THE Bible is always telling Christian people to _go forwards_—to grow—to become wiser and stronger, better and better day by day; that they ought to become better, and better, because they can, if they choose, improve. This text tells us so; it says that we shall bring forth more fruit in our old age. Another text tells us that “those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength;” another tells us that we “shall go from strength to strength.” Not one of St. Paul’s Epistles but talks of growing in grace and in the knowledge of God, of being _filled_ with God’s Spirit, of having our eyes more and more open to understand God’s truth. Not one of St. Paul’s Epistles but contains prayers of St. Paul that the men to whom he writes may become holier and wiser. And St. Paul says that he himself needed to go forward—that he wanted fresh strength—that he had to forget what was past, and consider all he had done and felt as nothing, and press forward to the prize of his high calling; that he needed to be daily conquering himself more and more, keeping down his bad feelings, hunting out one bad habit after another, lest, by any means, when he had preached to others, he himself should become a castaway. Therefore, I said rightly, that the Bible is always bidding us go forwards. You cannot read your Bibles without seeing this. What else was the use of St. Paul’s Epistles? They were written to Christian men, redeemed men, converted men, most of them better I fear than ever we shall be; and for what? to tell them not be content to remain as they were, to tell them to go forwards, to improve, to be sure that they were only just inside the gate of God’s kingdom, and that if they would go on to perfection, they would find strength, and holiness, and blessing, and honour, and happiness, which they as yet did not dream of. “Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect,” said our blessed Lord to all men. “Be ye perfect,” says St. Paul to the Corinthians, and the Ephesians, and all to whom he wrote; and so say I to you now in God’s name, for Christ’s sake, as citizens of God’s kingdom, as heirs of everlasting glory, “Be you perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” Now I ask you, my friends, is not this reasonable? It is reasonable, for the Bible always speaks of our souls as living things. It compares them to limbs of a body, to branches of a tree, often to separate plants—as in our Lord’s parable of the tares and the wheat. Again, St. Paul tells us that we have been planted in baptism in the likeness of Christ’s death; and again, in the first Psalm, which says that the good man shall be like a tree planted by the waterside; and again, in the text of my sermon, which says “that those who are planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age; they shall be fat and flourishing.”