e minded'; by which we
understand not divergently minded from one another, but 'otherwise' than
the true norm or law of life would prescribe, and so may stand in need
of the hope that God will by degrees bring them into conformity with His
will, and show them 'this,' namely, their divergence from His Pattern
for them.

It is worth our while to look at these large thoughts thus involved in
the words before us.

I. Then there are people whom without exaggeration the judgment of truth
calls _perfect_.

The language of the New Testament has no scruple in calling men 'saints'
who had many sins, and none in calling men perfect who had many
imperfections; and it does so, not because it has any fantastic theory
about religious emotions being the measure of moral purity, but partly
for the reasons already referred to, and partly because it wisely
considers the main thing about a character to be not the degree to which
it has attained completeness in its ideal, but what that ideal is. The
distance a man has got on his journey is of less consequence than the
direction in which his face is turned. The arrow may fall short, but to
what mark was it shot? In all regions of life a wise classification of
men arranges them according to their aims rather than their
achievements. The visionary who attempts something high and accomplishes
scarcely anything of it, is often a far nobler man, and his poor,
broken, foiled, resultless life far more perfect than his who aims at
marks on the low levels and hits them full. Such lives as these, full
of yearning and aspiration, though it be for the most part vain, are

'Like the young moon with a ragged edge
E'en in its imperfection beautiful.'

If then it be wise to rank men and their pursuits according to their
aims rather than their accomplishments, is there one class of aims so
absolutely corresponding to man's nature and relations that to take them
for one's own, and to reach some measure of approximation to them, may
fairly be called the perfection of human nature? Is there one way of
living concerning which we may say that whosoever adopts it has, in so
far as he does adopt it, discerned and attained the purpose of his
being? The literal force of the word in our text gives pertinence to
that question, for it distinctly means 'having reached the end.' And if
that be taken as the meaning, there need be no doubt about the answer.
Grand old words have taught us long ago