^ A missionary who had returned home after living many years in a heathen land said that what impressed him most when he came back to America was not the stately buildings, the mechanical improvements on every hand, or the handsome girls, but the beautiful old ladies. Heathen women grow ugly as they grow old. This he attributed not so much to hard work as to a vacant mind and unimproved heart. The reverse is often seen in our country. Not that certain charms which belong to youth can be retained with advancing years, but other and better ones replace them.^
II.
The Glory of the Lord.
1. This is the object of the beholding. What is it ? " The heavens declare the glory of God ; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." But we look in vain, in creation, for the glory of which we are in search. What is this glory? It is not the essential glory of God. We cannot see that. " No man can see my face and live." It is the moral glory that we have to behold and reflect ; and creation is not a sufficient guide to that glory. It does exhibit His glory ; but there are mysteries all around us in nature which baffle us when we seek to read in them the > Henry Druminond. ' G. B. F. Hallook.
2 COR. III. i8 91
character of God. We remember the words of the beloved Apostle : " The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us ; and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth." It is in Christ that the glory of God is seen — in the face of Jesus Christ.
The meaning of the phrase, " the glory of the Lord," is made plainer in the next paragraph of the Epistle, when the Apostle affirms that, while " the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God " is veiled from those who do not believe, Christ in the eternal brightness of His Person and work has dawned upon his own soul, and thereby given " the light of the knowledge of the glory of God." This, then, is the all-blessed vision which is stamping upon him the image of itself and assimilating his whole character into its own likeness.
^ As the glory of bright light, when it falls on a prism, splinters into its component rays, so the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ divides into its essential and wondrous qualities — mercy and truth, righteousness and peace — as it strikes the Cross of Christ; and there we learn how God can be just, and the Justifier of him that believeth in Jesus. It is in Christ. Yes, it is in His life, in His lowliness. Have you ever meditated upon Matt. xi. 28 — the one place in Scripture in which Christ speaks of His heart ? "I am meek and lowly in heart." Half the difficulties in the way of accepting the revelation of God to-day would disappear if men, like their Saviour, were lowly in heart. Eemember there is only one way of being lowly. It is by the indwelling of the Lowly One. Ponder the lowliness and the loyalty. He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem until, as His disciples followed Him, they were afraid. Something about Him awed them. Yet they followed Him. They were drawn after Him by the irresistible force of love.^
^ The whole nature follows love. Whithersoever it goes, all the faculties troop after it. It is the magnet of human nature. Where the heart is, there are all the treasures of mind and will and moral nature. Let this love be planted in Christ — won and fixed by our ever deepening sense of truth and goodness and all moral beauty — and we begin to go over to Him upon it as upon a bridge. Using this love as it were some broad stream, the truth, the strength, the humility, the sympathy, the very righteousness of Christ float down into us and become our own.^
1 E, W. Moore. 2 Theodore T. Hunger.
92 TRANSFORMED BY BEHOLDING
I beheld From eye to eye thro' all their order flash A momentary likeness of the King.^
2. Or we may say it is the glory of Christ in all the events of His life.
(1) St. Paul is contemplating the glory of the coming of Jesus. He marvels at the manner of His coming, for, mark you, there is a glory to be found in the possession of glory. There is a greater glory to be found in laying a glory by. You may lay aside a crown, and by the very surrender you may ascend a loftier throne. Queen Victoria was clothed in one glory when she wore her crown and the regalia of regal splendour at some brilliant function of State ; she wore another glory, deeper, richer, when, laying aside the crown, she wore the weeds of common sorrow and went into a peasant's cottage in the Highlands, carrying to the sick and to the broken the balm of human comfort and the consolations of Divine grace. There is a glory that comes from surrender of glory ; there is a glory that exalteth.