Bible Commentaries
Ephesians 2

Verse 8

Salvation the Gift of God

By grace have ye been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.— Ephesians 2:8.

These are pregnant words to be written by a prisoner at Rome. St. Paul was always most free in spirit when he was most fettered in body. The longer he lived in drear captivity the riper grew his spirit. This, the last of his great Epistles, is like the swan-song sung in view of inexorable death. For him eternity is filled with God. The Father folds in His bosom the blessed Son, and the Son helps to create the beatitude of the Father. There he reads the mystery, hidden from the ages, but now revealed, that all men might be one in Christ. Then he looks down on man, dead in trespasses and sins, but redeemed in Christ, according to the eternal purpose of God. Then he looks up and sees principalities and powers in heavenly places, learning through Christ the manifold wisdom of God. Then, glancing out, he sees renewed humanity, the Church of Christ, with all its graces and with all its glory. He traces all this to Divine grace working through human faith, all of God, all through man, and the more God passes into man, the more grandly man becomes the image of the living God.

I

The Nature of Salvation

1. It is a salvation from spiritual death.—In the Bible the word “salvation” is not a technical theological term. It means deliverance generally. Any special import in a particular passage must depend on the context. In the present instance the context clearly shows what kind of salvation St. Paul is thinking of. This is neither rescue from earthly poverty and pain—the lower old Jewish salvation, nor escape from future torment—the lower Christian salvation. It is deliverance from a present spiritual death. The soul is saved from itself.

Salvation is not only the rescue and deliverance of a man from evils conceived to lie round about him, and to threaten his being from without, it is also his healing from evils which have so wrought themselves into his very being, and infected his whole nature, that the emblem for them is a “sickness unto death,” of which this mighty Physician comes for the healing. But salvation is more than a shelter, more than an escape. It not only trammels up evil possibilities, and prevents them from falling upon men’s heads, but it introduces all good. It not only strips off the poisoned robe, it also invests with a royal garb. It is not only negatively the withdrawal from the power, and the setting above the reach, of all evil, in the widest sense of that word, physical and moral, but also the endowment with every good, in the widest sense of that word, physical and moral, which man is capable of receiving, or God has wealth to bestow.

2. It is an accomplished salvation.—Salvation is a Divine act completed, but regarded as continuous and permanent in its issues. The Revised Version slightly modifies the translation of the Authorized Version and reads, “ye have been saved” (A.V. “are saved”). The saving was a fact, finished, rounded, completed, realized once for all. In an earlier Epistle St. Paul said, “We are saved by hope.” Despair means death. But here the saving is a fact and a process. It is done and it continues until man obtains the beatitude of God. Out there swims the lifeboat. The man may be lifted into it from the devouring waves, and you say he is saved. But leaving him there in the open boat, tempest-tossed, wind-driven, you expose him to death as certain, though more slow-footed. And so the saving of man, though the work of God, is a process that goes on till the boat reaches the eternal shore, and we step on to the firm land to realize the larger freedom and the diviner end.

3. It is the gift of God.—Salvation is entirely God’s gift to us; and it must be so. For we cannot make it or get it for ourselves; we have no power of our own to make it for ourselves, nothing of our own to offer in exchange for it. If our salvation does not come to us as God’s free gift, it can never come to us at all. This is what St. Paul keeps insisting upon over and over again in his statements of the doctrine of justification; it is the foundation upon which the whole doctrine has to be reared. And so the very first step in the way of our salvation must be taken by God Himself; we can have nothing at all to do with it.

“Not of yourselves: it is the gift of God.” This word has often been misunderstood, as if it referred to the faith which is mentioned just before. But that is a plain misconception of the Apostle’s meaning. It is not faith that is the gift of God; it is salvation by grace. That is plain from the next verse: “not of works, lest any man should boast.” What is it that is “not of works”? Faith? Certainly not. Nobody would ever have thought it worth while to say, “Faith is not of works,” because nobody would have said it was. The two clauses necessarily refer to the same thing; and if the latter of them must refer to salvation by grace, so must the former. 1 [Note: A. Maclaren, Creed and Conduct, 37.]

Alas! many don’t understand the nature of Christianity, which is one great giving from beginning to end. Christ, God’s Son, was a gift. The salvation He has procured us is a gift. The sacrifice which got that salvation is a gift. Heaven, with all its eternal felicities, is a gift—a free, a full, a perfect gift. And yet for Christ’s cause there are men who can, and who will, do nothing! It is astonishing the forms, the methods, the excuses which people will sometimes adopt—people with wealth—to get off from giving to God a little of what God has given so lavishly to them. 2 [Note: Dr. MacGregor of St. Cuthberts, in Life by Frances Balfour, 44.]

II

The Source of Salvation

“By grace.”

1. The fountain of all our deliverance from sin lies in the deep heart of God, from which it wells up undrawn, unmotived, uncaused by anything except His own infinite loving-kindness. People have often presented the New Testament teaching about salvation as if it implied that God’s love was brought to man because Jesus Christ died, and turned the Divine affections. That is not New Testament teaching. Christ’s death is not the cause of God’s love, but God’s love is the cause of Christ’s death. “ God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son.” When He loves, He loves freely and unmodified except by the constraint of His own Being. Just as the light, because it is light and must radiate, falls upon dung-hills and diamonds, upon black rocks and white snow, upon ice-peaks and fertile fields, so the great fountain of the Divine grace pours out upon men only by reason of its own continual tendency to communicate its own fullness and blessedness.

“Grace” is a word our fathers understood and loved better than we. It was defined as “favour.” And favours even of God are not agreeable to the proud spirit of man. But no common term can ever exhaust, or express, this great and rich idea. “Grace” expresses and denotes at once the feeling that prompts the favour and the gratitude the favour begets. It denotes both the beneficence that comes of a joy that cannot be uttered, and yet must be expressed, and the joy that cannot bear the sight of pain and misery, and guilt and death, confronting it on this wide earth. 1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn, in The Preacher’s Magazine, January 1909, p. 8.]

Do you know what it is to be impressed by a word? Lately, the word grace, especially as used in Galatians, has come to me morning, noon, and night, with a fullness of meaning it never had before. What an infinite mercy it is that salvation from beginning to end is by grace! How useless and how needless to look anywhere for merit, and how simple just to take! This has a commonplace look now it is written, and yet it has meant so much to me. 2 [Note: John Brash, in Memorials and Correspondence, 9.]

There is another term that stands near “grace”—the term “love.” But the two terms are worlds apart. All grace is love, but not all love is grace. Grace loves to do good in an equal measure to all; but love can never dispense with a fit object. Grace is a thing of nature so infinite that no man who has it dare resist or disobey its command. The beautiful spirit incarnated in beautiful speech is gracious. The gracefulness which is the delight of gods and men comes from the loveliness of perfect deeds. There is a grace which corresponds to the word of the old philosopher, “The best and the last part of beauty is grace.” Grace has been called beauty in motion, beauty in action. God is gracious by the nature He bears as Deity. But man is gracious by gift. The beneficence of God creates grace in man. But a heathen man could have spoken of grace in some such terms as we have used. St. Paul, however, took the term, made it Christian, baptized it, and lifted it into a new and splendid sense. It meant to him absolute freedom in all that God gave. God is no infinite creditor, and we are no infinite debtors. Grace cannot be bought, not even by blood; for He who is gracious gave to the death the Son of His love. See, then, grace is free, sending the Son to make that glorious sacrifice whereby we are all redeemed. Because grace is free it is given without fee, merit, or reward. Only the mercy of God, only the grace of heaven, only the free unfettered love of the Father, can save men. 1 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]

2. Through universal grace, all walls of partition fall down, and men stand alike and equal before God. Before St. Paul’s day men appended God to a race, a priesthood, a sacrifice. They read God through what they did, and through themselves alone. But St. Paul read man through God. He read history through heaven. St. Paul brought the great and splendid conception of grace to vivify all that man signified, and all that he could achieve. Can you think what was done when, instead of coming to God with all the terror of soul that seeks to buy His grace, and to pay Him in blood, and by pain and suffering have merit before Him, men came to Him simply because of His infinite mercy? Did you ever think that what happened then was that men, instead of coming to God as an infinite power whose pity they must buy, looked at mankind through God’s own eyes? The eyes of grace brought to the interpretation of man the great and glorious dream of an Eternal and Universal Father who could not will but save. He is a grand King who is the Father of His people, and the grandest of all discoveries was made by the Apostle when he said, Not by might, not by any merit of our own, not by any works, but altogether of grace is God’s great action. When he said this, down fell the wall of partition, down came every act which divided and distinguished men. Where God is gracious, men who through His grace are saved become one mankind.

Grace is given for the merits of Christ all over the earth; there is no corner, even of Paganism, where it is not present, present in each heart of man in real sufficiency for his ultimate salvation. Not that the grace presented to each is such as at once to bring him to heaven; but it is sufficient for a beginning. It is sufficient to enable him to plead for other grace; and that second grace is such as to impetrate a third grace; and thus the soul may be led from grace to grace, and from strength to strength, till at length it is, so to say, in very sight of heaven, if the gift of perseverance does but complete the work. 1 [Note: Newman, Difficulties felt by Anglicans, 70.]

The play of chances which brings up a ternion or a quaternion is nothing compared to what has been required to prevent the combination of which I am reaping the fruits from being disturbed. If my origin had been less lowly in the eyes of the world, I should not have entered or persevered upon that royal road of the intellectual life to which my early training for the priesthood attached me. The displacement of a single atom would have broken the chain of fortuitous facts which, in the remote district of Brittany, was preparing me for a privileged life; which brought me from Brittany to Paris; which, when I was in Paris, took me to the establishment of all others where the best and most solid education was to be had; which, when I left the seminary, saved me from two or three mistakes which would have been the ruin of me; which, when I was on my travels, extricated me from certain dangers that, according to the doctrine of chances, would have been fatal to me; which, to cite one special instance, brought Dr. Suquet over from America to rescue me from the jaws of death which were yawning to swallow me up. The only conclusion I would fain draw from all this is that the unconscious effort towards what is good and true in the universe has its throw of the dice through the intermediary of each one of us. There is no combination but what comes up, quaternions like any other. We may disarrange the designs of Providence in respect to ourselves; but we have next to no influence upon their accomplishment. Quid habes quod non accepisti? The dogma of grace is the truest of all the Christian dogmas. 2 [Note: E. Renan, Recollections of My Youth, 326.]

III

The Channel of Salvation

“Through faith.”

1. Faith is the condition of salvation on man’s side. The Christian requirement of the condition of salvation is expressed in the word “faith.” “Ye have been saved by grace”—there is the source; “ye have been saved by grace, through faith”—there is the condition, the medium, the instrument, the channel. It is a thousand pities, one sometimes thinks, that the word was not translated “trust” instead of “faith,” and then we should have understood that it is not a theological virtue at all, but just the common thing that we all know so well, which is the cement of human society and the blessedness of human affection, and which only needs to be lifted, as a plant that had been running along the ground, and had its tendrils bruised and its fruit marred, might be lifted and twined round the pillar of God’s throne, in order to grow up and bear fruit that shall be found after many days unto praise, and honour and glory.

There is something on our side, by means of which we are to accept the salvation, and if that something be not exercised salvation may be brought to our doors but it will not do us any good. You may bring the biggest nugget of gold in the world to my door; there it may be outside on a wheelbarrow, and I may be inside dying of starvation; the nugget will do me no good if I do not take it in. If I do not turn it into money, and apply it to the satisfaction of my wants, I shall be as badly off as if the nugget had never been presented to me at all. The glorious gift of salvation is brought to our doors, and the question is, Have we taken it into our hearts? 1 [Note: W. H. M. H. Aitken, Mission Sermons, 119.]

Faith is as distinctive of man as grace is distinctive of God, for this reason—while grace describes God’s attitude to man, faith describes man’s attitude to God. While grace speaks of the relation of the ideal to man, faith speaks of the relation of man to the ideal. Hence all faith speaks of man in relation to God. Where His grace works our good, our faith responds to His grace. The one is the answer to the other—the response of earth to the voice that speaks from heaven. 2 [Note: A. M. Fairbairn.]

We got, I forget how, to the subject of the Divine permission of Evil, which Wordsworth said he had always felt the hardest problem of man’s being. When four years old, he had quaked on his bed in sharp conflict of spirit on this subject. “Nothing,” he said, “but Faith can keep you quiet and at peace with such awful problems pressing on you—Faith that what you know not now, you will know in God’s good time. It is curious, in that verse of St. Paul’s about Faith, Hope, and Charity or Love, that Charity should be placed the highest of the three; it must be because it is so universal and limitless in its operations: but Faith is the highest individual experience, because it conquers the pride of the understanding—man’s greatest foe. 1 [Note: H. N. Pym, Caroline Fox, Her Journals and Letters, i. 305.]

2. Why is faith selected as the channel of salvation?

(1) Faith has been selected as the channel of grace because there is a natural adaptation in faith to be used as the receiver. Suppose that I am about to give a poor man an alms; I put it into his hand—why? Well, it would hardly be fitting to put it into his ear, or to lay it upon his foot; the hand seems made on purpose to receive. So faith in the mental frame is created on purpose to be a receiver; it is the hand of the man, and there is a fitness in bestowing grace by its means. Faith which receives Christ is as simple an act as when your child receives an apple from you, because you hold it out, and promise to give him the apple if he comes for it. The belief and the receiving relate only to an apple; but they make up precisely the same act as the faith which deals with eternal salvation; and what the child’s hand is to the apple, that your faith is to the perfect salvation of Christ. The child’s hand does not make the apple, or alter the apple, it only takes it; and faith is chosen by God to be the receiver of salvation, because it does not pretend to make salvation or to help in it, but it receives it.

(2) It gives all the glory to God.—The hand which receives charity does not say, “I am to be thanked for accepting the gift”; that would be absurd. When the hand conveys bread to the mouth, it does not say to the body, “Thank me, for I feed you.” It is a very simple thing that the hand does, though a very necessary thing; and it never arrogates glory to itself for what it does. So God has selected faith to receive the unspeakable gift of His grace, because it cannot take to itself any credit, but must adore the gracious God who is the giver of all good.

(3) It unites man to God.—When man confides in God, there is a point of union between them, and that union guarantees blessing. Faith saves us because it makes us cling to God, and so brings us into connexion with Him. Years ago, above certain great falls, a boat was upset, and two men were being carried down the current, when persons on the shore managed to float a rope out to them, which rope was seized by them both. One of them held fast to it, and was safely drawn to the bank; but the other, seeing a great log come floating by, unwisely let go the rope, and clung to the log, for it was the bigger thing of the two, and apparently better to cling to. Alas! the log, with the man on it, went right over the vast abyss, because there was no union between the log and the shore. The size of the log was no benefit to him who grasped it; it needed a connexion with the shore to produce safety. So, when a man trusts to his works, or to sacraments, or to anything of that sort, he will not be saved, because there is no junction between him and Christ; but faith, though it may seem to be like a slender cord, is in the hand of the great God on the shore side; infinite power pulls in the connecting line, and thus draws the man from destruction.

(4) Faith touches the springs of action.—If I walk across a room, it is because I believe my legs will carry me. A man eats because he believes in the necessity of food. Columbus discovered America because he believed that there was another continent beyond the ocean. Many another grand deed has also been born of faith, for faith works wonders. Commoner things are done on the same principle; faith in its natural form is an all-prevailing force. God gives salvation to our faith, because He has thus touched the secret spring of all our emotions and actions. He has, so to speak, taken possession of the battery, and now He can send the sacred current to every part of our nature. When we believe in Christ, and the heart has come into the possession of God, then are we saved from sin, and are moved towards repentance, holiness, zeal, prayer, consecration, and every other gracious thing.

The next day I again went to Farringford. I found Tennyson walking up and down the ballroom. I walked up and down with him for three-quarters of an hour. After talking of various matters, he came back to the subject of immortality. “It is hard,” he said, “to believe in God, but it is harder not to believe in Him. I don’t believe in His goodness from what I see in nature. In nature I see the mechanism. I believe in His goodness from what I find in my own breast.” … Then he said, “I wonder what the earliest Christians thought of it all.” I said that I thought that they were content with seeing in Christ a revelation of God and an assurance of God’s love; later came the controversies and the need for definition. He said that, of course, we must have doctrine. I assented, remarking that the form must be more or less human. “After all,” he said, “after all, the greatest thing is faith.” Having said this, he paused, and then recited, giving earnest emphasis to the long rolling lines which sang of a faith victorious, a faith which can wait till the opening doors of Heaven disclose what faith waits for:—

Doubt no longer that the Highest is the wisest and the best,

Let not all that saddens Nature blight thy hope or break thy rest,

Quail not at the fiery mountain, at the shipwreck, or the rolling

Thunder, or the rending earthquake, or the famine, or the pest

Neither mourn if human creeds be lower than the heart’s desire!

Thro’ the gates that bar the distance comes a gleam of what is higher.

Wait till Death has flung them open, when the man will make the Maker

Dark no more with human hatreds in the glare of deathless fire! 1 [Note: Bishop W. Boyd Carpenter, Some Pages of My Life, 269.]

3. The entire system of salvation revealed in the Gospel is based upon this foundation doctrine, that the faith which saves the soul is a faith which looks immediately to, and which terminates definitively in, the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ as the almighty and atoning Redeemer. Now, it is of exceeding importance to have a clear and distinct understanding of this cardinal doctrine, that, in order to salvation, there must be a personal faith in a Personal Saviour. Wrong views here are ruinous. Any mistake as to the object of faith is fatal error. Yet there may be and there is a belief of the truth of Scripture which is not faith in the New Testament and saving sense of the term. There may be a belief of all that God has revealed in His Word, and even an intellectual apprehension of the remedial scheme as set forth in the Gospel, altogether apart from that faith which is connected with the elements of spiritual life and the earnest of salvation. And the explanation of this is to be found in the nature of the case. The object of saving faith is not the truth about Christ, but the Person of Christ; it is not the testimony, but the Testifier. Of course there must of necessity be the believing of the truth about Christ, the crediting of the testimony given in the Word concerning Him. But what is the relation which the truth and the testimony bear to Christ? Why, the truth is but the light under which He is revealed; the testimony is only the platform on which He is exhibited. And what is the relation which faith bears to the truth and the testimony about Christ? Why, faith eyes Christ as He is seen by the light of the truth; it occupies itself with Him as He is set forth in the testimony. But faith is not satisfied with the mere speculative knowledge and the certified evidence of Christ’s Saviourhood. Faith breaks through all his Scripture surroundings and presses forward to Christ Himself, and finds its proper focus and fruition in the Person of the revealed and realized Saviour.

As Dr. Liddon so moved among his fellow-men, so thought of them and approached them, he seemed as one who was often thinking of the gaze of Christ lighting on him, the Hand of Christ pointing to some act of service, the Voice of Christ prompting some witness to the Faith. There was a memorable tone that came into his words when in preaching or in argument or in conversation he spoke of that which he condemned as slighting or disloyal to Christ. It was, quite simply, like the way in which a man fires up when any one has, even unawares, spoken rudely or contemptuously of his friend; and there are parts of his writings in which, for those at least who knew him, that same tone still sounds. It was but one sign of a real habit of thinking constantly of his Master; of a very attentive listening for His command; of an earnest, anxious desire to go straight forward in His cause, to live and die as His. 1 [Note: J. O. Johnston, Life and Letters of H. P. Liddon, 403.]

Salvation the Gift of God

Literature

Aitken (W. H. M. H.), Mission Sermons, iii. 109.

Beeching (H. C.), Inns of Court Sermons, 168.

Campbell (D.), The Roll Call of Faith, 1.

Cunningham (W.), Sermons, 203.

Dale (R. W.), Christian Doctrine, 148.

Davies (D. C.), The Atonement and Intercession of Christ, 108.

Drummond (H.), Natural Law in the Spiritual World, 331.

Grant (W.), Christ our Hope, 215.

Harris (H.), Short Sermons, 182.

Jackson (G.), Memoranda Paulina, 186.

Jeffrey (R. T.), The Salvation of the Gospel, 171.

Kuyper (A.), The Work of the Holy Spirit, 378.

Lynch (T. T.), Three Months’ Ministry, 49.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Ephesians, 98.

Maclaren (A.), Creed and Conduct, 31.

Murray (W. H.), The Fruits of the Spirit, 168.

Price (A. C.), Fifty Sermons, vii. 321.

Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 65.

Romanes (E.), Thoughts on the Collects for the Trinity Season, 163.

Roose (J. S.), Our Protestant Faith, 89.

Salmon (G.), Gnosticism and Agnosticism, 272, 292.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Messages to the Multitude, 55.

Spurgeon (C. H.), Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit, xviii. (1872), No. 1064; xxvii. (1881), No. 1609.

Tholuck (A.), Hours of Devotion, 182.

Vaughan (J.), Sermons (Brighton Pulpit), New Ser., xxii. No. 1222.

Watts-Ditchfield (J. E.), Here and Hereafter, 11.

Webb-Peploe (H. W.), Calls to Holiness, 97.

Christian World Pulpit, xxv. 371 (Stevenson); xxix. 100 (Sunman); xlvii. 221 (Stalker); lxv. 161 (Fairbairn).

Church of England Magazine, lxii. 272 (Cardale).

National Preacher, xxviii. 91 (Harding).

Preacher’s Magazine, xx. 7 (Fairbairn).

Verse 10

God’s Workmanship

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.— Ephesians 2:10.

This chapter contains an argument which is a good illustration of the two-edged way in which the sword of the Spirit cuts enemies who come from different directions. On the one hand, St. Paul strikes at those who would teach that licentiousness is possible to men who are saved by grace. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, for good works. It is true that we do not improve ourselves. It is all of grace, yet good works are binding upon us all the more. On the other hand, let us not take any credit to ourselves. If we are elevated or refined, it is because God has taken pains with us; otherwise we should be as coarse and foul as any one. Indeed, we should never have come into the workshop but for the heavenly artist. “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” It is, as old Mr. Honest said, when the rest of the pilgrims came to watch him cross the river, “Grace reigns.”

The teaching of St. Paul, then, is that men and women are not the sole architects of their own characters; the Supreme Architect who works upon them is God. We are saved by grace—by a long series of Divine interpositions, by Heavenly compulsions and impulsions, by the energies of a ceaseless Hand that works upon us and brings out the Heavenly design, and completes the Divine symmetry. It is easy, of course, to turn such a thought into folly. Human nature is, unfortunately, so constituted that very few minds are capable of seeing both sides of the truth. Thus it happens that those who cling most to the consoling thought of a gospel of pure grace often neglect the equally binding gospel of a ceaseless struggle after goodness. And again, the good people who build up a life of flawless honour, integrity, and virtue, often find, because they have not learned to need it, a gospel of grace incomprehensible. Yet both are true, just as it is true that a ship depends for its movement equally on the men who work the pulleys and on the wind that fills the sails. So we work out our own salvation; but we move to no heavenly shores till the wind comes out of the waste heaven, and God touches us. For it is by grace, by a Divine interference, that we are saved; nor is salvation possible without it.

It was the supreme truth of God’s free grace that converted both Luther and Wesley. The one rose from Pilate’s staircase in Rome with the dawn upon his brow, as a man enfranchised of a new world; the other in Aldersgate Street in half-an-hour cast the husk of twenty years of ritualism, and emerged into unbounded spiritual liberty. For us also to grasp this truth is life. Yet so ill-balanced and frail of judgment are we that there is only too much peril of wresting such a truth to our destruction. Rather for us the most necessary truth to-day is that goodness can be found only by effort, that the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth violence, that God will not save us by any spiritual necromancy, that if we are not prepared to be as earnest over religion as we are over our worldly affairs, there is no religion and no salvation for us. 1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Divine Challenge, 107.]

“Hamlet,” says Professor Bradley, “usually speaks as one who accepts the received Christian ideas, yet when he meditates profoundly he seems to ignore them.” There has been too much of this Hamlet-spirit in the Church. Yet her shortcomings have only thrown into more brilliant relief the quenchless patience of God’s love, and the tenacity of His revelation. The vital truths of the faith have refused to be ignored for long. It has been a revelation to the world, as well as to the Church itself, how vital and undying is the sheer grace of God in Christ, often thwarted, often grieved, but never chilled by human imperfections. 2 [Note: J. Moffatt, Reasons and Reasons, 28.]

I

A Divine Creation

“We are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus.”

1. The term rendered “workmanship” signifies “a poem,” and the idea is, that as a poem owes its conception to the singer’s intellect and fancy, so a believer in Christ owes his character and standing to God. We are indebted to the Greeks for the word, and for its beautiful meaning. A poem with them was, first, anything made; but as beauty and harmony are elements in all truly original or created works, the word “poem” came to be applied more and more exclusively to the expression of truth and beauty in rhythmical form.

Only in one other place does the word occur in the New Testament. That place is Romans, chapter 1 Ephesians 2:20; and there the Apostle uses it with reference to the wonders of creation. This bright and beautiful world in which we live is full of God’s poetical works. “The heavens are telling the glory of God;” the starry sky, with the sun and moon, is not only a Divine poem, but also an oratorio, full of celestial harmonies. The little islands are the poetry of the sea. Gems and precious stones, such as the diamond and the emerald, are the poetry of the mineral kingdom. Flowers are the poetry of the vegetable kingdom. The young ones of living creatures are the poetry of the animal kingdom. Children are God’s poetical works in the world of mankind; we remember the lines which Longfellow addresses to them—

Come to me, O ye children!

And whisper in my ear

What the birds and the winds are singing

In your sunny atmosphere.

For what are all our contrivings,

And the wisdom of our books,

When compared with your caresses,

And the gladness of your looks?

Ye are better than all the ballads

That ever were sung or said;

For ye are living poems,

And all the rest are dead. 1 [Note: C. Jerdan, Manna for Young Pilgrims, 102.]

“We are His poem!” Each Christian age has been a canto of it; each Christian life and death a word. Its strains have been pealing down the centuries, and “though set to a tune which admits of such endless variations that it is often difficult to detect the original melody amid the clash of the chords that conceal it, it will eventually be resolved, through many a swift modulation and startling cadence, back to the perfect key.” 1 [Note: H. G. Miller, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians, 93.]

Biographers of Wordsworth have marked the exact period when his genius reached its height, and after that the glory came only at intervals, and the real poems were rare. And because a true poem is so rare a thing, it has always been appraised as the highest form of literature. Many great books come—and go; but a true poem is as fresh after long centuries as when it was first written. “Poesy never waxeth old,” and knows no decay. It knows no decay because it is permeated with the spirit of beauty; because it is the enduring monument of a combination of fine gifts, whose final result is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. That is what a poem is, and St. Paul says that we are the expression of the mind of God, as the In Memoriam is the expression of the full mind and heart of Tennyson. We are God’s Poems. 2 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Divine Challenge, 111.]

If thou hadst been a poet! On my heart

The thought flashed sudden, burning through the weft

Of life, and with too much I sank bereft.

Up to my eyes the tears, with sudden start,

Thronged blinding: then the veil would rend and part!

The husk of vision would in twain be cleft!

Thy hidden soul in naked beauty left,

I should behold thee, Nature, as thou art!

O poet Jesus! at thy holy feet

I should have lien, sainted with listening;

My pulses answering ever, in rhythmic beat,

The stroke of each triumphant melody’s wing,

Creating, as it moved, by being sweet;

My soul thy harp, thy word the quivering string. 3 [Note: George MacDonald, “Concerning Jesus” (Poetical Works, i. 255).]

2. The poem depends entirely upon the poet for its creation. It is the unveiling of the deepest and most intimate secrecies of his heart. His own image is projected over every page, and it is the poignant personal element in poetry that makes it so beautiful, and gives it its enduring charm. Men, then, are God’s poems. The intimacies of God’s heart are expressed in man—God’s highest thoughts, God’s deepest emotions. The prayer of Moses was that the beauty of God might rest upon him. When a man is finished at last in the likeness of Christ, God’s sense of beauty is satisfied in him, God’s art has found its finest expression and the beauty of God does rest upon him. The true Christian is God’s poem in a world of prose, God’s beauty in a world of gloom, God’s fine and finished art in a world where men forget beauty, and are careless of moral symmetry and spiritual grace.

There is no bioplasm in the spiritual world. By no means or contrivance can a soul live the life of God without the direct interposition of the Holy Spirit. You may galvanize a dead bird into a flutter, but there is no life in a galvanic shock. The Gospel, which is such a rich exhibition of pathos, beauty, and prospect, when its truths are naturally presented, may create emotion, but it cannot give the new heart by outward experiment. Life comes from life, and not from declarations of truths. We may touch and move the external nature, but God alone can give the new life. 1 [Note: T. Davies, Sermons, ii. 116.]

I remember once seeing a little fountain playing in the room of a house in which I was staying. I went near to examine it and heard the click and whirr of machinery! The fountain was the product of a mechanical contrivance; it went by clockwork. It was wound up and played for a little while and then sank into stagnancy again. How different from the spring! One plays in feverish spasms; the other flows in restful persistence. “Not of works”: that is the manufactured fountain. “We are his workmanship”: that is the life of the spring. The Christian life is quietly natural; it is the creation of the ceaseless energy of God. 2 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The Examiner, Nov. 19, 1903, p. 508.]

3. The new creation is “in Christ Jesus.” One of the earliest and most majestic names of God is Maker, Creator. The Psalmist says, “Thy hands have made me and fashioned me.” We wear the image of the earthly Adam by our natural descent, and in this sense we are the creatures of God. But the first creation has been marred, and we need to be created again by being brought into connexion, relationship, and union with the second Adam, the Lord from heaven. We are created in Christ Jesus.

Now, if every Christian is a true poem of God, and if the Holy Catholic Church is the supreme Divine epic “created” in our world, who is the Hero of the composition? Our text answers that the Hero is the Lord Jesus Christ. The poem is full of Him. God’s people are “created in Christ Jesus for good works.” This Hero is both Divine and human. He is the Son of God and the Flower of men, and also the one Mediator between God and us. God has purchased the Church, and every individual member of it, with His own blood. The Church is Christ’s body, “the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” His Spirit dwells in the heart of every believer. His glory fills the entire Society of His people. Every poem of which He is the Hero shall spread His name and His fame throughout the universe to all eternity. 1 [Note: C. Jerdan, Manna for Young Pilgrims, 105.]

In every great poem there is a definite subject, a leaping thought, or a hero around whom everything gathers. The central figure of Homer’s Iliad is Achilles, a typical Greek—handsome, brave, passionate, hospitable, affectionate. The hero of the Odyssey is the wandering Ulysses, also an ideal Grecian of the Homeric age. The hero of Virgil’s Æneid is “the pious Æneas,” a famous Trojan, one of the principal figures of classical legend. Dante’s Commedia is the great poem of retribution, his own figure dominating the whole of it. The outstanding personality in Milton’s Paradise Lost is Satan, while that in Paradise Regained is Jesus of Nazareth. The hero of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King is King Arthur of the Round Table, or, as some would have it, Sir Lancelot of the Lake. 2 [Note: Ibid. 104]

II

The Practical End

“For good works.”

1. St. Paul indicates in one brief phrase the right relation of good works to the Christian life. It is “for good works” that we are created in Christ. Or, to put it otherwise, good works, holiness, Godlike character, are the aim of God in creating us afresh. They are His ultimate goal; accordingly they cannot be the cause of our being saved, but must be its issue and consequence. They are the fruit of the good tree, not its root or vital sap; and we are said to be created for good works just as a tree is created, or exists, for its fruit. Hence the true relation is altogether distorted and reversed when character and conduct are made pre-conditions of our obtaining Divine grace, instead of the joyous result of our having accepted it.

This is a problem exactly parallel to that of slave labour. If the end of labour be taken as the maximum of production, then the question history had to solve was this, How is this end attained most effectively?—by slave labour or by free? In Greece, in Rome, in our own dependencies a hundred years ago, an unhesitating answer was given in favour of slavery; yet emancipation had only to become a fact to prove that, even from the economic point of view, freedom was inestimably the more advantageous of the two. So is it also in religion. Let men believe that they must purchase salvation by hard, grim toil, as the mere bond-slaves of God, and their hands will sink in weakness and despair. But tell them that in Christ Jesus they are the sons and daughters of the Lord Almighty, and grateful love and wonder will evoke a beauty and a wealth of goodness of which else they had vainly dreamed. 1 [Note: H. R. Mackintosh, Life on God’s Plan, 55.]

Wordsworth has described in a memorable and familiar passage the history of human life as it is developed under the influence of the world, the sum of external and transitory things.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Shades of the prison-house begin to close

Upon the growing Boy,

But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,

He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east

Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,

And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man perceives it die away,

And fade into the light of common day.

This description of the experience of the growing child is the exact reverse of the truth in regard to the life “in Christ.” The fresh rays of glory which the boy sees about him do not “fade” or “die away” with advancing years, but, as his power of vision is strengthened and disciplined by continuous use, are seen to spread from point to point with undimmed lustre, till at last all Nature is flooded with the heavenly splendour. The solitary star is found to be the quickening sun. Love for the Ascended Christ continually calls forth fresh and more glorious manifestations of His Person and will ( John 14:23).

Life “in Christ” is, in other words, a progressive realization of a personal fellowship with God in thought, word and deed, which brings an ever-increasing power of discerning Him in His works and a surer faith by which we apprehend the invisible ( Hebrews 11:1). Thus the Christian appropriates in action little by little what has been done once for all, and gladly recognizes “the good works, which God afore prepared that [he] should walk in them” ( Ephesians 2:10). He is himself God’s “workmanship” and his character is a reflection of the living Christ, gained in the common business of life as he places himself before His open presence ( 2 Corinthians 3:18). 1 [Note: B. F. Westcott, Christian Aspects of Life, 24.]

2. The Christian life is always metrical, beating in harmony with the will of God. It is in religion as in music. Nature is full of musical voices, of simple notes that sound melodiously in every ear; but out of these the cultured and quickened imagination of the master can create harmonies such as Nature never has created or can create—can in his Oratorio weave sounds into symphonies so wondrous that they seem like the speech of the gods suddenly breaking articulate upon the ear of man, speaking of passions, hopes, fears, joys too tumultuous and vast for the human tongue to utter; or opening and interpreting for mortals a world where, remote from discord or dissonance, thought and being move as to the stateliest music. So in the spiritual sphere the truly holy religious person is the master spirit, making audible to others the harmonies his imagination is the first to hear. In him the truths and ideas of God, as yet indistinctly seen or partially heard by the multitude, are embodied, become as it were incarnate and articulate, assume a visible and strenuous form that they may inspire men to nobler deeds, and show them how to create a higher manhood and purer society.

Professor Gilbert Murray writes of the Greeks that “the idea of service to the community was more deeply rooted in them than in us, and that they asked of their poets first of all this question: ‘Does he help to make men better? Does he make life a better thing?’ ” These were the questions that Signor (Mr. Watts) asked himself daily and hourly. I remember how pleased he was when Verestchagin agreed heartily with his aphorism, “Art should be used to make men better.” 1 [Note: Mrs. Watts, in George Frederic Watts, ii. 279.]

Tennyson, in one of his earlier poems, gives his conception of the place and work of the true poet:

The poet in a golden clime was born,

With golden stars above;

Dower’d with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,

The love of love.

He saw thro’ life and death, thro’ good and ill,

He saw thro’ his own soul.

The marvel of the everlasting will,

An open scroll,

Before him lay: with echoing feet he threaded

The secretest walks of fame:

The viewless arrows of his thoughts were headed

And wing’d with flame.

The poet, says another, is the writer who pours forth his thought and inner life in the melody of metre, and under the inspiration and power of a Divine emotion. Poetry, like all creation, is self-revelation. It is the highest form of expression. In literature the imperial minds worthy of the name poet are few. The Hebrew race had but one David, the Greek but one Homer, the Italian but one Dante, the German but one Goethe, the English but one Shakespeare. 2 [Note: A. Lewis, Sermons Preached in England, 125.]

In your concord and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung. And do ye, each and all, form yourselves into a chorus, that being harmonious in love and having taken the scale (or keynote) of God, ye may in unison sing with one voice through Jesus Christ unto the Father, that He may both hear you and acknowledge you by your good deeds to be members of His Song of Solomon 3 [Note: Ignatius, Epistle to the Ephesians.]

When Carlyle describes Elizabeth Fry standing fair as a lily, in pure womanliness, amid the abominable sights of old Newgate; or Longfellow describes Florence Nightingale moving with her lamp among the wounded at Scutari—

And slow, as in a dream of bliss,

The speechless sufferer turns to kiss

Her shadow, as it falls

Upon the darkening walls—

what is the effect on the mind? It is the effect of poetry. We feel touched, purged, exalted: we know that these women were in truth God’s poems. And there are men and women in the world still who touch the soul by the same Divine magic. 1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Divine Challenge, 113.]

III

A Comprehensive Design

“Which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.”

1. God’s great plan includes the Christian life and all its conditions. By the revelation of the moral law He has already fixed the pathway of the believer’s obedience, and by creating us in Christ, He fits us by disposition and aptitude for that obedience. For each of us a path of spiritual development has been prepared beforehand, our travelling by which will be the realization of the Divine ideal of our life which has hovered before the mind of God from the beginning. For every life God has a plan that touches the details as well as the great issues of the life, and there comes into the life of the believer nothing unknown to God. There are certain words that we make use of very often. We say that a certain contingency has arisen, an exigency, a combination of circumstances, that such and such a thing happened. All those words may be very necessary when we are talking about our own arrangements and our own outlook upon life, but they find no place in the vocabulary of God. There is no contingency that can surprise or startle Him, no exigency that He does not see; no detail of a human life is enshrouded in the mystery of an unborn hour so that God cannot detect it.

I think, as I look back over my life, that there is hardly a single thwarting of my wishes, hardly a single instance where things seemed to go against me, in which I cannot even now see, that by God’s profound mercy they really went for me all the while; so that if I could have looked forward only so far as the time now present I should have longed for and welcomed all those things which I have feared and grudgingly accepted.… There is nothing that God does not work up into His perfect plan of our lives: all lines converge, all movements tend to do His will, on earth as in Heaven. 1 [Note: Francis Paget, Bishop of Oxford, 49.]

2. God, who does nothing vainly or at random, delights in that which is individual; He prepares us for the pathway of good works because He has also prepared the pathway for us; the two have originated together in His mind. It has been chosen for us, as a fitting stage to educe and develop our special powers; we have been created for it, and therefore endowed with the powers it will call for. Men differ in gifts and aptitudes as infinitely as do the leaves of a tree in form and texture; and one of the beautiful and inspiring thoughts that lie, like precious grains of gold, beneath the surface of this text, is the message that God has His own ideal for each one of us, and therefore would have us manifest the Christ-like and Christ-nourished life each in his own way. God keeps no set moulds into which character must run; rather the mould is broken after the emergence of each new life. For each the end of the journey is the same, when we shall all come to the measure of Christ’s fullness; but one may approach the far-shining summit up a gentle slope, soft with grass and deep with flowers, another over morass and torrent, and at last along the flinty way where the tender feet are bruised, and the wind blows keen across the snow. It matters little, if only we tread the ordained pathway of God.

Mrs. Josephine Butler, for whose heroism he had a deep veneration, was one of four women of mark whom Signor (Mr. Watts) wished to include in his series of portraits for the National Gallery. Her portrait was painted, and at Limnerslease, where she came to stay with us. Very lovely in her youth, in age her delicate sensitive nature still gave true beauty to a face that bore but too plainly the marks of an heroic crusade. When she saw the portrait for the first time she said but a few words. She left the room and went to take the rest which at intervals was now necessary for her. Before she came downstairs to dinner she had written what she had not been able to say to Signor:—

“When I looked at that portrait which you have just done, I felt inclined to burst into tears. I will tell you why. I felt so sorry for her. Your power has brought up out of the depths of the past, the record of a conflict which no one but God knows of. It is written in the eyes, and whole face. Your picture has brought back to me all that I suffered, and the sorrows through which the Angel of God’s presence brought me out alive. I thank you that you have not made that poor woman look severe or bitter, but only sad, and yet purposeful. For with full purpose of heart she has borne and laboured, and she is ready to go down to Hades again, if it were necessary, for the deliverance of her fellow-creatures. But God does not require that descent more than once. I could not say all this aloud. But if the portrait speaks with such truth and power to me, I think it will in some way speak to others also.” 1 [Note: Mrs. Watts, in George Frederic Watts, ii. 250.]

Some time ago, when in Manchester, I saw men at work pulling down whole streets of houses to make room for a new railway station. All appeared ruin and disorder. Here was a party digging out foundations; in another place the bricklayers were building walls; elsewhere some were laying foundations for other walls; beyond them others were still pulling down. It seemed like chaos, and yet in the architect’s office could be seen the elevation and picture of the complete whole. Every man was working to a plan. And so God has His elevation, but He does not show it. “It doth not yet appear.” When Joseph was in jail, he was in the path of Providence, and the fetters of iron were as much part of the plan as the chain of gold he wore when brought to the summit of greatness. 2 [Note: T. Champness, New Coins from Old Gold, 86.]

To erect a great building, to paint a great picture, to carve a great statue, to compose a great oratorio, to write a great poem, requires a great theme, and to live a great life requires a great purpose. So we, God’s poems, to fulfil our mission in the world, must have a great purpose. Gladstone, Wellington, Grant, Lincoln, Washington, Luther, Savonarola, Paul, were all men of purpose and noble ambition. Frances Willard, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Fry, and Susanna Wesley were women of purpose, as have been all those who have accomplished anything worth the doing. 3 [Note: A. Lewis, Sermons Preached in England, 143.]

3. The sense of a high vocation will go far to redeem life from failure. Our consciousness of being in touch with God would be deepened if we would only recognize that He has prepared the specific enterprise and exercise of duty for us, and is ready to meet us face to face upon that line. Whatever love may be, it is dutiful; it assigns duties to others, and to itself. To ignore this truth is to miss one of the dimensions of His great love. To accept it is to reach a new degree of cheerfulness and effectiveness in our service of God and man. More than that, to believe “we are his workmanship” here because we are needed for some end of His own makes us aware of the wonderful precision and definiteness with which God uses the details of our individual lives to draw us into the destiny of our tie to Jesus Christ. We are created in Christ Jesus for good works. They are not irrelevant to our spiritual career any more than they were to His. If we understand anything of the moral energy which throbs in God’s redeeming purpose, we shall grow more and more conscious that our duties are a vocation, and that they become for each of us a private interpretation of the great will of Love with its design and its demands.

I have been reading Margaret Fuller’s love letters. Sometimes the letters are light and frolicsome, glancing along the surface of things as a swallow skims the stream. At other times one is dropped sheer down into inconceivable depths. Here is a phrase which laid hold of me from these strange epistles. She is writing to the one she cared for and loved. “May God refine you and chasten you until the word of your life is fully spoken.” “The word of your life!” As though every life was purposed to be some articulated word, clearly and fully spoken. It is only another way of saying that life is ordained to be a distinct and distinguished poem, expressing in some altogether peculiar way the mind and will of God. 1 [Note: J. H. Jowett, in The Examiner, Nov. 19, 1903, p. 508.]

Among the art treasures of Rome there is a mysterious unfinished statue. It represents a barbarian king in chains—one of those tall fair-haired men of the North—men of our own blood—who, even when they stood in captivity before their Roman conquerors, extorted admiration by their splendid physique and their royal dignity of bearing. The peculiarity of this statue is that it has never been finished. The work is wrought with great care and skill up to a certain point—then it suddenly stops short. Conjecture has been busy about the statue. Why did the sculptor stop, after having done so much? Was the reason caprice, or accident, or sudden death, or impatience at his failure to realize the ideal aimed at? Who can tell? The secret lies buried in a forgotten past. But He who labours at the chiselling of new men and women in Christ never loses patience, never tires of His task. Obstacles may delay, but they can never finally baffle His sublime purpose. 1 [Note: Martin Lewis.]

There’s heaven above, and night by night

I look right through its gorgeous roof;

No suns and moons though e’er so bright

Avail to stop me; splendour-proof

I keep the broods of stars aloof:

For I intend to get to God,

For ’tis to God I speed so fast,

For in God’s breast, my own abode,

Those shoals of dazzling glory, passed

I lay my spirit down at last.

I lie where I have always lain,

God smiles as he has always smiled;

Ere suns and moons could wax and wane,

Ere stars were thunder-girt, or piled

The heavens, God thought on me his child;

Ordained a life for me, arrayed

Its circumstances every one

To the minutest; ay, God said

This head, this hand should rest upon

Thus, ere he fashioned star or sun.

And having thus created me,

Thus rooted me, he bade me grow,

Guiltless for ever, like a tree

That buds and blooms, nor seeks to know

The law by which it prospers so:

But sure that thought and word and deed

All go to swell his love for me,

Me, made because that love had need

Of something irreversibly

Pledged solely its content to be. 2 [Note: Browning, “Johannes Agricola in Meditation.”]

More than once in those long nights I spent on the Atlantic, I went on deck when all was still, and felt how insignificant a thing was man, in all that lonely immensity of sea and sky. There was no sound save the cry of the wind among the spars, the throb of the great engines, the sound of the many waters rushing round the vessel’s keel. I felt the mystery of life; I was conscious of “the whisper and moan and wonder and diapason of the sea.” And then out of the stillness there came a voice, clear and ringing—the voice of the man on the look-out crying to the night, “All’s well, and the lights burn bright! All’s well, and the lights burn bright!” How did I know all was well? What knew I of the forces that were bridled in the mysterious throbbing heart of those unceasing engines, of the peril that glared on me in the breaking wave, or lay hidden in the dark cloud that lay along the horizon? I knew nothing; but the voice went sounding on over the sea: “All’s well, and the lights burn bright!” And the wind carried it away across the waters, and it palpitated round the world, and it went up soaring and trembling, in ever fainter reverberations, among the stars. So I stand for a little while amid great forces of which I know little; but I am not alone in the empty night. The world moves on to some appointed goal, though by what paths I know not; it has its Steersman, and it will arrive. And, amid the loneliness and mystery, the peril and uncertainty, I have learned to hear a Voice that cries, “All’s well!” and tells me why all is well; if is the Voice of Christ saying, “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” God has not left His world. He is working out His supreme art in it every day, and if we be true Christians we are God’s poems wrought in Christ Jesus unto good works. 1 [Note: W. J. Dawson, The Divine Challenge, 118.]

Lord, in my spirit, one by one

Thou dost repeat the wonders done

At Thy creative work begun.

When first I came from out the night,

The earliest sense that woke was sight,

And Thou didst say, “Let there be light.”

I saw pass by Thy shining car;

I had no thought of near or far;

I tried to catch the bright day-star.

But when I found my strength was spent

The air with infant cries I rent,

And met therein my firmament,—

I learned that distance vast divides

The river in the sky that glides

From ebb and flow of earthly tides.

Then grew I up from eve to morn,

With each beginning newly born,

Leaving each former stage forlorn.

First, as a plant of field I grew,

Unmindful of the winds that blew,

Unconscious that I nothing knew.

Next, with the cattle on the plain,

Bird of the air, fish of the main,

I rose to sense of joy and pain.

Then woke the spirit of the man,

With laws to bind, with hopes to fan,

With powers to say “I ought,” “I can.”

One stage remains to make me blest,

The brightest, loveliest, and the best;

My bosom must become Thy rest.

In vain from peak to peak I go,

If on the summit of pure snow

I cannot Thy communion know.

For bird of air and fish of sea

The earth was made a rest to be;

I came to be a rest to Thee.

Creation’s Spirit most doth move,

And mightiest on the waters prove,

When life has found a home for Love. 1 [Note: George Matheson, Sacred Songs, 155.]

God’s Workmanship

Literature

Blunt (J. J.), Plain Sermons, i. 195.

Champness (T.), New Coins from Old Gold, 79.

Dawson (W. J.), The Divine Challenge, 107.

Gregg (J.), The Life of Faith, 22.

Howatt (J. R.), The Children’s Pew, 201.

Jerdan (C.), Manna for Young Pilgrims, 101.

Lewis (A.), Sermons Preached in England, 132.

McGhee (R. J.), in The New Irish Pulpit, 465.

Mackintosh (H. R.), Life on God’s Plan, 43.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Ephesians, 108.

Moffatt (J.), Reasons and Reasons, 25.

Pearse (M. G.), Parables and Pictures, 13.

Ramsay (A. A.), Things that are Lovely, 19.

Romanes (E.), Thoughts on the Collects for the Trinity Season, 234.

Smellie (A.), In the Secret Place, 321.

Westcott (B. F.), Christian Aspects of Life, 23.

Christian World Pulpit, xxviii. 95 (Spurgeon); liv. 295 (Sheepshanks).

Examiner, Nov. 19, 1903, p. 508 (Jowett).

Homiletic Review, lii. 58 (Morgan).

Verse 19

The Commonwealth of Christ

So then ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.— Ephesians 2:19.

1. These words were addressed to Christians of Gentile birth who had been brought out of the darkness of paganism into Gospel light. The Apostle reminds them that in the days of their ignorance they had no part in God’s promises or in the hope of Israel. They were separated by a great wall from the elect people. The Jews were God’s household, and the Gentiles were outside. But now the cross of Jesus has broken down the dividing wall and brought Jew and Gentile together. The Heavenly light shines equally on the faces of both. Faith makes all races of one kin and kind. We are all alike fellow-citizens with the saints and of the household of God.

2. St. Paul had to labour strenuously and continuously against Jewish exclusiveness. The last thing that the Jews would think of was to admit the Gentiles to equal rights with themselves. One has smiled, rather sadly, to see men whose desperate eagerness to keep hold of some small privilege they had got was even exceeded by their desperate terror lest anybody else should get hold of anything like it. Now St. Paul set himself to put this selfish and jealous littleness down. So far, he has quite succeeded. For though human beings do yet try to keep worldly advantage and privilege to themselves, excluding others, it is ages since any professed Christian thought to keep God’s grace or Christ’s mercy so. Everybody knows that there is no more certain mark of really being within the Fold than the earnest desire that all we know and care for should be brought into it likewise. No Christian can even be imagined as desiring to keep this great possession to himself, or as grudging any human being his entrance. We have the believer’s feeling on this matter in memorable words once spoken by him who wrote this Epistle—words which, when and where they were said, combined well the grace which comes of high culture with the heartiness of Christian kindliness—“I would to God, that not only thou, but also all that hear me this day, were both almost, and altogether such as I am, except these bonds.”

I heard Dr. Alexander Whyte, of Edinburgh, speak recently about the great Puritans John Owen and Thomas Goodwin. He bade us read them; he told us of his own debt to them. “Thomas Goodwin and John Owen, and Richard Baxter and Matthew Henry, they are all upon my shelves. But not they alone! Side by side with the Puritans stand the works of great Catholics and great Anglicans. It is not with the Puritans alone I hold fellowship; I hold fellowship also with those other Christians between whom and the Puritans there seemed to be a great gulf fixed. I hold fellowship with Augustine, and pour out my soul in the words of his Confessions. I hold fellowship with À Kempis, while he teaches me the Imitatio Christi. I hold fellowship with William Law while he addresses to me his Serious Call, and with Jeremy Taylor while he discourses about Holy Living and Holy Dying. I hold fellowship with Newman and with Robertson, as I read their sermons—two men sundered far from each other, and both of them ecclesiastically separated from me. In my study every day of my life I enjoy the ‘Communion of Saints.’ ” 1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 178.]

I

The Disabilities of Aliens

1. The Gentiles hitherto had been in the position of strangers and sojourners. As aliens they had no rights of citizenship, and all they could look for was temporary hospitality. They had no real standing within the commonwealth. Gentiles and Jews stood apart in their agelong traditions and customs. The Apostle has expressed in strong, emphatic language the ancient separation between the two. He has spoken of the Greeks as “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,”—as those “that once were far off,”—of the “middle wall of partition” to be broken down; and no words could picture too strongly the great gulf that had divided these families of men. The descendant of Abraham—conscious of the election of his race to stand alone among men, as the people of Jehovah; exulting in the noble train of lawgivers and prophets who had come forth from the secret place of God to proclaim the final glory of the Jew; trained to believe in one great Invisible, of whom there was no likeness “in the heaven above or in the earth beneath”—had learned to look with hatred or contempt on the outcast, lawless Gentile, with his image of God in every valley and on every hill. And the Greek—living as the free child of nature; having no law but the darkened light of conscience; feeling in heaven and earth to find the presence of an Infinite Beauty, whose Image he tried to carve in grace and majesty in snowy stone—had come to look with philosophic pride on the stern land of the Hebrew, and in philosophic scorn on his strange, exclusive loneliness. But not only were they at enmity with each other, they were both at enmity with God, and tried painfully by ceremony and sacrifice to avert His eternal wrath.

2. The chasm that divided the one from the other seemed almost impassable. There were deep and seemingly irreconcilable differences between them. Those differences did not vanish even when Jew and Gentile both turned Christian; they continued to subsist, as any reader of the New Testament may discover for himself. It is no exaggeration to say that there was, in the early days of Christianity, a Jewish Church and a Gentile Church. And yet “in Christ” the differences were solved, and Jew and Gentile might greet one another as brethren. “So then,” cries the Apostle, exulting in the effects of the reconciling work of Christ, “ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but ye are fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God.”

The alienation of Gentiles from the Divine covenant was represented in the structure of the temple at Jerusalem by a beautifully worked marble balustrade, separating the outer from the inner court, upon which stood columns at regular intervals, bearing inscriptions, some in Greek and some in Latin characters, to warn aliens not to enter the holy place. One of the Greek inscriptions was discovered a few years ago, and is now to be read in the Museum of Constantinople. It runs thus: “No alien to pass within the balustrade round the temple and the enclosure. Whosoever shall be caught so doing must blame himself for the penalty of death which he will incur.” 1 [Note: C. Gore, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 104.]

II

The Widening of the Commonwealth

1. Every race had looked forward to some hoped-for better society.—The Jews had for generations, often with the fiercest impatience, expected the coming of the Messianic kingdom. The Greeks had been encouraged by their teachers and philosophers to aim at creating the perfect city and perfect state. Plato himself had not only written his wonderful book on the ideal Commonwealth, but had for a time acted as Prime Minister to a despot who was willing to make such laws as the Athenian statesman might suggest. The Spartans, the Athenians, and the Macedonians had each in turn tried to build up the ideal state, and the bloody and treacherous history of the Greeks in general is not without nobility when we watch it as a tragic effort at making a really Godlike state. Far more impressive than the Greek history had been the Roman patriotism and the Roman imperialism. This forced itself upon the world as something gigantic and irresistible, that bound together nations and religions the most diverse in one mighty whole. Here in the Roman empire that Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood of man spread far and wide, and made many hope that better things were in store.

2. Christ came to found an ideal society.—How did He do it? He selected a few men who had the faculty of believing. They were not men of great imagination, or talent, or culture. They were men who could believe in the unseen. These men He trained, until at last one of them uttered the faith that had been growing in the hearts of all, and said to Jesus, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Immediately Jesus saw that His long and arduous task was on the way to completion. He saw that He had in this little group of men the lever with which He would turn the world upside down. He was filled with exultation and delight. He was beginning already to see of the travail of His soul and be satisfied, and He cried out, “Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jonah.… I also say unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church; and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it.” The great word was out now and the great idea launched upon the world. One confused fisherman, with a few men of like mind of whom he was the leader, formed the solitary rock in the midst of a world of shifting sand, and upon this rock Jesus would build His Church—a society embodying His spirit, living according to His laws, steadfastly administering His principles to the whole world, little by little leavening the lump, the society of the meek who should inherit the earth!

The Roman Empire had in Paul’s time gathered into a great unity the Asiatics of Ephesus, the Greeks of Corinth, the Jews of Palestine, and men of many another race; but grand and imposing as that great unity was, it was to Paul a poor thing compared with the oneness of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Asiatics of Ephesus, Greeks of Corinth, Jews of Palestine, and members of many another race could say, “Our citizenship is in heaven.” The Roman Eagle swept over wide regions in her flight, but the Dove of Peace, sent forth from Christ’s hand, travelled farther than she. As Paul says in the context, the Ephesians had been strangers, “alienated from the commonwealth of Israel,” wandering like the remnants of some “broken clans,” but now they are gathered in. That narrow community of the Jewish nation has expanded its bounds and become the mother-country of believing souls, the true “island of saints.” It was not Rome that really made all peoples one, it was the weakest and most despised of her subject races.

What the early Christians felt when they embraced Christ and joined the little churches in their own cities, was that they had become members of a new race, a new and heavenly community, which was their proper and eternal home. Until now they had thought themselves mere human beings, born into a very strange and often cruel world, without any definite or trustworthy knowledge as to their destiny, plagued with toil and hardship, I disease and the fear of death. But now suddenly their whole perspective was altered. Instead of being citizens of this world they were citizens of heaven, and only sojourners and strangers in the earthly life. Instead of being units in a confused and wearisome life that soon went out into nothingness, they were members of a blessed and everlasting family of which God was the Father, and Jesus Christ the loving herald of His purposes. 1 [Note: N. H. Marshall.]

Foremost and grandest amid the teachings of Christ were these two inseparable truths— There is but one God; all men are the sons of God; and the promulgation of these two truths changed the face of the world, and enlarged the moral circle to the confines of the inhabited globe. To the duties of men towards the Family and Country were added duties towards Humanity. Man then learned that wheresoever there existed a human being, there existed a brother; a brother with a soul immortal as his own, destined like himself to ascend towards the Creator, and on whom he was bound to bestow love, a knowledge of the Faith, and help and counsel when needed. 1 [Note: Mazzini.]

3. Salvation comes to the individual through society.—The salvation in the Bible is supposed usually to reach the individual through the community. God’s dealings with us in redemption thus follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural development. For man stands out in history as a “social animal.” His individual development, by a Divine law of his constitution, is rendered possible only because he is first of all a member of some society, tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society alone, and through the submissions and limitations of his personal liberty which such membership involves, does he become capable of any degree of free or high development as an individual. This law, then, of man’s nature appears equally in the method of his redemption. Under the old covenant it was to members of the “commonwealth of Israel” that the blessings of the covenant belonged. Under the new covenant St. Paul still conceives of the same commonwealth as subsisting and as fulfilling no less than formerly the same religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and enlarged to include the believers of all nations, and not merely one nation; but it is still the same commonwealth, or polity, or church; and it is still through the Church that God’s “covenant” dealings reach the individual.

It is for this reason that St. Paul goes on to describe the state of the Asiatic Christians, before their conversion, as a state of alienation from the “commonwealth of Israel.” They were “Gentiles in the flesh,” that is by the physical fact that they were not Jews; and were contemptuously described as the uncircumcised by those who, as Jews, were circumcised by human hands. And he conceives this to be only another way of describing alienation from God and His manifold covenants of promise, and from the Messiah, the hope of Israel and of mankind. They were without the Christian society, and therefore presumably without God and without hope.

A lonely faith is an undeveloped, undiscovered, untested, unedified faith. Like a man cast on a desert island, it does not know what is in it; it cannot open out its natural germs. It is through the slowly realized recognition of its part in the manifold and multitudinous kingdom of which it has become a member that it discloses its increasing capacities. 1 [Note: H. Scott Holland, God’s City, 35.]

The devout meditation of the isolated man, which flitted through his soul, like a transient tone of Love and Awe from unknown lands, acquires certainty, continuance, when it is shared-in by his brother men. “Where two or three are gathered together” in the name of the Highest then first does the Highest, as it is written, “appear among them to bless them”; then first does an Altar and act of united Worship open a way from Earth to Heaven; whereon, were it but a simple Jacob’s-ladder, the heavenly Messengers will travel, with glad tidings and unspeakable gifts for men. 2 [Note: Carlyle, Miscellanies, iv. 11.]

It is so easy in happy family life, in absorption in one’s special work, to forget the duties of a citizen, to avoid the fret and stress, may-be the hardships and the danger, of politics and social duty. But it is not enough for men to be “kind towards their friends, affectionate in their families, inoffensive towards the rest of the world.” The true man knows that he may not decline responsibility for those whom God has made his fellow-citizens. And higher still, higher than family or country, stands Humanity; and no man may do or sanction aught for either, which will hurt the race. Ever before Mazzini stood the vision of the cross, Christ dying for all men, not from utilitarian calculation of the greatest number, but because love embraces all. 3 [Note: Bolton King, Mazzini, 266.]

III

The Privileges of Citizens

1. They were now citizens—no more strangers, that is, outside the Kingdom of God entirely; nor even sojourners, that is, resident foreigners, such as were found in most ancient States, enjoying some measure of protection and privilege, but not the full rights of citizens. Such was the position of proselytes in Israel. But now, Paul says to his Gentile readers, ye are no longer in any inferior position, but fellow-citizens with the saints, i.e. the people whom God has separated to Himself out of the world. Ye have all the privileges which these enjoy; nay, ye have them in common with them, so that there is absolutely no difference, since all alike now have these privileges on the same ground, that of the reconciling work of Christ. Ye have, through Him, an even more blessed position than the saints under the old covenant had, ye are “of the household of God”—not merely citizens of the Kingdom of God, but children of His family. This flows from the access to God as Father asserted in Ephesians 2:18.

Roman citizenship was in many respects a unique thing. At least there is nothing in the modern world quite like it. When you speak of a citizen of Leicester or of London, you think of one who has either been born or has spent the best years of his life there, who has home, friends, and interests centred in its activities. Roman citizenship did not mean that. It was an imperial privilege rather than local. London indeed gives its freedom to a few honoured strangers, and that bears a faint resemblance to the Roman practice. The Roman citizenship was conferred upon a few persons all over the empire, persons who, had never set foot in the great city. It was given to them for some service they had done, and descended to their children. Paul did not see Rome until he was an old man, but he was all his life a Roman citizen. And it meant in brief three things:—First, it was a grand Freemasonry. It brought a man into companionship and brotherhood with Romans everywhere. It gave him entrance to the best society. It made him one of a superior race, and put upon him a mark of nobility. Secondly, it conferred upon him certain legal rights. It was an aegis of protection over him. Roman law and all Rome’s power were behind him. He could not be tried, condemned, or punished save by Romans, and if ever he was wronged, misjudged, falsely accused, he had the privilege of carrying his cause to the highest court, and appealing to Cæsar himself. And thirdly, there was his responsibility. Wherever he lived, in Tarsus or Ephesus, he remembered that he was a Roman, that Roman manners were expected of him, that his conduct must be that of an imperial race, and that he must try to fashion the place of his abode and the things of daily life as far as possible after Rome’s best models. 1 [Note: J. G. Greenhough, Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 159.]

In the time of the Apostle when the mass of the population were slaves, the goods and chattels of their masters, lying at their absolute disposal for life or death, to be a Roman citizen was a distinction the value of which those who know nothing of slavery but the name can only very inadequately estimate. To be a citizen was to be a man, an integral part of a commonwealth. It was to be identified with its glory: it was to be shielded and armed with the majesty of its influence. In the very name there was a power that commanded the instant reverence of all that could not boast the privilege, and the sympathy of all that did. Hence the alarm of Lysias upon discovering that Paul was a Roman, and the deference which he, who had only purchased his freedom, could not help paying to the man who could declare himself freeborn. But what is mere civil freedom in comparison with spiritual freedom—freedom “from the law of sin and death”; freedom from the curse and tyranny of evil and the evil one; the freedom conferred by “the perfect law of liberty”; freedom to obey the instincts and impulses of our spiritual and immortal nature, and to enter into communion with the Invisible and the Eternal. “He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, and all are slaves besides.” 2 [Note: J. H. Smith, Healing Leaves, 410.]

2. They now belong to the fellowship of the saints.—They are citizens in the holy state—the commonwealth of the people consecrated to God—citizens with full rights and no longer strangers or unenfranchised residents. The idea of the chosen people all through the Old Testament is that they are as a whole consecrated to God. Priests and kings appointed by God to their several offices may indeed fulfil special functions in the national life, yet the fundamental idea is never lost, that the entire nation is holy, “a kingdom of priests.” It is because this is true that the prophets can appeal as they do to the people in general, as well as to priests and rulers, as sharing altogether the responsibility of the national life. Now the whole of this idea is transferred, only deepened and intensified, to the Christian Church. That too has its divinely-ordained ministers, its differentiation of functions in the one body, but the whole body is priestly, and all are citizens—not merely residents but citizens, that is, intelligent participators in a common corporate life consecrated to God.

To the Apostle Paul every Christian was a saint. Turn to the inscriptions of his letters. This is the kind of address we find: “Paul and Timothy, to all the saints in Christ Jesus which are at Philippi.” “Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, to the saints and faithful brethren in Christ which are at Colossae.” “Paul, unto the church of God which is at Corinth, even them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.” It is quite obvious the references here are to living men and women, the men and women who formed the membership of these various churches. These were Paul’s “saints.” And, further, he does not confine the term to a select few in each church, conspicuous for their special piety. The people whom Paul addresses as “saints,” we soon discover, were very far from being perfect people. They were, indeed, full of faults and imperfections and failings. Think of the people at Corinth with their quarrellings and excesses and sensualities! And yet Paul thinks and speaks of them as “saints”! It is not simply that in these faulty and imperfect Christians he sees the promise of the glorified saint, just as the naturalist may see the giant oak in the tiny acorn! Faults and all, these Christians were “saints,” in this sense, that they were consecrated to God, and had given themselves to Christ. For that is the New Testament meaning of the word “saint”; it means one dedicated, set apart, to the will of God. And, in spite of all their shortcomings and sins, these early Christians had given themselves to Christ; the deepest thing in them was the love they bore to Christ; the life they lived, they lived in the faith of Christ. And every one of whom that can be said, according to the Apostle’s teaching, is a “saint.” 1 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 169.]

After being in China more than twenty years Griffith John said to young missionaries, “Preach the Gospel, and take time to be holy as the preparation.” In the Mission Conference in Shanghai, in 1877, he said, “The missionary must above everything be a holy man; the Chinese expect it of him. I am persuaded that no minister can be a great spiritual power in whom this is not in good measure seen. He must be more than a good man; a man who takes time, not only to master the language and the literature of the people, but to be holy.… Brethren, this is what we need if this empire is to be moved by us. To this end the throne of grace must be our refuge; the shadow of the Almighty must every day and every hour be our dwelling, we must take time to be filled with His power, we must take time to be holy.” 2 [Note: A. Murray, Aids to Devotion, 47.]

3. More intimately still, they belong to the family or household of God.—A household is a place where a family is provided for, where there is a regular and orderly supply of ordinary needs. And the Church is the Divine household, in which God has provided stewards to make regular spiritual provision for men, so that they shall feel and know themselves members of a family, understood, sympathized with, helped, encouraged, disciplined, fed. But there is another idea which, in St. Paul’s mind, attaches itself strongly to the idea of the “divine family.” It is that in this household we are sons and not servants—that is, intelligent co-operators with God, and not merely submissive slaves. It is noticeable how often he speaks with horror of Christians allowing themselves again to be “subject to ordinances,” or to “the weak and beggarly rudiments,” the alphabet of that earlier education when even children are treated as slaves under mere obedience. “Ye observe days, and months, and seasons, and years. I am afraid of you.” “Why do ye subject yourselves to ordinances? Handle not, taste not, touch not.” It is perfectly true to say that what St. Paul is deprecating is a return to Jewish or pagan observances. But this is not all. He demands, not a change of observance only, but a change of spirit.

The prominent characteristic of a family is mutual affection. A family is held together by love. There is the love of the father for each and all, and there is the love of all for him and for each other. And so it is in the Divine family. “God is love”; pure, infinite, eternal love. This, as it is the glorious summary of His perfections, the grand resultant expression of all His attributes, is the characteristic of every individual member of His spiritual family. “We love him because he first loved us” and “This commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also.” That, however, which the Apostle seems to have had more particularly in view is the high privilege which attaches to this Divine relationship. “Ye are no more strangers and sojourners, but fellow-citizens with the saints, and of the household of God”: that is—as children of God, born of His Spirit, and genuine members therefore of His spiritual family, you have a peculiar interest in His love and care. He, the Father of all men, is emphatically your Father. Others He regards indeed with the love of benevolence, but you He regards with the love of complacency. Others participate in His universal goodness, but you are the objects of His special solicitude. A child has a certain right to the consideration of his father which no stranger to the family possesses: and so you, as members of God’s family, have a claim upon His affection which none but His spiritual children can allege. Having received from Him not “the spirit of bondage again to fear,” not the spirit of a slave, which shuns His presence and quails before His eye, but “the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father,” so He privileges and encourages you to come before Him lovingly and trustfully, with all the freedom and confidence of a child, casting all your care upon Him, and looking for all things in that boundless love which has pledged all His attributes and excellences, all His treasures of grace and glory, for your perfection and blessedness.

Sin brings separation from God. The word “depart” uttered to the workers of iniquity is not an arbitrary one. It voices a law of God that runs through all His moral realm. Sin pushes the prodigal away from his home and friends, his property, his pleasures, his reputation, his character, even his clothes and his food. The law of the word “depart” has driven him away from everything that was beautiful and of good report. Behold him in his rags and loneliness—feeding swine. Think it not strange, if that man is driven from God and goodness who yields himself to sin. By a changeless law of moral repulsion, he is pushed away. Is it hopeless? Yes, as long as his back is turned toward God. But let him “come to himself,” let him feel his sin and degradation, let him long for home, for forgiveness, for his Father’s face, and the law of changeless love takes hold of him. 1 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 77.]

4. The higher status involves a heavier responsibility.—The enfranchised must do credit to their citizenship; they must live as becometh saints, and manifest the spirit, not of slaves, but of sons. Christian citizenship must begin with the thought of our individual life and purpose. The truly good citizen is made out of the truly good man. The common life is made of our individual lives, and the whole cannot be better than the constituent parts. If, then, our citizenship is to be a Christian citizenship, we must first of all be Christian men. The first thing that the Spirit of Christ does for every one who is in any real and vital sense a disciple, or, as we say in our modern phrase, a Christian man, is to lay hold of the spirit, breathing into it new aspirations, creating, as St. Paul would have said, the new man; and the new man in Christ thus born of the Spirit finds his heart aglow with new aims and new ambitions, new purposes and ideals of conduct. He is illuminated with new thought and with new conceptions of duty and of happiness.

God knows if I could in any way, by preaching that great part of the Communion of Saints, make men generally feel how they are living one in another, and how every single soul has his share of responsibility for his fellows, and every single soul his blessing from undertaking that responsibility, and how any single soul receives a blessing from the fellowship of his fellows in everything that he undertakes—if I could impress that upon my countrymen generally, I would be content to do nothing more in all my life than to preach this greatest of all Christian doctrines. 1 [Note: Frederick Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury, ii. 312.]

As Paul waited in his Roman prison, he had all around him soldiers and civilians, high and low, men of various types and kinds, most of whom claimed, we may suppose, Roman citizenship, and, moreover, nearly all of whom were members of the household of Cæsar; and we can imagine the discussions of which these great texts in his letters are the echo. Yes, he says, you claim to be citizens of this great Empire of Rome, you are members of the household of Cæsar, and you are very proud of it all; but do you also remember that you have to think of your real calling as something deeper and broader and higher and more enduring than all of these, if you are to be in the best sense good citizens of the Roman Empire and good members of the Imperial household; why, then you must bear always in mind that you are called of God to live as members of the commonwealth of Christ, to remember in all circumstances that you are fellow-citizens with the saints and of God’s household. 2 [Note: Bishop J. Percival.]

The Nation some time ago gave the story of a business man, the inheritor of an honoured name and honourable business traditions, who had a temptation put in his way to abandon the old methods of his firm, and join a great trust that cared more for its dividends than the welfare of its workmen. There was money in it, and the man was sorely tempted. But on the night in which the decision was to be taken, he fell into a reverie in front of his fire, and he seemed to behold his old father looking at him, with such concern in his eyes; and at the sight of his father’s face the temptation lost its power; he must act as his father’s Song of Solomon 3 [Note: J. D. Jones, Things Most Surely Believed, 184.]

The Commonwealth of Christ

Literature

Beeching (H. C.), The Apostles’ Creed, 83.

Bellett (J. C.), in Sermons for the People, i. 104.

Boyd (A. K. H.), Sermons and Stray Papers, 198.

Fleming (S. H.), Fifteen-Minute Sermons for the People, 122.

Greenhough (J. G.), Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 158.

Hort (F. J. A.), Village Sermons in Outline, 102.

Jones (J. D.), Things Most Surely Believed, 166.

Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 81.

Smith (J. H.), Healing Leaves, 407.

Stuart (E. A.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., i. 86.

Westcott (B. F.), Christian Aspects of Life, 102.

Christian World Pulpit, lxv. 397 (Percival).

Church of England Pulpit, xliii. 269 (Terry).

Churchman’s Pulpit: St. Andrew, St. Thomas, xiv. 48; All Saints, xv. 410.

National Preacher, xl. 51 (Smith).

Verses 20-22

Spiritual Architecture

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.— Ephesians 2:20-22.

1. St. Paul was a Jew, and the Jewish temple had the same fascination for his thought and the same powerful hold upon his imagination as in the case of other Jews. St. Paul had indeed ceased to worship there, but his attachment to the ideas that the temple represented was so strong that it became with him a favourite image and illustration of the Christian Church. Now as a building that temple was one of the most beautiful in existence; and as the chosen residence of Jehovah it was sacred in the mind of the Apostle. And yet one can hardly think that St. Paul was referring here to the temple at Jerusalem, for he was writing not to Jews but to the men and women of Ephesus, men and women who, for the most part, had never seen the temple at Jerusalem, and could neither appreciate its beauty nor understand the allusion. But then Ephesus had its temple too. Paul and the Ephesians were brought together on one occasion in very severe contest about the merits of this temple, the glory of their city, the temple of the great Diana of the Ephesians. That building was one of the wonders of the world. We are told that when it was erected all the architects of celebrity joined in constructing the plan, that it was reared of the most costly materials, and that after it had been burnt down by the hand of a madman or a fanatic equal care was exercised in the reconstruction of it. Every woman of Ephesus brought all that was costly and splendid to aid in the rebuilding of the favourite temple. It was a saying that the sun never shone upon a finer edifice than the temple of Diana at Ephesus. This structure was quite familiar to the Ephesian Christians; they had ceased indeed to be worshippers at the shrine, but they had not ceased to admire the building. Hence the singular appropriateness with which the Apostle points to it as a beautiful illustration of the church or the building of which he was about to speak.

2. What the Apostle is about to speak of is not any material structure or ecclesiastical organization, but the great spiritual fellowship of the redeemed in Jesus Christ. It is a Church in which living men are the materials, of which God Himself is the Architect and the Builder. Its foundation has been laid with His own hand on the ruins of the fallen temple of humanity. It has been in process of construction ever since; its advancement has never been interrupted; it is still rising, this grand spiritual edifice! One day the glorious structure will be completed. That is the Church of which St. Paul writes—no earthly structure, no ecclesiastical organization, but this spiritual Church, built upon the foundation of apostles and prophets.

If you liken human life and development to a dwelling, the lower story is on the ground, and made of clay. How roomy, and how full of men that live next to the dirt! Above that, however, is a story of iron. There are men of energy, and of a ruling purpose irresistible, seeking and gaining their ends at all hazards; and this story is populous, too. The next story is dressed in velvet and carved wood, and here are they that dwell in their affections, and are brought together by the sympathy of a common gentleness and kindness—but on the lower levels of life. Above that is a room of crystal and of diamonds, and there are but few that dwell in it. From its transparent walls one may behold the heaven and the earth. Out of it men may see the night as well as the day—men who live a life so high, so pure, and so serene that they may be said to dwell at the very threshold of the gate of heaven itself. 1 [Note: Henry Ward Beecher.]

I

The Materials of the Building

The Temple of God is made up of “the blessed company of all faithful people,” the apostles and prophets being the foundation, and Christ Himself the chief corner-stone. This is that one body into which we are all baptized by one spirit. This is the society for which Christ prayed that they might be “all one.”

A few years ago I spent an evening at a meeting called for the purpose of deepening the spiritual life. It was a meeting of great power and blessing. That same night a dream came which fixed itself vividly on my mind. I stood on a rocky promontory overlooking a terrible chasm. Spanning the chasm, from one rocky side to the other, was a bridge of the most dazzling beauty, exquisite in design and workmanship, and built of the most costly material. As I stood in awe and wonder, I exclaimed, “How glorious!” No sooner had I spoken than a voice at my side, in tones of reproach, said: “You see only its beauty. Look again and see its size. That bridge is large enough to carry across in safety the entire human race.” Again I looked, and lo! the bridge, albeit the most beautiful thing my eyes had ever seen, was so wide and so strong that the whole race might have crossed over it. 1 [Note: C. B. Keenleyside, God’s Fellow-Workers, 31.]

1. Where do the materials come from? The stones for this building are dug out of that vast quarry of sinful humanity of which Ephesus formed a part. “In whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God in the Spirit.”

A quaint old legend runs thus: Proceeding from a pile of material which had been left as rubbish, after a great building had been erected, a voice was heard shouting, “Glory! glory!” A passer-by, attracted by the rejoicing, stopped to know the cause; and found that the voice came from a mass of marble half covered with dust and rubbish. He brushed away the dirt, and said—

“What are you shouting for? There is surely little glory to you in the rubbish heap.”

“ No,” said the marble, “not much glory now, that is true; but Michael Angelo has just passed by, and I heard him say, ‘I see an angel in that stone.’ And he has gone away for his mallets and chisels, and he is coming back to carve out the angel.”

And the stone went off again in an ecstasy, shouting, “Glory! glory! glory!”

Humanity was like that stone in the rubbish heap—broken, unclean, useless; but the great Sculptor saw it, and He wondered that there was no one to help. As Angelo saw the angel in that stone, so God sees the image of His Son in the human wreck. Jesus would not have died for us had it been otherwise. To His eye, the flower is in the bud, the fruit in the blossom, the butterfly in the grub, the saint in the sinner, and the hero in the rustic. The grace of God carved a Müller out of the family scapegrace, a Pastor Hsi out of the ruined opium fiend, a John B. Gough out of the bar-room wreck. 1 [Note: C. B. Keenleyside.]

Exclusive of animal decay, we can hardly arrive at a more absolute type of impurity than the mud or slime of a damp, overtrodden path in the outskirts of a manufacturing town. I do not say mud of the road, because that is mixed with animal refuse; but take merely an ounce or two of the blackest slime of a beaten footpath on a rainy day, near a large manufacturing town.

That slime we shall find in most cases composed of clay (or brickdust, which is burnt clay) mixed with soot, a little sand, and water. All these elements are at helpless war with each other, and destroy reciprocally each other’s nature and power, competing and fighting for place at every tread of your foot—sand squeezing out clay, and clay squeezing out water, and soot meddling everywhere and defiling the whole. Let us suppose that this ounce of mud is left in perfect rest, and that its elements gather together, like to like, so that their atoms may get into the closest relations possible.

Let the clay begin. Ridding itself of all foreign substance, it gradually becomes a white earth, already very beautiful; and fit, with help of congealing fire, to be made into finest porcelain, and painted on, and be kept in kings’ palaces. But such artificial consistence is not its best. Leave it still quiet to follow its own instinct of unity, and it becomes not only white, but clear; not only clear, but hard; nor only clear and hard, but so set that it can deal with light in a wonderful way, and gather out of it the loveliest blue rays only, refusing the rest. We call it then a sapphire.

Such being the consummation of the clay, we give similar permission of quiet to the sand. It also becomes, first, a white earth, then proceeds to grow clear and hard, and at last arranges itself in mysterious, infinitely fine, parallel lines, which have the power of reflecting not merely the blue rays, but the blue, green, purple, and red rays in the greatest beauty in which they can be seen through any hard material whatsoever. We call it then an opal.

In next order the soot sets to work; it cannot make itself white at first, but instead of being discouraged, tries harder and harder, and comes out clear at last, and the hardest thing in the world; and for the blackness that it had, obtains in exchange the power of reflecting all the rays of the sun at once in the vividest blaze that any solid thing can shoot. We call it then a diamond.

Last of all the water purifies or unites itself, contented enough if it only reach the form of a dew-drop; but if we insist on its proceeding to a more perfect consistence, it crystallizes into the shape of a star.

And for the ounce of slime which we had by political economy of competition, we have by political economy of co-operation, a sapphire, an opal, and a diamond, set in the midst of a star of snow. 1 [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters (Works, vii. 207).]

2. The Foundation has been laid by apostles and prophets. They are our spiritual progenitors, the fathers of our faith. We see Jesus Christ through their eyes; we read His teaching, and catch His Spirit in their words. Their testimony, in its essential facts, stands secure in the confidence of mankind. Nor was it their words alone, but the men themselves—their character, their life and work—that laid for the Church its historical foundation. This “glorious company of the apostles” formed the first course in the new building, on whose firmness and strength the stability of the entire structure depends. Their virtues and their sufferings, as well as the revelations made through them, have guided the thoughts and shaped the life of countless multitudes of men, of the best and wisest men in all ages since. They have fixed the standard of Christian doctrine and the type of Christian character. At our best, we are but imitators of them as they were of Christ.

If a man is to be a pillar in the temple of his God by and by, he must be some kind of a prop in God’s house to-day. We are here to support, not to be supported. No one can be a living stone on the foundations of the Spiritual House, which is God’s habitation, without being a foundation to the stones above him. 2 [Note: M. D. Babcock, Thoughts for Every-Day Living, 7.]

3. Christ is the chief Corner-stone.

The idea of the corner-stone, so repeatedly alluded to in Scripture, can be understood only by reference to the buildings of remote ages. We must imagine a massive stone, like one of those at Stonehenge, cut to a right angle, and laid in the building so that its two sides should lie along the two walls, which meet at a corner, thus binding them together in such a way that neither force nor weather could dissever them. This term does not necessarily signify that it would be put at the top or at the bottom of a building; it only means that it occupied a very important position, which it would have if it lay a few courses above the lowest, so as to act by its weight on those below, and to serve as a renewed basis to those above. A corner-stone bound together the sides of a building. Some of the corner-stones in the ancient work of the Temple foundations are seventeen or nineteen feet long, and seven and a half feet thick. At Nineveh the corners are sometimes formed of one angular stone. A corner-stone must, then, be of great importance; hence, more than once in Scripture great princes or leaders of a nation are called by this name of corner, or corner-stone ( Judges 20:2; 1 Samuel 14:38; Isaiah 19:13). In A.V. they are called the chief, or the stay, of their people; in the original, the word is “corners,” or “corner-stones.”

But in a sense far higher, far beyond that in which any earthly prince can be called by this name, may we apply it to our Lord Jesus Christ. He so applied it to Himself, when speaking the parable of the Householder on the last week of His public teaching, as recorded by St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke ( Matthew 21:42; Mark 12:10; Luke 20:17). It was so applied by St. Peter when, confronting the Sanhedrin, he boldly charged them with being the murderers of Christ: “This is the stone which was set at nought of you builders, which is become the head of the corner.”

Christianity is not one truth, but many; it is a whole system of truth, and yet is there not one truth in the system that is prominently majestic, as is the sun in the solar system? It is the truth that centres in Jesus Christ. There are many precious truths on which the Church is built; there is one truth on which the Church reposes, as upon the corner-stone. There is one truth on which our hopes and prospects all depend. There are many bright and glorious hopes which we gain from this Bible, but there is one which is more prominent than all the others—it is Jesus Christ, the Saviour of sinners and the King of men. There are many stones in the foundation of our hopes for the future; there is one corner-stone, that is Jesus Christ. 1 [Note: R. Vaughan Pryce.]

The plain historic truth in regard to the Christian Church is this, that from the beginning the Christian Church has held an attitude towards Jesus that absolutely forbids His classification with other men, that absolutely lifts Him above all that have ever trodden the earth before or since, and pays to Him such honour as can justly be given only to the perfect incarnation of the eternal God. The very first record that we have tells us that the early Church used to sing a hymn to Christ as God early in the morning; and it was for that that He was ever worshipped. 1 [Note: H. van Dyke.]

Christ is made the sure foundation

And the precious corner-stone,

Who, the two walls underlying

Bound in each, binds both in one,

Holy Sion’s help for ever,

And her confidence alone.

All that dedicated City,

Dearly loved by God on high,

In exultant jubilation

Pours perpetual melody;

God the One and God the Trinal,

Singing everlastingly.

To the temple, where we call Thee,

Come, O Lord of Hosts, to-day;

With Thy wonted loving-kindness

Hear Thy people as they pray,

And Thy fullest benediction

Shed within its walls for aye.

Here vouchsafe to all Thy servants

What they supplicate to gain;

Here to have and hold for ever

Those good things their prayers obtain,

And hereafter in Thy glory

With Thy blessed ones to reign.

Laud and honour to the Father,

Laud and honour to the Son,

Laud and honour to the Spirit,

Ever Three and Ever One:

Consubstantial, coëternal

While unending ages run. 2 [Note: Angularis Fundamentum, Latin Office Hymn, translated by J. M. Neale.]

II

The Design of the Building

The plan of the Spiritual Temple was drawn by the hand of the Master Architect, who threw up the over-arching dome of the skies and scattered it full of worlds; and taught all architects how to design and all builders how to build. The plan bears on its face the Divine imprint. No human mind could have conceived it, and no human hand could have drawn it. It is inherent in the nature of the Infinite. It is not an afterthought of man, but a forethought of God; not a human accident, but a Divine plan. In beauty it as far exceeds anything that man could draw as the blue sky or the star-studded arch of the heavens exceeds in beauty the highest triumph of human skill. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are God’s thoughts higher than our thoughts, and God’s ways than our ways.

There is a story of an old mason whose work day by day was the mixing of the mortar for use in the erection of a beautiful building. It was this old man’s custom to contemplate the plan of the finished building as displayed outside the contractor’s office. He said it helped him to mix his mortar so much better if he could keep before his mind the lovely thing that the architect had planned. The Bible is the rule of Faith, the character-builder’s “Vade mecum.” It pictures the Perfect Temple, Christ Jesus. It says that we shall be like Him. And he that hath this hope in him, purifieth himself even as He is pure. 1 [Note: E. J. Padfield.]

The greatest European painter of the past fifty years Was probably Arnold Boecklin. He has influenced modern painting abroad more, perhaps, than any other. How? When a young man in Florence his soul was filled with an ideal of painting which was quite other than that of any of his contemporaries, and he laboured to put this ideal upon canvas. At first no one would buy his pictures, and he nearly starved to death. But he laboured on because he loved his art. By and by when he became known, his work, it might almost be said, produced a revolution in the art world. It was not this revolution, however, that he had striven for, but the beauties his soul had seen. So with the Church. The Church will reform the world, not by making that reform her object, but by fixing her gaze and desire upon the ideal which has been set before her by her Lord, the ideal of the “Holy Catholic Church.” 1 [Note: N. H. Marshall.]

1. There is unity in the design.—The building is not a heap of stones thrown carelessly together. It has a marvellous symmetry. It is fitly framed together. The idea in the Apostle’s mind seems to be a temple, with a number of courts all being built at the same time. At first there seems to be but very little connexion between them, but as the building proceeds, every several building grows into a holy temple. How lovely it is to trace the gradual growth of this building, the simple devotion of the first believers, the brotherly love of the Pentecostal Church, the missionary ardour of St. Paul and his companions, the faith and constancy of the early martyrs, who loved not their lives to the death; the steadfast devotion to truth of Waldenses, and Lollards, the Huguenots, and our own Reformers; the consistent godliness in some unknown cottage home, and the brilliant services of Christian philanthropists, who have overthrown gigantic evils by the power of the cross of Christ. And for all this building the chief corner-stone is Jesus Christ, but if He is the chief corner-stone, we also are to be corner-stones, joining together what would otherwise run counter to one another.

The image is that of an extensive pile of buildings, such as the ancient temples commonly were, in process of construction at different points over a wide area. The builders work in concert, upon a common plan. The several parts of the work are adjusted to each other; and the various operations in process are so harmonized that the entire construction preserves the unity of the architect’s design. Such an edifice was the apostolic Church—one, but of many parts—in its diverse gifts and multiplied activities animated by one Spirit and directed towards one Divine purpose.

St. Peter and St. Paul carried out their plans independently, only maintaining a general understanding with each other. The apostolic founders, inspired by one and the self-same Spirit, could labour at a distance, upon material and by methods extremely various, with entire confidence in each other and with an assurance of the unity of result which their teaching and administration would exhibit. The many buildings rested on the one foundation of the Apostles. “Whether it were I or they,” says our Apostle, “so we preach, and so ye believed.” Where there is the same Spirit and the same Lord, men do not need to be scrupulous about visible conformity. Elasticity and individual initiative admit of entire harmony of principle. The hand may do its work without irritating or obstructing the eye, and the foot run on its errands without mistrusting the ear.

As Hooker lay dying, he was observed to be held in an ecstasy of contemplation; and on being asked what might be the subject of his thoughts, he replied, that he was admiring the wondrous order which prevails throughout all the distinctions and multitudes of the heavenly world. “Without which order,” he added, “peace could not be in heaven.” If on earth, which is “without the gate,” we find so much regularity and order, what may we imagine to be the order and fitness of all things in the house of our Father’s glory? 1 [Note: J. Pulsford, Christ and His Seed, 84.]

Unity in itself, especially unity conditioned upon a common catechism, is not an object. Neither is it a thing to be compassed by any direct effort. It is an incident, not a principle, or a good by itself. It has its value in the valuable activities it unites, and the conjoining of beneficent powers. The more we seek it, the less we have it. Besides, most of what we call division in the Church of God is only distribution. The distribution of the Church, like that of human society, is one of the great problems of Divine wisdom; and the more we study it, observing how the personal tastes, wants, and capacities of men in all ages and climes are provided for, and how the parts are made to act as stimulants to each other, the less disposed shall we be to think that the work of distribution is done badly. It is not the same thing with Christian Unity, either to be huddled into a small inclosure, or to show the world how small a plat of ground we can all stand on. Unity is a grace broad as the universe, embracing in its ample bosom all right minds that live, and outreaching the narrow contents of all words and dogmas. 2 [Note: Horace Bushnell, Preacher and Theologian, 62.]

Himself the staunchest champion of the existing union of Church and State, Stanley practised his own precept of making “the most of what there is of good in institutions, in opinions, in communities, in individuals.” And this sympathy was neither a strategic union, nor an armed truce, nor the tolerance of indifference. It was the real fellow-feeling which springs from the power, and the habit, of descending into those deeper regions of thought and emotion where conflicting opinions find a point of union. To the Baptists he was grateful for the preservation of “one singular and interesting relic of primitive and apostolic times”; to the Quakers, for “dwelling, even with exaggerated force, on the insignificance of all forms, of all authority, as compared with the inward light of conscience”; to the “Dissenting Churches” generally, for keeping alive “that peculiar force of devotion and warmth which is apt to die out in light of reason and in the breath of free inquiry.” Religion, he told his American hearers, could ill afford to lose even “the Churches which we most dislike, and which in other respects have wrought most evil.” 1 [Note: R. E. Prothero, The Life of Dean Stanley, ii. 242.]

2. The design has holiness written upon it.—In what sense do we speak of the Church as “holy”? The word as applied to the ancient Jewish Church, from which it was inherited by the Christian Church, meant “set apart for God’s service,” “consecrated to Him.” It implied the election of the nation by God for His purposes; as it is said in Deuteronomy, “Thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself.” These covenant privileges the Apostles regarded as being carried on to the Christian Church, and accordingly St. Paul speaks habitually of the members of the Christian society as “holy,” the word which our Version renders “saints”; and St. Peter similarly quotes and applies to the Church the declaration, “Ye are an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation”—holy because elect.

But both St. Peter and St. Paul invariably explain that this Holiness in the sense of consecration implies a demand for holiness in the sense of purity of life. “Ye are the temple of God,” says St. Paul, “and the Spirit of God dwelleth in you. If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy.” And so St. Peter, “As he which hath called you is holy, be ye yourselves also holy in all manner of living.” Your holiness must not be merely “separation for God’s service,” it must be conformity to God’s! nature. It must be holiness in the sense in which God can be spoken of as “holy,” i.e. perfect, sinless. “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” The condition of this freedom from sin is abiding in Christ and His Spirit, and this is not only possible, but a growing reality which will one day be actual fact of experience.

The Tabernacle was holy because it was indwelt by God. Of course there is a sense in which all places are indwelt by God. “Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord.” But in a very special sense God chose to make the Tabernacle in the Wilderness, for the time being, His local habitation. There it was He manifested Himself, as He manifested Himself nowhere else, to man. There it was He held converse with those whom He had appointed as the representatives of man. There it was He accepted the sacrifices which prefigured the great Sacrifice which was to be offered in the end of the world. The Tabernacle was holy because it was indwelt by God. The Church of Christ is holy because she is indwelt by God the Holy Ghost. “The Lord (says the Prophet) shall suddenly come to his temple.” May we not say that there was at least one great fulfilment of that prophecy on the day of Pentecost, when God the Holy Ghost suddenly came, and by coming laid the first stones of that great Temple of the living Church of Christ which is the Holy Habitation of the Most High?

God occupied, if one may say so, but part of the Tabernacle. God the Holy Ghost occupies every part of the Christian Church. At first sight that seems a truism, but it contains a momentous question for every one of us. If God the Holy Ghost occupies every part of the Christian Temple, if the Church of Christ is filled in every corner by God the Holy Ghost, the question arises, Does God the Holy Ghost dwell in me? If not, then I am not part of that holy temple and I am not part of the Church of God. Let there be no possible mistake; nothing but the indwelling of God the Holy Ghost can make us parts of the true Church of Christ, of that holy temple which is built up of living stones. 1 [Note: W. M. Hopkins, The Tabernacle and its Teaching, 92.]

“Ye are in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. And if Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin; but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.” Wonderful equivalence and exchange! The Lord leaves not His disciple orphaned; He comes to him; He is in him; He manifests Himself to him, and abides in him. And yet it was expedient that He should go away; for otherwise the Paraclete would not come. The Paraclete comes; and behold He mediates and makes for the Christian’s soul and self a Presence of the Lord which somehow is better—far better—for the man in this his pilgrimage and tabernacle than even the joy and glory, if it were granted, of his Saviour’s corporeal proximity—shall I dare to say than his Saviour’s personal indwelling as the Son of Man outside the vehicle of this Presence of the Spirit?

This sacred mediation of the heavenly Spirit, this conveyance through Him of every blessing of the vital Union, appears everywhere in the subject. In the imagery of the Building it is “in the Spirit” that the saints, compacted into their Corner Stone, are “being builded together to be the habitation of God.” “Where that Spirit is”—if I may quote words of the Dean of Llandaff—“where that Spirit is, there is the Body, and only there.” And so it is when the exercises and actions of the spiritual life—which life is Christ—are spoken of at large. It is “in the Spirit” that the saint—that is to say, the genuine Christian here below—“has access” in Christ unto the Father. It is those who are “led by the Spirit” who “are” in truth and deed, not in a certain sense, but in reality and nature, “the sons of God” in His Son. It is “by the Spirit” that they “mortify,” that they continuously do to death, “the deeds of the body,” in the power and name of Christ. It is “by the Spirit” that they “walk” in Christ. It is “because of the Spirit dwelling in them” (a truth full of significance as to the nature of the body of the resurrection) that “their mortal body shall be quickened,” in the day when their Lord from heaven shall change it into likeness to His own. Of that harvest the indwelling Spirit is the Firstfruits. Of that inheritance He is the Earnest. So the Sevenfold One is sent forth into all the earth, as the Eyes, as the Presence, of the exalted Lamb of the Sacrifice. It is by Him, and by Him alone, that that presence is in the Church, and is in the Christian. 1 [Note: Bishop H. C. G. Moule, All in Christ, 171.]

3. The actual is ever approximating to the ideal.—The work keeps moving on. Just as, when any great building is being erected, you see here and there the different workmen engaged with the particular portion which devolves upon them, so it is with the holy temple St. Paul speaks of in the text. The ministers and stewards of God’s mysteries are doing their work in the particular part of the spiritual building assigned to them. One may have his work to do in a part of the building where a skilled and superior workman is required; another in a more humble place, though it too is necessary for the perfection of the whole; some have to chisel wealth into stones meet for the Master’s use; some to chip off the excrescences of intellect, in order that the stones may fit into the walls of God’s building; some have, with ruder hands, to blast the rocks of ignorance and prejudice, and to be content to leave the polished corners of the temple to more experienced hands. But you see, all the while the building is growing; it is rising higher and higher; and as we see more activity, more zeal, more earnestness in the cause of this building of God, we know that Satan trembles; because every living stone in the spiritual building, which is precious in the eyes of the great Architect of the Universe, is a stone rescued from the ruins of the world, destined to have its final place amongst those of which the Lord speaks, when He says, “They shall be mine, when I make up my jewels.”

We did not speak of the “higher life,” nor of a “beautiful Christian,” for this way of putting it would not have been in keeping with the genius of Drumtochty. Religion there was very lowly and modest—an inward walk with God. No man boasted of himself, none told the secrets of the soul. But the Glen took notice of its saints, and did them silent reverence, which they themselves never knew. 1 [Note: Ian Maclaren, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush.]

We call to mind the beautiful description by Tennyson of that mysterious city which Gareth and those with him beheld through the mist. They pronounced it “a city of enchanters,” and it was told them concerning its builders—

They came from out a sacred mountain-cleft

Toward the sunrise, each with harp in hand,

And built it to the music of their harps.

For an ye heard a music, like enow

They are building still, seeing the city is built

To music, therefore never built at all,

And therefore built for ever.

III

The Use of the Building

1. It is to be “ a habitation of God in the Spirit.”—God is to be the occupant of the Temple. Here is the eternal destiny of the true Church of God. It is not only that it is to be “saved in Christ for ever,” ineffable as is the wonder of that fact. It is not only that it is “to enjoy God fully for ever,” though that amazing prospect is so amply and definitely revealed. It is to be a holy Sanctuary, a Shrine, a Divine Presence-Chamber, a permanent Habitation of God. In measure, the wonderful fact has already begun to be; already He dwells in His people, and walks in them; already the eternal Son resides in the very heart of the true member of the Church, by faith. But all this is as when some building, planned already by the master in its final glory, is slowly rising, and beginning to show, amidst fragments and dust and the noise of the workmen, some hints and outlines of what it is to be; the owner, the intending dweller in it, walks in and out amidst the vast beginnings, and perhaps rests and shelters himself under the unfinished walls and roofs. It will be otherwise when the last stone is in place, and the last splendid equipment of the chambers is completed, and he receives his admiring friends in the banquet-chamber, and shines out amidst the shining of his palace, himself the central splendour of it in all his dignity of wealth and welcome. So it is with the saints, and with their common life as the Church of God. Wonderful are the beginnings. Amidst all the apparent confusions of the field where the building is in progress, its form and scale begin to show themselves, across the perspective of centuries and continents. And when the stones already in place are scrutinized, it is found that each of them is a miniature of the whole; a shrine, a home of the presence of the Lord, by faith. But a day of inauguration is drawing on when “we shall see greater things than these.” Then the Divine indwelling in each “living stone” will be complete and ideal, “for sinners there are saints indeed.” And as for the community, it will cohere and be one thing with a unity and symmetry unimaginable now.

There all the millions of His saints

Shall in one song unite,

And each the bliss of all shall view

With infinite delight.

Paul seems to say to these Ephesians: “You have in your city a magnificent temple, the wonder of the world, the temple of Diana. It bears witness to man’s need of worship. But you know that that temple is not really a habitation of God. The eternal Spirit of God dwells not in temples of stone and marble. The one real temple of the Divine Spirit is the human heart. Ye are the habitation of God.” Socrates, indeed, and the Stoics had taught this, but St. Paul’s thought goes far beyond that of Socrates and the Stoics. It is not only the individual human heart, says St. Paul, that is the temple of God—it is a Society. “Ye are builded together,” he says, “in Christ into an habitation of God in the Spirit.” Here is the originality of the conception—a new conception of a Society so filled with the life of Christ that it may be said to be “in Him”; built up, like some cathedral, into a glorious unity of idea, with infinite diversity in its members—a conception then new, now so familiar, of a Church, a continuous embodiment on earth of the Spirit of Christ. And this new conception, this dream, has been realized; it took form; it became a living organism; it lives to-day; it is the Church of Christ. 1 [Note: J. M. Wilson in The Guardian, May 29, 1911, p. 725.]

2. The Church should reveal the power of the indwelling God.—It is a “habitation of God in the Spirit.” This is what no other society is or can be. The Church possesses Divine gifts and powers, because it is the abode of a Divine presence. It is a spiritual Society. The world looks on the Church and sees only a great organization, with much that is imperfect, much perverted, much incomplete. The Divine origin of the Church, the Divine presence with the Church, have never saved it, were never pledged to save it, from the consequences of human wilfulness or error. The world knows nothing of the indwelling Spirit which gives to the Church its essential character. How could it? For we are speaking of that “Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him; but ye know him for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.” Yes; the very meaning and purpose of the existence of the Church is that it is the area, the clothing, the environment, the casket, of the supernatural. If it is not this, it is nothing; it is a mere human society, graceless, giftless, powerless. If it is this, it is verily “the fulness of him that filleth all in all.”

In accomplishing the conversion of the world, the Church has two points to prove and testify—first, that Christ is alive and at work now to-day on earth, and that He can be found of them that believe, and manifest Himself to those that love Him; and, secondly, that He is so by virtue of the deed done once for all at Calvary—by which the prince of this world was judged, and the world was overcome, and man given access to God. What proofs can the Church offer for these two points? It has three proofs to give. First, its own actual life. This is its primary witness, that Christ is now alive at the right Hand of God the Father. This is the cardinal testimony. “Christ is alive, otherwise I should not be alive as you see me this day.” And then this personal life of Christ in His Church verifies and certifies to the world the reality of that old life on earth, of that Death on Calvary, of that Resurrection on Olivet. The fact that the man at the Beautiful Gate has this perfect soundness in the presence of all, the very man whom they knew and saw so lame,—this makes it certain that God did send His Son Christ Jesus to be a Prince of Life. And, therefore, the living Church bears a book about with it, the Gospel book, the Apostolic witness, the witness of those who so beheld, tasted, handled, the Word of Life, of those who were actually there all the time in which “the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us.” And again, the body carries with it a third witness; not only the Apostolic record, but the Apostolic rite, the act commanded by the dying Christ to be done for ever as a memorial and a witness until His coming again. Ever that society rehearses this deed of the new covenant, that deed which is the seal and pledge to men for all time, of the one covenant sealed with Christ’s blood once for all, even on the night of His betrayal. Ever this rehearsal continues until Christ comes again, and every such rehearsal verifies, to all who take and eat the bread, that great sacrifice which the Lord offered when in the upper chamber among the Twelve, “he took bread, and blessed it, and brake.” 1 [Note: H. Scott Holland, Helps to Faith and Practice, 94.]

Dr. Dale was spending a summer holiday at Grasmere, and had walked over to Patterdale to spend the day with Dr. Abbott, the headmaster of the City of London School, an able and prominent Broad Churchman. In the early evening his friend started with him to set him on his way home, still intent on the questions, religious and ecclesiastical, which they had discussed for many hours. “We were walking together from the head of Ullswater up towards the foot of Grisedale tarn, and he asked me, with an expression of astonishment and incredulity, whether I really thought that if the shepherds of Patterdale—a dozen or score of them—determined to constitute themselves a Congregational church, it was possible for such a church to fulfil the purposes for which churches exist. To such a question there could be but one answer. Great natural sagacity, high intellectual culture, however admirable, are not essential: ‘It is enough if, when they meet, they really meet in Christ’s name—but no man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost.’ ” Christ’s presence with the shepherds of Patterdale would be a sufficient reply to all who challenged their competency to discharge the functions of church government. Whatever gifts and endowments might be necessary for the development of religious thought and life in their full perfection, the Divine presence was its one and its only essential condition. 1 [Note: Life of R. W. Dale, 247.]

3. Each individual life should be a shrine of the Spirit.—Union with Christ, and a consequent life in the Spirit, are sure to result in the growth of the individual soul and of the collective community. That Divine Spirit dwells in and works through every believing soul, and while it is possible to grieve and to quench It, to resist and even to neutralize Its workings, these are the true sources of all our growth in grace and knowledge. The process of building may be and will be slow. Sometimes lurking enemies will pull down in a night what we have laboured at for many days. Often our hands will be slack and our hearts will droop. We shall often be tempted to think that our progress is so slow that it is doubtful if we have ever been on the foundation at all or have been building at all. But “the Spirit helpeth our infirmities,” and the task is not ours alone, but His in us. We have to recognize that effort is inseparable from building, but we have also to remember that growth depends on the free circulation of life, and that if we are, and abide, in Jesus, we cannot but be built “for a habitation of God in the Spirit.”

Till man has personal relations with God, it is hard to conceive of his having any corporate relations. It would be a monstrous unreality to conceive of a society which God could make His abode, in no single member of which was the presence of the Spirit of God. A whole cannot be utterly diverse from its parts. The presence of the Spirit of God and of the life of God in the soul of man must be presupposed before we can even approach the subject of the corporate life of the Church, or, in other words, of the building up of the Christian Society as a habitation of God in the Spirit. There is no doubt there was at one time a great danger of over-individualism among religious people in this land. It was not an uncommon thing to hear people say, “A man’s religion lies between himself and his God.” Why, half the Bible is straight against that! Possibly there may be some little danger the other way now.

Man is a temple either for God or His opposite. It is for us to choose whom we will have to live within. The secret of power is the recognition of the all-loving, me-loving, God. All-holy, and therefore never resting, cost Him what it may, till we are holy too. Away with the austere man! Enter and abide, thou striving Spirit of Love! It is a wonderful thing, that consciousness of the Indwelling Jesus. I only lately became positively conscious of this. How, I do not know, of course; but it was so, and He abides. When over us and in us there is One greater and holier, and more filled with love for us than our furthest thought, and we know it and walk in the light of it, there is power and sweet influence. 1 [Note: F. W. Crossley, in Life, by J. Rendel Harris, 70.]

In the days of Trajan there lived a Saint of God named Ignatius, who sealed his testimony with his blood. Ignatius was commonly known as Theophoros—or the Bearer of God. I imagine that there was such a pre-eminent holiness, such a supernatural sanctity in his character that he seemed to be a kind of incarnation of the Divine life. The title given to Ignatius is one to which every Christian who is faithful to his calling may in some degree humbly lay claim. He is a Theophoros, a God-bearer. Christ dwells in him and he dwells in Christ. Christ is “in him the hope of glory.” 2 [Note: S. C. Lowry, The Work of the Holy Spirit, 20.]

We all live in the sublime. Where else can we live? That is the only place of life. And if aught be lacking, it is not the chance of living in heaven, rather it is watchfulness and meditation, also perhaps a little ecstasy of soul. Though you have but a little room, do you fancy that God is not there, too, and that it is impossible to live therein a life that shall be somewhat lofty? If you complain of being alone, of the absence of events, of loving no one and being unloved, do you think that the words are true? Do you imagine that one can possibly be alone, that love can be a thing one knows, a thing one sees; that events can be weighed like the gold and silver of ransom? Cannot a living thought—proud or humble, it matters not; so it come but from your soul, it is great for you—cannot a lofty desire, or simply a moment of solemn watchfulness to life, enter a little room? And if you love not, or are unloved, and can yet see with some depth of insight that thousands of things are beautiful, that the soul is great and life almost unspeakably earnest, is that not as beautiful as though you loved or were loved? And if the sky itself is hidden from you, “does not the great starry sky,” asks the poet, “spread over our soul, in spite of all, under guise of death?” 1 [Note: Maeterlinck, The Treasure of the Humble, 179.]

Our souls go too much out of self

Into ways dark and dim:

’Tis rather God who seeks for us,

Than we who seek for Him.

Yet surely through my tears I saw

God softly drawing near;

How came He without sight or sound

So soon to disappear?

God was not gone: but He so longed

His sweetness to impart,

He too was seeking for a home,

And found it in my heart. 2 [Note: F. W. Faber.]

Spiritual Architecture

Literature

Beeching (H. C.), The Apostles’ Creed, 83.

Bellett (J. C.), in Sermons for the People, i. 104.

Colyer (J. E.), Sermons and Addresses, 173.

Findlay (G. G.), The Epistle to the Ephesians, 146.

Fleming (S. H.), Fifteen-Minute Sermons for the People, 122.

Greenhough (J. G.), Christian Festivals and Anniversaries, 158.

Holland (H. S.), God’s City and The Coming of the Kingdom, 29.

Hopkins (W. M.), The Tabernacle and its Teaching, 89.

How (W. W.), The Knowledge of God, 173.

Keenleyside (C. B.), God’s Fellow-Workers, 11.

Lowry (S. C.), The Work of the Holy Spirit, 42.

Pulsford (J.), Christ and His Seed, 81.

Romanes (E.), Thoughts on the Collects for the Trinity Season, 141.

Skrine (J. H.), Saints and Worthies, 39.

Stuart (E. A.), in Sermons for the People, New Ser., i. 86.

Christian World Pulpit, lii. 401 (Pryce); lxv. 397 (Percival); lxxix. 138 (Marshall).

Church of England Pulpit, xliii. 269 (Terry).

Churchman’s Pulpit: St. Simon and St. Jude, All Saints, xv. 303 (Paget).

Homiletic Review, li. 290 (H. van Dyke).