cleitus.'

[48] Acts xx. 17 ff.

[49] Col. iv. 16.

{48}

THE EPISTLE TO THE EPHESIANS

CHAPTER I. 1-2.

Salutation.

[Sidenote: _Salutation_]

St. Paul begins this, in common with his other epistles, with a brief
salutation to a particular church or group of churches, in which is
expressed in summary the authority he has for writing to them, the
light in which he regards them, and the central wish for them which he
has in his heart.

Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus through the will of God, to the saints
which are at Ephesus, and the faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you
and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Here, then, we have three compressed thoughts.

1. The particular person Paul writes this letter because he is not
only a believer in Christ but also an 'apostle of Christ Jesus through
the will of God.' The word apostle is a more or less general word for
a delegate, as when St. Paul {49} speaks of the 'apostles (or
messengers) of the churches[1];' but by an apostle in its highest
sense, 'an apostle of Jesus Christ,' St. Paul meant one of those,
originally twelve in number, who had received personally from the risen
Christ a particular commission to represent Him to the world. This
particular and personal commission he claimed to have received, in
common with the twelve, though later than they--at the time of his
conversion. 'Am I not an apostle?' he cries. 'Have I not seen Jesus
our Lord[2]?' 'He appeared to me also as unto one born out of due
time[3].' 'In nothing was I behind the very chiefest apostles[4].'
And as his claim to the apostolate was challenged by his Judaizing
opponents he had to insist upon it, to insist that it is not a
commission from or through Peter and the other apostles, or dependent
upon them for its exercise, but a direct commission, like theirs, from
the Head of the Church Himself. He is, he writes to the Galatians,
'Paul, an apostle, not from men, nor (like those subsequently ordained
by himself or the other apostles, like a Timothy, or a Titus, or like
the later clergy) through man,' but directly through, {50} as well as
from, the risen Jesus whom his eyes had seen, and His eternal Father[5].

It is surely a consolation to us of the Church of England, who belong
to a church subject to constant attack on the score of apostolic
character, to remember that St. Paul's apostolate was attacked with
some excuse, and that he had to spend a