for our weakness and our frailty, we
ought not to expect Him to indulge us in avoidable and needless errors.
We made a mistake. Very well. We knew no better than to make it. But
now that we do know better, we have no business repeating it. And right
along here comes a great expanse of territory which holiness people
need to cover. Here there is infinite room for advancement and progress.

"THE IMITATION OF CHRIST"

Thomas A'Kempis wrote a wonderful book on "The Imitation of Christ."
The failure in so many quarters in becoming Christlike is due to the
false method pursued. First, get a Christlike heart, and then let that
heart govern your life and actions. "Work OUT your own salvation," said
Paul, "for it is God that worketh IN you." Precisely! God puts a holy
heart into a man's breast, and his business from thence on is to bring
his life into line with the heart. The old life-habits may cling to him
for a time, but it is the business of the sanctified soul to free
itself from all that Jesus would not do were He on earth. Imitation of
Christ comes after sanctification, and not before. You simply can not
imitate Jesus if you have a reptile heart in you. If you have a filthy
mind you will talk "smut" and think "smut" in spite of yourself. You
may hide your bad self from the world, but your wife, or your husband,
or your family, those who are acquainted with you intimately, know that
you are base and coarse.

DANTE.

A glutton may stand and look at the thin, austere, ascetic face of
Dante and say within himself, "I will be a Dante," but all the world
knows that in a few hours he will be gourmandizing as swinishly as
before. And men look at the beautiful Jesus held up in Unitarian
pulpits and resolve to act like Him, and go right on being selfish, and
proud, and deceitful, and devilish. There must be a moral miracle,
there must be a spiritual upsetting and overturning, before a carnal
heart can begin to imitate the pure and spotless Son of God.

KINDNESS.

After we are sanctified, we ought to imitate Christ in kindness. How
kind He was! Where did He abuse anyone? He preached the truth, but He
never maligned any of His auditors.

THE "LITTLE THINGS"

It is the "little things" that make up the mosaic of life. Our friends
know us, not by the speeches we deliver, nor the sermons we preach, nor
the books we write, but by the tones of our voices, and the letters we
pen, and the words we use in daily life. Introduce kindn