ST. MATTHEW xvn. i, 2 355
it which is the active, busy, forceful thing ; that the world with all its noisy cities, its movements and its bustle, is not a burning point hung in darkness and silence, but that it is just a little fretful affair with infinitely larger, louder, fiercer, stronger powers, working, moving, pressing onwards, thundering in the background ; and that the huge forces, laws, activities, behind the world, are not perceived by us any more than we perceive the vast motion of great winds, except in so far as we see the face of the waters rippled by them, or the trees bowed all one way in their passage.1
1. The soul may be transfigured. — In those hours of absorbing emotion, in desire and communion and surrender, God's Spirit works in upon the soul. By a spiritual law the whole inner core of our being is reacted upon, and mind and heart and will are transformed. This subjective blessing of prayer — the cleansing and renewing of the soul while we pray — is not the only, not the supreme, answer to prayer; but it is the first, the im- mediate, and the most enduring answer we can receive ; it is the answer which is never denied.
^| What possibilities of glory there are in human nature ! Scientists perceive in us undeveloped senses, and anticipate a period when man will possess qualities, perceptions, and powers far exceeding any attributes of the present. It is in Christ Jesus that the latent glory of our nature stands most fully and con- spicuously declared. In Him we see what man is in the Divine ideal. He has shown of what our moral nature is capable ; in Him we behold the transfigured conscience, will, affections, character. He has shown of what this physical vesture is capable in exalta- tion, refinement, and splendour.2
2. TJieface may be transfigured. — The face is the involuntary and, at the last, the accurate index of the soul. A man may " smile, and smile, and be a villain " through a few years of his life. But in the end, let him pose and posture and dissemble as he will, what he has become in his soul is seen on his face. As surely as the sap wells up in the stem, and bursts out into leaf and blossom, and as certainly as the acid in a man's blood will be seen in the scab upon his skin, the passion of his soul renewed in hours of consecration will become the light and the line which all men's eyes can see.
1 A. C. Bf-nson, Joycnis Oard, 120. * W. L. Watkinson.
356 THE TRANSFIGURATION
Tj There were two faces which the great artists of the Middle Ages held it to be their just ambition to represent. One was the face of Christ. But that face was as a rule the artist's despair. The other face was that of the Madonna Mary, the Virgin of Nazareth. These mediaeval artists sought far and near for faces of perfect beauty as models for their portraits. They looked into every young face in the hope that the ideal in line and form and colour would be found. One can see in all the galleries of the Continent those pictures of radiant youth and dazzling bloom. But the nobler minds soon passed beyond the thrall of those faultless faces with their dimpled beauty and their earthly charm. They began to search after something more lovely and more sig- nificant than skin-deep loveliness. They began to discern that the face of some simple peasant girl, marked by no unusual grace of contour or of colouring, could wear a glory which earth could not give. They marked that her daily prayer before the cross had schooled her soul to God's discipline and enriched it with God's grace. So Raphael painted as his Madonnas a simple peasant girl, with motherhood's human yearning in her eyes, and the pale austerity of consecration matching her white stole, and the mark of her rapt and adoring humility manifest in the grace and sweetness of her air. They realized that when the soul had become transfigured the light in the temple of God shone through.1
3. The life may be transfigured. — " His raiment was white and glistering." We read these words with a little wonder and more doubt. We are tempted to think that they are a note of ex- aggeration in the report. We wonder if the white snow of the Hermon Hill above them had not dazzled their eyes. But quite apart from the fact that the radiance of the face would steal down and illumine Christ's white robe, this statement is a hint and a prophecy of a vital truth. The transfiguration of the soul within is not only seen in the shining of the face ; it begins to transform and to ennoble the very habit of the life. It is nothing marvellous to us that after years of devotion and long continuing in hours of prayer and the renewing of the mind from day to day, the clothes a man wears proclaim the transfiguring power of the Spirit of God. Although not suddenly and in a moment, yet surely and with increasing beauty, all life is transfigured. A man's look, his courtesies of speech and of gesture, his walk and poise, his ways and customs, his gifts and services, the very 1 W. M. Clow, The Secret of the Lord, 185.