ot be
complacent over the partial transformation which you have felt. There
is but a fragment of the great image yet reproduced in your soul, a
faint outline dimly traced, with many a feature wrongly drawn, with
many a line still needed, before it can be called even approximately
complete. See to it that you neither turn away your gaze, nor relax
your efforts till all that you have beheld in Him is repeated in you.

Likeness to Christ is the aim of all religion. To it conversion is
introductory; doctrines, devout emotion, worship and ceremonies,
churches and organisations are valuable as auxiliary. Let that
wondrous issue of God's mercy be the purpose of our lives, and the
end as well as the test of all the things which we call our
Christianity. Prize and use them as helps towards it, and remember
that they are helps only in proportion as they show us that Saviour,
the image of whom is our perfection, the beholding of whom is our
transformation.

III. Notice, lastly, that the life of contemplation finally becomes a
life of complete assimilation.

'Changed into the same image, from glory to glory.' The lustrous
light which falls upon Christian hearts from the face of their Lord
is permanent, and it is progressive. The likeness extends, becomes
deeper, truer, every way perfecter, comprehends more and more of the
faculties of the man; soaks into him, if I may say so, until he is
saturated with the glory; and in all the extent of his being, and in
all the depth possible to each part of that whole extent, is like his
Lord. That is the hope for heaven, towards which we may indefinitely
approximate here, and at which we shall absolutely arrive there.
There we expect changes which are impossible here, while compassed
with this body of sinful flesh. We look for the merciful exercise of
His mighty working to 'change the body of our lowliness, that it may
be fashioned like unto the body of His glory'; and that physical
change in the resurrection of the just rightly bulks very large in
good men's expectations. But we are somewhat apt to think of the
perfect likeness of Christ too much in connection with that
transformation that begins only after death, and to forget that the
main transformation must begin here. The glorious, corporeal life
like our Lord's, which is promised for heaven, is great and
wonderful, but it is only the issue and last result of the far
greater change in the spiritual nature, which by faith and love
beg