“The apostle incites the readers,” says Chrysostom, “by the thought of the prize at stake. When he has said that our enemies are powerful, he adds thereto that these are great possessions which they seek to wrest from us. When he says _in the heavenly places_, this implies _for the heavenly things_. How it must rouse and sober us to know that the hazard is for great things, and great will be the prize of victory. Our foe strives to take _heaven_ from us.” Let the Church be stripped of all her temporalities, and driven naked as at first into the wilderness. She carries with her the crown jewels; and her treasure is unimpaired, so long as faith in Christ and the hope of heaven remain firm in her heart. But let these be lost; let heaven and the Father in heaven fade with our childhood’s dreams; let Christ go back to His grave--then we are utterly undone. We have lost our all in all! FOOTNOTES: [154] Ἐνδυναμοῦσθε [from δύναμις] ἐν Κυρίῳ καὶ ἐν τῷ κράτει τῆς ἰσχύος αὐτοῦ. See the note on these synonyms, on p. 76. Comp., for this verb, Col. i. II; 2 Tim. iv. 17; Phil. iv. 13: Πάντα ἰσχύω ἐν τῳ ἐνδυναμοῦντί με,--“I have strength for everything in Him that _enables_ me.”] [155] Comp. remark on μεθοδεία (iv. 14), p. 247. [156] John xii. 31, xiv. 30, xvi. 11: comp. Luke iv. 5-7; Heb. ii. 14. [157] 2 Cor. ii. 11, xi. 3; 2 Thess. ii. 9, 10; 2 Tim. ii. 26, etc. [158] Rev. xii, 7-10; Gen. iii. 4, 5; Zech. iii. 1; Job i. [159] Ch. iv. 27; 2 Cor. ii. 11; Luke xxii. 31. [160] Luke x. 17-20, xi. 14-26. [161] Col. i. 13: comp. Acts xxvi. 18, etc. [162] Luke xvi. 8, xviii. 6. [163] Τὰ πνευματικὰ tῆs πονηρίας. [164] Mr. Moule aptly observes, in his excellent and most useful Commentary on Ephesians in the _Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges_: St Paul’s “testimony to the real and objective existence” of evil spirits “gains in strength when it is remembered that the epistle was addressed (at least, among other designations) to Ephesus, and that Ephesus (see Acts xix.) was a peculiarly active scene of asserted magical and other dealings with the unseen darkness. Supposing that the right line to take in dealing with such beliefs and practices had been to say that the whole basis of them was a fiction of the human mind, not only would such a verse as this [vi. 12] not have been written, but, we may well assume, something would have been written strongly contradictory to the thought of it” (p. 176). [165] See p. 103. [166] The objection against the common rendering taken from the absence of the Greek article (τά) before the phrase ἐν τοῖς ἐπουρανίοις, required to link it to τὰ πνευματικὰ τῆς πονηρίας, is not decisive. [167] Col. ii. 8-10, iii. 1-4; Phil. iii. 20, 21: comp. Eph. i. 3, ii. 6, 18, iv. 10, 15; Heb. vi. 19, 20, etc. CHAPTER XXIX. _THE DIVINE PANOPLY._