In our union through grace and faith with Christ crucified, we realize again the original design of our being. Christ has purchased by His blood no new or foreign bride, but her who was His from eternity,--the child who had wandered from the Father’s house, the betrothed who had left her Lord and Spouse. In regard to this “mystery of our coherence in Christ,” Richard Hooker says, in words that suggest many aspects of this doctrine: “The Church is in Christ, as Eve was in Adam. Yea, by grace we are every one of us in Christ and in His Church, as by nature we are in our first parents. God made Eve of the rib of Adam. And His Church He frameth out of the very flesh, the very wounded and bleeding side of the Son of man. His body crucified and His blood shed for the life of the world are the true elements of that heavenly being which maketh us such as Himself is of whom we come. For which cause the words of Adam may be fitly the words of Christ concerning His Church, ‘flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones--a true native extract out of mine own body,’ So that in Him, even according to His manhood, we according to our heavenly being are as branches in that root out of which they grow.”[147] FOOTNOTES: [141] Compare pp. 47, 83, 169, 189. [142] Heb. ii. 9-12, ix. 14, 15, x. 5-22, xiii. 12. [143] See Rom. vi. 1-11; Col. ii. 11, 12; 1 Cor. x. 2, xii. 13. [144] Ἐν ῥήματι. Λόγος is word as expressive of _thought_. Ῥῆμα, the utterance of a living voice,--a _sentence_, _pronouncement_, _message_; it is the Greek term employed in all the passages here cited. [145] The words “of His flesh and of His bones,” following “members of His body” in the A.V., appear to be an ancient gloss adopted by the Greek copyists, which was suggested by Gen. ii. 23. They are unsuitable to the idea of a spiritual union, and interrupt rather than help the apostle’s exposition. [146] St Paul changes the Ἕνεκεν τούτου of the original to Ἀντὶ τούτου, which conveys the idea that marriage has its counterpart in the fact that we are members of Christ. [147] _Ecclesiastical Polity_; v. 56 7. CHAPTER XXVII. _THE CHRISTIAN HOUSEHOLD._ “Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. ‘Honour thy father and mother,’ which is a first commandment, _given_ in promise,--‘that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.’ And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but nurture them in the chastening and admonition of the Lord.