My Prayer Book_LASANCE - the Catholic Kingdom!

1% The ImiCah qf Christ
influence of Christ in our lives ddes not make us less
ourselves, but rather vivifies us, quickens our powers,
and brings out our dormant faculties of mind and
heart.
"That isan altogether false devotion whichdevitalizes
personal character, and makes of men little more than
walking statues -even though they are labelled statues
of Christ. But true devotion shows itself in a quickeping
of our life, in an intensifying of all those faculties
of mind and heart which go to make up personal character.
True devotion purifies and cleanses, but it also
quickens and exalts individual character.
"I make these remarks lest I should be misunderstood,
when I say that the objact of the Christian religion
is to produce in us the life of Christ. It is not
the external life of Christ as He lived it in Galilee and
Judea during His earthly sojourn that is to be reproduced
in us. How could it be? We can not alt be
caTpenters, we can not all be public preachen. That
was but a transient phase of Our Lord's human life,
rendered necessary by the work He was set to do by
His Father's will, dming those thirty-three years We
are called to imitate this external life of Our Lord only
in so far as we are called to do similar work on earth
to His. But rnany hare to do work for God which
Our Lord did not have to do, and they can not therefore
find in His earthly life any exact model of their
own. And yet they are Christian only in so far as their
lives are an expression of Our Lord's life.
"No, it is not Our Lord's exterior earthly life, but
rather His interior eternal life that we have to reproduce
ill ow lives; or I may put it in another way: it is not
any prticular manifestation of His life, but the living
mind and power of Christ itself that xqug be in us if
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