St. Paul has unfolded the dimensions of the revelation of God given in the catholic church. The interests of the whole of mankind and of the whole universe which it is to subserve--that is its breadth: the eternal and slowly realized intention of God of which it is the expression--that is its length: the spiritual elevation up to which it takes men--that is its height: the gulf of sin and misery from which it rescues them--that is its depth. And now he is about to press upon the Asiatic Christians the moral obligations which this great catholic brotherhood involves. He begins his exhortation and enforces it by reminding them of what he was enduring as a prisoner for Christ's sake--'For this cause (i.e. seeing that all this is true), I, Paul, the prisoner of Christ Jesus in behalf of you, the Gentiles.' But when he has thus made a beginning, he pauses to add weight {122} to his appeal by emphasizing a personal but very important consideration. The particular truth of the catholicity of the Church had been in quite a special sense entrusted to him, Paul, personally, as apostle of the Gentiles. He assumes that they have heard of this, his special commission, and that it was the subject of a special revelation to himself[1]. Indeed the fact must have formed part of his teaching at Ephesus and throughout Asia, for his mind was full of it; he had contended for it against strong opposition in his epistle to the Galatians[2]; he had asserted it in his speech on the occasion of his being made a prisoner at Jerusalem: and he had quite recently explained it 'in brief compass' in the letter to the Colossians which was intended to have, in part at least, the same readers as his present epistle[3]. This special revelation then and accompanying commission justifies him in particular, and more than any of {123} the other apostles, in pressing upon his converts the doctrine which forms the special topic of this epistle. But to think of his special office as apostle of a catholic society, is to think also of its extraordinary difficulty. [Sidenote: _The difficulty of catholicity_]