That St. John would have assented to these bold and honest words, that such is St. John's conception of human and divine morality, the story in the text shows, to my mind, especially. It is, so to speak, a crucial experiment, by which the truth of the Scripture theory is verified. The difficulty in all ages about a standard of morality has been--How can we fix it? Even if we agree that man's goodness ought to be the counterpart of God's goodness, we know that in practice it is not, as mankind has differed in all ages and countries about what is right and wrong. The Hindoo thinks it right to burn widows, wrong to eat animal food; and between such extremes there are numberless minor differences. Hardly any act is conceivable which has not been thought by some man, somewhere, somehow, morally right or morally wrong. If all that we can do is, to choose out those instances of morality which seem to us most right, and impute them to God, shall we not have an ever-shifting, probably a merely conventional standard of right and wrong? And worse--shall we not be always in danger of deifying our own superstitions--perhaps our own vices: of making a God in our own image, because we cannot know that God in whose image we are made? Most true, unless "we believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ," "perfect God and perfect man." In Him, says the Bible, the perfect human morality is manifested, and shown by His life and conduct to be identical with the divine. He bids us be perfect even as our Father in heaven is perfect; and He only has a right- -in the sense of a sound and fair reason--for so doing; because He can say, and has said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father."