(2) The Apostle contemplated the glory of the living of Jesus, the glorious manner of His life, and when the Apostle Paul looked at the manner of the life of Jesus, what was he more especially gazing at ? With what was he concerned ? If we look through the eyes of St. Paul at Jesus at work in His ministry among men, what do we see? What is there glorious to look upon ? Well, there is the Master, not playing with trifles on the outskirts of experience, but gloriously ministering to earth's sternest realities in the very centre of human need. What is He doing that Paul calls glorious ? We see Him dealing with human guilt and overwhelming it by the energies and the grace of firmness. We see Him dealing with human sin and making weaklings invincible by the impartation of the strength of His own soul. We see Him dealing with human fears, driving them away, just as night birds are driven away by the coming of the dawn. We see Him dealing with human death, speaking to death as nobody else has ever addressed it, speaking to death as its Master ; commanding it, calling upon it to loose its hold upon its victim, and to let its captive free. As we look through the eyes
* Tennyson, Idylls of the King.
2 COR. III. i8 93
of the Apostle Paul we see Jesus dealicg with guilt and sin and fear and sorrow and death — and Paul said, " Glory, the glory of the Lord."
(3) Not merely the glory of the manner of His coming, and the glory and the manner of His doing and living, but the glory of His dying, the gloriousness of the manner of His death. To St. Paul the death of Jesus was not merely awful; it was altogether unique. He had seen Stephen die, and die gloriously, and he scarcely referred to it again. The Saviour's death he could not get away from. It was never out of his sight, never out of his mind, for in that dark pit St. Paul found his sun rise. " Out of the strong came forth sweetness ; out of the eater came forth meat." Stephen's death was a martyrdom, and a glorious martyrdom, too. Jesus' death was more than a martyrdom, and therefore surpassing in glory.
(4) But even that contemplation would be very imperfect, if to the Apostle's conception of Jesus Christ as glorious we did not add the Apostle's conception of Jesus Christ as glorified. In the Apostle's conception of Jesus Christ, Jesus not merely walked into death. He walked out again. The glorious Jesus emerged as the glorified Lord. As St. Paul says, " Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name ; that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow." And again, he speaks of "his mighty power which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places, far above all principality, and power, and might, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come."
It will not be questioned, by those who are at home in St. Paul's thoughts, that " the Lord " means the exalted Saviour, and that the glory must be something which belongs to Him. Indeed, if we remember that in the First Epistle, chap. ii. 8, He is character- istically described by the Apostle as " the Lord of glory," we shall not feel it too much to say that the glory is everything that belongs to Him. There is not any aspect of the exalted Christ, there is not any representation of Him in the Gospels, there is not any function which He exercises, that does not come under this head. " In his temple everything saith, Glory ! " There is a glory even in the mode of His existence : St. Paul's conception of
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Him is dominated always by that appearance on the way to Damascus, when he saw the Christ through a light above the brightness of the sun. It is His glory that He shares the Father's throne, that He is head of the Church, possessor and bestower of all the fulness of Divine grace, the coming Judge of the world, conqueror of every hostile power, intercessor for His own, and, in short, bearer of all the majesty which belongs to His kingly office. The essential thing in all this — essential to the under- standing of the Apostle, and to the existence of the apostolic " gospel of the glory of Christ " (chap. iv. 4) — is that the glory in question is the glory of a living Person. When St. Paul thinks of it, he does not look back, he looks up ; he does not remember, he beholds in a glass ; the glory of the Lord has no meaning for him apart from the present exaltation of the Kisen Christ. " The Lord reigneth ; he is apparelled with majesty " — that is the anthem of his praise.
^ Once, years ago in Normandy after a day of flooding rain, I beheld the clouds roll up and depart and the auspicious sky reappear. Once in crossing the Splligen I beheld that moving of the mists which gives back to sight a vanished world. Those veils of heaven and earth removed, beauty came to light. What will it be to see this same visible heaven itself removed and unimaginable beauty brought to light in glory ! ^