viction which has faded away from the minds of many professing Christians. Above all, let us find or make time for the patient, habitual contemplation of the great facts which kindle our devotion. For if you never think of Jesus Christ and His love to you, how can you love Him back again? And if you are so busy carrying out your own secular affairs, or pursuing your own ambitions, or attending to your own duties (as they may seem to be) that you have no time to think of Christ, His death, His life, His Spirit, His yearning heart over His bride, how can it be expected that you will have any depth of love to Him? Let us, too, wait with prayerful patience for that Divine Spirit who will knit more closely to our Lord.

Unless we do, we shall get no happiness out of our religion, and it will bring no praise to Christ or profit to ourselves. I do not know a more miserable man than a half-and-half Christian. after the pattern of, I was going to say, the ordinary average of professing Christians of this generation. He has religion enough to prick and sting him, and not enough to impel him to forsake the evil, which yet he cannot comfortably do. He has religion enough to inflame his conscience, not enough to subdue his will and heart. How many of my hearers are in that condition it is for them to settle. If we are to be Christian men at all, let us be so out and out. Half-and-half religion is no religion.

"One foot on land, and one on sea.

To one thing constant never!"

That is the type of thousands of professing Christians. "I fear lest by any means your minds be corrupted from the simplicity that is towards Christ."

66

XVI.

The Race and the Goal.

THIS one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize."-PHIL. iii. 13, 14.

HIS buoyant energy and onward looking are marvellous in "Paul the aged, and now also a prisoner of Jesus Christ." Forgetfulness of the past and eager

anticipation for the future are, we sometimes think, the child's prerogatives. They may be ignoble and puerile, or they may be worthy and great. All depends on the future to which we look. If it be the creation of our fancies, we are babies for trusting it. If it be, as Paul's was, the revelation of God's purposes, we cannot do a wiser thing than look.

The Apostle here is letting us see the secret of his own life, and telling us what made him the sort of Christian that he was. He counsels wise obliviousness, wise anticipation, strenuous concentration; and these are the things that contribute to success in any field of life. Christianity is the perfection of common Men become mature Christians by no other means than those by which they become good artizans,

sense.

ripe scholars, or the like. But the misery is that, though people know well enough that they cannot be good carpenters, or doctors, or fiddlers without certain habits and practices, they seem to fancy that they can be good Christians without them.

So the words of my text may suggest appropriate thoughts on this first Sunday of a new year. Let us listen, then, to Paul telling us how he came to be the sort of Christian man he was.

I. First, then, I would say, make God's aim your aim.

Paul distinguishes here between the "mark" and the "prize." He aims at the one for the sake of the other. The one is the object of effort; the other is the sure result of successful effort. If I may so say, the crown hangs on the winning post; and he who touches the goal clutches the garland.

Then, mark that he regards the aim towards which he strains as being the aim which Christ had in view in his conversion. For he says in the preceding context, "I labour if that I may lay hold of that for which also I have been laid hold of by Jesus Christ." In the words that follow the text he speaks of the prize as being the result and purpose of the high calling of God "in Christ Jesus." So then he took God's purpose in calling, and Christ's purpose in redeeming him, as being his great object in life. God's aims and Paul's were identical.

What, then, is the aim of God in all that He has done for us? The production in us of God-like and God-pleasing character. For this suns rise and set; for this seasons and times come and go; for this sorrows and joys are experienced; for this hopes and

For this all the discipline

fears and loves are kindled. of life is set in motion. For this we were created; for this we have been redeemed. For this Jesus Christ lived and suffered and died. For this God's Spirit is poured out upon the world. All else is scaffolding; this is the building which it contemplates, and when the building is reared the scaffolding may be cleared away. God means to make us like Himself, and so pleasing to Himself, and has no other end in all the varieties of His gifts and bestowments but only this, the production of character.

Such is the aim that we should set before us. The acceptance of that aim as ours will give nobleness and blessedness to our lives, as nothing else will. How different all our estimates of the meaning and true nature of events would be, if we kept clearly before us that their intention was not merely to make us blessed and glad, or to make us sorrowful, but that, through the blessedness, through the sorrow, through the gift, through the withdrawal, through all the variety of dealings, the intention was one and the same, to mould us to the likeness of our Lord and Saviour! There would be fewer mysteries in our lives, we should seldomer have to stand in astonishment, in vain regret, in miserable and weakening retrospect of vanished gifts, and saying to ourselves, "Why has this darkness stooped upon my path?" if we looked beyond the darkness and the light, to that for which both were sent. Some plants require frost to bring out their savour, and men need sorrow to test and to produce their highest qualities. There would be fewer knots in the thread of our lives, and fewer

mysteries in our experience, if we made God's aim ours, and strove through all variations of condition to realize it.

How different all our estimate of nearer objects and aims would be, if once we clearly recognized what we are here for! The prostitution of powers to obviously unworthy aims and ends is the saddest thing in humanity. It is like elephants being set to pick up pins; it is like the lightning being harnessed to carry all the gossip and filth of one capital of the world to prurient readers in another. Men take these great powers which God has given them, and use them to make money, to cultivate their intellects, to secure the gratification of earthly desires, to make a home for themselves here amidst the illusions of time; and all the while the great aim, which ought to stand out clear and supreme, is forgotten by them.

There is nothing that needs more careful examination by us than our accepted schemes of life for ourselves. The roots of our errors mostly lie in these beliefs that we take to be axioms and never examine into. Let us begin this new year by an honest dealing with ourselves, asking ourselves this question, "What am I living for?' And if the answer, first of all, be, as, of course, it will be-the accomplishment of nearer and necessary aims, such as the conduct of our business, the cultivating of our understandings, the love and peace of our homes, then let us press the investigation a little further, and say, What then? Suppose I make a fortune, what then? Suppose I get the position I am striving for, what then? Suppose I cultivate my understanding and win the knowledge that I am nobly striving after, what