that produces a moral change upon him. That he must be susceptible to
that change, that he must be a party to it, goes without saying; but
that neither his aptitude nor his will can produce it, is equally
certain.
Obvious as it ought to seem, this may be to some an almost startling
revelation. The change we have been striving after is not to be
produced by any more striving. It is to be wrought upon us by the
moulding of hands beyond our own. As the branch ascends, and the bud
bursts, and the fruit reddens under the co-operation of influences
from the outside air, so man rises to the higher stature under
invisible pressures from without. The radical defect of all our former
methods of sanctification was the attempt to generate from within that
which can only be wrought upon us from without. According to the first
Law of Motion, every body continues in its state of rest, or of
uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it may be
compelled _by impressed forces_ to change that state. This is also a
first law of Christianity. Every man's character remains as it is, or
continues in the direction in which it is going, until it is compelled
_by impressed forces_ to change that state. Our failure has been the
failure to put ourselves in the way of the impressed forces. There is
a clay, and there is a Potter; we have tried to get the clay to mould
the clay.
Whence, then, these pressures, and where this Potter? The answer of
the formula is--"By reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord we
are changed." But this is not very clear. What is the "glory" of the
Lord, and how can mortal man reflect it, and how can that act as an
"impressed force" in moulding him to a nobler form? The word
"glory"--the word which has to bear the weight of holding those
"impressed forces"--is a stranger in current speech, and our first
duty is to seek out its equivalent in working English. It suggests at
first a radiance of some kind, something dazzling or glittering, some
halo such as the old masters loved to paint round the head of their
Ecce Homos. But that is paint, mere matter, the visible symbol of some
unseen thing. What is that unseen thing? It is that of all unseen
things the most radiant, the most beautiful, the most Divine, and that
is _Character_. On earth, in Heaven, there is nothing so great, so
glorious as this. The word has many meanings; in ethics it can have
but one. Glory is character, and nothing less, and it can be nothing
more. The earth is "full of the glory of the Lord," because it is full
of His character. The "Beauty of the Lord" is character. "The
effulgence of His Glory" is character. "The Glory of the Only
Begotten" is character, the character which is "fullness of grace and
truth." And when God told His people _His name_, He simply gave them
His character, His character which was Himself: "And the Lord
proclaimed the name of the Lord ... the Lord, the Lord God, merciful
and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth."
Glory then is not something intangible, or ghostly, or transcendental.
If it were this, how could Paul ask men to reflect it? Stripped of its
physical enswathement it is Beauty, moral and spiritual Beauty, Beauty
infinitely real, infinitely exalted, yet infinitely near and
infinitely communicable.
With this explanation read over the sentence once more in paraphrase:
We all reflecting as a mirror the character of Christ are transformed
into the same Image from character to character--from a poor character
to a better one, from a better one to a little better still, from that
to one still more complete, until by slow degrees the Perfect Image is
attained. Here