ther elements which men lay hold of
in their conceptions of deity. When men make gods they make them in
their own image: when God reveals God, the emphasis is put on an
altogether different aspect of His nature. It is His self-communicating
and paternal love revealed to the heart of a son which will kindle the
highest aspiration of praise, and that fatherhood is not found in the
fact that God has made us, but in the higher fact that He has redeemed
us and has sent the spirit of His Son into our hearts. The doxology of
our text is a distinctively Christian doxology which Paul conceives can
only be uttered by lips which have learned to say 'Abba, Father,' 'and
have received the adoption of sons' through the eternal Son.

Mark, too, that this glad ascription of glory to God is conceived of as
sounded forth for ever and ever, or literally through 'ages and ages, as
long as successive epochs shall unfold.' It is not as if the revelation
of the divine character were in the past, and the light of it continued
to touch stony lips to music, but it fills in continuous forthcoming
every age, and in every age men receive the fulness of God, and in every
age redeemed hearts bring back their tribute of praise and love to Him.

II. The Greetings.

The Apostle's habit of closing all his letters with kindly messages is,
of course, more than a habit. It is the natural instinct to which all
true hearts have a hundred times yielded. It is remarkable that in this
letter there are no individual greetings, but that instead of such there
is the emphatic greeting to every saint in Christ Jesus. He will not
single out any where all are so near His heart, and He will have no
jealousies to be fed by His selection of more favoured persons. It may
be too, that the omission of individual messages is partly occasioned by
some incipient tendencies to alienation and faction of which we see some
traces in His earnest exhortations to stand fast in one spirit, and to
be of the same mind, having the same love, and being of one accord, as
well as in his exhortation to two Philippian women to be of the same
mind in the Lord. The all-embracing word at parting singularly links the
end of the letter with its beginning, where we find a remarkable
sequence of similar allusions to 'all' the Philippian Christians. He
has them all in His heart; they are all partakers with Him of grace; He
longs after them all.

The designation by which Paul describes the recipient