Part 9 (2/2)
They are these:
”We all, with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory, even as from the Lord, the Spirit.”
Now observe at the outset the entire contraction of all our previous efforts, in the simple pa.s.sive: ”WE ARE TRANSFORMED.”
We ARE CHANGED, as the Old Version has it--we do not change ourselves. No man can change himself. Throughout the New Testament you will find that wherever these moral and spiritual transformations are described the verbs are in the pa.s.sive. Presently it will be pointed out that there is a RATIONALE in this; but meantime do not toss these words aside as if this pa.s.sivity denied all human effort or ignored intelligible law. What is implied for the soul here is no more than is everywhere claimed for the body. In physiology the verbs describing the processes of growth are in the pa.s.sive.
Growth is not voluntary; it takes place, it happens, it is wrought upon matter. So here. ”Ye must be born again”--we cannot be born ourselves. ”Be not conformed to this world, but BE YE TRANSFORMED”--we are subjects to transforming influence, we do not transform ourselves.
Not more certain is it that it is something outside the thermometer that produces a change in the thermometer, that it is
Something outside the soul of man
that produces a moral change upon him. That he must be susceptible to that change, that he must be a party to it, goes without saying; but that neither his apt.i.tude nor his will can produce it, is equally certain.
Obvious as it ought to seem, this may be to some an almost startling revelation. The change we have been striving after is not to be produced by any more striving. It is to be wrought upon us by the moulding of hands beyond our own. As the branch ascends, and the bud bursts, and the fruit reddens under the co-operation of influences from the outside air, so man rises to the higher stature under invisible pressures from without. the radical defect of all our former methods of sanctification was the attempt to generate from within that which can only be wrought upon us from without.
The radical defect of all our former methods of sanctification was the attempt to generate from within that which can only be wrought upon us from without. According to the first Law of Motion, every body continues in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a straight line, except in so far as it may be compelled BY IMPRESSED FORCES to change that state. This is also a first law of Christianity. Every man's character remains as it is, or continues in the direction in which it is going, until it is compelled BY IMPRESSED FORCES to change that state. Our failure has been the failure to put ourselves in the way of the impressed forces. There is a clay, and there is a Potter; we have tried to get the clay to mould the clay.
Whence, then, these pressures, and where this Potter? The answer of the formula is--”By reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord we are changed.” But this is not very clear. What is the ”glory”
of the Lord, and how can mortal man reflect it, and how can that act as an ”impressed force” in moulding him to a n.o.bler form? The word ”glory”--the word which has to bear the weight of holding these ”impressed forces”--is a stranger in current speech, and our first duty is to seek out its equivalent in working English. It suggests at first a radiance of some kind, something dazzling or glittering, some halo such as the old masters loved to paint round the head of their Ecce h.o.m.os. But that is paint, mere matter, the visible symbol of some unseen thing. What is that unseen thing? It is that of all unseen things the most radiant, the most beautiful, the most Divine, and that is CHARACTER. On earth, in Heaven, there is nothing so great, so glorious as this. The word has many meanings; in ethics it can have but one. Glory is character, and nothing less, and it can be nothing more. The earth is ”full of the glory of the Lord,” because it is full of His character. The ”Beauty of the Lord” is character. ”The Glory of the Only Begotten” is character, the character which is ”fullness of grace and truth.” And when G.o.d told His people HIS NAME, He simply gave them His character, His character which was Himself: ”And the Lord proclaimed the name for the Lord...the Lord, the Lord G.o.d, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth.”
Glory then is not something intangible, or ghostly, or transcendental.
If it were this, how could Paul ask men to reflect it? Stripped of its physical enswathement it is Beauty, moral and spiritual Beauty, Beauty infinitely real, infinitely exalted, yet infinitely near and infinitely communicable.
With this explanation read over the sentence once more in paraphrase: We all reflecting as a mirror the character of Christ are transformed into the same Image from character to character--from a poor character to a better one, from a better one to a little better still, from that to one still more complete, until by slow degrees the Perfect Image is attained. Here
The solution of the problem of sanctification
is compressed into a sentence: Reflect the character of Christ.
You will be changed, in spite of yourself and unknown to yourself, into the same image from character to character.
(I.) All men are reflectors--that is
The first law
on which this formula is based. One of the aptest descriptions of a human being is that he is a mirror. As we sat at table to-night the world in which each of us lived and moved through this day was focused in the room. What we saw when we looked at one another was not one another, but one another's world. We were an arrangement of mirrors. The scenes we saw were all reproduced; the people we met walked to and fro; they spoke, they bowed, they pa.s.sed us by, did everything over again as if it had been real. When we talked, we were but looking at our own mirror and describing what flitted across it; our listening was not hearing, but seeing--we but looked on our neighbor's mirror.
All human intercourse is a seeing of reflections. I meet a stranger in a railway carriage. The cadence of his first words tell me he is English and comes from Yorks.h.i.+re. Without knowing it he has reflected his birthplace, his parents, and the long history of their race. Even physiologically he is a mirror. His second sentence records that he is a politician, and a faint reflection in the way he p.r.o.nounces THE TIMES reveals his party. In his next remarks I see reflected a whole world of experiences. The books he has read, the people he has met, the companions he keeps, the influences that have played upon him and made him the man he is--these are all registered there by a pen which lets nothing pa.s.s, and whose writing can
Never be blotted out.
What I am reading in him meantime he is also reading in me; and before the journey is over we could half write each other's lives.
Whether we like it or not, we live in gla.s.s houses. The mind, the memory, the soul, is simply a vast chamber paneled with looking-gla.s.s.
And upon this miraculous arrangement and endowment depends the capacity of mortal souls to ”reflect the character of the Lord.”
(2). But this is not all. If all these varied reflections from our so-called secret life are patent to the world, how close the writing, complete the record within the soul itself! For the influences we meet are not simply held for a moment on the polished surface and thrown off again into s.p.a.ce. Each is retained where first it fell, and stored up in the soul forever.
This law of a.s.similation
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