things that He did, He did because it was His nature to do them. He
came to this world because His love would not let Him stay away from
us. It was His nature that brought Him here, and it is His nature to
be what He is, and so his character is to become our nature; it is to
be so wrought in us that we cannot give it up. It is our eternal
character, and therefore any amount of pains is worth spending on the
achievement of it.

The second point of perfectness lies here. You know that in painting
a likeness or cutting out a bust one feature often may be almost
finished while the rest are scarcely touched, but in standing before
a mirror the whole comes out at once. Now we often in the Christian
life deal with ourselves as if we were painters and sculptors, not as
if we were mirrors: we hammer and chisel away at ourselves to bring
out some resemblance to Christ in some particulars, thinking that we
can do it piecemeal; we might as well try to feed up our body
piecemeal; we might as well try to make our eye bright without giving
our cheek colour and our hands strength. The body is a whole, and we
must feed the whole and nourish the whole if any one part of it is to
be vigorous.

So it is with character. The character is a whole, and you can only
deal with your character as a whole. What has resulted when we have
tried the other process? Sometimes we set ourselves to subdue a sin
or cultivate a grace. Well, candidly say what has come of this.
Judging from my own experience, I would say that this comes of it:
that in three or four days you forget what sin it was that you were
trying to subdue. The temptation is away, and the sin is not there,
and you forget all about it. That is the very snare of sin. Or you
become a little better in a point that you were trying to cultivate.