Page:Sermon by the Bishop of Rochester 1901.djvu/5



[Extracted from the Eagle, Vol. xxii, No. 124, March 1901.]

Not fashioning yourselves according to your former lusts in the time of your ignorance: but like as He which called you is holy, be ye yourselves also holy in all manner of living.—1 Pet. i. 14, 15.

T is a great thing to have a standard of life. For want of one men drift and waste time and strength. In the book which we all read at Oxford for Class or Pass we were taught on the first page by the wisest of the Greeks that everything had its end or goal; and that man's thoughts about himself must be aimed at finding the end, or goal, or aim of his own life.

I suppose that even if a man chose a wrong or low end his life would gain in consistency and force; it would be more effective for evil. But as most men don't mean to do wrong, but slide or fall into it, a real attempt to choose what Aristotle calls an end, or we may call a standard, would with most men lift as well as steady their life.

Here, in these words, are two standards. The first is very easy to understand. Fashioning yourselves according to your desires.

One might call this ironical, or scornful; only that Bible language is generally too direct and too grave to be so described.

But it might be a subject for irony—a life which has for its standard the satisfaction of its own wishes—that motley and varying crew: the many desires of all sorts and kinds crossing, and clashing, and competing, some looking up, some pulling down; some