feeble copy of some great picture beside the
original, and compares it touch for touch, line for line, shade for
shade, and so corrects its errors. Take your lives to the Exemplar in
that fashion, and go over them bit by bit. Is _this_ like Jesus Christ;
is _that_ what He would have done? Then '_in_ Him,' thus in contact with
Him, thus correcting our daubs by the perfect picture, we shall learn
our lesson and listen to our Teacher.

Still your passions, muzzle your inclinations, clap a bridle on your
will, and, as some tumultuous crowd would be hushed into silence that
they might listen to the king speaking to them, make a great silence in
your hearts, and you will 'hear Him' and be taught 'in Him'.

III. Lastly, the test and result of having learned the Lesson and
listened to the Teacher is unlikeness to surrounding corruption.

'Ye have _not so_ learned Christ.' Of course the hideous immoralities of
Ephesus are largely, but by no means altogether, gone from Manchester.
Of course, nineteen centuries of Christianity have to a very large
extent changed the tone of society and influenced the moral judgments
and practices even of persons who are not Christians. But there still
remains a _world_, and there still remains unfilled up the gulf between
the worldly and the godly life. And I believe it is just as needful as
ever it was, though in different ways, for Christians to exhibit
unlikeness to the world. 'Not so,' must be our motto; or, as the Jewish
patriot said, 'So did not I, because of the fear of the Lord.'

I do not wish you to make yourselves singular; I do not wish you to wear
conventional badges of unlikeness to certain selected evil habits. A
Christian man's unlikeness to the world consists a great deal more in
doing or being what it does not do and is not than in not doing or being
what it does and is. It is easy to abstain from conventional things; it
is a great deal harder to put in practice the unworldly virtues of the
Christian character.

There are wide regions of life in which all men must act alike, be they
saints or sinners, be they believers, Agnostics, Mohammedans, Turks,
Jews, or anything else. There are two ways of doing the same thing. If
two women were sitting at a grindstone, one of them a Christian and the
other not, the one that pushed her handle half round the circle for
Christ's sake would do it in a different fashion from the other one who
took it from her hand and brought it round to t