receive wisdom (ἐν) in connection with the knowledge of himself.
The wisdom then which the apostle says God has communicated to us, is the divine wisdom in the Gos- pel, the mystery of redemption, which had been hid for ages in God, but which he has now revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit. See the glorious doxology for this revelation contained in Rom. 16, 25-27. Indeed this whole Epistle to the Ephesians is a thanksgiving to God for the communication of this mysterious wisdom. Mysterious, not so much in the sense of incomprehensible, as in that of undiscoverable by human reason, and a matter of divine revelation. With wisdom the apostle connects φρόνησις, which is here used much in the same sense as σύνεσις in Col. 1, 9, ‘That ye may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. The verb φρονέω is used for any mental exercise or state whether of the understanding or of the feelings. In the New Testament it is commonly employed to express a state of the affections, or rather, of the whole soul, as in Mark 8, 33, ‘Thou savourest not the things which be of God.” Rom. 8,5, “To mind the things of the flesh.” Col. 8, 2, “Set your affections on things above,” ὥς. &e. Hence its derivative φρόνημα is used not only for thought, but more generally for a state of mind, what is in the mind or soul, including the affections as well as the understanding. Hence we have such expres- sions as φρόνημα τῆς σαρκός ὦ carnal state of mind ; and φρόνημα τοῦ πνεύματος a state of mind produced