ins here. It is good to be clothed with the immortal vesture of
the resurrection, and in that to be like Christ. It is better to be
like Him in our hearts. His true image is that we should feel as He
does, should think as He does, should will as He does; that we should
have the same sympathies, the same loves, the same attitude towards
God, and the same attitude towards men. It is that His heart and ours
should beat in full accord, as with one pulse, and possessing one
life. Wherever there is the beginning of that oneness and likeness of
spirit, all the rest will come in due time. As the spirit, so the
body. The whole nature must be transformed and made like Christ's,
and the process will not stop till that end be accomplished in all
who love Him. But the beginning here is the main thing which draws
all the rest after it as of course. 'If the Spirit of Him that raised
up Jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from
the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies, by His Spirit that
dwelleth in you.'

And, while this complete assimilation in body and spirit to our Lord
is the end of the process which begins here by love and faith, my
text, carefully considered, adds a further very remarkable idea. 'We
are all changed,' says Paul, 'into the _same_ image.' Same as what?
Possibly the same as we behold; but more probably the phrase,
especially 'image' in the singular, is employed to convey the thought
of the blessed likeness of all who become perfectly like Him. As if
he had said, 'Various as we are in disposition and character, unlike
in the histories of our lives, and all the influences that these have
had upon us, differing in everything but the common relation to Jesus
Christ, we are all growing like the same image, and we shall come to
be perfectly like it, and yet each retain his own distinct
individuality.' 'We being many are one, for we are all partakers of
one.'

Perhaps, too, we may connect with this another idea which occurs more
than once in Paul's Epistles. In that to the Ephesians, for instance,
he says that the Christian ministry is to continue, till a certain
point of progress has been reached, which he describes as our
_all_ coming to 'a perfect _man_.' The whole of us together
make a perfect man--the whole make one image. That is to say, perhaps
the Apostle's idea is, that it takes the aggregated perfectness of
the whole Catholic Church, one throughout all ages, and containing a
multitu