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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 https://archive.org/details/transfigurationo01 guns 
 

 
 Frank W. Gunsaulus, D. D. 
 
 THE MINISTER AND THE 
 SPIRITUAL LIFE 
 Yale Lectures on lear ~ for 1911 
 12mo. cloth - - net $1.25 
 
 THE HIGHER MINISTRIES 
 OF RECENT ENGLISH POETRY 
 12mo. cloth - - - net $1.25 
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION 
 OF CHRIST 
 12mo. cloth Tie - net 50c. 
 
 PATHS TO THE CITY OF GOD 
 
 and other Sermons 
 
 New Popular Edition - net .50 
 PATHS TO POWER 
 12mo. cloth - . - net $1.25 
 
 YOUNG MEN IN HISTORY 
 Quiet Hour Series 
 18mo. cloth . - - =) 28 
 
 
 
The Transfiguration 
 of Christ 
 
 BY 
 FRANK WAKELEY GUNSAULUS 
 
 Our notions of what ts natural will be 
 enlarged in proportion to our greater 
 knowledge of the works of God and the 
 dispensation of His providence. 
 
 But er, Analogy. 
 
 
 
 fC STRATA B arr: 
 
 New YorK CuHICAGO TORONTO 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 LoNnDON AND EDINBURGH 
 
Copyright, 1886, 
 By FRANK WAKELEY GUNSAULUS. 
 
 All rights reserved. 
 
 Copyright, 1907, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY. 
 
To my friends aforetime who were mem- 
 bers of Johns Hopkins University, Balti- 
 more, and to friends who latterly were 
 members of the University of Chicago, all 
 of whom studied with me, in these lectures, 
 “ The Transfiguration of Christ,’ I dedi- 
 cate this revised edition of a volume which 
 owes much to their interest and thought. 
 
 F. W. G. 
 Central Church, Chicago. 
 January ist, 1907. 
 

 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 I. The Nature and Method of Chris- 
 Tats LWTPR a aN 3a, NaN Neh Nee ca UP 
 II. The Time of the Transfiguration . 33 
 III. The Place of the Transfiguration 63 
 IV. The Transfigured Christ . . . 93 
 V. The Appearance of Moses . . « 129 
 VI. The Appearance of Elias . . . 159 
 RUD JEStES OME Ve Veal) ‘ «2033 
 
 VIII. The Transfiguration and the Res- 
 
 BITELIOIY (Pes! fall's) \)))'9) || shila 
 
 er 
 
LECTURE L 
 
 » Nature and Method of Christian 
 | Thinking. 
 
 
 
Ov yap cerodiopevors piBors éLaxodovOncavtes eyvwpicapev 
 tpiv mv tov Kupiov nav "Incod Xpiorov divauiw Kat mapovoiav, 
 GAA’ erdmrat yernBevtes THs Exetvov peyarcdTyTOs. AaPwy yap rapa 
 cod matpos Tiny Kai doéav, wris evexPetons ard roracde wrod THs 
 peyadorperous Soéns: Odrds eat 0 vids pov 0 ayamnros, cis Ov éyw 
 evddxnoa. Kai ravtyv thy dwrynv nueis yKovoamev ef ovpavod évex- 
 Ocigay, cv avT@ ovTEs ev TH Ope 75 ww.” 
 
 EMISTOAH METPOY. BY. i. 16, 17, 18. 
 
 «Tf the miracles, if revelation itself cannot stand upon the super- 
 human character of Jesus, then let it fall. If that character does 
 not contain all truth in itself, then let there be no truth. If there is 
 anything worthy of belief not found in this, we may well consent 
 to live and die without it. Before this sovereign light, streaming 
 out from God, the deep questions and dark surmisings and doubts 
 unresolved, which make the night so gloomy and terrible about 
 us, hurry away to their native abyss. God, who commanded the 
 light to shine in darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the 
 light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. 
 This it is that has conquered the assaults of doubt and false learn- 
 ing in all past ages, and will in all ages to come. No argument 
 against the sun will drive it from the sky. No mole-eyed scep- 
 ticism, dazzled by its brightness, can turn away the shining it re- 
 fuses to look upon. And they who long after God will be ever 
 turning their eyes thitherward, and either with reason or without 
 reason, or, if need be, against manifold impediments of reason, will 
 see and believe.” — Horace BusHNELL. 
 
NCIC NCIC NEE) 
 
 THE TRANSFIGURATION 
 OF CHRIST. 
 
 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 The Nature and Method of Christian 
 Thinking. 
 
 “And when He was come into the house, the blind men came 
 unto Him, and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to 
 do this? They say unto Him, Yea, Lorp.” — Mattuew ix. 28. 
 
 “ Nature is the parable of grace. The worlds of mind and mate 
 ter interpenetrate each other. In Him we live, and move, and 
 have our being. In all the process of grace, He is first, not we, 
 We find Him, because He first finds us. We confirm our faith by 
 means of reason, indeed, but that faith is itself the fruit of Divine 
 contact with the soul. We must learn that it is not by arguments 
 without, but by the breath of God within, that we get our first im- 
 pressions of the Divine existence.’* Francis L. Patton, Zhe 
 Genesis of the Idea of God. 
 
 HAVE chosen to study with 
 you this event in the life of the 
 
 
 
 man and the men of our Lord’s 
 immediate ministry, in order that, before 
 entering into the light of Christ’s trans- 
 figuration, we may gain for ourselves the 
 
4 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 true point of view of all Christian thinking, 
 and become sympathetic with the condi- 
 tions and methods of Christian discovery. 
 Here Jesus made clear the relation between 
 an acceptance of Hzmse/f in the spirit of a 
 man and the new vision which the powers 
 of thought shall thereby obtain, in which 
 any event of the mutual life of Christ anda 
 man may be rightly understood. Per- 
 haps never more deliberately did He stop 
 to show that He Himself in the human 
 spirit must be the source of any or all intel- 
 lectual conditions whereby His dealings 
 with it may be comprehended. 
 
 These blind men had been following Him 
 with their want, crying: “ Zhou Son of 
 David, have mercy upon us.”* It is evident 
 from their cry that some of the conditions 
 of blessing were already theirs. Always 
 the thoughts with which the mind comes 
 to a fact or truth, limit, or enlarge, and, in- 
 deed, otherwise modify the real possession 
 
 1 Verse 27. 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 5 
 
 we have when any fact or truth is appre- 
 hended through thinking. So their ideas, 
 coming from tradition or arising out of 
 their conscious need, were at once the ave- 
 nues along which their blessing must come 
 and the gates which should admit it fully 
 by their breadth or contract it by their nar- 
 rowness. They had conceived of Him as 
 “ the Son of David.” That conception was 
 an open door into their spirits; and yet, 
 when compared with a complete conception 
 of Jesus, we see that it was too narrow to 
 let the whole and even the essential Christ 
 into their conscious life. It prepared them 
 by its opening expectancy, but its slight 
 breadth imposed a mental limitation. They 
 asked only for “ mercy ”—“ Have mercy 
 upon us.” And this significant cry, arising 
 from conscious need, was modified in its 
 very birth by their apprehension of Christ ; 
 yet it was the only opening through which 
 His merciful gift might pass. Thus did the 
 measure of their faith determine at once the 
 
6 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 measure of the blessing He might bestow. 
 It could be no more, for their conscious life 
 had not opened unto more; it could be no 
 less, because of the abundant mercifulness 
 to which they had appealed. So when the 
 biessing was given, He indicated not any 
 arbitrary limit which He put upon it, but 
 rather the necessary limit which their spir- 
 itual hospitality, as seen in their faith, made 
 for it. “ According to your faith,’ He said, 
 “ be it unto you.” 
 
 It is pleasant to think that God's bless- 
 ings are not thus conditioned and modified 
 by our faith; that the greatness of His gift 
 does somehow get in, in spite of our little- 
 ness; and, working in us unconsciously, 
 that it does at last reveal itself to our 
 conscious life. And the truth in such a 
 thought is this, namely, that the very least 
 of an apprehended blessing leads us to the 
 larger stores of grace; and so swift is the 
 movement of the newly touched mind, 
 
 1 Verse 29. 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 7 
 
 from the new want which the fresh blessing 
 discloses, to a renewed appeal, that we do 
 not recognize how we are constantly ap- 
 proaching God, again and again, by new 
 stages of developed faith which are ours 
 after each answer He gives. 
 
 The comparative narrowness of the faith 
 of these blind men has another evidence. 
 After they had seen Him, through their 
 newly opened eyes, and He had said: 
 “ See that no man know it,’ “ they spread 
 abroad His fame in all that country.” As 
 in many similar cases, He would have made 
 such an addition to their interior life, 
 through His touch upon their exterior life, 
 that the visible achievement would have 
 been lost in their newly developed and in- 
 visible manhood, That, however, would 
 have been a greater blessing than they 
 could have received through a spiritual 
 vision limited by their conceiving of Christ 
 simply as the “ Sox of David.” No; they 
 
 1 Verse 30, 
 
& The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 could not admit that greater illumination. 
 The idea which they had of Jesus Christ 
 had defined itself when they cried, “ Son of 
 David,’ and the conception which they had 
 of their own need discovered itself in the 
 prayer: “ Have mercy.” This was their 
 mental attitude. It was too narrow a gate- 
 way for the complete gift which the Christ 
 brought with Him, yet it was sufficiently 
 broad to admit enough of His influence to 
 create in them a new mental condition, 
 which would make the incoming of more 
 inevitable. The view of Him, expressed in 
 that cry, had filled them with such a vision 
 of Him and of His visible kingdom, with its 
 immediate and manifest triumph, that they 
 discerned the stately movings of the Mes- 
 siah in His growing fame. 
 
 Profoundly did Christ then recognize the 
 fact, of which they were all too unconscious, 
 that there must be in the totality of each 
 character which we call the spirit of the 
 man, a deeper acceptance of Himself. 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 9 
 
 This presence of Himself in their spiritual 
 life must be the prerequisite to any intelli- 
 gent taking in of anything He might do for 
 them. “ Believe ye that I am able to do 
 this?” He said. In the narrow opening 
 of mind which was disclosed by their cry, 
 He, as something more than the “ Sox of 
 David,” saw an opportunity of entrance. 
 He proposed to widen the gate as He en- 
 tered, by asking for a more hospitable faith. 
 Then, as though He would fasten that gate 
 of apprehension open against the wall of 
 their consciousness, He held their thought 
 and made them look from out the very 
 depths of their spirits, and say: “ Yea, 
 Lord.” When they accepted Him as 
 “ Lord,’ their mental apprehension had 
 widened from the narrowness of the cry, 
 “ Thou, Son of David.’ Then it was that 
 He entered as sight to their blindness. So, 
 He was accepted personally, before He 
 came into them as miracle and blessing. 
 He Himself had touched the centres of 
 
10 ~=The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 their spiritual life, and He thus widened 
 from within, through the mind without, a 
 path for the miracle. All that this blessing 
 and wonder were to their intellectual life 
 was made possible and even natural by His 
 presence in their spiritual life. Accepting 
 Him at the very centres of their being, they 
 could accept the miraculous blessing in the 
 outlying realm of thought. Limited was 
 their acceptance ; limited was the blessing. 
 The hands which were held out were filled 
 with all they could hold. But back of the 
 holding out of any hands which might carry 
 anything away, was the Christ of an inte- 
 rior experience, who inspired their larger 
 faith. A greater miracle within—the ac- 
 cepted Christ—had prepared them for the 
 lesser one without. After His entrance into 
 them, the supernatural was natural to their 
 minds, to the extent of their conscious re- 
 ception of the natural lordship of Jesus 
 Christ over their spirits. 
 
 Here are disclosed the nature and method. 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 11 
 
 of Christian thinking. They flow out of 
 the nature of the Christian life—the hiding 
 of the soul, z. ¢., the life with Christ in God! 
 —the mastery by the Christ of the human 
 spirit, inclusive, as the spirit is, of the con- 
 cerns and destiny of intellect, sensibilities 
 and will. 
 
 Christianity means a revelation of the Di- 
 vine in the human—first in Jesus Christ ; 
 then in other men. The religions before 
 Christ were efforts from earth towards 
 heaven ; the religion of Christ is the effort of 
 heaven towards the earth. In the highest 
 pre-Christian religion, the sacrifice was of- 
 fered by men for the reconciliation of God ; 
 in Christianity, the sacrifice is made by God 
 for the reconciliation of man. In the one, it 
 was to change the feelings of heaven that the 
 altars flamed with fire and were red with 
 blood: in the other, it was to transform the 
 feelings of earth that the altar-steps of Cal- 
 vary bore the crucifix. A related difference 
 
 1 Colossians iii. 3. 
 
12 +The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 is seen, at that moment when the empire of 
 the old passed into the republic of the new 
 humanity. Froude says, concerning Julius 
 Cesar:! “Strange and startling resem- 
 blance between the fate of the founder of 
 the kingdom of this world and of the foun- 
 der of the kingdom not of this world, for 
 which the first was a preparation, Each 
 was denounced for making himself a king. 
 Each was maligned as the friend of publi- 
 cans and sinners: each was betrayed by 
 those whom he had loved and cared for: 
 each was put to death: and Czsar also was 
 ‘believed to have risen again and ascended 
 into heaven and become a divine being.” 
 This, however, does not do justice to the 
 first proposition of the Christian system. 
 To our eyes, the position of Czsar in the 
 mind of Rome was the last achievement of 
 the decaying spirit. It was the exalting of 
 a man from earth, by colossal effort, into 
 the stature of a god. To our eyes, also, 
 1 Cesar, a Sketch, closing words. 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 13 
 
 the place of Jesus in the consciousness of 
 humanity was the first fact vouchsafed to 
 note the inspiration of the receptive spirit. 
 It was the approach of the living God, to 
 effortless and waiting souls, in the form and 
 substance of a man. As the evening of 
 Paganism left the race with the apotheosis 
 of a Cesar, the morning of Christianity 
 broke with the incarnation of God in the 
 Christ. The evening darkened into mid- 
 night, with man crying up to God: that 
 midnight retreated before the morning, 
 with God speaking to and in humanity. 
 
 It is indisputable, in the presence of this 
 vital difference, that much of our thinking 
 on Christian topics inside the church is 
 pagan. We begin on earth to build our 
 steps of apprehension to the realm of God. 
 We make our intellectual fundamental to 
 our spiritual life, and expect great dis- 
 coveries unto the spirit from a keen and 
 alert reason. We have not taken the 
 living Christ as the primal and initiative 
 
14. The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 fact in personal as well as historic Chris- 
 tianity ; but, with characteristic rationalism, 
 we have begun with an incidental miracle 
 to explain the essential miracle—the babe 
 in the manger, or the victim on the cross. 
 Our religious thinking has oftentimes been 
 even less prophetic than the Psalmist’s. We 
 have tried to see God in the light of nature, 
 while he said: “Jz Thy light shall we see 
 light.” ’ We have sought to explain Christ 
 in the light of events, related or isolated, 
 while He was saying to our twilight: « 7 
 am the light of the world.” Our thinking 
 has thus, and too often, reversed the divine 
 order; and, without a word which would 
 prepare the mind for its new light, we have 
 attempted to produce illumination upon its 
 blindness, asking its bewildered vision then 
 to recognize, in it all, a supernatural Christ. 
 
 Jesus Christ does not manifest His essen- 
 tial Godhead more plainly than in the spirit- 
 ual faith He demands as fundamental to any 
 
 1 Psalm xxxvi. 9. 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 15 
 
 intellectual apprehension of Him. In a 
 sense, perhaps not wholly understood by 
 himself, did one of the earlier theologians 
 declare: “ God is the way to Himself.” The 
 Christ maintains, in His influence on the 
 soul of man, this divine characteristic. In 
 it all, He does not destroy the native logic 
 of human nature. His entrance into the 
 human spirit restores it. Faith is a spirit- 
 ual apprehension which comes by a united 
 act of the intellect, the feelings and the will. 
 In the act of faith, man is simply his in- 
 tegral self. The truth which faith sees has 
 the evidence of the other domains of the 
 spirit of man, in its appeal to any one. 
 Through its wide hospitality, God and His 
 Christ enter the whole nature. The in- 
 tellect has a new premise, from the entire 
 spirit’s experience. It can see God through 
 thought, because into all the texture of 
 thinking God has entered, as a fact lying 
 back in the consciousness of the whole 
 spiritual nature. It can now see light, 
 
16 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 because light is in its eye; and even the 
 abstract truth, which escaped it so long, 
 is apprehended by a sight divine. 
 
 Jesus does not offer to the intellect the 
 supernatural in the abstract. He comes as 
 its incarnation, offering Himself to the 
 spirit, whose eye is faith, that He may 
 assume His natural lordship over a man’s 
 entire conscious life. No act of intellect 
 can admit Him. He asks to be taken by 
 faith, which involves the activity of the 
 whole soul. He influences and acts from 
 the centre, where intellect, feeling, and will 
 are articulated and concurrent in the one 
 supreme act of faith. Once at the centre 
 of man’s conscious life, He will be borne 
 outward to the entire circumference of its 
 intellectual, emotional, and volitional ac- 
 tivity, and be everywhere its Lord. Con- 
 crete in Him, the supernatural is taken into 
 the new combinations of man’s conscious 
 life, the moment he accepts in the faith of 
 his undivided spirit the lordship of Jesus 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 17 
 
 Christ. Then begins his Christian experi- 
 ence, which the intellect shares with the 
 feelings and the will. Until then, there has 
 been a persistent fragmentariness of his na- 
 ture in being and action. In this initial act 
 of accepting Christ, man is consciously one. 
 He begins to think, as ason of God. The 
 new logic of his new life pervades the 
 operations of his mind. In this experience, 
 so interfused are the realms of spiritual life, 
 that he may “ love God with all his mind.” ' 
 Having an interior experience with the 
 supernatural, he has an eye for it, as he 
 never had before. In the growing con- 
 sciousness which is his, of the supernatural- 
 ness of Jesus Christ, he feels his own. It is 
 the moment when his true life begins to 
 realize itself. In the central depth of 
 Christ’s supernaturalness, his own is quick- 
 ened into life and becomes conscious. “ J 
 am the vine,” said his lord, “ ye are the 
 branches.”* In the life of Christ, ours must 
 
 1 Matthew xxii. 37. * John xv. 5. 
 
18 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 begin; and with its vitality ours must thrill, 
 driving, as it grows, more deeply into His, 
 and repeating the rhythm of the life divine, 
 as its juices circulate in our veins. Being 
 thus vitally attached to the life of Christ, 
 we repeat His life intellectual, emotional, 
 volitional ; and hence, so far as the privilege 
 and duty of Christian living go, they are 
 one; and, in thought, as well as action, we 
 have their union as we obey the injunction: 
 “Let this mind be in you which was in 
 Christ Jesus.” > 
 
 These words of Paul are evidence of his 
 intelligent grasp of the philosophy of 
 Christian faith and life. Here, he had in 
 mind an ethical problem. Man’s struggle 
 with visible expediency was in his thought. 
 “ The mind of Christ” had the significance 
 of a condition in which Christ “made Him- 
 self of no reputation, and took upon Himself 
 
 1 Philippians ii. 5, 6,7. See Bishop Brooks’s sermon 
 on this text. 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 19 
 
 the form of a servant, and was made in the 
 likeness of men,’ and “ became obedient unto 
 death.” Just as then that problem of ethics 
 was solved, so now must our problems of 
 thought gain their solution. This “ ménd 
 of Christ” is to be the salvation of the 
 human intellect. No more truly does the 
 acceptance of Christ in the spirit bring with 
 it the consciousness of one’s new attitude 
 to the universe as a we// than the con- 
 sciousness also of a new attitude unto it as 
 an zuztellect. The consciousness of one’s 
 own supernaturalness through the reve- 
 lation of Christ, in the face of that arrogant 
 and tyrannous naturalism which sin has 
 developed, asserts itself in a new method of 
 self-determining life, after the zz2/Z of 
 Christ: that same consciousness asserts 
 itself in a new view of the universe, in 
 which there lies a unique mental method 
 that makes the supernatural natural, at 
 least to the process and realization of the 
 new intellectual life. The intellect is « dorm 
 
20 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 again,’ and “ born of the spirit.”* In its 
 old life, it had touched this finite thing and 
 that, with no reference to the infinite. Now 
 it sees through and by means of the infinite, 
 and, in its atmosphere, looks upon the finite. 
 What has happened to the man? The 
 fact is that, intellectually, he is converted. 
 He is “ born from above” and “ of God.” 
 It is not a wondrous development of the 
 old life, however well it has succeeded in 
 adding together many finite things that 
 it might reach the infinite ; but it is a totally 
 new life, wherein it begins with the infinite 
 as the fact of which it is the most sure. It 
 is the soul’s veal life It is a life in God, 
 for He begins, in creation and providence, 
 with the infinite—Himself. It discloses it- 
 self with the same experience, in the affec- 
 tions and will. Coming into the spirit by 
 
 1 John iii. 4. 2 John ili. 5. 
 8x John iii. 9. 
 4 Martineau, “ Hours of Thought with Sacred Things.’ 
 Sermon on “ The Finite and Infinite in Human Nature.” 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 21 
 
 faith, instead of coming to one of its realms, 
 the intellect, by reason, Jesus Christ at 
 once enters the whole region of the in- 
 terior life, and acts at that central point 
 where the realms of the spirit are one 
 through the act of faith. It is not the old 
 life of the will, continually adding to its 
 finite efforts that it may reach the infinite. 
 Its true life begins in the infinite, not by 
 achieving it, but by yielding unto it, that it 
 may be strong. And so with the affec- 
 _ tions. It is not a life developed into com- 
 pleteness out of the incompleteness of the 
 old. The new life begins where the old 
 sought to end—with the infinite Love. 
 Thus Jesus addresses the paganism of our 
 time, which tries to build its ladder to the 
 skies, hoping that it will some day and 
 somehow so understand nature as to find its 
 Reason for the human intellect, or that 
 some time it may obtain a satisfying cosmic 
 emotion for the affections, or that by and 
 by it will control the restless powers of the 
 
22 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 universe by its will. He says, as of old, 
 “ Ye must be born again.” 
 
 The true method of Christian thinking 
 then, flows out of the nature of the “ xew 
 birth,’ which is the characteristic event in 
 the related life of Christ and the human 
 spirit. As did the blind men, so must the 
 spiritual nature get from the supernatural 
 Christ, whom it truly calls “« Lord,” a quite 
 natural mental preparation for and an out- 
 look upon the supernatural, a preparation 
 of that sort which not only saves it from the 
 confusion of ignorance, but gives it the 
 peace of intelligent power. There is no 
 other peace for so sublime a being as man. 
 We may see the point of view which the 
 mind obtains, as we note one character- 
 istic trait of Christ and of His truest 
 disciples. That trait is their consciousness 
 of infinity. The acceptance of the personal 
 Christ gives the mind this atmosphere. 
 Just as with the supernatural Christ, in the 
 spirit’s experience, the mind has a sense of 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 23 
 
 the supernatural, so with the infinite Christ, 
 at the centre of character, there takes posses- 
 sion of the entire being a consciousness of 
 infinity as natural as it is pervasive. “ In- 
 finity” is abstract to aridity without Him: 
 it is concrete to impressive reality in Jesus 
 Christ. With this consciousness, allied 
 with and oftentimes not to be distinguished 
 from the sense of the supernatural thus 
 gained in Christ, a believer comes to what 
 are termed “ miracles ”; and, looking upon 
 them from a divine point of view, they are 
 seen to come naturally into the order of the 
 universe. A world without miracles be- 
 comes far less credible than a world with 
 them. It is only necessary to get the 
 point of view and the mental method 
 furnished to these blind men in Christ’s 
 accepted lordship over their souls, and then 
 miracles may appear as natural in the 
 order of our thought as they were in the 
 order of their occurrence. Jean Paul says: 
 “What are miracles on earth are nature 
 
24 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 in heaven.” If, then, one accepts his 
 “heavenly place” of spiritual experience 
 and of consequent mental life “zz Christ 
 Jesus” as his point of view, he must look 
 upon the Transfiguration of Christ as the 
 natural manifestation of His infinite power 
 and glory. 
 
 Whenever we approach such an event, we 
 see how necessary even yet, it is for Him to 
 say to His disciples : “ Marvel not at this.” 
 He continually aimed at decreasing their 
 unintelligent astonishment at these normal 
 manifestations of His life, saying, “ Marvel 
 not at this,” or by asking silence concerning 
 it. He was seeking to get them to realize 
 the fact that, having accepted Him, there 
 was nothing for them to wonder at, and 
 that, though without Him, they must bea 
 constant source of intellectual confusion ; 
 with Him in their spiritual life, they were 
 matters of course. He was showing them 
 the naturalness of miracles eventuating, as 
 
 1 Ephesians i. 3, 20; ii. 6. 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 25 
 
 they did, out of that greatest of miracles, 
 Himself. Lord of their whole life, He was 
 Lord of their thought and in it; so that 
 from this accepted lordship they ought to 
 expect, as they had indeed accepted, a lord- 
 ship over nature which should make won- 
 ders cease. With their sense of the super- 
 natural feeding upon Him,—with the infi- 
 nite, which was He, in the mind’s eye, they 
 should have no thoughtless surprise at the 
 appearance of the supernatural anywhere.? 
 
 We need have no fear, as Jesus Himself 
 had none, that in this view the evidential 
 value of the miracles, to which the Trans- 
 figuration is related, shall be lost. It is not 
 necessary to repeat considerations which 
 have been stated with great force in our 
 day and which show that their evidential 
 value, though urged in a way quite differ- 
 ent from that of former times, has, never- 
 
 1Steinmeyer, 7ie Miracles of our Lord, Introduc. 
 tion. Venn, On some of the Characteristics of Belie/, 
 Pp. 187. 
 
26 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 theless, a mighty and even irresistible 
 effect—an effect withal precisely such as 
 Jesus Himself desired that it should have 
 over the men of His ownage. “ Blessed” 
 still are they “ who, not having seen, have 
 nevertheless believed.”' We addresses Him- 
 self to the whole spirit through faith, not to 
 the intellect alone through its processes of 
 logic. Once in the soul, He comes to the 
 intellect with a native lordship. He, as the 
 supernatural itself within the atmosphere of 
 man’s life, makes the supernatural credible. 
 Hume’s phrase, “ the contrariety of miracles 
 to experience,” falls to the ground. The 
 intellect has necessarily participated in the 
 experience of the whole spiritual nature, and 
 in that experience, one’s thinking has had 
 to do with the greatest of miracles—the 
 miracle of the Christ. After Jesus Christ 
 has sent the thrill of His supernatural life 
 from the centre to the circumference of a 
 man’s spirit, any words about miracles being 
 1 John xx, 29; 2 Corinthians v. 7. 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 27 
 
 “interruptions of the course of nature” 
 seem to clearly indicate an inadequate con- 
 ception of nature and positive ignorance of 
 that dominant personal nature within. In- 
 deed, the consciousness of infinity, which 
 the whole spiritual nature gets in Christ, so 
 prepares the intellect for the natural out- 
 working of His essential life, that, when 
 miracles come from His hand, the mind 
 feels that it has not failed to understand 
 Him, and has the evidence which comes of 
 seeing what it expected to see. 
 
 « Peace settles where the intellect is meek ; 
 
 The faith heaven strengthens when He moulds the 
 Creed.” ? 
 
 1« Miracles and the proof of miracles from testimony 
 cannot be spared. When the peculiarities which dis- 
 tinguish Christianity from all other religions have im- 
 pressed our minds, when the character of Christ in its 
 unique and supernal quality has risen before us in its 
 full attractive power, and when, from these influences, 
 we are almost persuaded, at least not a little inclined, to 
 believe in the gospel as a revelation of God, we crave 
 ~ some attestation of an objective character; we naturally 
 expect that if all this be on a plane above nature, there 
 will be some explicit sign and attestation of the fact.— 
 Prof. George P. Fisher. ? Wordsworth. 
 
28 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 It is not meant, in this lecture, to assume 
 that the entire preparation of the human 
 spirit for Christian discovery has to do with 
 the intellect alone, and that such an event 
 as the Transfiguration of Christ has its 
 entire lesson to impart to the faculties of 
 thought. Christian thinking itself is spir- 
 itual. Everything Christian restores and 
 preserves the integrity of the spiritual being 
 of man. This consciousness of infinity 
 which Christ brings with Himself into the 
 spirit is the common medium through 
 which intellect, affections, and will have ex- 
 perience by and in fazth. Christ comes to 
 the whole nature in each of His manifesta- 
 tions of essential life. Faith is, psycholog- 
 ically, the act of the entire interior nature. 
 It alone has the concurrent power of intel- 
 lect, sensibilities and will. And when in 
 their integrity, as a unit, they take the 
 Christ, by the laws of the spiritual life, 
 whatever He is or has will touch whatever 
 the man is or has. This consciousness of 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 29 
 
 infinity will be dominant everywhere. The 
 will loses its finiteness ; and it so girds itself 
 with His might that a St. Paul says, “ J can 
 do all things through Christ which strength- 
 eneth me.”* It has not only obtained a 
 consciousness of infinity in the abstract, but 
 it has what was the source of its clear meta- 
 physic,—a reality which in the realest way 
 has developed its real self. The feelings 
 lose their incapacity ; the affections lose 
 their finiteness. They so clothe themselves 
 with His nature that the Infinite reveals 
 Himself as Love, and the love of Love be- 
 comes the passion of the heart. They, 
 also, have not only obtained a conscious- 
 ness of infinity, but they have, what was the 
 ground of this, a reality so real to them that 
 they stir with forces which are boundless. 
 The intellect, too, loses its finiteness. It so 
 adopts Himself as its point of view, and the 
 medium through which He looks as its own, 
 that it becomes a reality to itself for the 
 ' Philippians iv. 13. 
 
30 «The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 first time. It is contemporary with the 
 powers which moved in the chaos of the 
 past and work yonder in the rich future. 
 It is at home with the counsels of the In- 
 finite One. They are its readiest postu- 
 lates. In the light of the infinite, it sees 
 light. The “new heavens” of thought 
 have come, and, underneath, the “new 
 earth” of thought.? So far as the inter- 
 pretation of any new event on earth is con- 
 cerned, it must be gained from this point of 
 view. Things are to be understood “ from 
 above.” Like the “new Jerusalem” of 
 man’s civilization, the “ new Jerusalem” of 
 his philosophy of life “ cometh down from 
 God, out of heaven.” * 
 
 The study upon which we now enter 
 proceeds upon the assumption, then, that 
 Christ had been accepted by Peter, James, 
 and John, and that in order to understand 
 
 4 Psalm xxxvi. 9. 3 Revelation xxi, i. 
 
 8 Revelation xxi, 2, 
 
The Nature of Christian Thinking. 31 
 
 the event, in even the small measure of 
 which our present life makes us capable, 
 there must be in us the preparation of mind 
 which the presence of Christ in us brings. 
 Beginning with this sense of the super- 
 natural and consciousness of infinity, the 
 glistening garment and the shining face are 
 not as unnatural and incongruous as, with- 
 out these, is the merest chemical change in 
 the test tube to the student abreast with his 
 science.! The mind finds a universe on its 
 hands, when it takes up an atom. Says 
 Tyndall: “ The study of any part of nature 
 completely would involve the study of the 
 whole.”? It is becoming painfully evident 
 to a non-Christian philosophy that the finite 
 cannot explain the infinite. Hands are 
 reaching out for the infinities. Indeed, 
 men are surer of the infinite than of the 
 finite. The dust trembles with forces not 
 
 ' Modern Realism, p. 46; The Unseen Universe, p. 986 
 8 The Forms of Water, p. 6. 
 
32 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 its own.! It is beyond its finite horizon 
 that the movement began with which mat- 
 ter is stirred. The “atom” is quite as 
 much a fact of metaphysics as of physics. 
 In the twilight of our time, a mind which 
 has felt the intellectual lordship of Christ 
 may stand unbewildered in the glory of a 
 Transfiguration, because it sees a philosophy 
 without the infinite dashed into pieces even 
 by the soft-falling dew. 
 
 As a step in the unfolding of the infinite, 
 we shall look at the Transfiguration of 
 Christ. Here, as elsewhere, in Him and 
 His life the finite and infinite meet; the 
 natural and the supernatural coalesce. Be 
 it ours to see life’s problem where its con- 
 flicting forces are in luminous peace, that 
 we may gain the experience which fuses 
 them into that transfigured calm. 
 
 1 Pieton, Mystery of Matter, First Essay ; Clark-Max- 
 well, Biography, p. 169; The Supernatural in Nature, 
 p- 65; Pierce, /acality in Science, c. 3; Kekulé, Lehr 
 
 buch der organischen Chemie, Lange, Geschichte des- 
 Materialismus, ii. 190. 
 
LECTURE II. 
 The Time of the Transfiguration. 
 
 “ Nihil sine etate est.’” — TERTULLIAN. 
 
pAb eat 
 
 LUN i 
 
 AY NG 
 
 ‘ait Bae) 
 
 
 
BB es eS 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 The Time of the Transfiguration. 
 
 “* And it came to pass about an eight days after these sayings.” 
 — Luxgix. 28. 
 
 aN the unity of a great nature or 
 
 
 
 <a4/ movement lies a logic which makes 
 the succession of events in its ca- 
 reer a continuous development. Behind 
 and within the latest is the significance of 
 the earliest fact. Psychology now sees 
 the whole man, in the most seemingly 
 partial exercise of the soul. The person- 
 alty so reigns supreme and infuses itself 
 through the division lines which any me- 
 chanical geography may have made of the 
 realm of our interior life that every power 
 is seen to be concerned in and to condi- 
 tion the action of every other. Theology, 
 in the glow of a renascent life, finds that 
 
36 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 God has not at one time acted as the su- 
 preme justice, and at another as the infi- 
 nite mercy, but that at all times and every- 
 where He has been manifesting Himself. 
 It is marvelous to thoughtful minds how 
 we could have escaped the fact, that, when 
 we say “God is,” we have put aside all 
 conceptions of an interrupted providence 
 and a broken human history. It goes 
 without saying that along with these have 
 gone all dogmas which make the nature of 
 
 , 
 
 God a collection of opposing attributes, or 
 a battle-ground of inharmonious powers. 
 The infinite is one. God is the absolute 
 integer. In the light of this fact, the rev- 
 elation of God in Holy Scripture, in hu- 
 man history, and in His self-manifestation 
 in Jesus Christ, becomes a unit; and as 
 His revelation in the life of man accounts 
 for the “solidarity” of the race, so the 
 presence of Himself in Jesus of Nazareth 
 gives Christ’s career a unity all divine, — 
 a unity which He declared as such when 
 He said : “Vy Father worketh hitherto, and 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 37 
 
 TI work.” Inno clearer words could Paul 
 have declared this phase of the dezty of 
 Christ than by saying, “ Fesus Chrost, the 
 same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.” * 
 
 All great poetry, however surely it has 
 missed its inspirer, has noted what a Chris- 
 tian theist must term the unity of God in 
 His revelation in history, as it has de- 
 tected the life of every meaning of the 
 past in the present. To its vision, the fu- 
 ture is radiant only by a continuity of life 
 which relates its eras in an unbroken eter- 
 nity. Says George Eliot: — 
 
 “Presentment of better things on earth 
 Sweeps in with every force that stirs our souls 
 To admiration, self-renouncing love, 
 Or thoughts, like light, that bind the world in one; 
 Sweeps like the sense of vastness, when at night 
 We hear the roll and dash of waves that break 
 Nearer and nearer with the rushing tide, 
 Which rises to the level of the cliff 
 
 Because the wide Atlantic rolls behind, 
 Throbbing respondent to the far-off orbs.” 
 
 Bayard Taylor’s Prince Deukalion utters 
 
 1 John v.17. ? Hebrews xiii. 8; Ephesians iv. to, 
 
38 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 it, in spite of something of the darkness 
 which in Shelley or Byron became athe- 
 istic or revolutionary : — 
 “The past 
 
 Is man’s possession, not his mocking glimpse 
 Through loopholes of the jail where Reason pines. 
 It gives the Prophet vision. . . 
 
 . . » What common eye can see 
 Past things as present, ancient miracle 
 To-day’s dull fact, God’s hand upon the man 
 It looks at? Over gulfs of ages these 
 First find their sanctity, as our dark orb 
 Drinks light from ether till it grows a star.” 
 
 Over against much revolutionary poetry, 
 which, like that sort of philosophy, has 
 involved atheism by suggesting the ex- 
 istence of a Godless moment, the evo- 
 lutionary thought of all deep souls has 
 presented a Unity, which, both intelligent 
 and infinite in history, has inculcated a 
 consistent theism. So much has been in- 
 volved in this “mere theism” that the his- 
 tory of the universe must be read to un- 
 derstand its content. 
 
 This unity of life in God has its mani- 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 39 
 
 festation, as does God Himself, in the 
 historic Christ. The Gospels alone do not 
 furnish the whole record of His influence. 
 He comes to our age, not only as a being 
 like the Socrates of Plato, or even of 
 Xenophon, borne to us in a _biograph- 
 ical sketch, and effective simply by the 
 power of the truths He taught, but also 
 as having for nineteen centuries revealed 
 Himself by His influence upon and along 
 with the forces which make history. In 
 all this, the deep unity of the divine nature 
 is revealed. The Oriental conception of 
 this unity is strikingly presented in these 
 lines : — 
 
 “Though God extends beyond creation’s rim, 
 Each smallest atom holds the whole of Him;” 
 
 and in these, also :— 
 “ Mirrors God maketh each atom in space, 
 And fronteth each one with His perfect face.”! 
 Just as God discloses His character and 
 the meaning of His providence in each 
 event in the history of the universe, so 
 4 Alger, Zhe Poetry of the Orient, 
 
40 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Jesus Christ, His self-manifestation, puts 
 His entire being and mission in such an 
 event as the transfiguration. But another 
 vision of His unity appears also. Just as 
 the unity of God’s life is seen in the con- 
 tinuity of movement and the development 
 of the process and the results of divine 
 government, so the unity of the life of 
 Christ is seen in that growth of revealed 
 truth, which not only carries the mind of 
 man to greater revelations at each step, but 
 also carries him just so far and by such 
 means as will make the revelation as con- 
 tinuous in the life of human souls as it is 
 in Christ. 
 
 I have dwelt thus long upon this point, 
 because it seems to me that in the unity of 
 Christ’s life, as set over against the discon- 
 nectedness and broken character of every 
 human life, there is evidence of the very 
 divinity which flashes forth in the event 
 whose place in the career of Jesus seems 
 such an indication of the perfect integrity 
 of His nature. The unit of His life moved 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 4l 
 
 like a constant factor through history. Its 
 divine integrity made the fragmentary 
 events of many generations a unity. So 
 He seemed to Stephen, as related to other 
 lives.! And when He is studied in relation 
 to His own life, the conscious unity that 
 binds one fact to another has no parallel in 
 the universe, save in God, whose mani- 
 festation He is. The time of the trans- 
 figuration is the moment when the earth 
 and skies demand it; and with an imperial 
 consciousness of what His life is — a con- 
 sciousness that never seems less spon- 
 taneous when it is most august — He unites 
 the threads of His past teaching with those 
 unseen as yet in the future, in the glory of 
 transfiguration. It carries out the unity 
 of God, as incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. 
 The choice of that night is as truly illus- 
 trative of the divinity of Christ as is any- 
 thing that He said. The transfiguration 
 itself was the next fact which was to con- 
 tinue the revelation of God in Him. And 
 
 1 Acts vib 
 
42 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 so, “after six days,” or, as Luke is less 
 definite, “about an eight days after these 
 sayings, He took them into a mountain 
 apart.” 
 
 “ About an eight days after” what “ say- 
 ings”? Sayings of whose meaning we 
 may have a more just conception, if we go 
 back a little in the stream and move along 
 with the current of His teaching. 
 
 His Galilean ministry? had its character- 
 istic features summed up in the miracle of 
 the loaves and fishes. Behind any lesson of 
 the personal kindness there exhibited, in 
 the unostentatious manifestation of His 
 power, lay a vision, for which His previous 
 dealing with these disciples had prepared 
 them, of the identity of the infinite and in- 
 visible in Jesus Christ. It was the moment 
 when He would have them see how this 
 sense of the supernatural in them gave 
 them an apprehension of the infinite, and 
 how near to them and in Him was the 
 kingdom of the invisible. For that hour, 
 
 1Cf. Edersheim’s Life of Christ, vol. i. p. 106 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 43 
 
 the king was enthroned in their very 
 presence; and in His hands nature and 
 the supernatural, the finite and infinite, 
 were blended. At the touch of the in- 
 visible majesty in Him, the limitations of 
 the visible were destroyed, and there 
 seemed to be the presence in the finite 
 of the infinite. When He blessed the 
 visible supply, there went into it the re- 
 serve of the invisible in Him. This fact 
 of the blessing of it has fixed the atten- 
 tion of the four evangelists, and in one the 
 eucharistic idea is prominent.! Thus, in 
 the least of the incidents of this event, does 
 the presence of a king and kingdom of the 
 invisible assert itself.2 And it is not mar- 
 velous that this should be the fact. This 
 Teacher had come to found a kingdom. 
 In all the changes of form which His idea 
 must undergo to make itself understood, 
 this conception of regency is constant. It 
 so impressed the time, that Peter’s “przest- 
 
 1 Godet, S¢. Zuke, vol. i. p. 407. 
 3 Trench on Zhe Miracles, p. 96. 
 
44 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 hood” of believers is “voyal,’1 and He 
 who came to found it is seen by the seer 
 of Patmos as “king of kings.”* But it 
 had many forms of statement. Its natural 
 many-sidedness admitted of it. It is pro- 
 claimed by John the Baptist as the “ #zzg- 
 dom of heaven ;” * and this term is used by 
 the lips of the Christ. It is declared to 
 be the “kingdom of God” in moments 
 when it is being preached by its king and 
 His subjects.° Wherever it is preached or 
 proclaimed, it is a kingdom of which noe 
 man can say: “Lo, kereT” Gee em 
 there !” “ for the kingdom of God is 
 within you.”® It “cometh not with 
 observation.” It is the reign of the in- 
 visible in the visible, because it is the 
 reign of God in Christ. To accept it 
 is to throw one’s whole self and destiny 
 into the hands of the invisible kingship of 
 Christ. In the acceptance of it, one be- 
 
 1] Peter ii. 9. 2 Revelation xix. 16. 
 8 Matthew iii. 2. 4 Matthew vii. 11; xiii. 11. 
 6 Luke ix, 27. 6 Luke xvii. 20, 21. 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 45 
 
 comes a member of the royal family of the 
 invisible God. The law of Christ is the law 
 of his life, —a life invisible, hid with the 
 invisible majesty of Christ, in the invisible 
 God. With sucha kingdom to found, and 
 being such a king, the Galilean ministry 
 could not be closed without some such 
 manifestation. And the character of the 
 miracle was inevitable from the intelligent 
 unity of Christ’s life. It was, as it needs 
 must be, an event where the infinite in 
 Him might touch the material nature, with 
 which He had to do, in a way which should 
 manifest the complete subservience of the 
 visible to the invisible! Soin this miracle 
 He manifested the invisible kingship hid- 
 den in His humiliation, and the secret of 
 that kingdom, which in Him made the 
 finite serve the infinite. 
 
 All this came out of the fact that He 
 saw that whatever worth the invisible had 
 for Him must soon be known. The visible 
 world was beginning to shiver under his 
 
 1 Weiss, Life of Christ, vol. ii. 385. 
 
46 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 feet. John the Baptist had just been slain 
 by order of Herod, and His own death be- 
 came more evident. In the news from 
 Herod’s household, He saw Calvary. So 
 out of this visible life of the multitude, He 
 goes into a more solitary place with His 
 own disciples, -— the invisible and sad king 
 of an invisible and as yet not understood 
 kingdom. The unexpected crowd confronts 
 Him. He will celebrate a feast. The visible 
 crowd cannot take the invisible king from 
 His throne, and it is then that He is not 
 only an invisible king, but also the king of 
 the invisible. The thousands are fed.! 
 There is no break now in the current of 
 this flowing soul. The invisible king is 
 declaring Himself the king of the invisible, 
 in a way that will lead Him and the dis- 
 ciples to a moment of transfiguration. 
 Still, He will seek retirement, and “ He 
 cometh to Bethsaida;”* and as this in- 
 visible king manifested His sovereignty 
 over material nature at the lake-side, so 
 
 1 Luke ix. 17. 2 Mark viii. 22. 
 
Time of the Transfiguration, 47 
 
 here He showed his regnancy over the life 
 of man in the restoration of sight to the 
 blind man. The next step in its mani- 
 festation must be when the invisible glows 
 and illumines from its own visible shrine, 
 Himself. It has touched nature and man 
 with the infinite ; will it not confess its own 
 hidden power ? 
 
 The shadows were still growing more 
 deep and wide. The invisible king was 
 journeying on toward Hermon, passing 
 through the towns of Czsarea Philippi, 
 not as a guest of earth, but as a scorned 
 and hated visionary. Then was the time 
 when, for them and for Him, it was best to 
 know how the public sentiment and their 
 private faith stood. “ Whom say men that 
 I am?” said He, whose very devotion to 
 the invisible had exiled the nation. “ And 
 they answered, Fohn the Baptist: but some 
 say, Elias ; and others, one of the prophets.” 
 They, even in this answer, which had no 
 word of reference to His Messianic charac- 
 
 1 Verse 27. 
 
48 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 ter, had stated it in the most favorable light. 
 For the popularity of Jesus had gone. 
 Anything that had helped them to connect 
 Him with the gigantic political movements 
 for which their Messiah should come had 
 long ago been entirely cast aside. Public 
 opinion was digging deeper than ever the 
 valley of His humiliation, and to His eyes 
 there had come across his path the shadow 
 of death. Then, with that quality which 
 belonged to the king invisible, which 
 counted not on the good opinion of the 
 crowd, and looked deeply into the soul of 
 the individual, ever content to found a 
 kingdom upon the least visible foundation, 
 He said: “ Whom do ye say that I 
 am?” “Thou,” said the ardent Peter, 
 “art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” 
 The world of the future was created. Clad 
 . in humiliation, weary and sad in His solemn 
 grandeur, its king stood near; and when 
 He answered Peter the invisible energies 
 of an eternal empire were in His hand. 
 
 1 Verse 29. 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 49 
 
 “ Blessed art thou,’ said He, “ for flesh and 
 blood hath not revealed tt unto thee, but my 
 Father which is in Heaven.” The Invisible 
 Himself had revealed to Peter the invisible 
 kingship of Christ. 
 
 But the entire answer is the disclosure 
 of this invisible kingdom. Jesus identifies 
 this confession of His invisible and divine 
 kingship with the future of Peter and the 
 destiny of the world. “ Thou art Peter 
 (Ilérpos), and on this rock (rérpa) will I butld 
 my church, and the gates of Hades shall 
 not prevail against it.” Then, as though 
 He would have Peter see, as did He, the 
 expansiveness of his faith in the invisible 
 and the naturalness with which these 
 powers of the invisible should come into 
 such a capable grasp, He disclosed that 
 unity of divine government which makes 
 His treatment of man consonant with that 
 other manifestation of God in the laws of 
 the world, and said: “J wiz/l give thee the 
 keys of the kingdom of heaven,’ —for these 
 are the powers of the invisible to which 
 
50 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 you open your hand,— “and whatsoever 
 thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in 
 heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on 
 earth shall be loosed in heaven,’ 1\—“so 
 surely shall the forces of the invisible in 
 the Invisible Himself and in your invisible 
 life be one, and so certainly has your 
 faith seized, yea, so does all faith in Me 
 grasp, this Invisible God whose Christ I 
 am.” The church was founded and the 
 lines of her immortal advance were made 
 clear. Yet darkness was upon their souls, 
 and His sky was overcast. 
 
 Peter had done a bold and brave thing. 
 This confession of Peter, however, did not 
 release the gaze of Christ from the swift- 
 coming Calvary. He saw it all. The 
 philosophy of the invisible life had its 
 consummate fruit in self-sacrifice. The 
 crown of thorns already hung in the air 
 over His head. From that moment, He 
 began to indicate to them how the life of 
 the invisible in Him ran toward a complete 
 
 1 Matthew xvii. 18, 19. 
 
Time of the Transfiguration, 51 
 
 self-abnegation. He wanted them to see 
 how, at last, He would be driven to throw 
 His very life out upon the invisible. Al- 
 ways was the invisible personal and loving, 
 because it was God, His Father; never- 
 theless, death by suffering and as an out- 
 law was sad to Him, partly because it was 
 so terrible to them. In the face of such 
 visions of the Messiah as would eliminate 
 all dishonor from the life and destiny of 
 the Jew, did He begin to point a steady 
 finger to His cross. In a moment, when to 
 Peter there had come words which had the 
 tones of a universal triumph in them, He 
 would make them see that the philosophy 
 of the invisible life did not end in either 
 confession or promise ; and thus “ He began 
 to show unto His disciples how that He 
 must go unto Ferusalem, and suffer many 
 things of the elders and chief priests and 
 scribes, and be killed, and the third day be 
 raised up.’ ' Mingled indignation and 
 pain rush into the words of Peter’s rebuke. 
 
 1 Matthew xvii. 21. 
 
52 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 The man of the world seems to speak, 
 while the child of the invisible is silent. 
 “Lord!” he says, with a more than 
 Jewish pride in his Messiah, “ Lord! be it 
 far from Thee ;” and with a total blindness 
 to the quality of this invisible kingship, 
 he adds, “‘ 7hzs shall never be unto Thee.” 
 He cannot yet conceive of the immortal 
 sovereignty of the invisible. He has not 
 yet seen the transfiguration, nor felt the 
 power of the event which explains the 
 glory of the transfiguration not less than 
 that of death,—the resurrection. It is 
 the slave of the visible and earthly who 
 speaks. The reply came, “ Get thee behind 
 me, Satan !”” —for it was Satanic to think 
 of frustrating the progress of this king of 
 the invisible. “ Zhou art an offence unto 
 me.” What royalty hath this invisible 
 king! “ For thou savourest not the things 
 that be of God,’ — “thou hast not entered 
 into the secrets of the invisible,” — “ dut of 
 the things that be of men,” — “thou hast 
 confessed the bondage of the visible.” 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 53 
 
 Then follow the great assertions which 
 state the ethics of the invisible life. It is 
 an unfolding of what Christ meant when 
 He said: “ Follow me.” Self-denial stands 
 out, with the simple but distinct promi- 
 nence which its relationship to such a 
 philosophy of life must give it. “Jf any 
 man would come after me,’ —the hiding- 
 place as well as the manifestation of God, 
 — “let him deny himself,’ —\et him bury 
 out of sight the visible, expedient, and 
 earthly,— “and take up his cross and follow 
 
 me.” * 
 
 There the secret of all great life 
 was made an open one, in the voluntary 
 _ taking up of the cross. Criminals, who bore 
 it with shame and by constraint, did not 
 attach to it a vileness which a noble taking 
 of it up in the self-determining soul might 
 not remove. In its new associations with 
 a willing and heroic devotion to the in- 
 visible, which stands behind majorities 
 who sneer and respectability which scorns, 
 there was to come that which should make 
 
 1 Verse 24. 
 
54 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 it a symbol of sainthood forever. It would 
 thenceforth image the fact, in which life 
 was discovered in death! and it would sug- 
 gest the very nature of the event of earth, 
 which, imitated in timid but sincere lives, 
 should prove the death of the Galilean 
 peasant to be, through all its eras, the 
 most living fact in all the world. 
 
 The teaching of the succeeding words 
 is knit together by a logic which has thus 
 brought out the fact that there is no real 
 victory in the divine life, save the triumph 
 of the invisible ; a logic which, also, as we 
 shall see, makes the transfiguration, and, 
 at last, the resurrection, cwo characteristic 
 moments in its sure advance. But before 
 either of these scenes can come, Jesus in 
 His invisible kingship must make clear the 
 profound sympathies of this invisible king- 
 dom with certain aspects of truth and cer- 
 tain duties of the hour. Those disciples 
 must have been conscious of how inevitably 
 out of such a conception there should come 
 the truth, “Whosoever shall save his life 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 55 
 
 shall lose it: and whosoever shall lose his 
 life for my sake shall find it.” “For 
 my sake,’ — what a sovereignty of the 
 invisible did that phrase disclose! Visi- 
 bly an outcast and fugitive, as truly as 
 when in Mary’s lap in the manger “a 
 king without regalia, a God without his 
 thunder,” He was then, as ever, offering 
 them no abstract philosophy of the in- 
 visible, but a concrete fact, namely, Him- 
 self, as the beginner, teacher, inspirer, and 
 guide of an invisible life in them. “For 
 
 » 
 
 my sake:” it was a word that made one 
 the secret of their lives and His, and made 
 the last visible thing which they clung to 
 — Himself —a gate into the invisible. 
 
 It will be noticed that in the progress of 
 this teaching, severe as it is to the minds 
 of those disciples, Jesus relies on the 
 love they bear Him, and hence upon the 
 magic of Himself, to save them from the 
 despair into which they were so likely to 
 fall from the heights of such lofty truth. 
 This is illustrated when He asks them: 
 
56 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 “ For what ts a man profited, if he gain the 
 whole world, and lose himself?””' Here the 
 issue between the visible world and the in- 
 visible self is made plain, but only by put- 
 ting these disciples upon the very summit 
 of the lofty truth that man is in his essen- 
 tial nature an invisible being. It is a 
 height which makes even our philosophy 
 dizzy. The wide valleys almost charm us 
 into leaping from so great an altitude. 
 How must the disciples have felt the won- 
 drous height and the rare atmosphere! 
 But their teacher knows that He can keep 
 the head from being dizzy, by making the 
 appeal of this truth to their hearts. He 
 saves a panic of the intellect, by putting 
 Himself again before their love. “ For 
 whosoever shall be ashamed of me,’ He 
 says, with a depth of personal feeling in 
 which His invisible self touches this newly 
 announced invisible selfhood in them, “of 
 him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when 
 He shall come in His own glory and in His 
 
 1 Verse 26. 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 57 
 
 Father's, and of the holy angels.’ It is the 
 same truth brought out of the atmosphere 
 of the absolute and made relative. But 
 with this disclosure of the personal rela- 
 tionships, which such a truth has, there 
 comes a new phase of this invisible king- 
 ship and His kingdom of the invisible. The 
 invisible king is in the day of humiliation 
 now. Beneath these plain garments is a 
 sovereign, and under them is the hiding- 
 place of a divine glory. “ Verily,” said 
 the prophet of the invisible One, “ Zhou 
 art a God which hidest Thyself.’ These 
 disciples have not been mistaken in the 
 truth they have apprehended. They do 
 follow the king, but He is “ the King 
 immortal and invisible,’ and this fact 
 Jesus has tried to teach them. By and by, 
 this unseen majesty will burst forth. It 
 does not now, because Jesus is founding a 
 kingdom of the invisible. Shall the king 
 of such a realm flaunt his royalty? Nay, 
 His royal family must be children of the 
 
 1 Isaiah xlv. 15. _ 2 Timothy i. 17. 
 
58 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 invisible. But the day of glory draweth 
 nigh. He, the seer of the invisible, detects 
 its light in the distance, as his eye flashes 
 across the visible grave of Joseph of 
 Arimathea. And so, when He tells them 
 of these things, “ Whosoever shall be 
 ashamed of me and my words” in my in- 
 visible kingship on earth, “of him shall 
 the Son of man be ashamed,” He makes 
 vivid the hour of glory, and adds, “ when,” 
 in the confessed kingship of the invisible, 
 “ He cometh in His own glory, and in His 
 Father's and of the holy angels.” 
 
 There is but one danger now, — they 
 will put this hour of glory on the other 
 side of their life on earth. But that they 
 may be assured that this kingdom of the 
 invisible is to have its moments of glo- 
 rious victory here, He says: “ There be 
 some standing here, which shall not taste 
 of death until they see the kingdom of 
 God.” 3 
 
 The instant has now come in the pro- 
 
 1 Matthew xvi. 28. 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 59 
 
 cess of divine self-manifestation when the 
 soul of man is so heavily weighted with 
 the truth of the Invisible One in Christ 
 that it lags behind, and, as we shall see, 
 sleeps in the presence of the Incarnate 
 God. In this account of the development 
 of Christ’s idea, we have not been forget- 
 ful of the fearful strain which these chil- 
 dren of Judaism were asked to bear, that 
 they might follow Him with an honest 
 heart. Christ Himself, perhaps, never was 
 so conscious of walking along a difficult 
 way. For here that line, where the vis- 
 ible and invisible meet, impossible except 
 to divine feet, along which Jesus had to 
 travel, becomes clearly evident to thought. 
 If men had ever seen God truly, they 
 would have been so familiar with the in- 
 visible that they would not have expected 
 a visible kingdom, however gorgeous and 
 sublime. They had not seen Him, and 
 Jesus must reveal Him. In person and 
 influence, He must so make the Invisible 
 One visible that He and His kingdom 
 
60 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 should ever after be known as invisible. 
 The very success of the Incarnation, if in- 
 dulged for a moment, would have ruined 
 the result it aimed at. The seen Christ 
 must incarnate the unseen God, —a task 
 for Deity alone. Up to this time the 
 Incarnation has been so complete that 
 where the “Word” is most undoubtedly 
 “made flesh,’ there the proclamation is 
 most clearly made of the Invisible God. 
 The development of the life of Christ is 
 the growth of this profound idea and pur- 
 pose, in apprehensible statement or illus- 
 trative event. Event so follows statement 
 that each movement in His career is an 
 additional proof of how perfectly He com- 
 prehends the mighty unit of His life. 
 Where His lips have just ceased to move 
 with the utterance of His profound faith 
 in the invisible, He throws His life, until, 
 at last, on Calvary, His very being, upon 
 the unseen. Yet, at every step, He is less 
 a weird and spectral abstraction, and more 
 a concrete, personal thing. The Son of 
 
Time of the Transfiguration. 61 
 
 God and the Son of man are one in His 
 enlarging life. He must invite and de- 
 velop their love, even if it begins in a con- 
 ception of Him after a most visible sort ; 
 but at the right instant, He must, in His 
 love for them, turn its tide away, lest they 
 lose in the incarnation the Incarnate One. 
 “For about an eight days” these forces 
 were at work, as never before. Death by 
 the cross lay yonder before the Christ. 
 The tonger He spoke, the more certain 
 to them was Calvary; and eight days of 
 thought must have left them between two 
 worlds of thought and hope: “one dead, 
 the other,” seemingly, “ powerless to be 
 born.” Still they followed, led on, they 
 knew not why. Nineteen centuries after, 
 we can seem to see the gravitation ; for all 
 these invisible forces were converging into 
 an event, inevitable alike to the Christ and 
 the spiritual culture of those disciples, — 
 the transfiguration. 
 
1 : 
 Ng 
 
 
 
 eee 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
LECTURE Ll. 
 The Place of the Transfiguration. 
 
 “ Forever through the world’s material forms, 
 Heaven shoots its immaterial ; night and day 
 Apocalyptic intimations stray 
 Across the rifts of matter.’”” 
 

 
LECTURE III. 
 The Place of the Transfiguration. 
 
 “He took Peter, James, and John, and went up into a moun- 
 tain apart to pray.’’— Luxe ix. 28, with MATTHEW xvii. 1, and 
 
 Mark ix, 2. 
 
 T is not that the earthly spot of 
 a4| this significant event may be de- 
 ais} termined that the student of 
 Christ’s life stops at the mountain’s base 
 and looks upward towards its summit, but 
 
 
 
 that, from His choice of the mountain the 
 character of His companionship, and the 
 acknowledged purpose of prayer, there 
 may be found the place in the geography 
 of the soul’s life where naturally such an 
 incident might occur. The traditional 
 view points to Mount Tabor. But per- 
 haps St. Jerome neglected to note how, 
 from ancient times, it had been crowned 
 with fortifications and known the publicity 
 
66 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 of acity upon its summit. Nevertheless, 
 the churches which have crowded to the 
 supposed spot, and that monastery, now 
 thirteen centuries old, stand to note the 
 vitality of the tradition. Nothing has so 
 pointed away from Tabor, to a mountain 
 near Czesarea Philippi, as the improba- 
 bility of an unmentioned journey which 
 must have been made within the few days 
 intervening, and the fact that Mark, after 
 recording events subsequent to the trans- 
 figuration, says, “ 7hey departed thence 
 and passed through Galilee.” It was, 
 most probably, one of the spurs of Her- 
 mon, where the vapors of summer floating 
 in that loftier atmosphere are condensed 
 at the touch of the snow-crowned summit, 
 and those clouds are formed, one of which 
 may have swept before the gaze of the 
 disciples while they looked upon the trans- 
 figured One. 
 
 Uncertain as this must ever be, the 
 place of the transfiguration of Jesus Christ 
 
 1 Mark ix. 30. 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 67 
 
 in the unnamed holy land of the spir- 
 itual life is more sure. The mountain- 
 height on which naturally such an issuing 
 forth of the Infinite through the finite 
 ever occurs, is a result from the opera- 
 tion of forces, of which the strata of the 
 spiritual world preserve the record. As 
 a physical relationship appears to the geol- 
 ogist between Sinai, Hermon, and Calvary, 
 so these seemingly isolated points in the 
 experience of the human soul may be seen 
 to have been uplifts from the level plain 
 of consciousness, by the action of resist- 
 less spiritual forces. In a sense more Em- 
 ersonian than Swedenborgian, “ the world 
 is the mirror of the soul.’”’! As actual, to 
 the true soul, are the facts of the ideal 
 as are those of the real world? No ex- 
 haustive catalogue of the distances which: 
 separate them or of the relationships 
 
 1 Address to Divinity Students. Emerson’s Works, 
 vol. i, 
 
 2 Lotze, Mikrocosmos, Book IV. chap. iii.; Hill, 7he- 
 ology of the Sciences, p. 29. 
 
68 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 which bind them has been made; yet they 
 act and re-act throughout the universe. 
 Christ’s whole life showed with what sov- 
 ereignty they move on. And here we 
 find that same unity of life with which His 
 nature dominated His career, uniting such 
 of these facts into one that, whatever 
 doubt there may be in our geography of 
 the seen world, there can be none in 
 that of the unseen as to where the trans- 
 figuration —the flash of the unseen glory 
 through the seen humiliation —did and 
 must ever occur. 
 
 I. In Jesus Christ, the seen and unseen 
 were in unique companionship. So His 
 attitude to the seen was always in perfect 
 harmony with His relations unto the un- 
 seen world. By His being the revelation 
 of the one, He became, especially by His 
 use and treatment of the other, its revealer 
 also. So vital was this union in Him that 
 whatever He did, involving a use of na- 
 ture, became a revelation of His grace. 
 Of this fact we have proof, not only in the 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 69 
 
 use He made of mustard-seed and lily as 
 they were taken up in the language of His 
 lips, but also in that use which He made 
 of Genesareth and Hermon as they were 
 taken up in the language of His life. 
 Here, His seeking the mountain is a subtle 
 but powerful revelation of the quality and 
 meaning of the next truth which He had 
 to speak. And, as it was truth which 
 must be uttered without words, so, silently, 
 He goes into the mountain to pray. 
 
 This use of that mountain brings again 
 to mind that unity of life which ever came 
 from the unity of His nature. Twice 
 before has He sought the mountain for 
 prayer. Each time He reveals the qual- 
 ity of the unseen kingdom which He has 
 come to found, and its profound relation to 
 that consciousness of infinity, of which I 
 have spoken. Once, a vision of earthly 
 glory had swept like a flood over those 
 who heard Him. The thought of the 
 Messianic triumph had seized the people. 
 They were about to compel Him into the 
 
70 ~—«~‘The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 championship of their idea of material 
 splendor and the leadership of their hosts. 
 Just as now, going up the mountain of 
 transfiguration, He sees His cross in the 
 gulf between His idea and theirs, so then 
 He must have seen the coming solitude of 
 Calvary as He sought the solitude of those 
 mountains. Before that time, He had 
 done likewise. It was for a moment's sol- 
 itude before the sermon on the mount. 
 In both cases, we may see how Jesus dig- 
 nifies nature, in His use of it. What min- 
 istries He here shows, lying unemployed 
 by needy souls, in the world of mountain 
 and valley! The body and soul are so re- 
 lated that the one, touched by the pure air, 
 and the other, influenced by the healthful 
 word of Christ, seem to live a new life, 
 each for the other, in a new universe. 
 Sacred enough to Him was every breath 
 of that mountain air. It blessed a body 
 through which a truth should soon be 
 more surely seen, which would explain 
 nature and the soul. The sublimity of 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 71 
 
 that suggestive spot ministered its em- 
 bodied charm to Him whose sublimity 
 should make earth the most interesting 
 spot in the universe. That wide outlook 
 under the quiet stars became somewhat 
 harmonious with the sweep of horizon 
 which He entertained and gave to the hu- 
 man soul. 
 
 The truth of nature fell, with a primal 
 ease and naturalness, into the hands of 
 the truth itself. It is not strange that the 
 self-manifestation of God in Christ should 
 so use nature as that it would appear to 
 have something of the same truth to tell 
 which was the message of Christ. It was 
 a truth told, however, in a different lan- 
 guage. 
 
 It is a quite superficial theism whose 
 God goes not out contemporaneously and 
 harmoniously in Creation in nature and in 
 Incarnation in Jesus Christ. The corre- 
 spondent truths of nature and Christ are at 
 root one truth, working itself out in its 
 dual revelation. Creation and Incarnation 
 
72 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 lie in the nature of Love. The subjective 
 personal God urges Himself into objec- 
 tivity of life. Creation is the manifesta- 
 tion of God in the unconscious objectivity 
 of nature; Incarnation is the manifesta-_ 
 tion of God in the conscious subjectivity 
 and objectivity of Jesus, the Christ. In 
 Christ, God sees Himself as perfectly man- 
 ifested. 
 
 Out of these relations of nature and 
 Christ in God came the Christ’s attitude 
 toward and use of nature. Looking upon 
 Him, as that poetic soul who receives 
 such dainty patronage in certain circles, 
 He seems the mystic Voice which could 
 aSSerec —— 
 
 “To me the meanest flower that blows can give 
 Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” 
 As a man only, He might have climbed 
 up the mountain side that He should have 
 such moments as were Wordsworth’s, of 
 which the poet of Rydal Mount has said: 
 
 “ Oft in these moments such a holy calm 
 Would overspread my soul that bodily eyes 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 73 
 
 Were entirely forgotten, and what I saw 
 Appeared like something in myself, a dream, 
 A prospect of the mind.” 
 
 But the attitude of the Christ toward 
 nature was not that of a listener for its 
 secret. He Himself was its secret. In 
 that “presence which disturbs” the be- 
 
 holder, 
 é “With the joy 
 
 Of elevated thoughts : a sense sublime 
 
 Of something far more deeply interfused, 
 
 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
 
 And the round ocean, and the living air, 
 
 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
 
 A motion and a spirit that impels 
 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, 
 
 And rolls through all things,” 
 it was His to feel the thrill of a preéx- 
 istent life, —a life which was His before 
 the worlds were created; to be conscious 
 on earth of the hour in eternity when by 
 Him the worlds were framed, when the 
 Word which was in the beginning was 
 with God, as it was God; and, as “the 
 Word made flesh,” to see nature in the 
 light of Himself. As the Incarnate God, 
 
74 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 He had a unique attitude toward nature. 
 The God-created “lily of the field” must 
 appear in its real significance to God’s 
 Incarnate Self. If it was truth of lily 
 or of mustard seed, it passed through the 
 divine consciousness which in simple self- 
 utterance had said, “J am the Truth.” » 
 As He travelled up that mountain path, 
 He must have realized this and vastly 
 more. He could not tell the disciples, 
 for they were already unable to bear in- 
 telligently the gifts of truth which He had 
 disclosed to them. 
 
 All this, from the divine side, was in the 
 experience of Him whose body, then and 
 there, stood for nature’s achievement. Be- 
 hind it stood the entire creation. As that 
 weary body made its way up that moun- 
 tain side, it seemed to be stepping upon an 
 unread page in its own biography. That 
 mountain had been lifted by a world-pain 
 “with which the whole creation had been 
 groaning until now.”* Along together, in 
 
 1 John xiv. 6. ; 2 Romans viii. 22. ° 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 75 
 
 this use of nature, do the facts of the Cre- 
 ation and the Incarnation lie, as they are 
 seen to lie in the being and life of God. 
 It was natural that God should go forth 
 into Incarnation in Christ. From the up- 
 per side of the problem of Christ’s human 
 life we note a supreme naturalism. This 
 is the side of the Incarnation. But it was 
 also natural to nature itself that, at last, 
 a goal should appear which should justify 
 these painful experiences, ever brighter as 
 their results seemed to be in their long 
 reign. From the lower side of the prob- 
 lem of Christ’s human life, also, we note a 
 supreme naturalism. This is the side of 
 Creation. Thus nature, coming up out of 
 infinity, moving on in circles of devel- 
 opment with an infinite dynamic, found 
 itself, through the continuity and in the 
 goal of Creation, with the human body of 
 the Nazarene. The Christ, coming down 
 out of that same infinity, the self-manifes- 
 tation of God, was conscious of the In- 
 finite in this same human body. Creation 
 
76 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 and Incarnation were thus one in the 
 Christ of God, as before the morning stars 
 sang together they were one in God. 
 Jesus had, in His self-conscious life, the 
 objectivity of nature and the subjectivity 
 of God. That mountain marked a mo- 
 ment in nature when, and a place where, 
 the two lines of God’s manifestation in 
 Creation and in Incarnation were approach- 
 ing each other, though with agony which 
 pained the planet in its travail. “ The 
 whole creation groaneth and travaileth to- 
 gether in pain until now,” —this was the 
 fact beneath NHermon’s white-crowned 
 magnificence. And Jesus Christ, with 
 these unspoken meanings which nature 
 had to Him alone, went forward to these 
 scenes of transfiguration, where the ever- 
 fresh agony of that world-pain, growing 
 yet more intense and keen, as in man’s 
 history the creature should groan “for the 
 mantfestations of the sons of God,” should 
 be, for a moment, apprehended in the is- 
 
 1 Romans viii. 19. 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 77 
 
 sues it bore, and understood in the glory of 
 its hero, saint, martyr, and God. 
 
 II. The place of the transfiguration was 
 not only a place where Jesus was thus re- 
 lated to nature: it was a place also where 
 He related Himself with the universe in 
 prayer. The fact of its being a place of 
 prayer before it was the place of transfigu- 
 ration will furnish us with opportunity to 
 find, in the attitude and bearing of Jesus, 
 the nature of prayer and the naturalness 
 of such an event as the transfiguration 
 to the praying Christ. Prayer, as it is 
 seen in Jesus of Nazareth, involves a per- 
 fect faith in the Supreme Power of the 
 universe as good! Not only does God 
 reveal Himself personally in Christ as 
 the eternal goodness, but Christ in His at- 
 titude toward the universe outside of Him 
 seems constantly to confront a Power 
 Supreme which is paternal in the aims 
 of government and beneficent in their 
 accomplishment. The Zezt-Gezst, which 
 
 ar Liddon, Some Elements of Religion, p. 164. 
 
78 The Transfiguration of Christ, 
 
 is thought to offer no prayer, never- 
 theless confronts in its science, which is 
 supposed to give the basis for this hos- 
 tility, a universe whose laws seem the 
 method of a Power whose end in govern- 
 ment is good. The Infinite Somewhat 
 seems to have in aim, at least, 
 “One far-off divine event 
 To which the whole creation moves.” 
 
 Advancing science is nearer, than on yes- 
 terday, to the confession that the “All- 
 Great zs the All-Loving, too.” With 
 Jesus, the fact at the base and summit of 
 things was the Infinite Goodness. Modern 
 thought seems about to grant that this, 
 the first truth of the Incarnation, is the 
 last revealed truth of Creation. Science 
 is crowding it to the front. Mr. Huxley is 
 unable even to cry down the “tone of op- 
 timism” in the speech of the evolutionist ; 
 
 1 The Supernatural in Nature, p. 148; Fowle, Recon- 
 ciliation of Religion and Science, p.210 ; Stewart and Tait, 
 The Unseen Universe, p. 224; Hanna’s Life and Letters 
 of Thomas Erskine, 4th Edinburgh ed., p. 360. 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 79 
 
 and he tells us that Du Bois Reymond, in 
 a lecture on Leibnitz, “seriously argues 
 that the doctrine of evolution supplies a 
 scientific equivalent to that philosopher’s 
 remarkable conception of the best of all 
 possible worlds.” ! It is more significant 
 when we remember the littleness of our 
 world, in the eyes of the modern spirit, 
 and are not therefore compelled logically 
 to deal with it in quite so absolute a man- 
 ner. 
 
 It is certain that, whatever may be the 
 force of the statement that nature seems 
 full of cruelty and pain, there is a silent 
 approach unto higher forms of life. Nat- 
 ural order has its law of death and resur- 
 rection. With the sacrifice of the unfit 
 comes the survival of the fittest. The 
 laws which have made it so hard for man 
 to exist at all, the severest of them, are 
 the ones which seem most heavily loaded 
 with his destiny. Man has travelled over 
 boiling abysses, from the obedience of one 
 
 1 Article “Evolution,” Zucyc. Britannica. 
 
80 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 law to the obedience of the next. The 
 hardest to obey was the safest stone he 
 could risk himself upon. The event to- 
 ward which the Supreme Power has aimed 
 was so important, the aim was so direct, 
 that the track along which force flies is 
 walled with adamant. It is always flying: 
 nature is its path, being, as it is, the about 
 to be born. Now and then, it looks like 
 retrogression. The Pterodactyls and Di- 
 nosaurians have ceased to exist, and thus 
 the two higher orders of reptiles have 
 departed. But the aim of God was sure. 
 The law of one life has broken, or rather 
 opened out, into the law of another. Birds 
 have superseded the Pterodactyls, and 
 mammals have walked in the wake of the 
 Dinosaurians. The nature, which became 
 the graveyard of the lower, became the 
 cradle of the higher. Like John, from 
 Patmos, our science sees “an angel stand- 
 ing in the sun.” + 
 
 But, it is said, grant to prayer its vision 
 
 1 Revelation xix. 17. 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 8&1 
 
 of a good power, yet that power has a 
 method, with which prayer must have and 
 can have nothing to do, which is law. 
 The answer is not only that, if this is the 
 method of a good power, the soul wants 
 not to change it, that the highest prayer is 
 “ Thy will be done,” but that, also, prayer 
 is the act by which the soul puts itself 
 in such relationship to this law that it 
 comes into contact with forces which 
 would not touch it otherwise, which it is 
 the will of goodness to give after its order, 
 which is law. Prayer is the step of the 
 soul into the region of the higher law. 
 We see a lower law break or open out into 
 a higher in nature. That seems consti- 
 tutional. Do they not thus break — the 
 lower into the higher — until the Power 
 Supreme, who is His own method, girds 
 whole with Himself ? Each law’s authority 
 is taken up into the one above it; and 
 prayer is not a thrust at the authority of 
 the lower law, which touches it, but a move- 
 ment toward the very source of its author- 
 6 
 
82 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 ity, —a movement which brings it within 
 the range of a higher law and its benefit.! 
 This view of the nature of the law and its 
 source, which has endured much repeti- 
 tion, seems never to have been de- 
 stroyed. 
 
 Christ was one with this source; and He 
 was true to the method of the divine na- 
 ture, as it affects us in prayer. In His 
 prayers, we see that He lives not in one 
 universe in action, and in another in 
 prayer; but that it is the same universe 
 with one government, whose laws are a 
 unit.2, By His native and preéxistent re- 
 lation to the universe, by what the laws of 
 the universe were to Him through His 
 sinlessness and positive holiness, He, in 
 prayer, touched the law along which the 
 infinite glory travels, and His face was 
 
 1 Salmon, Zhe Reign of Law and other Sermons, 
 p. 32; Romanes, Christian Prayer and seneral Laws, 
 
 p. 64. 
 
 2 Kennard, Unity of the Material and Spiritual 
 Worlds, p. 116; Abbott, Zirough Nature to Christ, p 
 129. 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 8&3 
 
 flooded with radiance. Yet all this was in 
 harmony with the same laws of the divine 
 order with which the weakest disciple has 
 to do, and does not injure the conception 
 of prayer which is a comfort to devout 
 souls.! What, by nature, was His relation 
 to the universe, we, praying in His name, 
 through His intercession, obtain by grace; 
 and by our taking hold of God, through a 
 personal holiness founded upon His, we 
 touch laws, in prayer, higher than those 
 whose benefit is ours without it. Many 
 are the blessings which thus lie above us, 
 just as, until that night, there was wait- 
 ing, in the very heart of the universe, a 
 transfiguration for Him. 
 
 III. The place of the transfiguration was 
 a place of solitude and yet of companion- 
 ship. I put the fact of human companion- 
 ship alongside the fact of Christ’s Divine 
 solitude in order that in it we may see, 
 first, another disclosure of the spirit of 
 Christ in His ideal and real life; and, 
 
 1 Jellett, The Efficacy of Prayer, p. 28. 
 
84 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 secondly, that we may gain the lesson of 
 the uses of Christian solitude and com- 
 panionship. 
 
 In the nature of Christ, we have seen 
 how the ideal and real were both actual 
 to Him, and were united naturally in 
 His life. The ideal reserves its treas- 
 ures, for the solitary moments, in merely 
 human lives. A man of the greatest in- 
 tellectual power will hardly do more than 
 to bring into contact, even in his intel- 
 lectual life, these two worlds, as we call 
 them. For the reason that in man’s 
 spiritual life the two worlds are not one, 
 he is accustomed to talk of two sets of 
 laws, not always even harmonious: one 
 for the realm of the real, the other for 
 the ideal. Nature and spirit, earth and 
 heaven, the finite and infinite, have been 
 so divorced in the actual life of mankind 
 that the mind has recognized two systems 
 of government. In Jesus Christ, how- 
 ever, they are one. The one integral Life 
 makes an unbroken universe. Truth and 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 85 
 
 life are one in the Truth and the Life. 
 By what Jesus Christ is to the soul of the 
 Christian, each disciple has in Him an un- 
 shattered universe, whose “natural super- 
 naturalism” flows from the Word, by 
 whom, in the beginning, it existed! All 
 this Jesus shows in His transfiguration. 
 It began in a place and moment of soli- 
 tariness. The weary disciples, however, 
 were soon within its influence, as it burst 
 forth into all the realms of Christ’s infinite 
 nature. The higher it reaches into the 
 ideal world, the deeper it goes into the 
 real world. As it rises into the ideal realm 
 of Moses and Elias, it runs down to rouse 
 the sleeping realism of Peter, James, and 
 John. Out of solitude the transfigured 
 One goes into companionship, which, on 
 the one side, takes Him further into the 
 solitude of God, and, on the other, takes 
 Him deeper into the companionship of 
 man. It all shows the unity, which was 
 infinite in its inclusiveness, in the nature 
 and life of Christ. 
 
 1 John i. 1, 2. 
 
86 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 These, solitude and companionship, each 
 modifying the other, each the more divine 
 for the other’s influence, are thus so 
 distinctly used, and are yet so unitedly 
 one fact in the life of Jesus, that by them 
 we see how inevitably the spot of His 
 transfiguration takes its place as most dear 
 to both the practical and the ideal realms of 
 human life. It was not His first hour of 
 solitude. His very nature made Him sol- 
 itary. By the infinity within Him, the 
 man Christ Jesus was alone. That infin- 
 ity of nature urged Him along lines which 
 would have made Him lonely, had not this 
 unique soul been self-centred in God. “J 
 have trodden the winepress alone”) was not 
 a prophecy only, but the record which the 
 consciousness of Christ made of its past. 
 “Tam not alone, because the Father is with 
 me’ * was the record which His conscious- 
 ness of infinity in God made of itself. 
 “ My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken 
 Me?” was that line of autobiography 
 
 1 Isaiah Ixiii. 3. 2 John xvi. 10. % Matt. xxvii. 46. 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 87 
 
 which records the moment when He was 
 to realize that there was only one In- 
 finite, and that itwas He. In that solitude 
 ended the education of Jesus, and in that 
 loneliest moment the ideal fact of His 
 Deity became real to Him and the world. 
 In that hour He found in His own person 
 the companionship of God. 
 
 But in all these moments this Sox of 
 God was also the Sox of man. In the de 
 velopment of His self-consciousness, from 
 a child, these conceptions had ever gone 
 together. A heavenly and earthly compan- 
 ionship was His. On the one side, there 
 was the Infinite Love; on the other, the 
 loveless race of men. As His soul grew 
 receptive and intelligent of the Divine 
 Love, He felt more keenly the woe of hu- 
 man sin. It was the gathering meaning 
 of these two facts to Him that led Him 
 to take Peter, James, and John with Him. 
 As the one heavenly fact broke with its 
 inherent glory, He would have the other 
 earthly fact blessed by its radiance. The 
 
88 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 glory of God and the good of man are 
 ever one in the life of Christ. It is not 
 that He may have some private and indi- 
 vidual renewal of the old glory which He 
 had with the Father in the beginning, but 
 that, as He becomes more conscious of 
 His own power, men may become more 
 sure of their possessions in Him. Christ 
 is always saying, “ The glory which Thou 
 gavest Me I have given unto them, that they 
 may be one.” } 
 
 Thus, the deeper we go into His native 
 solitude, the nearer we come to the reason 
 of this companionship. The lonely Christ 
 was lonely for man’s sake. His was not 
 the lofty isolation of an exclusive and im- 
 perious dignity, but that of a Being who 
 would so solve the problem of human life, 
 by being alone, that whatever He was, or 
 might have, would be inclusive of human- 
 ity. He had, as a mere man, the loneli- 
 ness of genius. It will be necessary to 
 read only the greatest, who have not ac- 
 cepted His lordship over their souls, to 
 
 1 John xvii. 22. 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 89 
 
 find the depth of that solitariness Alone 
 in the times in which He lived, He rises 
 out of that multitude which thronged the 
 Orient with a dignity and grandeur all 
 His own. Consider Him with Earth’s 
 great names, and His own comes forth 
 with a quiet but sure glory which leaves 
 none with which to compare Him. The 
 very cosmopolitanism of His thought 
 seems only to make Him more supreme in 
 His solitude. In the special realms of 
 truth, sentiment, and purpose, where He 
 seems likeliest to find peers, He is most 
 peerless ; and He appears all the more sol- 
 itary in this very fact that He so sur- 
 passes the supreme souls in each sphere of 
 man’s interior life that no one sphere can 
 claim Him as peculiarly its own. The 
 very peculiarities of His solitude make 
 Him more solitary. Other souls which 
 are removed into such lofty realms by 
 their native height share the frigidity of 
 the exalted space, and partake of the great 
 distances which separate them from man- 
 1 Cf. Renan’s Zz, concluding words, 
 
90 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 kind. They constantly reveal a life to 
 which they can give no invitation to the 
 crowd below. Where Christ is highest 
 He is nearest to men. At the moment 
 of His supreme exaltation, He is commu- 
 nicating its vision and urging the race 
 through the gates He has opened. When 
 He brings His life up to the truth which 
 He has found in His soul, and throws Him- 
 self out upon its trusted infinitude, He is 
 dying for the privilege of man to reach 
 just such mental and moral manhood. 
 Alone, man for whom He dies is His com- 
 panion. Suffering —the very fact which 
 binds men in the companionship of grief 
 — was the fact on which Jesus rose at once 
 into a supremacy none could share, and 
 into a companionship with every child of 
 sorrow for whose deliverance He then gave 
 His life. Solitude and companionship, — 
 the very loneliness of His nature making 
 him the more sensitive in conscious grief 
 over man’s woe, at the moment when He 
 saw the world, for which He was dying, 
 
The Place of the Transfiguration. 91! 
 
 give the death-bearing blow! On and on, 
 into deeper solitude, did He go, as the 
 long agony of Calvary lingered, until, at 
 last, of God Himself He seemed bereft, 
 as He cried, “ My God, my God, why hast 
 Thou forsaken Me?”+1 when He was so 
 driven to identify Himself with the In- 
 finite One that, in perfect solitude of 
 earth and heaven, God and man, who had 
 both seemed to forsake Him, were made 
 one in His inclusive soul. At the moment 
 of His crucifixion by mankind, every child 
 of Adam was in His heart. “ Father,’ He 
 prayed, “forgive them, for they know not 
 what they do.” * 
 
 So it comes that the possibility of our 
 companionship with Christ lies in the fact 
 that He was solitary in nature and suffer- 
 ing. May we so partake of His life that 
 we shall have no moments when our per- 
 sonal blessings shall not reach mankind. 
 
 1 “ That voice of utter loneliness in the death-strug- 
 gle, that entirely credible utterance, because it could 
 never have been invented.” — SCHENKEL, Characterbild 
 Fesu, p. 308. 
 
 2 Luke xxiii. 34. 
 

 
LECTURE IV. 
 The Transfigured Christ. 
 
 “Dei Voluntas Rerum Natura Est.”? — AUGUSTINE. 
 
“In vast inorganic masses God discovers Himself as the supreme, 
 creative, and sustaining force. In the graduated orders of vital power 
 which range throughout the animal and vegetable worlds God unveils 
 His activity as the fountain of all life. In man, a creature exercising 
 conscious reflective thought and free self-determining will, God pro- 
 claims Himself a free, intelligent agent. Man may, if he will, reveal 
 much more than this of the glory of God; he may shed forth by the 
 free movement of his will rays of God’s moral glory, of love, of mercy, 
 of purity, of justice. But whether each man will make this higher 
 revelation depends not upon the necessary constitution of his nature, 
 but upon the free codperation of his will with the designs of God. 
 God, however, is obviously able to create a being who will reveal 
 Him perfectly and of necessity as expressing his perfect image and 
 likeness before his creatures. All nature points to such a being as 
 its climax and consummation. And such a being is the archetypal 
 manhood assumed by the Eternal Word. It is the climax of God’s 
 creation; it is the climax also of God’s Self-revelation. At this 
 point, God’s creative activity becomes entirely one with His Self- 
 revealing activity. The Sacred Manhood is a creature, yet it is 
 indissolubly united to the Eternal Word. It differs from every 
 other created being in that God personally tenants it. So far, then, 
 are Incarnation and Creation from being antagonistic conceptions of 
 the activity of God that the absolutely perfect creature only exists 
 as a perfect reflection of the Divine glory. In the Incarnation, God 
 creates only to reveal, and He reveals perfectly by that which He 
 creates. ‘The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we 
 beheld His glory,’’? — Lippon. 
 
LECTURE IV. 
 The Transfigured Christ. 
 
 “* And as He prayed, the fashion of His countenance was altered, 
 and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white and 
 glistering.”” — MATTHEW xvii. 2; LuKE ix. 29. 
 
 BWA Ave|l is time now for us reverently 
 SOE 
 
 
 
 to look into that transfigured 
 face. But before us stretch im- 
 measurable distances in thought and senti- 
 ment; and we are compelled to look through 
 nineteen hundred years of such constantly 
 changing life as would warn us against 
 expecting to discover the same radiance 
 in the face of the Nazarene as was visible 
 in what our age denotes as the earlier twi- 
 light hours, when belief was young and 
 traditions blossomed everywhere. Indeed, 
 our time, somewhat over-conscious that it 
 is possessed of the critical spirit, and that 
 thus it becomes the revealer and _inter- 
 
96 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 preter of past ages, has many voices which 
 insist that it is manifestly impossible for 
 us to have the same emotions or to learn 
 the same lessons at the foot of Hermon 
 as did these men, since the intellectual 
 point of view and the spiritual atmosphere 
 which may be ours are so radically different 
 from those of Peter, James, and John, and 
 since, to be plain, the problem which inter- 
 ests us is not at all the same problem to 
 which they so willingly devoted their re- 
 markable experiences. 
 
 Christian thought, however, declines to 
 accept all this. On the contrary, it is 
 maintained that while nearly nineteen cen- 
 turies have rolled between us and them, 
 the intellectual point of view and spir- 
 itual atmosphere which were contributed 
 through them to the world have more than 
 held their own, and that it is impossible 
 for serious thinkers to escape them. As 
 to the questions which confront us, it must 
 be held that there is testimony on every 
 hand to show that the problem which lies 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 97 
 
 most fundamental to any true science or 
 complete philosophy, whose clamor for so- 
 lution is just now pronounced, is at root 
 precisely that to whose solution are given 
 the flashes of glory which, after so many 
 years of modifying life, still penetrate the 
 night-air of the world. There is but one 
 great problem in all times. Its ever-vary- 
 ing statement is the unimpeachable tes- 
 timony to the agreement, in the presence 
 of many differences, between the merely 
 intellectual and the spiritual life. Philos- 
 ophy will make the problem impersonal 
 and intellectual; ethics will make it per- 
 sonal and spiritual. Modern life has the 
 same mighty environment which from the 
 beginning has interested, astonished, and 
 bewildered man. That environment we 
 call “the universe.’ Our present think- 
 ing has insisted strongly that it knows and 
 can deal with its physical nature and char- 
 acteristics only. But our present thinking 
 has insisted upon this, with such large ad- 
 missions as to the postulates of knowledge 
 
 </ 
 
98 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 and ground of things, with such a wealth 
 of metaphysical lore, supplying a some- 
 what rich vocabulary with such new terms 
 as ‘‘atom,” “energy,” “correlation,” “evo- 
 lution,” and the like, that it has taught the 
 age how idealistic the surest realism be- 
 comes when it seeks to give any account 
 of itself ; and it has made it as certain that 
 the nineteenth century will close with the 
 eye of man resting on the infinite as it 
 was that this century opened with the eye 
 of man resting on the finite. That this 
 infinite is not yet acknowledged to be the 
 Infinite One of our creeds and love is of 
 no more vital importance than it is that 
 Force, which confessedly moves toward 
 Goodness, is not called Father. One thing 
 seems safe; and it often looks like the bril- 
 liant child of materialistic parents, — the 
 super-material. One thing is certain, and 
 appears as the once unacknowledged com- 
 panion of physics ; and that is metaphysics. 
 What such storm and stress have joined 
 together are not likely to be put asunder. 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 99 
 
 Our point of view may, therefore, be 
 near enough to that of these simple- 
 hearted disciples for us to feel that their 
 panic is but the spiritual phase of our intel- 
 lectual unrest, and that, being one at root, 
 these problems are not wholly unrelated 
 in their solution. “How have things come 
 to be as they are, and, being in existence, 
 why do they behave as they do?”’ — that is 
 the problem of nineteenth-century thought. 
 “ What does our Master mean, and how will 
 He justify what He has said?” —this was 
 the problem in the minds of Peter, James, 
 and John. Let us note how nearly they 
 come together: one so intellectual and 
 abstract, the other so spiritual and con- 
 crete. Jesus had been speaking to the 
 disciples of an unseen kingdom which was 
 the kingdom of the unseen. Never yet 
 had it seemed to have any reference to the 
 enigmas of life and phenomena with which 
 Thales and Plato had dealt. Our recent 
 thought has been speaking to the most in- 
 telligent of an unseen kingdom, which is 
 
100 =6The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 also the kingdom of the unseen. Never 
 yet, to many at least, has it seemed to 
 have any reference to the wonders of love 
 and grace which Fénelon and Augustine 
 have considered. It is only necessary, 
 however, to linger with the physicist with 
 his metaphysics, and to call in the Chris- 
 tian moralist with his keen appreciation of 
 the sensible and material world, to see that 
 what will solve one problem must solve 
 the other. The universe is one. John and 
 Clerk-Maxwell, Peter and Mr. Tyndall, 
 James and Pasteur, have questions to be 
 answered which come close to each other 
 in one root. The disciples of Jesus will 
 find the inspirations and consolations of 
 the spiritual life in the Mediatorial Christ, 
 “by whom the worlds were created ;” and 
 His transfiguration will be the lustrous 
 moment in which they may catch a 
 glimpse of the nature of things. The 
 disciples of honest thought seem sure to 
 find the postulates and conclusions of the 
 intellectual life in a created world, whose 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 101 
 
 transfiguration will be seen, only when the 
 nature of things is found to be the Logos 
 of God,—the word unspoken until the 
 Incarnation, then spoken, — “the ground- 
 fact,” the “final end” of all things. 
 Certainly, our most reckless materialism 
 would confess, since matter has grown in- 
 tractable and will not submit to any ma- 
 terialistic account of itself, that such an 
 event as the transfiguration is reported to 
 have been would be full of interest as re- 
 vealing, perhaps, some of the possibilities 
 of matter, and indicating the presence 
 either of unknown potencies and laws, or 
 at least of unknown manifestations of those 
 which were familiar. Materialism has 
 helped to do so much for theology that 
 a scientific theologian would accept this 
 proposition, and add to it a belief in the 
 historic place of that scene amidst the 
 phenomena of our world, which as yet no 
 arguments have pronounced absurd. As 
 they come together, it will be found that 
 what Christian thought has in the life 
 
102 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 of Jesus is just what is demanded by the 
 philosopher for the centre of a complete 
 cosmology. There is that in matter which 
 makes it unaccountably instinct with the 
 forces of development. Into perpetually 
 higher phases of existence it is ever push- 
 ing itself. It is bounded and traversed 
 with laws, which seem systematically re- 
 lated one to another. Their operation is 
 such that the whole body of laws points 
 unmistakably upward. The drift of things 
 is much more surely upward, to some such 
 glorification and manifestation as is this 
 which we are studying, than it is down- 
 ward, to disorganization and death. Man 
 crowns it all, — the microcosm, refusing to 
 believe in death, carrying up into his being 
 the surge of these upward-working ener- 
 gies and determining his own destiny. 
 He can at least sing this :— 
 
 “ Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail? 
 What I aspired to be, 
 And was not, comforts me ; 
 A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the 
 scale.” 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 103 
 
 Somehow, at its centre, there are to be 
 found the key to all this movement and 
 the reason of its direction. Thecause of it 
 must be its reason. A cause must be ade- 
 quate in quality as well as in quantity, for 
 effects. Whatever that “cause,” “reason,” 
 or “final end” is, matter has within it that 
 which makes ascent and has prophecy. It 
 is with such facts as these that one grows 
 ready to read certain partially neglected 
 passages of Scripture. 
 
 The only one of the three Evangelists 
 present on the mount of transfiguration 
 was John. It is a significant fact that, 
 preceding and along with what seems his 
 reference to the Transfigured One, there 
 is given that conception of Jesus of Naza- 
 reth which, while it has most to suggest to 
 the phases of thought to which attention 
 has been drawn, most thoroughly illumines 
 the event and makes it live with profound- 
 est meanings. “ Azd the Word was made 
 flesh, and dwelt among us,” he says, “and,” 
 he adds, “we beheld His glory, the glory 
 
104 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 as of the only begotten of the Father, full 
 of grace and truth,” 1 
 
 The Gospel according to John has been 
 called “the new Genesis.” The writer of 
 the old Genesis had so far known God and 
 His universe that he began the story with 
 the simple but sublime statement: “ Jz the 
 beginning God created the heavens and the 
 carth.’* The writer of the new had so 
 far seen God in Christ, had so far discov- 
 ered that this now spoken Word of God 
 was primarily back of the physical uni- 
 verse in the depths of the unspoken, as the 
 Idea and Ideal of Creative Power, and 
 hence, as the final end and means by which 
 He should act, that he began his account 
 of the universe, in which he saw every 
 physical feature and force bound up with 
 spiritual events and forces, by saying: “lz 
 the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos 
 was with God, and the Logos was God. By 
 Him were all things made.” * 
 
 Now, in the transfiguration of Christ, 
 
 1jJohni.14. ?Genesisi.t. *% Johni. 1, 3. 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 105 
 
 the physical universe, with its laws and 
 forces, is involved, as well as the imperial 
 personage of the Christian faith. Here, 
 however, in this doctrine of the Lagos, in 
 Creation and in Incarnation, there are to 
 be found an intellectual point of view and 
 a spiritual atmosphere which will enable 
 us to see their relationship. In its very 
 nature, this truth of the Logos is the 
 illumination of all other truth. It must 
 thus be tested, — “a light not to see, but 
 to see with.” Never until every such event 
 in the life of the Nazarene be approached, 
 so that we may look upon both Him and 
 the physical universe from this point of 
 view and in this atmosphere, can we be 
 delivered from bewilderment and gloom. 
 This is not the place in which to review 
 long and learned discussions on the mean- 
 ing of this suggestive word. Athanasius 
 has been followed with satisfactory pre- 
 cision in the assertion of its large double 
 meaning, Verbum et Ratio Cardinal New- 
 
 1 Excursus, in Handy Volume Commentary on Fohn. 
 
106 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 man’s statement is important, in which he 
 says: “A distinction had already been ap- 
 plied by the Stoics to the Platonic Logos, 
 which they represented under two aspects, 
 the évéidGeros, and the zpodopixéds, 2, ¢., the 
 internal thought and purpose of God, and 
 its external manifestation, as if in words 
 spoken. The terms were received into 
 the church; the évéudberos standing for the 
 Word, as hid from everlasting in the bosom 
 of the Father, while the zpodopixes was the 
 Son sent forth into the world in apparent 
 separation from God, with His Father’s 
 name and attributes upon Him and His 
 Father’s will to perform.” ! 
 
 The processes of Creation and Incarna- 
 tion have already been spoken of as hav- 
 ing their explanation and goal in Christ 
 Jesus. From this, which is a different line 
 of thought, the suggestion comes that the 
 Logos —the once unspoken, but now 
 spoken, word, the Reason of God — is the 
 sublime fact in both. Creation is, “ be- 
 
 1 History of the Arians, vol. ii. 3, 2, 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 107 
 
 cause of Him,” “according to Him,” ‘in 
 Him ;” and since this Reason of God as 
 manifested is mediatorial,! it is “through 
 Him,” and “by Him were all things made 
 that were made.” The Incarnation is this 
 Reason spoken, uttered forth, embodied, — 
 “the Logos was made flesh and dwelt among 
 us.” Unuttered, the Logos was the Rea- 
 son for Creation, the Reason of Creation, 
 Reason in Creation. Uttered, the Logos 
 is the ever-present illumination and key 
 of existence, — Jesus the Christ. From 
 the beginning to the end, this is His office 
 and nature. “Before all things,” zporo- 
 toxos macys xticews “the first-born of all 
 Creation,’ 2 and “the First-fruits of 
 them that slept.” Jesus is thus the ra- 
 tional end of creation, because He was its 
 reason in the beginning. To our won- 
 der and darkness amidst the problems, He 
 is “the Light of the world.” As the un- 
 manifested Logos, He is the motive power 
 
 1Steward, Mediatorial Sovereignty, vol. i. p. 202. 
 2 Colossians i. 15. 
 
108 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 and aim of all history ; as the manifested 
 and spoken Logos, He is the consummate 
 flower, yet the Lord of the process, the 
 reason of the movements by which He 
 came. He, the Reason of every law and 
 force, has come out into manifestation, 
 travelling in the chariot of every force and 
 along the avenue of every law, and being 
 now Incarnate, flashes back through their 
 mysteriousness the illumination of Himself, 
 making them clear and radiant. He is the 
 spirit, the informing and authoritative 
 Fact of all laws, for He is Love; and law 
 is only Love's order. He includes in his 
 Person a!l laws, for Love is the all-inclu- 
 sive law, —a law unto itself. Is not this 
 the desideratum of all philosophy? Does 
 not this Mediation in Him between finite 
 and infinite, between absolute and relative, 
 furnish thought with its initiative and goal ? 
 Is it not to answer the fundamental ques- 
 tions, to find the Reason for things as they 
 are, and to see that this Reason, which was 
 so satisfactory at the beginning that things 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 109 
 
 became, is yet their Reason; that this 
 Personal Reason of the universe is its 
 motive power, its goal, its glory? As this 
 Fact, comes the Incarnate Logos with His 
 transfiguration. 
 
 Occupying this position, every view of 
 nature which denies what is called the 
 supernatural is curiously inadequate and 
 unphilosophical. Some such position as 
 that held by the Christian student of the 
 transfiguration seems a necessity. Natu- 
 ralism becomes inefficient to deal satis- 
 factorily with many facts which have a 
 far-away and yet sure harmony with what 
 is seen in Jesus Christ. There the Chris- 
 tian thinker grounds \his “ supernatural 
 naturalism,” and sees about him a strange 
 sympathy. The realism which has been 
 atheistic, now, in most unexpected quarters, 
 looks toward idealism, which is panthe- 
 istic. The next birth-pang for the ulti- 
 mate philosophy will be the passing through 
 this impending discussion. Afar, it may 
 be, but certain is the triumph of ideal- 
 
110 ~The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 realism, in this “ Ratio et Verbum,” this Lo- 
 gos, with its Christian theism granting the 
 vision of God in Christ. It is obviously 
 an incomplete account of matter and force 
 which leaves out such a scene; and Phi- 
 losophy has written her death-warrant un- 
 less she willingly and gladly follows out 
 the evident movements of force in matter, 
 the certain modifications of which matter is 
 the subject, which, “far beyond the ooze 
 and slime,” so leap with the infinite motive 
 power within them, and glow with the 
 eternal and changeless reason, which, in 
 the silence of some remote past, augured 
 their existence and destiny. Christian 
 philosophy enthrones the Logos, the 
 Christ, as this Motive Power and Rea- 
 son. 
 
 John did not feel that the glory of the 
 Logos on Hermon was out of harmony 
 with His nature and with the nature of the 
 universe as seen in the light of Him. If, 
 as seems John’s idea, this Logos was and 
 now is the organ and medium of creation, 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 11 
 
 then creation has no law broken, as He 
 flashes forth His interior glory : nay, rather 
 is the orderly process of nature illumined 
 and justified, as its ancient Reason stands 
 with it, upon it, having come to claim His 
 own. Doubtless John’s thoughts took a 
 quite different direction from ours. It was 
 a personal, concrete, and spiritual problem 
 to him, while every such event as the 
 transfiguration offers to our time an intel- 
 lectual, abstract, impersonal problem. But 
 John’s conception of Jesus is as great as 
 the soul. If we are right in the belief that 
 we are to find the settlement of intellect- 
 ual problems in spiritual truth, surely there 
 is light for every questioning mind here. 
 John is not alone in such a conception 
 of Jesus as makes Him unique, after this 
 manner, in the universe. Paul's most pro- 
 found students have found this same phi- 
 losophy of things in his first letter to the 
 Corinthians. ‘“ The absolute, universal 
 mediation of the Son is declared as unre- 
 servedly from: the first epistle to the 
 
112 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Corinthians,” says Bishop Lightfoot, “as 
 in any later statement of the Apostle.” ? 
 It will be observed that this mediatorial 
 function is as indispensable in the history 
 of matter as in the history of the soul ; 
 and whatever Jesus Christ is to the human 
 soul or to the physical world, as Mediator, 
 He is because He is the Logos. As Mar- 
 tensen urges: “ As Mediator between the 
 Father and the world, it appertains to the 
 essence of the Son not only to have His 
 life in the Father, but to live also in the 
 world. As ‘the heart of God the Father,’ 
 He is at the same time ‘the eternal heart 
 of the world,’ through which the divine 
 life streams into creation. As the Lagos 
 of the Father, He is at the same time the 
 Logos of the world, through whom the 
 divine life shines into creation.” 2 There 
 is this deep unity of teaching in the 
 analytic and argumentative Paul and the 
 mystic, intuitive John. Remarking upon 
 1 Lightfoot on Colossians, p. 122. 
 2 Christian Dogmatics, p. 189. 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 113 
 
 Paul’s fine perception of this truth in the 
 phrase “es airov,” Col. i. 15, 17, Light- 
 foot says: “All things must find their 
 meeting point in Him from whom they 
 took their rise, in the Word as the 
 Mediatorial agent, and through the Word 
 in the Father.” God is His own reason, 
 as manifested in Christ. When we ask 
 for the reason of things, we see it must 
 not, cannot, be outside of God’s own na- 
 ture, and that it is the unuttered Lagos. 
 When that Zogos is uttered in the Incar- 
 nation, then He testifies of Himself: “He 
 that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.” } 
 “The Word,” adds the Bishop of Durham, 
 “is the final goal as well as the Creative 
 agent of the universe,. .. the goal... 
 as He was the starting-point.” “As all 
 creation passed out from Him, so does it 
 all converge again toward Him. Heis not 
 only the ‘apy, but also the réAos of crea- 
 tion.” “In Him,” says Paul to the Colos- 
 sians, “ were all things created, and by Him 
 
 1 John xiv. 9. 
 
114. ‘The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 all things consist.” 1 Each of these Apos- 
 tles has a philosophy of things whose 
 vision comprehends a Christocentric uni- 
 verse. 
 
 Now let us apply all this to the problem 
 of the transfiguration, and what a natural 
 thing it was! Peter, James, and John had 
 been the recipients of a special culture. 
 Once before they had been with Him, — 
 with this Living Centre of universal law 
 and force whose name was Love, who thus 
 made the motions and energies obedient 
 to Love’s dominion and triumphs, — where 
 the darkest phase of the problem of the 
 universe confronted them and Him. It 
 wore only a less terrible visage then, at 
 the side of the dead body of the daughter 
 of Jairus,? than here, when He had per- 
 sisted all the way to Hermon in announce 
 ing to them His own death. It must be 
 noted that these three times in which 
 Jesus vouchsafed to these three disciples 
 His special culture— namely, the raising 
 
 1 Colossians i. 15. 2 Luke viii. 41. 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 115 
 
 of the daughter of Jairus, the transfigura- 
 tion, and the scene in dark Gethsemane — 
 were but three steps in discovery, three 
 lessons on the same theme. That theme 
 was the Invisible Kingship of Himself in 
 this invisible kingdom, which also was the 
 kingdom of the Invisible. At the bedside 
 where the little girl lay dead, the physical 
 was supreme, the natural had its confessed 
 victory over the spiritual. But at the ap- 
 proach of this living Centre of all laws, 
 this Force from whom and to whom are 
 all forces, a new factor came into the 
 equation ; and, because that factor was 
 Incarnate Love, the all-inclusive Law, the 
 Authority and Power Supreme, the result 
 was changed. The law of death opened 
 into the larger law of life: there was no 
 infraction ; but the dead lived. “ She ts 
 not dead, but sleepeth.’ In the all-encir- 
 cling presence of Life there is no death. 
 The Logos which was the Reason of all 
 Law was there and was supreme. So har- 
 monious was this new “Order” with the 
 
116 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 old order of nature that, into the wonder 
 and mystery which followed the raising of 
 the maid from the dead, He inserted the 
 plain and realistic words: “ Give the child 
 some food.” The touch of the higher — 
 yea, of the Highest — Law, which was 
 Love, had opened the way for the min- 
 istry of the lower; and what we call the 
 supernaturalism of raising the child was so 
 natural that the next thing after the mir- 
 acle was the demand for physical nutri- 
 ment. The Lagos is the Law of all laws; 
 in Christ Jesus, the lowest is harmonious 
 with the highest. 
 
 Now, at the moment of His transfigura- 
 tion, Peter, James, and John, after days of 
 long misunderstanding of what this un- 
 . seen kingdom and this kingdom of the 
 unseen meant, were again in the pres- 
 ence of the Unseen King. A new phase 
 of His work was here to be begun. Says 
 Godet : ‘This moment marks the apogee 
 of the public ministry of Jesus, and, if we 
 may venture to say it, the point of tran- 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 117 
 
 sition from action to passion. A royal 
 pathway had been originally opened to 
 Him: it led through temptation and moral 
 progress from innocence to holiness, — this 
 was the first stage of the journey; then 
 through a glorious transformation, physical 
 and spiritual, from holiness to glory... . 
 Jesus had reached that point of His exist- 
 ence when, according to the royal law, of 
 which we have been speaking, He was to 
 raise Himself by means of a transforma- 
 tion out of the form of existence which 
 belongs to earth into the heavenly state. 
 The transfiguration was the first step in 
 this glorious ascent. That light which from 
 His inner being, illumined from above, ir- 
 radiates His body and makes even His very 
 raiment to glister is the beginning of His 
 glorification. These two messengers from 
 a higher world, who present themselves to 
 Him, are ambassadors come to meet Him 
 and to introduce Him into the heavenly 
 habitations. Lastly, that cloud, mysterious 
 emblem of the Father’s presence, is, as it 
 
118 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 were, the chariot in which the Holy One 
 and the Just is to ascend into the world of 
 glory. But what happens now? The light 
 disappears ; the heavenly messengers van- 
 ish; the cloud is withdrawn. Jesus re- 
 mains ; He is seen amongst his disciples 
 the same as before ; and soon, as if nothing 
 had happened, He comes down the moun- 
 tain with his disciples, who had been wit- 
 nesses of the scene. .. . Jesus had it in 
 His power to accept this triumphant de- 
 parture ; and it was right that God should 
 offer it to Him, for it was the reward due 
 to His holiness. But in thus reéntering 
 heaven, Jesus must have entered it alone. 
 .. . Humanity unreconciled would have 
 remained on earth struggling with the 
 bonds of sin and death until its entire dis- 
 solution. ... After having fulfilled the 
 task set before the innocent man, —that of 
 becoming the holy man, perfect in all re- 
 spects, — Jesus, on the point of laying His 
 hand on the crown which was the reward 
 due His victorious course, turns away from 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 119 
 
 it, because He sees before Him another 
 task, a final work indispensable for Him, if 
 it is His purpose to ascend not alone, but 
 followed by a great company,—the re- 
 habilitation of fallen humanity.” 1 
 
 That at the transfiguration of Christ is 
 preached a gospel which includes “the re- 
 habilitation of humanity” no one can doubt. 
 Rejecting whatever we may of the inci- 
 dental material of Professor Godet’s sug- 
 gestive exposition, we must agree that the 
 fact that the “ Lamb of God” came into 
 the world “to take away the sins of the 
 world” includes and makes necessary the 
 fact of His glorification, beginning on Her- 
 mon, triumphant at the grave of Joseph, 
 and so complete in its transformation of 
 His physical self that, on the day of ascen- 
 sion, earth and heaven are one; His sacred 
 feet, so long homeless and once so cruelly 
 scarred, miss the rocks of Olivet, and soon 
 Jesus is at home again, the enthroned 
 Logos on the right hand of God the 
 
 1 Studies in the New Testament, p. 111, 
 
120 =©The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Father. The atonement involves all these 
 steps and processes. It is the reconcilia- 
 tion of all that is human to the divine. 
 Man is not pure spirit alone. The hu- 
 man personality is not redeemed by forces 
 which simply recreate a new life in the 
 soul. Such a life within as gives a pledge 
 to the “body of our humiliation” every 
 sound theology must offer as the complete 
 salvation in Christ. Any real illumination 
 of man in the transfiguration must illu- 
 mine both mind and matter; and, in the 
 splendor of such an event in the history of 
 man as the shining face of that great Gal- 
 ilean, there are many suggestions which 
 penetrate and glorify the far-off future of 
 both. Jesus Christ was the Divine Self- 
 revelation ; He was also the revelation of 
 man under God,—the illustrator of the 
 possibilities of humanity in Him. “The 
 glory which Thou hast given unto Me 
 I have given unto them.” The factor in 
 the outworking of this glory with which 
 we have to do is His holiness, — ever 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 121 
 
 above us, yet vouchsafed unto us by grace. 
 It was His power, personal and resistless, 
 In Him, through Him, it is ours, — this 
 same personal loving harmony with the 
 genius of things, with God. When the 
 soul falls in love with Love, with Christ, it 
 has bound itself to the Lagos, the Reason 
 of things. What, by His nature, He was 
 in the beginning with God, we, through 
 Him, obtain by grace. His transfigura- 
 tion was thus, at once, the achievement of 
 His holiness and a natural event in His 
 life in His own universe. Something of 
 its peculiar radiance belongs to any human 
 being who begins and completes his holi- 
 ness —in body, soul, and spirit—in the 
 holiness of Christ Jesus. His power in 
 prayer there is repeated in the prayer of 
 every man and woman, who, going on to- 
 ward some cross of self-sacrifice, stops on 
 Hermon. One power alone is resistless 
 with the Supreme Holiness, and that is 
 holiness. Because that power is holiness 
 — loving loyalty unto and harmony with 
 
122 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 the Ruler of things through the mani- 
 fested Logos, the plan and idea of things 
 — there is no infraction of law. 
 “The old order changeth, 
 Giving place to new.” 
 
 But there is an “order” in the “change,” 
 a law by which the ministry of the old 
 passes over and up into the ministry of the 
 new. His transfiguration and our trans- 
 figuration of body, soul, and spirit are of 
 this “new order.” 
 
 Christ Jesus began on Hermon, in Him- 
 self, the rehabilitation of man. There 
 
 1 In his Gospel of the Resurrection (p. 179), Canon 
 Westcott shows with great force the personal and moral 
 significance of the resurrection of the body. He says: 
 “The noblest of the ancient moralists looked upon 
 man’s body as a hopeless burden and fatal hindrance to 
 the soul, and in this they have been followed by the 
 noblest non-Christian moralists in every age. The 
 famous thanksgiving of Plotinus that he ‘ was not tied to 
 an immortal body’ expresses the common feeling of all 
 who have not felt the power of the resurrection. But 
 Christianity transfigures what philosophy would destroy. 
 It shows that the corruption by which we are weighed 
 down does not belong to our proper nature, and is not 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 123 
 
 full redemption began to appear. Human- 
 ity saw Him as its “Living Head.” Life 
 
 necessarily bound up with it forever. It lays open with 
 a deeper and more searching criticism than a system of 
 morality could direct the internal struggles to which the 
 ‘flesh’ must give occasion and the inevitable defeats 
 which we must suffer in our efforts toward the divine 
 life. Plato does not describe more sadly than St. Paul 
 the afflictions by which we are beset while yet oppressed 
 by ‘the body of humiliation’ (Phil. iii. 21). Or, to take 
 an example from a different sect and age, M. Aurelius 
 does not express more keenly than St. John a sense of 
 the evils of the present life. But there is an immeasur- 
 able chasm between the Apostles and Platonists or 
 Stoics. ‘ We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being 
 burdened,’ St. Paul writes, ‘not for that we would be 
 unclothed but clothed upon, that mortality might be 
 swallowed up by life’ (2 Cor. v. 4). The better change 
 for which he longed was not the destruction but the en- 
 nobling of his body, so that it might ‘be fashioned like 
 unto Christ’s body of glory, according to the working 
 whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Him- 
 self. And the power by which this transformation 
 should be effected was the simple contemplation of 
 Christ in His essential majesty. Nay, in some sense, 
 the change is already begun on earth, so far as that we 
 can look forward with full hope to its accomplishment ; 
 for ‘ we all with open face beholding as in a glass the 
 glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image 
 
124 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 is transfigured, if the transfigured One is 
 Saviour and Lord of the whole being. Not 
 alone in the resurrection, but in this earlier 
 event of transformation, which is the glo- 
 rification in Christ of man’s earthly life, 
 are our “bodies members of Christ.” } 
 “From glory unto glory,’—this is the 
 line of advance and its method. “This 
 corruptible must put on incorruption, this 
 mortal must put on immortality,” — first, 
 in the transfiguration of our whole life 
 there must begin the process, which com- 
 pletes itself when the graves open. Our 
 physical life lays hold of its redemption 
 through the life of Christ in us. We are 
 not to be “‘ wnclothed, but clothed upon, that 
 mortality might be swallowed up of life.” 
 Thus begins the redemption of the body 
 from glory to glory’ (2 Cor. iii. 18). ‘ Beloved, now are 
 we the sons of God:’ such are St. John’s words. ‘And 
 it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know 
 that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him, for 
 we shall see Him as He is’” (1 John iii. 2). 
 1 x Cor. vi. 15. 
 
 2 See last lecture, on “The Transfiguration and the 
 Resurrection,” 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 125 
 
 The transfiguration of the human body 
 of Jesus Christ was thus an event in which 
 all creation had a definite and unique il- 
 lumination. Its whole past was lit up and 
 at least partially explained. With possi- 
 bilities in Christ, as the Zogos of creation, 
 such as these, every fartherest atom had 
 quivered and advanced from the begin- 
 ning. All natural forces were striving 
 with high energy to this and the greater 
 events beyond it.! He, in that hour of 
 glory, was sending back upon the dark 
 abysses of the groaning creation a gleam 
 of the radiance which interpreted, as it 
 penetrated, the long agony. “All crea- 
 tion,” says Dean Alford, in his exposition 
 of Paul to the Ephesians, — “all creation 
 is summed up in Christ.”2 All laws of 
 
 1 “To the very important thought that the God-man, 
 Jesus Christ, is not merely a means of humanity, that is 
 for the work of redemption in particular, but is also an 
 end in Himself served by the entire world, too little im- 
 portance has frequently been attached.” — Dorner, Per- 
 son of Christ, vol. iv. p. 332- 
 
 2 Note on Ephesians i. 10, 11. 
 
126 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 nature, with its pain and sin and death, 
 all laws of grace, with its peace and holi- 
 ness and life, rise into the law of love, in 
 Him. Here, He only carries into the 
 loftier jurisdiction of His personal life the 
 laws and processes which lie in the burst- 
 ing seed and the falling star. 
 “‘The earth is crammed with heaven, 
 
 And every common bush afire with God.” 
 In the Christ was the point where that 
 flame quivered for a moment; and Nature 
 confessed in His transfiguration her kin- 
 ship with the supernatural. In His pres- 
 ence, the highest dreams of poet and seer 
 repeat again their musings : — 
 
 “What if all animated natures 
 
 Be but organic harps, diversely framed, 
 
 That tremble into life as o’er them sweeps 
 One intellectual breeze ?” 
 
 Let us embrace, then, the large faith 
 which feeds upon this splendid scene. 
 Jesus transfigured is the transfiguration of 
 the whole universe. Let us take up the 
 strain of apostle and saint, and teach it to 
 
The Transfigured Christ. 127 
 
 our philosophy, — “that at the name of 
 Jesus every knee should bow, of things in 
 heaven and things on the earth and things 
 under the earth; and that every tongue 
 should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, 
 to the glory of the Father.! “The first 
 born before all creation” is “Heir of all 
 things ;” and God “hath put all things 
 under His feet.” The destiny of this 
 spurned and blasted planet is bound up 
 with the destiny of the life in Christ. 
 The Logos attaches every nook and cranny 
 of the universe to Himself. ‘For it is 
 the good pleasure of the Father that in 
 Him should all fulness dwell, and through 
 Him to reconcile all things unto Himself, 
 having made peace through the blood of 
 His cross; through Him, I say, whether 
 things upon the earth or things in the 
 heavens.” 2 
 
 To a larger study of this “ reconcilia- 
 tion” we must address ourselves, as the 
 
 1 Phil. ii. To. 2 Colossians i. 19. 
 
128 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 fact of evil and its results grow more 
 plain in the presence of the Law and the 
 Prophets, — Moses and Elias, who “ap- 
 peared in glory and talked with Him.” 
 
 
 
LECTURE V. 
 ye Appearance of Moses. 
 
 
 

 
a as 
 
 The Appearance of Moses. 
 
 “And, behold, there talked with Him two men, which were 
 Moses and Elias, who appeared in glory, and spake of His decease 
 which He should accomplish at Jerusalem. But Peter and they 
 that were with Him were heavy with sleep: and when they were 
 awake, they saw His glory, and the two men that stood with Him. 
 And it came to pass, as they departed from Him, Peter said unto 
 Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: let us build three taber- 
 nacles; one for Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not 
 knowing what he said. While he thus spake, there came a cloud 
 and overshadowed them, and they feared as they entered into the 
 cloud. And there came a voice out of the cloud: saying, This is my 
 beloved Son, hear Him. And when the voice was past, Jesus was 
 found alone.’’ — LuKE ix. 30-36. 
 
 AICHAEL ANGELO has been 
 surpassed by the strong chisel- 
 
 
 
 ing of the human soul as it has 
 written history and determined the chief 
 forces of civilization. In a niche far more 
 proportionately prominent than that in 
 any fane of art and religion, has the his- 
 toric spirit placed the Moses which it has 
 
132 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 brought forth from its partial imprison- 
 ment in the past. As new lands of Canaan 
 open before man’s eager eye, and other 
 Jordans are crossed by his resolute feet, 
 he is impressed with the ioftiness of that 
 early leadership and the sublimity of that 
 unknown grave. No figure of the early 
 times is more surely rising out of the 
 mists of antiquity and assuming his true 
 place in the annals of his race than is 
 Moses, the lawgiver of Israel and the ben- 
 efactor of mankind. The splendor of that 
 burning bush flashes in the night of every 
 modern gloom, and the face of which he 
 wist not that it shone? looks out from 
 the morning hours of a new day. Says 
 Lowell : — 
 “ Never to see a nation born 
 Hath been given to mortal man, 
 
 Unless to those who on that summer morn 
 
 Gazed silent when the great Virginian 
 
 Unsheathed his sword, whose fatal flash 
 
 Shot union into the incoherent clash 
 Of our loose atoms, crystallizing them 
 
 1 Exodus xxxiv. 29. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 133 
 
 Around a single will’s unpliant stem, 
 And making purpose of emotion rash.”1 
 
 Add to the glory of Washington the 
 fact that Moses’ rod had no historic prec- 
 edent, that yet it transformed into a new 
 nationality a mighty mass of slaves, and 
 “around that single will’s unpliant stem ” 
 gathered from a host of wanderers a com- 
 monwealth whose law and religion were 
 one, and something of this personal force 
 in the history of human society is under- 
 stood. The farewell address of Washing- 
 ton has but a more local application to the 
 world of to-day; for the nations of earth 
 read those last words of the great leader 
 of Israel, and feel a certainty of govern- 
 ment in God, as this statesman ascends 
 Nebo, saying, “‘ Zhe eternal God ts thy ref- 
 uge, and underneath ave the everlasting 
 arms.” The solution of problems, which, 
 on superficial inquiry, must seem to have 
 been beyond the reach of his influence, is 
 seen to lie close to the idea with which he 
 
 1 “Under the Great Elm.” 
 
134 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 forsook an Egyptian court, and to have its 
 root in that conception of the government 
 of God which sustained his soul in the 
 moment when Israel was in mutiny. The 
 word of his time was Jaw; the word of 
 ours is /éberty; but as the self-governing 
 soul manifests its half-understood free- 
 dom in the flush of ardent youth, it finds 
 no liberty which does not fulfill law, and 
 none valuable which will not submit to its 
 regulation. A deep Christian philosophy, 
 instead of deposing this mighty Jew and 
 tearing his achievements from its sacred 
 books, recognizes the providence of his- 
 tory, first at Sinai, and then at Calvary ; 
 and assures the mind that there can be 
 but a partial understanding of the new 
 song of the redeemed without some knowl- 
 edge of the song of Miriam at the sea- 
 side. So identical are the meeting-points 
 of the forces of human redemption that, 
 from the Isle of Patmos, one who was 
 gifted with the inclusive vision of a seer 
 saw the inhabitants of heaven singing 
 “the song of Moses and the Lamb.” 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 135 
 
 Living yet amid the regnant influences 
 of progress, it is significant that. George 
 Eliot, the poetess of much that makes our 
 time too halting and infirm to follow his 
 steps, should see the meanings that start 
 from the grave of Moses. 
 
 “But Israel waited, looking toward the Mount, 
 Till with the deepening eve the elders came, 
 Saying : ‘ His burial is hid with God: 
 We stood far off and saw the Angels lift 
 His corpse aloft until they seemed a star 
 That burnt itself away within the sky.’ 
 The people answered with mute orphaned gaze, 
 Looking for what had vanished evermore. 
 Then through the gloom without them and within 
 The spirits shaping light, mysterious speech, 
 Invisible Will wrought clear in sculptured sound, 
 The thought-begotten daughter of the voice 
 Thrilled on their listening sense : ‘ He has no tomb. 
 He dwells not with you dead, but lives as Law.’”2 
 
 Such words are but the testimony of the 
 modern spirit to the truth that Moses 
 stands, in the annals of men, not only for 
 that code of Sinai, but that, in his career 
 and in his attitude toward the destinies of 
 
 1 “The Death of Moses,” Poctical Works, p. 261. 
 
 > 
 
136 ©The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 mankind, there were gathered up the scat- 
 tered meanings of this “Invisible Will” 
 as it moves in the Universe, and that there 
 came from out the fire of his soul a concep- 
 tion of the nature and majesty of law which 
 has shone through dolorous and lawless 
 centuries into the age in which we live. 
 He made the idea of law the possession of 
 religion, and religion has invested this idea 
 with her eternal sanctities.1 He has asso- 
 ciated law with the Supreme Power of the 
 universe so vitally that the awful grandeur 
 of Sinai and the no less impressive sub- 
 limity of his silent guardianship seem but 
 natural in the career of a soul whose priv- 
 ilege it was to entertain so important a 
 message. “He endured,” says Paul, “as 
 seeing Him who is invisible.” 2 Law was 
 the avenue along which traveled the swift 
 feet of the Infinite Will ; and although hav- 
 ing but an incomplete vision of a single 
 route along which the Infinite swept — 
 
 1 Michaelis, Zaws of Moses, vol. i. p. 66. 
 2 Hebrews xi. 27. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 137 
 
 the law of conduct —he had such an in- 
 sight into that, that congenial minds have 
 been led into a more easy discovery of 
 those highways, parting here and meet- 
 ing there, by which Omnipotence reaches 
 every point in the universe. Moses stands 
 for all these laws, since they all meet and 
 cross in the realm of conduct, whose law- 
 giver he was. All roads ran to Rome, 
 and all laws run into the life of man, — 
 
 “Since God collected and resumed in man 
 
 The firmaments, the strata and the lights, 
 
 Fish, fowl and beast, and insect —all their trains 
 
 Of various life caught back upon His arm 
 
 Reorganized and constituted Man 
 
 The Microcosm, the adding up of works, 
 “ Microcosm” that Man is, he repeats the 
 history of the universe. He has the expe- 
 rience of unconscious ages in a thought. 
 He has to do with the laws of the life 
 below him ; for the visible universe hides 
 its problem in his skull, and thither the 
 laws tend, meeting in the law of his life.? 
 
 1 Mrs. Browning. 
 2 Vancotta, Zhe Development-Law of the Earth, The 
 
138 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 When St. Paul says, of the law of Moses, 
 “the law was our schoolmaster,’ he states 
 what is true of all law. Its work is the 
 work of education. Man is created for 
 a self-determining life, and the worth of 
 law is that it puts man beyond itself, by 
 making him fit for self-determination.? 
 The laws of nature not only hold the visi- 
 ble universe in orderly unity, but are the 
 perpetual revelation, to a docile mind, of 
 the character and method of the supreme 
 Power. The laws of human history are a 
 ceaseless school, and offera culture wideas 
 man’s life. The laws of God everywhere 
 are loaded with benefit, which enters into 
 personality by obedience. If they accom- 
 plish their full end, their personality be- 
 comes so strong that obedience is forgotten 
 in the free alliance of the nature with the 
 power behind the law, whose method of 
 action it is. Mosaism is an illustration of 
 
 Supernatural in Nature, p. 184. Haeckel, The History 
 of Creation. 
 
 1 Galatians iii. 24, 25. 
 
 2 Macgregor on Galatians, zm /oc. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 139 
 
 this educative influence inlaw.! In the as- 
 sertion that this is the real aim of law can 
 be seen both the power and incomplete- 
 ness of the law of Israel.2 It needs not 
 that any exhaustive list of texts be offered 
 that we may see how plainly these are set 
 forth in the early writings of Christianity. 
 In heathenism itself, it has been found 
 that law alone could not comprehend the 
 life of man. The broken law and the law- 
 breaker — these have been _ problems 
 which the existence and power of law alone 
 could not handle. When the law has 
 been broken, and the personality it was 
 meant to serve has become disobedient, 
 it has no power to make the weakness of 
 disobedience over into the power to obey, 
 nor to kindle a love of obedience. The 
 
 1 Russell Martineau, Zhe Roots of Christianity in 
 Mosaism. Luckock, The Tables oj Stone, p. 43- 
 
 2 Leathes, Foundations of Morality, p. 16. Smith, 
 Characteristics of Christian Morality, p. 29. 
 
 8 Cocker, Christianity and Greek Philosophy. 
 Leathes, Zhe Religion of Christ, Lecture 1. Martensen, 
 Christian Ethics, vo}. i. sec. 8, 
 
140 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 law of Moses was “added because of 
 transgressions.” 1 Jt could restrain evil ; 
 it could not help up the evil-doer who had 
 fallen. It was a power to save, when 
 obeyed, and even then its end was to be 
 outgrown by the personality which it built 
 up. “ The law was a schoolmaster,” says 
 Paul, “to bring us to Christ.”* What a 
 scholarship it gave to the world! All that 
 can ever follow will not make obedience less 
 fundamental to the development of char- 
 acter ; and this was its earliest gift to the 
 race. Those precepts could not but put 
 the mind of men in the attitude for princi- 
 ples; those services of the temple and that 
 careful performance of small and incomplete 
 duties were an education which the world 
 was not to forget. But it would be a 
 wasted culture without Christ. Its value 
 lies in the fact that it brought the world 
 to “Christ that we might be justified by 
 Saith.” Then it ends: “ After that faith is 
 come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.” 
 
 1 Galatians iii. 17 ; Joshua xv. 22, 
 
 2 Galatians iii. 24, 25. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 141 
 
 The appearance of the great lawgiver 
 in the glory of Christ’s transfiguration has, 
 then, this significance,—the law has 
 brought the world to Christ. In the glory 
 of Christ, Moses had a right to stand. It 
 has also the significance that Moses as the 
 giver of the law has yielded now to this 
 new lawgiver, Jesus, the Christ of God. 
 It was not Christ standing in the neighbor- 
 hood of the glory of Moses, but Moses 
 standing in the presence of the transfig- 
 ured Christ. Jesus left the words “/ am 
 come not to destroy, but to fulfill”) as the es- 
 timate, by the Christ, of these laws ; and in 
 His treatment of Mosaic legislation, as we 
 shall see, He gave to Moses an indefeasible 
 right to be the heavenly companion of His 
 transfigured hour. But, also, Jesus made 
 plain the fact that the era of law, as the 
 supreme element in man’s progress, was 
 done, and that henceforth the law of liberty 
 and the law of love should rule the souls 
 of men. These two facts will appear, as 
 
 1 Matthew v. 17. 
 
142 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 we note the fundamental difference in the 
 revelations through Moses and Jesus Christ. 
 
 In Moses, man has a revelation of the 
 method of God ; in Jesus Christ a revela- 
 tion of the nature —a manifestation of the 
 very self —of God. The nature of Moses 
 could come only so near to God as to find 
 His method; the nature of Jesus Christ 
 was so divine as to reveal Him — the Naz- 
 arene was “the express image of His per- 
 son.’ 1 Thus, the proclamation of the lips 
 and life of Moses is: “God zs Law;” the rev- 
 elation of Jesus Christ is: “ God zs Love.” ? 
 Law is the method of love. The laws of 
 nature and of the soul are the methods of 
 operation which Love, by its inherent 
 orderliness, uses to unify existence and 
 to save the universe from ill-fated and 
 destructive chaos, unto a constructive and 
 beneficent cosmos, and to realize at last 
 in conscious completeness its self in the 
 destiny of man. Robert Browning has 
 
 1 Hebrews i. 3; 1 Corinthians iv. 4; Colossians i. 15. 
 2 1 John iy. 8. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 143 
 
 seen deeply into the somewhat indivisible 
 alliance of essence and method in God and 
 in His revelation in nature: — 
 “T spoke as I saw. 
 
 Ireport, as man may of God’s work — a//’s Love, yet all’s 
 
 Law. 
 Now I lay down the judgeship He sent me. Each fac- 
 
 ulty tasked, 
 To perceive Him, has gained an abyss where a dewdrop 
 
 was asked.” 
 And nothing more certainly indicates the 
 intelligent hold which this seer has on the 
 truth as it is in Jesus than the influence 
 which this profound conception has with 
 him, in the domain of ethics. It is true 
 that, in God’s nature and His revelation in 
 history, the method of God is so allied and 
 contemporaneous with His essence that all 
 not only seems but is both Love and Law. 
 And it is certain that Love is the essential 
 element of which Law isthe method. The 
 duty of the human soul is to be unsatisfied 
 with enforced or unintelligent obedience 
 of Law, and to rest not until it enters into 
 the very life of the personal Force behind, 
 
144 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 and in all law. Thus shall it find in God 
 rootage for its own true and real life, so 
 that afterward its own being shall feed 
 upon a deeper life, paternal and everlast- 
 ing. Then, from within every chamber of 
 its inmost being, the energy of that soul 
 shall go out sympathetically and harmoni- 
 ously with these laws. No longer are they 
 restraining powers, but a part of its own 
 natural method of existence, because of its 
 affectionate alliance with the Love of which 
 they are the order. To do this is not only 
 a duty, but man’s privilege through the In- 
 carnation of God in Christ. God zs Love. 
 In Jesus of Nazareth, Love is so human that 
 it charms and commands the remnant of 
 the divine within us—ourlove. “ And J,” 
 said the Christ, “2f J be lifted up from the 
 earth, will draw all men unto me.” By the 
 acceptance of Christ, we do accept God ; 
 and by the might of Christ’s influence, we 
 find ourselves “ hid with Christ in God.” * 
 Thus, out of the divine nature, in which 
 
 1 John xii. 32. 2 Colossians iii. 3. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 145 
 
 the’ soul is rooted, in Christ, does its 
 law of love come. Christ is a law unto 
 Himself, because He, with the Father, is 
 Love ; and Love is its own law. In Him 
 the soul falls in love with Love, and thus 
 finds its true self ; and it finds also that it is 
 a law unto itself, since Love has assumed 
 the throne. God-like it is for the first time, 
 for it is self-centred; manly for the first 
 time, since it feels that it was made for this. 
 The schoolmaster’s work is done. It has 
 come to Christ. Law is lost in Love. 
 And yet, as always in Christ’s transfig- 
 ured hours, Moses is present. In the light 
 of this experience, it can understand him. 
 Moses is fulfilled in Christ, because not 
 only does the soul feel the /aw of love, but, 
 for the first time, it feels the Jove of law. 
 
 “ Life, with all it yields of joy and woe 
 And hope and fear, — believe the aged friend, — 
 Is just our chance o the prize of learning love, 
 
 How love might be, hath been indeed, and is ; 
 1 2 Corinthians v. 14; Romans xiii. 10; Galatians 
 v. 13; I John iii. 1; iv. 7; viii. 16; Ephesians v. 2; 
 John xiii. 34. 
 
146 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 And that we hold thenceforth to the uttermost 
 Such prize, despite the envy of the world, 
 And having gained truth keep truth ; that is all.” 
 
 But into the midst of this “ chance o’ the 
 prize of learning love,” by the slow wan- 
 derings in life’s desert, even under the com- 
 mand of Moses, Christ comes; and God, 
 who in Moses educates men by the revela- 
 tion of His method, now, through the In- 
 carnation, offers Himself. The days of te- 
 dious “learning” are omitted, in one touch 
 of the eternal Christ. So that the entire 
 gift of Christianity to man is Christ. Love 
 is lovable, in this most lovely manifestation 
 of its very self. The soul does not resist 
 its appeal to the power of love that it has. 
 Jesus is the appeal of God’s nature to the 
 God-like within us. In the loving brother, 
 the fatherhood of God so persuades the 
 latent sonship of the human soul into ut- 
 terance, that we are no longer creatures, 
 but sons, and cry: “Adda, Father.”? 
 
 1 Browning, A Death in the Desert. 
 
 2 John v.17; Actsi. 4; John xiv. 20; Matt. xxiii. 9; 
 John xx.7 ; Mark xiv. 36. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 147 
 
 Christianity is as eternal as the soul. It 
 is the love of Love. Every element of life 
 that lifts the soul to that self-centred life, 
 it takes up and fulfills. All morality is 
 thus more than “touched with emotion ;” 
 it is transformed; and, in hours when 
 Jesus is transfigured in some human soul, 
 it comes from its home, and, like Moses, 
 is seen in the light of something far more 
 divine, which is its fulfillment. 
 
 “ They talk of morals, O thou bleeding Lamb! 
 The true morality is love of Thee.” 
 
 As Love, in the Incarnation, did complete 
 Law, and in the nature of God must ever 
 give it its fullness, so in the real life of a 
 man, the life in which he partakes of God 
 in Christ, “ove,” and love alone, “zs the 
 Sulfilling of the law.” 1! The power returns, 
 at last, to its Source. Christ breaks down 
 the legalism of the soul, by the develop- 
 ment within it of the affectionate alliance 
 which in all high moments every good man 
 feels with the divine order. 
 
 1 Romans xiii. Io. 
 
148 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 “The very God! think, Abib, dost thou think? 
 
 So the All-Great were the All-Loving too ; 
 
 So through the thunder comes a human voice 
 Saying, ‘O heart I made, a heart beats here! 
 
 Face my hands fashioned, see it in Myself ; 
 
 Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of Mine, 
 But Love I gave thee, with Myself to love, 
 
 And thou must love Me who have died for thee.’”? 
 
 And it is this law of love which is thus, 
 because in his essential nature man is a 
 child of God, the law of liberty,” to every 
 soul which has found its sonship unto the 
 Father, in our elder brother, Jesus the 
 Christ. In Christ Jesus, not only do the 
 affections throb in sympathy with law as 
 seen in Love’s manifestation, but the will, 
 in that sublime instant of experience, be- 
 comes, for the first time, self-determining 
 in the life, because it allies itself with the 
 will of heaven, and its empire is as sure as 
 that of God. It wields the omnipotency 
 of Love by the fact that having willingly 
 submitted to Love, the method of Love is 
 
 1 Browning, vol. iii. p. 226. 
 2 James i. 25; ii. 12. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 149 
 
 its method. This method is its law. It 
 is not a law of restraint any more. As 
 the law of love insures the love of law, so, 
 and for the same reason, the law of liberty 
 insures the liberty of law. “ Where the 
 spirit of the Lord ts, there ts liberty ;”? and 
 there is also law. Moses is fulfilled in 
 Christ. And, as in this light of transfigu- 
 ration we note the appearance of the great 
 lawgiver, we must be impressed with the 
 deep alliance, which our age seems not to 
 have felt, of that real freedom, after which 
 all else is vague yearning, with the govern- 
 ment of God. 
 
 Never does the government of the Al- 
 mighty seem to disclose its throne so nearly 
 as when, in Jesus Christ, Law recedes into 
 Love. Christ Himself, in the moment of 
 this revelation, is a sacrifice. For the law- 
 lessness of earth, He substitutes the infi- 
 
 1 Wiitke, Christian Ethics, Lacroix’s Translation, 
 vol. i. p. 241. 
 
 2 2 Corinthians iii. 17; Romans viii. 21; Galatians 
 ve L 
 
150 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 nite Love behind and within all law. In 
 Love’s wounded side, the law is made in- 
 tact. But there is something else to do. 
 To stop there would be to leave the world 
 with Moses. In this very act, Love so re- 
 veals His loveliness, and hence the loveli- 
 ness of law, that the still living embers of 
 the God-like in a sinful soul —the powers 
 of love beneath all the hate of sin — are so 
 inspired that they glow, and, delivered from 
 the love of sin, as well as from its guilt, it 
 sees and feels itself saved to God in Christ, 
 — saved, with an honored Jaw, to Love, by 
 love. 
 
 So “ there is, therefore, now no condemna- 
 tion to them which ave in Christ Fesus. 
 For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Fe- 
 sus hath made me free from the law of sin 
 and death.’ Moses appeared at the trans- 
 figuration of Christ, because “the daw was 
 our schoolmaster.’ He disappeared, be- 
 cause it had brought us “to Christ.” How 
 clearly did Paul understand this! The 
 
 1 Romans viii. §. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 151 
 
 record of the old was sacred to him. 
 “And it came to pass, when Moses came 
 down from Mount Sinai with the two tables 
 of testimony in Moses’ hand, when he came 
 down from the mount, that Moses wist not 
 that the skin of his face shone while he talked 
 with Him.’' The record of the new was 
 still more sacred ; its story of transfigu- 
 ration yet more sublime. “ Suz,” says Paul, 
 “af the ministration of death, written and 
 engraven in stones, was glorious, so that 
 the children of Israel could not stedfastly 
 behold the face of Moses, for the glory of his 
 countenance; which glory was to be done 
 away ; how shall not the ministration of 
 the spirit be rather glorious.” ? 
 
 The heavenly visitant was not silent. 
 With Elias, he conversed with the trans- 
 figured Christ. The theme of their con- 
 versation was “the decease which He should 
 accomplish at Ferusalem.” Fifteen cen- 
 turies of celestial life had revealed to the 
 
 1 Exodus xxxiv. 29. 
 2 2 Corinthians iii. 7, 8. 
 
152 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 old lawgiver a significant event lying in 
 the path of this new lawgiver, the Christ, 
 of whom Moses was a prophet, which he 
 had not seen on earth.1. Standing for the 
 majesty of law, and insisting upon obedi- 
 ence, Moses had seen the law broken, and 
 was not unconscious of the ruin it wrought 
 in the disobedient nature. There came 
 into existence a temple service in the taber- 
 nacle and a series of sacrifices, which, as 
 many another unspoken movement of the 
 deeper consciousness of man, pointed to the 
 Lamb of God which taketh away the sins 
 of the world.2, The serpent was lifted up 
 in the wilderness? The interest with 
 which the leader of the exodus had 
 watched the beneficent influence of these 
 and felt their insufficiency in a soul which 
 confessed it in prophecy, had grown, as, 
 near the Throne of God he had, for these 
 
 1 Delitzsch, Old Testament History of Redemption, 
 p. 7I. 
 
 2 Liddon, Zhe Divinity of Christ, p. 103. 
 
 8 Exodus xxvi. ; Hebrews ix. Io, 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 153 
 
 fifteen hundred years, found a point of 
 view from which he saw the concerns of 
 man. This heavenly life could not have 
 lessened his sense of the majesty of law. 
 He must have held to the great idea which 
 he gave to mankind, with a firmer hand, as 
 he learned that its source was Love. It 
 must have seemed a more terrible thing 
 that any man should ever have broken it. 
 His system of sacrifices — how little could 
 it do. Nothing but Love’s own sacrifice 
 could answer ; and when, in glory ineffable, 
 Moses stood with the Christ, the truth of 
 Sinai grasped the fact of Calvary, and the 
 voice that gave the law spoke of “ the de- 
 cease which He should accomplish at Feru- 
 salem.” } 
 
 It was a moment in Christ’s life and in 
 the spiritual culture of those disciples 
 when that shadow had grown intense as 
 midnight. If never before, Moses had 
 given them all to know that the skies 
 were bending with a mighty interest over 
 
 1 Numbers xxi. 8 ; John iii. 14. 
 
154 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 this long tragedy, and that the zenith was 
 over Golgotha. The great central fact of 
 earth’s history was also the great central 
 fact of the happiness of heaven, — the 
 death of Jesus of Nazareth. To the 
 broken-hearted Christ, what a ministra- 
 tion of power! Earth with its noise and 
 empire of evil might forget the lonely 
 Galilean peasant who had “ not where to lay 
 His head,” but heaven’s most illustrious 
 citizen would speak to Him of the quench- 
 less interest of the skies. Jews whom he 
 came to save, the nation whose only real 
 patriot He was, might scorn to mention a 
 scene which should bring into itself the 
 odium of centuries, and a mode of death 
 which would exile His name from the lips 
 of men; even His disciples might push 
 away from their vision the horrible fancy 
 of an outlaw’s death for Him, but Moses, 
 the most colossal figure of their history, 
 their statesman and God’s friend, had come 
 in that hour, with the flash of the throne 
 yet in his eye and the life of eternity in 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 155 
 
 his voice, to speak with Him, not concern- 
 ing the brilliancy of His transfigured face, 
 or even of the raptures of the blest, but 
 only of that topic so carefully avoided, — 
 “the decease He should accomplish at Feru- 
 salem.” 
 
 Here, then, does Moses confess that 
 the law of all other laws is that of self- 
 sacrifice. It is the law of all other laws, 
 because it is the law of Love, whose 
 method all law is. Moses, looking from a 
 heavenly point of view, sees in this mo- 
 ment of glory a moment to come which 
 Heaven will recognize as having a far 
 deeper glory. Itis that which seems dark- 
 est to those disciples, for they look from 
 an earthly point of view. Moses and the 
 Christ speak of this hour to come as the 
 time when something should occur which, 
 even to Him, would be an achievement. 
 They speak about “the decease (or the 
 departure) which he should accomplish? at 
 
 1“The decease which He was about to accomplish 
 denotes, not the finishing of life by dying (Bleek), but 
 
156 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Jerusalem.” Afterwards, when Jesus stood 
 alone with the world, He saw the same 
 glory of Calvary. “ The hour is come,” 
 said He, “‘ when the Son of man should be 
 glorified.””+ Still, the greatest assertion 
 is that of His whole career as to the 
 authority of this law of self-sacrifice. In 
 the consciousness of power, which Satan 
 confessed,? He chose weakness in life, and 
 confronted death, saying: “Mo man taketh 
 My life from Me, but I lay it down of My- 
 self.”? Whatever truth has been spoken 
 in this lecture is summed up in this law of 
 self-sacrifice. It is the law of love. In 
 Christ, as the manifestation of Love, it 
 was the law of liberty. This law of love 
 in operation will make us followers of 
 Him, and give unto us the same liberty of 
 law, making each so truly a law unto him- 
 
 the completion of death itself.” Godet, St. Luke, vol. i. 
 p. 428. Cf. Milligan, 7ke Resurrection of Our Lord, p. 
 120. 1 Thessalonians v. 9, 10; John vi. 54, 60. 
 
 1John xii. 23. 2 Luke iv. 10, 11. 
 
 8 John x. 17, 18. 
 
The Appearance of Moses. 157 
 
 self that no man taketh his life from him, 
 but he lays it down of himself. To that 
 soul Christ has come, not only to fulfill the 
 past, but, by His decease which He did “ ac- 
 complish” at Jerusalem, to “reconcile” it 
 “unto God by His death” that it may be 
 “ saved by His life.’ ' In His self-sacrifice, 
 we begin our own. The one “made per- 
 fect through suffering ” is “‘ the Captain of 
 our salvation.” 
 
 “Strong in Thy strength, though in myself but weakness, 
 
 Equal to all I know that I shall be, 
 
 If I can seize the mantle of Thy meekness 
 And wrap it close around my soul like Thee.” 
 
 1 Romans v. 10 ; 2 Corinthians v. 18, 19. 
 

 
 
 
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_ LECTURE VL 
 The Appearance of Elias. 
 
 
 

 

 
 LECTURE VIL 
 
 The Appearance of Elias. 
 
 ® And behold there talked with Him two men, which were Moses 
 and Elias, who appeared im glory, and spake of His decease which 
 He should accomplish at Jerusalem. But Peter and they that were 
 with Him were heavy with sleep: and when they were awake, they 
 saw His glory, and the two men that stood with Him. And it ame 
 to pass, as they departed from Him, Peter s2id unio Jesus, Master, 
 it is good for us to be here: let us build three tabernacles; one for 
 Thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not knowing what he 
 said, While he thus spake, there came a cloud and overshadowed 
 them, and they feared as they entered mto the doud. And there 
 came a voice out of the cloud: sayimg, This is my beloved Son, 
 hear Him. And when the voice was past, Jesus wes found alone.” 
 — Luxe ix. 30-36. 
 
 S the waters of the Red Sea 
 divided themselves at the stroke 
 of the rod of Moses, so the brown 
 
 current of the Jordan was broken at the 
 
 touch of the folded sheepskin of Elijah. 
 
 “The law and the prophets” are not the 
 
 names of two great movements, having 
 
 their sources at different fountains and 
 
 It 
 
 
 
162 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 moving through different realms of the 
 human soul, but they denote one mighty 
 current flowing from one divine wisdom 
 and providence, and touching banks which 
 are covered with forms of life different 
 only by the latitudes through which it 
 makes its course. It is not strange that, 
 at such evident points of contact, these 
 souls, Moses and Elias, should be united. 
 A pure theism and its harvest of truth 
 and hope for mankind —for these, stood 
 these two monarchs of the past. From 
 this theism, “the law and the prophets” 
 inevitably came. If God was, He ruled; 
 this was at the basis of the “/aw.” If 
 God was, man’s truest visions of himself, 
 and of that which should enable him to 
 realize them, had their foundation in His 
 very character; and this made “ prophecy.” 
 It is impossible to take into the mind the 
 one, without receiving with like hospitality 
 the other. As our recent thinking puts 
 itself into that age, and accepts Moses, it 
 finds how naturally, out of laws and pur- 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 163 
 poses of which man is there made con- 
 scious, there grows a hope for the future, 
 which, uniting itself with the Messianic 
 idea, should go out into all the manifold 
 spiritual consciousness of Israel, modify- 
 _ ing institutions, antagonizing heathenism, 
 unifying the people with a hope which 
 should always lead, because it could never 
 be outgrown. All this repeats itself in the 
 human soul. Once let a man adopt as a 
 code of life the deliverances of Sinai, and 
 the soul becomes its own prophet. It in- 
 vests itself with a prophetic enthusiasm, 
 and is borne along into new conflicts with 
 surrounding evil, as a veritable Elijah. 
 That natural Messianic hope, which every 
 child of Adam has, which he recognizes, 
 even if he says nothing but “It will be 
 better some day,” grows more into the 
 certainty that somewhere and somehow he 
 will be the man he was destined to be, and 
 unites to itself every truth and fact that 
 may be assimilated into its life; and thus 
 Sinai is followed by Carmel. 
 
164 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Indeed, in Moses himself did the proph- 
 et seem to rise out of the lawgiver. He 
 was so true to the government of the 
 present hour that he reached forward into 
 the civilization of the future. When Aaron 
 and Miriam said: “Hath the Lord indeed 
 spoken only by Moses ? Hath He not spoken 
 also byus ?” 1 they obtained information 
 from God that He was speaking through 
 the lawgiver, in a peculiar manner.? Out 
 from the nature of that law there came to 
 Moses not only the revelation of the duty 
 of the king of that land to which they 
 were being led,? but there came also a 
 larger vision to which he was true. “ The 
 Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a 
 Prophet, from the midst of thee, of thy 
 brethren, like unto me; unto Him shall ye 
 hearken.” * So Moses, yet glowing with 
 the manifested glory of God on the Mount, 
 possessed the character of a peerless 
 prophet. 
 
 1 Num. xii. 2, 2 Verse 8. 
 3 Deut. xvii. 14. * Deut. xviii. 15-22. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 165 
 
 “And there arose not a prophet since im 
 Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord 
 knew face to face.”1 In the glory which 
 came to him on the summit of Sinai, there 
 was a suggestiveness which carried the 
 augury of a full revelation. Moses be- 
 lieved in God, after a manner that much of 
 our superficial theism cannot understand. 
 He felt that the future, as the present of 
 humanity, was rooted in the nature of God. 
 He could give mankind, as he touched it 
 in the life of Israel, the vision of no greater 
 fact than this: ‘‘ Zhe eternal God is thy 
 refuge, and underneath are the everlasting 
 arms.’ * Was that which transfigured his 
 face to lie hidden forever from men, or be 
 only thus partially revealed ? Nay, it would 
 open its whole treasure to One, who, by 
 nature and holiness, would rise into sover- 
 eignty over the guardian law which held it. 
 In the solitary experience of Moses, there 
 was a disclosure of what lay in God and 
 
 1 Deuteronomy xxxiv. 10. 
 2 Deuteronomy xxxiii. 27. 
 
166 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 what had for a moment touched a human 
 face. Moses “wést not that his face did 
 shine ;’’ yet he was then a prophet of One 
 who, fifteen centuries afterward, should so 
 entertain that glory that it should attract 
 him from the skies. 
 
 Many were the unnoticed facts which 
 entered into the atmosphere of the pre- 
 Christian consciousness. They did influ- 
 ence, in very evident ways, the fire which 
 trembled so uncertainly in the mind of 
 Israel ; and it is impossible that, in Moses, 
 pure theist that he was, the too brief 
 vision! which he had of God should not 
 have fed the flame of this vaguely ex- 
 pressed hope, which finally was realized in 
 One, who, in his presence on Hermon, 
 did prove Himself “the only begotten Son, 
 which is in the bosom of the Father,” 
 “who,” though “xo man hath seen God at 
 any time,” “hath declared Him.”* An- 
 other proof of this relationship lies in the 
 fact that Malachi, ages after prophetism 
 
 1 Exodus xxxiii. 20. 2 John i. 18. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 167 
 
 had grown out of the law, speaks of the 
 second Elijah,—John the Baptist, — who 
 should precede the Messiah in the day of 
 Jehovah, and makes one past whose chief 
 figures are Moses and Elias.1_ Everywhere 
 does Christ Himself recognize the prophet 
 in the lawgiver, and the unity of Moses 
 and Elias. “Jf ye had believed Moses ye 
 would have believed Me, for he wrote of 
 Me.”* Hewill not break the bond; He 
 says, “ The law and the prophets were until 
 Fohn.”* All real prophecy was along the 
 lines of law. Its vision-point is the theis- 
 tic idea of a divine order. This is such a 
 height, that from it prophecy looks over 
 ages. All real law is prophetic. It is edu- 
 cating a personal life, which shall be free 
 from its presence. Its birth-place is the 
 theistic idea of man made in the image of 
 God. This is such a goal that toward it 
 all its powers tend. When He gives His 
 commandment, we are told that “on these 
 1 Malachi iv. 4, 5. 2 John v. 46. 
 8 Matthew xxii. 40; vii. 12, 
 
168 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 hang the law and the prophets.” Christ 
 saw Himself as the conclusion of the soul’s 
 mighty argument as disclosed in history. 
 Assuming the premises of Mosaism, the 
 logic leads through prophetism, and so 
 truly ends in Christ that He could say, 
 “Do not think that I will accuse you to the 
 Father. There is one that accuseth you, 
 even Moses, in whom ye trust.”1 Thus, in 
 an unsuspected way, was the Christ’s na- 
 tive sense of eternity ministered unto, as 
 in the distance between Moses and Elias 
 He saw the interval of centuries, and yet 
 felt in Himself the consummation of that 
 process of redeinption which made the 
 world’s history a single event. 
 
 So profound is the relationship which 
 binds law and prophecy, that their repre- 
 sentatives, Moses and Elias, not only ap- 
 pear together in the hour of Christ’s vis- 
 ible glory, but just as, the law being taken 
 up into love in Christ, and having brought 
 the world to a new lawgiver, Moses dis- 
 
 * John v. 45. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 169 
 
 appeared, so also did Elias, the prophecies 
 of the past being realized in a fact which 
 was the Christ, who was Himself the new 
 prophet. As together they came, drawn 
 by the powers which make history, to the 
 scene of Hermon, so together they quit 
 the spot, where, as they departed, it was 
 proposed that this peerlessness of the 
 Christ, which they came to confess, should 
 be lost sight of. These facts will appear, 
 as we note the fulfillment of prophecy in 
 Christ Jesus. 
 
 Just as in the quality of the mind 
 of Moses there was that which made 
 him the fit representative of all law, so 
 there is that in the attitude of Elijah, 
 rude and wild, yet reverent and awed at 
 the mouth of the cave, the avenger and 
 the seer, killing the enemy, and at last 
 leaving his mantle with one who should 
 carry the soul of man nearer to the reign 
 of gentleness and the era of love,! which 
 makes him gather into his voice the 
 
 1 2 Kings ii. 
 
170 ~=6 The _ Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 thousand unspoken prophecies of nature 
 and the soul, and makes him speak more 
 truly than uninspired lips could speak the 
 half-expressed visions which have floated 
 before the loftiest minds of other nations. 
 Elijah was the personal force which car- 
 ried the impulse of the human soul in Is- 
 rael over an abyss,! and, in Elisha, con- 
 nected it with a life which could not be 
 silent, until it was preéminent in civilizing 
 power. The prophets are the saviours of 
 the times in which they live, by giving the 
 disconnected years a sense of that eternity 
 which no more surely predicates a past 
 than a future. In them, for a moment, the 
 Zeitgeist yields to the Lwigketts - Geist ; 
 and, in a way to which Matthew Arnold 
 seems blind, the Aderg/aube? is the realest 
 literature of the soul. Every man who has 
 lived has been a prophet of the Christ. At 
 
 1 Delitzsch, Messianic Prophecies, p. 56; Ewald, His- 
 tory, vol. i, p. 563. 
 
 2M Arnold, Literature and Dogma, p. 148; God and 
 the Bible, p. 157. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 171 
 
 his best hours, he has at least dimly felt the 
 essential relationship he had in himself 
 unto the Supreme. A sense of sin,! which 
 has spoken in all literature, has been the 
 confession he made of a need which grew 
 vocal, as it became too strong for his 
 myths, and at last confessed decisively 
 that Pan was dead. That sense of sin has 
 not been satisfied with its own sacrifices. 
 It has looked through them all and dimly 
 seen the Sinless One. “If,” said Horace, 
 “a guiltless hand hath touched the altar, it 
 is as potent to soothe the averted Penates 
 with a handful of meal and salt, as with 
 the costliest victim.” ? Virgil’s fourth ec- 
 logue becomes comparable to Isaiah,* and 
 Lucretius speaks these words, — 
 
 “ Nec pietas ullast velatum saepe videri 
 
 Vertier ad lapidem atque omnis accedere ad aras, 
 
 1 Ullmann, Zhe Sinlessness of Jesus, chaps. i., ii., iii. 3 
 Miiller, Zhe Christian Doctrine of Sin, vol. i. p. 70; 
 Kalisch, Leviticus, Essay on Sacrifice. 
 
 2 Abbott, Zhrough Nature to Christ, pp. 126, 127. 
 
 8 James F. Clarke, Zvents and Epochs of Religious 
 History, p. 284. 
 
172 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas 
 Ante deum delubra, nec aras sanguine multo 
 Spargere quadrupedum, nec votis nectere vota, 
 
 Sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.” 2 
 
 The greatest souls have so confessed 
 this sense of sin and this necessity for 
 sacrifice that, to an age which listens in- 
 tently to the past, the anxious outlooking 
 of pre-Christian thought, in a trust vague 
 and yet profound, seems in itself a proph- 
 ecy most impressive. But this is a single 
 line along which the human soul in heath- 
 enism sent its eye. Every idol it has made, 
 from the most disgusting to a colossal 
 Jove, has told of a yearning for an incar- 
 nate God ; and every Buddha, princely, sol- 
 itary, sad soul, who seeks in vain to solve 
 life’s complex problem, testifies of Him 
 who, King of Heaven, leaves a throne eter- 
 nal to be alone and sorrow-stricken, but to 
 solve that same problem, pointing at last 
 to the life immortal, as Buddha pointed to 
 the extinction of life, to Nirwana. The 
 
 1 Sellar, Roman Poets of the Republic, p. 357+ 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 173 
 
 Brahmin, unsatisfied with Vishnu’s incar- 
 nation, and even with the Krishna of the 
 Bhagavad Gita, who yet holds to it as 
 his all, is a prophet of that long company 
 which “hath been since the world began.” 
 God hath not left Himself without a wit- 
 ness anywhere ; and, unconsciously, every 
 man has his expectant and yearning self 
 represented in that conscious vision which 
 made the transfiguration of Christ so glad 
 an hour to Elijah. This man stands un- 
 satisfied, yet hopeful, in the midst of a na- 
 tion, either satisfied or hopeless, and thus 
 is the type of the prophets of God and 
 man. 
 
 All the prophecies of the human soul 
 have their best statement and acquire the 
 vision of inspiration in the prophecy of 
 Israel. By its fulfillment in Jesus, every 
 Elijah is present, and, in the hour of the 
 Christ’s transfiguration, he yields up his 
 office. 
 
 In his masterly way, Delitzsch has justly 
 indicated a single phase of the prophecy 
 
174 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 of the Christ which was latent in the chaos 
 at the beginning.1 Obviously, however, 
 the earliest prophecy of Christ is the char- 
 acter of God. Believing in Him, man be- 
 lieves in himself, A pure theism makes a 
 race of prophets. Love must reveal Him- 
 self, and, if sin come between Him and 
 His child, He must reveal Himself as a 
 Redeemer. God, as the prophet of Himself 
 Incarnate, was the Word, and that was re- 
 alized in Christ ; so that when John begins 
 the new Genesis, he is more profound 
 than the author of the old, and says, 
 “Tn the beginning was the Word, and the 
 Word was God.”* Creation must hold the 
 prophecy which was in the Word from the 
 beginning, because it was made “ through 
 Him.” So that the “groaning creation” ® 
 was the second prophet. If, in the next 
 instant of its existence after its beginning, 
 it had not “ ¢tvavailed” and thus moved to- 
 ward a goal; if it had begun immediately 
 
 1 Old Testament History of Redemption, p. 11. 
 2 John i. 1. 8 Romans viii. 22. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 175 
 
 to disintegrate and degenerate ; if it had 
 even simply stood still, there would have 
 been no prophecy in it. But when the 
 “travail” began; when the long pain of 
 its progress, of which the Bible and sci- 
 ence speak, first throbbed, then it uttered 
 prophecy. The unincarnate Word pulsed 
 in its “gvoan and travail,” as in that life of 
 the Spirit by whom Christ cometh again, in 
 which we “ have the firstfruits of the Spirit, 
 even we ourselves groan within ourselves, 
 waiting for the adoption, to wit, the re- 
 demption of our body.” Nature’s story of 
 woe is our own. Microcosm that this 
 body is, it carries in its pain, and into the 
 soul’s yearning, the prophecy of the Christ, 
 —the expectation of the Reason, Logos, 
 — which, because it was the reason for 
 creation satisfactory to God in the begin- 
 ning, shall be a satisfactory reason to us 
 for our created selves. So man, as both a 
 child of God and of created nature, the 
 two earliest prophets, is the third prophet 
 
 1 Romans viii. 23. 
 
176 ©The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 of the Christ. The word spoken to Adam 
 after his sin, “ Where art thou ?”1is God's 
 first intimation that He seeks man. It 
 was the oldest announcement of the fact 
 of which He spoke, when He said, “J have 
 loved thee with an everlasting love.” It 
 was, as Delitzsch suggests, “designed to 
 bring man to Himself.” But it was more: 
 it is the assertion of the nature of Love to 
 seek and find the sinner, who was hiding 
 in fear and shame. It shows how God’s 
 own nature, as Love, was the deep 
 prophecy of His coming after the sin- 
 cursed race, in Christ; and, at the trans- 
 figuration, Elijah’s appearance and depar- 
 ture told how truly this prophecy was 
 fulfilled, in One who so really incarnated 
 God that men saw the profound fact: 
 “ Herein ts love, not that we loved God, but 
 that He loved us, and” —is there not a 
 fine logic here? — “sent His Son to be the 
 propitiation for our sins.” “ We love Him, 
 because He first loved us.”* 
 
 1 Genesis iii. 9. 2 John iv. 10, 19. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 177 
 
 From this infinite Love came the word 
 of prophecy that the seed of the woman 
 should bruise the serpent’s head. “J 
 will put enmity between thee and the 
 woman,’ said God to the serpent, “axd 
 between thy seed and her seed; tt shall 
 bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his 
 heel,” 1—a prophecy which had been par- 
 tially fulfilled in Him who had already be- 
 gun to spoil “principalities and powers,’ ? 
 to whom in those hours Elias was speak- 
 ing, of the death through which “He 
 might destroy him that hath the power 
 of death, that ts, the devil;”’ and in whom 
 it should have complete fulfillment when 
 in men, through Him, “the God of 
 peace should bruise Satan under their feet 
 shortly.” 8 
 
 Out of this infinite Love sprung the bow 
 in the cloud,—a prophecy strengthening 
 all others,* for it was God’s declaration of 
 eternal trustworthiness. On Him, it sig- 
 
 1 Genesis iii. 15. 2 Colossians ii. 15. 
 
 8 Romans xvi. 20. $ Genesis ix. 14, 15, 16. 
 
 12 
 
178 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 nified, man might rely; and the Messianic 
 idea ever after stood more firm because of 
 the seven-colored announcement that in all 
 this mingling of sun and storm there was 
 a faithful God looking through every drop. 
 Elijah stood in the very presence of that 
 Sun of righteousness as He flashed out 
 His latent glory on Hermon. The bow 
 was gone, for the air was clear of storm. 
 Once more to the race’s childhood must 
 God speak ; and to Abraham there come 
 the words: “ And in thee shall all the na- 
 tions of the earth be blessed,’ +— words 
 whose fulfillment is transfigured before him 
 in that glorious One, whose Majesty David 
 sees, when he says, “ Men shall be blessed in 
 Him ; all nations shall call Him blessed ;”* 
 whose power goes into the eloquence of Pe- 
 ter; and whose unique position in history, 
 as Jesus of Nazareth, inspires the teach- 
 ing and career of St. Paul.? As Elias, this 
 prophet of a later age, saw how, in his own 
 1 Genesis xii. 3. 2 Psalms Ixxii. 17. 
 8 Romans iv. 16; Galatians iii. 16; Acts iii. 35. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 179 
 
 words, there were taken up all the lofty 
 meanings which these words had, when 
 spoken three times, —once to Abraham, 
 once to Isaac, and once to Jacob,— the 
 glory of transfiguration grew more intense. 
 He was in the presence of the One who 
 had thus made a unit of history. Already 
 had this fact, moving so triumphantly 
 through the eras of Israelitish life, been the 
 source of the national spirit. Now, Christ 
 was founding a nationality of redeemed 
 souls which should include past and future, 
 and thus was continuing in Himself with 
 a divine power the prophetic benedictions 
 which fell from the lips of dying patriarchs. 
 In Him, even the past must have grown 
 brighter, and, as Elias was seen only in the 
 light of Christ’s transfiguration by the dis- 
 ciples, so the deep words of ancient days 
 were fully understood for the first time. 
 Jacob had pointed out the tribe of Judah as 
 the royal tribe, in a way that did not portray 
 to the consciousness of Israel the features 
 of the Christ, but here Elias saw what it 
 
180 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 all meant. “ Fudah, thou art he whom thy 
 brethren shall praise: thy hand shall bein 
 the neck of thine enemies: thy father’s 
 children shall bow down before thee. 
 Fudah is a lion's whelp: from the prey, 
 my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, 
 he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; 
 who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall 
 not depart from Fudah, nor a lawgiver from 
 between his feet, until Shiloh come; and 
 unto him shall the gathering of the people be. 
 Binding his foal unto the vine, and his ass’s 
 colt unto the choice vine ; he washed his gar- 
 ments in wine, and his clothes in the blood 
 of grapes.” 1 Elias must have remembered 
 how that name Shz/oh stood out in Israel- 
 itish history. There the tribe of Judah 
 had assembled, in fulfillment of this proph- 
 ecy, having received its possession in Gil- 
 gal; and, when the tabernacle of the cove- 
 nant was pitched there, the victory was 
 sure and the land was theirs.2, He must 
 have known, also, how royal above the rest 
 
 1 Gen. xlix. 8-12. 2 Josh. xviii. 1; Num. xxiv. 17. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 181 
 
 had been the tribe of Judah in the wars of 
 the judges? and under the leadership of 
 David ? and Solomon,? and how Moses had 
 blessed him.* History was eloquent then, 
 as he read the prophecy in its fulfillment 
 there on Hermon, for he stood in the pres- 
 ence of One“ who sprang out of Fudah,”® 
 yea, of the “Lon of the tribe of Fudah, 
 the Root of David,’ who was then “re- 
 vailing to open the book and to unloose the 
 seven seals thereof.” ® 
 lijah was seeing the triumph of the 
 
 soul which was his companion on that 
 earthly visit, and even then stood by him, — 
 Moses. With him, he now saw the mean- 
 ing of the exodus, the passover lamb, and 
 read in the shining face of Christ the un- 
 written harmony of the song of Moses and 
 that of the Lamb.’ The mediatorship of 
 
 1 Judges i. 2; xx. 18. 
 
 2 2 Samuel ii. 4; Psalm xviii. 40. 
 
 8 1 Kings xii.; 2 Dhronicles x. 11. 
 
 £ Deuteronomy xxxiii. 7. 5 Hebrews vii. 14. 
 
 6 Revelation v. 5. 
 7 Deuteronomy v. 23-25; Exodus xx.19; Hebrews 
 
 viii. 6, 
 
182 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Moses was now lost in that of Christ, which 
 fulfilled it.1 The elder prophet and law- 
 giver was seen only in the light of this 
 prophet which at last had come.” 
 
 “Tf,” says Professor Leathes, “the con- 
 sciousness of Abraham was that his seed 
 should be the blessing of the world, the con- 
 sciousness of Moses was that his prophetic 
 office should give place to Another ;” 3 and 
 he so awards Samuel the place of the first 
 of the prophets, after Moses, as to leave 
 out of its full connection a prophetic hour 
 for which, on the mount of Christ’s glory, 
 Elias must have stood. Delitzsch, among 
 others, seems to see “ the image of the fu- 
 ture One as it took on the form of a King,” 
 in the words of Balaam ;‘ and recent schol- 
 arship will agree that this world-blessing 
 had its threefold announcement, as seed, 
 prophet, and king, when Balaam said: “J 
 
 1 Deuteronomy v. 23-25; Exodus xx. 19; Hebrews 
 viii. 6. 
 
 2 Acts iii. 22-24; Acts vii. 37; John vii. 40. 
 
 8 The Religion of the Christ, p. 52. 
 
 4 Messianic Prophecies, p. 40. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 183 
 
 shall see Him, but not now: I shall behold 
 Him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star 
 out of Facob, and a Sceptre shall rise out 
 of Israel.’1 For that trumpet-tone stood 
 Elias, when he looked at Jesus in that glory 
 of which John was a beholder, — John who 
 should afterward see this Star from Patmos 
 and hear Him say, “/ am the root and off- 
 spring of David, and the bright and morning 
 Star,’? and see “on His vesture and thigh 
 a name written, Kinc oF Kinocs.”? It is 
 indicative of the essential melody, which, in 
 different natures and at various times, man- 
 ifested itself in these prophecies, that Elias 
 stood not more for the maternal Hannah, 
 singing, “ Zhe adversaries of the Lord shall 
 be broken to pieces; out of heaven shall He 
 thunder upon them; the Lord shall judge 
 the ends of the earth; and He shall give 
 strength unto His King, and exalt the horn 
 of His Anointed,’ * than for the unknown 
 One, who, seeing another side of life’s 
 
 1 Numbers xxiv. 17. 2 Revelation xxii. 16. 
 3 Revelation xix. 16. * 1 Samuel ii. 10, 
 
184 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 problem in the sins of Eli’s sons, looked 
 into the same future, and with a vision 
 which entered into the very counsel of 
 God, proclaimed: “ And I will raise Me 
 up a faithful priest, that shall do according 
 to that which is within my heart and in my 
 mind: and I will build him a sure house ; 
 and he shall walk before Mine Anointed for 
 ever.” 1 Elias saw all this fulfilled in the 
 broken empires, across which the Messiah 
 had come with unseen feet, and in that 
 priesthood, greater than that of Eli, who 
 was the descendant of Aaron, which is “‘ zot 
 after the law of a carnal commandment, but 
 after the power of an endless life.” 2 
 
 It is the remark of the penetrative 
 Horsley that “prediction in its highest 
 form, the Messianic, is nowhere more per- 
 spicuous than in the Psalms.” Certainly 
 the expectation of the past, vague as it 
 might have been, gained immensely in 
 clearness and intensity as that spirit which 
 took form in national songs made for itself 
 
 1 y Samuel ii. 35. 2 Hebrews vii. 11-16, 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 185 
 
 the literature which we know as the 
 Psalms. Whatever their dates, this collec- 
 tion of odes is the poetry of a peculiar peo- 
 ple, whose whole history must have been 
 made under the influence of a certain hope. 
 Taking the successive forms of “the seed 
 of Abraham,” “the successor in prophecy 
 to Moses,” and “the ideal King,” they mark 
 the development of a harmony which was 
 gathered into the melody of Elias’s tones, 
 as on that spot of Christ’s transfiguration 
 he felt the security of a yearning past in 
 the grandeur of the present. Truly the 
 words of the old national hymn, “ He hath 
 not dealt so with any nation,’ + must have 
 seemed a commonplace announcement of 
 the significance of a national history whose 
 Christ was so glorious. All that David's 
 lyre had yielded of the music of the future 
 was more than taken up in “the satisfying 
 symphonies” of this “Sox of David,”? 
 from the current of whose life there went 
 
 1 Psalm cxlvii. 20. 
 2 Cf. Delitzsch, Commentary on Psalms, CX. 4. 
 
186 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 intimations of a song eternal, the ode of a 
 redeemed race. That fore-gleam of light 
 which did break upon the Psalmist’s soul 
 when he said, “ 7he Lord hath sworn, and 
 will not repent, Thou art a priest for ever 
 after the order of Melchizedek,’+ Elias now 
 saw, in the orb from which it made its way 
 through the centuries; for that transfig- 
 ured One, Jesus, “was made a surety of a 
 better testament,” “hath an unchangeable 
 priesthood,’ and is “able to save unto the 
 uttermost all that come unto God by Him, 
 seeing He ever liveth to make intercession 
 for them.”* In that same shining face, 
 Elias saw the source of those rays of light, 
 which had touched the darkest days of the 
 past. The words of God, calling David, 
 “ Arise, anoint him, for this is he,’* had 
 now their full meaning to the ages,—a 
 meaning which Newman, seeing Christ 
 transfigured, has recognized in his verses 
 concerning David : — 
 
 1 Cf. Delitzsch, Commentary on Psalms, cx. 4. 
 2 Hebrews vii. 22, 24, 25. 8 2 Samuel ii. 4. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 187 
 
 “ Strange that guileless face and form 
 To lavish on the scarring storm ! 
 Yet we take thee in thy blindness, 
 And we buffet thee in kindness; 
 Little chary of thy fame, — 
 
 Dust unborn may bless or blame, — 
 But we mould thee for the root 
 Of man’s promised healing Fruit.” 
 
 All that this troubled life had of prophecy 
 was made real in the sorrow-stricken One,! 
 whose face glowed with no glory which 
 could keep Elias from speaking to Him of 
 His death. Elias was true to facts lying 
 as yet unseen when they stirred the souls 
 of the national poets. Only in that glowing 
 face could he see the power which would 
 make true the words, “ For thou wilt not 
 leave My soul in hell; neither wilt thou suf- 
 Ser Thy Holy One to see corruption ;” * for the 
 transfiguration was so clearly the intimation 
 of the resurrection, that Jesus, as we shall 
 note, put the disciples off, until, in the tri- 
 umph at Joseph’s tomb, they could under- 
 
 1 Perowne on Psalm xxxv. 27. 
 2 Psalm xvi. Io. 
 
188 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 stand Hermon’s glory. Only there could 
 be gained the significance of the words, 
 “ Thou art fairer than the children of men ; 
 Thy throne ts for ever and ever.” On Her- 
 mon, the sweet note of the old song was 
 made true: “Out of Zion, the perfection 
 of beauty, God hath shined.” That Psalm, 
 with whose martial strain Cromwell’s host 
 charged at the battle of Dunbar, with its 
 words, “‘ Thou hast ascended on high, Thou 
 hast led captivity captive: Thou hast re- 
 ceived gifts for men ; yea, for the rebellious 
 also, that the Lord God might dwell among 
 them,’ 1 was fast becoming history, as 
 Elias waited on Hermon, to converse with 
 Jesus about Calvary. All these prophe- 
 cies, however, made Elias not less inter- 
 ested to see, as he did, in speaking to 
 Christ about His decease, the fulfillment 
 of one prophecy in a lonely sufferer, cry- 
 ing, “ My God, my God, why hast Thou for- 
 saken Me?” and, at last, of another, when 
 “the stone which the builders refused ts be- 
 
 1 Psalm Ixviii. 18. 2 Psalm xxii. 1. 
 
The Appearance of Ehas. 189 
 
 come the head of the corner,’ and David's 
 joy should be complete in the saying of 
 “the Lord unto” his “ Lord, Sit Thou at 
 My right hand, until I make Thine enemies 
 Thy footstool.” * 
 
 More still must this face have shone 
 to the great prophet, as he stood with the 
 memory of the words uttered so long ago 
 by others of his companions in the heav- 
 ens. Here he stood in the sound of His 
 voice, whose speech had been uttered so 
 inadequately by himself and the succeed- 
 ing schools. Here was the morning Sun 
 whose light had made the sky less dark 
 and the times less dolorous, in which Elijah 
 himself, Elisha, Obadiah, Joel, Jonah, 
 Amos, and Hosea carried the national 
 expectation by lofty declaration, by a wise 
 and tender leadership, by a quenchless 
 hope, by a larger vision, by a typical life, 
 by a sweet courage, or by the cry, “ Come, 
 and let us return unto the Lord: for He 
 hath torn us, and He will heal us; He 
 
 1 Psalm cxviii. 22. 2 Psalm cx. I. 
 
190 =6©The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 hath smitten, and He will bind us up. 
 After two days He will revive us: on the 
 third day He will raise us up, and we shall 
 live before Him.” ? 
 
 Before him stood radiant the One of 
 whom Isaiah had spoken. It was “the 
 day” of which Isaiah had a sight, when he 
 said, “Jn that day shall the branch of 
 Fehovah become an ornament and a glory.” 
 There was the “vod” which had “come 
 Sorth out of the stem of Fesse,” and “the 
 branch” which should “grow out of his 
 roots.’® ‘The Gentiles” had begun to 
 “seek,” and “ His rest” had already been 
 “glory.”* “A virgin” had “brought forth 
 a son, Immanuel.’*> The very glory of 
 heaven was then telling the saints of all 
 ages, “ For unto us a child is born, unto us 
 a son is given.” “ The government” of the 
 future was already “upon His shoulders,” 
 and “redeemed” souls, “returning” and 
 “coming” “unto Zion with songs and ever- 
 
 1 Hosea vi. 1,2. ? Isaiah xxviii. 5. *% Isaiah xi. 5. 
 * Verse Io. § Tsaiah vii. 14. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 191 
 lasting joy upon their heads,” were “obtain- 
 ing 
 tng” were fleeing “away.” 1 “ Wonderful, 
 Counsellor, Mighty God, Father of Eternity, 
 Prince of Peace,’*— lips were already 
 
 2) ¢ 
 
 ‘joy and gladness, and sorrow and sigh- 
 
 calling Him by these titles. Breaking no 
 “bruised recd,’ quenching no “smoking 
 flax,” He was setting “judgment in the 
 earth ;” >and the rapturous words of Micah, 
 the statesman-like anticipation of Habak- 
 kuk,® the echoing language of Zephaniah,® 
 the heaven-illumed but tearful vision of 
 Jeremiah,’ the fine mysticism of Ezekiel,® 
 and the far-reaching hope of Daniel ® were 
 being rapidly fulfilled, alongside of the or- 
 acles of Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. 
 That dimly seen Fact which had moved 
 through all the eras of their life was a 
 Person ; and Elias, coming with the light 
 of the heavenly world in his eye, stood 
 
 1 Isaiah xxxv. Io. 2 Tsaiah ix. 6. 
 
 3 Isaiah xlii. # Micah iv. 1; v. 2. 
 
 & Habakkuk ii. 4. 6 Zephaniah iii. Io. 
 
 7 Jeremiah xxiii. 5. 8 Ezekiel xxxiv. 16, 23. 
 
 ° Daniel ii. 44. 
 
192 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 reverently in the glory of the transfigura- 
 tion of Christ. 
 
 But with such a complete fulfillment he 
 cannot yield even to the proposition of 
 Peter ; and after the cloud and the voice 
 Jesus is found alone. Just as Moses dis- 
 appeared before the new Lawgiver, who 
 came not to destroy but to fulfill, so did 
 Elias quit the height of Hermon before 
 the new prophet, who, while fulfilling the 
 past, held the empire of the future. The 
 transfigured One was the new prophet, 
 whose forecast was inclusive of eternity, 
 and whose transcendent point of view was 
 the heart of God. The day of Elias was 
 done, when at last to the soul of man, 
 looking so long from all points on the cir- 
 cumference of being, there appeared a 
 luminous centre, the Fact Jesus Christ. 
 Just as human thought and desire have 
 looked centrewards from the many out- 
 lying points and been at rest, so the 
 centre, fixed in absolute love, has sent out, 
 through radii of time which traverse eter- 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 193 
 
 nity and radii of space which traverse in- 
 finity, a lite ever new and renewing, re- 
 lating the universe of man and God in 
 perennial hope. Jesus is not only the 
 Christ of God unto man, but becomes also 
 the Christ of man unto God. By realiz- 
 ing all the lofty dreams of the human soul 
 as it yielded to the brooding love, He 
 came into the realm of our visible life to 
 be the perpetual source of fairer visions. 
 In Him, the soul has an infinite future. 
 Jesus of Nazareth is the prophet of human 
 nature. Peter did not see all that this 
 meant, at the moment of Christ’s transfig- 
 uration. But afterwards it came to him 
 through the swift-flying years. In that 
 second letter, when he would leave the 
 church some scene from his memory which 
 gathered into its significance the meanings 
 of this holy religion, his feet are again on 
 Hermon ; his eye is once more fixed upon 
 the glowing face of the Christ. “ More- 
 over,” he says, “J will endeavor that ye 
 may be able after my decease to have these 
 
194 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 things always in remembrance. For we 
 have not followed cunningly devised fables, 
 when we made known unto you the power 
 and coming of our Lord Fesus Christ, but 
 were eyewitness of His majesty. For He 
 received from God the Father honor and 
 glory, when there came such a voice to Him 
 Srom the excellent glory, This ts my beloved 
 Son, in whom Iam well pleased. And this 
 voice which came from heaven we heard, 
 when we were with Him in the holy mount.” 
 And what is the truth which came with all 
 this glory? This it is, which Peter rushes 
 on to speak, “ We have a more sure word 
 of prophecy.’ + That more sure word is the 
 historic Christ. 
 
 The more profoundly we study Chris- 
 tianity and the soul of man, the more 
 surely we see the force of the prophetic 
 element in Jesus of Nazareth. Whenever 
 a human soul begins to yield to His in- 
 fluence, there is felt the spell of prophecy. 
 The first step is to open the hitherto 
 
 1 2 Peter i. 19, 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 195 
 
 closed gates of an infinite future, when 
 the Saviour is admitted. A soul asks the 
 way to God in Christ; and the asking 
 comes in a simple plea to be shown the 
 way of salvation. There is only one word to 
 speak, “ Belzeve on the Lord Fesus Christ.” 
 When, in howsoever small measure, it does 
 believe on Him, it takes to its native eter- 
 nity as a bird to the air of heaven. He 
 invites it out into infinities of time, not by 
 any abstract explanation of eternity, but 
 by bearing its life out upon His own con- 
 sciousness of eternity, until, prophet that 
 He is, it has its own consciousness, in 
 which self-sacrifice and the immortal life 
 are inevitable. In Christ, its dumb proph- 
 ecies are fulfilled ; the soul finds use for its 
 breadth of wing. And this use is the be- 
 ginning of the Christian experience, and 
 that gives significance to this opening 
 hour of its life in Christ. To use His 
 own figure of the vine, so prophetic is the 
 vine on which the branch now finds itself, 
 that it thrills with the new life, and the im- 
 
196 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 pulse of its vital energy is “che power of 
 an endless life.” No longer does it wither 
 with lack of vitality, for it has surging 
 through it the life of God, and that, being 
 the motive power of the universe, allies it 
 with the concerns, not of a spot of earth, 
 but of infinity. An alliance is formed in 
 Christ with the order of the universe, and 
 the future is secure. As the Christian life 
 goes on, it is the more prophetic. Christ 
 unfolds the depths of His own nature in 
 the unfolding of the spiritual conscious- 
 ness, and every new break of the old life is 
 a bud, which is to be a blossom, which is 
 to fall away only for fruit having in itself 
 many seeds. As times and seasons change 
 and pass, it grows to be a still “more sure 
 word of prophecy.” The higher the re- 
 ality, the loftier the summons in Christ’s 
 inspiration and command to a still more 
 holy life which shall be a matrix for the 
 future. “Perfect even as the Father in 
 heaven is perfect :” —as long as such an 
 intimation comes from Christ to the soul 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 197 
 
 there will lie before it a land in which 
 prophecy and fact are one. In the glory 
 of the transfiguration, a prophet was seen, 
 whose glory naturally changes the soul 
 “from glory unto glory.” 
 
 Paul saw the prophetic force of His sal- 
 vation when he said, “ But we all with open 
 face, beholding as in a glass the glory of the 
 Lord, are changed into the same image from 
 glory unto glory, even as by the spirit of the 
 Lord.” Peter said the voice came from 
 “the excellent glory.” New heavens were 
 unfolded. Who shall say where His “ Fo/- 
 low Me” shall cease to sound upon man’s 
 listening soul? “Such trust have we 
 through Christ to God-ward’* that an in- 
 finite prophecy abides. In reverence, the 
 soul sees Christ confer what seem His 
 peculiar powers upon its advancing life. 
 These words become the new points of 
 vision for men. From them, the holy of 
 all ages have noted how above all our con- 
 
 1 2 Corinthians iii. 18. 
 2 2 Corinthians iii. 4. 
 
198 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 ceptions dwells the Incarnate God, and 
 yet how more familiar than our hope is 
 His ever-enlarging humanity. When Jesus 
 offers the treasures of His grace, the heart 
 often has the experience of that elder 
 Ephraim of whom Hosea heard God say, 
 “TI have written unto him the great things 
 of my law, but they were accounted a strange 
 thing.” 1 Never more than when Christ 
 offers the soul all that it may have does it 
 need the faith of Abraham, who “ staggered 
 not at the promise of God through un- 
 belief.”* We are dazzled into doubt often- 
 times by the lustre of a crown of which 
 we get visions now and then. “The 
 severe prerogatives of an existence half 
 divine are ours.” Yet calmly does Jesus 
 go on, fulfilling, yet prophetic, to open the 
 new treasures in Himself, until at last He 
 comes to that high priestly supplication, 
 a petition and a prophecy, inclusive of the 
 sad lyric notes of a broken heart and the 
 epic strains of an assured triumph, and 
 
 1 Hosea viii. 2. 2 Romans iii. 20. 
 
The Appearance of Elias. 199 
 
 prays, “ The glory which Thou gavest unto 
 Me I have given unto them, that they may 
 be one, even as We are one, lin them and 
 Thou in Me, that they may be made per- 
 fect in one.” 1 As His own stature rose in 
 that solemn air and assumed its heavenly 
 proportions, so truly was He the prophet 
 of man that man seemed to rise with Him. 
 The testimony of all other powers is con- 
 fined to the realm of fact, but the “ ¢estz- 
 mony of Fesus ts the spirit of prophecy.” 
 This fulfilling Fact, whose face shone, 
 and who then began anew the career of an 
 eternal prophet, was all these, because He 
 was the Saviour of the human soul from its 
 sins. The presence of Elias, departing only 
 after he had conversed with Him concern- 
 ing the “decease which He should accom- 
 plish at Ferusalem,” was in harmony with 
 the relations of the death of Christ to the 
 feelings of the soul, as expressed in all 
 prophecy; to the need, and therefore to 
 the sacrificial gift out of God’s love; to the 
 
 2 John xvii. 22. 2 Revelation xix. 10, 
 
200 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 salvation which should save men; to the 
 obedience and love of a law whose right- 
 eousness was emphasized in the work of 
 redemption. To complete this work of re- 
 demption, this new prophet of humanity, 
 to whom the past surrendered, as its great 
 figures disappeared, was to found a race of 
 prophets whose lives should be lived by 
 the law of His life, — self-sacrifice, —and 
 the secret of whose whole power and hope 
 lay in the cross. So Elias talked of His 
 decease. The old minstrel sounded on 
 that harp, whose string then received his 
 last touch, the key-note of the future. The 
 prophets of humanity still see furthest, 
 when from Hermon they look by way of 
 Calvary. 
 
 — “All through life I see a cross, 
 Where sons of God yield up their breath; 
 There is no gain except by loss; 
 There is no life except in death, 
 Nor glory but in bearing shame, 
 Nor justice but in taking blame ; 
 And that eternal Passion saith, 
 ‘Be emptied of glory, and right, and name!’”2 
 1 Olrig Grange. 
 
LECTURE VIL 
 Jesus Only. 
 
\ y 
 a 
 
 
 
DLL LDS 
 
 LECTURE VIL 
 
 
 
 Jesus Only. 
 
 “« And Peter said, Master, it is good for us to be here; let us build 
 three tabernacles; one for Thee, one for Moses, one for Elias: not 
 knowing what he said. While he thus spake, there came a cloud, 
 and overshadowed them, and they feared as they entered into the 
 cloud. And there came a voice out of the cloud: saying, This is my 
 beloved Son, hear Him. And when the voice was past, they saw 
 no man save Jesus only.”— MATTHEW xvii. 4; Mark ix. 8, 9; 
 LUKE ix. 30-36. 
 
 HE transfiguration of Christ fur- 
 nishes an illustration of how 
 
 
 
 
 = 
 
 re 
 found the greater upon the less, and to 
 rest the partially understood present upon 
 the evident past. As we have already 
 seen, the coming of Christ unto men so 
 restores the integrity of the soul that the 
 intellect recovers its native logic ; and that 
 fact is nowhere more clearly shown than 
 in this: that when the Christ has His full 
 
 influence upon the soul the mind is con- 
 
 
 
 men are continually prone to 
 
204 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 verted, the order of thought is reversed, 
 and the past is understood in the fact of 
 the present and in the promise of the 
 future. “We walk by faith, not by sight.” 
 It is evident that Peter had not yet taken 
 the Christ fully into the currents of his 
 life. His Lord shows this, when He puts 
 them off, and asks them not to speak of 
 this scene until the resurrection from the 
 dead, when, in them, there should be a 
 risen Christ which should justify and make 
 clear the Saviour whom they had so unin- 
 telligently followed. Then, He seems to 
 say, full faith in the transfiguration will 
 come. Peter furnishes, in himself, the por- 
 trait of a piety which has not been “ bur- 
 ied in His death” nor yet has “risen with 
 Christ.” His proposition to build three 
 tabernacles indicates the desire he had 
 that his Christ, as well as himself, should 
 have the visible association of these mon- 
 archs of the past. These words show that 
 Peter, at least, thought that he understood 
 Jesus. In the unexpressed panic of their 
 
Jesus Only. 205 
 
 souls, they caught upon Moses and Elias, 
 these great figures vouchsafed from the 
 unseen, as means of estimating the Christ, 
 instead of clinging to Him as the one Fact 
 which then and there flooded the whole 
 past with such a radiance that all its steps 
 must seem a divine path. Peter saw such 
 a triumph in that hour, for his Christ, that 
 he would have been glad to have those 
 who made it stay and continue it. But that 
 would have been to found a commonwealth 
 of three citizens, Christ, Moses, and Elias, 
 to the impossibility of whose existence 
 that cloud, be it ‘“‘shekinah of radiance”’ or 
 barrier of darker folds, with its voice gave 
 its testimony. That cloud rolls yet before 
 the eyes of any mind which has done such 
 wrong to its powers of discovery and their 
 Lord as to find no infinite difference be- 
 tween the leader and lawgiver of Israel 
 and the Saviour of men. It comes yet 
 from any Hermon-height of our culture, 
 drifting from the snow which makes it, 
 and lingering like a phantom, until it 
 
206 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 speaks with a revelation to that soul 
 whose spiritual life knows no difference 
 between the touch of an infinite Christ 
 and the influence of the mighty spirits 
 who cleared the way for Him. 
 
 The spiritual life of our time confesses 
 its character in a literature which builds 
 tabernacles to a lofty legalism and a wan- 
 dering hope. It is the hour of Christ’s 
 transfiguration. Let us not continue the 
 error of mistaking it for the hour of His 
 resurrection. Literature, the record of the 
 soul’s life, is a snow-crowned Hermon. 
 On this height the face of Jesus shines. 
 From the romance-criticism of Renan to 
 the elegant paganism of Arnold, we hear 
 the unwilling confessions of the glory in 
 Jesus of Nazareth, When Emerson is 
 asked why he does not include Jesus 
 among his “representative men,” he con- 
 fesses the glistening garment which He 
 wears by saying, “It takes too much 
 strength of constitution to do that.”!- The 
 
 1 Bartol, Principles and Portraits, p. 221. 
 
Jesus Only. 207 
 
 Occident is told by the Orient that He is 
 theirs,! and confessions from the East aver 
 that the Hermon on which He stands is 
 loftier than their Himalayas. The poetry 
 of our day is the lyric of His sad life, and 
 the epic of His career will be gathered, 
 here a line and there another, from strains 
 which use all the rhythms of the soul. 
 Science confirms His theories of life; and 
 the infinity in which He lived seems surer 
 to philosophy than all else. The student of 
 history and of man beholds the transfigu- 
 ration of the Nazarene, and has a “ NMovum 
 organum.” A Napoleon confesses, “JZ 
 know men, and tell you that Fesus is not 
 a man. Comparison is impossible between 
 Him and any other being in the world. He 
 zs truly a being by Himself.” 
 
 Thus, in the darkness, does the face of 
 Christ shine. Many a Peter, seeing how 
 the law of human life seems to give its 
 recommendation to the Christ, and noting 
 how the hopes of man gladly recognize 
 
 1 Mozoomdar, Zhe Oriental Christ, p. 116. 
 
208 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Him as at least a hopeful sign for man- 
 kind, proposes to ground the religious life 
 here, and in various ways informs the race 
 that, at last, Christianity is safe! “Let us 
 build three tabernacles.” Let us pause, 
 rather, and notice that Christ is not visi- 
 ble in the light of their transfiguration, 
 but that Moses and Elias are visible in the 
 glory of the Christ. Our modern Chris- 
 tianity flaunts its weakness in its ready ac- 
 ceptance of patronage. We are so super- 
 ficial in our Christian life that we bless 
 literature and science for coming where 
 they certainly must come, or be unseen of 
 mankind. Christ, the transfigured, is the 
 transfigurer of these. Take Him from his- 
 tory, and on what mountain top could our 
 modern lawgivers and prophets gather? 
 This is lost sight of, as Peter’s proposition 
 comes again to the lips of our anticipatory 
 and apologetic religiousness. And there 
 is no escaping the saddest phase of the 
 fact, namely, that from a band of disciples, 
 as aforetime, from whom the cause of the 
 
Jesus Only. 209 
 
 Christ has special reason to expect the 
 truest faith, there do come, in these mo- 
 ments of confessed transfiguration, over- 
 tures of defence through ardent apology 
 and schemes of personal service through 
 fancied piety which would identify with 
 forces outworn the pervasive, conquering 
 Saviour. We seem delighted to find some 
 great soul that will make Christ a little less 
 incredible to us, through a complimentary 
 line, or Christianity a little more easy to 
 our native paganism, by a pleasing para- 
 graph of praise. Instead of going through 
 history with a Fact, the surest we have, 
 to explain the otherwise meaningless lives 
 of men, to relate the fragments of a divided 
 humanity into unity, to lift up the half- 
 hearted philosophies of a passing day and 
 join them to such truth as shall fulfill 
 them, we seek to defend our holy Chris- 
 tianity by patronizingly showing its like- 
 ness to some far-off humanism, and essay 
 to relieve our faith from embarrassment by 
 quoting, alongside the sayings of Christ, 
 14 
 
2i0 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 some merely verbal similarity from lips 
 which confess the panic of the soul, and are 
 soiled with sin. Peter carried the passion 
 for comparativism into realms where there 
 is but One. More just was he to history 
 than we, who seek a new apologetic as we 
 gather the words of the stories to find a 
 classical element in early Christianity, or 
 compare Socrates or Marcus Aurelius 
 with the King of Kings. 
 
 A cloud rolls between. Under it our 
 superficial faith must learn of its igno- 
 rance of history and of its misapprehension 
 of religion. With the coming of that 
 cloud, it learns that Christ is the light in 
 which these are seen; for when He is lost 
 to sight, so also are lawgiver and prophet. 
 The elegant paganism or the lofty Judaism 
 of any age, ancient or modern, is appre- 
 ciated alone in the light of Christianity. 
 Meaningless indeed were Plato and Seneca 
 to the conduct of Greece and Rome; and 
 “conduct is three fourths of life.”1 They 
 
 1 Mathew Arnold. 
 
Jesus Only. 211 
 
 would mean Jess to us, had not Chris- 
 tianity rescued them. Take the loftiest 
 pre-Christian writer and put the Christ out 
 of sight, and lo, the more tenderly he 
 speaks the more he seems to scorn the 
 hopelessness of the human heart. Plato’s 
 beautiful words, “ May I, being of a sound 
 mind, do unto others what I would that 
 they should do unto me,” would indicate 
 only the disproportion of dream and fact 
 in the world, were there not One who had 
 realized the ideal. The modern words con- 
 cerning immortality put into the speech of 
 Cato, “It must be so,” would, like many 
 real utterances, make the universe false, 
 if One, who spake with authority, had not 
 said, “Jf zt were not so, I would have told 
 you; I go to prepare a place for you.” 
 Only when, in peerless glory, we see 
 the Christ transfigured on heights of hu- 
 man thought, or on the facts of modern 
 progress, does every prophet’s whisper 
 concerning Him become audible. Then 
 
 2 John xiv. 2. 
 
212 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 we know what the mind of Plato was aim- 
 ing at when he said, “We will wait for 
 one, be it god or god-inspired man, to 
 teach us our religious duties, and, as 
 Athene in Homer says to Diomed, to take 
 away the darkness from our eyes;” or 
 when he said, “We must lay hold of the 
 best human opinion, in order that, borne 
 on it as on a raft, we may sail o’er the 
 dangerous sea of life, unless we can find a 
 stronger boat, or some word of God, which 
 will more surely carry us.” But the mo- 
 ment we confuse the relations of Plato and 
 the Christ, and seek to make them equal, 
 they both disappear in the cloud. There is 
 no Saviour, then, and Plato means nothing. 
 The soul is living over again, in our age, 
 its pre-Christian era; modern literature is 
 full of a lofty legalism and eloquent with 
 the prophecy of a Christ. God doth not 
 leave Himself without a witness. The mis- 
 sionary of the nineteenth century has only 
 to say in certain circles, “As certain of your 
 own poets have said,” to repeat Paul’s ex- 
 
Jesus Only. 213 
 
 perience with classicalism. Our Moses is 
 a Stoic; Elijah to-day is Hellenic rather 
 than Hebraic ; and in these hours of apol- 
 ogetic Christian life, there is no greater 
 danger to the Church than that her Peters 
 will so persist in building like tabernacles 
 to literary prophecy, scientific legalism, 
 and historic reality, that she and the 
 world shall lose the unconscious message 
 of Huxley and Arnold, with the Christ, in 
 nineteen centuries of whose light they 
 may be seen. The cloud has already come 
 over us; we feared as we “entered” it; but 
 that cloud is lifting, and as the Voice 
 speaks, “ 7hzs is my beloved Son, hear 
 Him,” there comes to sight “xo man 
 save Fesus only.” 
 
 This has been the error of one wing of 
 a Christian life, which must ever be apolo- 
 getic or nothing. The error of the other 
 wing, safe as it supposes itself to be in 
 theories of inspiration, is quite as remark- 
 able. As the cloud has gathered over 
 heads which were indubitably orthodox, 
 
214 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 and as, in spite of all protests, we have 
 entered it, there has been a large proclama- 
 tion of “fear.” The whole body of theol- 
 ogy has seemed to be going, and the con- 
 sternation has been pathetic. But the 
 cloud has been a “ dright” one, though it 
 “overshadowed” us; and now we see that 
 we had too nearly identified facts of the 
 most vital difference in quality and im- 
 port, and had thus brought upon our pow- 
 ers of spiritual apprehension a vagueness 
 of perception and an obtuseness of appre- 
 ciation which did not render less dense the 
 cloud which produced our distrust, whose 
 largest element was “fear.” This has 
 been the history of much of the world’s 
 skepticism. History is simply repeating 
 itself along this line, in our querulous 
 and startled time. The era of theological 
 thought preceding our own had too nearly 
 identified Judaism, legal and prophetic, 
 with Christianity. A far too Mosaic con- 
 ception of God had passed as a neces- 
 sity to any correct creed. A spirit of ec- 
 
Jesus Only. 215 
 
 clesiasticism and an attitude toward those 
 who differed from the traditional thought, 
 quite like that of Elijah after the sacrifice 
 on Carmel, had possessed the church. A 
 conception of the perfect sacredness of 
 some history and of the total unsacredness 
 of other chapters of history, called “ pro- 
 fane,’ which conception was essentially 
 Jewish, was made to survive or perish 
 alongside the burning words of St. Paul 
 at Athens, or the words of Christ on 
 the Mount. Where this was questioned, 
 men were informed, theology was to stop. 
 “Let us build three tabernacles: it is 
 good for us to be here,” said many a Peter, 
 “not knowing what he said.’ Ue has had 
 time recently, under the cloud, to find out 
 just what he said. Dogmatism is now 
 much more nearly proportioned to intelli- 
 gence. Under the blur which he has 
 made of the character and authority of 
 Christ, in the attempt to identify Him 
 with Moses in doctrine or in power, we 
 have known what it is to be “afraid” of 
 
216 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 the loss of truth. But, as of old, it has been 
 a “bright cloud.” For a time it seemed to 
 some faithless ones as though criticism 
 would leave the top of Hermon, not only 
 without a Moses and Elias, but also with- 
 out a Christ. All were hid for a moment. 
 But a Voice is now speaking out of the 
 cloud ; and whenever the church fully hears 
 the message, “ Zhzs zs My beloved Son, hear 
 Him, and proclaims Jesus only, the last 
 vapor of our skepticism will lift and pass 
 away, and “ Fesus” will be “found alone.” 
 The inspiration and significance of the 
 Old Testament are found in the New. 
 
 Of far more consequence is the error in 
 our religious life which carries such deso- 
 lation. We are pouring the “new wine” 
 into “old bottles ;’’ and the new wine is 
 being lost. A legal and constrained Chris- 
 tian life and an anticipatory gospel upon 
 our lips and in our hearts are proof 
 enough of how Peter has perpetuated unto 
 our day his desire to build three taber- 
 nacles. <A brief study of our Mosaism, of 
 
Jesus Only. 217 
 
 motive and life, will indicate the supreme 
 value of the cloud whose overshadowing is 
 so significant. 
 
 Every human being is conscious, in pro- 
 portion to his thoughtfulness, of the pres- 
 ence of law with which he has to do. Our 
 day has a thousand voices proclaiming its 
 omnipresent reign, and a thousand other 
 voices declaring the worth of liberty. It 
 would seem just the hour in the history of 
 ethics when the law of liberty might be- 
 come the law of man’s life. But intel- 
 lectual perceptions are ever apt to be 
 one-sided ; and our era of intellectualism, 
 in the church and out of it, has seen, 
 at a single moment, but one side of this 
 “law of liberty.” It has thus strength- 
 ened the hold of the conscience upon 
 Jaw at one time, and the hold of the will 
 upon /zderty at another. Thus, the mind 
 has been divided against itself, and the 
 whole truth has been lost. Where this 
 teaching has been the strongest in speech, 
 there has been nothing real offered to the 
 
218 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 mind which would unite these two seem- 
 ingly diverse powers, law and _ liberty. 
 The church has been far too forgetful that 
 one Fact alone, personal and authoritative, 
 could unite them. Forms and ceremonies, 
 ecclesiasticism and doctrines, have been so 
 substituted for Him that, in the church, 
 men have grasped “/aw,” and out of it 
 they have adored “ Uéberty.” “Law” 
 alone has degenerated into legalism ; 
 “liberty” alone has gone into /bertinism. 
 Thoughtful, inquiring natures behold, too 
 frequently, a formal, Mosaic spiritual life 
 in the church, and a careless, licentious 
 paganism outside. Our church-life is the 
 confession that we have been building a 
 tabernacle unto Moses, because we have 
 not lovingly seen the peerlessness of 
 Christ. 
 
 Fesus only is the watchword of evan- 
 gelical reform. Moses is sublime, but only 
 because Christ fulfills him. We shall be 
 judged by a law, but, as James suggests, 
 it shall be “the perfect law of liberty.” 
 
Jesus Only. 219 
 
 Under these words there will be a growing 
 appreciation of the power of real Chris- 
 tianity. We behold its influence now, as 
 it is fenced in by formalism and shut 
 up by constraint. At the fastened gate, 
 Jesus is standing, and the words which He 
 speaks are solemn enough to us who are 
 living in the careful mechanism of law: 
 “Except your rightcousness exceed that of 
 the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no 
 wise enter into the kingdom of heaven.’ 
 Such an announcement falls with great 
 force upon us. For we have been so care- 
 ful and painstaking and proper in all our 
 mechanical piety. “Is all that to go for 
 nothing?” Like the young man, we are 
 telling our Master how very faithful we 
 have been to the commandments since we 
 became members of the church; but when 
 He asks for personal and total surrender 
 to Him, our piety goes away “sorrowful.” 
 Nothing seems so strange to a modern Old 
 Testament saint as the treatment which 
 
 1 Matthew v. 20. 
 
220 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 the New Testament gives to all his la- 
 borious concerns about the proprieties of 
 piety. He never considers what a thor- 
 ough drudge he has made of himself, and 
 how slavish has become his religious life. 
 
 He has nothing but “law ;” and lo! he is 
 hanging to that, not because he loves it, but 
 because he fears to let go. Under what a 
 “cloud” he stands, even at the transfigu- 
 ration of Christ! But it is a “bright” 
 cloud. Heaven is glorious on the other 
 side, and when the Voice speaks to that 
 soul and tells him, “ Zhzs zs my beloved 
 Son,” using the very words of the baptism- 
 scene, and adds, “ear Him,” the cloud 
 lifts away, and he sees “zo man save 
 Fesus only.” We lose even Christ, when 
 He is no more than Moses to us. Moses 
 must be left behind, because Christ has 
 achieved freedom from the burden and 
 love of evil; and in that freedom the law is 
 more sacred than ever, and the soul is 
 “a son, not of the bond woman, but of 
 the free.” “Tutors and governors” have 
 
Jesus Only. 221 
 
 finished their work. “ The fulness of the 
 t7me’’ is come, and God hath “sent forth 
 His Son, made of a woman, made under 
 the law, to redeem them that were under the 
 law, that we might receive the adoption of 
 sons.” + “Stand fast, therefore, in the lib- 
 erty wherewith Christ hath made you free, 
 and be not again entangled with the yoke of 
 bondage.” * 
 
 Let us not say that the life by law is 
 valueless. Every man’s Mosaism is a prep- 
 aration for the Christ. A moral man is 
 not a pagan; as the Old Testament was 
 divine, and not human, after the manner of 
 the Phzdo or the mythology of the Hin- 
 dus. But over all human life stands at 
 this hour the personal Christ. Obedience 
 learned in Moses is not to be forgotten in 
 Christ. Into a modern Mosaism, however, 
 which is full of “ 7how shalt not,’ He in- 
 troduces, “ Thou shalt love the Lord thy 
 God with all thy heart, and with all thy 
 soul, and with all thy mind. This is the 
 
 1 Galatians iv. 5. 2 Galatians v. I. 
 
222 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 first and great commandment. And the 
 second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself. On these two com- 
 mandments hang all the law and the 
 prophets.” 1 Here then we see, again, that 
 the law of liberty and the law of love are 
 one. This law of love runs up to God, 
 who is Love, and it gets its power there; 
 and then, when the knees are trembling 
 and the soul is weary, and God seems too 
 far off, when the soul cannot grasp the In- 
 finite, Jesus Himself offers Himself, not as 
 a moralist, but as “tie Son,” who makes 
 “free indeed,’ as at once the motive and 
 personal object of the soul’s devotion, in- 
 clusive of law, because He is God of very 
 God; that is, the love of Love to us, — 
 Himself, as the life of our living. “ 7hzs 
 man must be counted worthy of more 
 glory than Moses, inasmuch as He who 
 founded the family hath more honor than 
 the family. For Moses was intrusted with 
 jurisdiction simply as an upper servant of 
 
 1 Matthew xxii. 38. 
 
Jesus Only. 223 
 
 the houschold, but Christ as the Son who is 
 the head of the household.” + 
 
 When, thus, our Christianity is more 
 full of Christ, it will be po’ verful in all 
 lines of real reform. Solong asa Mosaism 
 of life abides, Christian statesmanship can 
 hardly be expected to see that not somuch 
 in laws made to restrain crime, but in 
 building up from within a manhood which 
 will freely move toward righteousness, lies 
 the work of legislatures and societies. So 
 long as the church forgets that “the King- 
 dom of God is within,” or nowhere, she 
 will be wasting efforts in the attempt to 
 push in upon a man a temperance or a 
 virtue only from the outside. There is no 
 such real foe to the demon of intemperance 
 as a loved and personal Saviour. So long 
 as a Christian nation has not been blessed, 
 in the religious life which it has, by a mo- 
 rality deeper than that of Moses, our mar- 
 riage and divorce legislation may be ex- 
 pected to occupy its present position ; but 
 
 1 Hebrews iii. 2, 6. 
 
224 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 when out of the cloud God speaks, and we 
 see “zo man save Fesus only,” the infamy 
 of our sin will be realized and some of its 
 pollution purged away. Thus the destinies 
 of society and of the nation lie in the 
 hands of Christians ; and our own salvation 
 waits for the experience in the soul of a 
 personal Christ. 
 
 The evils coming and the good detained 
 by an anticipatory gospel of life are quite 
 as considerable. Our age is wondrously 
 prophetic. Elias has tabernacles with the 
 Christ ; and such acloud has hidden both, 
 as it ever must be, that the human mind 
 is bewildered. “Bright” as it is with 
 promise that a better hour draweth near, it 
 yet “over-shadows ” the church’s work, the 
 world’s progress and reform. We are wait- 
 ing for a new statement of doctrine, a new 
 method of church government, a new apolo- 
 getics which shall silence skepticism, and 
 an untried reason of some sort which shall 
 make us all we ought to be. In our prop 
 osition to build to Elias, Christ and Elias 
 
Jesus Only. 225 
 
 both have left the scene. It is everywhere 
 repeated. A soul, a church, or an age, 
 which waits expectantly for fresh light in 
 the presence of sufficient light for the 
 doing of duty, loses even its reason and 
 hope for any more illumination. Nothing 
 so threatens modern Christianity with dis- 
 aster as the disposition to confuse the 
 claims of the real Christ and the unspoken 
 prophetism which stands waiting. There 
 is a moral film which gathers over the spir- 
 itual eye, when it looks unappreciatively 
 into the face of the shining Christ, — a film 
 which hides Him at last from the eye. 
 Nothing but the Voice from the cloud and 
 the vision of “xo man save Fesus only,” 
 received in hearty faith and in total forget- 
 fulness of the great souls which crowd to 
 His transfiguration, can deliver us from 
 that spiritual stupor in which we stand, 
 beclouded and afraid. 
 
 I know of nothing which, as a doctrine 
 of life, more truly illustrates the passion 
 of our century for prophecy, and its forget- 
 
 15 
 
226 = The _Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 fulness of facts, and, at the same time, 
 shows how really every modern Elias has 
 been fulfilled ages ago in Christ, than the 
 present influence and certain future of 
 Positivism. Comte is our chief modern 
 Elias, to whom tabernacles are builded in 
 England, France, and America. Dense 
 indeed have been the clouds which have 
 rolled over the modern mind, in the prog- 
 ress of the building. As they roll away, 
 we see how gross was the blindness of a 
 gospel which has, in itself, principles which 
 make Jesus of Nazareth the most vital 
 soul of all history, and which, nevertheless, 
 at the very hour of His transfiguration in 
 recent thinking, makes a conception of 
 Humanity which leaves Him out. No 
 being of earth has ever so stood for his 
 race as did this Galilean. No man among 
 men has so felt their cares and carried their 
 sorrows as has this Man of Calvary. Nay, 
 not the whole race, outside of His soul, 
 has so consciously and intelligently borne 
 its own problem, to say nothing of finding 
 
Jesus Only. 227 
 
 its solution, as did this Nazarene. The 
 Humanity of Comte, as well as that of Isa- 
 iah, is a dream without Him. He makes 
 this fiction a reality only at Calvary, for at 
 that spot His own life bore its consummate 
 fruit. No man so bowed to the service of 
 Humanity as the Christ who both lived 
 and died for it, yet, being no Comtean, He 
 did not worship it. The gospel of Comte 
 is self-worship ; for Humanity is made up 
 of individuals, and if each worships Human- 
 ity, he is worshipping either what includes 
 him, or a set of persons who worship him, 
 since, at its best, it is a cult wherein each 
 man worships the rest. It is a scheme to 
 lift the race by the strength of its own 
 arms, and to leave out of the effort Him 
 who, according to its very principles, has 
 the most power. 
 
 Max Miiller tells us that the concept of 
 Humanity is the gift of Christ. Only as 
 nearly nineteen centuries transfigure Him 
 can this modern Elias be seen. As the be- 
 wildered thought of our time comes to a 
 
228 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 calm, and the supremacy of Jesus is con- 
 fessed, we see that Christ alone as a per- 
 petual Fact furnishes the only Positivism. 
 The blind man was a Positivist of a real 
 sort when he said: “‘ One thing I know, 
 that whereas I was once blind, now I see.” 
 The Positive philosophy of the soul comes 
 when this prophet and lawgiver of Human- 
 ity becomes its Lord and Saviour. The 
 Son of God alone is the Son of Man. The 
 “Theological Stage” is never passed in a 
 true Positivism. The Divine Christ is 
 history and prophecy ; and is the centre of 
 a Religion of Humanity. No dream of 
 Comte has ever outrun the fact in Christ 
 Jesus. And by those facts He stands to 
 continue His prophecy for Humanity, say- 
 ing : ‘‘ Greater works than these shall ye do, 
 because I go unto the Father.” 
 
 Thus, the more truly we see the trans- 
 figuration of Jesus in our day, the more 
 surely are we left in the presence of His 
 absolute lordship. Our Judaism, like that 
 of the disciples, comes down from the height 
 
Jesus Only. 229 
 
 of Hermon, saying: “ Why then say the 
 scribes that Elijah must first come?” We 
 repeat their experience: ‘“ And He said, 
 Elyah indeed cometh, and shall restore all 
 things: but I say unto you that Elijah ts 
 come already, and they knew him not, but 
 they did unto him whatever they listed. 
 Even so must the Son of Man also suffer of 
 them. Then understood the disciples that 
 He spake unto them of Fohn the Baptist.” + 
 The real prophets of the Christ are too 
 full of Him to escape His fate. The Jew 
 yet waits for Elijah. To-day, he has a seat 
 prepared for him at the circumcision of his 
 child ; ata certain moment in the passover, 
 the door is opened by the youngest child, 
 that Elijah may come in; and, in the era 
 of the Talmud, the goods without owners 
 were put by until Elijah should come. 
 Our Judaic Christianity waits with quite 
 as much ceremony for its new light, and 
 our anticipatory literary spirit is quite as 
 unappreciative of any John the Baptist. 
 
 1 Matthew xvii. 12. 
 
230 ©The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 The days of prophecy are closed so far as 
 prophecy means only the foretelling of a 
 coming Lord and Saviour. John the Bap- 
 tist had come, and the mistake of men had 
 been that they had weighed him in scales 
 fit only for the elder Elias. This son of 
 Elizabeth and Zacharias had a sense of 
 present reality that made the dream of 
 his soul contemporaneous with its realiza- 
 tion in Jesus Christ. Truly, he was “ more 
 than a prophet.’ No “reed shaken by the 
 wind,” no “man clothed in soft garments,” 
 was he, but a child of the past uttering the 
 accents of present and future. This man 
 had seen the glow of transfiguration in the 
 face of the young Man whom the crowd did 
 not know ; and that hour marks forever the 
 unique spot where the old and the new 
 met face toface. “He must increase, but I 
 must decrease,’ was the voice of the past 
 speaking of “ Fesus only.” “ Greater than 
 he,” said the Christ, “zs the least in the 
 kingdom of heaven,” 1— words which tes- 
 1 Mattthew xi. 1. 
 
Jesus Only. 231 
 
 tify how, in Christ, the believer begins 
 where the prophet ends his life. 
 
 Real Christianity is single-eyed, and 
 wants no other vision than that of the 
 Person it adores. “Saved by hope,” —yet 
 that hope is surrounded by an all-embra- 
 cing fact. Our advance comes by going 
 the more profoundly into the Reality of 
 which our hope is born. Infinity alone 
 bounds that advance. “For by one offering 
 He hath perfected for ever them that are 
 sanctified,’ yet “we shall be satisfied” 
 only “when we awake in His likeness.’ 
 
 So full was He of this prophecy in Him- 
 self and for them, that the disciples kept 
 the memory of Moses and Elias, speaking 
 to Him about the “exodus which He 
 should accomplish at Jerusalem.” As they 
 went back to heaven, He found the glory of 
 His transfiguration running through the 
 tomb. They could speak to Him about 
 death only as the “exodus ;” though the 
 words of these heavenly visitants seem to 
 
 1 Hebrews x. 14. 2 Psalms xxii. 15. 
 
232 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 involve the glory which was to follow. 
 They, however, must be silent about the 
 secrets whose key He carried. But He 
 could prepare His disciples to utter the 
 magic word, “ He is risen from the dead,” 
 —a word which even they could not have 
 then understood, the connection of which 
 with the transfiguration we shall study in 
 the next lecture, 
 
LECTURE VIII. 
 
 The Transfiguration and the Resurrection. 
 
 ‘« Whether we be young or old, 
 Our destiny, our being’s heart and home, 
 Is with infinity, and only there! 
 With hope it is, hope that can never die, 
 Effort and expectation and desire, 
 And something evermore about to be.” 
 WorDSWORTH. 
 

 
CFSSRSS 
 
 LECTURE VIII. 
 
 The Transfiguration and the Resurrection. 
 
 *« And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, 
 saying, Tel] the vision to no man until the Son of man be risen again 
 from the dead. 
 
 * And they kept that saying among themselves, questioning one 
 with another, what the raising from the dead should mean.” — Mark 
 
 ix, Q, 10. 
 
 HE transfiguration, as we have 
 studied it, was a brief, partial, but 
 
 
 
 significant manifestation of the 
 hidden power and reserved glory in the 
 Christ. It was an hour when the veil was 
 withdrawn from before the Throne, and a 
 glimpse was vouchsafed of “ Him that sit- 
 teth thereon,” “on whose vesture and thigh 
 a name is written, King of Kings and 
 Lord of Lords.” A single look, across 
 nineteen centuries, upon that shining face 
 makes the mind confess the inevitable- 
 
 1 Revelation xix. 26. 
 
236 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 ness of the event. The time had come 
 when the Being who had bowed Himself 
 in humiliation, in obedience to laws which 
 traverse the lower realm of human life, 
 must lift Himself, if only for an hour, to 
 His natural place, and assume His normal 
 attitude in the universe; and, having thus 
 come face to face again with the laws which 
 traverse an upper zone, be smitten with 
 the ancient “ glory” which He “had with 
 the Father before the world was.” } 
 
 We have noticed how, in the very splen- 
 dor of this glory, Moses and Elias, free 
 from the restraints of space and time, yet 
 so visible that the disciples recognized 
 their presence, conversed with the glorified 
 One about “the exodus which He was about 
 to accomplish at Ferusalem.’ We must 
 agree that though Christ spoke most prob- 
 ably in Aramaic, that word éfodev, which 
 must have been an equivalent, means more 
 than death, although death be the inciden- 
 tal fact in the exodus of Christ from this 
 
 1 John i. 14. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 237 
 
 world. If we turn to Christ’s own view of 
 His death, it becomes clear that such a 
 word as exodus, rather than the word death, 
 is in harmony with His thought. Looking 
 out of the deepest gloom, He says, “And 
 now, O Father, glorify thou me.’+ Moses 
 and Elias, “clothed upon” with spiritual 
 bodies, were speaking in harmony with 
 His idea of His death and its issues, and 
 in harmony, as it is seen, with the facts to 
 come, when they spoke of the “ exodus,” — 
 a word which may be said to include much 
 that was immediately beyond the decease 
 of Christ. So, while Moses and Elias 
 were speaking, there was an intimation of 
 a glory whose existence was bound up with 
 His leaving this life; and this future glory 
 seems to have been suggested by, or at 
 least related to, the glory of that transfig- 
 ured face. The step then taken seemed 
 to involve the necessity of another in the 
 same process. Indeed, Christ clearly rec- 
 ognizes the fact that the disciples need to 
 
 1 Milligan, The Resurrection of our Lord, p. 262. 
 
238 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 have this scene connected in their minds 
 with something which may make it plain. 
 They had heard the conversation about the 
 “ exodus”’ which He was to “ accomplish 
 at Ferusalem.’ But that exodus meant 
 only the death of their Lord to them, as 
 yet. Christ saw their confusion in the 
 words of Peter. Ever conscious, as He 
 wzs, of how an unrelated truth, or an iso- 
 latcd fact, however luminous, deranges 
 rather than continues the mind’s steady 
 advance, He bids silence until the greater 
 truth and fact, to which this is related, 
 shall come to their growing culture. In 
 doing this, He showed that that glory be- 
 yond, of which this was such a strong in- 
 timation that Moses and Elias in its light 
 talked about His exodus} rather than His 
 death alone, was the same glory of that 
 coming morning when it should be said at 
 the grave where He was buried: “He zs 
 not here; He is risen.’ “ He charged them 
 
 1 Dr. Westcott on John xii. 32. “The Ufting up in- 
 cludes death and the victory over death.” 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 239 
 
 that they should tell no man what things 
 they had seen, save when the Son of man 
 should be risen from the dead.” 
 
 Jesus did not attempt to put the trans- 
 figuration out of their thoughts, by telling 
 them to forget it. He might have felt sure 
 that these three chosen ones, who were the 
 recipients of the special culture of that 
 particular friendship, would not lose their 
 hold on a continuous thread of teaching 
 by this mighty event. Yet He knew that 
 others would; and He must have thought 
 also how even these three, by saying noth- 
 ing about it to others, would attach no is- 
 olated or wondering significance unto it, 
 and might yet, in secret, experience its 
 influence at the very centres of their life. 
 There was an hour beyond in Gethsemane, 
 when they would be alone with Him again ; 
 and there were others on Calvary, where 
 they would need to explore the entire past 
 to find any memory of their Lord which 
 would lend a ray of light to their gloomy 
 souls: then, the private memory of the 
 transfiguration might furnish illumination. 
 
240 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Deeper, however, than any immediate 
 purpose of Jesus was the reason of this 
 charge. It lay in the nature of things, as 
 at that moment things had peculiar illus- 
 tration in the career of Jesus of Nazareth. 
 That wondrous unity of life, to which atten- 
 tion has been called, was disclosing itself 
 again. The life of Jesus was one process 
 of divine self-manifestation. His transfig- 
 uration marks one of its stages ; His resur- 
 rection marks another. The same latent 
 power which made His face shine at Her- 
 mon carried His body at a later day 
 through the broken sepulchre and past the 
 Roman guard. In one, Christ’s “ power” 
 was manifested as “glory;” in the other, 
 His “glory” was manifested as “ power.” 
 Jesus is “declared to be the Son of God with 
 power, according to the spirit of holiness 
 by the resurrection from the dead.’1 The 
 resurrection was the gleaming fact which 
 shone through His death with such trans- 
 figuring glory as to give Moses and Elias, 
 
 1 Romans i. 4. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 241 
 
 whose bodies of resurrection were seen in 
 the light of Christ’s transfiguration, not 
 death as their theme, but the exodus, — of 
 whose glory they could see a prophecy in 
 that glowing face. It needs only to look 
 into the crucifixion, as the event where 
 Christ, by His blood, gave His life to the 
 world, to see the relation of the transfigura- 
 tion to the resurrection of Christ, at the 
 most decisive moment of His career. So 
 clear and so involved with other phases of 
 the gospel ?is this, that Delitzsch, speaking 
 on the “d/ood” and its symbolism, says: 
 “ As far as concerns the presentation of the 
 blood, the Rzsex One has brought before 
 God, His Father, in the vessel of His body, 
 transfigured yet identical with what it had 
 been when crucified, His blood ¢ransfig- 
 ured, yet identical with what it had been 
 when shed, and this high-priestly self-pre- 
 sentation of the Redeemer is become the 
 eternally effective settlement of our eter- 
 nal Redemption.” 2 
 
 1 Steinmeyer, Passion and Resurrection History, p. 254. 
 2 Hebr. Brief, p. 393, quoted by Professor Milligan. 
 
242 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 In this mention of the resurrection to 
 His disciples, as they came away with 
 Him from the mountain-summit, there is 
 the most satisfying evidence that the 
 transfiguration had done its work of in- 
 spiration and assurance upon His sad spir- 
 it. He now saw through death to victory, 
 so clearly that ever after He would have 
 His disciples think of this recent event in 
 the light of another event yet more glori- 
 ous. A mightier certainty of being filled 
 with Omnipotence possessed the outcast 
 Galilean. It was a certainty so instructive 
 to Him that He would have His disciples 
 cherish it for their dark hours. In its 
 illumination, there stretched fronr His 
 weary feet a pathway through the grave of 
 Joseph of Arimathea; and the moment of 
 transfiguration and that of resurrection be- 
 came unto Him the two points in time 
 where the divine Omnipotence and glory 
 should be remembered to have been irre- 
 sistible. 
 
 There were, thus, in these two events, 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 243 
 
 a relationship of power and a relationship 
 of glory. In dealing with the transfigura- 
 tion alone, noting how the nearer we come 
 to the divine the more we see the majesty 
 of law and the orderliness of God, we have 
 found that it does not detract from the 
 proper deity of Jesus to behold, in the 
 event of Hermon, how large and vital a 
 condition His personal holiness was to any 
 such scene. However much His holiness 
 —as a personal harmony with the uni- 
 verse, rising as it does into serviceableness 
 unto moral aims and forces — was the con- 
 dition of His transfiguration, we must ad- 
 mit that it was a more thoroughly disci- 
 plined, mature, and therefore resistless 
 force, when the day of gloom came over the 
 newly occupied tomb of Joseph. Indeed, 
 in a text already quoted, there is contained 
 a direct presentation of the fact that the 
 power of holiness, either by its grasp upon 
 the laws unseen through an aim that in- 
 cluded their ministries, or by its being in 
 itself the Love itself whose order they 
 
244 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 were, and which gathered them all into the 
 highest and most inclusive law that could 
 be, — the law of life through death, — did 
 prove its necessary supremacy and mani- 
 fest its natural energy in that open grave. 
 Jesus is “declared to be the Son of God 
 
 with power.’ According to what? “ Ac- 
 cording to the spirit of holiness.” By what? 
 “ By the resurrection from the dead.” 
 
 It is certain that only the attitude and 
 feeling of holiness, on the part of man, can 
 serve as the condition of sovereignty over 
 nature. Every day the chemist, in his per- 
 sonal alliance with a natural order, sees, 
 inside of that order, the operation of one 
 law issue forth into another, at the touch 
 of a personal force. Nothing but deepest 
 “holiness” toward nature can at all see how 
 “the old order,” in a test-tube, “changeth, 
 giving place to new.” These changing 
 “orders,” one circle breaking into another, 
 seem to break, in our time, into a circle the 
 segments of whose circumference are being 
 seen, — the law of life out of death or by 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 245 
 
 means of death. As man becomes more 
 God-like, he is touching laws that break into 
 this law. Put into the tomb of Joseph the 
 Holiness by which the worlds which man 
 studies in test-tube and spectroscope were 
 ~made, the Personal Order of the universe 
 itself, the Logos, the universal dynamic, and 
 what could be more natural than the resur- 
 rection, — than that Life should break forth 
 out of death? The Holiness which per- 
 mitted death shall then have justified its 
 permission, for ever after it is the servant 
 of life; and the resurrection of Jesus 
 comes to be what it is assumed to be in 
 the Bible, the utterance of the most in- 
 clusive law of God, the all-embracing and 
 unifying fact of the universe. 
 
 On the resurrection of Christ our cos- 
 mology must stand; as on Christ Himself, 
 the Zogos, must stand all anthropology and 
 theology. The resurrection of the Christ of 
 God is that all-inclusive manifestation of the 
 Logos, which, in the beginning, moved in 
 chaos toward a cosmos, and which, at last, 
 
246 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 through that manifestation, abolishes the 
 primeval discord of Life and Death, thus 
 giving man his (Cosmos-Logos) cosmology. 
 
 It is thus plain that the church must 
 stand where her Founder placed her, upon 
 an event inclusive of al] that concerns 
 man. Our gospel is, because of these 
 facts, “the gospel of the Resurrection.” 
 Christ is “che way, the truth, and the life ;” 
 but the Zzfe speaks its largest word when 
 it says: “J am the Resurrection and the 
 Life.” “ Because J live, ye shall live 
 also,’ said He who is the Resurrection. 
 “Tf Christ be not risen, then is our faith 
 vain and our preaching vain.”* It is the 
 fact which girds the universe of the seen 
 with the reality and authority of the un- 
 seen. It is the proof of that divine order 
 which is inclusive of our own system; and 
 by that event God pledges “ the restitution 
 of all things.” * “ Repent ye,” said Peter, 
 “that He may send the Christ who hath 
 
 1 John xi. 25. 2 John xiv. 19. 
 8 y Cor. xv. 14. 4 Acts iii. 21. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 247 
 
 been appointed for you, even Fesus: whom 
 the heaven must receive until the times of 
 restoration of all things.’ 1 Into this 
 event, every other in the life of Christ and 
 every event in the life of man must go 
 for their full significance. 
 
 The transfiguration of Christ had pecul- 
 iar characteristics, besides this, which 
 would relate it to the resurrection. Yet 
 they all depend upon the fact that the 
 Logos in the transfiguration had just inti- 
 mated the native mastery which He had, 
 and the supreme relation which He held 
 to the universe, or that Christ had by per- 
 sonal holiness utterly yielded in the res- 
 urrection to the power which for an hour 
 glorified Him in the transfiguration. Yet 
 that power was He, — “J and my Father 
 are one.’* The resurrection completed the 
 transfiguration. What was partially seen 
 by those three on Hermon was seen more 
 fully by Mary and the other women,’ by 
 
 1 Acts iii. 21. 2 John x. 30. 
 8 Luke xxiv. 10, 
 
248 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Peter,! by the disciples on the road to Em- 
 maus,? by the ten troubled ones,’ by the 
 doubting Thomas,‘ by the seven near the 
 sea of Galilee,® by “more than five hun- 
 dred’’ and by James,® by the triumph of 
 Ascension,’ and by a saving appearance to 
 an intolerant foe who journeyed toward 
 Damascus. He had been ‘¢ransfigured ; 
 He was now transformed. Never again 
 was that flesh and blood, sprung from the 
 life of the tribe of Judah, to lose a ray of 
 its fully achieved excellence. 
 
 So contemporaneous were the truth and 
 character of Christ in their steps of growth 
 — that is, such a unit was His life — that 
 the transfiguration marked one of the 
 stages of the transformation which became 
 complete at His resurrection. His physi- 
 cal life was up with His spirit to the height 
 of His personal holiness. As He came 
 nearer the cross, and, at last, as we have 
 
 1 Luke xxiv. ro. 2 Luke xxiv. 13-16, 
 8 Luke xxiv. 46. 4 John xx. 27. 
 § John xxi. 2. 6 1 Cor. xv. 6, 7. 
 
 7 Acts i. 9. 8 Acts ix. 5. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 249 
 
 seen, at the crucifixion so identified Him- 
 self with the Supreme Holiness, His whole 
 self was so pervaded with the infinite, that, 
 a little later, Jesus was “ declared the Son 
 of God with power, according to the spirit 
 of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead.” 
 
 Never do the apostles, at the decisive 
 moments in their ministry, so speak of the 
 resurrection as to break away from this 
 suggestive characteristic which it has with 
 the earlier event of Hermon. The first in 
 the order of Christ’s life seems to be where 
 the nascent power of the Christ manifested 
 itself as glory; the second where the ma- 
 turer glory of Christ manifested itself as 
 power. At the transfiguration, there stood 
 one beholding the glory and hearing the 
 charge to tell no man of this event until 
 the resurrection. Peter seems to have 
 caught the meaning which Christ had, 
 when, forty days after the crucifixion, he 
 tries to make clear to his hearers what the 
 power was in the day of Pentecost. “He 
 had shed forth this, which we both see and 
 
250 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 hear.” Something, which was forgotten at 
 the hour of the denial, had given Peter a 
 conception of the Christ as the Omnipo- 
 tence of history. As he proceeded, he 
 spoke of Him as the One “whom God 
 hath raised up, having loosed the pains of 
 death, because it was not possible that He 
 should be holden of it.’ As His face 
 glowed with the “ glory” which He had 
 with the Father before the world was, so 
 He rose with the “power” that was the 
 Son’s when the worlds were created. As 
 on the mountain there was no arbitrary 
 fracture of a lesser law in whose jurisdic- 
 tion Christ had been walking, but rather 
 there was a natural issuing of the less into 
 the greater, so, at the grave of Joseph, 
 God did not loose the pains of death by 
 breaking the laws of death’s ministry and 
 realm, but, because death is the servant of 
 life throughout the universe, God — the 
 Order Himself, because, at last, He isa Law 
 unto Himself — “ loosed the pains of death, 
 
 1 Rom. vi. 4; 1 Cor. vi. 14. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 251 
 
 because it was not possible that He” — the 
 self-conscious Logos— “should be holden 
 of it.” 
 
 The resurrection of Jesus is a fact of the 
 deepest philosophical significance. Philos- 
 ophy is confessing a “groaning creation.” 
 It is evident that a Logos has been in 
 things from the beginning. The more we 
 study the Christ, in the light of the deeper 
 thinking of our own day, the more we are 
 ready to confess that in Him is “the na- 
 ture of things.” Things seem tending 
 through all the universe to some such fact 
 as the resurrection. Life by means of 
 Death — Death as the servant of Life— 
 are facts appearing on every side. An oc- 
 cult law is touched by the quivering atom 
 and the brain of man, which promises a 
 goal for creation, —a goal which includes 
 not only the transfiguration of matter, 
 but its transformation as well. It is with 
 a grip almost prophetic that materialism 
 will not let the most spiritual scheme for- 
 sake matter. God’s truth does not leave 
 
252 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 itself without a witness in the most be- 
 nighted places.1 The problem of the ma- 
 terial world is not solved in man, noble 
 being that he is, save as man’s life and 
 being have their Hermon and stand by the 
 open grave of a risen Lord. The Word 
 from the beginning, the Logos of the uni- 
 verse, comes there to demonstrate that the 
 seen exists for the unseen, that the spirit- 
 ual will not be submerged in the material, 
 but that matter will be transfigured, and at 
 last transformed, according to the law of 
 resurrection in Christ Jesus. “ Zhe resto- 
 vation of all things,’ mentioned in the 
 speech of Peter, hovers over like a dream 
 which is rapidly being fulfilled in Him who 
 zs not only the “ Resurrection,” but also 
 “ the first-born of all creation.” * With the 
 “new heaven” shall come the “ew earth, 
 wherein dwelleth righteousness.” ® 
 
 The resurrection body of Jesus Christ 
 was His completely transfigured body. It 
 
 1 Biichner, X7a/ft und Stoff, p. 2 (Aufl. 4.) 
 2 Col. i. 15. 8 2 Peter iii. 13, 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 253 
 
 was no longer the body of His humiliation, 
 but the body of His glory. Looking from 
 the isle of Patmos, John seems not to have 
 forgotten the glorious face of the transfig- 
 uration, nor the promise that lay in the re- 
 quest of Jesus to be silent until the resur- 
 rection ; for, beholding his risen Lord, he 
 says: “And His countenance was as the 
 Sun shineth in His strength.’1 In His as- 
 cended life, the transfiguration was entire. 
 
 These considerations will help us to un- 
 derstand the communication of power and 
 glory, in transfiguring and resurrection 
 power, to His present “ dody,” the church 
 of Christ. We have no reason, with these 
 considerations, to grasp with less earnest 
 hand the faith of ages in the resurrection 
 of the body. And, in these studies, we 
 may be able to see not only the spiritual 
 transfiguration and resurrection, which go 
 on in the soul of the believer, but also we 
 may have some vision of the glory to come, 
 when “He shall change our humble body 
 
 1 Revelation x. 1. 
 
254 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 that it may be fashioned like unto His own 
 glorious body.’1 The body of Christ’s 
 glory is “ the firstfruits” of a resurrection 
 which believers shall have in Christ. “ Be- 
 cause He lives, we shall live also.” He 
 that has righteousness has that which be- 
 gins in, and is vouchsafed unto him through 
 the righteousness of Christ; so also he 
 that shall be raised again at the last day 
 shall be raised by “ the power of His resur- 
 rection.” When Paul writes to the Philip- 
 pians of the yearning of his soul, he con- 
 fesses the aspiration “¢hat I may know 
 Him and the power of His resurrection.” * 
 Christ Himself, who is “the resurrection,” 
 “formed within,” is “the hope of glory,’ 
 a glory which first appears on life’s moun- 
 tains in transfiguration of soul and body, 
 and afterwards appears at life’s graves in 
 resurrection of soul and body. 
 
 Enough has been quoted from the New 
 Testament to show that, first, “the power 
 of His resurrection” is the power of His 
 
 1 Phil. iii. 21. 3 Phil. iii. 10, 8 Col. i. 17. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 255 
 
 transfiguration ; and, secondly, that there is 
 a glimpse of the resurrection body in the 
 transfiguration of Christ. Our body is 
 “sown a natural body.’+ Into our life 
 Christ comes; and it is transfigured with 
 the glory of the transfigured One. This 
 process of spiritualization goes on. The 
 body is holy. It becomes the temple of 
 God. Death comes, and we are His still. 
 The body is raised with the ower of the 
 risen One. From the time we accept Jesus 
 Christ, “our citizenship 1s in heaven, from 
 whence alsowe wait for the Saviour, the 
 Lord Fesus Christ, who shall fashion anew 
 the body of our humiliation that tt may be 
 conformed to the body of His glory” —a 
 glory which flashed out at Hermon and 
 was supreme at the tomb, — “ according to 
 the mighty working whereby He ts able to 
 subdue all things unto Himself’? That 
 mighty working had its genesis in Love di- 
 vine. It set the incarnation side by side 
 with the creation. As a process, it is the 
 
 1 1 Cor. xv. 44 2 Phil. iii. 20. 
 
256 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 work of Redemption, —a work whose ad- 
 vancing triumph was signalized in the 
 transfiguration of Christ, whose future was 
 proved secure in the resurrection of Jesus 
 Christ, and whose culminating victory is the 
 “adoption” for which “we wait:” “to wit, 
 the redemption of the body.” Then, adds 
 the seer, when the body of man is re- 
 deemed, — because it is nature’s “ micro- 
 cosm, the summing up of worlds,” — “ the 
 creation shall be delivered from the bondage 
 of corruption”? —that is, the law of death 
 shall yield to the law of life — “ unto the 
 glorious liberty of the sons of God.” 
 
 Our resurrection body will come from 
 the complete transfiguration of our whole 
 life. As the resurrection body of Christ, 
 by a complete transfiguration, was trans- 
 formed, so by the same process of grace 
 through Him our bodies shall “de con- 
 formed to the body of His glory.” This 
 process of grace involves the means of 
 Christ’s glorification, as the end it seeks 
 
 1 Romans viii. 23. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 257 
 
 involves a glory like His own. “ We are 
 always bearing about in the body the dying 
 of the Lord Fesus.’ The willing anticipa- 
 tion of that “dying” led Him to the trans- 
 figuration, and the fact led to the resurrec- 
 tion, “that the life also of Fesus might be 
 manifested in our mortal flesh.”’1 Every 
 true disciple says, “ Becoming conformed 
 unto Hrs death, of by any means I may at- 
 tain unto the resurrection from the dead.” * 
 In these words, we have the central truth 
 of our resurrection. It touches the cir- 
 cumference by many radii; and the deeper 
 the study given to them the more truly do 
 the truths of transfiguration and resurrec- 
 tion in Christ become one in doctrine and 
 life. 
 
 “Being made conformable unto His 
 death” (@dvaros not éodos), or “ knowing 
 the fellowship of His sufferings,’ carries the 
 duty of “bearing about in the body the 
 dying of the Lord Fesus.” But that very 
 burden, in the soul of Christ, led Him 
 
 1 2 Cor. iv. 10, 2 Phil. iii. 10. 
 
258 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 upon Hermon and transfigured Him, “ that 
 the life also of the Lord Fesus might be 
 manifested,” first in transfiguration, then 
 in resurrection, “zz our mortal flesh.” 
 This is the predestinated fortune of the 
 saved humanity which is in Christ Jesus. 
 For Paul, writing to the Romans, indicates 
 how the transfiguration and resurrection 
 lie in the track of the humanity which 
 thus follows Him, when he says: “ For 
 whom He did foreknow, He did also pre- 
 destinate to be conformed to the tmage of 
 Hts son, that He might be the first-born” 
 “among many brethren.” 1 The conforma- 
 tion unto His death precedes the confor- 
 mation unto His image ; that is, the trans- 
 formation. Paul goes on to explain the 
 process of grace: “ Moreover, whom He 
 did predestinate, them also He called: and 
 whom He called, them also He justified: 
 and whom He justified, them also He glo- 
 vified.” But, as we have seen, in the 
 words “ becoming conformed unto fits 
 
 1 Beet on Romans ix. 21. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 259 
 
 death, of by any means I might attain to 
 the resurrection of the dead,” that confor- 
 mation has its end only in the glorification, 
 not of transfiguration, but of “ vesurrection 
 from the dead.” The death (@dvaros) be- 
 comes glorious departure (é0d0s) at the 
 mount of transfiguration, both in Christ’s 
 life and our own. For in that hour of 
 glory the body has the pledge of its “7e- 
 demption.” “Conformed unto His death,” 
 we are, at last, conformed unto His image, 
 and the transfiguration of Hermon issues 
 forth into the transformation of Joseph’s 
 sepulchre.! 
 
 1 The suggestive note of Professor Milligan may be 
 quoted here, though by no means because we agree en- 
 tirely with his position: “ By da mv. aiwy., Delitzsch 
 says, ‘I understand the whole Divine human, but more 
 particularly the Divine inward, being of Christ, that 
 Divine personality which at the Resurrection interpen- 
 etrated, and, as it were, absorbed, the oapé, so that He 
 now is altogether zvevya.’ We,” says Professor Milligan, 
 “understand the 7vedua spoken of in them to be a short 
 description of that mode of existence upon which our 
 
 Lord entered after His resurrection. On earth His 
 state could not be so described, ‘the Word became flesh’ 
 
260 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Thus must our studies, begun on Her- 
 mon, end where all human thought and life 
 
 (John i. 14). He was then subject to all the weaknesses 
 and limitations of the flesh. The veda was no doubt 
 the foundation of His being even then, but in His great 
 act of self-denial and self-sacrifice, He had taken into 
 union with it our flesh. That flesh He had to interpen- 
 etrate and to ¢ransfigure by its power, completing the work 
 of His doing so at the Resurrection. He then entered 
 on the full condition of zveidya, in which He had existed 
 before all time, but with this change: that transfigured 
 human nature was now a part of His Being or mode of 
 existence. And thus it is that He affects our redemp- 
 tion from the power of the oapé. By that faith, which is 
 communion with Him, we are made partakers of His 
 mvevya, and are thus gradually raised more and more 
 above the limitations and sufferings of our natural con- 
 dition. The work in us, however, is not completed here. 
 The ‘spirit’ of Christ has first to take full possession 
 of our spirits, and then, at the resurrection, to effect 
 that work upon our bodies which was effected on Christ’s 
 body at His Resurrection. ‘But if the spirit of Him 
 that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead dwelleth 
 in you, He that raised up Christ Jesus from the dead 
 shall quicken also your mortal bodies, because of His 
 spirit that dwelleth in you’ (Romans viii. 12).” Zhe 
 Resurrection of our Lord, p. 249. 
 
 It is quite noticeable that so incisive a thinker should 
 have used the words which we have italicized, and yet 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 261 
 
 under Divine grace ever shall joyfully con- 
 clude its task, with a Risen Christ and a 
 Redeemed Humanity. It has grown in- 
 creasingly evident, in these hours which 
 we ‘have spent on Hermon, that the des- 
 tiny of man and the universe is in the 
 Christ; that it lies yet in the hands 
 which held it at the beginning, — in the 
 “Logos.” The Transfiguration of “ che 
 Word made fiesh” was the visible sign 
 that the unity of the universe, finite and 
 infinite, matter and mind, man and God, 
 was secure in Him. But this sign became 
 
 failed to find in the transfiguration, with which Jesus 
 connects His resurrection, the most significant expla- 
 nation of a process which was going on in Christ, as it 
 must be in His follower, and which declared itself there 
 as a process to be understood in its goal, the resurrec- 
 tion of Christ. 
 
 The remarkable volume of Professor Westcott, 7he 
 Gospel of the Resurrection, says of the resurrection that 
 “it issues in the ascension, for which it is the prepa- 
 ration and condition,” and adds, “It is not the putting 
 off of the body, but the transfiguration of it,” without 
 seeming to find in the transfiguration of Jesus any 
 special relationship unto it. Page 157. 
 
262 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 demonstration, when the Transfigured be- 
 came the Transformed, and the Transfig- 
 urer of humanity stood forth its Trans- 
 former. 
 
 All that Christ was is ours. We live in 
 Him and through Him. Our halting faith 
 waits in the valleys of humiliation ; He 
 points a significant finger to the heights of 
 glory, and says, “ Follow me.” When the 
 flash dazzles us, and the scene bewilders 
 our souls yet half-asleep, we grow faith- 
 less; yet we must follow. Our faith in 
 ourselves is astonished, when He says to 
 His Father: “ The glory which Thou hast 
 given unto Me,I have given unto them.” + 
 Life is transfigured. But he who receives 
 the Transfigured and Transfiguring Christ 
 has within him a force that never rests. 
 “Christ” is “formed within, the hope of 
 glory.” There is something beyond. A 
 process is going on that includes the des- 
 tinies of soul and body. John, remember- 
 ing, perhaps, the transfiguration and its 
 
 1 John xvii. 22. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 263 
 
 prophecy of the resurrection, understood 
 it, when he said : “ Beloved, now are we the 
 sons of God; and it doth not yet appear 
 what we shall be: but we know that, when 
 He shall appear we shall be like Him; for 
 [the reason that] we shall see Him as 
 He is.” “ And,’ he adds, as though to 
 strengthen the statement, “ every man 
 that hath this hope purifieth himself, even 
 as He ts pure.” 1 Then, His future is ours ; 
 and from the Transfiguration we move on 
 to the Resurrection, — two stages of prog- 
 ress, “from glory unto glory.’ We shall 
 be growing more and more like Him, as 
 we look with half-views and through clouds, 
 until, finally, from this process of trans- 
 formation, through being “ conformed unto 
 His death,’ we shall emerge ‘‘conformed 
 unto His image,’ having “ attained the res- 
 urvection from the dead.’ “We all with 
 wnvetled face, beholding, asin a mirror, the 
 glory of the Lord, are transformed into the 
 same image, from glory unto glory.” * 
 
 1 John iii. 2, 3. 2 2 Cor. iii. 18. 
 
264 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 So, from Hermon, the soul cries, “ Death 
 ts swallowed up in victory. O death, where 
 7s thy sting? O grave, where is thy vic- 
 tory ?”1 Moses and Elias, to whom even 
 immortality may have been, only a vague 
 dream,” could not speak of the death of 
 Christ, as they saw His body quivering 
 with the latent power of His resurrection, 
 and as there they felt the freedom of their 
 own celestial bodies,? save as that death 
 issued forth into His resurrection and as- 
 cension (@dvaros into éo80s), And a trans- 
 figured Christ is not enough for His peo- 
 ple. He must bea Risen Saviour. His 
 glory must become power in our souls. 
 What ¢ransfigured Him to Peter on the 
 mountain transformed Him to Peter at the 
 grave of Joseph. After the crucifixion 
 we can determine what Christ really was 
 to Peter only by his despair. He had lost 
 even the Transfigured Christ, as any soul 
 
 2h Con xv.iG5. 
 2 Perowne, /mmortality, p. 173. 
 8 Delitzsch, Psychology, pp. 427, 499. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 265 
 
 in woe will soon cease to admire a Christ 
 who, to its admiring wonder, only sur- 
 passes the laws and prophecies of the hu- 
 man soul. We see it all in our own ex- 
 periences. Broken-hearted and fearful, 
 Peter’s denial seems to him not so far 
 wrong, after all. All have fled from the 
 cross in hopelessness and darkness. Three 
 days elapse, and the once transfigured 
 Christ is transformed. He has risen from 
 the dead. These illiterate fishermen are 
 transformed, also. They are eloquent, 
 now, with the name of Christ. “Three 
 times did Peter deny Him; three times 
 does he confess Him.” Stephen comes. 
 The line of Christian martyrs is founded. 
 Soon James, the beholder of the transfig- 
 uration, is so transformed into a hero that 
 He leads the company of Christian heroes. 
 It is no longer a gospel of Incarnation, or 
 Transfiguration, but “he gospel of the Res- 
 urrection.’ Peter stands before all Israel, 
 saying: “ The God of Abraham, and of 
 Isaac, and of Facob, hath glorified His Son 
 
266 The Transfiguration of Christ. 
 
 Fesus.’ 1 Now the glorification of Hermon 
 is complete. “ Christ” is “ formed within 
 the hope of glory.” 
 
 We must not linger longer in the splen- 
 dor of this scene. The world calls from the 
 mountain’s base. The vision must be left 
 in the memory; the next duty must be 
 taken up. Not to teach us that the world 
 of the ideal and the world of the real are 
 two worlds, but that they are one, and that 
 the glory of God and the good of man are 
 one, is this chapter in the life of Christ 
 given unto us. Raphael is its most suc- 
 cessful expositor. In that study, which he 
 could not complete,—the most admired 
 painting in the world, —not only the 
 mountain height appears, radiant with 
 celestial splendor and visited by heavenly 
 spirits, but the base also, where human fail- 
 ure and triumphant evil cry out in a pit- 
 eous prayer and a maniac’s shriek. It is 
 the picture of the Christian life. Not for 
 an instant does Jesus stand bewildered be- 
 
 1 Acts iii. 13. 
 
The Transfiguration and Resurrection. 267 
 
 tween the vision of God and the need of 
 man. He, to whose immortal sight came 
 Moses and Elias, confronts the victorious 
 Satan, and with the same voice which had 
 just spoken with the heavenly visitants of 
 His coming glory does He banish the 
 Evil One from the suffering child. In the 
 joy of that moment, the human soul will 
 ever see how the ideal and real are one; 
 and how in that miracle the transfiguration 
 of Jesus went out into the life of man- 
 kind. 
 “<«Hadst thou stayed I must have fled :? 
 This is what the Vision said. ”1 
 
 1 The “Theologian’s Tale,” in Zales of a Wayside 
 Inn. Longfellow. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 2 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 
 

 
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