doing whatever he desired to do.  With respect to our moral and spiritual capacities, we remark that they are not only indefinite, but absolutely infinite.  Let that man answer who has ever truly and heartily loved another.  That man knows what it is to partake of the infinitude of God.  Literally, in the emphatic language of the Apostle John, he has felt his immortality—­“God in him and he in God.”  For that moment, infinitude was to him not a name, but a reality.  He entered into the infinite of time and space, which is not measured by days, or months, or years, but is alike boundless and eternal.

Again, we perceive a third trace of this infinitude in man, in the power which he possesses of giving up self.  In this, perhaps more than in anything else, man may claim kindred with God.  Nor is this power confined to the best of mankind, but is possessed, to some extent at least, by all.  There is no man, how low soever he may be, who has not one or two causes or secrets, which no earthly consideration would induce him to betray.  There is no man who does not feel towards one or two at least, in this world, a devotion which all the bribes of the universe would not be able to shake.  We have heard the story of that degraded criminal who, when sentence of death was passed upon him, turned to his accomplice in guilt, in whose favour a verdict of acquittal was brought in, and in glorious self-forgetfulness exclaimed—­“Thank God, you are saved!” The savage and barbarous Indian whose life has been one unbroken series of cruelty and crime, will submit to a slow, lingering, torturing death, rather than betray his country.  Now, what shall we say to these things?  Do they not tell of an indestructible something in the nature of man, of which the origin is divine?—­the remains of a majesty which, though it may be sullied, can never be entirely lost?

Before passing on let us observe, that were it not for this conviction of the divine origin, and consequent perfectibility of our nature, the very thought of God would be painful to us.  God is so great, so glorious, that the mind is overwhelmed by, and shrinks from, the contemplation of His excellence, unless there comes the tender, ennobling thought that we are the children of God, who are to become like our Father in Heaven, whose blessed career it is to go on in an advance of love and duty towards Him, until we love Him as we are loved, and know Him almost as we are known.

II.  We pass on, in the second place, to consider the Christian motive—­“Even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.”  Brethren, worldly prudence, miscalled morality, says—­“Be honest; you will find your gain in being so.  Do right; you will be the better for it—­even in this world you will not lose by it.”  The mistaken religionist only magnifies this on a large scale.  “Your duty,” he says, “is to save your soul.  Give up this world to have the next.  Lose here, that you