A perfect man must be kind and wise, patient and loving,--not one whose life shall make the worldling sore and resentful, but shall rather make him sad and longing,--not one who boasts to be a “man of prayer,” but forgets to be a man of love,--not one who makes Faith the cuckoo nestling that edges out Charity,--not one too much absorbed in devotion, and even divine and religious contemplation, to enter into the difficulties, and wants, and cries, and doubts, and struggles of those beneath the mountain which he is ascending. He must be one of a universal kindliness,--of an always ready sympathy for any feeling which he perceives to be real, howsoever it find no echo in his own heart; one ever just, generous, forbearing, forgiving; ever ready to stop and to descend to raise the fallen; firm and fixed in principle, but tender and gentle in heart; speaking the truth, but speaking it still in love; severity against sin never swamping yearning for the sinner; never base or mean in things large or little; always ready to suppose the best of others; never vaunting, never puffed up; not easily provoked; thinking no evil; rejoicing with the joyful, weeping with the sad; hard only upon himself; bearing all things, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things. Never giving others to understand that he has already attained, or is already perfect; not counting himself to have apprehended, but _pressing toward the mark_. Alas! it is true that men are mostly content with a very low standard, and if they seem to themselves and others to have attained that, easily rest there;--and the great opportunity passes away ungrasped. Torn leaves, tattered leaves, at best marred and imperfect, not one approaching perfection, not one without a flaw. Ah, yes, one,--and one only. How glorious the thought that in Christ, born into the world, and taking our nature upon Him,--in Christ, the Seed of the woman,--this our poor human nature, tattered, torn, and defaced, is exalted into absolute and eternal Perfection. All the fiercest storms and blights and heats attacked our nature in Him, but attacked it in vain. The most minute and scrutinising examination can here detect no least speck, or swerving from the ideal of symmetry. In Him we see what we long, vainly it seems, to be. In Him we see that towards which He would exalt us, if we will be exalted,--that which we may in a sense attain, if we will be perfected. And so at last we turn from sad contemplation of innumerable greater or less failures, and dwell restfully and hopefully upon the only and all-sufficient perfect One. To be like Him when He shall appear, oh, glorious hope that He has given us! to awake thus in the Spring of the Next Year, and this in a Land where there are no blights, nor colds, nor heats, to mar that shape. But let us remember, that having this hope, we should even now be purifying ourselves, even as He is pure.