It was reserved for Paul, in a moment of inspiration, to put into a single phrase a description of the goal of the human spirit, as something which may be forever approached but never reached, in these words, “Till we all attain unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”  The fullness of Christ!  That is the soul’s final destiny.  It was the far call of that goal which it faintly heard at its first awakening and which has never entirely ceased to sound in his ears.  Who shall explore the contents of that great phrase?  It is a subject for meditation, for prayer, but never for discussion.  He who approaches it in a controversial spirit never understands it.  What are the qualities of the character of Christ?  Some of them lie on the surface of the story.  He never doubted God, or, if so, but for a single moment; He was unselfish; He lived to love and to express love; He had some mysterious preternatural power over nature—­such, perhaps, as science is approaching in later times; kindness, sympathy, helpfulness, purity, shone from His words and actions.  He declared that the privilege of dying to save those who despised Him was a joy.  He lived in the limitations of the human condition and, therefore, on the earth only hints of “His fullness” are discernible.  The full revelation is to be the endless study of those who are able to see and to appreciate things as they are.  But we may ask ourselves whither these lines tend.  When the intelligence, the love, the compassion, the mercy, the purity, the moral power and spiritual grandeur which only in dim outline are revealed in the Christ, have perfect manifestations, what will the vision be?  The very thought transcends the farthest flights of the poet’s imagination and the most daring speculations of philosophers.  In “the fullness of Christ” is the soul’s true goal.  For that all men, and not the elect few, were created.  That is the revelation of the divine plan for humanity.  Toward that evolution has been slowly, and often painfully, pressing from those dim aeons when the earth was without form and void.  When man appeared as the flower of all the cosmic process he started at once toward this goal.  And with great modesty, and simply because I believe in God and that His love cannot be defeated, I dare to hope that, sometime and somehow, after all the pains of retribution and moral discipline have done their inevitable work, after all the fires of Gehenna have consumed the desire to sin, after Hades and Purgatory have been passed, the souls which, for a time, have dwelt in these mortal bodies, purified and without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, will be given the beatific vision and permitted to realize the height and depth, the length and breadth of “the fullness of Christ.”

    “That one Face, far from vanish, rather grows,
    Or decomposes but to recompose,
    Become my universe that feels and knows.”

INDEX