s
'beyond all things' is more fully expressed in the next words, in which
he labours by accumulating synonyms to convey his sense of the
transcendent energy which waits to bless: 'exceeding abundantly above
what we ask.' And as, alas! our desires are but shrunken and narrow
beside our thoughts, he sweeps a wider orbit when he adds 'above what we
_think_.' He has been asking wonderful things, and yet even his
farthest-reaching petitions fall far on this side of the greatness of
God's power. One might think that even it could go no further than
filling us 'with all the fulness of God.' Nor can it; but it may far
transcend our conceptions of what that is, and astonish us by its
surpassing our thoughts, no less than it shames us by exceeding our
prayers.

Of course, all this is true, and is meant to apply, only about the
inward gifts of God's grace. I need not remind you that, in the outer
world of Providence and earthly gifts, prayers and wishes often surpass
the answers; that there a deeper wisdom often contradicts our thoughts
and a truer kindness refuses our petitions, and that so the rapturous
words of our text are only true in a very modified and partial sense
about God's working _for_ us in the world. It is His work _in_ us
concerning which they are absolutely true.

Of course we know that in all regions of His working He is _able_ to
surpass our poor human conceptions, and that, properly speaking, the
most familiar, and, as we insolently call them, 'smallest' of His works
holds in it a mystery--were it none other than the mystery of
Being--against which Thought has been breaking its teeth ever since men
began to think at all.

But as regards the working of God on our spiritual lives, this passing
beyond the bounds of thought and desire is but the necessary result of
the fact already dealt with, that the only measure of the power is God
Himself, in that Threefold Being. That being so, no plummet of our
making can reach to the bottom of the abyss; no strong-winged thought
can fly to the outermost bound of the encircling heaven. Widely as we
stretch our reverent conceptions, there is ever something beyond. After
we have resolved many a dim nebula in the starry sky, and found it all
ablaze with suns and worlds, there will still hang, faint and far before
us, hazy magnificences which we have not apprehended. Confidently and
boldly as we may offer our prayers, and largely as we may expect, the
answer is ever more than