nature is the manliest and noblest that advances in the knowledge of Divine truth and in the self-sacrificing love of Christ. The whole fabric of the Christian character is built up in the ever-increasing exercise of Christ-like love. +Lessons.+--_Christian manhood is_--1. _Acquired by an intelligent faith in Christ._ 2. _Developed by an imitation of Christ._ 3. _Maintained and strengthened by constant fidelity to Christ._ _GERM NOTES ON THE VERSES._ Vers. 13-16. _The Growth of the Church._ +I. The goal of the Church's life+ (ver. 13).--The mark at which the Church is to arrive is set forth in a two-fold way--_in its collective and its individual aspects._ We must all unitedly attain the oneness of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God; and we must attain, each of us, a perfect manhood, the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. All our defects are, at the bottom, deficiencies of faith. We fail to apprehend and appropriate the fulness of God in Christ. The goal of the regenerate life is never absolutely won; it is hid with Christ in God. But there is to be a constant approximation to it, both in the individual believer and in the body of Christ's people. And a time is coming when that goal will be practically attained, so far as earthly conditions allow. The Church after long strife will be reunited, after long trial will be perfected. Then this world will have had its use, and will give place to the new heavens and earth. +II. The malady which arrests its development+ (ver. 14).--The childishness of so many Christian believers exposed them to the seductions of error, and ready to be driven this way and that by the evil influences active in the world of thought around them. So long as the Church contains a number of unstable souls, so long she will remain subject to strife and corruption. At every crisis in human thought there emerges some prevailing method of truth, or of error, the resultant of current tendencies, which unites the suffrages of a large body of thinkers, and claims to embody the spirit of the age. Such a method of error our own age has produced as the outcome of the anti-Christian speculation of modern times, in the doctrines current under the names of Positivism, Secularism, or Agnosticism. Modern Agnosticism removes God farther from us, beyond the reach of thought, and leaves us with material nature as the one positive and accessible reality, as the basis of life and law. Faith and knowledge of the Son of God it banishes as dreams of our childhood. This materialistic philosophy gathers to a head the unbelief of the century. It is the living antagonist of Divine revelation.