is world carries with it another message. _There_ is Christ in the
heavens, veiled and unseen. Here are you on earth, his representative.
There is a rage at present for putting pictures into all books, and folk
will scarcely read unless they get illustrated literature. The world has
for its illustrations of the gospel the lives of us Christian people. In
the book there are principles and facts, and readers should be able to
turn the page and see all pictured in us.

That is what you are set to do in this world. 'As the Father sent Me,
even so send I you.' 'As He is, so are we in this world.' It may be our
antagonist, but it is our sphere, and its presence is necessary to evoke
our characters. Christ has entrusted His reputation, His honour, to us,
and many a man that never cares to look at _Him_ as He is revealed in
Scripture, would be wooed and won to look at Him and love Him, if we
Christian people were more true to our vocation, and bore more
conspicuously on our faces and in our characters the image of the
heavenly.

II. Look for a moment at the second thought that is here: such a
likeness to Jesus Christ is the only thing that will enable a man to
lift up his head in the Day of Judgment.

'We have boldness,' says John, _because_ 'as He is, so are we.' Now that
is a very strong statement of a truth that popular, evangelical theology
has far too much obscured. People talk about being, at the last,
'accepted in the beloved.' God be thanked, it is true. A sweet old hymn
that a great many of us learned when we were children, though it is not
so well known in these days, says:--

'Bold shall I stand in that great day,
For who aught to my charge shall lay,
While through Thy blood absolved I am
From sin's tremendous curse and shame?'

I believe that, and I try to preach it. But do not let us forget the
other side. My text is in full accordance with the principles of our
Lord's own teaching; and who knows the principles of His own words so
well as the judge, who tells us, in His pictures of that great day, that
the question put to every man will be, not what you _believe_, but what
did you _do_, and what _are_ you?

But this truth of my text has been not only wounded in the house of the
friends of Christianity, but it has been overlooked by one of the very
frequent objections that we hear made to evangelical teaching, that,
according to it, a man is judged according to his belief and not
according