to him as a journey, was the Church of God, in its vast extent of all the souls who had been, are, or are to be of that divine commonwealth. For these he laboured and prayed, suffered and died; with these was all his sympathy; and to add to their number his highest joy. In that magnificent vision of the City of Peace he swept away as unworthy of a thought the divisions which had arisen from human sin. To him there was neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free; but Christ was all things and in all.

For the very idea under which Christianity presented itself in the teaching of the Apostles was the new creation of all things springing out of the love of God, exhibited in the Incarnation of His Son, and implanted in the hearts of men by His Spirit as a consequence of the Birth, the Life, the Death, and the Resurrection of Christ. The whole order of morality was based upon the personal union of the Godhead and Manhood in the Godman. The natural Sonship of Christ as man led to the adopted Sonship of men His brethren. The work which the Holy Spirit wrought in the highest degree in our Lord's Incarnation, effecting the union of the divine and human natures in the Person of the Eternal Son, He worked in a lower degree, but in the same order, in the redemption of each individual. For it is the participation of the divine nature communicated to the soul by

the gift of habitual grace which constitutes that adopted Sonship, on which rests the whole operation of the Christian, the whole merit of eternal life.

This divine generation was declared by our Lord in His words to Nicodemus to be necessary for every one who would even enter into His kingdom. Of this entrance He spoke as a new birth, as true and real as the natural birth, for "that which is born of the Spirit is spirit," just as "that which is born of the flesh is flesh." The state of man in it is called by St. Paul "a new creation." For creation is the passage from not being into being. And being is twofold; the being of nature, and that of grace. Now the first creation was that in which creatures were made by God from nothing in a natural being. The new creation is that by which they are produced in the being of grace, because those who are without grace are nothing before Him. Thus the infusion of grace is a creation. The sons of this new creation are viewed and described collectively by St. James, in words which rather shadow out than delineate distinctly some untold and inconceivable magnificence of design, while he connects them with the Incarnation of the Son and the gift of the Spirit. For, after declaring that every good giving and every perfect gift is from above, descending from the Father of Lights, he adds: "Of His own will has He begotten us, in order that we might be a sort of beginning of

His creatures."*

By entrance into this state of adoption, all relative superiority or inferiority arising from nation, sex, or civil condition is done away; for what are these to a creature renewed after the likeness of his Creator?

Again, let us compare what this adoption is in the individual with what it is in the mass. In the individual, as we have seen, it is "a new creation;" in the mass it is entitled "the Body of Christ."‡ For as the origin and seed are supernatural, so are the growth and termination. The soul, new created in grace, has new desires, affections, hopes, and fears, directed towards the objects now disclosed to it, and the mass of souls thus new created grows up into a Body, which takes the name of its Head, because it is first formed and then ruled by the Spirit of its Head.

Further, let us contrast both the individual in this state of adoption with the individual as he was before in the broken and impaired state of the Gentile world, and the Christian commonwealth with the Gentile commonwealth.

As to the individual, there is man in his state of fallen nature wasting himself away in desires which deceived him with a false appearance of good; the pendant to which is man in his new state of adoption created according to God in justice and true sanctity.§

* John iii. 6; Gal. vi. 15; James i. 16, 17.

† See Gal. iii. 26, and Col. iii. 9.

As to the mass, the Apostle collects in one view the whole heathen world, summing them up in clear decisive words as "the nations walking in the vanity of their minds, having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their hearts, who in their callousness have given themselves up to lasciviousness to work every uncleanness with greediness." As a contrast he sets before men the Church, as springing directly from the gifts of Christ at His ascension; for as part of these gifts, administered through all time by the Holy Spirit, came the whole arrangement of the ecclesiastical ministry, the appointed guard against error, "until we all arrive into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ."* Thus it is that the Christian commonwealth,-in order to show how entirely supernatural a creation it is, how absolutely the work of God redeeming, how exactly and definitely an organic whole,— is termed "the Body of Christ." And of such a title there is full justification in the fact that in every individual composing it the root is the grace of adoption, not an imitation merely, but an actual participation of that immeasurable grace which is bestowed on Christ incarnate, which in the mass grows up to what the Apostle calls by the name

Ephes. iv. 17-19 and 13.

of the material created thing most wonderful in the universe of God, the Body of His Son. In what other words was it possible to show so clearly how the Christian people was the reduplication of the incarnate God?

source.

Let us trace some of the social consequences hence arising. How could those whose whole spiritual existence lay in the possession of this adopted Sonship-of this brotherhood embracing the redeemed out of all races and countries-suffer their hopes, desires, and sympathies to be confined within the limits of a particular nation? Man, no doubt, will ever love his country with a natural love: but it is a natural love alone. It cannot rise above its The nation is a result of the dispersion of the human family at Babel, and therefore a result of human division and sin. Its attraction, its manifold ties and organisation, begin and end with this world. The hopes and fears participated in it have their beginning and their end here. With this life it ceases itself, and is never reproduced. How could those who were exalted by their very state as Christians to be "fellow-citizens of the saints and of the household of God" make the nation their home, and sink to be mere citizens of Romulus?

And descending from the commonwealth to the individual, let us trace the conception of virtue itself as it would be formed by man in his fallen state, and as it is formed by the Christian.

Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Epictetus, whom