Epistle to the Ephesians

The relations of St. Paul with the Ephesians cannot be as accurately determined from the Epistle itself as those with the Corinthians and Galatians. But, on the other hand, there is no Church respecting which we have so much information from other sources. The 19th and 20th chapters of the Acts of the Apostles give us hints which are invaluable. We know from the previous chapter that Apollos had visited Ephesus while he was in the fervor of his first convictions, before Aquila and Priscilla had instructed him respecting the Christ. The opening of the 19th chapter explains the character and effect of his preaching. St. Paul finds certain disciples. He at once asks them the question, “Have ye received the Holy Spirit since ye believed?” to which they answer, “We have not so much as heard if there is a Holy Spirit.” He asks them, “Into what were ye then baptized?” They reply, “To John’s Baptism.” These men belonged to no Apollos school such as we hear of afterwards in Corinth. That school was Christian in the admitted sense of the word, however, like every school, it might divide Christ. On the other hand, it must not be supposed that the Alexandrian characteristics of Apollos were absorbed in his reverence for the teaching of John the Baptist. We may be tolerably sure that he would speak of John as having come to withdraw his countrymen from sensible and visible things, and to fix their minds on the divine and Eternal Teacher, Light, Word. In this sense he spoke of a divine Lord, and those who listened to him might truly be called “disciples” by St. Luke. His acknowledgment of John’s mission raised him far above the mere Theosophers of his city. It brought him in contact with the people; it made him, to a certain extent, a leveller. It may have combined with his previous Philonic education to break down his Jewish prejudices, and to prepare him for seeing children of Abraham raised out of stones. That which he and his followers wanted, as St. Paul’s words to them show, was a belief that the King of whom John spoke had been manifested, and that he was baptizing, as St. John said He would, with the Holy Spirit and with fire.

This is the first great help in ascertaining the condition of the Ephesian Church. Though it would be rash to say that these twelve Johannine disciples formed the nucleus of the Christian society in Ephesus, we may suppose that St. Luke would not have alluded to them in this place when he is recording the commencement of St. Paul’s two years’ preaching, if the facts had not some close connection with each other. The next of which he speaks points to a more formal desertion of the synagogue than we read of elsewhere. For three months Paul discoursed in it with the freedom which Jews seem seldom to have refused to Rabbis who assumed the Scriptures as the data from which they reasoned. But observing, it would seem, that his disputations were doing harm rather than good, that the conscience of the Jews was becoming harder, and that they were misrepresenting his teaching to the multitude, he separated himself, and discoursed daily in the school of one Tyrannus. Here Jews and Gentiles were admitted indiscriminately; in the most important city of Asia Minor a Jew was heard for two years, declaring a message from God to both equally.

Next we hear of unusual powers of healing exercised by the Apostle. It would be in accordance with the notions commonly entertained of these powers to assume that they were more frequent and remarkable in Ephesus, because it was a greater resort of strangers than any city which St. Paul had yet visited. I do not undervalue that explanation; but I think St. Luke himself suggests another, which demands at least equal attention. He has already led us to observe that the Christians in Ephesus required to be impressed with the sense of spiritual power. Their moral preparation since they had begun from the preacher of repentance was the best possible. But that victory over the powers of evil, which was indicated by the miracles of our Lord and His Apostles, they had not yet entered into. Perhaps they shrunk instinctively from the belief in powers which they saw abused to the most shameful and demoralizing purposes. For it is evident from St. Luke’s account that the arts of sorcery and magic, all those acts which betoken the belief in the presence of a spirit, but not of a holy Spirit, were flourishing here in great luxuriance. Every thing in the history of the Old or New Testament would suggest the thought, that the exhibitions of divine power took a more startling form where superstitions grounded mainly on the reverence for diabolical power were prevalent; that they were the proclamations of a beneficent and orderly government which had been manifested to counteract and overcome one that was irregular and malevolent. In this way a deadly blow was given to idolatry, which relied mainly for its defence on appeals to the curiosity and fears of men. And that it may be seen that the Christian testimonies against these enchantments were not of the same nature with them, that they did not depend upon the use of charms or cabalistical words, the story of the Jewish youths who tried to imitate Paul and practise his abjuration, is related in connection with the planting of the Church in Ephesus. It was no sham battle with the powers of evil that Paul was waging. He had not a new scheme of acting upon the nerves of weak women, or the consciences of evil men, but the power of making the one reasonable and the other pure.

Next, it is in Ephesus, as these announcements might prepare us to expect, that idolatry becomes first clearly aware what a new foe it has to encounter. Nowhere else do we hear of any tumult at all resembling that which was raised by Demetrius and his craftsmen. The historian dwells upon it at unusual length, as if to make us aware both of its singularity at that time, and of its importance as a type of events which would occur afterwards. There was, as we have heard already, a powerful colony of Jews in Ephesus, who had of course stood entirely aloof from the worship of Diana, yet had occasioned no alarm to those who were interested in upholding it. Alexander probably appeared in the theatre at Ephesus to assert the innocence of his countrymen, and to vindicate them from suspicion of the least sympathy with the new sect. St. Paul, as the town-clerk testified for him, had not transgressed the respect which was due to the religion of the country, had spoken no disrespectful words of the goddess or the temple; as far as association with heathens went, he had of course been far less exclusive than the elder Jews. It was precisely in this freedom from exclusiveness that the peril to the craft lay. If a society of Jews and Gentiles recognizing no divisions and barriers was possible, idolatry was hastening to its end. Demetrius had sagacity to see it; catholicism, not Judaism, would cause the silver shrines to be an unmarketable article.

We have here a number of hints which I think may give us a clue to the object and connection of this most memorable epistle. Here, if anywhere, we may expect to find the ground of a spiritual society which has a deeper foundation than the Jewish calling or covenant, which has its foundations in the nature of God Himself, which explains and supports all human relationships, which has all spiritual enemies to fight with, set forth less controversially and dogmatically than in the Epistle to the Galatians, with less allusion to Judaical opposers, with more direct reference to mankind and to the universe. All that St. Paul has taught and borne in this city, its own position as one of the great emporiums of the world, I would add, those fears respecting future disturbers of that Church which he could not dismiss from his mind when he was giving his affectionate benediction to the elders of it at Miletus,—all these thoughts must have been with him when he wrote, deepened by reflections which came to him in his prison-hours, on the relation in which the little band in Ephesus stood to the whole family in earth and heaven, and to the powers of darkness which were striving with it, but should not prevail against it.

Though there is so much in the opening passage of this Epistle respecting adoption, redemption, the forgiveness of sins, the main subject of it is certainly not to be sought for in these words. As little can it be said that the sin or fall of man is the starting-point of the Apostle, and that having laid the foundation of his divinity in this, he proceeds to the remedy. The doctrine of the rapturous sentence, which is not merely the exordium to the letter, but the enunciation of its design, is, in the strictest sense of the word, supralapsarian. The Apostle thanks “the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, because he has blessed us with all spiritual blessings in the heavenlies in Christ, even as He chose us out in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love.” Here, as the Predestinarian school rightly assures us, is the assertion of a divine purpose which was to be executed in time, but which was not formed in time, which cannot be contemplated in reference to it and under its conditions. And they cannot be wrong in saying that the rest of the Epistle is unintelligible if the divine purpose, the Eternal Order, of which the Apostle speaks almost in the first words of it, is forgotten, or merged in any of the acts or events by which it was realized; or if the knowledge of that which was before all worlds—of the Divine Mind, which can be affected by no accidents, which can suffer no change—is not contemplated as the great reward and fruition which the Apostle is holding out to his converts and the whole Church. Most heartily and inwardly do I assent to all these positions, and desire to show how free they are from the moral dangers which have been sometimes imputed to them by Arminian divines, how little they need to be restrained and qualified; rather how much necessity there is for expanding them beyond the limitations which the Calvinistical writers have imposed upon them.

The satisfactory answer to the charge of immorality lies, as the truest and devoutest Predestinarians have again and again alleged, in the effect which the divine Election is said to produce, “That we may be holy and without blame before Him in love.” They have scarcely done full justice to their own argument, for they have, at least many of them have—merely asserted that the Apostle never contemplates the end of happiness except through the means of holiness. But I see nothing about holiness and blamelessness being means to an end. There is indeed a higher object contemplated than any which can be fulfilled by any condition of mind and character in particular members of the Church, or in the whole Church. All is said to be to the praise of the glory of His grace. All is tending to the great result of gathering together all things in Christ as a Head, whether things in heaven, or things in earth. But so far as those are concerned whom the Apostle includes in the word “us,” the being holy and without blame is treated as the highest blessing of which they can be inheritors. If the Election in Christ has this one end, how can it be injurious to the inner life or outward acts of men that they should believe themselves the objects of such an Election? The danger is evidently that they should not suppose themselves the objects of it; that they should think God has not intended them to be holy, or has not given them the means of becoming so. Terrible danger certainly lies in that belief to every one who entertains it; experience shows how terrible it is. If we do any thing whatsoever to strengthen or authorize it in the heart of any man whatsoever, we are accessories in making him unholy and evil. But that is not all we do. If we give ourselves credit for belonging to the class in which we do not include him, or in which we have tempted him not to include himself, we have put our own Election on a new ground. It is no longer that God, being holy, wishes the creature He has made in His image to be like Him. It is that being Almighty He has been able to decree that certain persons, of whom I am one, shall have certain spiritual and divine blessings. I call them spiritual and divine; but do I mean what I say? A spiritual and divine blessing is to be a partaker of the character which I account most spiritual and divine. God, as I have represented Him to myself, is not one who has a Will to all good, who merely aims at what is good, but is a Great Power, who can do what He likes. I may resemble such a Being:—it is too probable that within my own sphere I shall try to resemble Him. But this cannot be my ultimate object. It must be to get something from Him. His Will, on which I rest, must be the Will to confer on me certain tangible benefits, defined by my own particular taste, from which other men are excluded, or to give me an exemption from certain penalties in which other men are involved. The spiritual blessing and the spiritual curse alike vanish upon this hypothesis. The old phrases remain; but a new signification has been given to them. The good man who has found sin to be his misery, the knowledge of God his blessing, is not aware of the transformation. He uses the language he received from godly forefathers in the sense which their practice, or his own experience, taught was the simple and natural one. But how does he writhe and groan at the discovery that words of life to him have become words of death to those who seem most passionately to adopt them, and of death also to some—evidently more honest, less self-deceivers—who cast them indignantly aside. This is what I mean by saying that the Calvinistical theory requires not to be diluted or mitigated, but unfolded; that its poison lies not in the breadth, but in the narrowness of its assertions; that it becomes mischievous when it becomes self-contradictory.

How great this contradiction is, will appear, I think, as we proceed to examine St. Paul’s statement in this Epistle, and especially those words which the Calvinistical school have borrowed from him. “He hath chosen out” (ἐξελέξατο), “having predestinated” (προορίσας), are both evidently most vital words in the Apostle’s introduction; their importance cannot be overrated; they deserve the most careful examination. The modern Calvinist seems to take it for granted that the first of these expressions must denote the choosing out some from a ruined mass, or majority. Yet there is no allusion to ruin, or to a majority. The Election is said to be “before the foundation of the world;” not only before the world suffered any loss or fall, but before it had been called into existence. “Oh! but there was, of course, a foresight of this loss and fall.” You assume that there was; first, because you confound the words ἐξελέξατο and προώρισε, whereas St. Paul carefully distinguishes them, appropriating each to a use of its own; secondly, because the expression, “chosen us out in Him,” suggests to you the time when Christ came in the flesh. Supposing you did not mix the notion of His appearance with what is here said of Him, would it be necessary for you to look upon this election as in any sense a foresight? Would not you then be led to think of an Eternal Son of God, one with His Father before all worlds? And would not this election be really what the Calvinists say it is, not in time, but in the strictest sense, in Eternity? Adopt that explanation of the text, or reject it, as you please; but it cannot surprise you that as I have been tracing the revelation of such an Eternal Son of God through all the Gospels which record the acts of Jesus on earth, through all the Epistles which speak of Him as ascended into heaven, I should at once recognize this announcement of Him as most Pauline, most consistent with all the New Testament oracles. “But why ‘elected?’ why not ‘constituted,’ or some phrase of that kind?” Perhaps we may find that phrase, and equivalent phrases, occurring frequently and very significantly in this Epistle, and in others which we have considered already, or may consider hereafter. But the expression, “He hath chosen out,” cannot be dispensed with; no other can exactly supply its place. The participle, “constituted,” if not qualified or interpreted by this, might lead us to think of the order of an involuntary earth which cannot depart from its law, though it may need a quickening, renewing power at every moment to make it bring forth and bud according to that law. The Apostle carries us into the “heavenlies”—(not the “heavenly places,” as our translators render it, so perverting the idea of a sentence from which place and time are carefully excluded)—into a region of voluntary beings, of spirits, standing by a spiritual law, capable of a spiritual blessing. But that spiritual law must be one of allegiance or affiance to God; the spiritual or heavenly blessing must be that of being subject to His Will or choice. The character of that Will or choice, the certainty and security of it because it is the Will or choice of one who is Righteous, does not affect in the least the nature of the tenure. A subject Will must be chosen and upheld by the higher Will; it stands by His knowledge or apprehension of it. This principle is asserted in the Epistle to the Romans, assumed in every Epistle, but is nowhere brought out with so much distinctness and fulness as here.

If election, according to St. Paul, has just as much, and just as little, to do with foresight or pre-ordination, as creation has, how does the participle, “having predestinated,” come in? Connect it with the word which follows it, and you see at once. Having predestinated us to the adoption of sons (υἱοθεσία). What the force of this expression is we have ascertained from the Epistle to the Galatians. St. Paul follows the analogy of the Roman custom strictly. It takes place when one who is already a son really is acknowledged as such by his father, and is emancipated from the bondage and pupillage to which he has been subject during his infancy. God having chosen us in His Son before the foundation of the world, designed to declare this election, to show what we are by manifesting Him. Then we hear for the first time, in connection with this adoption, of the redemption and remission of transgressions. The sons, being claimed, are delivered from their servitude to masters, whether such as the Father has appointed over them, or such as they have chosen for themselves—rightful schoolmasters or illegitimate usurpers. The sons having broken the laws of their Father’s house—whether those laws have been openly and formally made known to them, or only revealed to them in their hearts and conscience—must have a forgiveness or release of their offences. To omit these wonderful acts of redemption and amnesty would be to fail in explaining how the original and eternal purpose of the Father is accomplished—how it is brought to bear upon the conditions of human creatures. But the Apostle does not linger upon these acts. He does not investigate their nature and operation, but crowds them rapidly together, fearful lest the main subject of his thanksgiving and of his teaching on this occasion should be forgotten in any of its most precious and mysterious details.

It would indeed amply repay the longest study to examine the order in which these details are introduced, in what relation they stand to each other, how they are all referred to one ground, the good pleasure of His Will, and to one end, the gathering up all things in Christ; the divine Wisdom and Prudence devising them and making them conduce to this object—not suddenly but gradually revealing the mystery of His Will. But however desirable the minute investigation is after the road has been travelled frequently, the reader must allow the Apostle to carry him along at his own speed on his own wings, if he would know any thing of the height from which he is descending and to which he is returning.

It will seem to some that the great question of all, in these early sentences and in the epistle generally, cannot be settled unless we can determine who are included in the word “us,” which St. Paul uses in the third verse and so often afterwards. I confess that I do not feel the least solicitude on this point. If the pronoun was in the dual number or in the singular I should be content. If St. Paul had been the only person in the world who had been brought to believe in the true God—to believe that He was not such a God as the chief priests of the heathens or of the Jews took him to be, and that His only-begotten Son is the Centre of all things in heaven and earth, in whom they would be gathered up, he must give thanks to God for having imparted that knowledge to him, for having chosen him in Christ that he might be holy and blameless. He could not dare to deny that calling, whether he was walking worthy of it or no; God would rebuke him in his conscience if he said, “Thou hast not called me and chosen me to be holy.” Supposing then he and “those who first hoped in Christ” formed the most insignificant section in the world, he could not help feeling that they represented the true condition of humanity, the purpose and will of God concerning it. For he had called them to be sons. How? St. Paul says, by causing “His Son to be made of a woman, made under the law.” Christ becoming a man, subjecting Himself to the actual conditions of suffering and dying man, so claims us to be sons. If he took upon him not the nature of Paul or James, but of men, He claimed not Paul or James but men to be his sons. And since, according to the doctrine of the chapter, the adoption to Sonship on earth corresponds to the election in the heavenlies, cannot be more extensive than that, it must follow that what St. Paul asserts on behalf of himself and the little band of those who had turned to God and believed in Christ, was a share in the privileges of humanity as that is created elected, known by God in Christ. For the original purpose before the foundation of the world must be that of which Adam’s sin and the sin of every descendant of Adam is the contravention and denial; every man trying to stand by himself, and not to stand upon God’s election, is on a fallen, rebellious, false ground; every man claiming the privilege of God’s election, now manifested to all in Christ, affirms that neither Adam’s sin, nor all the sin of the world, has been able to defeat the design of the Creator.

The Apostle therefore can pass, without the least diffidence or hesitation, from “us” who have first hoped in Christ, to “you” who have heard the word of truth, and believed the Gospel of your salvation. The word of truth was, that God had sent his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, that they might receive the adoption of sons. The Gospel of their salvation was, that Christ had redeemed them from a curse and bondage, and brought them into His body of which He was the head. This word of truth, this Gospel, had been preached to them before they believed it. They had believed it in consequence of the preaching; their belief therefore did not confine it to them. But having believed, they were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. That Spirit was the pledge and assurance that they were partakers of that adoption which was proclaimed to man in Christ the Son of God and the Son of Man, of that Redemption which He had procured for men by encountering their tyrants—Death, the grave, hell, the spirit of evil. And this same Spirit was the earnest of an inheritance into which they should enter when He who had purchased them should come to claim them as His.

St. Paul is certain that they have believed what they had a right to believe, what was true for them, and for those who did not believe it. And he has no doubt that the Spirit of Truth—that Spirit who had been mocked and parodied by the spirits of which the enchanters boasted, those which were spoken of in the curious books they had burnt—was with them, binding them together in one, prompting them to love and good works. He has therefore ground for continual thanksgiving on their behalf. But he has a motive also to continual prayer, that they may have an ever-fresh and increasing wisdom and revelation—illuminated eyes in their hearts, so that they may know what their calling means, what the hope of it is, what the wealth of the glory of God’s inheritance in the saints is; what the surpassing magnitude of his power is towards those who are believing in it, that belief itself being the effect of the energizing of this power. We sink at first under the weight of this language; the reader may be tempted to cry out with Festus, “Thou art beside thyself, Paul!”But if he has that kind of madness which the ancients identified with the highest inspiration, it is compatible with the most entire practical soberness. The only hope that the Ephesians would be preserved from the fanaticism and inebriation which the dealers in magic were propagating was, that they should confess themselves to be under the guidance of a Spirit in the strictest sense familiar, but awful, one who was leading them into the apprehension of objects real as any of those with which their senses conversed, but not fluctuating—into the knowledge of the Eternal Being who had first taken knowledge of them. And St. Paul cannot think that he is preaching Christ while he is hiding from them the truth that they have received this Spirit, or the truth of that calling or election whereof this Spirit is the seal, or the truth of that inheritance whereof it is the earnest. For he can only measure that power which is working in each Ephesian convert, in each miserable creature of that city, into which the refuse of the earth was poured, by the power which energized in Christ when God raised Him from the dead and exalted Him on high. The mysterious operation of that Divine Spirit who in death and the grave still united the Son of Man to the Father, who enabled him by that union to triumph over the fetters of space and time, this is not the type or image of that operation which begets faith in the most naturally sense-bound man, and raises him into union with the risen and ascended Lord; it is the very same. St. Paul cannot separate them; if he did, the believer might fancy that his holiness was some peculiar possession, that the Spirit had been given to him individually. He would not understand that he was only faithful, only holy, when he was lifted out of himself, when he was acknowledging himself the member of a living body, united to a living Head, that body being the fulness of Him that filleth all in all, of Him to whom every lordship, and principality, and power, in this age and in the age to come, is subjected.

Christ being then proclaimed as the Head and reconciler of the two worlds, as the fulfiller of God’s original purpose and election to those who had fallen from it, he can speak to the Ephesians as men who, being dead in trespasses, God had quickened with Christ. The words which are interposed between the accusative and its verb help wonderfully to illustrate the meaning of the Apostle, and show what is the thought which has possession of him. The Ephesians were walking according to the course (αιῶνα) of this world; they were following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is energizing in the children of disobedience, among whom the Apostle declares that he himself, and all his Christian brethren, Jews or Gentiles, had once their conversation (ἀνεστράφημεν), doing the inclinations of the flesh, and of the thoughts of the mind (διανοιῶν), and were by nature the children of impulse (ὀργῆς) like others. This language I apprehend shows us from what he believes Christ had redeemed or emancipated them. It was a bondage of the will. The will was enslaved to nature; it looked upon itself as belonging to the outside world, as chained to fate or necessity. It was actually so chained, because a spirit of unbelief and disobedience had got the mastery of it, because it had exercised its awful prerogative of choice by submitting to a tyrant who compelled it to fulfil his behests. The careless reader thinks that St. Paul is accumulating clauses and epithets unnecessarily, to describe the character of this bondage; that we should have understood the subject better if he had chosen any one of his different forms of expression; that there must be tautology in them, if there is not contradiction. But the more we are acquainted with the efforts of philosophers to formalize the facts which exhibit the liberty and servitude of man—the proofs that he has a will while he is yoked to the car of fate—the more we have known of the contradictions in ourselves to which these experiments of theirs correspond—the more shall we appreciate the worth and the inspiration of this language, which sets forth the case as it is, with all its perplexities and anomalies; which shows whence those anomalies and perplexities proceed, how frightful they needs must be when a spirit falls under that which is sensual and hugs its fetters; how impossible it is to find any way out of them, if we will not recognize the existence of a disobedient Spirit, if we will not believe that this Spirit is at war with God as well as man, and that God by claiming men as his sons declares his yoke to be broken.

I shall not enter into the questions which this passage suggests respecting the “wishes or inclinations of the flesh or the thoughts,” because I apprehend the Epistle to the Romans determines the sense of those words, which sense is strictly applicable here. Nor shall I justify my deviation from the usual rendering of the word ὀργή (wrath, anger). It must justify itself if it is good for any thing and consistent with the context; otherwise let the old translation abide, to which I have no objection, except that it seems to me irrelevant, and to presume an ellipsis, which we should avoid when we can. What I do wish the reader to remark very carefully, and I should be sorry if any mere accidents of the passage detained him from the observation, is the use of the three compounds συνεζωοποίησεν (has co-vivified), συνήγειρεν (has co-raised), and συνεκάθισεν (has co-seated)—quickened together with, raised together with, set down together with. The idea which is indicated by these verbs is that which it seems the design of the Epistle to develope. The quickening, raising, ascending, are declared to have taken place already. The Apostle does not say this by a bold figure of speech. He cannot speak otherwise if he is to be scientifically accurate, if he is to lay any foundation for practical faith and obedience. The clause which follows, “that he may show forth to the ages that are coming on, the surpassing wealth of his grace in his goodness towards us in Christ Jesus,” connects the past revelation with the future, the completed manifestation of God’s love in Christ, and of man’s state as redeemed in Him, with the perpetually new and growing discovery of that love and that state by all the experiences of the universe, even by all the experiences of men’s rebellion.

For he continues, By this grace—the grace that is to be shown forth in all coming æons—ye have been saved, completely saved out of the hands of the tyrant; completely restored to your spiritual estate as sons. It is God’s grace which has delivered your wills. And you claim your salvation, your freedom, by believing in your Saviour. Yet even this—this act of faith—does not come forth from you; it is God’s gift. For we are redeemed that we may carry out the divine purpose in our creation. We are created to good works, which God hath before ordained that we should work in them. Our wills are in their true restored state, when responding, conforming to His will; so they become productive of good deeds.

The passage which follows is eminently Pauline. He addresses the Gentiles as having been fleshly, given up to their own fleshly notions and appetites, and to fleshly gods, and therefore as really uncircumcised, but as receiving the name uncircumcised, because they wanted the fleshly sign of a spiritual calling which their Jewish neighbors possessed. He reminds them that their misery was not this,—that they wanted the sign, —but that they were without Christ—not acquainted with the true Lord of their spirits, alienated from the polity of Israel, which existed to testify of Him and of His mysterious dominion; strangers to those Covenants of Promise which spoke of God’s election of men to be his servants and people; not having hope of the future, rather having a continual dread of it; without God therefore in the world which He had made,—in the midst of His own order,—however many gods they might fashion out of that world. He calls upon them to remember and believe that they, being in this condition, being so far from God, so far from any divine fellowship or polity, had become nigh in Christ, nigh to God, nigh to each other, and to those Jews who seemed divided by such hopeless barriers from them. The blood of Christ that blood which He by the Eternal Spirit had poured forth was the quickening life-blood of the whole body, removing whatever had kept the different parts of it divided from each other. For He is our peace, who hath made both races, the circumcised and the uncircumcised, one; having dissolved in Himself the middle wall of partition between them—having annulled the actual enmity between them, which arose from their occupying a different religious position, as well as the divine decree, which seemed to declare; “These are spiritual, these are carnal;” that he might create the two in Him one new man, one common humanity, making reconciliation between them, in virtue of the higher reconciliation which he had made between both and God; in virtue of his having slain in His body on the Cross that deeper and more dreadful enmity between the distrustful rebelling creature and the loving, self-sacrificing Creator. And having accomplished His work, He proclaimed His great covenant of peace between heaven and earth, to those who were far off from any spiritual apprehensions and worship, and to those whom God had brought nigh to Himself by His calling and education. A Gospel of peace indeed, for through Him we both have access to the same Father by the same Spirit. So then, he concludes, you are not strangers, newly admitted to visit the divine city, like the chance comers for purposes of trade to Ephesus,—or like those who have a sojourn or quarter provided them in its outskirts. You are citizens of this divine city, which includes in it all the holy men of all ages. You belong to God’s own household and family. You have been established upon the very foundation on which Prophets and Apostles stood and stand. Christ is the Corner Stone who holds them and you together. In Him the whole building fitly framed together shall grow to a holy temple in the Lord; in Him you have been built together, —your whole Church, all its members,—for an habitation of God through the Spirit.

Every one must be conscious of an overflowing fulness in the style of this Epistle, as if the Apostle’s mind could not contain the thoughts that were at work in him, as if each one that he uttered had a luminous train before it and behind it, from which it could not disengage itself. Nowhere does this sequence of thoughts appear to be more disturbed, according to ordinary rules of arrangement, than in the passage immediately following the one of which I have just spoken; nowhere is there a stricter order, one which more justifies itself to the higher reason. It is in this passage that one seems to discover the subject of the Apostle’s elaborate composition, the centre of its harmony. An unhappy mistake of our translators, in the sixth verse of the third chapter, has, I think, prevented us from feeling how true this is; how much light is thrown all around the letter from that revelation which the Apostle speaks of here, as not made to former ages, but as now made to Apostles and Prophets by the Spirit. We read “that the Gentiles should be fellow-heirs and of the same body.” How “should be?” Was not the Apostle the messenger of a reconciliation which had been effected, of a middle wall which had been broken down? Whatever is the meaning of the Apostle, this cannot be his meaning. He, the Apostle of the Gentiles, cannot be telling them of a blessing which was to come upon them hereafter. He might look forward amidst sorrow and despondency, when ready to be accursed from Christ for his brethren’s sake, to a time when all Israel should be saved. But he was the herald of a gift which had been bestowed upon the Gentiles, he invited them to enter the fold. On what ground? Because it had been shown him that the Gentiles are fellow-heirs and of the same body. Beginning from that highest ground before the Fall, before the Creation, he had seen God creating all things in Christ, God purposing to gather up all things in Christ, men standing only in virtue of God’s election of them in Christ. So the truth dawned upon him, that all men, of whatever race or tongue, do constitute one body in Him; that out of Him, whether circumcised or uncircumcised, they must be divided; since in Him, whether circumcised or uncircumcised, they are one, by the law of their creation, and become actually one, when they believe that law and submit to it.

Here was the foundation of a Gospel, the Gospel with which St. Paul was entrusted; good news to men, not of something which was coming to them, but of their actual state, of that state which belongs to them, but which they do not recognize. The grace was given to him that he should preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ. He desired to make all see (So we render gwrisat, and I do not perceive how we could render it better) what is the economy of the mystery that has been hidden from the ages in God, who hath created all things. That truth of man’s condition which had been unveiling itself in proportion as God had unveiled Himself to man, that truth had now become apprehensible by all creatures. They might be told of it, they might know it. And the effect of this revelation was not to be measured by the number of persons who might receive it then or in any after age, among Jews or Gentiles, among any inhabitants of this planet. The revelation of God’s love in Christ, of Christ’s incarnation, and sacrifice, and resurrection, of the victory over fallen and rebellious wills, was a revelation to the whole universe, to the principalities and powers in heavenly places. The Church, however small its numbers, however insignificant its members, declared to them the manifold wisdom of God, according to the fore-arrangement of the ages which He made in Christ Jesus our Lord.¹

Such a flight as this might, one would have thought, have tempted the Apostle to forget the poor humble sinful creatures to whom he had been writing. Their well-being might have been lost sight of in the glory of principalities and powers. But it is not so. He cannot even conclude his sentence without saying, “in whom we have boldness and access with confidence by the faith of Him.” And this confidence and this faith remind the Apostle of all the discipline by which he has been led into them—of those tribulations which had often shaken the faith of his converts, though it was to them he owed his power of entering into their sufferings, and his apprehension of the glory of which they were inheritors together.

I believe that there was in the Apostle’s mind, at this time, a sense of opposites, of the union of weakness and strength, of tribulation and glory, of all that had been and all that was to be, of the absolute love of God, of the discovery of that love to man in the Mediator, of the working of that love in man through the Spirit, of the fellowship of the poorest creature of flesh and blood on earth with the spirits in Heaven, of a canopy of love above and of an abyss of love beneath compassing the whole creation, which could only find its expression in a prayer.

And this is the prayer:—“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom 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.”

Our translators have taken the whole of the third chapter as a parenthesis. With much more justification from the Apostle’s words (τούτου χάριν being at the beginning both of the first and of the fourteenth verse), Lachmann terminates the parenthesis at the beginning of the prayer. There is no reason why St. Paul should not repeat the expression so familiar to him, “the prisoner in the Lord,” without having any conscious reference to the same phrase as it stands in the beginning of a passage occurring so long before. What follows arises out of the revelation which he has spoken of and the supplication which was based upon it. He beseeches them to walk worthy of the calling wherewith they had been called,—that calling which had carried out the purpose of God before the worlds were,—that calling of men who had been hostile to each other in form and in spirit,—whom God himself seemed to have divided,—to be one body, to have one spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. They were to remember that these were the blessings which had been bestowed upon them, blessings which it would require a strenuous endeavor to preserve. The danger lay in their thinking that they were to create a state for themselves, instead of accepting one and abiding in it. Lowliness of mind, gentleness, long-suffering, forbearance—qualities apparently negative rather than positive, were the qualities that were demanded of them that they might enter into the rich inheritance which had been freely bestowed upon them.

But these blessings were common to all. The one Lord and one faith were for the Church, for the whole body. The Apostle here, as in the Epistle to the Corinthians, is careful to show that each individual has also his own gift. He who had ascended on high, as the emancipator of man from all his bondage, an ascent implying a previous descent, a claim to possess the very lowest corners of the earth, a victory over the whole universe—He had bestowed these gifts exactly in their due measure and proportion. He had given apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers; but each with a view to the edification and consolidation of the whole body. Each was a step to the great end which would be accomplished when all should meet together in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, when all the scattered portions of humanity should be gathered into the perfect Man, should reach the full stature of the Christ. These gifts and ministries were contributing to educate those who received them out of the state of infancy into this manhood; out of the condition in which they were the sports of every chance current of doctrine,—liable to be carried round and round in endless circles of error by the craft and sleights of deceitful men,—into a condition of steadfast love, of steadfast truth in act and speech, but a steadfastness which implies perpetual growth into Him who is the Head of the body; into Him from whom the body derives all its form and compactness, as well as a continual renewal of its vital energy, the life of each part ever conducing to the life of the whole.

In this flight or rapture St. Paul has never lost sight of his original principle, that God is regenerating and reconstituting humanity in Christ according to that original purpose which he had purposed before the worlds were. Nor does he ever lose sight of the practical result of this divine purpose to the Ephesians particularly, and to the Gentiles generally. All the exhortations which follow to the very end of the Epistle assume as their groundwork that the true state of man, and consequently their state, is now revealed in Christ; that a divine illumination was all about them and within them; and that if they did not live in it, if their lives were not clear and orderly, it was because they were shutting their eyes.

The next passage brings out with great clearness and power the Apostle’s idea of the distinction between the new and old man. He does not for a moment admit that the Gentiles had not a light near them, that there was not a life of God within them. But he speaks of their minds being darkened, of their being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that was in them. He accounts for that ignorance by the hardening of the heart, which hardening was itself the effect of the loss of feeling that comes when men give themselves over to lasciviousness—to the working of uncleanness with greediness. On the other hand, he does not allow the baptized Ephesians to think that the evil which had been in them in former days was not in them still, that they were not likely to walk as the other Gentiles walked. Only they need not so walk. They had been taught of the Christ, the true Light, the true Lord of their spirits. They had heard of him and been taught in Him as the truth is in Jesus. In other words, they had heard how that divine life of God had been fully exhibited in the acts of a man. They might know by what He was, that which He would have them to be. They might put off the old man, the one with whom they had had their converse hitherto, that old man that was corrupt by following after deceitful lusts. They might be renewed in the spirit of their mind, and put upon them the new man, that man who was created after God in righteousness and holiness of truth. Thus then the new Man was that true and divine Man with whom their spirits had to do, of whom their consciences testified till they had drowned them in lusts, who had now revealed Himself to and in man as his righteous Lord, whose righteousness the man who trusted in it and rejoiced in it, could claim as his own.

There being this righteousness, a righteousness for them one and all, not as separate creatures, but as members of a body, St. Paul could bid them speak truth every one with his neighbor, could bid them keep the anger which he would not have them stifle, under such government that they should not injure one another. He could bid the robber become the laborer and the giver, and the foul and filthy speaker utter gracious and healthful words. All these were precepts of plain reason, the justice of which every heathen would acknowledge. But the ground of them lay in that righteous constitution for man, which had been revealed in Christ, and in that Holy Spirit with which He had sealed them against the day when He should redeem them and claim them as His. The Apostle had already spoken to the Ephesians of this sealing and redemption. The goods which lay on their quay in bond with the owner’s mark upon them, for which he had paid his earnest-money, for which he would certainly pay the full price and take them into his own possession, suggested the analogy. It is the nature of the seal upon which he dwells here. The Owner’s own Spirit, the Spirit of holiness and love, had been bestowed upon them. This was the earnest-money, this was the sign to whom they belonged. Let them remember that it was a Person, a loving Person who was dwelling with them, and that all bitterness and wrath and anger and violence were more grievous to Him than they could be to the most tender and sensitive of friends. Let them remember that gentleness, compassion, forgiveness, were the qualities which He was seeking to work in them. For these were what God had manifested to be His own nature when in Christ He had forgiven them. Having this Spirit, this seal of their adoption, they might be imitators of God as His own beloved children. They could walk in love, even as Christ loved them, who gave Himself for them, a fragrant offering and sacrifice. They might put away fornication and uncleanness and covetousness. They might substitute thankfulness for grovelling and foolish talking. For surely they knew that the fornicator, the unclean man, and the extortioner, had no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. These were the habits of mind which of necessity cut them off from the divine fellowship. Whatever foolish persons might tell them, this was the misery they had escaped, this was the wrath of God which was resting on the children of disobedience. To be brought out of these was their blessedness and their salvation. Let them not then claim fellowship with these. They knew what it was to be in that darkness of which he had spoken. Light was now shining about them, the light which was in the Lord. Oh let them walk as children of the light. Light is fruitful; fruitful in goodness, righteousness, truth. Let them discern and test by it, what is acceptable to the Lord. Darkness is unfruitful. Let them have no fellowship with its works, let them rather lay them bare and bring them to the light. The acts which court secrecy it is shameful even to speak of. But all things are proved and manifested by the light; manifestation is the very sign and characteristic of light. And that light is about the dullest sleeper, and a voice is ever speaking to him saying, “Awake, and arise out of the habitations of the dead, and the Christ will illuminate thee.” Therefore if there is this darkness and this light about you, walk carefully, not as fools, who know not whither they are going, but as wise men seize each opportunity, rescue it from the evil days. Keep your understandings free to understand what the will of the Lord is, not yielding to sottishness, but being filled with the Spirit, keeping up merry musical hearts, singing and making melody to the Lord within, being musical also in your intercourse with each other, keeping up a tone of thankfulness for all things to God, in the Name of Him in whom He is reconciled to us, submitting yourselves also one to another in His Name who came to be the servant of all.

On this same ground he rests all human relationships. Wives must be submissive to their own husbands as to the Lord, because the man is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the Head of the Church. The high and universal order is manifested in the individual order; the subjection of the Church to Christ involves the subjection of the wives to the husbands. But as He being the Head, is the Saviour of the whole body, as He loved the Church and gave Himself for it, in order that having cleansed it He might sanctify it, in order that He might present it to Himself a glorious Church; so the love of the husband should go forth towards his wife with a like purifying and elevating influence. He should feel her part of himself, should love her and cherish her as his own body, even as Christ loves the Church because we are members of His body. Here is the ground for that original precept, that a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and that they should be one flesh. The mystery no doubt is a very great and deep one. It is that very mystery of Christ’s relationship to humanity which he had been speaking of before, which the former ages had not known, which was now made manifest. But each husband and wife might enter more and more into this mystery by carrying it out in their love and reverence to each other.

All other relations have the same foundation. The fifth commandment, with its blessing and promise of endurance upon the land, was not a mere command. There was a righteousness at the root of it. And children obeying their parents, and parents not provoking their children, but bringing them up and representing to them in their own acts the education and discipline of the Lord, were also entering into this mystery, carrying out the meaning of this revelation.

In every case it is a mutual relationship which is unfolded. The servant is to be obedient to the master in simplicity of heart, feeling himself the servant of Christ, confessing the will of God, certain that the Lord is no respecter of persons. The masters are to do the same things to them, to forbear threatening, to be sure that they have a Master in Heaven, and to be sure that He will not treat them better than their slaves.

Here is the true divine and human republic in which all the universality and spirituality of the Platonical republic is united with the reverence for relationships which Aristotle perceived to be at the basis of every sound polity, but which he could not reconcile with the other condition of it. In the God-Man, in Him in whom all things were created, in whom men were chosen, in Him who was born of the Virgin and was subject to her, who had brothers and friends, who loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus, St. Paul found the eternal centre round which all the different portions of human society are moving in their different orbits, who keeps them from ever becoming discordant or from disturbing the unity of the system.

Therefore what remained was that the Ephesians should be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Their work was not to win a position, but to maintain one which had been given them. And that was no holiday task. It was not a battle with flesh and blood. All the powers of spiritual evil were gathered against them; they were assaulting their spirits on the right and on the left. They needed a spiritual armor to withstand these enemies. They would have to withstand in the evil day, and when they had done all that they could do, still their task was to stand. Let them stand then on that ground that had been won for them, girded with truth about their loins, with Christ’s truth for their breastplate, with Christ’s Gospel of peace for the sandals to their feet, with faith as a shield to the whole body, with the confidence of salvation for their helmet, with the Spirit’s sword, the word of God, to strike down the enemy. And if they wished to know how they were to wear this armor, how they were to exercise these weapons of defence, how each man was to fight at once for himself and for his neighbor; then let them pray with all prayer and supplication in the spirit; let there be watchfulness and perseverance in their supplication for all saints, and among them for him who needed the exhortations which he was addressing to them for himself, who wanted so much more of spiritual freedom and courage, because, as far as his body was concerned, he was an ambassador in bonds. But bondman or freeman, he could wish to all the brethren peace and love with faith. It was not a barren wish; for the peace and the love and the faith came not from him, but from the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. And when they loved that Lord in sincerity, the grace to which their love was only the response, would come forth richly and freely upon them all.