Of course it is impossible that he can mean by this ‘very thing’ the second of the roads by which it was possible to reach the ultimate issue, because he did not know whether his brethren and he were to die or to be changed.  He speaks in the context about death as a possible contingency for himself and for them,—­’If our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved,’ and so on.  Therefore we must suppose that ‘the self-same thing’ of which he is thinking as the divine purpose in all His dealings with us, is not the manner in which we may attain that ultimate condition, but the condition itself which, by one road or another, God’s children shall attain.  Or, in other words, the highest aim of the divine love in all its dealings with us Christian men, is not merely a blessed spiritual life, but the completion of our humanity in a perfect spirit dwelling in a glorified body.  Corporeity—­the dwelling in a body by which the pure spirit moves amidst pure universes—­is the highest end of God’s will concerning us.

That glorified body is described in our context in wonderful words, which it would take me far too long to do more than just touch upon.  Here we dwell in a tent, there we shall dwell in a building.  Here in a house made with hands, a corporeal frame derived from parents by material transmission and intervention; there we shall dwell in a building of which God is the maker.  Here we dwell in a crumbling clay tenement, which rains dissolve, which lightning strikes, and winds overthrow, and which finally lies on the ground a heap of tumbled ruin.  There we dwell in a building, God’s direct work, eternal, and knowing no corruption nor change.  Here we dwell in a body congruous with, and part of, the perishable earthly world in which it abides, and with which it stands in relation; there we dwell in a house partaking of the nature of the heavens in which it moves, a body that is the fit organ of a perfect spirit.

And so, says Paul, the end of what God means with us is not stated in all its wonderfulness, when we speak of spirits imbued with His wisdom and surcharged with His light and perfectness, but when we add to that the thought of a fitting organ in which these spirits dwell, whereby they can come into contact with an external universe, incorruptible, and so reach the summit of their destined completeness.  ‘The house not made with hands,’ eternal, the building of God in the Heavens, is the end that God has in view for all His children.

II.  So, then, secondly, note the slow process of the Divine Workman.

The Apostle employs here a very emphatic compound term for ’hath wrought.’  It conveys not only the idea of operation, but the idea of continuous and somewhat toilsome and effortful work, as if against the resistance of something that did not yield itself naturally to the impulse that He would bestow.  Like some sculptor with a hard bit of marble, or some metallurgist who has to work the rough ore till it