laid by apostles and prophets, refers to them
as proclaiming the Gospel. The real laying of the foundation is the
work of the divine power and love which gave us Christ, and it is the
Divine Voice which proclaims, 'Behold _I_ lay in Zion a foundation!' But
that divine work has to be made known among men, and it is by the making
of it known that the building rises course by course. There is no
contradiction between the two statements, 'I have laid the foundation'
and Paul's 'As a wise master-builder I have laid the foundation.'

A question may here rise as to the meaning of 'prophets.' Unquestionably
the expression in other places of the Epistle does mean New Testament
prophets, but seeing that here Jesus is designated as the foundation
stone which, standing beneath two walls, has a face into each, and binds
them strongly together, it is more natural to see in the prophets the
representatives of the great teachers of the old dispensation as the
apostles were of the new. The remarkable order in which these two
classes are named, the apostles being first, and the prophets who were
first in time being last in order of mention, confirms this explanation,
for the two co-operating classes are named in the order in which they
lie in the foundation. Digging down you come to the more recent first,
to the earlier second, and deep and massive, beneath all, to the
corner-stone on whom all rests, in whom all are united together.
Following the Apostle's order we may note the process of building;
beneath that, the foundation on which the building rests; and beneath
it, the corner-stone which underlies and unites the whole.

I. The process of building.

In the previous clauses the Apostle has represented the condition of the
Ephesian Christians before their Christianity as being that of strangers
and foreigners, lacking the rights of citizenship anywhere, a mob
rather than in any sense a society. They had been like a confused heap
of stones flung fortuitously together; they had become fellow-citizens
with the saints. The stones had been piled up into an orderly building.
He is not ignoring the facts of national, political, or civic
relationships which existed independent of the new unity realised in a
common faith. These relationships could not be ignored by one who had
had Paul's experience of their formidable character as antagonists of
him and of his message, but they seemed to him, in contrast with the
still deeper and far more pe