l which is His heritage.

This mutual possession and indwelling is possible if Jesus be the Son of
God, but the language is absurd in any other interpretation of His
person. It is clearly in its very nature capable of indefinite increase,
and as containing in itself the supply of all which we need for life and
blessedness, is fitted to be what nothing else can pretend to be,
without wrecking the lives that are unwise enough to pursue it--the
sovereign aim of a human life. In following it, and only in following
it, the highest wisdom says Amen to the aspiration of the lowliest
faith. 'This one thing I do.'

II. Paul's life's aim was righteousness to be received.

He goes on to present some of the consequences which follow on his
gaining Christ and being 'found in Him,' and before all others he names
as his aim the possession of 'righteousness.' We must remember that Paul
believed that righteousness in the sense of 'justification' had been his
from the moment when Ananias came to where he was sitting in darkness,
and bid him be baptized and wash away his sins. The word here must be
taken in its full sense of moral perfectness; even if we included only
this in our thoughts of his life's aim, how high above most men would he
tower! But his statement carries him still higher above, and farther
away from, the common ideas of moral perfection, and what he means by
righteousness is widely separated from the world's conception, not only
in regard to its elements, but still more in regard to its source.

It is possible to lose oneself in a dreamy mysticism which has had much
to say of 'gaining Christ and being found in Him,' and has had too
little to say about 'having righteousness,' and so has turned out to be
an ally of indifference and sometimes of unrighteousness. Buddhism and
some forms of mystical Christianity have fallen into a pit of immorality
from which Paul's sane combination here would have saved them. There is
no danger in the most mystical interpretation of the former statement of
his aim, when it is as closely connected as it is here with the second
form in which he states it. I have just said that Paul differed from men
who were seeking for righteousness, not only because his conceptions of
what constituted it were not the same as theirs, though he in this very
letter endorses the Greek ideals of 'virtue and praise,' but also and
more emphatically because he looked for it as a gift, and not as the
result of his