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God blessed me with a dear Christian mother. Her gentle, patient life so loving and Christlike stamped upon my soul in early childhood the ideal of real Christian character. I had before me constantly an example of what I ought to be. As I look back at those days, my association with my mother seems to have been the only bright spot in my early life.
But the growth of Christlike and God-pleasing character is the divine purpose, and should be the human aim, of all lives. Our tasks, our joys, our sorrows, our gains, our losses these are all but the scaffolding, and the scaffolding is only there in order that, course upon course, may rise the temple-palace of a spirit, devoted to, shaped and inhabited by, our Father, God.
With a feeling of awe Grey knelt beside the bed, while his grandfather laid his hands on his head and said: "May God bless my boy Grey, and make him a good man not like me, the chief of sinners, but Christlike and pure, so that he may one day reach the eternal home where I hope to meet him, through the merits of the blood of Jesus, which cleanseth from all sin all sin, even mine.
Would you not explain to them that the worst way to honour God is to dishonour man who is made in His image, and is the work of His hands; and, that if one wants to paint Christ one must take the most Christlike person one can find, and if one wants to paint the Madonna, the purest girl one knows?
It is not the spasmodic, the exceptional, the rare, not the lofty or transcendentally Christlike acts or characters that are alone the manifestation of the Spirit. Nor is this gift a thing that a man can discover as distinct from his own consciousness.
It was his complete forgetfulness of self, his entire willingness to sink his own individuality, his own comfort, his own position, his good name, that made Gordon so Christlike, and lifted him above the level of his fellows.
I could fill a book with stories of the wonderful behaviour of these poor souls. The temptation is to say of a man like Father Rowley that he has such a natural spring of human charity flowing from his heart that by offering to the world a Christlike example he converts his flock.
It constantly exalts us and as constantly depreciates our brethren. God’s saints are animated with a spirit of kindness and brotherly affection for each other, and this does not manifest itself in wounds and slights, and if we are looking for such manifestations it is because we do not believe that they have Christlike feelings toward us.
Certainly he does give a Christlike example and undoubtedly that must have a great influence on his people; but he does not believe, and I don't believe, that a Christlike example is of any use without Christ, and he gives them Christ. Even the Bishop of Silchester had to admit the other day that Vespers of the Blessed Sacrament as held at St. Agnes' is a perfectly scriptural service.
And so we may combine these two in this statement: If any man is going to build a Christlike life he will have to detach himself from surrounding things and dear ones, and to crucify self by suppression of the lower nature and the endurance of evils.
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