No man is ever called to be another. God has as many plans for men as he has men; and, therefore, he never requires them to measure their life exactly by any other life. We are not to require it of ourselves to have the precise feelings, or exercises, or do the works, or pass through the trials of other men; for God will handle us according to what we are, and not according to what other men are. And whoever undertakes to be exercised by any given fashion, or to be any given character, such as he knows or has read of, will find it impossible, even as it is to make himself another nature.

God's plan must hold and we must seek no other. To strain after something new and peculiar is fantastic and weak, and is also as nearly wicked as that kind of weakness can be. To be a copyist, working at the reproduction of a human model, is to have no faith in one's significance, to judge that God means nothing in his particular life, but only in the life of some other man.

Submitting himself, in this manner, to the fixed opinion that his life means nothing, and that nothing is left for him but to borrow or beg a life-plan from some other man, what can the copyist become but an affection or a dull impostor.

from "Christ the Form of the Soul"

What form is to body, character is to spirit. For as all material bodies are shaped by the outline or boundary which contains them, so the soul has its working and life contained within the limits or laws of the character. Indeed, we can give no better definition of character than to say that it is the form of the spirit, that habit or mould into which the feelings, principles, aims, thoughts and choices have settled.

And as all material objects have their beauty in their forms, so the soul has her beauty in the character, that lovely shape of goodness and truth in which she appears to men. It is on the ground of this analogy between form and character that the word image is so frequently used in Scripture with a spiritual sense. Other kindred words are used in a similar manner.

Thus it is that Christ, the divine Word, is spoken of as being in the form of God, the image of God, the image of the invisible God, the express image of his person. In the same way man is said to be created in the image of God, the design being not only to affirm a resemblance between his nature and God's, but also that his character is in the form or likeness of God.

from "The Power of an Endless Life"

We exist here only in the small, that God may have us in a state of flexibility, and bend or fashion us, at the best advantage, to the model of his own great life and character. And most of us, therefore, have scarcely a conception of the exceeding weight of glory to be comprehended in our existence.

If we take, for example, the faculty of memory, how very obvious is it that as we pass eternally on, we shall have more and more to remember, and finally shall have gathered in more into this great storehouse of the soul, than is now contained in all the libraries of the world.

And there is not one of our faculties that has not, in its volume, a similar power of expansion. Indeed, if it were not so, the memory would finally overflow and drown all our other faculties, and the spirits, instead of being powers, would virtually cease to be any thing more than registers of the past.

from "Growth"

He dies! it is finished! The body that was taken for endurance and patience, has drunk up all the shafts of the world's malice, and now rests in the tomb.

No! there is more. Lo! he is not here, but is risen; he has burst the bars of death and become the first fruits of them that slept. In that sign behold his victory. Just that is done which signifies eternal redemption--the conquest and recovery of free minds, taken as powers dismantled by eternal evil. By this offering, once for all the work is finished.

What can evil do, or passion, after this, when its bitterest arrows, shot into the divine patience are by that patience so tenderly and sovereignly broken? Therefore now to make the triumph evident, he ascends, a visible conqueror, to the Father, there to stand as priest forever, sending forth his Spirit to seal, and testifying that he is able to save unto the uttermost all that come unto God by him.