Do we not need to be _strong_--to “gain full strength,” as the apostle prays, in order to grasp in its substance and import this immense revelation and to handle it with practical effect? Narrowness is feebleness. The greatness of the Church, as God designed it, matches the greatness of the Christ Himself. It needs a firm spiritual faith, a far-seeing intelligence, and a charity broad as the love of Christ to comprehend this mystery. From many believing eyes it is still hidden. Alas for our cold hearts, our weak and partial judgements! alas for the materialism that infects our Church theories, and that limits God’s free grace and the sovereign action of His Spirit to visible channels and ministrations “wrought by hand.” Those who call themselves Churchmen and Catholics contradict the titles they boast when they bar out their loyal Christian brethren from the covenant rights of faith, when they deny churchly standing to communities with a love to Christ as warm and fruitful in good works, a gospel as pure and saving, a discipline at least as faithful as their own. Who are we that we dare to forbid those who are doing mighty works in the name of Christ, because they follow not with us? When we are fain to pull down every building of God that does not square with our own ecclesiastical plans, we do not apprehend “what is the breadth!” We draw close about us the walls of Christ’s wide house, as if to confine Him in our single chamber. We call our particular communion “the Church,” and the rest “the sects”; and disfranchise, so far as our word and judgement go, a multitude of Christ’s freemen and God’s elect, our fellow-citizens in the New Jerusalem--saints, some of them, whose feet we well might deem ourselves unworthy to wash. A Church theory that leads to such results as these, that condemns Nonconformists to be strangers in the House of God, is self-condemned. It will perish of its own chillness and formalism. Happily, many of those who hold the doctrine of exclusive Roman or Anglican, or Baptist or Presbyterian legitimacy, are in feeling and practice more catholic than in their creed. “With _all_ the saints” the Asian Christians are called to enter into St Paul’s wider view of God’s work in the world. For this is a collective idea, to be shared by many minds and that should sway all Christian hearts at once. It is the collective aim of Christianity that St Paul wants his readers to understand, its mission to save humanity and to reconstruct the world for a temple of God. This is a calling for _all the saints_; but only for _saints_,--for men devoted to God and renewed by His Spirit. It was “revealed to His _holy_ apostles and prophets” (ver. 5); and it needs men of the same quality for its bearers and interpreters.