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out the world to-day know when they see him, if they never knew before, that Jesus is greater than the greatest teacher: there is a spontaneous worship of Jesus as "Lord" wherever his name is known. Burn your creeds, all of them, to-day, and dethrone Jesus from his place at the right hand of Eternal Majesty, and the loving and not witless world's heart will reënthrone and re-deify him to-morrow.

XII.

THE FULLNESS OF GOD.

A COMMUNION SERMON.

The fullness of God. - EPHESIANS iii. 19.

THIS letter of the great Paul for I shall regard it as his, though the question is mooted by the scholars was probably written during his enforced leisure while waiting to be transferred to Rome. Though in prison, he was not isolated. A highway from Asia Minor and the west to Jerusalem passed through Cæsarea, and he was in frequent communication with persons whom he had known during his active career. It was the time of the long Roman peace, an age of much travel and commercial and mental activity, in many ways. not unlike that in which we live. Like this, too, it was an age of cosmopolitanism, gathering its ideas, as it did its merchandise, from all parts of the world. The apostle,, thus in intercourse with the world, but forbidden his accustomed activity and supported at public expense, was perhaps able to enter into a more comprehensively intelligent interest in events. He had by natural selection

chosen as the scene of his labors in the gospel those parts of the world which were fullest of the modern spirit and energy. There he had planted his churches in the busy whirl of life. It was the kind of thing he liked. He believed in men and in their doings. He believed in life. He believed that the gospel belonged to the living world crowded with affairs. He was a Catholic, not a Separatist. He grasped that frequent saying of Jesus, that he came that men might have life, and might have it abundantly.

It was Paul's rediscovery of this fact that saved the gospel from oblivion. The Jewish followers of Jesus were tending to become a sect of recluses who ran away from life like monks, who practiced separating rites, and made a virtue of negations. He began his career by proclaiming that everything was good in its way, that there was room for everything, and that the best place to preach the gospel was where men were thickest and busiest. He struck out for the centres of population and of intercourse, and there he planted his churches.

Asia Minor was in that day the scene of an intense life. Upon slavery and monopoly, as today upon machinery and monopoly, was flourishing a class endowed with wealth and leisure. Since there was no pity for him, the slave took precisely the place machinery does to-day. There was a prosperous middle class engaged in trade. Disregarding the slave, as they did, society was well

to-do and intelligent. There was a general smattering of learning. The lecture lyceum system was universal. Men were mentally alert and had an itch for novel ideas. Eclecticism was the rage. The greater variety of elements one could weave into his thought, the more learned he was thought. It was a shallow method with most, yet at that time anything else would have been more objectionable. Out of this medley the natural tendency of the mind was already beginning to bring a species of organic unity. Something of Persian dualism and Hindoo theosophy, brought by travelers, many of them Jews of the dispersion, mingled with the wholesomer Hebrew and the saner Greek; and out of it were already beginning to appear signs of that which afterward was known as Gnosticism. It was a combination of philosophy and religion and manner of life. As yet it was only in the air. Intelligent and sensitive men felt it and were aware of its importance.

Paul knew of it. Indeed, his vigorous preaching of the philosophy of life had had something to do in causing its first crystallizations. Young men of open minds and generous impulses visited him in prison. Such men were always attracted to him by his sturdy manhood and intellectual breadth. He could learn from them what was doing in Ephesus and the other cities of Asia Minor, as we older men probe the young fellows from college or from the European universities about the freshest thought

which has not yet found its way into print. They could tell the apostle that which interested him exceedingly about the latest philosophical speculations and the terms which were current. It was the age of the gnosis, that is, of science. As yet that word meant knowledge in its general sense, as we employ, or should employ, the word science. It had not become the technical name of a system. After the term science, which was meant to indicate their method, the most common and important term was pleroma, or "fullness." All the lyceums were occupied in debates about the fullness, somewhat as a few years ago, while the doctrine of development was still on trial, every class-room discussion touched upon evolution. This doctrine of the fullness was to the general effect that mind, that reason, that wisdom, truth, power, life, so abounded as to fill the universe; so that folly, falsehood, weakness, death, unreason, were crowded out. It was as yet vague and self-contradictory, a medley from the four corners of the earth. Yet there was something hopeful about its affirmation of the fullness. Men had been content, partly because of mental indolence or cowardice, to think there was much of emptiness, that in fact the odds were on the side of negations. "Oh, to be nothing, nothing," they had sighed, and had fled from life with its full experiences as though they contaminated. Negations were practiced under the mistake that they were virtues. A conflict was waged

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