and as they are capable
of being exhibited in this present condition of things, are all that are
to flow from it. It was not worth Christ's while to die, it was not
worth God's while to send His Son, there was no sense or consistency in
that great voice that echoes from heaven, calling us to love and serve
Him, unless, beyond the jangling contradictions, and imperfect
attainments, and foiled aspirations, and fragmentary faith, and broken
services of earth, there be a region of completeness where all that was
tendency here shall have become effect; and all that was but in germ
here, and sorely frostbitten by the ungenial climate, and shrivelled by
the foul vapours in the atmosphere, shall blossom and burgeon into
eternal life. The Christian life, as it is to-day, in its attainments
and imperfections, is at once the witness of the reality of the power
that has produced it, and clamantly calls for a sphere and environment
in which that power shall be able to produce the effects which it is
capable of producing.

God is 'not a man that He should lie, nor the son of man that He should
repent.' Men begin grand designs which never get further than the paper
that they are drawn on; or they build a porch, and then they are
bankrupt, or change their minds, or die, and the palace remains
unrealised, and all that pass by mock and say, 'This man began to build
and was not able to finish.' But God's designs are certain of
accomplishment. Unless we are to be reduced to a state of utter
intellectual bewilderment and confusion, and forgo our belief in His
veracity and resources to execute His designs, the design that lies in
the calling must needs lead on to the realm of perfectness. If we
consider the agent by which it is effected, even the risen Christ; if we
consider the cost at which it was accomplished, even the death on the
Cross, the mission of His Son, and His assumption of the limitations of
an incarnate life; if we consider the manifest potencies of the power
that He has brought into operation in the present Christian life; and if
we consider, side by side with these, the stark, staring contradictions
and as manifest inevitable limitations of the effects of that power, His
calling carries in its depths the assurance that what He means shall be
done, that Jesus Christ has not died in vain, that He has not ascended
to fill a solitary throne, but is the Firstfruits of a great harvest;
and that we shall one day be all that it is i