a fragment of what they once dreamed that
they {165} might do or be. But you can design your life, not according
to quantitative completeness, but according to qualitative
completeness. It may be long or short, but in either case it may be of
the right stuff. It may be carved out of pure marble with an artist's
hand, and then, whether the whole of it remains to be a thing of beauty
or whether it is broken off, like a fragment of its full design, it is
a finished life. You give back your life to God who gave it, perhaps
in ripe old age, perhaps, as your Master did, at thirty-three, and you
say: "I have accomplished, not what I should like to have done, but
what Thou hast given me to do. I have done my best. It is finished.
Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit."

{166}

LXVI

ATTAINING TO THE RESURRECTION

_Philippians_ iii. 11.

(MONDAY AFTER EASTER)

This is certainly a very extraordinary saying of St. Paul--that he
hopes to attain unto the resurrection from the dead. We are so apt to
think of the resurrection as a remote truth, to be realized in some
distant future, when some day we shall die and live again, that the
very idea of attaining to such a resurrection now is not easy to grasp.
But here we have a resurrection which can be attained any day. "I have
not already attained," says St. Paul, "but I press on." It is
possible, that is to say, for a man to-day, who seems perfectly
healthy, to be dying or dead, and for a man to rise from the dead
to-day and attain to the resurrection.

And thus the fundamental question of the Easter season is not: "Do I
believe that people when they die shall rise again from the dead?" but
it is "Have I risen from the dead {167} myself?" "Am I alive to-day,
with any touch of the eternal life?" Mr. Ruskin describes a grim
Scythian custom where, when the king died, he was set on his throne at
the head of his table, and his vassals, instead of mourning for him,
bowed before his corpse and feasted in his presence. That same ghastly
scene is sometimes repeated now, and young men think they are sitting
at a feast, when they are really sitting at a funeral, and believe
themselves to be, as they say, "seeing life," when they are in reality
looking upon the death of all that is true and fair. And on the other
hand the most beautiful thing which is permitted for any one to see is
the resurrection of a human soul from the dead, its deliverance from
shame and sin,