the bondage and darkness of Egypt. The principalities and powers of this world, spiritual hosts of wickedness in the super-terrestrial regions, are vainly endeavouring to hold back the people of God, in "this darkness." We have only to wait like Israel at the Passover "with our loins girt, and our feet shod." The Deliverer will soon appear from heaven, clad in armour of salvation, as in the ancient passover songs, cleaving the darkness with his sword of light, and leading forth the captives. In these themes, variously interwoven in Ephesians and Colossians, it is difficult to say whether it is the note of unity or the note of freedom which predominates. Certainly we can recognize the same great apostle of liberty who in the epistles of the earlier period had proved the power and value of his religious insight by seizing upon the doctrine of Son ship as the essential heart of the gospel. It is the same genius consciously taught of God who had demanded and obtained recognition on equal terms for his gospel of Grace and Son ship, a gospel given by revelation of God's Son "in" him, who now demands that the gift of the Spirit to Jew and Gentile be recognized as calling for reconstruction of the doctrine of the coming Kingdom. "He that ascended is the same also that descended to the lowest depths that he might fill all things." And he poured out the "gifts" in order that they might make one organism of the new social order, a new creation animated and vitalized by Jesus' spirit of loving service. For just as in all the great earlier epistles the note of longing for peace and unity in love rings ever stronger and clearer above the strife, so in the later epistles, the note of triumph in liberty has a deep under-chord of thanksgiving for reconciliation achieved. The great pæan of reverent adoration for the glory of God's grace in Eph. i. 3-14, is a thanksgiving for the union of Jew and Gentile in one common redemption. The retrospect of the work of God in ii. 11-21 is the proclamation of "peace to him that was far off and peace to him that was nigh." It is described as the building of Jew and Gentile into one living temple, upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus Himself being the chief corner-stone. The exhortation to the unity of the Spirit in iv. 1--vi. 9 rests upon an exultant application of the figure of the "one new man" in whose body all are members, that would be inconceivable if at the time of writing the church which had received the gifts from the ascended Lord was not indeed one body, but two bodies standing apart in mutual distrust and jealousy.