tion. To be told that absolute perfection in it is unattainable, will not satisfy them. There is a power which draws them upwards: and they welcome, they cherish, they strive to increase its force. It would be in vain to apply the magnet to clods of earth and worthless rust; but the smallest particle of iron hastens to obey its attraction. Would Canova or Chantrey content himself with mediocrity, from the assurance that he would never reach the absolutism of perfection; that, in every part of his path and at the top of every summit, he would see a point further and higher, a "yet beyond" ever flitting before him? No; the sculptor, the painter, the poet, would scorn such depressing inference the man who could yield to it is not of their society, he wants the soul of fire, the panting after excellence, the love of it for its own sake, which is the very characteristic of genius. Yet, the fine ideal, which charms on such noble minds, has not the wondrous certainty of being attained in another state of being. The creations of genius, the earthly miracles of art, have this sad addition to their inherent imperfection, that they decay and perish; and their authors die before them. But it is not so with the habits of the immortal spirit. They die not when the body dies. For evil or for good, they have before them an endless existence, and their qualities of exasperated malignity or of purest moral excellence secured in full complete

ness. Much more then may it be expected that religion should be soaring and irrepressible. “This is the true grace of God, wherein" sincere believers "stand." They love religion for its own loveliness. They aspire to God, through the Mediator, and by the Spirit of his power, from the feelings of determinate preference and warm-hearted delight. They can take an honest share in the expressions of ancient piety: O, how I love thy law! It is my meditation all the day: and let it be observed, that this burst of feeling is the very next utterance after the solemn acknowledgment before cited, 'I have seen an end of all perfection.' 'I esteem thy precepts concerning all things to be right, and I hate every false way. I love thy testimonies exceedingly. I love thy law. I love thy commandments above gold; yea, above fine gold. I esteem all thy precepts concerning all things to be right, and I hate every false way. Trouble and anguish have taken hold on me: yet thy commandments are my delights. I have chosen thy precepts. Thy law is my delight. Let my soul live, and it shall praise thee: and let thy judgments help me. I have gone astray, like a lost sheep: seek thy servant, for I do not forget thy commandments.-Not as though I had already attained, either were already perfect: but I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which also I am apprehended of Christ Jesus. I count not myself to have appre

bended but this one thing I do; forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark, for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.-This is the message which we have heard of him and declare unto you, that GOD IS LIGHT, and in him is no darkness at all. If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie and do not the truth: but, if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship one with another; and the blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin. If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and so cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar,' (constructively, and by the tendency of so daring a contradiction to the testimony of God in his word,) and his truth is not in us. My little children; these things write I unto you that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: and he is the propitiation for our sins; and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world. And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments. He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoso keepeth his word,

in him, verily, is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him.”

In these and many similar parts of the divine word, we find the humble acknowledgments of imperfection joined with the most delicate sensibility to the evil of inherent sin, the deepest abhorrence of it, and the most earnest strivings after an indefinitely growing purity of mind and life. This is that PERFECTION which is not only predicable and to be represented as an object of desire; but which is a necessary and indispensable part of the character of every true Christian. It denotes sincerity, in opposition to affectation and assuming in the supposed indications of religion; and symmetry, in contradistinction to a rickety and palsied profession of religion, in which some of the pretended parts of the body of piety appear to be of a monstrous growth, inflated, disproportionate, and incongruous; while other virtues, not less necessary as components of the divine whole, show no signs of a living existence.

Christian Perfection is described by Bernard of Clairvaux, that bright luminary of a dark age, as

1 Ps. cxix. different verses. Phil. iii. 12, 13, 14. 1 John, i. 5-10; ii. 1-5. The word translated just in ch. i. 9; and righteous in ii. 1; has, in several passages of the Old Testament, (by its well-known correspondent Hebrew adjective,) and in some of the New Testament, the sense of kind, benign, generous. See Ps. xxxv. 24; li. 14; lxix. 27; lxxi. 2, 15; cxliii. 1, 11. Matt. i. 19.

1

"the unwearied endeavour to make progress; the constant effort to reach perfection." It was in his time, and not only before it, but lamentably enough in subsequent periods, a commonly received notion that the perfection of religious obedience consisted in certain forms, observances of worship, and states of life. In our own more enlightened times, among the strictest nominal Protestants, the notion is extensively dominant, either explicitly maintained or held by plainest implication, that an exact and consistent conscientiousness, the fair and universal conjunction of piety, virtue, and morality, are not required from men in business, who have to move daily in the world, whose station calls for a continual and closely vigilant attention to life's endless bustle, labour and skill, forethought and contrivance, commerce and politics, literature and science;-that religion is not absolutely needful for them;-that it is in fact a thing impracticable in their circumstances, the exhortation to it impertinent, and the expectation of it unreasonable;-that the full and just measure of practical Christianity is applicable only to persons who enjoy ample leisure, to the retired, the aged, or the infirm; to the poor, who have no other consolation; and to the professional minis

"Indefessum proficiendi studium et jugis conatus ad perfectionem, perfectio reputatur." Epist. 253.