rt, summons or calls us. Consider, also, what this
calling is to. 'God hath not called us to uncleanness, but to holiness,'
or, as this letter has it, in another part, 'unto salvation through
sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth.' By all the
subduing and animating and restraining and impelling tones in the
sacrifice and life of Jesus Christ we are summoned to a life of
self-crucifixion, of subjection of the flesh, of aspiration after God,
of holy living according to the pattern that was showed us in Him. We
are summoned here and now to a life of purity and righteousness and
self-sacrifice. But also 'He hath called us to His everlasting kingdom
and glory.' That voice sounds from above now. From the Cross it said to
us, 'I die that ye may live'; from the throne it says to us, 'Live
because I live, and come to live where I live.' The same invitation,
which calls us to a life of righteousness and self-suppression and
purity, also calls us, with the sweet promise that is firm as the throne
of God, to the everlasting felicities of that perfect kingdom in which,
because the obedience is entire, the glory shall be untremulous and
unstained. Therefore, considering who summons, by what He summons, and
to what He calls us, do there not lie in the fact of that divine call to
which we Christians say that we have yielded, the solemnest motives, the
loftiest standard, the most stringent obligations for life? What sort of
a life will that be which is worthy of that voice? Is yours? Is mine?
Are there not the most flagrant examples of professing Christians, whose
lives are in the most outrageous discordance with the lofty obligations
and mighty motives of the summons which they profess to have obeyed?
'Worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called!' Have I made my own the
things which I am invited to possess? Have I yielded to the obligations
which are enwrapped in that invitation? Does my life correspond to the
divine purpose in calling me to be His? Can I say, 'Lord, Thou art mine,
and I am Thine, and here my life witnesses to it, because self is
banished from it, and I am full of God, and the life which I live in
the flesh I live not to myself, but to Him that died for me?'

An absolute correspondence, a complete worthiness or perfect desert, is
impossible for us all, but a worthiness which His merciful judgment who
makes allowance for us all may accept, as not too flagrantly
contradictory of what He meant us to be, i