Christian beliefs, and implies that it had been familiar long before the
date of this Epistle, which itself dates from not more than at the most
thirty years from the death of Christ. Surely that lapse of time is far
too narrow to allow of such a belief having sprung up, and been
universally accepted about a dead man, who all the while was lying in a
nameless grave.

The descent is presented as _His_ act, but decorum and truth required
that the exaltation should be God's act. 'He humbled Himself,' but 'God
exalted Him.' True, He sometimes represented Himself as the Agent of His
own Resurrection and Ascension, and established a complete parallel
between His descent and His ascent, as when He said, 'I came out from
the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go
unto the Father.' He was no less obedient to the Father's will when He
ascended up on high, than He was when He came down to earth, and whilst,
from one point of view, His Resurrection and Ascension were as truly His
own acts as were His birth and His death, from another, He had to pray,
'And now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with Thine own self with the glory
which I had with Thee before the world was.' The Titans presumptuously
scaled the heavens, according to the old legend, but the Incarnate Lord
returned to 'His own calm home, His habitation from eternity,' was
exalted thither by God, in token to the universe that the Father
approved the Son's descent, and that the work which the Son had done was
indeed, as He declared it to be, 'finished.' By exalting Him, the Father
not merely reinstated the divine Word in its eternal union with God, but
received into the cloud of glory the manhood which the Word had assumed.

II. The glory of the name of Jesus.

What is the name 'which is above every name'? It is the name Jesus. It
is to be noted that Paul scarcely ever uses that simple appellative.
There are, roughly speaking, about two hundred instances in which he
names our Lord in his Epistles, and there are only four places, besides
this, in which he uses this as his own, and two in which he, as it were,
puts it into the mouth of an enemy. Probably then, some special reason
led to its occurrence here, and it is not difficult, I think, to see
what that reason is. The simple personal name was given indeed with
reference to His work, but had been borne by many a Jewish child before
Mary called her child Jesus, and the fact that it is this common n