No people in the world have done more and
struggled more to attain this relative moral perfection than our English
race has. For no people in the world has the command to _resist the
devil_, to _overcome the wicked one_, in the nearest and most obvious
sense of those words, had such a pressing force and reality. And we have
had our reward, not only in the great worldly prosperity which our
obedience to this command has brought us, but also, and far more, in
great inward peace and satisfaction. But to me few things are more
pathetic than to see people, on the strength of the inward peace and
satisfaction which their rudimentary efforts towards perfection have
brought them, employ, concerning their incomplete perfection and the
religious organizations within which they have found it, language which
properly applies only to complete perfection, and is a far-off echo of
the human soul's prophecy of it. Religion itself, I need hardly say,
supplies them in abundance with this grand language. And very freely do
they use it; yet it is really the severest possible criticism of such an
incomplete perfection as alone we have yet reached through our religious
organizations.
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