plans absolutely one's own, is to work arbitrarily and
ignorantly, and ultimately to fail and to know that one has failed.
Thus men, when they realize the facts of their condition, must depend,
and rejoice to depend, wholly upon God as for forgiveness where they
have done wrong, so also for suggestion and power that they may do
anything aright. There is {76} then no room for human pride. It is a
mistake. We come back to recognize, what St. Paul realized in his own
deep spiritual experience and taught the Church at the beginning.
Whatever is good in the world is all of divine initiation and of divine
grace. It is all, not to our glory, but (as St. Paul three times
repeats in the opening paragraphs of our epistle) 'to the praise of his
glory,' or 'to the praise of the glory of his grace which he freely
bestows on us' out of His pure love and goodwill.

[Sidenote: _St. Paul's leading thoughts_]

These are the great leading thoughts which are in St. Paul's mind as he
begins to write to the Asiatic Christians. His heart, his imagination,
his intellect is full of the thought of the catholic society as it
exists in Christ, the extension of His life; of this society as the
outcome of an eternal and slow-working purpose of God; of this society,
as serving universal divine ends for humanity and for the universe; of
this society, as affording a sphere in which all men's faculties may be
enlightened and delighted with the depth and largeness of the divine
purpose; while his whole being is kept, safe from all the delusions of
pride, in continual and conscious dependence upon divine grace. {77}
With these thoughts reflected in our minds we shall find that we have
the main clue to the whole of the Epistle to the Ephesians, and more
particularly to all the words of the opening chapter, which St. Paul
begins with a great ascription of praise to God for the blessing of the
Church.

Blessed _be_ the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath
blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly _places_ in
Christ: even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world,
that we should be holy and without blemish before him in love: having
foreordained us unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ unto
himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of
the glory of his grace, which he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved:
in whom we have our redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of
o