October 4

Eleventh Friday after Trinity

My grace is sufficient for thee: for My strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. Therefore I take pleasure in infirmities, in reproaches, in necessities, in persecutions, in distresses for Christ's sake: for when I am weak, then am I strong. 2 Corinthians 12:9, 10.

THE poor deformed races of men who creep along the frozen seas, if removed to the sunny south, rise to a nobler stature and developed powers. This same law nourished Christian hope through the belief that the faint feeble beginnings of this season of struggles and fears, while the corruptible body weigheth down the soul, far off from God, when transferred to more genial skies, shall, if not here, yet there, expand into their predestined fulness; and all whose eyes shall then behold God, shall grow into the perfect likeness of God, in the power of the vision of God. We are saved more by hope than by actual attainment; more by tastes cherished, by movements onward, than by conquests completely gained, or ends completely compassed. You mourn that you have not attained the graces you seek; you are ashamed to speak of the littleness of your amendment. Be it so. But can you feel assured that the character which is being formed in you is true to your vocation; that the increases of grace are growing as surely as the concentric rings which on the trunk of the oak show the annual increase of its bulk; that the character being formed in you is such as would, in the more congenial atmosphere of your Heavenly Father's home, surely assume the very form and likeness of Christ, even as the risen body shall be "fashioned after His glorious Body"? Then surely all is well.