When all the over-work of life Is finished once, and fast asleep
We swerve no more beneath the knife But taste that silence cool and deep ; * Life and Letters of F. W. Rohertson, 57.
EPHESIANS III. 19 207
Forgetful of the highways rough,
Forgetful of the thorny scourge,
Forgetful of the tossing surge, Then shall we find it is enough?
How can we say "enough" on earth — " Enough " with such a craving heart ?
I have not found it since my birth, But still have bartered part for part.
I have not held and hugged the whole, But paid the old to gain the new: Much have I paid, yet much is due,
Till I am beggared sense and soul.
Not in this world of hope deferred,
This world of perishable stuff: — Eye hath not seen nor ear hath heard
Nor heart conceived that full "enough": Here moans the separating sea,
Here harvests fail, here breaks the heart:
There God shall join and no man part, I full of Christ and Christ of me.^
III.
All the Fulness of God.
When he asks for " all the fulness," St. Paul thinks of other elements of revelation in which we are to participate. God's wisdom. His truth, His righteousness, along with His love in its manifold forms — all the qualities that, in one word, go to make up His holiness — are communicable and belong to the image stamped by the Holy Spirit on the nature of God's children. " Ye shall be holy, for I am holy " is God's standing command to His sons. So Jesus bids His disciples, " Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect."
^ While the holiness of God gathers up into one stream of white radiance the revelation of His character, " the fulness of God " spreads it abroad in its many-coloured richness and variety. The term accords with the affluence of thought that marks this supplication. The might of the Spirit that strengthens weak * Christina G. Rossetti, Poems, 192.
2o8 OUR HIGH CALLING
human hearts, the greatness of the Christ who is the guest of our faith, His wide-spreading Kingdom and the vast interests it embraces and His own love surpassing all — these objects of the soul's desire issue from the fulness of God ; and they lead us in pursuing them, like streams pouring into the ocean, back to the eternal Godhead. The mediatorial kingdom has its end : Christ, when He has " put down all rule and authority," will at last " yield it up to his God and Father " : and " the Son himself will be subjected to him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all " (1 Cor. xv. 24-28). This is the crown of the Kedeemer's mission, the end which His love to the Father seeks. But when that end is reached, and the soul with immediate vision beholds the Father's glory, the plenitude will be still new and unexhausted ; the soul will then begin its deepest lessons in the knowledge of God which is life eternal .^
(1) To have all the fulness of God is to be full of joy. — "These things have I spoken unto you that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full " (John xv. 11). In the following chapter and the 24th verse, " Hitherto have ye asked nothing in my name ; ask, and ye shall receive, that your joy may be full." And in the following chapter and the 13th verse, our Lord prays, " And now I come to thee ; and these things I speak in the world, that they might have my joy fulfilled in themselves," or, in other words, " that they may be filled full with my joy."
^ Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian .^
^ She really cared for nothing but the life of the spirit. The sources of joy were very far removed from the surface of things for her. They were in the inner recesses and not subject to sudden changes of weather like a brawling mountain torrent. To some extent this belief that God was in all creation made her a little self-centred. She was like one who sits at a warm fireside in the winter time heedless of storms and tempests outside. She did what her own heart asked her to do. She liked to quote : " I must be filled with joy if my feet are on the right road and my face set towards 'the gate that is called Beautiful,' though I may fall many times in the mire and often in the mist go astray." *
(2) It is to be full of j^eace. — " Now the God of hope fill you
1 G. G. Findlay, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 202.
* G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 296.
• J. Ramsay MacDonald, Margaret Ethel MacDonald, 60.
EPHESIANS III. 19 209
with all joy and peace in believing, that ye may abound in hope." Joy is peace singing ; peace is joy reposing.
^ If peace means satisfaction, acceptance of the whole of an experience as good, and if even we, in our weakness, can frequently find rest in the very presence of conflict and of tension, in the very endurance of ill in a good cause, in the hero's triumph over temptation, or in the mourner's tearless refusal to accept the lower comforts of forgetfulness, or to wish that the lost one's preciousness had been less painfully revealed by death — well, if even we know our little share of this harmony in the midst of the wrecks and disorders of life, what limit shall we set to the Divine power to face this world of His own sorrows, and to find peace in the victory over all its ills ? ^