spirits.  Faith is made the antithesis of sight.  It is so, in certain respects.  But faith is also paralleled with and exalted above the mere bodily perception.  He who believing grasps the living Lord has a contact with Him as immediate and as real as that of the eyeball with light, and knows Him with a certitude as reliable as that which sight gives.  ‘Seeing is believing,’ says sense; ‘Believing is seeing’ says the spirit which clings to the Lord, ’whom having not seen’ it loves.  A bridge of perishable flesh, which is not myself but my tool, connects me with the outward world. It never touches myself at all, and I know it only by trust in my senses.  But nothing intervenes between my Lord and me, when I love and trust.  Then Spirit is joined to spirit, and of His presence I have the witness in myself.  He is the light, which proves its own existence by revealing itself, which strikes with quickening impulse on the eye of the spirit that beholds by faith.  Believing we see, and, seeing, we have that light in our souls to be ’the master light of all our seeing.’  We need not think that to know by the consciousness of our trusting souls is less than to know by the vision of our fallible eyes; and though flesh hides from us the spiritual world in which we float, yet the only veil which really dims God to us—­the veil of sin, the one separating principle—­is done away in Christ, for all who love Him; so as that he who has not seen and yet has believed, has but the perfecting of his present vision to expect, when flesh drops away and the apocalypse of the heaven comes.  True, in one view, ‘We see through a glass darkly’; but also true, ’We all, with unveiled face, behold and reflect the glory of the Lord.’

Then note still further Paul’s emphasis on the universality of this prerogative—­’We all.’  This vision does not belong to any select handful; does not depend upon special powers or gifts, which in the nature of things can only belong to a few.  The spiritual aristocracy of God’s Church is not the distinction of the law-giver, the priest or the prophet.  There is none of us so weak, so low, so ignorant, so compassed about with sin, but that upon our happy faces that light may rest, and into our darkened hearts that sunshine may steal.

In that Old Dispensation, the light that broke through clouds was but that of the rising morning.  It touched the mountain tops of the loftiest spirits:  a Moses, a David, an Elijah caught the early gleams; while all the valleys slept in the pale shadow, and the mist clung in white folds to the plains.  But the noon has come, and, from its steadfast throne in the very zenith, the sun, which never sets, pours down its rays into the deep recesses of the narrowest gorge, and every little daisy and hidden flower catches its brightness, and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof.  We have no privileged class or caste now; no fences to keep out the mob from the place of vision, while lawgiver and priest gaze upon God.