For St. Paul's now is balanced by a then. " When that which
is perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away."
Beyond this life of mediate and imperfect knowledge expressed
in the language of riddles lies the promise of a life where know-
1 cor. — 24
370 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT
ledge will be immediate, distinct, consummated in the vision of God " face to face " ; when partial knowledge will be exchanged for knowledge so full, so complete, so personal, that St. Paul dares to compare it with God's present perfect insight into each human soul ; — " then shall I know fully even as also I have been fully known."
Meanwhile, in this our present state of limited and imperfect knowledge, amid all the uncertainties and perplexities of life, there is one sure clue, one indispensable guide to direct us — " love never faileth."
The idea is one, but the Apostle gives it in two parallel statements, after the manner of Hebrew poetry. And each statement has its two sides — " now " and " then." Thus — I. Seeing.
1. Now we see in a mirror, darkly.
2. Then face to face. II. Knowing.
1. Now I know in part.
2. Then shall I know even as also I have been known.
I.
Seeing.
It is often hard to get people to see. Their gaze is on the outward — the shows of sense and of time — on the seen; and therefore to the New Testament writers it is but blindness. To them he who does not see the unseen does not see at all. But, given the vision of faith, it will develop from faltering dim beginnings, and its horizon will become richer and more heavenly. It will rejoice in the mirror. It will not even resent the riddle. And why? Because it is conscious of moving onwards to the Face.
U One summer evening sitting by my window I watched for the first star to appear, knowing the position of the brightest in the southern sky. The dusk came on, grew deeper, but the star did not shine. By-and-by, other stars less bright appeared, so that it could not be the sunset which obscured the expected one. Finally, I considered that I must have mistaken its position, when suddenly a puff of air blew through the branch of a pear-
i CORINTHIANS xm. 12 371
tree which overhung the window, a leaf moved, and there was the star behind the leaf.
At present the endeavour to make discoveries is like gazing at the sky up through the boughs of an oak. Here a beautiful star shines clearly : here a constellation is hidden by a branch : a universe by a leaf. Some mental instrument or organism is required to enable us to distinguish between the leaf which may be removed, and a real void : when to cease to look in one direc- tion, and to work in another. Many men of broad brow and great intellect lived in the days of ancient Greece, but for lack of the accident of a lens, and of knowing the way to use a prism, they could but conjecture imperfectly. I am in exactly the position they were when I look beyond light. Outside my present knowledge I am exactly in their condition, I feel that there are infinities to be known, but they are hidden by a leaf.1
T| The late Professor T. C. Edwards says that St. Paul got his metaphor of the mirror from Philo, who got it from Plato, and he mentions the striking passage in Plato's Republic, where Socrates is illustrating the slow development of our faculties by the case of men who have been immured in a cavern and are suddenly dragged into the sunlight. Not a man at first can make out, in the unaccustomed glare, a single object as it is. " Hence, I suppose, habit will be necessary to enable him to perceive objects in that upper world. At first he will be most successful in distinguishing shadows; then he will discern the reflections of men and other things in water, and afterwards the realities ; and after this he will raise his eyes to encounter the light of the moon and the stars, finding it less difficult to study the heavenly bodies and the heaven itself by night than the sun and the sun's light by day." Finally, he will see the sun as it is, not as it appears in water or on alien ground, and then he will conclude that the sun is the author of the seasons, the guardian of the visible world, and the cause of all he and his friends used to see. On some such lines the idealism of St. Paul runs respecting the soul and its spiritual vision as it ascends from the partial to the perfect, from the fleeting to the real. One may note, in passing, the joy of discovering a kinship between such minds as Plato, St. Paul, and Wordsworth, children of ages far distant, but each illumined by the immanent Eeason, by the " Light which lighteth every man."2
1 Richard Jefferies, The Story of My Heart, 188.
2 B. M. Pope, The Poetry of the Upward Way, 152.
372 THE PARTIAL AND THE PERFECT