*[f A pleasant, sunny landscape has the power of transcribing its own joyous image into the heart of him who intelligently surveys it. The shadow of a cloud, it has been said, does not pass over the face of a field without making some change in it, and in the feelings of the observer. However this may be, it is certain that we cannot live without influencing others, and others influencing us. Human society is a vast network of reciprocal influences. Everybody acts and is acted upon in turn. Every man helps to mould and fashion the character and destiny of every other man within the sphere of his attraction. The thoughts of a man, spread over the pages of a book, have power to work an intellectual assimilation in the mind of him who care- fully studies the pages. So must it be spiritually, only in a much higher degree.^
^ Nathaniel Hawthorne has a story of a great stone face carved on the mountain side, which reproduced itself in the spectator. A young man who never wearied of gazing on that face had his life beautified by the vision, and one day as the people looked on his face, they said, " It is the same as on the mountain side."
^ Jenny Lind told me, with all her own vivid, emphatic brilliancy of gesture and look, of a scene which had evidently
^ B. Vaughan. " J. Davies, The Kingdom without Observation, 96.
JAS.-JUDE — 19
290 WHAT WE ARE. WHAT WE SHALL BE
left on her an indelible impression of wonder and glory. She had gone to look on the face of her friend, Mrs. Nassau Senior, after death. The son of her friend had shown her the stairs, and pointed out the door of the room where the body lay, and put the candle in her hand, and left her. She pushed open the door and entered alone ; and there, before her, lay the face, fine and clear-cut, encompassed about with a mass of white flowers. On it was peace, and a smile, with the lips parted ; but that was not all. I must tell the rest in her own words. " It was not her own look that was in her face. It was the look of another, the face of another, that had passed into hers. It was the shadow of Christ that had come upon her. She had seen Christ. And I put down my candle, and I said, ' Let me see this thing. Let me stop here always. Let me sit and look. Where are my children ? Let them come and see. Here is a woman who has seen Christ.'" I can never forget the dramatic intensity of her manner as she told me all this, and how she at last had to drag herself away, as from a vision, and to stumble down the stairs again.^
What we, when face to face we see The Father of our souls, shall be, John tells us, doth not yet appear; Ah, did he tell what we are here !
A mind for thoughts to pass into, A heart for loves to travel through, Five senses to detect things near. Is this the whole that we are here ?
Kules baffle instincts — instincts rules, Wise men are bad — and good are fools, Facts evil — wishes vain appear. We cannot go, why are we here?
O may we for assurance sake, Some arbitrary judgment take. And wilfully pronounce it clear. For this or that 'tis we are here ?
Or is it right, and will it do, To pace the sad confusion through, And say : — It doth not yet appear, What we shall be, what we are here.
^ H. Scott Holland, Personal Studies, 26.
I JOHN III. 2 291
Ah yet, when all is thought and said, The heart still overrules the head ; Still what we hope we must believe, And what is given us receive;
Must still believe, for still we hope That in a world of larger scope, What here is faithfully begun Will be completed, not undone.
My child, we still must think, when we That ampler life together see, Some true result will yet appear Of what we are, together, here.^
3. The clear vision is possible only to cleansed eyes. — The Jews had looked for Him through many centuries, and when He came they did not know Him. When Christ parts the veil once more, and with the fulness of His being, as St. Paul says, apart from sin, is manifested, shall we know Him ? Will He find faith on earth, the faith to receive Him ? He will not be like what we to-day imagine. He will be as unlike some of our imaginations as He was when first He came. If you are thinking of Him as He parted from His disciples, He was not even then what you have sometimes thought Him. He was still scarred, and His brow was still riven with Calvary ; and this is the last truth of this great word of St. John. We shall never see Him till we are like Him, simply because we cannot. You do not know your friend, you do not know your enemy, except in so far as you are like him. From your life there must go, not only impurity, but all leanings towards it ; and in its place there must be that burning repugnance that was in Him when He declared " he hath nothing in me," when the advent of the Evil One was to Him unspeakable and unutterable pain because He was pure. And if we would learn the way of purity, it is the old way of sorrow and toil — the way He went. " I consecrate myself for their sakes, that they may be consecrated."