obedience." "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled
with the spirit."

There is a tender exhortation to husband and wife, based on the likeness
of their union to Christ and his church. There is a special word to
children, servants, masters. The sweetness is matched by the strength.
"Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his
might."

The epistle is full of the spirit of a present heaven. There is scarcely
any thought of the future, no reference to the second coming, no dwelling
on the hereafter. It is all-sufficient, all-uniting love,--Christ, a
spiritual presence, as the head--God the Father of all. The love of
Christ is a pure spiritual passion. There is no theorizing about him,
not even much personal distinctness,--only the consciousness as of some
celestial personality. The seen and unseen worlds seem to blend in a
common atmosphere.

Even as an ideal, this transcends the philosophy of Epictetus, and
outshines the vision of Plato. As one of the charter documents of a
society which had come into an actual existence,--as the aim toward which
thousands of men and women were struggling, however imperfectly,--it
marks the coming of a new life into the world.

The Pauline idea of Christ is shown as it worked itself out in the brain
and heart of Paul himself. In the Fourth Gospel we have, not the
experience of an individual, but an idealized portrait of the Master.

The germ may have lain in some genuine tradition of his words, as they
were caught and treasured by some disciple more susceptible than the rest
to the mystical and contemplative element in Jesus. These words, handed
down through congenial spirits, and deeply brooded; these ideas caught by
minds schooled in the blending of Hebraic with Platonic thought,--minds
accustomed to rely on the contemplative imagination as the discloser of
absolute truth; the waning of the hope of Messiah's return in the clouds;
the growth in its place of a personal and interior communion with the
divine beauty and glory as imaged in Jesus; a temper almost indifferent
to outward event, too full of present emotion to strain anxiously toward
a future, yet confident of a transcendent future in due season; an
assumption that in this belief lay the sole good and hope of humanity,
and that the rejection of this was an impulse of the evil principle
warring against God; the crystallization of these memories, hopes, and
beliefs into a