leavened.' This likeness does not reach
its completeness by a leap. It is not struck, as the image of a king is,
upon the blank metal disc, by one stroke, but it is wrought out by long,
laborious, and, as I said, approximating and tentative touches. My text
suggests that to us by its addition, 'So are we, _in this world_.' The
'world'--or, to use modern phraseology, 'the environment'--conditions
the resemblance. As far as it is possible for a thing encompassed with
dust and ashes to resemble the radiant sun in the heavens, so far is the
resemblance carried here. Some measure of it, and a growing measure, is
inseparable from the reality of a Christian life.

Now, you Christian people, does that plain statement touch you anywhere?
'So _are_ we.' Well! you would be quite easy if John had said: 'So _may_
we be; so _should_ we be; so _shall_ we be.' But what about the 'so
_are_ we'? What a ghastly contradiction the lives of multitudes of
professing Christians are to that plain statement! 'Like Jesus
Christ'--would anybody say that about anything in me? 'So are we'--no
words of mine, dear brethren, can make the statement more searching,
more impressive; but, I pray you, lay this to heart: 'If any man have
not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.' You may take sacraments
and profess Christianity, or, as we Nonconformists have it, 'join
churches,' and do all manner of outward work for ever and a day; but if
you have not the likeness of Christ, at least in germ, and growing to
something more than a germ, in your characters, you had better revise
your position, and ask whether, after all, you have not been walking in
a vain show, and fancied yourselves the servants of Christ, while you
bear the image of Christ's enemy.

A very tiny gully on a hillside, made by showers of rain, may fall into
the same slopes, and has been created by the very same forces, working
according to the same laws, as have scooped out valleys miles broad,
bordered by mountains thousands of feet high. And in my little life,
poor as it is, limited as it is, environed as it is by the world, and
therefore often hampered and stained, as well as helped and brightened,
by its environment, there may be, and there will be, in some degree, if
I am a Christian man, the very same power at work by which Jesus Christ,
the Son of the Father shines as the sun on the throne of the universe.

But then, notice further, how that limitation to which I have referred
in th