VI. Perfection Divine and Human. MATT. v. 48. "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect." FROM no lips but those of the great Mediator between the divine and the human in our world could this precept fall without failing of its beauty and suffering reproach for its extravagance. Had any teacher less near to God, less dear to man, given utterance to it, it would have been taken to imply either a presumptuous estimate of earthly possibilities, or a low conception of heavenly sanctity. How often is the Christian preacher, nay, even the Stoic moralist,-accused of demanding too much from human nature, of urging the wing of aspiration beyond its appointed height, when he merely asks for some faint lineaments of the Divine image on the soul, and rebukes the petty thoughts and low ambitions which completely shut it out! When he looks among them for only some reflected trace of the infinite purity, some pious nobleness to mark them as the Children of the Highest, how readily is he charged with losing himself in the regions of romance! Yet here the Teacher of teachers, the great interpreter of Conscience, tranquilly demands, not merely the consciousness of God, but the living likeness of him; not only the resemblance of an involuntary feature and a transient hour, but a similitude intentional, constant and complete: "Be ye perfect, as your Father in Heaven is perfect." And from him we accept the injunction, as giving not only the ideal of our life, but the actual of his. Himself the middle point of reconciling harmony, where the attributes of humanity are touched with the glory of a divine perfection, he renders it credible to us that, all minds being of one race, the Supreme Holiness may repeat itself in all: he destroys the hopeless distance at which an unapproaching worship stands; and brings into conscious sympathy and resemblance the goodness of the finite and the infinite. Self-evidently, it is not in the scale, but only in the kind, of character, that our nature can be brought to the similitude of God's. Cut off, as we are, from all sensible approach to him in dimension, we can bear his image only in the spirit of our souls. It is just in this, however, that the perfection of a moral agent must consist. He might have great magnitude and long duration and intense force, yet be no more than a monster and an anti-god, a gigantic depositary of passion and disorder. Space and Time and Power are mere physical elements, quite neutral in the estimate of character, and conceivable alike of Devil and of Deity. It is in the kind of sentiment ruling within the mind, the balance of its graces and the proportion of its love, that all its perfectness consists: and these are colours that may be no less faultlessly blended within the miniature frame of a mortal nature than on an amplitude boundless as the sky. To change our physical relation to God, of absolute dependence and incommensurable littleness, is no more possible than for the wave to become the ocean: but just as the same laws that sway the masses of the sea also trace the ripple and shape the spray, so may the very same divine principles, the same preferences, the same constancy which belong to the spiritual life of God, reappear in the tiny currents of our will and even the very play and sparkle of our affections. It is but the affectation of humility, or the dislike of noble claims, that can make us shrink from our affinity with the Father and Inspirer of all souls. There is a special feature in the Divine perfection on which Christ in his exhortation emphatically dwells. God warms with his sunshine the evil and the good, and refreshes with his rain the just and the unjust. No impulse of anger, no persuasion of complacency, diverts him from his steady ways, or alters the fundamental ground-work of beneficence, on which all his administration rests. There is a common mercy, an inalienable Once love, which he never permits to become contingent, and from which nothing ever falls away. It abides with the sinful as with the saintly, and returns the same mild look to guilty defiance as to trustful prayer. Looking on Nature as the theatre and on her methods as the activity of God, we cannot fail to be struck with his serene perseverance through the storms of human affairs, and the heavings of human passion. having established a physical law, he persists in doing thus and no otherwise without weariness from lapse of time or deviation from change of place. Go where you will, live where you may, you are in the presence of his silent veracity, his unswerving consistency. The rules which he has laid down for this terrestrial sphere, which dispose of its matter, distribute its growths, and determine its movements,—which we read off from the ocean, and the mountains and the air,-are followed no less in the furthest fields of telescopic vision; and processes observed in the newest continents and never traced till yesterday explain the geologic vestiges of incalculable time. Science cannot find a Law, provincial or provisional: intending to interpret one spot, she alights upon a truth for all: struck with a momentary phenomenon, she seizes the key of a periodic combination. She cannot detect the orbit of the moon, without discovering the plan of all the solar worlds; or catch and expound the sunbeam in a crystal without telling a truth of Orion and Pleiades. Ere yet there was any moral life upon this world, a material order had been established, and was slowly building up and garnishing the future dwelling-place of man: the rippled sand, the gravelled beach, the sedgy marsh, the treasured and the melting snow, have left their record of seasons and successions like our own. And through all the subsequent moral vicissitudes of human history, this steady order has continued, as if those vicissitudes had not entered on the scene. There are indeed legends which tell of a visible sympathy of the elements with the affairs of man,-of Nature angry with his crimes: but no such convulsion at her heart has left a trace upon her punctual record and her calm face. Over Arctic wastes or teeming cities the Sun is equally lavish of his flood, and glances alike from the sword of an Attila and the crucifix of a Xavier: the full moon indifferently flings her purity into the windows of revelry and guilt, and paints the Saviour's image on the chancel-floor where lonely sorrow and devotion kneels. What Science calls the uniformity of nature, Faith accepts as the fidelity of God. They are but the settled ways of his sole causation, the program of his everlasting work, the dial-plate which the index of human expectation is to traverse age by age. When we speak of their unerring regularity, we do but attest his truth, which keeps the time-piece steady for us, and warns us how the shadows lie. He that framed these |