reflect this absolutely unworldly, this heavenly Person?  When we look into our hearts, what do we find in point of fact?  We find a thousand ,things that we know have no right there; that we know to be wrong.  How can such hearts reflect this perfect purity of Christ?  Well, we must see to it that these hearts be cleansed; we must hold ourselves before Christ until from very shame these passions of ours are subdued, until His purity works its way into our hearts through all obstructions; and we must keep our hearts, we must keep the mirror free from dust, free from incrustations, once we have cleansed it.

In some circumstances you might be tempted to say that really it is not so much that there is a veil on the mirror as that there is no quicksilver at all behind.  You meet in life characters so thin, so shallow, that every good thought seems to go through and out of them at the other side; they hear with one ear, and it goes out at the other.  You can make no impression upon them.  There is nothing to impress, no character there to work upon.  They are utterly indifferent to spiritual things, and never give a thought to their own character.  What is to be done with such persons?  God is the great Teacher of us all; God, in His providence, has made many a man who has begun life as shallow and superficial as man can be, deep enough before He has done with him.

Two particulars in which the perfectness of this method appears may be pointed out.  First of all, it is perfect in this:  that anyone who begins it is bound to go on to the end.  The very nature of the case leads him to go on and on from glory to glory, back and back to Christ, until the process is, actually completed, and he is like Christ.  The reason is this:  that the Christian conscience is never much taken up with attainment made, but always with attainment that is yet to be made.  It is the difference not the likeness that touches the conscience.  A friend has been away in Australia for ten years, and he sends you his likeness, and you take it out eagerly, and you say, “Yes, the eyes are the very eyes; the brow, the hair are exactly like,” but there is something about the mouth that you do not like, and you thrust it away in a drawer and never look at it again.  Why?  Because the one point of unlikeness destroys the whole to you.  Just so when any Christian presents himself before Christ it is not the points of likeness, supposing there are any, which strike his conscience—­it is the remaining points of difference that inevitably strike him, and so he is urged on and on from one degree of proficiency to another until the process is completed, because there is no point at which a man has made a sufficient attainment in the likeness of Christ.  There is no point at which Christ draws a line and says, “You will do well if you reach this height, and you need not strive further.”  Why, we should be dissatisfied, we should throw up our allegiance to Christ if He treated us so.  He is our ideal, and it is resemblance to Him that draws us and makes us strive forward; and so a man is bound, to go on, and on, and on, still drawn on to his ideal, still rebuked by his shortcomings until he perfectly resembles Christ.