ct
and specific efforts, constantly repeated, to subdue and suppress
individual acts of transgression. We have to fight against evil, sin by
sin. We have not the thing to do all at once; we have to do it in
detail. It is a war of outposts, like the last agonies of that
Franco-Prussian war, when the Emperor had abdicated, and the country was
really conquered, and Paris had yielded, but yet all over the face of
the land combats had to be carried on.

So it is with us. Holiness is not feeling; it is character. You do not
get rid of your sins by the act of divine amnesty only. You are not
perfect because you say you are, and feel as if you were, and think you
are. God does not make any man pure in his sleep. His cleansing does not
dispense with fighting, but makes victory possible.

Then, dear brethren, lay to heart this, as the upshot of the whole
matter: First of all, let us turn to Him from whom all the cleansing
comes; and then, moment by moment, remember that it is our work to
purify ourselves by the strength and the power that is given to us by
the Master.

II. The second thought here is this: This purifying of ourselves is the
link or bridge between the present and the future.--'Now are we the sons
of God,' says John in the context. That is the pier upon the one side of
the gulf. 'It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but when He is made
manifest we shall be like Him.' That is the pier on the other. How are
the two to be connected? There is only one way by which the present
sonship will blossom and fruit into the future perfect likeness, and
that is,--if we throw across the gulf, by God's help day by day here,
that bridge of our effort after growing likeness to Himself, and purity
therefrom.

That is plain enough, I suppose. To speak in somewhat technical terms,
the 'law of continuity' that we hear so much about, runs on between
earth and Heaven; which, being translated into plain English, is but
this--that the act of passing from the limitations and conditions of
this transitory life into the solemnities and grandeurs of that future
does not alter a man's character, though it may intensify it. It does
not make him different from what he was, though it may make him more of
what he was, whether its direction be good or bad.

You take a stick and thrust it into water; and because the rays of light
pass from one medium to another of a different density, they are
refracted and the stick seems bent; but take the