While the holiness of God gathers up into one stream of white radiance the revelation of His character, “the fulness of God” spreads it abroad in its many-coloured richness and variety. The term accords with the affluence of thought that marks this supplication. The might of the Spirit that strengthens weak human hearts, the greatness of the Christ who is the guest of our faith, His wide-spreading kingdom and the vast interests it embraces and His own love surpassing all,--these objects of the soul’s desire issue from the fulness of God; and they lead us in pursuing them, like streams pouring into the ocean, back to the eternal Godhead. The mediatorial kingdom has its end; Christ, when He has “put down all rule and authority,” will at last “yield it up to His God and Father”; and “the Son Himself will be subjected to Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. xv. 24-28). This is the crown of the Redeemer’s mission, the end which His love to the Father seeks. But when that end is reached, and the soul with immediate vision beholds the Father’s glory, the Plenitude will be still new and unexhausted; the soul will then begin its deepest lessons in the knowledge of God which is life eternal. * * * * * St Paul is conscious of the extreme boldness of the prayer he has just uttered. But he protests that, instead of going beyond God’s purposes, it falls short of them. This assurance rises, in verses 20 and 21, into a rapture of praise. It is a cry of exultation, a true song of triumph, that breaks from the apostle’s lips:-- “Now unto Him that is able to do above all things,-- Yea, far exceedingly beyond what we ask or think,-- According to the power that worketh in us: To Him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus, Unto all generations of the age of the ages.--Amen!” (vv. 20, 21). Praise soars higher than prayer. When St Paul has reached in supplication the summit of his desires, he sees the plenitude of God’s gifts still by a whole heaven outreaching him. But it is only from these mountain-tops hardly won in the exercise of prayer, in their still air and tranquil light, that the boundless realms of promise are visible. God’s giving surpasses immeasurably our thought and asking; but there must be the asking and the thinking for it to surpass. He puts always more into our hand and better things than we expected--when the expectant hand is reached out to Him.