, but rather ask you simply to consider one point in reference
to it, and that is that, side by side with the reference to the gift of
Christ as being the measure of our possible attainments, the Apostle
enlarges on the Infinite variety of the shapes which that one gift
takes in different people. 'He gave some apostles, some prophets,' etc.;
one man receiving according to this fashion, and another according to
that, and to each of us the distribution is made 'according to the
measure of the gift of Christ.' That is to say, it takes us all, the
collective goodness and beauty of the whole community of saints, to
approximate to the fulness of that gift, and all are needed in their
different types and forms of excellence, sanctity and beauty, in order
to set forth, even imperfectly, the richness and the manifoldness of His
great gift. And so 'we all come'--there is a multiplicity--'unto the
perfect man, the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ'--there
is a unity in which the multiplicity inheres.

So try to get a little more of some different type of excellence than
that to which you are naturally inclined. Seek, and consciously
endeavour, to appropriate into your character uncongenial excellences,
and be very charitable in your judgments of the different types of
Christian conformity to Christ our Lord. The crystals that are set round
a light do not quarrel with each other as to whether green, or yellow,
or blue, or red, or violet is the true colour to reflect. We need all
the seven prismatic tints to make the perfect white light. The gift of
Christ is many-sided; try not to be one-sided in your reception of it.

IV. And now the last form of this measure is 'according to the energy of
the might of His power, which He wrought in Christ when He raised Him
from the dead.'

When we gazed upon the riches of God's grace, they were high above us,
when we looked upon 'the power that worketh in us,' we saw it working
amidst many hindrances and hamperings, but here there is presented to
us in a concrete example, close beside us, of what God can make of a man
when the man is wholly pliable to His will, and the recipient of His
influences. And so there stands before us the guarantee and the pattern
of immortal life, the Christ whose Manhood died and lives, who is
clothed with a spiritual body, who wields royal authority in the Kingdom
of the Most High. And that is the measure of what God can do with me,
and wishes to do w