the right. Is he forgetting the great gulf between knowledge and
practice? Not so, but he is strong in the faith that love needs only to
know in order to do. The love which abounds more and more in knowledge
and in all discernment will be the soul of obedience, and will delight
in fulfilling the law which it has delighted in beholding. Other
knowledge has no tendency to lead to practice, but this knowledge which
is the fruit of love has for its fruit righteousness.

III. The great Name in which this completeness is secured.

The Apostle's prayer dwells not only on the way by which a Christian
life may increase itself, but in its close reaches the yet deeper
thought that all that growth comes 'through Jesus Christ.' He is the
Giver of it all, so that we are not so much called to a painful toil as
to a glad reception. Our love fills us with the fruits of righteousness,
because it takes all these from His hands. It is from His gift that
conscience derives its sensitiveness. It is by His inspiration that
conscience becomes strong enough to determine action, and that even our
dull hearts are quickened into a glow of desiring to have in our lives,
the law of the spirit of life, that was in Christ Jesus, and to make our
own all that we see in Him of 'things that are lovely and of good
report.'

The prayer closes with a reference to the highest end of all our
perfecting--the glory and praise of God; the former referring rather to
the transcendent majesty of God in itself, and the latter to the
exaltation of it by men. The highest glory of God comes from the gradual
increase in redeemed men's likeness to Him. They are 'the secretaries of
His praise,' and some portion of that great honour and responsibility
lies on each of us. If all Christian men were what they all might be and
should be, swift and sure in their condemnation of evil and loyal
fidelity to conscience, and if their lives were richly hung with ripened
clusters of the fruits of righteousness, the glory of God would be more
resplendent in the world, and new tongues would break into praise of Him
who had made men so like Himself.

A PRISONER'S TRIUMPH

'Now I would have you know, brethren, that the
things which happened unto me have fallen out
rather unto the progress of the gospel; 13. So
that my bonds became manifest in Christ throughout
the whole praetorian guard, and to all the rest;
14. And t