0.2. Preface

PREFACE

Early in the year 1894 proposals and invitations were issued for a gathering of clergy at Cambridge in the Long Vacation, with a view to the delivery of courses of lectures on theological subjects. The gathering took place in the month of July, when about one hundred and twenty clergymen were present in Cambridge, and the announced lectures were read day by day in the Divinity School. At the kind request of the Professors and Committee I undertook an expository course, and on four successive mornings read upon the Epistle to the Ephesians. Those readings, slightly recast and carefully revised, make the eight chapters of this little volume. This original occasion of the writing of these ’studies’ will explain some features of their present form, such as the assumption throughout that the reader is a Christian Minister, and generally the free use of citations from the Greek and references to ancient and modern Church writers.

There is little need to anticipate in a Preface the allusions made in the book to its own manifest and inevitable incompleteness. The writer’s best hope for his publication is that it may serve in some measure as a help and guide towards work far better than his own, in the way of direct Scriptural research, the direct interrogation of the Heavenly Book concerning its messages from God. It is to be feared that at present, amidst the clatter of many criticisms, there is a serious risk lest that ’marking, learning and inwardly digesting,’ for which the Scriptures were given to us, and which can alone give an adequate basis to spiritual convictions worth the name, may fall out of fashion. A greatly exaggerated attention (such it seems to me to be) to the human aspects of the Bible is now prevalent; and this by no means tends to promote that use of the Word Written which was followed by our Lord and the Apostles when the Old Testament was in their hands. But to that use we must assuredly come back, unless we are seriously prepared to revise the Christianity of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Among the other wonderful phenomena of the Ephesian Epistle, let us not forget its witness against a humanitarian study of the Person of our Master.

Here is a letter written by a Christian missionary to representative Christian converts in a centre of evangelization, at a time when the life of the Man of Nazareth was still fresh in hundreds of living memories. Yet that Man is present to the writer and to the readers not under the conditions of His earthly sojourn, when His Form had for its background the society and scenery of Galilee and Judea, but altogether in the fulness of the wonder and the glory of heavenly being and power. He is ’far above all heavens.’ He ’dwells in the heart by faith.’ His ’love passeth knowledge.’ He is the divine Bridegroom of His disciples, regarded in their unity as the mystic Bride. They died and rose with Him; nay, they are enthroned beside Him. He is all in all to them for their deepest needs, and for their most exalted hopes. Such is this primeval Christology. But now let these brief Studies on ’Paul’s celestial Letter’ speak for themselves. Or rather may the Apostle’s Lord be pleased to use them, such as they are, speaking through them to His disciples something ’concerning Himself.’

H. C. G. M.

November 22, 1894.