f the grace that we may possess. This
limitless limit alone bounds the possibilities for every man, the
certainties for every Christian.

The effect must be proportioned to the cause. And what effect will be
adequate as the outcome of such a cause as 'the riches of His glory'?
Nothing short of absolute perfectness, the full transmutation of our
dark, cold being into the reflected image of His own burning brightness,
the ceaseless replenishing of our own spirits with all graces and
gladnesses akin to His, the eternal growth of the soul upward and
Godward. Perfection is the sign manual of God in all His works, just as
imperfection and the falling below our thought and wish is our 'token in
every epistle' and deed of ours. Take the finest needle, and put it
below a microscope, and it will be all ragged and irregular, the fine,
tapering lines will be broken by many a bulge and bend, and the point
blunt and clumsy. Put the blade of grass to the same test, and see how
regular its outline, how delicate and true the spear-head of its point.
God's work is perfect, man's is clumsy and incomplete. God does not
leave off till He has finished. When He rests, it is because, looking on
His work, He sees it all 'very good.' His Sabbath is the Sabbath of an
achieved purpose, of a fulfilled counsel. The palaces which we build
are ever like that one in the story, where one window remains dark and
unjewelled, while the rest blaze in beauty. But when God builds, none
can say, 'He was not able to finish.' In His great palace He makes her
'windows of agates' and _all_ her 'borders of pleasant stones.'

So we have a right to enlarge our desires and stretch our confidence of
what we may possess and become to this, His boundless bound--'The riches
of glory.'

But another form in which the standard, or measure, is stated in this
letter is: 'The working of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ,
when He raised Him from the dead' (i. 19, 20); or, as it is put with a
modification, 'grace according to the measure of the gift of Christ'
(iv. 7). That is to say, we have not only the whole riches of the divine
glory as the measure to which we may lift our hopes, but lest that
celestial brightness should seem too high above us, and too far from us,
we have Christ in His human-divine manifestation, and especially in the
great fact of the Resurrection, set before us, that by Him we may learn
what God wills we should become. The former phase of the