t while living here on earth. It vivifies and lends joy to
it; for the joy of sympathetic companionship is the one supreme and
transcendent happiness in life. And to live in this atmosphere requires
one absolute and inevitable condition, the constant exercise of the
moral virtues,--of truth, rectitude, generosity, and love. The life held
amenable to these, the life which commits itself utterly into the divine
keeping, is not a life of hardship; the "road that winds up hill" is the
road of perpetual interest and exhilaration. It is a fatal fallacy to
invest it with gloom and despair. It is the only possible source of the
constant, intellectual energy of life, of sweetness, of joy, of
happiness.

The only standard which is worthy for one to hold as that by which he
measures his life is the divine one illustrated in the character of
Jesus. To measure one's quality of daily life by this is always to fall
short of satisfactory achievement; and still there is always the
realization that its achievement is only a question of persistence and
of time. It is the direction in which one is moving that determines his
final destination. There is the deepest inspiration to the soul in
taking for one's perpetual watchword, "Be ye therefore perfect, even as
your Father in heaven is perfect." Not that this divine state is
attained; but there is perpetual aid in the conviction that one's
self--his spiritual self--_can_ "press on to the high calling of God."
Man is a divine being; the divine life is his only true life.

The deepest loyalty to the divine ideal involves, however, not only the
striving after perfection, but the charity for imperfection. To denounce
evil is a part of rectitude; to condemn sin is a moral duty; but to
condemn the sinner is not infrequently to be more deeply at fault than
is he who thus offended. An illustration of this point has recently been
before the public. A New York clergyman preached on Easter Sunday a
sermon that was not his own. He gave no credit to its writer. The sermon
was published, and a minister of another church, recognizing it, at once
proceeded to "expose" the matter in the daily press. Not only did he
call public attention to the error, but he did it in a manner that
seemed to rejoice in the opportunity; a manner so devoid of sorrow or
sympathy as to fill the reader with despair at such an exhibition. Rev.
E. Walpole Warren fittingly rebuked the evident malice with which the
fault was exposed