CHAPTER XII.

FOR the main theme of our enquiry in the

last chapter we went to the Epistle to

the Ephesians. And now, for the last of our successive explorations of this continent of living truth, we come to the same Epistle again, and to a passage more full if possible than even that other of the inmost treasures of the doctrine of the Spirit.

Who has not read and re-read the closing verses of the third chapter of the Ephesians with the feeling of one permitted to look through parted curtains into the Holiest Place of the Christian life? Who has not longed to step into that sanctuary in a personal experience of its riches and blessings? Who that in any true sense has entered in by grace does not feel, does not know, that indeed it is rest and joy beyond all exposition to be there?

THE SPIRITUAL TEMPLE, EPH. II., III. 229

It is the spiritual summum bonum of the Pilgrimage. It is the beginning of the happiness of the eternal Country.

Approaching this very sacred passage for some special meditations on one glorious part of it, let us first briefly recall its contents as a whole.

It forms the resumption of a dropped subject. At the close of ch. ii. the Apostle had written of the building of the great spiritual Temple, the true Church of God, the holy structure in which every stone is living and in living contact with the Angulare Fundamentum, the Stone of the Corner. That structure he had described as rising, growing, "into an holy sanctuary in the Lord; " preparing for the eternal Day of its final consecration, when it should be ready at length and for ever to be the "abiding habitation of God in the Spirit." Then followed a long and memorable digression, in which the imagery of sanctuary and habitation disappears. But at the fourteenth verse of the next chapter, our present chapter, it comes up again. We read again, and in a like connexion with the work and grace of

Eph. ii. 22.

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Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, of a permanent inhabitation." 1 We see again a divine Indweller, abiding in a shrine constructed as it were of human materials and prepared for His presence by the skill and power of the Spirit. But there is a difference. The former passage had to do rather with the believing Company as such, the Temple of the true Church. This has to do rather with that company as seen in its individuals; it speaks of the Eph. iii. 17. hearts" of the saints, a word full of the thought of separate personalities; it contemplates them as each an abode for the divine Indwelling. Each living stone is as it were taken by itself, and seen as a miniature of the Living Temple; not so that the glorious total is forgotten, for it appears throughout the whole passage in the use of the plural (" your hearts,"

Eph. iii. 18. and "with all saints"), but so that the individual aspect of the matter is the most prominent for the time. This form of the divine Inhabiting St Paul here dwells upon, and supplicates the Father of the great Family

Eph. iii. 16.

1 The Karоikĥoat of iii. 17 takes up the Karоikητýριov of ii. 22.

THE PRAYER OF EPH. III.

231

that by the Spirit it may take place fully and decisively in each Ephesian disciple. And then he proceeds to prayer on prayer, all Eph. iii. 17-21. springing from this same root of blessing. He asks that the saints, thus each possessed by Christ as perpetual Inhabitant, "rooted and grounded" in that eternal Love which is manifested and conveyed through Him, may all together in some sort grasp the measureless dimensions of that Love, and all get a new and blissful knowledge in particular of the Love of Christ Himself, and all be filled with "the Fulness of God," with "the plenitude of those blessings which the Infinite One is willing and able to bestow at each moment upon the finite recipient." Then follows that great Doxology in which "glory is given," now and in the endless prospect, to the Father of the Son and of the saints in Him, in view of His almighty and unmeasured power to bless, and of the coming eternal manifestation of His praise "in the Church, and in Christ Jesus.'

" 1

We have thus in some slight sense traversed

1 I use the preferable reading here, ἐν τῇ ἐκκλησίᾳ καὶ ἐν Χριστῷ 'Inσov.

the paragraph and reviewed its outline. I do so partly because there is a sort of sacred necessity to do so; to be so near such treasures of revealed grace and life, and to say nothing about the rest of them because our precise concern is with only one or two, is at least difficult. But also this view of the passage as a whole brings out what I would wish to remember throughout our present enquiry, that the profoundly individual blessing and experience with which we are specially concerned is set forth in connexion with more than individual interests. It is a thing which does not terminate in the saint; it goes out through him to "all the saints," and it finds its rest and goal in the glory of God.

But now to come to the treasures of truth which are our immediate subject. They are, the Dwelling of Christ in the heart by faith, and the connexion of this great gift of grace with a special work of the HOLY SPIRIT.

Let me speak very simply, and at no great length, of the Inhabitation of the Lord in the heart. The theme is one rather for believing