t+ (_karpon_,
not _karpon_) of righteousness--the result, in witness and service, of
your reconciliation and renewal,[6] fruit which is borne +through Jesus
Christ+, the Procurer and the Secret of your fruit-bearing life, to
+God's praise and glory+, the true goal and end of all our blessings
and of all our labours.

So the Letter opens; with greeting, with benediction, and then with an
outpouring, of sympathies full at once of the warmest and tenderest
_humanity_ and of the inmost secrets of divine truth and life. It is a
preamble beautifully characteristic not only of St Paul but of the
Gospel. It illustrates from many sides the happy fact that there is
nothing which so effectually opens human hearts to one another as the
love of Christ. We are all sadly familiar with the possibilities of
isolation between heart and heart. Poets have written with eloquent
melancholy of our personalities as islands which lie indeed near
together, but in an unfathomable ocean, over whose channels no boat has
ever passed. Schools of pessimistic thought have positively affirmed
that never really has one _ego_ found its way into another through the
hermetic seal of individuality; all that we seem to know of others is
but the action of our own mind within itself, occasioned by a blind
collision with a something not itself, which we can strike upon but can
never really know. Such lucubrations are artificial, not natural; a
distortion of mysterious facts, not an exposition of them; the result
of an arbitrary selection from the data of our consciousness, and then
the treatment of the selection as if it were the whole. Quite apart
from the Gospel, the facts of human intercourse are full of evidence to
wonderful and beautiful possibilities of insight and intercourse
between human spirit and spirit. But if we want to read the best
possible negative to the gloomy dream of impenetrable isolation, we
must come to the Lord Jesus Christ. We must make experiment of what it
is, in Him, to know and love others who are in Him too. Then indeed we
shall find that we can, in the common possession of a living Lord who
dwells in our hearts by faith, see as it were from heart into heart, in
the warm light of His presence. We shall find how wonderful is the
friendship with one another to which the friends of Jesus are called,
and for which they are enabled in Him.

"IN HIM": those words are the key to this deep, tender, healthful
union, and as it