_But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the
Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by
the spirit of the Lord_.--II. Corinthians iii. 18.
We may see from this passage how the apostle Paul received the Lord,
and how he understands his life to be the light of men, and so their
life also.
Of all writers I know, Paul seems to me the most plainly, the most
determinedly practical in his writing. What has been called his
mysticism is at one time the exercise of a power of seeing, as by
spiritual refraction, truths that had not, perhaps have not yet, risen
above the human horizon; at another, the result of a wide-eyed habit of
noting the analogies and correspondences between the concentric regions
of creation; it is the working of a poetic imagination divinely alive,
whose part is to foresee and welcome approaching truth; to discover the
same principle in things that look unlike; to embody things discovered,
in forms and symbols heretofore unused, and so present to other minds
the deeper truths to which those forms and symbols owe their being.
I find in Paul's writing the same artistic fault, with the same
resulting difficulty, that I find in Shakspere's--a fault that, in each
case, springs from the admirable fact that the man is much more than
the artist--the fault of trying to say too much at once, of pouring out
stintless the plethora of a soul swelling with life and its thought,
through the too narrow neck of human utterance. Thence it comes that we
are at times bewildered between two or more meanings, equally good in
themselves, but perplexing as to the right deduction, as to the line of
the thinker's reasoning. The uncertainty, however, lies always in the
intellectual region, never in the practical. What Paul cares about is
plain enough to the true heart, however far from plain to the man whose
desire to understand goes ahead of his obedience, who starts with the
notion that Paul's design was to teach a system, to explain instead of
help to see God, a God that can be revealed only to childlike insight,
never to keenest intellect. The energy of the apostle, like that of his
master, went forth to rouse men to seek the kingdom of God over them,
his righteousness in them; to dismiss the lust of possession and
passing pleasure; to look upon the glory of the God and Father, and
turn to him from all that he hates; to recognize the brotherhood of
men, and the hideousness of what is unfair, unloving, and
self-exalting. His design was not to teach any plan of salvation other
than obedience to the Lord of Life. He knew nothing of the so-called
Christian systems that change the glory of the perfect God into the
likeness of the low intellects and dull consciences of men--a worse
corruption than the representing of him in human shape. What kind of
soul is it that would not choose the Apollo of light, the high-walking
Hyperion, to the notion of the dull, self-cherishing monarch, the
law-dispensing magistrate, or the cruel martinet, generated in the
pagan arrogance of Rome, and accepted by the world in the church as the
portrait of its God! Jesus Christ is the _only_ likeness of the living
Father.
Let us see then what Paul teaches us in this passage about the life
which is the light of men. It is his form of bringing to bear upon men
the truth announced by John.
When Moses came out from speaking with God, his face was radiant; its
shining was a wonder to the people, and a power upon them. But the
radiance began at once to diminish and die away, as was natural, for it
was not indigenous in Moses. Therefore Moses put a veil upon his face
that they might not see it fade. As to whether this was right or wise,
opinion may differ: it is not my business to discuss the question. When
he went again into the tabernacle, he took off his veil, talked with
God with open face, and again put on the veil when he came out. Paul
says that the veil which obscured the face of Moses lies now upon the
hearts of the Jews, so that they cannot understand him, but that when
they turn to the Lord, go into the tabernacle with Moses, the veil
shall be taken away, and they shall see God. Then will they understand
that the glory is indeed faded upon the face of Moses, but by reason of
the glory that excelleth, the glory of Jesus that overshines it. Here,
after all, I can hardly help asking--Would not Moses have done better
to let them see that the glory of their leader was altogether dependent
on the glory within the veil, whither they were not worthy to enter?
Did that veil hide Moses's face only? Did he not, however
unintentionally, lay it on their hearts? Did it not cling there, and
help to hide God from them, so that they could not perceive that the
greater than Moses was come, and stormed at the idea that the glory of
their prophet must yield? Might not the absence of that veil from his
face have left them a little more able to realize that his glory was a
glory that must pass, a glory whose glory was that it prepared the way
for a glory that must extinguish it? Moses had put the veil for ever
from his face, but they clutched it to their hearts, and it blinded
them--admirable symbol of the wilful blindness of old Mosaist or modern
Wesleyan, admitting no light that his Moses or his Wesley did not see,
and thus losing what of the light he saw and reflected.
Paul says that the sight of the Lord will take that veil from their
hearts. His light will burn it away. His presence gives liberty. Where
he is, there is no more heaviness, no more bondage, no more wilderness
or Mount Sinai. The Son makes free with sonship.
And now comes the passage whose import I desire to make more clear:
'But we all,' having this presence and this liberty, 'with open face
beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the
same image,' that of the Lord, 'from glory to glory, even as of the
Lord, the spirit.'
'We need no Moses, no earthly mediator, to come between us and the
light, and bring out for us a little of the glory. We go into the
presence of the Son revealing the Father--into the presence of the
Light of men. Our mediator is the Lord himself, the spirit of light, a
mediator not sent by us to God to bring back his will, but come from
God to bring us himself. We enter, like Moses, into the presence of the
visible, radiant God--only how much more visible, more radiant! As
Moses stood with uncovered face receiving the glory of God full upon
it, so with open, with uncovered face, full in the light of the glory
of God, in the place of his presence, stand we--you and I, Corinthians.
It is no reflected light we see, but the glory of God shining _in_,
shining out of, shining in and from the face of Christ, the glory of
the Father, one with the Son. Israel saw but the fading reflection of
the glory of God on the face of Moses; we see the glory itself in the
face of Jesus.'
But in what follows, it seems to me that the revised version misses the
meaning almost as much as the authorized, when, instead of 'beholding
as in a glass,' it gives 'reflecting as a mirror.' The former is wrong;
the latter is far from right. The idea, with the figure, is that of a
poet, not a man of science. The poet deals with the outer show of
things, which outer show is infinitely deeper in its relation to truth,
as well as more practically useful, than the analysis of the man of
science. Paul never thought of the mirror as reflecting, as throwing
back the rays of light from its surface; he thought of it as receiving,
taking into itself, the things presented to it--here, as filling its
bosom with the glory it looks upon. When I see the face of my friend in
a mirror, the mirror seems to hold it in itself, to surround the visage
with its liquid embrace. The countenance is _there_--down there in the
depth of the mirror. True, it shines radiant out of it, but it is not
the shining out of it that Paul has in his thought; it is the fact--the
_visual_ fact, which, according to Wordsworth, the poet always
seizes--of the mirror holding in it the face.
That this is the way poet or prophet--Paul was both--would think of the
thing, especially in the age of the apostle, I shall be able to make
appear even more probable by directing your notice to the following
passage from Dante--whose time, though so much farther from that of the
apostle than our time from Dante's, was in many respects much liker
Paul's than ours.
The passage is this:--Dell' Inferno: Canto xxiii. 25-27:
E quei: 'S'io fossi d'impiombato vetro,
L'immagine di fuor tua non trarrei
Piu tosto a me, che quella dentro impetro.'
Here Virgil, with reference to the power he had of reading the thoughts
of his companion, says to Dante:
'If I were of leaded glass,'--meaning, 'If I were glass covered at the
back with lead, so that I was a mirror,'--'I should not draw thy
outward image to me more readily than I gain thy inner one;'--meaning,
'than now I know your thoughts.'
It seems, then, to me, that the true simple word to represent the
Greek, and the most literal as well by which to translate it, is the
verb _mirror_--when the sentence, so far, would run thus: 'But we all,
with unveiled face, mirroring the glory of the Lord,--.'
I must now go on to unfold the idea at work in the heart of the
apostle. For the mere correctness of a translation is nothing, except
it bring us something deeper, or at least some fresher insight: with
him who cares for the words apart from what the writer meant them to
convey, I have nothing to do: he must cease to 'pass for a man' and
begin to be a man indeed, on the way to be a live soul, before I can
desire his intercourse. The prophet-apostle seems to me, then, to say,
'We all, with clear vision of the Lord, mirroring in our hearts his
glory, even as a mirror would take into itself his face, are thereby
changed into his likeness, his glory working our glory, by the present
power, in our inmost being, of the Lord, the spirit.' Our mirroring of
Christ, then, is one with the presence of his spirit in us. The idea,
you see, is not the reflection, the radiating of the light of Christ on
others, though that were a figure lawful enough; but the taking into,
and having in us, him working to the changing of us.
That the thing signified transcends the sign, outreaches the figure, is
no discovery; the thing figured always belongs to a higher stratum, to
which the simile serves but as a ladder; when the climber has reached
it, 'he then unto the ladder turns his back.' It is but according to
the law of symbol, that the thing symbolized by the mirror should have
properties far beyond those of leaded glass or polished metal, seeing
it is a live soul understanding that which it takes into its
deeps--holding it, and conscious of what it holds. It mirrors by its
will to hold in its mirror. Unlike its symbol, it can hold not merely
the outward visual resemblance, but the inward likeness of the person
revealed by it; it is open to the influences of that which it embraces,
and is capable of active co-operation with them: the mirror and the
thing mirrored are of one origin and nature, and in closest relation to
each other. Paul's idea is, that when we take into our understanding,
our heart, our conscience, our being, the glory of God, namely Jesus
Christ as he shows himself to our eyes, our hearts, our consciences, he
works upon us, and will keep working, till we are changed to the very
likeness we have thus mirrored in us; for with his likeness he comes
himself, and dwells in us. He will work until the same likeness is
wrought out and perfected in us, the image, namely, of the humanity of
God, in which image we were made at first, but which could never be
developed in us except by the indwelling of the perfect likeness. By
the power of Christ thus received and at home in us, we are
changed--the glory in him becoming glory in us, his glory changing us
to glory.
But we must beware of receiving this or any symbol _after the flesh_,
beware of interpreting it in any fashion that partakes of the character
of the mere physical, psychical, or spirituo-mechanical. The symbol
deals with things far beyond the deepest region whence symbols can be
drawn. The indwelling of Jesus in the soul of man, who shall declare!
But let us note this, that the dwelling of Jesus in us is the power of
the spirit of God upon us; for 'the Lord is that spirit,' and that Lord
dwelling in us, we are changed 'even as from the Lord the spirit.' When
we think Christ, Christ comes; when we receive his image into our
spiritual mirror, he enters with it. Our thought is not cut off from
his. Our open receiving thought is his door to come in. When our hearts
turn to him, that is opening the door to him, that is holding up our
mirror to him; then he comes in, not by our thought only, not in our
idea only, but he comes himself, and of his own will--comes in as we
could not take him, but as he can come and we receive him--enabled to
receive by his very coming the one welcome guest of the whole universe.
Thus the Lord, the spirit, becomes the soul of our souls, becomes
spiritually what he always was creatively; and as our spirit informs,
gives shape to our bodies, in like manner his soul informs, gives shape
to our souls. In this there is nothing unnatural, nothing at conflict
with our being. It is but that the deeper soul that willed and wills
our souls, rises up, the infinite Life, into the Self we call _I_ and
_me_, but which lives immediately from him, and is his very own
property and nature--unspeakably more his than ours: this deeper
creative soul, working on and with his creation upon higher levels,
makes the _I_ and _me_ more and more his, and himself more and more
ours; until at length the glory of our existence flashes upon us, we
face full to the sun that enlightens what it sent forth, and know
ourselves alive with an infinite life, even the life of the Father;
know that our existence is not the moonlight of a mere consciousness of
being, but the sun-glory of a life justified by having become one with
its origin, thinking and feeling with the primal Sun of life, from whom
it was dropped away that it might know and bethink itself, and return
to circle for ever in exultant harmony around him. Then indeed we
_are_; then indeed we have life; the life of Jesus has, through light,
become life in us; the glory of God in the face of Jesus, mirrored in
our hearts, has made us alive; we are one with God for ever and ever.
What less than such a splendour of hope would be worthy the revelation
of Jesus? Filled with the soul of their Father, men shall inherit the
glory of their Father; filled with themselves, they cast him out, and
rot. The company of the Lord, soul to soul, is that which saves with
life, his life of God-devotion, the souls of his brethren. No other
saving can save them. They must receive the Son, and through the Son
the Father. What it cost the Son to get so near to us that we could say
_Come in_, is the story of his life. He stands at the door and knocks,
and when we open to him he comes in, and dwells with us, and we are
transformed to the same image of truth and purity and heavenly
childhood. Where power dwells, there is no force; where the spirit-Lord
is, there is liberty. The Lord Jesus, by free, potent communion with
their inmost being, will change his obedient brethren till in every
thought and impulse they are good like him, unselfish, neighbourly,
brotherly like him, loving the Father perfectly like him, ready to die
for the truth like him, caring like him for nothing in the universe but
the will of God, which is love, harmony, liberty, beauty, and joy.
I do not know if we may call this having life in ourselves; but it is
the waking up, the perfecting in us of the divine life inherited from
our Father in heaven, who made us in his own image, whose nature
remains in us, and makes it the deepest reproach to a man that he has
neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape. He who would
thus live must, as a mirror draws into its bosom an outward glory,
receive into his 'heart of heart' the inward glory of Jesus Christ,
_the Truth_.