ve power for shaping
our lives, and emancipating us from our evil.

Christ is _the_ type, the mould into which men are to be cast.
The Gospel, as presented in Scripture, gives us three things. It
gives us the perfect mould; it gives us the perfect motive; it gives
us the perfect power. And in all three things appears its distinctive
glory, apart from and above all other systems that have ever tried to
affect the conduct or to mould the character of man.

In Jesus Christ we have in due combination, in perfect proportion,
all the possible excellences of humanity. As in other cases of
perfect symmetry, the very precision of the balanced proportions
detracts from the apparent magnitude of the statue or of the fair
building, so to a superficial eye there is but little beauty there
that we should desire Him, but as we learn to know Him, and live
nearer to Him, and get more familiar with all His sweetness, and with
all His power, He towers before us in ever greater and yet never
repellent or exaggerated magnitude, and never loses the reality of
His brotherhood in the completeness of His perfection. We have in the
Christ the one type, the one mould and pattern for all striving, the
'glass of form,' the perfect Man.

And that likeness is not reproduced in us by pressure or by a blow,
but by the slow and blessed process of gazing until we become like,
beholding the glory until we are changed into the glory.

It is no use having a mould and metal unless you have a fire. It is
no use having a perfect Pattern unless you have a motive to copy it.
Men do not go to the devil for want of examples; and morality is not
at a low ebb by reason of ignorance of what the true type of life is.
But nowhere but in the full-orbed teaching of the New Testament will
you find a motive strong enough to melt down all the obstinate
hardness of the 'northern iron' of the human will, and to make it
plastic to His hand. If we can say, 'He loved me and gave Himself for
me' then the sum of all morality, the old commandment that 'ye love
one another' receives a new stringency, and a fresh motive as well as
a deepened interpretation, when His love is our pattern. The one
thing that will make men willing to be like Christ is their faith
that Christ is their Sacrifice and their Saviour. And sure I am of
this, that no form of mutilated Christianity, which leaves out or
falteringly proclaims the truth that Christ died on the Cross for the
sins of the world, w