to be continued and developed towards perfection by
continuous effort. 'Tis a life-long toil till the lump be leavened.'

One of the passages already referred to varies the metaphor of building,
in so far as it seems to represent 'your most holy faith' as the
foundation, and may be an instance of the doubtful New Testament usage
of 'faith,' as meaning the believed Gospel, rather than the personal act
of believing. But however that may be, context of the words clearly
suggests the practical duties by which the Christian life is preserved
and strengthened. They who build up themselves do so, mainly, by keeping
themselves in the love of God with watchful oversight and continual
preparedness for struggle against all foes who would drag them from that
safe fortress, and subsidiarily, by like continuity in prayer, and in
fixing their meek hope on the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto
eternal life. If Christian character is ever to be made more Christian,
it must be by a firmer grasp and a more vivid realisation of Christ and
His truth. The more we feel ourselves to be lapped in the love of God,
the more shall we be builded up on our most holy faith. There is no
mystery about the means of Christian progress. That which, at the
beginning, made a man a Christian shapes his whole future course; the
measure of our faith is the measure of our advance.

But the Apostle, in the immediately following words, goes on to pass
beyond the bounds of his metaphor, and with complete indifference to the
charge of mixing figures, speaks of the building as growing. That
thought leads us into a higher region than that of effort. The process
by which a great forest tree thickens its boles, expands the sweep of
its branches and lifts them nearer the heavens, is very different from
that by which a building rises slowly and toilsomely and with manifest
incompleteness all the time, until the flag flies on the roof-tree. And
if we had not this nobler thought of a possible advance by the
increasing circulation within us of a mysterious life, there would be
little gospel in a word which only enjoined effort as the condition of
moral progress, and there would be little to choose between Paul and
Plato. He goes on immediately to bring out more fully what he means by
the growth of the building, when he says that if Christians are in
Christ, they are 'built up for an habitation of God in the Spirit.'
Union with Christ, and a consequent life in the Spirit,