He is this because of the {13} position that belongs
to His person in the universe as a whole. He, as the Father's image or
counterpart, is His unique agent in all the work of creation. All
created things whatever, from the lowest to the highest, seen or
unseen, be they thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, are
the work of His hand. All were created through Him and have Him for
their end or goal, and He is the sustaining life of the whole universe
in all its parts. 'In Him all things consist' or have their unity in a
system. And because He occupies this position in the whole universe,
therefore a similar position and sovereignty belong to Him in the
spiritual kingdom of redemption. There too He is, through His manhood
and His sacrificial death upon the cross, the unique author of the
reconciliation with God. He is by His spirit the inherent life of the
redeemed, and the goal of all their perfecting. There is, in fact, no
divine quality, or attribute, or activity of God towards His creatures
which is not His. In Him it pleased the Father that all the fulness of
divine attributes and offices should dwell, and in Him as Son of God
made man dwells all this fulness bodily. The divine attributes, that
is, are not committed to a number of different mediators. {14} They
exist and are exercised in Him and in Him alone. It follows therefore
as a matter of course from this position of Christ in the universe and
in the church that the redemption effected by Him must be universal in
range and must extend equally and impartially to all. There 'cannot be
Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian and Scythian,
bond and free, but Christ is all and in all.'

Thus in the Epistle to the Colossians[10] the doctrine of the
catholicity of Christianity is again vindicated controversially, and
logically based upon the catholic character of Christ and upon His
universal function in creation and redemption; and in the contemporary
Epistle to the Ephesians, without note of controversy, the doctrine of
the catholic church, the brotherhood of all men in Christ, the doctrine
which is, we may truly say, the culmination of all St. Paul's teaching,
is allowed to develope itself in all its glory on the assumed basis of
that teaching about Christ's person which had made any narrower idea of
the church already seem incongruous and impossible. In the earlier
dispensation in which the covenant of God was with one peop