There are two thoughts in the petition : he prays that the Ephesians may be able to apprehend the love of Christ in its vast dimensions, and that they may have an experimental knowledge of it, though it passes knowledge. But the exposition of each clause by itself will be the best exposition of the whole text.
I.
EOOTED AND GROUNDED IN LoVE.
These two distinct conceptions " rooted " and " grounded " are frequently united in the Scriptures (as in Ps. cxliv. 12, and 1 Cor. iii. 9). Two cognate conceptions — one borrowed from the pro- cesses of nature, and the other from human art — are employed to indicate at once the life, the growth, the strength, and the stability of a Christian's hope, A tree and a tower are the material objects which are used here as alphabetic letters to express a spiritual thought. More particularly, as a tree depends for life and growth
1 R. W. Church, ViHagc Sermons, ii. 287.
EPHESIANS III. 17-19 165
upon its roots being embedded in a p;enial soil, and a tower depends for strength and stability upon il« foundation, thp Apostle desires, by means of these conceptions, to express and illustrate the corresponding features of the Christian life. If disciples are compared to living trees, love is the soil they grow in ; if they are compared to a building, love is the foundation on which it stands secure.
Tl The root is taken from the field of nature, the grounding or founding from the world of art. The root is laid in the soil to imbibe its virtues, the foundation is placed on its base to sustain the edifice. The root grows, and produces fruit, the foundation stands, and gives strength. The root needs continual supply, the foundation rests in its completeness, and abides always.^
1. Booted. — We cast our affections down into the character and the Being of God ; we wind them about His attributes ; we strike them into His promises; we drive them deep into His faithfulness. There the roots of our affection lie. They take up, they drink in, the nature of the love they live in ; they are always assimilating themselves to it, and they send up its sweet savour by little, silent threads, which are always running to the fountain of life. Our words, our actions, our whole outer being, cannot choose but mould itself to them, and take that love. Because of those secret processes of the roots which are in Christ, we love. We love simply because we are rooted in love.
^ Most men, when they wish to be religious, begin by trying to give up certain things, and to do certain other actions. But there must be something that goes before that, else it is just as if you planted leaves without stems, or flowers without roots. The springs of life must be in their right places. The roots must be really in God. True religion does not consist so much in this thing, or that thing, as being always in a certain tone and atmo- sphere. The plant takes its character from the ground ; the soul, from its inmost, deepest associations. There must be that behind whereby we are always making inspirations of love.^
^ In descending by one of the passes of the Alps into the lovely valley of the Saarnen, the traveller may notice on the right hand of the path a pine tree, growing in extraordinary circum- stances. Enormous masses of hoary rock lie scattered in the bottom of the ravine. They have fallen from the crags which
^ J. Vaughan. ' Jhid.
i66 THE LOVE OF CHRIST
form its stupendous walls, and it is on the top of one of these, a bare, naked block, that the pine tree stands. No dwarf, misshapen thing, like the birch or mountain ash on an old castle wall, where the wind or passing bird had dropped the seed ; it is a forest giant, with rugged trunk, and top that shoots a green pyramid to the skies. At first sight one wonders how a tree seated on the summit of a huge stone, raised above the soil, with no apparent means of living, could live at all, still more grow with such vigour as to defy the storms that sweep the pass, and the severe and long winters that reign over these solitudes. A nearer approach explains the mystery. Finding soil enough on the summit, where lichens had grown and decayed, to sustain its early age, it had thrown out roots which, while the top stretched itself to the light, lowered themselves down to the naked stone, feeling for earth and food. Touching the ground at length, they buried themselves in it to draw nourishment from its unseen but inexhaustible supplies, to feed the sapling into a giant tree. ^
2. Grounded. — More than once in this Epistle to the Ephesians St. Paul uses the imagery of the foundations of a building to describe the foundations of a Christian life. Perhaps the reason was this. To any one entering Ephesus, the first object that would strike his eyes would be the splendid temple of Diana. There it stood, with its one hundred and seven pillars, each sixty feet high. All Asia had contributed to the building of it. Though its foundations were laid on marshy ground, years and years of patient labour had overcome all the natural difiiculties of the place. So St. Paul, coming to Ephesus to supplant this false form of worship, felt that the Christian's life must rest on a foundation as hidden, but as firm, as that of this heathen temple. That foundation-stone, he says, must be love.