And again, if Paul is here describing Christian vision of God as only indirect, as in a mirror, then that would be a point of inferiority in us as compared with Moses, who saw Him face to face.  But the whole tone of the context prepares us to expect a setting forth of the particulars in which the Christian attitude towards the manifested God is above the Jewish.  So, on the whole, it seems better to suppose that Paul meant ‘mirroring,’ than ‘seeing in a mirror.’

But, whatever be the exact force of the word, the thing intended includes both acts.  There is no reflection of the light without a previous reception of the light.  In bodily sight, the eye is a mirror, and there is no sight without an image of the thing perceived being formed in the perceiving eye.  In spiritual sight, the soul which beholds is a mirror, and at once beholds and reflects.  Thus, then, we may say that we have in our text the Christian life described as one of contemplation and manifestation of the light of God.  The great truth of a direct, unimpeded vision, as belonging to Christian men on earth, sounds strange to many of us.  ’That cannot be,’ you say; ’does not Paul himself teach that we see through a glass darkly?  Do we not walk by faith and not by sight?  “No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see Him”; and besides that absolute impossibility, have we not veils of flesh and sense, to say nothing of the covering of sin “spread over the face of all nations,” which hide from us even so much of the eternal light as His servants above behold, who see His face and bear His name on their foreheads?’

But these apparent difficulties drop away when we take into account two things—­first, the object of vision, and second, the real nature of the vision itself.

As to the former, who is the Lord whose glory we receive on our unveiled faces?  He is Jesus Christ.  Here, as in the overwhelming majority of instances where Lord occurs in the New Testament, it is the name of the manifested God our brother.  The glory which we behold and give back is not the incomprehensible, incommunicable lustre of the absolute divine perfectness, but that glory which, as John says, we beheld in Him who tabernacled with us, full of grace and truth; the glory which was manifested in loving, pitying words and loveliness of perfect deeds; the glory of the will resigned to God, and of God dwelling in and working through the will; the glory of faultless and complete manhood, and therein of the express image of God.

And as for the vision itself, that seeing which is denied to be possible is the bodily perception and the full comprehension of the Infinite God; that seeing which is affirmed to be possible, and actually bestowed in Christ, is the beholding of Him with the soul by faith; the immediate direct consciousness of His presence the perception of Him in His truth by the mind, the feeling of Him in His love by the heart, the contact with His gracious energy in our recipient and opening