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54 LOVE AND JOY IN BELIEVING
form of Christian love. He who loves his deliverer simply as a deliverer loves for the lowest of all reasons, merely because he has been rescued. But he who loves his Saviour for what that Saviour is, loves Him for the highest of all reasons, because He is Supreme Love, perfect Grace and Truth.
^ How can the bodily absence of the Lord be for the benefit of His people ? He Himself tells us. He must go, to send the Spirit. This fact touches the heart of the whole question. We can know Christ, trust Christ, love Christ, only as we are taught by the Spirit. Christ is a Spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and in truth ; Christ in His whole Person and work is the great God infinite and eternal, transcending, therefore, the grasp not merely of all bodily senses, but also of all human reason. And it is as thus transcending the comprehension of nature that He presents Himself to be known, to be trusted, to be loved, to be gloried in by the soul.^
^ Consider this strange fact : the Gospels give no hint as to Christ's personal appearance, the colour of His eyes or hair, the cast of His features, the form of His head, the fashion of His body. Christ, as to physique, is to us an absolutely unknown being ; but as to spirit, He is the best known of all beings. While physical descriptions help us to understand other persons, they would mar our conception of Him. In ordinary cases a good portrait is better than a big biography. How much better do we understand Dante, when we study his sad yet severe, worn yet ethereal face, with its keen, clear-cut features, yet look as of infinite remoteness from the world men most realize ; or Luther, when we examine the lines of his heavy and broad, yet massive and mighty counten- ance, so full of laughter or tears, the loud indignation of the controversialist, and the inflexible resolution that could stand solitary against the world ; or Oliver Cromwell, in whose large eyes, seamed brow, cheek furrowed and warty, and strong mouth, the mystic and soldier, the man of iron will and silent counsel, stands expressed. But so little has the outer man to do with Christ, so little is the face capable of expressing what was within, so impossible is it to human flesh or form to reveal the grace and truth that were in Him, that we should feel a description or a portrait an injury to our faith, a deprivation to our spiritual ideal.2
^ An old divine said that he wished he could have seen three things — Eome in her glory ; St. Paul preaching at Athens ; and Christ in the body. And it was because of their desire to satisfy
^ J. Hamilton, Faith in God, 235. ^ A. M. JFairbairn, The City of God, 346.
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themselves, and to meet this great longing, that the great painters of Christendom covered the walls of picture galleries with conceptions of the face of Jesus, Crowds have stood transfixed and touched before these masterpieces of art. But who has not turned from the very noblest of them with a sigh of dissatisfaction, and a secret conviction that even if the sublimest feature were to be taken out of each separate picture and all combined into one, the face so composed must still fall infinitely short of that in which Deity and humanity met, and shone, and wept, and loved. We shall never see anything worthy of that face till we see Him as He is.^
2. It is no hardship to have an invisible Saviour. — We can love Him the better that He is unseen. Sight assists the affection that is akin to instinct, but not that which lives in the spirit. That which the eye sees and the hand handles is commonplace and gross, loses in ethereality by what it gains in visibility. Were God localized, He would seem to our thought much less awful and majestic than when He is conceived as everywhere, like the air we breathe, the element in which all beings live. If there were only one spot on earth where God and my heart could stand face to face, God would seem to my heart much less Divine than He does now, when I can meet Him anywhere, speak to Him anywhere, just as my soul has need. So a Jesus visible to the eye, tangible to the touch, would be a Jesus too limited and gross to be the object of a universal and spiritual affection — a Jesus known to the senses rather than to the soul. And so, while God gave us an historical Christ on whom our faith could rest. He made the history but a moment in the heart of His invisible and eternal being, that we might be compelled to love Him, if we loved Him at all, in spirit and in truth,
^ There attaches a transcendent character to the soul's true love of the Lord, A beauty which we can see with our bodily eye, — a worth and excellence which we can measure off by the standard of our own being or observation, — all earthly and all finite grandeur, — utterly fail to touch the depths of a renewed heart, or to fill the large longings of the soul's love. Unless the soul finds the Lord in His gifts, it soon sucks out the sweetness from the blossom of all created beauty, and turns away from the crushed and withered leaves with discontented yearnings after something higher and better. All the noblest and tenderest of merely human loves retain their strength only so long as tliey