What should be the chief end and purpose of our daily life? is a question we do well to put to ourselves, and this is the answer to bring home to our inmost hearts: The glory of God in our recovery to His likeness; or, in other words, our becoming like God. As religion influences and rules in us, we shall be continually returning to Him. Nothing more confines the mind and heart of any one than the meanness and poverty of the end he is pursuing in his daily life. There is no true liberty to those who are in thraldom to this world, and to some particular interest in it. Low ends and aims debase and degrade us. For we shape ourselves to them, as far as we can. We are turned as clay to the seal, as Job says: as Laban's ewes did as to their young, before the watering troughs, so the conception of our minds and hearts take their character from what we keep before them, and if that is earthly only, we become only earthly. But if we make God and His glory our end, and the recovery of His image in our souls our cherished and prized aim, so the more we shall become Godlike, as Saint Paul says: We all, beholding the glory of the Lord with open face, are transformed into the same image, from glory to glory, as by the spirit of the Lord. See then what a noble and excellent end we all may and should live for. It will be, oh! blessed truth! eternal life begun. How calm and quiet amid all changes, how patient and hopeful under all crosses, how consistent and upright amid all temptations, will the keeping of this end steadily before us make us to be! It will be in some degree the life of everyone that partakes of the Spirit of Christ; as indeed it was His life, to honour the Father, the Eternal, Almighty, Infinite Creator, King, and God.
- text taken from Daily Bread - Bring a Few Morning Meditations for the Use of Catholic Christians by Father Richard Waldo Sibthorp