We could read ‘‘Children, 
 obey your parents” in a pedagogue’s tone, 
 in a tone of alarm, and in a tone of affected 
 and arbitrary or momentary superiority. We 
 could so read it as a kindly, loving exhorta- 
 tion ; and that it is not a threatening in the 
 narrow sense of the word is proved by two 
 facts—first, that Paul gives a reason for the 
 exhortation, and, secondly, attaches a promise 
 to its obedience. 
 
 What is the reasonP “ For this is right.” 
 He says it in a most noble tone; he wishes 
 the young hearts to whom the admonition 
 is addressed to build according to geometry, 
 to have the square and the plomb and the 
 compasses without which you cannot build 
 anything. You may unload carts filled with 
 bricks, but you build nothing until you enter 
 the great temple of geometry and go to the 
 altar of the square and the plomb and the com- 
 passes, and then say how you will handle the 
 load of unrelated bricks, or stones, or other 
 building material. It is as if the Apostle had 
 said, “This is geometry—moral geometry, 
 spiritual geometry ; unless you build accord- 
 ing to the action of the stars, you build 
 
218 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 nothing, you are busy in idling, you are 
 energetic and fussy in doing nothing or 
 in savagely and insanely attempting the 
 impossible. Every man must have a Bible. 
 It may not be my Bible, my mother’s Bible, 
 the sweet book I live upon, the honeycomb 
 sweeter than all other sweetness; yet every 
 man, atheist as well as theist, must have a 
 Bible, and a Bible of authority, if he would 
 do anything really constructive and endurable 
 in life. Here is the Euclid of the moral 
 geometry—“ for this is right’: tested by the 
 plomb line, tested by the square, tested 
 by the compasses. Put one foot of the com- 
 passes on the centre, touch the cireumference 
 with the other, and say whether that circum- 
 ference be a circle or only a rough polygon. 
 You must have tests and standards and 
 authorities, however much you may jeer at 
 them or hold them in unreasoning contempt. 
 Euclid in four words, Euclid with all his 
 definitions and axioms and theorems and 
 demonstrations in four words: do it because 
 it is right. And right always ends in a bene- 
 diction ; nay, benediction is the very soul of 
 right. No man can do right without sleeping 
 
THE EPHESIANS 219 
 
 well, without ease of mind, without a growing 
 sense of enlarging freedom and expanding 
 and deepening fellowship with God and things 
 eternal. 
 
 Then there is a promise as well as a reason— 
 “That it may be well with thee, and thou 
 mayest live long on the earth.” That is the 
 earliest notion of eternity. It was big enough 
 for the time; we needed the patriarchs to 
 show that there is nothing in mere duration 
 of ages. It is mournful reading to read about 
 the patriarchs and the men of high antiquity, 
 because after they lived six hundred and fifty 
 years they died, and after they had lived eight 
 hundred and twenty and nine years they 
 died; and after Methuselah came to his 
 climacteric age he died. Death waits long 
 for some people, but he always conquers in 
 his own sphere: it is a measurable sphere, 
 and a sphere we may sometimes mock at in 
 relation to other and greater spheres, but 
 time always conquers even Hercules and 
 Methuselah. But time was so used alge- 
 braically and symbolically as to point to the 
 unknown quantity called Immortality. That 
 would have been too long a word for the very 
 
220 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 first ages of the world—it would not have 
 been understood at all; so the Lord must 
 begin by promising that a man shall live 
 twenty years, and two hundred years, and three 
 hundred years, and until hundreds become 
 almost a thousand. What is the Lord doing 
 with all this variety of day and century and 
 age? He is endeavouring by condescending 
 methods to awaken the human mind into 
 a dawning conception of the everlasting, 
 immortality. There will arise a man in the 
 after ages who will speak about an awakening 
 trump, about an anastasis, a rising from the 
 power of death and the grave, and a going forth 
 in white robes to possess and enjoy eternity. 
 In the meantime, here is a promise to be 
 living upon. Thus God has schooled us and 
 educated us; He has given a promise for 
 the day, an assurance exactly needed for the 
 passing necessity or the transient occasion. 
 The little child is pleased to think that it 
 may by good conduct and by strict regu- 
 lation of diet live until it is a hundred years 
 old. Dear little heart, sweet little soul, that 
 is all it can at present take into its opening 
 mind of the conception of the eternal. Ages 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 221 
 
 will come when we shall not reckon our 
 growth by mere centuries, but by milleniums 
 and sons endless. As a matter of fact, how- 
 ever, and exactly suited to the school period 
 of life, it will be well with us in proportion 
 as we listen to those who have the right 
 and the ability to teach. It will go well with 
 us if we act rightly. What is “well”? 
 That is a little word, but it holds all the 
 blessings—it means rest, and joy, and hope, 
 and sweet content, and a mastery over diffi- 
 culties, and a grand capacity for taking 
 environments, so-called, and wringing their 
 necks and throwing them into the ditch. It 
 can only be well with a man when it is well 
 with his soul, when he is right with God, 
 when he listens, saying, day by day, “ Speak, 
 Lord, for Thy servant heareth.” Then shall 
 the day’s work be hard indeed in many a 
 case, but always will result in a good con- 
 science and in a deep and well-deserved sleep. 
 
 What applies to the child applies also to 
 husband and wife. We cannot order people 
 to submit, and we cannot command people 
 to love; we must therefore go elsewhere for 
 the meaning of these words. In a very 
 
222 THE EPISTLE TO q 
 
 narrow and superficial sense we may by 
 sheer strength of muscle make some weaker 
 man or woman submit or go under. That 
 is not the meaning of the Apostle; that 
 could not be the meaning of such a writer. 
 We must go deeper. If you have overcome 
 a nation by sheer force of military strength, 
 you may make that nation, in a certain 
 arbitrary sense, submit to you; but as soon 
 as that nation has had time to grow a 
 further muscle, it will take hold of your 
 throat and make you submit. There is only 
 one way of conquering men, women, children, 
 nations, and that is by reason, by love, by 
 righteousness, by reciprocity of manhood, 
 the continual interchange of all that is best 
 in thought, in imagination, in considerate- 
 ness, in love, and in other Christlike and 
 Godlike qualities. Do you suppose that 
 you can make anybody obey you simply 
 because you have the stronger arm? You 
 may even report in the public prints that 
 you have achieved a great victory. What 
 by? By the sword? Never! There is only 
 one victory, and that is the victory that is 
 moral, spiritual, rational, filled with the 
 
THE EPHESIANS 223 
 
 Spirit of Christ, which is the spirit of re- 
 deeming love. In that way you may kill 
 your enemies, and kill them into friendship— 
 kill them, so to say, by kindness and into 
 love. That nation is only strong in the 
 degree in which it is morally mighty; that 
 household rule is only beautiful and suffi- 
 cient and good in the degree in which 
 nobody is conscious of living under, in a 
 servile sense, anybody else. He leads best 
 who never seems to lead. We want to see 
 our leaders; and we want to see God, and 
 we cannot see Him. He leads who does not 
 appear to lead. Sight of him would lead 
 to disobedience or to criticism, or to a 
 vexatious mental turbulence. That is true 
 leading that never shows the leader. 
 
 In all these cases of submission and 
 obedience observe the rule is ‘in Christ, 
 pleasing Christ.” 
 
 Now with regard to the parents, under- 
 stand that the parents are restrained: 
 “Ye fathers, provoke not your children to 
 wrath.” Never make your children your 
 enemies, and never rule them too much. A 
 parent should never, if he can possibly help 
 

 
 224 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 it, make a fool of himself. He will be the 
 best parent who is the companion of his 
 children, who may sometimes, after five- 
 and-twenty years of age, be almost mistaken 
 for one of his own boys. They have lived 
 together so joyously, happily, co-operatively, 
 that kindly observation and criticism might 
 sometimes inquire, Now what is the relation 
 between these men, and if the one of them 
 is the father, which is it? Many people 
 have ruined their influence in their family 
 by being much too big and much too 
 conscious that there is no chair in the 
 house big enough for their enthronement. 
 But this cometh forth from the Lord of 
 hosts—this science of the household life, this 
 art and simplicity of artlessness and of 
 wisdom. We can so live as to make obedi- 
 ence a delight and to make disobedience a 
 positive pain to ourselves. There may be 
 few only who know, this, but it is known 
 by some, that to do anything but the parental 
 will would be a conscious self-contempt 
 and self-punishment. The parental will has 
 been proved so often to be “in the Lord,” 
 and “as Christ,’ and according to the very 
 
THE EPHESIANS 225 
 
 Spirit of Christ, that to deny it or resist 
 it would be an immediate and intolerable 
 penalty. Blessed are they in whose houses 
 there runs this spirit of mutual and recipro- 
 cal obedience and unity, saying, “Servants, 
 be obedient to them that are your masters 
 according to the flesh . .. Masters, forbear 
 threatening; knowing that your Master also 
 is in heaven ”’—emphatically, according to 
 the language of Paul, knowing that your 
 Master, as well as theirs, the Master being 
 the same, is in heaven. 
 
 Now in all these relations there are one 
 or two unchangeable points. First of all, 
 the child can never be so old as the parent 
 so long as they are both living. That is 
 not a commonplace, nor is it a paradox; it 
 is a philosophy. So long as they are both 
 living they owe the same duty one to another, 
 according to the degrees of experience and 
 education through which they have both 
 passed. The son may sometimes be wiser than 
 the father: I have heard so; I do not always 
 or necessarily believe it. The son believes it 
 —no wonder; but if any man is so educated 
 or schooled in academy or university as to 
 
 15 
 
rai. 
 rt 
 a 
 
 226 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 mock his own father’s ignorance, he has 
 been schooled in the wrong way, and his 
 university may have conferred a degree 
 upon him, but it has not made him a wise 
 and honourable man. He is most educated 
 and best educated who is most forbearing 
 with the disadvantages under which his 
 forefathers were doomed to live. They had 
 no schools according to the modern definition 
 of that term; they went to work when they 
 were ten years old, or twelve, or fourteen ; 
 they had to gather what they could from 
 dimly lighted night schools. But they were 
 faithful to their opportunities, and they saved 
 enough to put their sons to better schools, 
 and even to universities; and it would be a 
 sevenfold shame never to be forgiven if those 
 sons, owing themselves to their fathers’ self- 
 denial, should turn upon their fathers and 
 rend them for want of education. 
 
 As to the master and the servant, these 
 relations can never be changed. There will 
 always be masters, and there will always be 
 servants. It is none of our doing—it is a law 
 from the beginning; and if it be properly 
 accepted and properly worked out, it is a 
 
 of 
 
 E 
 
THE EPHESIANS 227 
 
 beneficent law. Relations may be ameliorated, 
 may be modified, may be adapted to new 
 circumstances, and every Christian would 
 wish them so to be; but big and little we 
 shall always have, great men and half-made 
 men we shall probably have until the end 
 of time. The great mischief is that a man 
 should take a false view of work, of labour, 
 and imagine that some other man has got 
 the pre-eminence because he had good luck 
 on his side. There is no good luck. I go 
 back to the eternal counsel, and I find 
 there the plan of life and the specification 
 all drawn up; and if I could but accept 
 what God has given me and make the most 
 of it, and try honestly and legitimately to 
 double it, I should be as happy as any lord 
 or prince that ever graced the upper circles 
 of society. You cannot make all men equal 
 even by holding a demonstration in Hyde 
 Park. You cannot make the little man a big 
 man, even by doubling his wages. There 
 are certain unchangeable points in human 
 history, and these relations—parent, child, 
 husband, wife, master, servant—must remain 
 for ever. But we can greatly improve the 
 
228 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 
 
 conditions, we can totally change the environ- 
 ment, and we can make men feel that it is 
 no disgrace to be working. I could tell of 
 a great man, who had taken certainly three 
 or four of the highest degrees in the univer- 
 sity, who the other day was working in the 
 subways and almost drains of London, that 
 he might qualify himself to go to the very 
 top of his profession. He would learn nothing 
 by mere hearsay; he would work his way 
 right up, and know everything about it. 
 No navvy should excel him in knowledge; 
 he would do it. Whilst he was doing this, 
 his kind, tender-hearted mother, who thinks 
 it a pity for any of her children to be 
 working in a subway or a drain, sent him 
 two sovereigns for a Christmas present; and 
 the son, with a gracious smile, sent it back 
 again, and said he did not need it; he had 
 all he wanted to be going on with, and he 
 _ was finding great comfort in his work. If 
 men would take things in the right spirit, 
 they would find sunshine where nobody else 
 could find it. Meanness of heart, discon- 
 tentment of spirit, peevishness of soul, can- 
 not find sunshine in midsummer’s longest 
 
THE EPHESIANS 229 
 
 day; but sweetness of soul and true obedience 
 and right-minded manhood can find sunshine 
 amid the snows of winter, amid the gloom 
 of December. Hence we come back and 
 back and back to these wonderful words we 
 have heard before in these present readings: 
 ‘as Christ . . . in Christ .. . as the Lord 
 
 . in the Lord.” That is the centre, and 
 that is the explanation, and that is the 
 music of it all. 
 
 This, then, is Christianity in the family. 
 It has a good word for everybody. It 
 begins with the husband and the wife. It 
 puts them into their right relation, and then 
 it goes up into the nursery, and talks to all 
 the little children in baptized language and 
 baptized smiles, and watches them until 
 they are seven, eight, ten years of age, and 
 then until they are five-and-twenty, and 
 leaves them for the nonce, saying, “ Now 
 you are going to become husbands and wives 
 yourselves.”” Then it goes into the kitchen, 
 and into the stableyard, and into all the 
 relations of life, and says, “ Here is direction 
 for you, here is sunshine, here is music.” 
 And when the question arises, ‘“ What is 
 
230 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 sunshine ?”’ and “ Oh, sir, tell me what that 
 music is?” the answer never changes: “In 
 Christ, as Christ, in the Lord.” The Apostle 
 stands back in the temple of eternity, and 
 gives out the law of development as men 
 are able to bear it. 
 
 Verse 10: “ Finally ~ 
 
 
 
 * Finally,” and then, to soften the cruel 
 word, ‘‘my brethren,” as if making brother- 
 hood for the purpose of breaking it up and 
 finding the sorest places in the heart. Please 
 note the date of this discourse, then note 
 the text, and then say if they be not appro- 
 priate one to the other. ‘“ Finally” is a 
 word which has many meanings. It is like 
 a diamond with many facets—little faces, 
 shining, glinting, gleaming, lights of faces. 
 Do not let us roughly and peremptorily, as 
 it were, dismiss the word “finally.” It fits 
 the season well; there are not many words 
 that could fit the hour more exquisitely, 
 more pathetically, more poetically. Let us 
 look at the meaning, the import of the 
 word “finally.” 
 
 First, it may be used in relation, as in this 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 231 
 
 case, to an argument, an expostulation, or 
 an exhortation. The great magician and 
 rhetorician has supplied all his arguments. 
 He has supplied the heart with many an 
 appeal; he has argued the case as a mighty 
 man of intellect alone could argue it; he 
 has presented it in the highest lights; he 
 has shown how the argument develops a 
 great decree and divine intent. Then he 
 breaks away to an apparently subsidiary 
 matter—entering the family, and giving 
 exhortation to husband and wife, and parent 
 and child, and master and servant. Then he 
 is apparently weak; he hardly knows now 
 how to bring the whole thing to a conclusion. 
 The Apostle Paul often got himself into such 
 verbal entanglement, but he always came out 
 of it; and now, gathering his singing-robe 
 around him, he says, “ Finally, brethren.” 
 And, as if instantaneously, the higher light 
 catches him, and he is away up to the 
 highest level of his argument; and he ad- 
 dresses a soldierlike appeal and challenge 
 to those who have been listening to his 
 argument and his appeal. That is a good 
 “finally”; at all events, it is a “ finally”’ 
 
232 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 not without merit. But it is not the real 
 “finally,” with sevenfold doom booming 
 through its music. There is a grander 
 “ finally’ somewhere. Yet we cannot alto- 
 gether dismiss the pedant, the logician, the 
 man of eloquence. He says in effect: The 
 proposition is this; the argument I intend 
 to establish is this; the illustrations with 
 which I will light up the argument are 
 these; and the personal applications which 
 I intend to make are these; and I have 
 spoken to each one of them as if he were 
 the only person interested : and now, gather- 
 ing up the whole thing into one grand 
 appeal, it is this. And we say, “ Plato, 
 thou reasonest well. It must be so; else 
 why?” It is, however, one thing to yield to 
 an argument, and another to obey it; it is 
 one thing to be intellectually convinced, and 
 another to be morally persuaded; it is one 
 thing to have the intellect thoroughly satis- 
 fied, as by chain-armour-like logic, and 
 another for the conscience to rise and say, 
 “J will do it.” Hence our lost poetry, and 
 lost sermons, and our lost consciences.” 
 Then we may, secondly, take the word 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 233 
 
 “finally” as indicating a completion—some- 
 thing that was intended to be completed by 
 the mind or by the hand, or in some way 
 indicative of construction and purpose. You 
 look at a statue, and you say, whilst your 
 eyes are still on the wet clay, “ Yes, that 
 will do; that is very good: I need not 
 return.” The artist smiles, and says, “‘ You 
 have hardly begun yet ; you must come back 
 after a given time.” And you return, and 
 observe that the statue is proceeding, and 
 proceeding satisfactorily, and you say, “ This 
 will be enough.” And the. artist says, “‘ No; 
 we now want the high lights, and the half 
 lights, and the quarter lights.” And you 
 say, “Can you not dispense with these?” 
 “Certainly not; if I am to speak from an 
 artistic point of view, they would almost 
 seem to be the most important part of the 
 whole fabrication.” ‘But they mean so 
 little to me.” “Yes, but they mean every- 
 thing to the effigy. The question is, whether 
 you are going to put yourself to a little more 
 inconvenience, or whether you are going to 
 destroy my reputation as a sculptor.” Does 
 the artist rest because he is tired P_ Certainly 
 
234 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 not; that would be a mean idea. God did 
 not rest because He was tired. God cannot 
 be wearied, Omnipotence cannot be fatigued ; 
 yet God rested. Why does the artist cease ?P 
 Because his work is done. He can do a 
 thousand more pictures quite as beautiful, 
 or statues quite as exquisite and complete; 
 but the particular work in question is finished 
 —consummatum est. And so I hear a great 
 wondrous voice in the ages, the stronger 
 because of its weakness, ‘‘ It is finished.” 
 In that sense, you see, the word “ finally ” 
 has a special application. We do not leave 
 the world because we are tired of it; we 
 do not die because we are utterly depleted 
 and exhausted as to our imagination of 
 possibility and as to our claim of ambition. 
 We say, “We have hardly begun to live.” 
 But we die and pass on, because all that is 
 possible in a given time and space has been 
 done. “It is finished” is written upon our 
 little fragment of work. The broken column 
 in the winter cemetery is the dreariest of 
 all pictures you can look upon, and yet so 
 pathetic, suggestive, and in its way grand. 
 What is all life but a broken column P_ What 
 
 
 
 | 
 
THE EPHESIANS 235 
 
 is man in his ninetieth, his hundredth year, 
 but a broken shaft—marble fine enough, but 
 the brokenness of it is the poetry and the 
 meaning and the divinity of purpose. 
 
 Then, thirdly, we may regard the word 
 “finally” as indicating qualification. When 
 you leave school, do you leave the world ? 
 You only leave one world to get into another 
 and a higher. Every school has written upon 
 its portal qualification, or equipment, or 
 _ preparation. When we leave school it is 
 to proceed into a larger school—schooldays 
 are never done. There are some things we 
 can only begin, we can never complete them 
 except in an intermediate and almost super- 
 ficial and even worthless sense. When the 
 apprenticeship is done and the indentures 
 are burned, is the work finished? does the 
 apprentice say ‘ Finally”? Only in an 
 intermediate sense; he is going to be more 
 an apprentice than ever, he is going to be 
 a bigger man, a greater worker, a more quali- 
 fied agent. Why those seven years under the 
 sealing-wax? To get ready for the eighth 
 year of manhood and virile energy. I see! 
 Then apprenticeship does not end life? No, 
 
236 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 
 
 apprenticeship but begins it. There are many 
 people who think that when they join the 
 Church, as the phrase is, all is over, Christian” 
 character is established and Christian intelli- 4 
 gence is sphered out into a thing of admirable — 
 completeness and beauty. Away! it is not 
 so! When you joined the Church, in the 
 sense of becoming a communicant, you only ~ 
 began the real stress and often the real 
 trouble. It was therefore but an intermediate — 
 “finally”; it was good-bye to the devil that — 
 it might be an eternal companionship with — 
 God. Do not imagine that Christian charac- — 
 ter is a completed act; never suppose that — 
 by one act you have done all things. Weare 
 not saved—we are being saved. Itisaverb — 
 of constant action, a verb transitive, never 
 losing but rather increasing its energy. We 
 are undergoing a process; one day we shall 
 be saved—oh, far-off, but glorious day! You 
 are a young man and are serving what you 
 term your articles. Are you a solicitor? 
 No, I am being qualified to become a solicitor. 
 Can you not qualify yourself by a given hour 
 to-day? No, that is not within my power. 
 Have you to slave on a few days or months 
 
THE EPHESIANS 237 
 
 or a year or two longer? Yes, if you may 
 call it slaving on; I have to attend, to serve, 
 to pay attention, to acquire, and to prepare 
 myself for a rather severe examination. And 
 after that, what? After that, the bigger 
 work, the fuller work; but without such 
 preparatory arrangement and discipline I 
 can never get into the rest of completed 
 training. Why, it is the same with the 
 training of the body. A man who is going 
 into a real contest that has any meaning in 
 it is not allowed to prescribe his own diet. 
 That is very remarkable. Yes, but it is a fact. 
 And yet in the Christian life a man under- 
 takes to prescribe his own diet, and he takes 
 it when he pleases, and lets it alone when he 
 pleases, and he goes to church when he wants 
 to go to church, and if he does not want to 
 go to church he never looks near the place ; 
 and then he expects the minister to turn him 
 out quite finished in education and in spiritual 
 culture. He plays the fool in the preparation 
 time, and then expects to come out top of the 
 list and with all the honours in his pocket. 
 This cannot be done; life is not to be success- 
 fully so played, so wrought, so developed. 
 
238 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 
 
 My friends must think of me not as dead, but. 
 as promoted to a higher school, where I shall 
 see my Lord and know as also I am known. 
 There are intermediate “finallys,” little, 
 partial summings up, trifling good-byes, 
 which we shall forget ere a century revolves. 
 We measure time so badly and take magni- 
 tudes and quantities so absurdly that we shall 
 be glad to burn all our little pocket-books — 
 by-and-by; for we have put down the big 
 as little and the little as big, and the whole 
 process has been a ludicrous miscalculation 
 and disproportion. Observe, therefore, when — 
 we say “ Finally,” we may really be saying 
 “Now, begin!” The finest epitaph I ever 
 heard was in one line—‘*‘ Here endeth the first 
 lesson.” There is nothing final in poetry, 
 nothing final in spiritual imagination and 
 contemplation. That a man should, have his 
 arms folded on his breast and be laid down in 
 his mother clay, and should have written on 
 the marble Bible above his bosom, ‘“ Here 
 endeth the first lesson!’’ So, let us remember, 
 there are intermediate “ finallys,” some little 
 ruptures. They look awful at the time. 
 The surgeon says, “That is an immense 
 
THE EPHESIANS 239 
 
 wound.” Relatively, it is immense; but in 
 another relation it is nothing—not a blood- 
 drop on a firmament. All the analogies 
 are in favour of another life. I do not know 
 a single analogy, which, fairly treated, points 
 to death in the sense of extinction or anni- 
 hilation. Why is the boy undergoing his 
 education? With a view to profession—that is 
 to say, he passes through the one world or life 
 that he may enter the higher life or world 
 that is to come. Why is this man sowing 
 seed on the field, apparently throwing it 
 away, scattering it in the air? What is the 
 meaning of this lavish gift and this energetic 
 idleness ? Why so? Because this is the way 
 into the harvest-world, and there is no other 
 way. ‘“ Whatsoever a man soweth that shall 
 he also reap.’ You cannot help it. You may 
 be agnostics, and atheists, and non-theists, and 
 secularists, and positivists, and any other 
 number of little tomfooleries you please to 
 elect as may gratify the immediate palate; 
 but you cannot hurt or hinder the great law, 
 that whatsoever a man soweth he has got 
 to eat it—eat it! 
 
 What is true of individuals is true of 
 

 
 240 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 nations. A bitter truth, a bitter aloes that 
 corrects some evil internal condition. What — 
 is this man or woman constantly going over — 
 the scales for? If some tune were played, 
 I could bear it; but from morning till night, 
 as it appears to my impatience, it is all one 
 scale after another, over and over again. 
 What is the meaning of it? You will 
 know if you will follow the man or the 
 woman to-night. You will observe the 
 gathering-up of all these scales and prac- 
 tisings, and you will be thrilled by the 
 issue. The greater the artist, the greater 
 the student. When you hear the final music 
 you will not begrudge the hours spent on 
 the practice of the scales. So it is in 
 every department of life. We think how 
 easily this or that is done; we do not know 
 the backlying process; we know nothing 
 about the wakeful hours, the weary head- 
 aches, the trying and trying again and 
 again. All these things are forgotten; but 
 when we hear the final outcome we are filled 
 with delight, and we foolishly imagine that 
 the man or the woman could have done so 
 by simply doing it on the spot, without 
 
THE EPHESIANS 241 
 
 any preparation such as would mean blood- 
 shedding, trial, and loss of nerve—yea, and 
 some pain of a small Gethsemane. 
 
 So we have our intermediate finals, and 
 we have a final that closes great experiences 
 which we may carry with us into another 
 world. Shall we know them there? Cer- 
 tainly; all the analogies are in favour of 
 that. There is one “finally” that we cannot 
 escape. Every one of us must give an 
 account of himself to God. We must all 
 stand before the judgment seat of Christ. 
 There is no discharge in that war; there is 
 a bourn from which no traveller returns. 
 Yet it seems that the little step between 
 the staying and the going is so small that 
 we might whisper across it. We do not 
 require words of music, or tempests and 
 roarings of thunder, because the little step 
 only took place last night. He, she, cannot 
 be far away by this time. May we not 
 have one word of recognition, salutation ? 
 No; for this time it is final. But only for 
 this time; there is another time. To-day 
 has not only a to-night but a to-morrow. 
 We must not so live as to miss the chance 
 
 16 
 
242 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 
 
 of meeting again; we must not shame our 
 
 plighted word; we must be faithful unto 
 
 death. And we shall be none the worse 
 
 because of our weakness. There is a time 
 
 when weakness may be strength, and when 
 
 the less we have to say for ourselves the 
 
 more our Christ may have to say for us, to 
 us. His look is light, His smile heaven! 
 
 Verses 10-13: “Finally, my brethren, be strong 
 
 in the Lord, and in the power of His might. Put on 
 
 the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to 
 
 stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle 
 
 not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, 
 
 against powers, against the rulers of the darkness 
 
 of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high 
 
 places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armour 
 
 of God, that ye may be able to withstand im the 
 evil day, and having done all, to stand.” 
 
 We have already delivered a discourse 
 upon the word “ Finally.” The words “my 
 brethren ’’ somebody else has inserted, but 
 the Apostle would not object to any one 
 putting in such words, for they occur as to 
 their spirit in many places. The man who 
 said to the Philippians “I have you in my 
 heart” would not object to any scribe inter- 
 polating the words “my brethren” in such 
 a connection as is now before us. 
 
THE EPHESIANS 24:5 
 
 * Finally, my brethren, be strong.” Who 
 says so? Who has any right to say so? 
 And what does “strong” mean? There 
 are some preachers who have no right to 
 say “Be strong.” A sermon upon “ Be 
 strong in the Lord”? may be a most wound- 
 ing, offensive, and unjustifiable discourse. 
 “Be strong” is a text that ought not to 
 be taken up by every one; only the chief 
 of musicians has any title to play on such 
 a harp. But we who do not belong to the 
 higher order of that class may preach upon 
 the holy, gentle words according to a measure 
 which I will presently specify. We cannot 
 always hear the chief of the musicians; 
 sometimes even his harp is out of tune, 
 though we know he has a right to this 
 music, for he has lived it. No strong man, 
 a man whose strength has never failed, 
 should dare to speak to the weak. He has 
 no right in that sanctuary; he is disqualified, 
 and he must be made to feel it. Who is it 
 that speaks this word to the Ephesians, “ Be 
 strong”? He calls himself “the man of the 
 chain”; that is his literal style and title. 
 In the hearing of the clang of that chain 
 

 
 
 
 244 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 he says to those who are sore pressed, “ Be ’ 
 strong.” What a thunderous power there — 
 is in the exhortation of such a man! There — 
 are many who sit in drawing-rooms and — 
 read the news from the war, and comment — 
 upon it languidly immediately before rising — 
 to approach the tea-table. What a mockery! 
 What do they know about war? But if 
 a man, all scars, carrying the medal of 
 wounds, should say to those who are fighting, 
 *“T am sorry I am not with you, for my 
 day is past—but be strong,” he would 
 compel all wise men to listen. There is. 
 nothing so offensive as preaching when the 
 preacher knows nothing about the marrow — 
 and core and innermost blood of the subject. 
 I will not listen to him; he is no priest 
 of God. He may have a regulation utterance, 
 and pronounce it at a regulation time, but I 
 shall not be there, God helping me. But 
 I will listen to my father-brother who says, 
 **T have been just where you are; I have felt 
 every pang, every smart of the inconceivable 
 agony, and by that right, and the experience 
 which has come out of it, I would venture 
 to say to you in the day of your trouble, 
 
THE EPHESIANS 245 
 
 ‘Be strong in the Lord.’” That whisper 
 will find my heart. He knows what he is 
 talking about. He does not deal in consola- 
 tion as a merchantman, selling it at so 
 much per ounce or so much per yard; he 
 knows the whole mystery, and speaks out 
 of the sanctuary of his soul, and the Lord 
 doth clothe his words with power, and make 
 him a kind of sub-redeemer to me in my 
 darkness and helplessness. 
 
 The rich cannot comfort the poor. The 
 men who were born rich and have never 
 had to do one single hand’s work for them- 
 selves cannot talk to the poor. They may 
 have speeches ending in still more verbose 
 resolutions; but wealth can never talk to 
 poverty. Poverty can talk the mother tongue 
 of poverty. There may be rich men who do 
 talk to the poor, and talk wisely, and with 
 the fullest of good intentions and with the 
 most unsuspected good faith; but they do 
 not know the lingo. You can tell the 
 foreigner when he speaks even grammatical 
 English. Are we, then, questioning the good 
 faith and tender sympathy of those men? 
 Far from it. We honour them and love them, 
 

 
 246 THE EPISTLE TO . 
 z 
 but they cannot do it. They would if they 
 could; but he who has not been in the 
 furnace does not know the fire, and he whose © 
 cupboard has always been full does not know — 
 what it is to cut the crust so that it will 
 cover two meals. 
 The free man cannot talk to the slave. — 
 He has great periods of a rhetorical squash — 
 kind, big as the great periods uttered by the — 
 great Irishman Curran, one of the most elo- 
 quent tongues that has wagged within the 
 century or the century and a half. But it is — 
 not talking to the slave. The slave says in 
 effect, when Curran is done, “ What is the 
 meaning of it all?” and if Curran should 
 answer, “I am sympathising with the slaye— 
 with you in your slavery,” the slave would 
 smile as only a slave can smile. It cannot 
 be done. There are transcendental impossi- _ 
 bilities—things we cannot struggle up to, | 
 because we lack the mystery and the spiritual | 
 insight and ineffable music which alone can 
 work the miracle of sympathy. Do we, then, 
 question the sincerity of the sympathy? By 
 no means—it is utterly sincere in many cases; 
 but unless you have been in Egypt you do 
 
THE EPHESIANS 247 
 
 not know what it is to make bricks without 
 straw. Some poor old neighbour could come 
 in and talk—not quite pure and grammatical 
 English, but the sort of English that the 
 heart knows and can interpret; and poor 
 old Grief, lifting its brown apron and drying 
 the tears from the eyes, would say, “Thank - 
 you—you have done me good.’ So we are 
 face to face with a man who knows the case, 
 who knows what strength is and what weak- 
 ness is, and who is in a kind of humiliation at 
 the very moment of this speech ; and, lifting 
 up his chained hand, he says to those who ‘ 
 are in actual and possible danger, “ Be strong 
 in the Lord and in the power of His might.” yi, 
 He had a right to say so; the world will 
 always listen to such a counsellor. i 
 Be strong “in the Lord.” That may be ee 
 described as a qualifying term. The ex- 
 hortation is not “ Be strong,” but “ Be strong 
 in the Lord ”’—in the strength higher than 
 your own, in the strength out of which all 
 true strength is originally derived. Have a 
 sanctuary into which you can flee; make no 
 svingham umbrella of some theory, and inven- 
 tion, and speculation of your own indigestion, 
 
means, being turned into more words: “ Con- — 
 
 nect yourselves with the Infinite; live, and _ 
 move, and have your being in God. Have a — 
 great temple of truth, a grand sanctuary of ; 
 insight and companionship with the Eternal, — 
 and let nothing come between your souls and 
 daily communion with the spirits of just men 
 
 made perfect, and with an innumerable com- 
 pany of angels; and remember that even 
 _ they, the sentries, derive their energy from 
 “ Him who ‘ fainteth not, neither is weary.’” 
 So many people do not know the meaning 
 of such words; they live in events. That is 
 ’ how most Christians are practical atheists. 
 : They think they are full of faith, when they 
 are only reading anecdotes and waiting for 
 the next edition to come out to see what the 
 people on the other side have done. The 
 people on the other side have done nothing. 
 Why fret and fume about these events? I 
 am so far akin to this great Apostle as to 
 my soul’s aspirations and desires that I 
 admire intensely the way in which he treated 
 events. We make much of them; we sell 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 249 
 
 them ; and who would deprive a man of his 
 livelihood even if he has been tempted to 
 develop a telegram and invent news from 
 the front? Where is the front? Who 
 leads? I have watched the Apostle for a 
 lifetime, and the way in which that man 
 gathers events together and wrings their 
 necks off is simply delightful. But we 
 publish a large placard at the door that we 
 will lecture on the great event of the week. 
 Ah me! it hurts the Cross; it writes Ichabod 
 on the altar and puts out the altar flame. 
 But we call such preaching living up to the 
 times. This man is a remarkable man for ad- 
 dressing himself to the hour. Poor creature! 
 I wish the hour were big enough to drown 
 him, in his official capacity. How did the 
 Apostle treat events that we think so serious 
 
 and soimportant? Why, he treated them like | 
 
 this: “Shall tribulation, or distress, or per- 
 secution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or 
 sword? Nay.” Ay, shall death, life, angels, 
 principalities, powers, things present, things 
 to come, height, depth, or any other creature? 
 —all events in one catalogue; and he said, 
 _ Nay, in all these things we are more than 
 
 / 
 
250 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 conquerors through Him that loved us.” q 
 When we have a city of the mind we shall — 
 have rest. When we live, and move, and haye ~ 
 
 our being in God we shall not be the sub- 
 jects of panic, or the victims of hot fever; 
 we shall be perfectly quiet—in quietness and 
 
 confidence we shall possess our souls. Oh ~ 
 
 that we had hearkened unto His voice and 
 obeyed His commandments! for then had 
 our peace flowed like a river, and our 
 
 righteousness had been as the waves of 
 
 the sea. 
 
 What shall we do in all the tragedy of 
 lifeP ‘Wherefore take unto you the whole 
 armour of God.’’ What is the second word? 
 You are quite right; you have hit upon the 
 pulse-word which so many of us are apt to 
 overlook : “ Wherefore take.” Not “ make.” 
 There is all the difference in the world in 
 this connection between “taking” armour 
 and ‘‘making” it. We have nothing to do 
 with making armour of this kind which 
 is intended for the defence and security of 
 the soul. But this would dry up many 
 sources and streams of invention and theory 
 and speculation? It would, certainly. The 
 
 
 
 
 
 ¥ 
 
THE EPHESIANS 251 
 
 Church has had so little to do that it has 
 taken to image-making on a large scale. 
 One man has a theory about the Atone- 
 ment, and another has a theory about the 
 future life; and he has changed that theory 
 twice, and modified it three times, and 
 published it, with footnotes and with an 
 appendix! What am I to make of this 
 theory or invention? He says, “I—I would 
 not say so now.” I cannot rest upon the 
 word which may be changed at any moment; 
 so I build upon what I believe to be the 
 word of the living God, the logosity of 
 the universe, the inbreathing, outbreathing 
 mystery of the divine oath. Do not go to 
 the armour-maker to see what is good for 
 your defence when the enemy, in all his 
 manifold energy, is heavy upon you; every- 
 thing has been provided in the Word of 
 God. Again and again I would say, as I 
 have said, “If you want a book to prove 
 that the Bible is sufficient, there is only one 
 book can do it, and that book is the Bible 
 itself.” And I would say to many an in- 
 quirer, ‘Have you read the Bible?” “Of 
 course!” No, not “of course.” It takes a 
 
net 
 
 — 
 
 252 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 
 
 
 man all his seventy years to read the Bible; 
 and when he is fourscore, and there is but 7 
 strength, labour, and sorrow, he has not 
 begun to read the Bible as one day he will — 
 read the spiritual revelation in piri ; 
 places. Everything is in the Word of God: — 
 all truth, all beauty, all music, all love; for c 
 God is in the Zion of His Word, and it — 
 cannot be shaken. If people knew the Bible — 
 as they know the newspaper, what another — 
 world it would be! Have you read the 
 Bible this morning? I thank you for your — 
 silence—it is eloquent. We should read it : 
 every morning. I believe we do break our 
 fast every morning. We feed the body, and 
 say to the soul, “Wait! when I have a 
 convenient season I will call for thee and 
 give thee some inexpensive and innutritious 
 food.” 
 
 What a wonderful view of the life of 
 Christian experience is given in these words! 
 which we shall utterly miss if we begin to 
 explain. It is very neat and natty if we 
 begin to explain armour, and loins girt 
 about with truth, and breastplate, and feet, 
 and shield, and helmet, and sword. That 
 
THE EPHESIANS 253 
 
 is not to expound the passage at all. What 
 is God’s view of human life so far as we 
 can make out from this description and 
 from this offer of grace? First of all, God 
 knows that—human_life isa fight. It is 
 something for God to tell us that He knows 
 all about the battle. A God afar off could 
 lecture us about the battle, and might 
 deliver to us a course of lectures about it; 
 but they would do us no good. But the 
 Lord says to us, through the medium of 
 His Son and through the ministry of His 
 Apostles, “Souls of mine, life is a tragedy, 
 a sorrow, a conflict, a daily agony; I know 
 every pulse of it.” We have not a high 
 priest that cannot be touched with the 
 feeling of our infirmities, but in all points 
 He was tempted like as we are, yet without 
 sin. It is something to believe that God 
 knows everything we suffer. What a fight 
 it is! The devil is so strong, so wakeful, 
 so cruel. He has nearly torn me to pieces; | 
 he is a terrible opponent. He is not a 
 metaphysical antagonist—he is a real and 
 tremendous foe, and he has said to me many 
 a time, ‘ Poor man! shut up that old book 
 

 
 
 254 THE EPISTLE TO * 
 of yours which you call the Bible: it is ; 
 old and obsolete, and quite behind the march ~ 
 of the ages.” Many a time he has said to — 
 me in the last twelve months, “ Get off your — 
 knees, you fool! and I will do what I can 
 for you. As for Him, nameless, who lives — 
 above the air, He cares nothing for yon, 
 and you may dig seven more graves and 
 He will scorn them all; rise!” Again and 
 again he has said to me and to you, “There _ . 
 is no utility in so-called prayer; it does 
 nothing for you, it is but wasted breath. 
 Do not imagine that there is anything above 
 you but the infinite azure; and there is 
 certainly no throne, no personality, no tender, 
 condescending, redeeming Providence. Carry 
 out your own will to the best of your power, 
 and when it is your turn to die breathe 
 your last; come!” And sometimes I have 
 almost gone. But, blessed be God, not 
 having gone, I preach the better after it 
 all, with a deeper soul, a holier truth, a 
 tenderer appeal; having been all but 
 scorched by hell, I have come by that way 
 nearer heaven. By whatever right this 
 suffering may have entitled me to speak, 
 
THE EPHESIANS 255 
 
 I venture to say, “ Be strong in the Lord, 
 and in the power of His might.” To-morrow 
 I shall be one year’s march nearer her and 
 the Home. But the devil has relaxed nothing 
 in severity, in cruelty, in opposition; he is 
 the devil still. 
 
 And _then, not only does God know that 
 it is a fight, ‘but He provides for every 
 aspect ¢ ct of it. He knows that we shall 
 require a helmet, and a sword, and a shield, 
 and that we shall require preparation for 
 our feet, and all manner of defences; and 
 He says, “ Poor soul! they are all here, all 
 of them; you are welcome to them, I made 
 them for you—not for angels, but for men.” 
 It is something to know that the Lord has 
 made provision for every moment of our 
 time, for every aspect of our struggle, for 
 every mutation of our fortunes. The 
 moment we realise that, we are young, 
 strong, triumphant. 
 
 I judge, thirdly, from this delineation that 
 the Lord knows the whole policy of the 
 enemy. He calls part of that policy by the 
 name “wiles”—little tricks and devices, 
 pits dug in unsuspected places. He knows 
 
256 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 what it is, does this wily enemy, to make us 
 stumble in our speech. He has a wonderful 
 power in the clouds, he bewilders and con- 
 fuses the poor struggling mind—and the Lord 
 knows every trick of the devil. When I 
 realise that, I say, “It will be well with me 
 in this case also.” The enemy stopped my 
 prayer yester morning, but I got it back in 
 the evening; the Lord was more than the 
 enemy. My soul’s opponent endeavoured to 
 tempt me to commit myself to false principles 
 and hazardous issues, and just whilst I was 
 thinking whether on the whole it might not 
 be better just to give way in this instance, 
 the Lord swept the devil and his tricks out 
 of my road, and I came to church, the 
 sanctuary, and the altar, and it was well with 
 me. And it will be well with you, suffering 
 ‘brother. You have your difficulties at home, 
 4 in your business, in your church, and princi- 
 pally in your own heart. Be strong in the 
 Lord ; never try to stop the inrushing stream 
 
 _ of fire which shoots from the volcano of hell 
 _ with the last tract on secularism, socialism, 
 agnosticism, and the various other little in- 
 | ventions of irresponsible minds. Understand 
 
THE EPHESIANS. 257 
 
 that you are now hearing a man speak who 
 has been through the whole case, who has 
 suffered, so far as man may have suffered 
 on this earth, the torments of the lost, and 
 who has had to fight the enemy at midnight, 
 and who found out soon that he could not 
 fight that enemy with straws, but only with 
 the steel of Heaven, the panoply of eternity. 
 The Lord knows, therefore, what we are doing.. 
 He says in the first instance, “‘ Withstand”’— ‘ 
 be obstinate, do your very best, uttermost, 
 that, having done all, you may get away from 
 “‘ withstand ” into ‘withstand ’”’ without the 
 “with ’—and having done all may stand. 
 We owe everything, under God, to the men 
 who have followed that policy. A great 
 martyr said to his brother when they were 
 going to the stake, “ My brother, this day we 
 shall light a fire in England that will never 
 be extinguished.” So they went as it were 
 hand in hand and heart linked with heart to 
 light a fire, and it burns to-day; and I ask 
 those of you who are in sympathy with such 
 spiritual heroism to see to it that that fire 
 never goes out. Do not be little creatures, 
 miserable, paltering debaters about whether 
 
 17 
 
258 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 this should be a preposition or that should be 
 an adverb, or whether we should stand to the 
 east or stand to the west or fly to the north. 
 Do not talk about these things, but light 
 a fire for God that shall never goout. Young 
 men of England! I ask you to be strong. 
 
 No man could have invented this expres- 
 sion. It brings with it some sign and token 
 of its divine origin. The most of things 
 that are in the Scriptures are things that 
 never would have occurred to the mind of 
 man. Hence I stand by the old argument 
 that the Bible is a book which no man 
 could have written if he would, or would 
 have written if he could. The uniqueness is 
 part of the argument. “The whole armour 
 of God.” Is there any mere poetry in the 
 word “whole”? Is it employed or intro- 
 duced in order to perfect a rhetorical climax P 
 or is there great weight of meaning in the 
 word “whole”? Is it the emphatic word in 
 the exhortation ? or are all the words on one 
 high level ?—the monotony not of weakness 
 or weariness, but of completeness. We must 
 revert to our own spiritual experience if we 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 259 
 
 would receive a sufficing answer to these 
 inquiries. Could we do without the word 
 “whole”? What does the word “ whole” 
 stand for in this connection? It stands for 
 completeness. There must not be one piece 
 of the panoply overlooked, nor must the 
 places and arrangements of the armour be 
 for a moment changed or otherwise related. 
 The provision of the divine grace is complete ; 
 we are armed from the head to the foot, 
 there is no unprovided place or spot in all 
 this divine clothing with spiritual steel. But - 
 is there any meaning in the word “ whole”? 
 Yes, there is great meaning in that word. 
 Consider what the exhortation would be 
 without the word ‘‘ whole,’ complete, entire. 
 It would be a different command or exhor- 
 tation; the military tone would be taken 
 out of it. It would sink into a very poor 
 admonition. There is a kind of gentle 
 severity in the very language, and specially in 
 that one word. “Whole armour.” Consider 
 what it would be if we missed any one of 
 the pieces. A man is panoplied all over 
 except the helmet. Then he is doomed, no 
 matter how muscular he may be, how alert, 
 
260 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 how determined. Suppose a man is panoplied 
 all over except the shield. He is lost, no 
 matter what his sword may be, or his helmet 
 of brass; if he has no shield, his heart is 
 exposed. Suppose a man is armed all over 
 except the sword. The foe mocks him, asks 
 him to produce his sword of straw, laughs 
 at him. Does the foe deride him simply 
 because he is wanting in one solitary piece 
 of armour? That is precisely what the foe 
 does. The armour is not to be looked upon 
 as consisting of pieces; although it is given 
 in detail, it is only given in detail in order 
 to mark the solidity of the unity of the 
 panoply. The armour is only enumerated 
 that it may be totalled, brought to one 
 grand fitness. 
 
 Many persons are armed in places. If 
 nine points out of ten are attended to, these 
 people suppose that they are very well pro- 
 vided for; but they are not. You have shut 
 up all your castle, every window, every 
 door, except the postern gate—the little gate 
 behind, the small door that a small burglar 
 may pass through. All that is wanted is 
 not an army of burglars, but one little 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 261 
 
 child-burglar that can creep through an un- 
 guarded pane of glass. Enough! the castle 
 is in the hands of the thief. How notice- 
 able it is that people are very fond of pet 
 graces and favourite virtues, and how they 
 dangle these before the eyes of those poor 
 creatures who are not similarly created or 
 provided for at those special points. It is 
 heart-sickening, it must hurt the Saviour! 
 How the mean creature who does not thirst 
 for strong drink mocks the poor creature 
 who, under the pressure of three generations, 
 burns to drink the fire-fluid! The Pharisee 
 holds himself erect, and says in the audience 
 of the people, “I do not need stimulants; I 
 have no craving for strong drink! Other 
 people can surely do as well as I can.” 
 Hold thy tongue, thou servant of the pit! 
 Thine own brother mayhap may have an 
 unquenchable fire in his throat, for which he 
 is not so broadly responsible as may be sup- 
 posed at first sight. The generations come up 
 again ; we reap old harvests. Our forefathers 
 are living in us; they heat the blood; they 
 should be twice damned. ‘The evil that 
 men do lives after them.” So it is through 
 
en 
 
 262 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 the whole gamut of human experience and 
 spiritual utterance; we are apt to be proud — 
 of the particular part of armour which we 
 have, and to torment other people because — 
 they are not equally strong at the same 
 points, though they may be stronger at other 
 points in the clothing of the divine panoply. 
 
 Let us be merciful, let us be tenderly — 
 
 gracious; the people who are more easily — 
 tempted than we are know it, mourn it, — 
 cry over it in unknown places and in 
 darkened hours—too well they know their 
 weakness and their shame. Do not let us 
 who are not tempted in such directions hold 
 ourselves up as stupendous models of be- 
 
 haviour in some other direction. A man 
 
 may not be drunk, but his soul may be 
 steeped in covetousness, which is worse than 
 drunkenness. A man may not be led away 
 by his passions, but he may be greedy, 
 selfish, self-considering, proud—and pride is 
 worse than any sin that stalks about the 
 city in the night-time. We condemn sin at 
 wrong points, or we exaggerate some sins 
 and practise others. Hence the beauty, the 
 force, the necessity, of the expression or 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 263 
 
 commandment, “ Put on the whole armour.” 
 Every inch of it, be equally strong at every 
 point; ay, and it will take thee all thy 
 time to panoply thyself in the steel of God. 
 The Christian life is a hard life; when it* 
 is otherwise it is not the life Christian., 
 Jesus Christ laid down this condition at the 
 very first. He said, “The badge of all our 
 tribe is a Cross; every man must bear His 
 Own cross, every man must carry the cross 
 at the heavy end. Except a man carry his 
 cross daily he cannot be My disciple. He 
 may have some kind of unpractical admira- 
 tion of Me, he may even say very fine and 
 attractive things about Me; but he knows 
 nothing about My salvation—that salvation 
 represents a garden of agony, a cross of 
 shame, a brand of dishonour in the eyes 
 of the world.’ Who, then, can be saved ? 
 That is no question for us; that is not our 
 inquiry. When we do put it, in our heat 
 and ignorance, Jesus says, ‘‘ Strive ye to enter 
 in at the strait gate.’ Do not inquire how 
 many people can get in at the strait gate 
 and walk along the narrow road, but strive - 
 ye, every one of you, as if ye were the only } 
 
264 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 creature in the universe to enter and to walk 
 along and to fight the devil day by day. 
 What wonder that the Christian religion is 
 not popular, and that Jesus Christ is at the 
 foot of the list of the religions of the world ? 
 Herein is that saying true, “ He that is first 
 shall be last, and he that is last shall be 
 first.” The statistical tables will be reversed, 
 and are being reversed with every process 
 of the sun. 
 Tf we look at this panoplied man, we 
 shall find that he is a living parable. Many 
 written parables have fascinated our imagina- 
 tion and delighted our hearts, and even 
 comforted our hearts in times of sore distress ; 
 but here is an incarnate parable, a living 
 picture of the complete man. Everything 
 upon the Christian man has a meaning. We 
 know what this is in ecclesiastical attire. 
 It is foolish to mock such attire and to ignore 
 its possible and even holy symbolism. You 
 inquire the meaning of this part of the 
 apparel, and the explanation is given to you. 
 It is symbolic. It is nothing in itself; and 
 if it were taken away from the rest of the 
 attire, what would it be but a piece of cloth, 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 265 
 
 or linen, or silken ribbon, or dumb drapery ? 
 But set in its place, interpreted by the truly 
 ecclesiastical genius, it has a meaning, and 
 a meaning not to be despised; but if the 
 meaning be exaggerated or misplaced, then 
 it will become an offence. The captain of a 
 ship will tell you, as I have heard him say, 
 “‘ Every passenger who comes near me when 
 I am standing looking over the sea says, 
 ‘What is the meaning of this chain, captain?’ 
 ‘What is the meaning of this arrangement 
 for turning the machinery ?’” ‘The captain 
 may well get wearied and tired of answering 
 such questions, for they occur day by day, 
 and on every voyage—on the voyage out and 
 on the voyage in; the same ignorance asks 
 the same questions, and the same petulance 
 gives the same keen and almost resentful 
 or uncivil replies. Carry the idea up to 
 its highest levels and meanings, and the 
 signification is this: that everything that is 
 provided for the Christian’s attire or accoutre- 
 ment is symbolical, is a sign, so that the man 
 thoroughly equipped for the fight is a living 
 parable read by well-trained eyes. The 
 parables flush with beauty; listen to them as 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 266 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 a voice, they tremble with ineffable music. 
 
 matciialism; and have signed the oan 
 condemning materialism, we go out and 
 practise it. So many people get rid of things 
 by signing them away. Many persons would — 
 be very religious if their signature could be 
 accepted as a sacrifice. That is where the 
 point of agony occurs. If by signing aaa 
 
 Christians, we would sign at once; we ¢ 2 
 always prepared to sign, and we are exceed- 
 
 his signature to the same credenda. 
 signing is not crucifixion, and “ except a man 
 take up his cross ’—not write his name—* he . 
 cannot be My disciple.” Christianity is know ne 
 by its hands and its side; no wound-prints _ 
 there must mean no Christ in the heart. Of 
 course this doctrine will empty the churches ; 4 
 praised be God, it will drive people away who 
 ought never to have been there. But if some 
 remain, they will be of the real quality, and — 
 he real quality is always in the majority ; not 
 
THE EPHESIANS 267 
 
 in a majority numerically, but in a majority 
 spiritually energetic, influential, and sove- 
 reign. 
 
 It is wonderful in reading over this panoply 
 to discover how much of it is meant for 
 defensive purposes. It is not all meant for 
 aggression. Christianity is both aggressive 
 and defensive. It is astonishing, I repeat, 
 how much of the Christian armour is for 
 purposes defensive. The helmet does not 
 fight, it protects; the shield does not aggress, 
 it secures, defends, protects the very heart 
 of the warrior. We need a great deal of 
 defensive armour. The devil is wily. If 
 there is one little heel spot missed in the 
 Christian Achilles, that little vulnerable heel 
 will be found out and some great assault will 
 be made upon it—mayhap the injection of 
 some deadly poison; and injections are not 
 accompanied with noise or with an uproar 
 that is supposed to betoken heroism and 
 angry strife; injection may be silent. The 
 morphia is inserted with hardly any sense 
 of pain; the digitalis makes no noise when 
 it gets into the life and helps the poor labour- 
 ing breath. So there are many noiseless 
 
268 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 temptations, there are many assaults that are 
 not suspected; and therefore this saying is 
 true, ‘“What I say unto you I say unto all, 
 Watch ; resist the devil, and he will flee from 
 you.” But to be called to all this arming 
 and watching and fighting and agonising 
 expectancy—is this the way to life eternal ? 
 Yes, and other way there is none. 
 
 It is very noticeable that a great deal of 
 this combat is‘ what may be called hand-to- 
 hand strife. It is not a discharge of ball 
 and other missile over a space of miles; it 
 is wrestling. Two men do not wrestle when 
 they are standing five miles apart, nor a mile 
 apart, nor a yard apart. It is when they 
 are grappling, one with the other, seeking 
 for the tightest place, watching every move- 
 ment of the antagonist, anticipating and dis- 
 counting it; the uplifting that there may be 
 the downcasting. Sometimes the Christian 
 warfare is just as hand-to-hand and arm-to-arm 
 as this. Jacob wrestled ; we speak and sing of 
 wrestling Jacob. The record says, ‘‘ Now there 
 wrestled with him,” and the wrestlers were 
 so near to one another that the one touched 
 the thigh of the other, and it shrank, and the 
 
 
 
 — = ' - FP 
 
 a 
 
THE EPHESIANS 269 
 
 shrunken muscle abides there till this day 
 .to tell what angel tussles there have been 
 in the dark nights of spiritual experience. 
 It is not enough to watch the agonies 
 which other men undergo. We cannot 
 always follow even our own brother into the 
 dark Gethsemane. Every man must fight 
 his own battle. We can help him up to a 
 given point. It is the same with what men 
 call grizzly, gruesome, cruel death. You can 
 accompany a sufferer it may be in some cases 
 up to the very last half-hour, or the last 
 fifteen minutes, or the last five minutes; but 
 he must go the rest alone. No two souls 
 ever go together within a certain compass 
 of time. It may be shorter, it may be longer, 
 but there is a period in which the whole 
 action becomes solitary ; there is no discharge 
 in that war. There is, apart from Christian 
 sympathy and succour, but one relief I have 
 ever found, and that relief is this—that I 
 too must go alone; that is a relief. How 
 easy to die! how hard to live! How de- 
 lightful to breathe the last breath away! 
 how terrible to turn from the chamber in 
 which the victory has been won, and to go 
 
270 THE EPISTLE TO 
 
 out into some other room desolate with un- 
 utterable misery! And as in the hour and 
 
 article of death there is this hand-to-hand 
 wrestling with the great foe, so all through 
 life there are days when nobody can be with 
 us, hours when we are most social when we 
 are most lonesome, strange grey times when 
 our dearest surviving friend would hurt us by 
 the very breath that is balmy with blessing. 
 So we find in this great combat the lonely 
 hour, the sacred strife, the contest that has 
 no help given to it except from God; and 
 God is most when we need Him most. 
 
 Is this armour all to be turned against 
 the enemy? No; it is to be turned, so to 
 say, but to say it with tenderest reverence, 
 sometimes against God. Howso? The proof 
 is here: Having equipped yourselves, then 
 follows the command or exhortation, ‘‘ Pray- 
 ing always with all prayer and supplication 
 in the Spirit, and watching thereunto with 
 all perseverance and supplication for all 
 saints.” Does the Lord make an armoury 
 that can be employed against Himself? 
 Yes, in a certain sense; but that sense 
 must be very carefully and even tenderly 
 
 
 
THE EPHESIANS 271 
 
 distinguished and discriminated. The action 
 is this: “The kingdom of Heaven suffereth 
 violence, and the violent take it by force.” 
 And God, having armed the men, says, ‘‘ Now 
 come and take My kingdom.” God is willing 
 to be overthrown. The angel was willing 
 that Jacob should throw him, as it were, in 
 some great struggle. This is part of the 
 condescension of the divine mercy. Some- 
 times a father wants even baby to deal some 
 heavy blow of tenderness upon him ; he means 
 to yield only by force in a certain construc- 
 tion of that term. And God says, ‘“ Now 
 that I have given you the whole armour, the 
 entire panoply, now come and let us fight, 
 - and you shall win; you shall overthrow Me 
 in the agony of prayer.” Do not go to God 
 to fight Him in your own strength and in 
 your own panoply, and say, ‘Now I have 
 made ample preparation for taking the fort 
 of Heaven.” No man can ever take the 
 celestial fort; it must be surrendered by God 
 in, answer to prayer. He waits to be gracious, 
 He waits for you to take it. He says, “Come 
 and prove the armour with which I have 
 clothed you.” “Prove Me now herewith, 
 
272 EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS 
 
 saith the Lord, and see if I will not open 
 the windows of heaven and pour you out a 
 blessing, river upon river, until you are not 
 able to receive it.” He clothes us with 
 armour that we may, so to say, violate His 
 very presence. He waits to be violated. 
 He watches the whole movement. He loves 
 His children. He loves them to win in the 
 great contention. 
 
 : 
 
The | 
 Historical Geography 
 of the Holy Land 
 
 Seventh Edition. With Scripture Index and Six Colored 
 Maps, specially prepared. 8vo, cloth, 730 pages, $4.50 
 
 
 
 
 
 - » + No one work has ever before embodied all this variety of material 
 to illustrate the whole subject. His geographical statements are pen-pictures. 
 We are made to see the scene. No important problem is untouched. With- 
 out question it will take its place at once as a standard work, indispensable to 
 the thoroughgoing student of the Bible. — Suxday-School Times. 
 
 . . » Anexhaustive collection of material lay outside the plan of the author. 
 His intention is rather to show how the history of the land is conditioned by 
 its physical structure. Itis thus the idea of Karl Ritter which rules the treat- 
 ment and presentation. Very comprehensive sections are concerned, not with 
 the history, but with the nature of the land. . . . The author pays special 
 attention to the military operations. One could sometimes imagine that an 
 officer is writing, who, above all, regards the land from the point of view of the 
 military strategist. In this connection especially the history of Israel in its 
 chief crises in Old Testament times receives striking illumination. Large pas- 
 sages are frequently quoted from the Old Testament in order to explain them 
 by the exhibition of their geographical background. In addition the author 
 has a special gift of vivid representation. He makes the history transact itself 
 before the eye of the reader in dramatic form. One sees, everywhere, that the 
 landscapes which he describes stand before his own eyes. Thus the book is 
 an extremely valuable means of aid to the understanding of the history, espe- 
 cially of the Old Testament. — Prof. Scutirer, of Kiel, in the 7ieol. Litera- 
 tur-Zeitung. 
 
 The book is too rich to summarize. . . . The language is particularly well 
 chosen. Few pages are without some telling phrase happily constructed to 
 attract attention and hold the memory, and we often feel that the wealth of 
 imagery would be excessive for prose were it not that it is chosen with such 
 appropriateness and scientific truth. . . . To the reader much of the pleasure 
 of perusing the volume comes from its luxurious typography, and the exquisite 
 series of orographical maps prepared by Mr. Bartholomew from the work of 
 the Survey. These maps alone are more suggestive and enlightening than 
 many treatises, and they are destined, we trust, to enliven many a sermon, and 
 turn the monotony of the records of Israelitish wars into a thrilling romance. ~ 
 Speaker. 
 
 a 
 
 
 
 A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON 
 3 and 5 W. 18th Street, New York 
 
By GEORGE ADAM SMITH, D-D., LL.D. 
 
 THE BOOK OF ISAIAH — 
 
 In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, sluth, $1.50 each. 
 
 VoLuME I. CHAPTERS I].—XXXIX. 
 VouuME II. CHAPTERS XL.—LXVI. 
 
 This is a noble volume of a noble series. Isaiah will ever be the cream of ” 
 the Old Testament evangelistic prophecy, and as the ages go on will sw 
 seed-thought of the Holy Ghost which grow into flowers and fruits, vines 
 and trees, of divine truth for the refreshment and nourishment of the intellect, 
 heart, character, and life. How can any pastor or instructor of the te, 
 young or old, afford to be without such aids ?— Baltimore Methodist. 
 
 Prof. George Adam Smith has such a mastery of the scholarship of his 
 subject that it would be a sheer impertinence for most scholars, even tho’ 
 tolerable Hebraists, to criticise his translations; and certainly it is not the 
 intention of the present reviewer to attempt anything of the kind, to do which 
 he is absolutely incompetent. All we desire is to let English readers ae 
 how very lucid, impressive — and, indeed, how yivid—a study of Isaidh is 
 within their reach ; the fault of the book, if it has a fault, being rather that # 
 finds too many points of connection between Isaiah and our modern world, 
 than that it finds too few. In other words, no one can say that the book is 
 not full of life. — Spectator. 
 
 It would be difficult to say how highly we appreciate the work, or how 
 useful we believe it will be. — Church Bells. 
 
 He writes with great rhetorical power, and brings out into vivid reality the 
 historical position of his author. — Saturday Review. 
 
 Mr. Smith gives us models of expositions; expositions for cultivated con- 
 gregations, no doubt, but still expositions which may have been largely 
 preached in church. They are full of matter, and show careful scholarly 
 throughout. We can think of no commentary on Isaiah from which the 
 preacher will obtain scholarly and trustworthy suggestions for his sermons so 
 rapidly and so pleasantly as from this. — Record. 
 
 The Book of the Twelve Prophets 
 
 COMMONLY CALLED THE MINOR 
 In Two Volumes. Crown 8vo, cloth, $1.50 each. 
 
 Vout. I— Amos, HoSEA AND MIicAH. Seventh Edition. 
 Vou. II.— ZEPHANIAH, NAHUM, HABAKKUK, OBADIAH, 
 HaGGalI, ZECHARIAH I.— VIII., ** MALACHI,” JOEL, 
 ‘ZECHARIAH” 1X.—XIV., AND JONAH. Fourth Edition. 
 
 In Dr. Smith’s volumes we have much more than a popular exposition of 
 the minor Prophets. We have that which will satisfy the scholar and the stu- 
 dent quite as much as the person who reads for pleasure and for edification. 
 . . . If the minor Prophets do not become popular reading it is not because 
 anything more can be done to make them attractive. Dr. Smith’s volumes 
 present this part of Scripture in what is at once the most attractive and the 
 most profitable form.— Dr. Marcus Dons, in the British Weekly. 
 
 Few interpreters of the Old Testament to-day rank higher than Georg 
 Adam Smith. Heis at home in criticism, in geographical and archzological 
 questions, and in philology. . . . Hardly any commentator of the present day 
 ss more successful than he in putting the student at once into the heart of an 
 Old Testament problem. — S. S. 77mes. 
 
 The above four volumes are contained in “ The 
 Expositor’s Bible.’’ and are subject to special sub- . 
 seription rates in connection with that series. 
 Descriptive circular on application. 
 
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 3 and 5 W. 18th Street, New York 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

 
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