And our part is determined for us, that we may contribute to the great whole. Our gracethe Divine help accorded usis proportional to the place which our part has in the great unity.
The unity of life, of all life, nay of all being, of the seen and the unseen: and, specially the fellowship of man with men and of man with God.
The Epistle to the Ephesians...in the fewest words commends this aspect of Creation to us, and it is...of intense practical significance.
If we believe in the unity shewn under three different aspects in Eph. 2:14-18, hope and confidence will return, when we look on the unfathomable sadnesses of life; if we believe that for each of us a work is prepared which we can do, if we surrender ourselves to God (2:10), we shall be saved from the restless anxiety of self-chosen plans; if we believe that all the details of ordinary life have a spiritual side and opportunities of service (Eph. 5:20 f.: cf. Col. 3:17), we shall be enabled perhaps to preach our Gospel a little more effectually in life.
[Part of the foregoing is taken from a letter, published in the Life and Letters of Bishop Westcott, vol. ii. p. 232, the rest from notes for an unpublished sermon.]
The forces of Nature, so to speak, are revealed to us as gathered together and crowned in man, and the diversities of men as gathered together and crowned in the Son of Man; and so we are encouraged to look forward to the end, to a unity of which every imaginary unity on earth is a phantom or a symbol, when the will of the Father shall be accomplished and He shall
sum up all things in Christ
all things and not simply all personsboth
the things in the heavens and the things upon the earth
(Eph. 1:10). (
Christus Consummator
, p. 103.)
Men, so to speak, furnish the manifold elements through which (in the language of St Paul) a body of Christ (Eph. 1:23) is shaped; just as the world furnishes the elements through which man himself finds expression for his character. (
ib.
p. 106.)
In the Epistle to the Ephesians St Paul lays open a vision of the spiritual origins and influences and issues of things temporal, and confirms the truth which lies in the bold surmise of the poet that earth is in some sense a shadow of heaven.
Now he sees in the fabric of the material Temple with its wall of partition a figure of the state of the world before the Advent, and then passes to the contemplation of its living antitype, built on the foundation of apostles and prophets with Christ for its head corner-stone. Now he traces in the organisation of the natural body the pattern of a glorious society fitly framed together by the ministries of every part, and guided by the animating energy of a Divine Head.
Now he shews how through the experience of the Church on earth the manifold wisdom of God is made known to the heavenly hierarchy. Now he declares that marriage, in which the distinctive gifts and graces of divided humanity are brought together in harmonious fellowship is a sign, a sacrament in his own language, of that perfect union in which the Incarnate Word takes to Himself His Bride, the firstfruits of creation. (
The Incarnation and Common Life
, p. 161.)
The concluding appeal or peroration (6:10-20), breathing a very lofty and eloquent tone, contains a carefully-wrought account of the warfare between the Church and the powers of darkness and evil which brood over the world. It is to be observed that here as generally throughout the Apostolic writings, the imagery is borrowed from the poetical books of the Old Testament. Most of it may be found in