III. The prayers now offered might suffice, if St Paul were concerned only for the individual needs of those to whom he writes and their personal advancement in the new life. But it is otherwise. _The Church_ fills his mind. Its lofty claims at every turn he has pressed on our attention. This is God’s holy temple and the habitation of His Spirit; it is the body in which Christ dwells, the bride that He has chosen. The Church is the object that draws the eyes of heaven; through it the angelic powers are learning undreamed-of lessons of God’s wisdom. Round this centre the apostle’s intercession must needs revolve. When he asks for his readers added strength of heart and a richer fellowship with Christ, it is in order that they may be the better able to enter into the Church’s life and to apprehend God’s great designs for mankind. This object so much absorbs the writer’s thoughts and has been so constantly in view from the outset, that it does not occur to him, in verse 18, to say precisely _what_ that is whose “breadth and length and height and depth” the readers are to measure. The vast building stands before us and needs not to be named; we have only not to look away from it, not to forget what we have been reading all this time. It is _God’s plan for the world in Christ_; it is the purpose of the ages realized in the building of His Church. This conception was so impressive to the original readers and has held their attention so closely since the apostle unfolded it in the course of the second chapter, that they would have no difficulty in supplying the ellipsis which has given so much trouble to the commentators since. If we are asked to interpret the four several magnitudes that are assigned to this building of God, we may say with Hofmann[97]: “It stretches _wide_ over all the world of the nations, east and west. In its _length_, it reaches through all time unto the end of things. In _depth_, it penetrates to the region where the faithful sleep in death [comp. iv. 9]. And it rises to heaven’s _height_, where Christ lives.” In the like strain Bernardine à Piconio, most genial and spiritual of Romanist interpreters: “_Wide_ as the furthest limits of the inhabited world, _long_ as the ages of eternity through which God’s love to His people will endure, _deep_ as the abyss of misery and ruin from which He has raised us, _high_ as the throne of Christ in the heavens where He has placed us.” Such is the commonwealth to which we belong, such the dimensions of this city of God built on the foundation of the apostles,--“that lieth four-square.”