THE SEALING, EARNEST, AND FIRSTFRUITS. 225

whom "all the Fulness dwells." Yes, we shall be filled, we shall be filling, in our Col. i. 29 with finite receptivity, with that "Fulness

ii. 10.

of God" which means whatsoever Eph. iii. 19. being glory in Him is capable of becoming grace in us.

Here will be a blessed and continuous answer to the prayer of our Communion Service, that wonderful and pregnant petition: "We humbly beseech Thee that all we, who are partakers of this holy Communion, may be FUL-FILLED with Thy grace and heavenly benediction."

Let us not forget the words which, with profound significance, just precede that prayer: "Here we offer and present unto Thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto Thee." We yield ourselves to Him for His will. He meets us with His sacred Fulness.

the

Eph. i. 13, 14;

To this same range of truth we may refer the language of St Paul about the SEALING by the Spirit, and EARNEST of the Spirit, and the FIRSTFRUITS of the Spirit.

iv. 30. 2 Cor. i. 22. Rom. viii. 23.

No

doubt the

1

"Gifts" of the primeval Church are considerably in view in each of those phrases. But surely the same reasons which have constrained us to apply the Apostle's language about the Fulness to the "more excellent way" of the divine life of faith, hope, and love, apply here. The believer, already a believer by the Spirit's lifegiving operation, is now also "sealed" as the property of his Master by the same Spirit's developed possession of Him. And this possession, with its holy fruit, is the "earnest " of his full possession of his God for ever in eternity; the "first-fruits'

Gal. vi. 8. of the harvest of "life everlasting" which is to be reaped "of the Spirit" then at length.

Come forth then, eternal Spirit, and be ever coming forth, from Thy secret place within our spirit, into all that we are, and all that we have, to fill all in all in us, and to overflow through us. Fill Thou us in a blessed continuousness and habit, enabling us in humble continuousness to

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receive Thee, day by day and hour by hour, through faith. At each crisis of need fill us with Thy special fulness out of Thy habitual. And when the hour of death shall come, so fill us that we may see with our spirit's eyes, in Thy light, heaven opened, and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. Amén.

CHAPTER XII.

OR the main theme of our enquiry in the

FOR

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, EPII. 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." Eph. ii. 22. 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