“The imitation of Christ”

Thomas A’Kempis wrote a wonderful book on “The Imitation of Christ.”  The failure in so many quarters in becoming Christlike is due to the false method pursued.  First, get a Christlike heart, and then let that heart govern your life and actions.  “Work out your own salvation,” said Paul, “for it is God that worketh in you.”  Precisely!  God puts a holy heart into a man’s breast, and his business from thence on is to bring his life into line with the heart.  The old life-habits may cling to him for a time, but it is the business of the sanctified soul to free itself from all that Jesus would not do were He on earth.  Imitation of Christ comes after sanctification, and not before.  You simply can not imitate Jesus if you have a reptile heart in you.  If you have a filthy mind you will talk “smut” and think “smut” in spite of yourself.  You may hide your bad self from the world, but your wife, or your husband, or your family, those who are acquainted with you intimately, know that you are base and coarse.

Dante.

A glutton may stand and look at the thin, austere, ascetic face of Dante and say within himself, “I will be a Dante,” but all the world knows that in a few hours he will be gourmandizing as swinishly as before.  And men look at the beautiful Jesus held up in Unitarian pulpits and resolve to act like Him, and go right on being selfish, and proud, and deceitful, and devilish.  There must be a moral miracle, there must be a spiritual upsetting and overturning, before a carnal heart can begin to imitate the pure and spotless Son of God.

Kindness.

After we are sanctified, we ought to imitate Christ in kindness.  How kind He was!  Where did He abuse anyone?  He preached the truth, but He never maligned any of His auditors.

The “Little things”

It is the “little things” that make up the mosaic of life.  Our friends know us, not by the speeches we deliver, nor the sermons we preach, nor the books we write, but by the tones of our voices, and the letters we pen, and the words we use in daily life.  Introduce kindness into a discordant family and how Eden-like the home becomes!  Why are we not as considerate and polite to those who are all the world to us as we are to strangers and neighbors?  Christlike kindness would fill our hearts with thoughtfulness for those about us.  It would bid us carry a torch to many a darkened life, and incite us to share the burden pressing upon many an aching shoulder.

True humility.

Christ had great charity for the faults of those with whom He was associated.  How He bore with the dull and almost stupid disciples!  How He bears with us in our worse and more inexcusable blockheadedness!  And, if He is so charitable and patient with our faults, how ought we to be with others?  There comes a time in our lives when we are simply astonished that people pay any attention to us at all.  We are so conscious of our short-comings, and so keenly aware of our mistakes, that it seems to us that surely no one is quite so blundering and fallible as we are.  How easy it is then to bear with one another!