It seems to me that the Christian Church suffers more from the judgments of those who criticize unfinished work than any organized body of men and women. Here is an organization whose members do not pretend to perfection; whose whole theory forbids any such idea. They are disciples--learners of the Divine Master. They are members of a school in which none ever arrives at fulness of knowledge. Their prayer is that they may grow; and they know that if they have the true life in them they will grow while they live. If there is one thing in the world of which they are painfully conscious, it is that they are pieces of unfinished work. Some of the members are very much lower in the scale of completeness than others. In some there is only a confused pile of timber and bricks. In others only a part of the frame is up, or the walls are hardly more than begun. In others, perhaps, the roof is on. In comparatively few do we see the outlines all defined and the rooms in a good degree of completeness. In none of them is there a perfected structure, and none see and acknowledge their incompleteness more than those whose characters are farthest advanced toward perfection. Now I put it to the world outside of the Christian Church to say if it has been entirely fair, and just in its judgments of the Church. Has it not judged Christianity by these imperfect disciples, and has it not condemned these imperfect disciples because they are not what they never pretended to be? Has it not criticized half-finished work, and condemned, not only the work, but Christianity itself, because this work was not up to the sample? It is very common to hear men say that such and such a Christian is no better than the average of people outside of the Christian Church, thus condemning the genuineness of his character because he is not a perfect Christian. A house is a house, even if it be only half-finished. At least, it is not any thing else; and as Christians cannot by any possibility be perfected on the instant, it follows that the large majority of Christians must be in various stages of progress--nay, that most of this large majority are not even half-finished. The Christian Church itself is a piece of unfinished work, and every individual member is the same. It is not pretended that either is any thing else. I never knew a Christian to set himself up as a pattern. So far as I know, they are very shy of pretension, and deprecate nothing more than the thought that anybody should take them for finished specimens of the work of Christianity in human life and character.