the same principle may be
widened out to embrace and direct us in the largest tasks and most
difficult circumstances.

'Worthily of saints'--the name is an omen, and carries in it rules of
conduct. The root idea of 'saint' is 'one separated to God,' and the
secondary idea which flows from that is 'one who is pure.'

All Christians are 'saints.' They are consecrated and set apart for
God's service, and in the degree in which they are conscious of and live
out that consecration, they are pure.

So their name, or rather the great fact which their name implies, should
be ever before them, a stimulus and a law. We are bound to remember that
we are consecrated, separated as God's possession, and that therefore
purity is indispensable. The continual consciousness of this relation
and its resulting obligations would make us recoil from impurity as
instinctively as the sensitive plant shuts up its little green fingers
when anything touches it; or as the wearer of a white robe will draw it
up high above the mud on a filthy pavement. Walk 'worthily of saints' is
another way of saying, Be true to your own best selves. Work up to the
highest ideal of your character. That is far more wholesome than to be
always looking at our faults and failures, which depress and tempt us to
think that the actual is the measure of the possible, and the past or
present of the future. There is no fear of self-conceit or of a mistaken
estimate of ourselves. The more clearly we keep our best and deepest
self before our consciousness, the more shall we learn a rigid judgment
of the miserable contradictions to it in our daily outward life, and
even in our thoughts and desires. It is a wholesome exhortation, when it
follows these others of which we have been speaking (and not else),
which bids Christians remember that they are saints and live up to their
name.

A Christian's inward and deepest self is better than his outward life.
We have all convictions in our inmost hearts which we do not work out,
and beliefs that do not influence us as we know they ought to do, and
sometimes wish that they did. By our own fault our lives but imperfectly
show their real inmost principle. Friction always wastes power before
motion is produced.

So then, we may well gather together all our duties in this final form
of the all-comprehensive law, and say to ourselves, 'Walk worthily of
saints.' Be true to your name, to your best selves, to your deepest
selves. Be tru