WHAT ARE WE AIMING AT? by Frederic William Farrar

Pacific Press Publishing Company · OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA · Feb 22, 1899

WHAT ARE WE AIMING AT?

By Frederic William Farrar

If righteousness be attainable here and now, then here and now we may at least enter in the kingdom of heaven. Is our conception of happiness identified with righteousness? Is that the thing which we desire? Is that our ideal? Is that the one goal to which we are stretching forward in the heavenly race? If so, then for us, even here and now, "the path to heaven lies through heaven, and all the way to heaven is heaven." What sort of condition answers to the heaven of which you dream, for which you sigh? Is it a state of things which you vaguely call glory? Is it a starry crown—the symbol of supreme self-aggrandizement? Is it a golden throne, the summit of individual exaltation? Is it the rest of an untroubled indolence? If so, our heaven may prove to be indeed a chimera both now and hereafter. Such notions of heaven betray the unsuspected fact that, after all, our high spiritual hopes resolve themselves into mere earthliness—into an ill-concealed amalgam of vanity and selfishness. The true conception of heaven is holiness. It is the elimination of baseness and sin.

—Dean Farrar, D.D.