e heart and service to
God, is brought out as at once a requirement and a characteristic of a
Christian. "What manner of persons ought we to be in all holy
conversation and godliness?" "Be ye holy, for I am holy," "as He which
hath called you is holy, so be ye holy in all manner of conversation."
"God hath not called us to uncleanness but unto holiness." "Having these
promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of
the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God." And it is
absolutely necessary that this grace should be cultivated if we would
either fulfil the mission of our priesthood or abide in the Divine
presence for ever. Holiness is requisite whether to see the Lord or to
walk before men unto all well-pleasing; and as living witnesses,
transcripts of _His_ holiness, enabled by his grace to maintain purity of
heart and life, God has promised to establish those who put their trust
in Him. Some Christians have been deterred from the search after this
blessing of heaven by the mistakes of those who have endeavoured to
expound it, or by the hypocrisy of those who have assumed its profession
that they might the better sin. It is marvellous how many different
views of it have at times obtained currency in the world. By some it has
been resolved into a sort of refined Hinduism, a state in which the soul
is "unearthed, entranced, beatified" by devout contemplation into a
pietistic rapture; others have deemed that the best way to secure it was
a retirement from the vexing world, a recreant forsaking of the active
duties of life, as if it consisted in immunity from temptation rather
than in victory over it. Others have placed it in surpliced observance
or in monastic vow; an equivocal regard to patterns of things in the
heavens which common men mistake for idolatry. Others again, reversing
the old Pythagorean maxim, and wearing the image of God upon their ring,
have expressed it by unworthy familiarity, a continual adverting to the
gifts of the spirit, and the experience of the soul in the flippancy of
ordinary conversation, as did some of the fanatics of the Commonwealth.
Others have represented it as a perpetual austerity, an investiture of
our family circles with all the hues of the sepulchre, and a flinging
upon the face of society the frown of a rebuking fretfulness, which would
make the good of an archangel evil spoken of in this censorious world.
But the scriptural holine