or
you may use either word), is holiness like His own. That is the crown of
all His purposes for men, the great goal and blessed home to which He
would lead us all.

And so, if in addition to the fact of His 'gift and calling' and all
that is included within it, if in addition to the purpose of that
calling we further think of the relation between us and Him which
results from it, so as that we, as the next verse says, call Him who
hath called us, 'Our Father,' then the motive becomes deeper and more
blessed still. Shall we not try to be like the Father of our spirits,
and seek for His grace, to bear the likeness of sons?

My text speaks only of effort, let us not forget that the truest way to
be partakers of His holiness is to open our hearts for the entrance of
the Spirit of His Son, and possessing that--having these promises and
that great fulfilment of them--then to perfect holiness in the fear and
love of the Lord.

FATHER AND JUDGE

'If ye call on Him as Father, who without respect of persons
judgeth according to every man's work, pass the time of your
sojourning here in fear.'--1 Peter i. 17.

'If ye call on Him as Father,' when ye pray, say, 'Our Father which art
in heaven.' One can scarcely help supposing that the Apostle is here, as
in several other places in his letter, alluding to words that are
stamped ineffaceably upon his memory, because they had dropped from
Christ's lips. At all events, whether there is here a distinct allusion
to what we call the Lord's Prayer or no, it is here recognised as the
universal characteristic of Christian people that their prayers are
addressed to God in the character of Father. So that we may say that
there is no Christianity which does not recognise and rejoice in
appealing to the paternal relationship.

But, then, I suppose in Peter's days, as in our days, there were people
that so fell in love with one aspect of the Divine nature that they had
no eyes for any other; and who so magnified the thought of the Father
that they forgot the thought of the Judge. That error has been committed
over and over again in all ages, so that the Church as a whole, one may
say, has gone swaying from one extreme to the other, and has rent these
two conceptions widely apart, and sometimes has been foolish enough to
pit them against each other instead of doing as Peter does here,
braiding them together as both conspiring to one result, the production
in the Ch