And we cease to wonder so much at the care God takes of human character,
and the cost He lays out upon it, when we think that it is the only work
of His hands that shall last for ever. It is fit, surely, that the
ephemeral should minister to the eternal, and time to eternity, and all
else in this world to the only thing in this world that shall endure and
survive this world. All else we possess and pursue shall fade and
perish, our moral character shall alone survive. Riches, honours,
possessions, pleasures of all kinds: death, with one stroke of his
desolating hand, shall one day strip us bare to a winding-sheet and a
coffin of all the things we are so mad to possess. But the last enemy,
with all his malice and all his resistless power, cannot touch our moral
character--unless it be in some way utterly mysterious to us that he is
made under God to refine and perfect it. The Express Image carried up to
His Father's House, not only the divine life He had brought hither with
Him when He came to obey and submit and suffer among us; He carried back
more than He brought, for He carried back a human heart, a human life, a
human character, which was and is a new wonder in heaven. He carried up
to heaven all the love to God and angels and men He had learned and
practised on earth, with all the earthly fruits of it. He carried back
His humility, His meekness, His humanity, His approachableness, and His
sympathy. And we see to our salvation some of the uses to which those
parts of His moral character are at this moment being put in His Father's
House; and what we see not now of all the ends and uses and employments
of our Lord's glorified humanity we shall, mayhap, see hereafter. And we
also shall carry our moral character to heaven; it is the only thing we
have worth carrying so far. But, then, moral character is well worth
achieving here and then carrying there, for it is nothing else and
nothing less than the divine nature itself; it is the divine nature
incarnate, incorporate, and made manifest in man. And it is, therefore,