'As He that hath called you is holy.' God's holiness is the very
attribute which seems to separate Him most from the creatures; for its
deepest meaning is His majestic and Divine elevation above all that is
creatural. But here, of course, the idea conveyed by the word is not
that, if I may so say, metaphysical one, but the purely moral one. The
holiness of God which is capable of imitation by us is His separation
from all impurity. There is a side of His holiness which separates Him
from all the creatures, to which we can only look up, or bow with our
faces in the dust; but there is a side of His holiness which, wonderful
as it is, and high above all our present attainment as it is, yet is not
higher than the possibilities which His indwelling Spirit puts within
our reach, nor beyond the bounds of the duty that presses upon us all.
'As He which hath called you is holy.' Absolute and utter purity is His
holiness, and that is the pattern for us.
Religion is imitation. The truest form of worship is to copy. All
through heathenism you find that principle working. 'They that make them
are like unto them.' Why are heathen nations so besotted and sunken and
obstinate in their foulnesses? Because their gods are their examples,
and they, first of all, make the gods after the pattern of their own
evil imaginations, and then the evil imaginations, deified, react upon
the maker and make him tenfold more a child of hell than themselves.
Worship is imitation, and there is no religion which does not
necessarily involve the copying of the example or the pattern of that
Being before whom we bow. For religion is but love and reverence in the
superlative degree, and the natural operation of love is to copy, and
the natural operation of reverence is the same. So that the old Mosaic
law, 'Be ye holy as I am holy,' went to the very heart of religion. And
the New Testament form of it, as Paul puts it in a very bold word, 'Be
ye _imitators_ of God, as beloved children,' sets its seal on the same
thought that we are religious in the proportion in which we are
consciously copying and aspiring after God.
But then, says somebody or other, 'it is not possible.' Well, if it were
not possible, try it all the same. For in this world it is aim and not
attainment that makes the noble life; and it is better to shoot at the
stars, even though your arrow never reaches them, than to fire it along
the low levels of ordinary life. I do not see that however the
unattainableness of the model may be demonstrated, that has anything to
do with the duty of imitation. Because, though absolute conformity
running throughout the whole of a life is not possible here on earth, we
know that in each individual instance in which we came short of
conformity the fault was ours, and it might have been otherwise. Instead
of bewildering ourselves with questions about 'unattainable' or
'attainable,' suppose we asked, at each failure, 'Why did I not copy God
_then_; was it because I could not, or because I would not?' The answer
would come plain enough to knock all that sophisticated nonsense out of
our heads, and to make us feel that the law which puts an unattainable
ideal before the Christian as his duty is an intensely practical one,
and may be reduced to practice at each step in his career. Imitation of
the Father, and to be perfect, 'as our Father in heaven is perfect,' is
the elementary and the ultimate commandment of all Christian morality.
'Be ye holy as He that hath called you is holy.'
Then let me remind you that the unattainableness is by no means so
demonstrable as some people seem to think. A very tiny circle may have
the same centre as one that reaches beyond the suburbs of the universe,
and holds all stars and systems within its great round. And the tiniest
circle will have the same geometrical laws applied to it as the
greatest. The difference between finite and infinite has nothing to do
with the possibility of our becoming like God, if we believe that 'in
the image of God created He him'; and that men who have been not only
made by original creation in the Divine image, but have been born again
by the incorruptible seed of the Word into a kindred life with His, and
derived from Him, can surely grow like what they have got, and unfold
into actually possessed and achieved resemblance to their Father the
kindred life that is poured into their veins.
So every way it is better indefinitely to approximate to that great
likeness, though with many flaws and failures, than to say it cannot be
reached, and so I will content myself down here, in my sins and my
meannesses. No! dear brethren, 'we are saved by hope,' and one prime
condition of growth in nobleness is to believe it possible that, by His
blessing we may be like Him here on earth in the measure of our
perception of His beauty and reception of His grace.