but also as simple as possible; it was the Lord Jesus Christ. Really
and literally, Jesus Christ was the one ruling consideration for St
Paul; not himself, his claims, position, influence, feelings; not even
the Church. To him the Church was inestimably precious, but the Lord
was more. And all his thoughts about work, authority, order, and the
like, were accordingly conditioned and governed by the thought, What
will best promote the glory of the Lord who loved us and gave Himself
for us? If even a separatist propaganda will extend the knowledge of
HIM, His servant can rejoice, not in the separatism, not in the unhappy
spirit which prompted it, but in the extension of the reign of Jesus
Christ in the human hearts which need Him. Surely, even in our own
day, with its immemorial complications of the question of exterior
order, it will tend more than anything else to straighten the crooked
places and level the rough places, if we look, from every side, on the
glory of the blessed Name as our supreme and ruling interest.

This view of the supremacy of the Saviour in the thoughts of St Paul
about the Church leads us to a view, as we close, of that supremacy in
all his thoughts about his own life. Our paragraph ends with the words
which anticipate a great blessing, a new developement of "salvation,"
in the writer's soul, in answer to the believing prayers of the
Philippians; and then comes the thought that this result will carry out
his dearest personal ambition--"that Christ may be magnified in my
body, whether by life or by death." Let us take up those final words
for a simple study, before God.

"According to my eager expectation," my _apokaradokia_, my waiting and
watching, with outstretched head, for some keenly wished-for arrival,
or attainment. Such is this man's thought and feeling with regard to
the "magnification" of Christ through his life and death. It is his
"hope," it is his absorbing "expectation." It is to him the thing with
which he wakes up in the morning, and over which he lingers as he
prepares to sleep at night. It is the animating inner interest which
gives its zest to life. What art is to the ambitious and successful
painter, what literature is to the man who loves it for its own sake
and whose books have begun to take the world, what athletic toil and
triumph is to the youth in his splendid prime, what the fact of
extending and wealth-winning enterprise is to the man conscious of
mercantil