'Man's chief end is to glorify
God and to enjoy Him for ever.' Yes, he who lives for God has taken that
for his aim which all his nature and all his relations prescribe, he is
doing what he was made and meant to do; and however incomplete may be
its attainments, the lowest form of a God-fearing, God-obeying life is
higher and more nearly 'perfect' than the fairest career or character
against which, as a blight on all its beauty, the damning accusation may
be brought, 'The God in whose hand thy breath is, and whose are all thy
ways, thou hast not glorified.'

People sneer at 'saints' and point at their failings. They remind us of
the foul stains in David's career, for instance, and mock as they ask,
'Is this your man after God's own heart?' Yes, he is; not because
religion has a morality of its own different from that of the world
(except as being higher), nor because 'saints' make up for adultery and
murder by making or singing psalms, but because the main set and current
of the life was evidently towards God and goodness, and these hideous
sins were glaring contradictions, eddies and backwaters, as it were,
wept over with bitter self-abasement and conquered by strenuous effort.
Better a life of Godward aspiration and straining after purity, even if
broken by such a fall, so recovered, than one of habitual earthward
grubbing, undisturbed by gross sin.

And another reason warrants the application of the word to men whose
present is full of incompleteness, namely, the fact that such men have
in them the germ of a life which has no natural end but absolute
completeness. The small seed may grow very slowly in the climate and
soil which it finds here, and be only a poor little bit of ragged green,
very shabby and inconspicuous by the side of the native flowers of earth
flaunting around it, but it has a divine germinant virtue within, and
waits but being carried to its own clime and 'planted in the house of
the Lord' above, to 'flourish in the courts of our God,' when these
others with their glorious beauty have faded away and are flung out to
rot.

II. We have set forth here very distinctly two of the characteristics of
this perfection.

The Apostle in our text exhorts the perfect to be '_thus_ minded.' How
is that? Evidently the word points back to the previous clauses, in
which he has been describing his own temper and feeling in the Christian
race. He sets that before the Philippians as their pattern, or rather
invit