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great idea launched upon the world. One confused fisherman, with a few men of like mind of whom he was the leader, formed the solitary rock in the midst of a world of shifting sand, and upon this rock Jesus would build His Church — a society embody- ing His spirit, living according to His laws, steadfastly administer- ing His principles to the whole world, little by little leavening the lump, the society of the meek who should inherit the earth !
The Eoman Empire had in Paul's time gathered into a great unity the Asiatics of Ephesus, the Greeks of Corinth, the Jews of Palestine, and men of many another race ; but grand and imposing as that great unity was, it was to Paul a poor thing compared with the oneness of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. Asiatics of Ephesus, Greeks of Corinth, Jews of Palestine, and members of many another race could say, "Our citizenship is in heaven." The Eoman Eagle swept over wide regions in her flight, but the Dove of Peace, sent forth from Christ's hand, travelled farther than she. As Paul says in the context, the Ephesians had been strangers, " alienated from the commonwealth of Israel," wandering like the remnants of some " broken clans," but now they are gathered in. That narrow community of the Jewish nation has expanded its bounds and become the mother-country of believing souls, the true " island of saints." It was not Eome that really made all peoples one, it was the weakest and most despised of her subject races.
^ What the early Christians felt when they embraced Christ and joined the little churches in their own cities, was that they had become members of a new race, a new and heavenly com- munity, which was their proper and eternal home. Until now they had thought themselves mere human beings, born into a very strange and often cruel world, without any definite or trustworthy knowledge as to their destiny, plagued with toil and hardship, disease and the fear of death. But now suddenly their whole perspective was altered. Instead of being citizens of this world they were citizens of heaven, and only sojourners and strangers in the earthly life. Instead of being units in a confused and wearisome life that soon went out into nothingness, they were members of a blessed and everlasting family of which God was the Father, and Jesus Christ the loving herald of His pur- poses.^
1 N. H. Marshall
58 THE COMMONWEALTH OF CHRIST
^ Foremost and grandest amid the teachings of Christ were these two inseparable truths — There is hut one God; all men are the sons of God ; and the promulgation of these two truths changed the face of the world, and enlarged the moral circle to the confines of the inhabited globe. To the duties of men towards the Family and Country were added duties towards Humanity. Man then learned that wheresoever there existed a human being, there existed a brother; a brother with a soul immortal as his own, destined like himself to ascend towards the Creator, and on whom he was bound to bestow love, a knowledge of the Faith, and help and counsel when needed.^
3. Salvation comes to the individual through society. — The salvation in the Bible is supposed usually to reach the individual through the community, God's dealings with us in redemption thus follow the lines of His dealings with us in our natural development. For man stands out in history as a " social animal." His individual development, by a Divine law of his constitution, is rendered possible only because he is first of all a member of some society, tribe, or nation, or state. Through membership in such a society alone, and through the submissions and limitations of his personal liberty which such membership involves, does he become capable of any degree of free or high development as an individual. This law, then, of man's nature appears equally in the method of his redemption. Under the old covenant it was to members of the " commonwealth of Israel " that the blessings of the covenant belonged. Under the new covenant St. Paul still conceives of the same commonwealth as subsisting and as fulfilling no less than formerly the same religious functions. True, it has been fundamentally reconstituted and enlarged to include the believers of all nations, and not merely one nation ; but it is still the same commonwealth, or polity, or church ; and it is still through the Church that God's "covenant" dealings reach the individual.
It is for this reason that St. Paul goes on to describe the state of the Asiatic Christians, before their conversion, as a state of alienation from the "commonwealth of Israel." They were " Gentiles in the flesh," that is by the physical fact that they were not Jews ; and were contemptuously described as the uncircumcised by those who, as Jews, were circumcised by human hands. And
^ Mazzini.
EPHESIANS II. 19 59
he conceives this to be only another way of describing alienation from God and His manifold covenants of promise, and from the Messiah, the hope of Israel and of mankind. They were without the Christian society, and therefore presumably without God and without hope.
^ A lonely faith is an undeveloped, undiscovered, untested, unedified faith. Like a man cast on a desert island, it does not know what is in it ; it cannot open out its natural germs. It is through the slowly realized recognition of its part in the manifold and multitudinous kingdom of which it has become a member that it discloses its increasing capacities.^