THE VICTORIOUS CHARACTER
‘And they loved not their lives unto the death.’
If we Christians believe at all, we must believe in an ideal for humanity. Jesus Christ is the Son of Man, and therefore He represents so completely the ideal for manhood, apart from any of the idiosyncrasies of race, that we feel He must be the expression of the Divine will for all humanity.
Let us see how one of the disciples of the Master conceived of this ideal, to realise some of the features of the type and ideal of character which the writer of the Book of the Revelation puts before us. He says:—
I. A man must have faith in good.
II. A man must realise, because of the very strength of his confidence in good, that it is worth paying a price for.
III. A man must also read this deep spiritual principle, so often forgotten by superficial teachers—that it is not enough that he shall be a believer in goodness, that a man must pay a price to maintain good in the world; he also thinks that only they will adequately promote good who have participated in the spirit of the ideal.
—Bishop W. Boyd Carpenter.