His eye explores the eternity in which the Creator dwelt alone, and gathers strength for conflict and martyrdom from those inscrutable counsels which took note of things and beings that were not, wrote indelible names in a Book of Life, and drew the boundary lines of future existences of which every moment and every circumstance was as clearly foreseen and as minutely predestined as though ages and generations had not to run their round before the first foundation of the first of them should be laid in time.

You can estimate, from this faintest sketch of the opening verses of the Epistle, the improbability (if I might so speak) of there being one local allusion or one personal greeting in the latest. When St Paul descends at

last from 'the holy mount' of his more than Apocalyptic intuition, it is but to tell how these Divine determinations were realized and wrought out in time; how the election became a calling, and the calling a sealing, and the sealing a possession, and the possession a glory; how the Christ of predestination became the Christ of incarnation, and the Christ of humiliation, and the Christ of resurrection, and the Christ of ascension, and the Christ of dominion, and the Christ of 'headship over all things to the Church;' how the dead in sins are quickened and raised and exalted already in Him -lifted into a new life, re-made for a Paradise not of manual but of spiritual culture, brought back from an exile of estrangement and godlessness into a home of reconciliation and com

munion—yea, forming, themselves, a holy and magnificent temple, of which Jesus Christ is the chief corner-stone, and God, through eternal ages, God in the Spirit, the Light and the Presence.

What room in such an Epistle for reminiscences and associations of earth? What place, we almost feel, for images and metaphors, temples of Diana, wonders of the world, amidst unearthly scenes and bodies celestial? We seem to be conscious, as we read this one letter, of a sort of reluctance to descend even to what is commonly called the practical. The word, I know, is inaccurate. Nothing is so practical as the spiritual. Nothing touches the spring of conduct like doctrine-if by 'doctrine' we understand God revealing Himself to what

this Epistle calls 'the eyes of the heart.' But, adopting the distinction, we say that St Paul finds here an unusual difficulty in turning to the practical. In the third chapter he tries to do so, and fails. For this cause I Paul, the prisoner of Jesus Christ for you Gentiles '-he is going to say, 'beseech you that ye walk worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called.' A whole chapter intervenes. Again he loses himself in matters deeper and higher; rises once more into a region divine; extricates himself through prayer and praise, and resumes at last in the fourth chapter the interrupted and suspended application. Even now it is but to enunciate principles, themselves running up again into mystery. This is what makes the Epistle

before us so dear, so precious to the Christian.

This is what makes it the model of the evangelist and the directory of the pastor. It is a standing protest in the Churches against that dull, dry, dismal detail of duties, against that morality falsely so called, under which the Church of England, for example, through the eighteenth century languished, slumbered, and sinned. St Paul knew that out of the heart are the issues of the life; and if he discoursed upon duty, if he discoursed upon the relation of wives and husbands, of masters and slaves, he so spake as to make each a wellspring of revelation, bringing Christ into all, and kindling into a sacrifice of living devotion each act and each circumstance of the mortal being.

All this he has done. With the handcuff on

his arm-with the rude rough Prætorian, some