"It may be said with perfect truth that the measure of a man is, not what he can do, but what he believes in. In every case the spiritual belief of a man outruns his actual capacity. 

  We often point with sadness to the amount of hypocrisy that exists in the world. We hear men in their books and conversation speaking about the most spiritual and edifying sentiments, but when we meet them face to face we experience a shock of contradiction. 

Yet there is no reason to suppose that the contradiction has it's root in hypocrisy. In a large amount of cases it would be more correct to say that these people are "justified by faith." They have the sight of an ideal; they see before them an image of what they would like to be. They have faith in it, that is to say, they believe it to be the only object worth following, and the only object which it will reward them to follow. They have sight of the ideal, but their foot-steps lag behind their sight. 

It springs from the fact that the nature of man does not advance simultaneously to perfection, that there are powers of the human soul which seem to outrun the others and arrive more quickly at their destined goal. It arises from that law of moral growth by which, while it is yet winter in the world of action, the aspirations are bursting into the buds of spring, and while the limbs are yet paralyzed with cold the heart is made aware that the time for the singing of birds is come.  

We may consider it certain that the imitative acts of the child are of less value than the principle of imitation which prompted them." 

George Matheson.