excellence and we too well understand the
advantages of being Christian men not to pay some attention to
Christ. But that will not make us conform to His image. In order to
be conformed to the image of Christ we must be wholly His. Suppose
you enter a studio where a sculptor is working, will he hand you his
hammer and chisel to finish the most difficult piece of his work or
to do any part of it? Assuredly not. It is his own idea that he is
working out, and none but his own hand can work it out. So with us
who are to be moulded by Christ. Christ cannot mould us into His
image unless we are wholly His. Every stroke that is made upon us by
the chisel and mallet of the world is lost to His ideal. As often as
we reflect what is not purely Christian, so often do we mar the I
image of Christ.

Now how is it with us? Need we ask? When we go along the street, what
is it that we reflect? Do we not reflect a thousand things that
Christ disapproves? What is it that our heart responds to when we are
engaged in business? Is it to appeals that this world makes to us? Is
it the appeal that a prospect of gain makes to us that we respond to
eagerly? That is what is making us; that is what is moulding and
making us the men that we are destined to be. We are moulded into the
character that we are destined to live with for ever and ever, by our
likings and dislikings, by the actual response that we are now giving
day by day to the things that we have to do with in this world. We
may loathe the character of the sensualist; no language is too strong
for us when we speak of him: but if we, in point of fact, respond to
appeals made to the flesh rather than appeals made to the spirit, we
are becoming sensual. We may loathe and despise the character of the
avaricious worldly man; we may see its littleness, and pettiness, and
greed, and selfishness: but do our own hearts go out in response to
any offer of gain more eagerly than they go out to Christian work or
to the interests of Christ's kingdom? Then we are becoming worldly
and avaricious; we are becoming the very kind of men that we despise.

Of course we know this. We Know that we are being made by what we
respond to, and the older we grow we know it the more clearly; we see
it written on our own character that we have become the kind of men
that we little thought one day we should become, and we know that we
have become such men by responding to certain things which are not
the things of t