Chapter 1 looks at depictions of human perfection in sources not usually consulted within Christian ethics. The first source is church memorials, first in Westminster Abbey -- particularly the twentieth-century Memorial to the Unknown Warrior and the seventeenth-century memorial to Isaac Newton -- and then seventeenth- and eighteenth-century family memorials in three parish churches near Canterbury Cathedral. The second source is recent depictions of perfection within the arts and sport mostly gleaned from the columns of The Times. And the last source is John Bayley’s autobiographical account of a ‘perfect’ meal cooked by his future wife, the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch. Together they indicate that a dynamic form of ‘perfection’ was, and still is, readily attributed to human endeavours.