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.
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
these "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 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 for 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