by bringing
a pure religion to the hearts of the ordinary people. Hence the tumult
against the teachers of the new religion, raised not by the civil or
religious authorities of Ephesus, but simply by the trade interest.

As soon as it was over St. Paul left Ephesus not to return there again.
But on his way back to Jerusalem he came not to Ephesus but to Miletus,
and sending for the Ephesian presbyters thither, he made them a
farewell speech[48], which is in conspicuous harmony with the features
of his later Epistle to the Ephesians. Already the doctrines of a
divine purpose or {43} counsel now revealed, of the Church in general
as the object of the divine self-sacrifice and love, and of the Holy
Ghost as accomplishing her sanctification and developing her structure,
appear to be prominent in his mind, and to have become familiar topics
with the Ephesian Christians. 'I shrank not from declaring unto you
the whole counsel of God. Take heed unto yourselves and to all the
flock, in the which the Holy Ghost hath made you bishops, to feed the
church of God, which he purchased with his own blood.... And now I
commend you to God, and to the word of his grace, which is able to
build you up, and to give you the inheritance among all them that are
sanctified.' These words from St. Paul's speech to the Ephesian
presbyters are in remarkable affinity with the teaching of our epistle.

v.

We have been assuming that this epistle was addressed to Ephesus, but
there are reasons to believe that it was not addressed to Ephesus only,
but rather generally to the churches of the Roman province of Asia, of
which Ephesus was the chief. The reasons for thinking this are {44}
partly internal to the epistle. St. Paul's personal relations to
individual Ephesian Christians must have been many and close, and we
know his habit of introducing personal allusions and greetings into his
epistles; but the so-called Epistle to the Ephesians is destitute of
them altogether, contrasting in this respect even with the Epistle to
the Colossians, written at the same time to a church which St. Paul
himself never visited. This would be a most inexplicable fact if the
Epistle to the Ephesians were really a letter to this one particular
church. More than this, St. Paul speaks in several passages in a way
which implies that he and those he wrote to were dependent on what they
had heard for mutual knowledge--'having heard of the faith in the Lord
Jesus