MORALITIES.
76. When people read, "The law came by Moses, but grace and truth by
Christ," do they suppose it means that the law was ungracious and
untrue? The law was given for a foundation; the grace (or mercy) and
truth for fulfilment;--the whole forming one glorious Trinity of
judgment, mercy, and truth.[33] And if people would but read the text
of their Bibles with heartier purpose of understanding it, instead of
superstitiously, they would see that throughout the parts which they
are intended to make most personally their own, (the Psalms,) it is
always the Law which is spoken of with chief joy. The Psalms
respecting mercy are often sorrowful, as in thought of what it cost;
but those respecting the Law are always full of delight. David cannot
contain himself for joy in thinking of it,--he is never weary of its
praise: "How love I Thy law! it is my meditation all the day. Thy
testimonies are my delight and my counsellors; sweeter also than honey
and the honeycomb."
[33] A great deal of the presumption and narrowness caused by my having
been bred in the Evangelical schools, and which now fill me with shame
and distress in re-reading 'Modern Painters,' is, to my present mind,
atoned for by the accurate thinking by which I broke my way through to
the great truth expressed in this passage, which all my later writings,
without exception, have been directed to maintain and illustrate.
77. I suppose there is no event in the whole life of Christ to which,
in hours of doubt or fear, men turn with more anxious thirst to know
the close facts of it, or with more earnest and passionate dwelling
upon every syllable of its recorded narrative, than Christ's showing
Himself to His disciples at the Lake of Galilee. There is something
pre-eminently open, natural, full fronting our disbelief, in this
manifestation. The others, recorded after the resurrection, were
sudden, phantom-like, occurring to men in profound sorrow and wearied
agitation of heart; not, it might seem, safe judges of what they saw.
But the agitation was now over. They had gone back to their daily
work, thinking still their business lay net-wards, unmeshed from the
literal rope and drag. "Simon Peter saith unto them, I go a-fishing.
They say unto him, We also go with thee." True words enough, and
having far echo beyond those Galilean hills. That night they caught
nothing; but when the morning came, in the clear light of it, behold!
a figure stood on the shore. They were not thinking of anything but
their fruitless hauls. They had no guess who it was. It asked them
simply if they had caught anything. They say, No, and it tells them to
cast again. And John shades his eyes from the morning sun with his
hand to look who it is; and though the glistening of the sea, too,
dazzles him, he makes out who it is at last; and poor Simon, not to be
outrun this time, tightens his fisher's coat about him, and dashes in
over the nets. One would have liked to see him swim those hundred
yards, and stagger to his knees upon the beach.
Well, the others get to the beach, too, in time, in such slow way as
men in general do get in this world to its true shore, much impeded by
that wonderful "dragging the net with fishes"; but they get
there--seven of them in all; first the Denier, and then the slowest
believer, and then the quickest believer, and then the two
throne-seekers, and two more, we know not who.
They sit down on the shore, face to face with Him, and eat their
broiled fish as He bids. And then to Peter, all dripping still,
shivering, and amazed, staring at Christ in the sun, on the other side
of the coal-fire,--thinking a little perhaps of what happened by
another coal-fire, when it was colder, and having had no word changed
with him by his Master, since that look of His,--to him so amazed,
comes the question, "Simon, lovest thou Me?" Try to feel that a
little; and think of it till it is true to you: and then take up that
infinite monstrosity and hypocrisy,--Raphael's cartoon of the charge
to Peter. Note first the bold fallacy--the putting _all_ the Apostles
there, a mere lie to serve the Papal heresy of the Petric supremacy,
by putting them all in the background while Peter receives the charge,
and making them all witnesses to it. Note the handsomely curled hair
and neatly tied sandals of the men who had been out all night in the
sea-mists, and on the slimy decks; note their convenient dresses for
going a-fishing, with trains that lie a yard along the ground, and
goodly fringes--all made to match;--an apostolic fishing costume. Note
how Peter especially, (whose chief glory was in his wet coat _girt_
about him, and naked limbs,) is enveloped in folds and fringes, so as
to kneel and hold his keys with grace. No fire of coals at all, nor
lonely mountain shore, but a pleasant Italian landscape, full of
villas and churches, and a flock of sheep to be pointed at; and the
whole group of Apostles, not round Christ, as they would have been
naturally, but straggling away in a line, that they may be shown. The
simple truth is, that the moment we look at the picture we feel our
belief of the whole thing taken away. There is visibly no possibility
of that group even having existed, in any place, or on any occasion.
It is all a mere mythic absurdity, and faded concoction of fringes,
muscular arms, and curly heads of Greek philosophers.
78. Among the children of God, there is always that fearful and bowed
apprehension of His majesty, and that sacred dread of all offence to
Him which is called the Fear of God; yet of real and essential fear
there is not any, but clinging of confidence to Him as their Rock,
Fortress, and Deliverer; and perfect love, and casting out of fear; so
that it is not possible that, while the mind is rightly bent on Him,
there should be dread of anything earthly or supernatural; and the
more dreadful seems the height of His majesty, the less fear they feel
that dwell in the shadow of it. "Of whom shall I be afraid?"
79. If for every rebuke that we utter of men's vices, we put forth a
claim upon their hearts; if for every assertion of God's demands from
them, we could substitute a display of His kindness to them; if side
by side with every warning of death, we could exhibit proofs and
promises of immortality; if, in fine, instead of assuming the being of
an awful Deity, which men, though they cannot, and dare not deny, are
always unwilling, sometimes unable to conceive, we were to show them a
near, visible, inevitable, but all beneficent Deity, whose presence
makes the earth itself a heaven, I think there would be fewer deaf
children sitting in the market-place.
80. If not by sympathy discovered, it is not in words explicable with
what divine lines and light the exercise of godliness and charity will
mould and gild the hardest and coldest countenance, neither to what
darkness their departure will consign the loveliest. For there is not
any virtue the exercise of which, even momentarily, will not impress a
new fairness upon the features.
81. The love of the human race is increased by their individual
differences, and the unity of the creature, made perfect by each
having something to bestow and to receive, bound to the rest by a
thousand various necessities and various gratitudes; humility in each
rejoicing to admire in his fellow that which he finds not in himself,
and each being in some respect the complement of his race.
82. They who are as the angels of God in heaven, yet cannot be
conceived as so assimilated that their different experiences and
affections upon earth shall then be forgotten and effectless: the
child, taken early to his place, cannot be imagined to wear there such
a body, nor to have such thoughts, as the glorified apostle who had
finished his course and kept the faith on earth. And so, whatever
perfections and likeness of love we may attribute to either the tried
or the crowned creatures, there is the difference of the stars in
glory among them yet; differences of original gifts, though not of
occupying till their Lord come; different dispensations of trial and
of trust, of sorrows and support, both in their own inward, variable
hearts, and in their positions of exposure or of peace; of the gourd
shadow and the smiting sun, of calling at heat of day, or eleventh
hour, of the house unroofed by faith, or the clouds opened by
revelation; differences in warning, in mercies, in sickness, in signs,
in time of calling to account; alike only they all are by that which
is not of them, but the gift of God's unchangeable mercy: "I will give
unto this last even as unto thee."
83. The desire of rest planted in the heart is no sensual, no unworthy
one; but a longing for renovation, and for escape from a state whose
every phase is mere preparation for another equally transitory, to one
in which permanence shall have become possible through perfection.
Hence the great call of Christ to men, that call on which St.
Augustine fixed as the essential expression of Christian hope, is
accompanied by the promise of rest; and the death bequest of Christ to
men, is peace.
84. He who has once stood beside the grave, to look back upon the
companionship which has been for ever closed, feeling how impotent,
there, are the wild love, and the keen sorrow, to give one instant's
pleasure to the pulseless heart, or atone in the lowest measure to the
departed spirit, for the hour of unkindness, will scarcely for the
future incur that debt to the heart, which can only be discharged to
the dust. But the lessons which men receive as individuals, they do
not learn as nations. Again and again they have seen their noblest
descend into the grave, and have thought it enough to garland the
tombstone when they had not crowned the brow, and to pay the honour to
the ashes, which they had denied to the spirit. Let it not displease
them that they are bidden, amidst the tumult and the dazzle of their
busy life, to listen for the few voices, and watch for the few lamps,
which God has toned and lighted to charm and to guide them, that they
may not learn their sweetness by their silence, nor their light by
their decay.
85. In the Cathedral of Lucca, near the entrance door of the north
transept, there is a monument by Jacopo della Quercia to Ilaria di
Caretto, the wife of Paolo Guinigi. I name it not as more beautiful or
perfect than other examples of the same period; but as furnishing an
instance of the exact and right mean between the rigidity and rudeness
of the earlier monumental effigies, and the morbid imitation of life,
sleep, or death, of which the fashion has taken place in modern times.
She is lying on a simple couch, with a hound at her feet; not on the
side, but with the head laid straight and simply on the hard pillow,
in which, let it be observed, there is no effort at deceptive
imitation of pressure.--It is understood as a pillow, but not mistaken
for one. The hair is bound in a flat braid over the fair brow, the
sweet and arched eyes are closed, the tenderness of the loving lips is
set and quiet; there is that about them which forbids breath;
something which is not death nor sleep, but the pure image of both.
The hands are not lifted in prayer, neither folded, but the arms are
laid at length upon the body, and the hands cross as they fall. The
feet are hidden by the drapery, and the form of the limbs concealed,
but not their tenderness.
86. I do not know any district possessing a more pure or uninterrupted
fulness of mountain character, (and that of the highest order,) or
which appears to have been less disturbed by foreign agencies, than
that which borders the course of the Trient between Valorsine and
Martigny. The paths which lead to it out of the valley of the Rhone,
rising at first in steep circles among the walnut trees, like winding
stairs among the pillars of a Gothic tower, retire over the shoulders
of the hills into a valley almost unknown, but thickly inhabited by an
industrious and patient population. Along the ridges of the rocks,
smoothed by old glaciers into long, dark, billowy swellings, like the
backs of plunging dolphins, the peasant watches the slow colouring of
the tufts of moss and roots of herb, which little by little gather a
feeble soil over the iron substance; then, supporting the narrow slip
of clinging ground with a few stones, he subdues it to the spade; and
in a year or two a little crest of corn is seen waving upon the rocky
casque. The irregular meadows run in and out like inlets of lake among
these harvested rocks, sweet with perpetual streamlets that seem
always to have chosen the steepest places to come down for the sake of
the leaps, scattering their handfuls of crystal this way and that, as
the wind takes them with all the grace, but with none of the
formalism, of fountains; dividing into fanciful change of dash and
spring, yet with the seal of their granite channels upon them, as the
lightest play of human speech may bear the seal of past toil, and
closing back out of their spray to lave the rigid angles, and brighten
with silver fringes and glassy films each lower and lower step of
sable stone; until at last, gathered altogether again,--except perhaps
some chance drops caught on the apple blossom, where it has budded a
little nearer the cascade than it did last spring,--they find their
way down to the turf, and lose themselves in that, silently; with
quiet depth of clear water furrowing among the grass-blades, and
looking only like their shadows but presently emerging again in little
startled gushes and laughing hurries, as if they had remembered
suddenly that the day was too short for them to get down the hill.
Green field, and glowing rock, and glancing streamlet, all slope
together in the sunshine towards the brows of ravines, where the pines
take up their own dominion of saddened shade; and with everlasting
roar, in the twilight, the stronger torrents thunder down, pale from
the glaciers, filling all the chasms with enchanted cold, beating
themselves to pieces against the great rocks that they have themselves
cast down, and forcing fierce way beneath their ghastly poise. The
mountain paths stoop to those glens in forky zigzags, leading to some
grey and narrow arch, all fringed under its shuddering curve with the
ferns that fear the light; a cross of rough-hewn pine, iron-bound to
its parapet, standing dark against the lurid fury of the foam. Far up
the glen, as we pause beside the cross, the sky is seen through the
openings in the pines thin with excess of light; and, in its clear
consuming flame of white space, the summits of the rocky mountains are
gathered into solemn crowns and circlets, all flushed in that strange
faint silence of possession by the sunshine, which has in it so deep a
melancholy, full of power, yet as frail as shadows; lifeless, like the
walls of a sepulchre, yet beautiful in tender fall of crimson folds,
like the veil of some sea spirit, that lives and dies as the foam
flashes; fixed on a perpetual throne, stern against all strength,
lifted above all sorrows, and yet effaced and melted utterly into the
air by that last sunbeam that has crossed to them from between the two
golden clouds.
High above all sorrow? Yes; but not unwitnessing to it. The traveller
on his happy journey, as his foot springs from the deep turf, and
strikes the pebbles gaily over the edge of the mountain road, sees
with a glance of delight the clusters of nut-brown cottages that
nestle along those sloping orchards, and glow beneath the boughs of
the pines. Here, it may well seem to him, if there be sometimes
hardship, there must be at least innocence and peace, and fellowship
of the human soul with nature. It is not so. The wild goats that leap
along those rocks have as much passion of joy in all that fair work of
God as the men that toil among them,--perhaps more. Enter the street
of one of those villages, and you will find it foul with that gloomy
foulness that is suffered only by torpor, or by anguish of soul. Here,
it is torpor--not absolute suffering--not starvation or disease; but
darkness of calm enduring: the spring, known only as the time of the
scythe, and the autumn as the time of the sickle, and the sun only as
a warmth, the wind as a chill, and the mountains as a danger. They do
not understand so much as the name of beauty, or of knowledge. They
understand dimly that of virtue. Love, patience, hospitality,
faith--these things they know. To glean their meadows side by side, so
happier; to bear the burden up the breathless mountain flank
unmurmuringly; to bid the stranger drink from their vessel of milk; to
see at the foot of their low death-beds a pale figure upon a cross,
dying, also patiently;--in this they are different from the cattle and
from the stones; but, in all this, unrewarded, as far as concerns the
present life. For them, there is neither hope nor passion of spirit;
for them, neither advance nor exultation. Black bread, rude roof, dark
night, laborious day, weary arm at sunset; and life ebbs away. No
books, no thoughts, no attainments, no rest,--except only sometimes a
little sitting in the sun under the church wall, as the bell tolls
thin and far in the mountain air; a pattering of a few prayers, not
understood, by the altar-rails of the dimly gilded chapel,--and so,
back to the sombre home, with the cloud upon them still unbroken--that
cloud of rocky gloom, born out of the wild torrents and ruinous
stones, and unlightened even in their religion, except by the vague
promise of some better thing unknown, mingled with threatening, and
obscured by an unspeakable horror--a smoke, as it were, of martyrdom,
coiling up with the incense; and amidst the images of tortured bodies
and lamenting spirits in hurtling flames, the very cross, for them,
dashed more deeply than for others with gouts of blood.
87. A Highland scene is beyond doubt pleasant enough in its own way;
but, looked close at, has its shadows.[34] Here, for instance, is the
very fact of one--as pretty as I can remember,--having seen many. It
is a little valley of soft turf, enclosed in its narrow oval by
jutting rocks, and broad flakes of nodding fern. From one side of it
to the other winds, serpentine, a clear brown stream, drooping into
quicker ripple as it reaches the end of the oval field, and then,
first islanding a purple and white rock with an amber pool, it dashes
away into a narrow fall of foam under a thicket of mountain ash and
alder. The autumn sun, low, but clear, shines on the scarlet
ash-berries and on the golden birch-leaves, which, fallen here and
there, when the breeze has not caught them, rest quiet in the crannies
of the purple rock. Beside the rock, in the hollow under the thicket,
the carcase of a ewe, drowned in the last flood, lies nearly bare to
the bone, its white ribs protruding through the skin, raven-torn; and
the rags of its wool still flickering from the branches that first
stayed it as the stream swept it down. A little lower, the current
plunges, roaring, into a circular chasm like a well, surrounded on
three sides by a chimney-like hollowness of polished rock, down which
the foam slips in detached snow-flakes. Round the edges of the pool
beneath, the water circles slowly like black oil; a little butterfly
lies on its back, the wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs
feebly quivering; a fish arises, and it is gone. Lower down the
stream, I can see over a knoll the green and damp turf roofs of four
or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the
cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by
a few ill-set stepping stones, with here and there a flat slab on the
tops, where they have sunk out of sight;--and at the turn of the brook
I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog--a picturesque and pretty
group enough certainly, if they had not been there all day starving. I
know them, and I know the dog's ribs also, which are nearly as bare as
the dead ewe's; and the child's wasted shoulders, cutting his old
tartan jacket through, so sharp are they.
[34] Passage written to be opposed to an exuberant description, by an
amiable Scottish pastor, of everything flattering to Scotchmen in the
Highlands. I have put next to it, a little study of the sadness of
Italy.
88. Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the
solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the
reader imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and
motion of the living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and
wasted plain. The earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he
never so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow, and carious,
like the dusty wreck of the bones of men. The long knotted grass waves
and tosses feebly in the evening wind, and the shadows of its motion
shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the
sunlight. Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around him, as if the
dead beneath were struggling in their sleep. Scattered blocks of black
stone, four-square remnants of mighty edifices, not one left upon
another, lie upon them to keep them down. A dull purple poisonous haze
stretches level along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of massy
ruins, on whose rents the red light rests, like dying fire on defiled
altars; the blue ridge of the Alban Mount lifts itself against a
solemn space of green, clear, quiet sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds
stand steadfastly along the promontories of the Apennines. From the
plain to the mountains, the shattered aqueducts, pier beyond pier,
melt into the darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral
mourners, passing from a nation's grave.
89. I was coming down one evening from the Rochers de Naye, above
Montreux, having been at work among the limestone rocks, where I could
get no water, and both weary and thirsty. Coming to a spring at the
turn of the path, conducted, as usual, by the herdsmen, into a
hollowed pine trunk, I stooped to it, and drank deeply. As I raised my
head, drawing breath heavily, some one behind me said, "Celui qui
boira de cette eau-ci, aura encore soif." I turned, not understanding
for a moment what was meant, and saw one of the hill peasants,
probably returning to his chalet from the market place at Vevay or
Villeneuve. As I looked at him with an uncomprehending expression, he
went on with the verse: "Mais celui qui boira de l'eau que je lui
donnerai, n'aura jamais soif."
90. It may perhaps be permitted me[35] to mark the significance of the
earliest mention of mountains in the Mosaic books; at least of those
in which some Divine appointment or command is stated respecting them.
They are first brought before us as refuges for God's people from the
two judgments of water and fire. The Ark rests upon the mountains of
Ararat; and man, having passed through the great Baptism unto death,
kneels upon the earth first where it is nearest heaven, and mingles
with the mountain clouds the smoke of his sacrifice of thanksgiving.
Again; from the midst of the first judgment by fire, the command of
the Deity to His servant is, "Escape to the mountain;" and the morbid
fear of the hills, which fills any human mind after long stay in
places of luxury and sin, is strangely marked in Lot's complaining
reply, "I cannot escape to the mountain, lest some evil take me." The
third mention, in way of ordinance, is a far more solemn one: "Abraham
lifted up his eyes and saw the place afar off." "The Place," the
mountain of myrrh, or of bitterness, chosen to fulfil to all the seed
of Abraham, far off and near, the inner meaning of promise regarded in
that vow: "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh
mine help." And the fourth is the delivery of the law on Sinai. It
seemed then to the monks that the mountains were appointed by their
Maker to be to man refuges from judgment, signs of redemption, and
altars of sanctification and obedience; and they saw them afterwards
connected, in the manner the most touching and gracious, with the
death, after his task had been accomplished, of the first anointed
Priest; the death, in like manner, of the first inspired Lawgiver; and
lastly, with the assumption of His office, by the Eternal Priest,
Lawgiver, and Saviour.
[35] With reference to the choice of mountain dwellings by the greater
monastic orders.
Observe the connection of these three events. Although the _time_ of
the deaths of Aaron and Moses was hastened by God's displeasure, we
have not, it seems to me, the slightest warrant for concluding that
the _manner_ of their deaths was intended to be grievous or
dishonourable to them. Far from this, it cannot, I think, be doubted
that in the denial of the permission to enter the Promised Land, the
whole punishment of their sin was included; and that, as far as
regarded the manner of their deaths, it must have been appointed for
them by their Master, in all tenderness and love, and with the full
purpose of ennobling the close of their service upon the earth. It
might have seemed to _us_ more honourable that both should have been
permitted to die beneath the shadow of the Tabernacle, the
congregation of Israel watching by their side; and all whom they loved
gathered together to receive the last message from the lips of the
meek lawgiver, and the last blessing from the prayer of the anointed
priest. But it was not thus they were permitted to die. Try to realize
that going forth of Aaron from the midst of the congregation. He who
had so often done sacrifice for their sin, going forth now to offer up
his own spirit. He who had stood among them between the dead and the
living, and had seen the eyes of all that great multitude turned to
him, that by his intercession their breath might yet be drawn a moment
more, going forth now to meet the angel of death face to face, and
deliver himself into his hand. Try if you cannot walk in thought with
those two brothers, and the son, as they passed the outmost tents of
Israel, and turned, while yet the dew lay round about the camp,
towards the slopes of Mount Hor; talking together for the last time,
as step by step they felt the steeper rising of the rocks, and hour
after hour, beneath the ascending sun, the horizon grew broader as
they climbed, and all the folded hills of Idumea, one by one subdued,
showed, amidst their hollows in the haze of noon, the windings of that
long desert journey, now at last to close. But who shall enter into
the thoughts of the High Priest as his eye followed those paths of
ancient pilgrimage; and through the silence of the arid and endless
hills, stretching even to the dim peak of Sinai, the whole history of
those forty years was unfolded before him, and the mystery of his own
ministries revealed to him; and that other Holy of Holies, of which
the mountain peaks were the altars, and the mountain clouds the veil,
the firmament of his Father's dwelling, opened to him still more
brightly and infinitely as he drew nearer his death?--until at last,
on the shadeless summit, from him on whom sin was to be laid no more,
from him on whose heart the names of sinful nations were to press
their graven fire no longer, the brother and the son took breastplate
and ephod, and left him to his rest. There is indeed a secretness in
this calm faith, and deep restraint of sorrow, into which it is
difficult for us to enter; but the death of Moses himself is more
easily to be conceived, and had in it circumstances still more
touching as regards the influence of the external scene. For forty
years Moses had not been alone. The care and burden of all the people,
the weight of their woe, and guilt, and death, had been upon him
continually. The multitude had been laid upon him as if he had
conceived them; their tears had been his meat night and day, until he
had felt as if God had withdrawn His favour from him, and he had
prayed that he might be slain, and not see his wretchedness. And now
at last the command came, "Get thee up into this mountain." The weary
hands, that had been so long stayed up against the enemies of Israel,
might lean again upon the shepherd's staff, and fold themselves for
the shepherd's prayer--for the shepherd's slumber. Not strange to his
feet, though forty years unknown, the roughness of the bare mountain
path, as he climbed from ledge to ledge of Abarim; not strange to his
aged eyes the scattered clusters of the mountain herbage, and the
broken shadows of the cliffs, indented far across the silence of
uninhabited ravines; scenes such as those among which, as now, with
none beside him but God, he had led his flocks so often; and which he
had left, how painfully! taking upon him the appointed power to make
of the fenced city a wilderness, and to fill the desert with songs of
deliverance. It was not to embitter the last hours of his life that
God restored to him for a day the beloved solitudes he had lost, and
breathed the peace of the perpetual hills around him, and cast the
world in which he had laboured, and sinned, far beneath his feet in
that mist of dying blue;--all sin, all wandering, soon to be forgotten
for ever. The Dead Sea--a type of God's anger understood by him, of
all men, most clearly, who had seen the earth open her mouth, and the
sea his depth, to overwhelm the companies of those who contended with
his Master--laid waveless beneath him; and beyond it the fair hills of
Judah, and the soft plains and banks of Jordan, purple in the evening
light as with the blood of redemption, and fading in their distant
fulness into mysteries of promise and of love. There, with his
unabated strength, his undimmed glance, lying down upon the utmost
rocks, with angels waiting near to contend for the spoils of his
spirit, he put off his earthly armour. We do deep reverence to his
companion prophet, for whom the chariot of fire came down from heaven;
but was his death less noble whom his Lord Himself buried in the vales
of Moab, keeping, in the secrets of the eternal counsels, the
knowledge of a sepulchre, from which he was to be called in the
fulness of time, to talk with that Lord upon Hermon of the death that
He should accomplish at Jerusalem?
And lastly, let us turn our thoughts for a few moments to the cause of
the resurrection of these two prophets. We are all of us too much in
the habit of passing it by, as a thing mystical and inconceivable,
taking place in the life of Christ for some purpose not by us to be
understood, or, at the best, merely as a manifestation of His divinity
by brightness of heavenly light, and the ministering of the spirits of
the dead, intended to strengthen the faith of His three chosen
apostles. And in this, as in many other events recorded by the
Evangelists, we lose half the meaning, and evade the practical power
upon ourselves, by never accepting in its fulness the idea that our
Lord was "perfect man,"--"tempted in all things like as we are." Our
preachers are continually trying, in all manner of subtle ways, to
explain the union of the Divinity with the Manhood--an explanation
which certainly involves first their being able to describe the nature
of Deity itself, or, in plain words, to comprehend God. They never can
explain, in any one particular, the union of the natures; they only
succeed in weakening the faith of their hearers as to the entireness
of either. The thing they have to do is precisely the contrary of
this--to insist upon the _entireness_ of both. We never think of
Christ enough as God, never enough as Man; the instinctive habit of
our minds being always to miss of the Divinity, and the reasoning and
enforced habit to miss of the humanity. We are afraid to harbour in
our own hearts, or to utter in the hearing of others, any thought of
our Lord as hungering, tired, sorrowful, having a human soul, a human
will, and affected by events of human life, as a finite creature is:
and yet one half of the efficiency of His atonement, and the whole of
the efficiency of His example, depend on His having been this to the
full. Consider, therefore, the Transfiguration as it relates to the
human feelings of our Lord. It was the first definite preparation for
His death. He had foretold it to His disciples six days before; then
takes with Him the three chosen ones into "an high mountain apart."
From an exceeding high mountain, at the first taking on Him the
ministry of life, He had beheld and rejected the kingdoms of the
earth, and their glory: now, on a high mountain, He takes upon Him the
ministry of death. Peter and they that were with Him, as in
Gethsemane, were heavy with sleep. Christ's work had to be done alone.
The tradition is that the Mount of Transfiguration was the summit of
Tabor; but Tabor is neither a high mountain, nor was it in any sense a
mountain "_apart_," being in those years both, inhabited and
fortified. All the immediately preceding ministries of Christ had been
at Cesarea Philippi. There is no mention of travel southward in the
six days that intervened between the warning given to His disciples
and the going up into the hill. What other hill could it be than the
southward slope of that goodly mountain, Hermon, which is indeed the
centre of all the Promised Land, from the entering in of Hamath unto
the river of Egypt; the mount of fruitfulness, from which the springs
of Jordan descended to the valleys of Israel? Along its mighty forest
avenues, until the grass grew fair with the mountain lilies, His feet
dashed in the dew of Hermon, He must have gone to pray His first
recorded prayer about death; and from the steep of it, before He
knelt, could see to the south all the dwellings of the people that had
sat in darkness, and seen the great light, the land of Zabulon and of
Naphtali, Galilee of the nations,--could see, even with His human
sight, the gleam of that lake by Capernaum and Chorazin, and many a
place loved by Him, and vainly ministered to, whose house was now left
unto them desolate; and chief of all, far in the utmost blue, the
hills above Nazareth, sloping down to His old home; hills on which yet
the stones lay loose that had been taken up to cast at Him when He
left them for ever.
"And as He prayed, two men stood by Him." Among the many ways in which
we miss the help and hold of Scripture, none is more subtle than our
habit of supposing that, even as man, Christ was free from the fear of
death. How could He then have been tempted as we are?--since among all
the trials of the earth, none spring from the dust more terrible than
that fear. It had to be borne by Him, indeed, in a unity which we can
never comprehend, with the foreknowledge of victory,--as His sorrow
for Lazarus with the consciousness of His power to restore him; but it
_had_ to be borne, and that in its full earthly terror; and the
presence of it is surely marked for us enough by the rising of those
two at His side. When, in the desert, He was girding Himself for the
work of life, angels of life came and ministered to Him; now in the
fair world, when He is girding Himself for the work of death, the
ministrants come to Him from the grave. But, from the grave,
conquered. One from that tomb under Abarim, which His own hand had
sealed long ago; the other, from the rest into which he had entered
without seeing corruption. "There stood by Him Moses and Elias, and
spake of His decease." Then, when the prayer is ended, the task
accepted, first, since the star paused over Him at Bethlehem, the full
glory falls upon Him from heaven, and the testimony is borne to His
everlasting Sonship and power. "Hear ye Him."
If, in their remembrance of these things, and in their endeavour to
follow in the footsteps of their Master, religious men of bygone days,
closing themselves in the hill solitudes, forgot sometimes, and
sometimes feared, the duties they owed to the active world, we may
perhaps pardon them more easily than we ought to pardon ourselves, if
we neither seek any influence for good, nor submit to it unsought, in
scenes to which thus all the men whose writings we receive as
inspired, together with their Lord, retired whenever they had any task
or trial laid upon them needing more than their usual strength of
spirit. Nor perhaps should we have unprofitably entered into the mind
of the earlier ages, if among our other thoughts, as we watch the
chains of the snowy mountains rise on the horizon, we should sometimes
admit the memory of the hour in which their Creator, among their
solitudes, entered on His travail for the salvation of our race; and
indulge the dream, that as the flaming and trembling mountains of the
earth seem to be the monuments of the manifesting of His terror on
Sinai, these pure and white hills, near to the heaven, and sources of
all good to the earth, are the appointed memorials of that light of
His mercy, that fell, snowlike, on the Mount of Transfiguration.
FINIS.
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