"A New, Complete Heart"

1895

"It is nothing less than character, nothing less than a new, complete heart, a fulfilled manhood, that Christ is trying to give us. Therefore, we may be patient, and be sure that the perfection of His gift cannot be all at once. He who enters into Christ enters into a region of life and growth which stretches far away before him. He stops across the threshold, and his feet are glad with the very touching of the blessed soil. Christ is so One that all which He is ever to be to the soul He is in some sense already. But none the less there is much which He cannot be until the soul is more, and so can take more of the life to live by. The world cannot give you blessings which will be complete to you at once. It is able and glad to set forth for you at the beginning of the feast the best wine it has. But Christ will take you, if you let Him, into His calm, strong power, and lead you on to ever richer capacity and ever richer blessing, till at last only at the end of eternity shall your soul be satisfied and be sure that it has touched the height and depth of His grace, and say: 'Now I know thy goodness wholly. Thou hast kept the good wine until now.' Oh, at the end of our eternity may those words be ours!" — Phillips Brooks.