(1) St. Paul calls the Father 'the God of our Lord Jesus Christ,' as our Lord Himself calls Him 'my God' (John xx. 17) in His resurrection state. It is no doubt of Christ _as man_ that the Father is God; but this relation of the Son as man to the Father depends upon an eternal subordination in which the Son, even as God, stands to the Father from whom He derives His divine life. The essential subordination of the Son (and Spirit) to the Father as the one fount of Godhead, is continually suggested in the New Testament; but it involves no inferiority in Godhead, or subsequence in time--'nothing before or after, nothing greater or less,' as the _Quicunque vult_ says. And it conveys to us the moral lesson that a subordinate position is not to be resented as if it were a dishonour. (2) The spirit of 'wisdom and revelation' vouchsafed to us is to enable us to apprehend in a measure the divine 'wisdom and prudence[1]' manifested in God's work of creation and redemption. The humility which is content to correspond patiently and teachably with the method of God is, as Francis Bacon was at pains to teach, of the essence of all fruitful human science. (3) The expression 'the fulness' or 'the fulness of the Godhead[2]' means the sum total of the divine attributes, which, instead of being spread over different angelic mediators, as the Colossians were disposed to imagine, are, by the divine will, all concentrated and combined in the glorified Christ. And here St. Paul teaches the Ephesian Christians that all that belongs to the glorified Christ is to belong also to the Church, which is His body. It is Christ who gives to all creatures whatever various gifts of life they have. He 'filleth all in all'; that is, 'He filleth the whole universe with all variety of {81} gifts.' But something much more than various gifts--the sum total of all He is--He pours, or intends to pour, into the Church, so that the Church as well as the Christ shall embody, and thus be identified with, the fulness of the divine attributes. At present the Church is this only ideally, or in the divine intention: the actually existing Church has still much need of growth that her members 'may be filled (as they are not at present) up to the measure of the divine fulness'; or, in other words, up to 'the measure of the stature of the fulness of the Christ[3].' The fulness, according to St. Paul's doctrine, is to be sought first in the eternal God; then in the glorified Christ; then, through Him, in the fully developed Church; and, finally, through the Church, in a sense in the universe as a whole, when the work of redemption is done and God is at last 'all in all' throughout His creation.