holiness which, wonderful
as it is, and high above all our present attainment as it is, yet is not
higher than the possibilities which His indwelling Spirit puts within
our reach, nor beyond the bounds of the duty that presses upon us all.
'As He which hath called you is holy.' Absolute and utter purity is His
holiness, and that is the pattern for us.

Religion is imitation. The truest form of worship is to copy. All
through heathenism you find that principle working. 'They that make them
are like unto them.' Why are heathen nations so besotted and sunken and
obstinate in their foulnesses? Because their gods are their examples,
and they, first of all, make the gods after the pattern of their own
evil imaginations, and then the evil imaginations, deified, react upon
the maker and make him tenfold more a child of hell than themselves.
Worship is imitation, and there is no religion which does not
necessarily involve the copying of the example or the pattern of that
Being before whom we bow. For religion is but love and reverence in the
superlative degree, and the natural operation of love is to copy, and
the natural operation of reverence is the same. So that the old Mosaic
law, 'Be ye holy as I am holy,' went to the very heart of religion. And
the New Testament form of it, as Paul puts it in a very bold word, 'Be
ye _imitators_ of God, as beloved children,' sets its seal on the same
thought that we are religious in the proportion in which we are
consciously copying and aspiring after God.

But then, says somebody or other, 'it is not possible.' Well, if it were
not possible, try it all the same. For in this world it is aim and not
attainment that makes the noble life; and it is better to shoot at the
stars, even though your arrow never reaches them, than to fire it along
the low levels of ordinary life. I do not see that however the
unattainableness of the model may be demonstrated, that has anything to
do with the duty of imitation. Because, though absolute conformity
running throughout the whole of a life is not possible here on earth, we
know that in each individual instance in which we came short of
conformity the fault was ours, and it might have been otherwise. Instead
of bewildering ourselves with questions about 'unattainable' or
'attainable,' suppose we asked, at each failure, 'Why did I not copy God
_then_; was it because I could not, or because I would not?' The answer
would come plain enough to knock all tha