And that is what any man must set before him as the test and the plan of his own life. You cannot say to yourself: "I will live until I am seventy, I will accomplish certain things, and will attain a certain position;" for the greatest and oldest of men when they look back on their lives see in them only 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.