e standard is too high, for it is simply a case of your
experience being too low. We want the whole thing not 'levelled down',
but 'levelled up'. Let God take full possession of you; let the Divine
power be exerted upon your particular difficulty; and seek to be wholly
anointed with that Holy Spirit who can not only cleanse, but keep you,
making you fruitful in every good word and work.

XII

Perpetual Covenants

'_Come, and let us join ourselves to the Lord in a perpetual covenant
that shall not be forgotten._' (Jeremiah 1. 5.)

We find in our Meetings persons who are perplexed by the doctrinal
statements about Holiness or entire Sanctification and equivalent
terms. Some take our words to mean more than we intend; others think
the statements imply less than we mean; some put the standard too high,
whilst others put it altogether too low.

At the close of a recent Meeting a gentleman said to me, 'I greatly
enjoyed your address, but I am sure you will never get people to follow
that line, because you advocate an abnormal life. It cannot be lived.'
Equally I find men who in an indefinite way imagine that high states of
emotion dispense with standards of morality such as truth, honour, and
rectitude in business. And it is with great difficulty that we make the
Bible standard plainly understood.

I think, however, that very few are perplexed as to what we mean by the
consecration side of Holiness. There is, in all who are moderately well
instructed in Bible truth, a living sense of God's claims, a
recognition of what I may call the law of consistency, and a feeling
that, as a matter of duty, we really ought to yield to those claims,
and devote ourselves to doing His will. That is what Jeremiah meant
when he called upon the people to join themselves unto the Lord in '_a
perpetual covenant that shall not be forgotten_'.

We all recognize how right it is for buildings to be dedicated to God's
service; we call them the houses of God. We also see the rightness of
contributing gifts to help God's cause; and yet men and women are so
slow to fully and definitely join themselves unto the Lord, that is, to
put the sacred mark upon their entire lives, and recognize their duty
in spending their lives for God alone. They are slow to regard their
bodily, mental, and other powers and faculties as belonging to God, and
slower still in yielding their hearts in supreme love to Him who loved
them, and gave Himself for them.