ght into fellowship with the perfect life, the more shall we feel
our own shortcomings. Let us be thankful if our consciences speak to us
more loudly than they used to do. It is a sign of growing holiness, as
the tingling in a frost-bitten limb is of returning life. Let us seek to
cultivate and increase the sense of our own imperfection, and be sure
that the diminution of a consciousness of sin means not diminished power
of sin, but lessened horror of it, lessened perception of right,
lessened love of goodness, and is an omen of death, not a symptom of
life. Painter, scholar, craftsman all know that the condition of advance
is the recognition of an ideal not attained. Whoever has not before him
a standard to which he has not reached will grow no more. If we see no
faults in our work we shall never do any better. The condition of all
Christian, as of all other progress, is to be drawn by that fair vision
before us, and to be stung into renewed effort to reach it, by the
consciousness of present imperfection.

Another characteristic to which these perfect men are exhorted is a
constant striving after a further advance. How vigorously, almost
vehemently, that temper is put in the context--'I follow after'; 'I
press toward the mark'; and that picturesque 'reaching forth,' or, as
the Revised Version gives it, 'stretching forward.' The full force of
the latter word cannot be given in any one English equivalent, but may
be clumsily hinted by some such phrase as 'stretching oneself out over,'
as a runner might do with body thrown forward and arms extended in
front, and eagerness in every strained muscle, and eye outrunning foot,
and hope clutching the goal already. So yearning forward, and setting
all the current of his being, both faculty and desire, to the yet
unreached mark, the Christian man is to live. His glances are not to be
bent backwards, but forwards. He is not to be a 'praiser of the past,'
but a herald and expectant of a nobler future. He is the child of the
day and of the morning, forgetting the things which are behind, and ever
yearning towards the things which are before, and drawing them to
himself. To look back is to be stiffened into a living death; only with
faces set forward are we safe and well.

This buoyant energy of hope and effort is to be the result of the
consciousness of imperfection of which we have spoken. Strange to many
of us, in some moods, that a thing so bright should spring up from a
thing