through whom, and to whom are all things.

In the earlier Epistles the initial act of the Christian life--the
justification of the soul--is explained with exhaustive elaboration:
but in the later Epistles it is on the subsequent relations to Christ
of the person who has been already justified that the apostle chiefly
dwells. According to his teaching, the whole spectacle of the
Christian life is due to a union between Christ and the soul; and for
the description of this relationship he has invented a vocabulary of
phrases and illustrations: believers are in Christ, and Christ is in
them: they have the same relation to Him as the stones of a building to
the foundation-stone, as the branches to the tree, as the members to
the head, as a wife to her husband. This union is ideal, for the
divine mind in eternity made the destiny of Christ and the believer
one; it is legal, for their debts and merits are common property; it is
vital, for the connection with Christ supplies the power of a holy and
progressive life; it is moral, for, in mind and heart, in character and
conduct, Christians are constantly becoming more and more identical
with Christ.

172. His Ethics.--Another feature of these later Epistles is the
balance between their theological and their moral teaching. This is
visible even in the external structure of the greatest of them, for
they are nearly equally divided into two parts, the first of which is
occupied with doctrinal statements and the second with moral
exhortations. The ethical teaching of Paul spreads itself over all
parts of the Christian life; but it is not distinguished by a
systematic arrangement of the various kinds of duties, although the
domestic duties are pretty fully treated. Its chief characteristic
lies in the motives which it brings to bear upon conduct.

To Paul Christian morality was emphatically a morality of motives. The
whole history of Christ, not in the details of His earthly life, but in
the great features of his redemptive journey from heaven to earth and
from earth back to heaven again, as seen from the extramundane
standpoint of these Epistles, is a series of examples to be copied by
Christians in their daily conduct. No duty is too small to illustrate
one or other of the principles which inspired the divinest acts of
Christ. The commonest acts of humility and beneficence are to be
imitations of the condescension which brought Him from the position of
equality with