who stood by Him in the lambent lustre, and shone with a brightness above that which had once been veiled on Sinai.  We shall never vanish from His side, but dwell with Him in the abiding temple which He has built, and there, looking upon Him for ever, our happy souls shall change as they gaze, and behold Him more perfectly as they change, for ’we know that when He shall appear we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.’

LOOKING AT THE UNSEEN

   ’While we look not at the things which are seen, but
   at the things which are not seen.’—­2 COR. iv. 18.

Men may be said to be divided into two classes, materialists and idealists, in the widest sense of those two words.  The mass care for, and are occupied by, and regard as really solid good, those goods which can be touched and enjoyed by sense.  The minority—­students, thinkers, men of ideas, moralists, and the like—­believe in, and care for, impalpable spiritual riches.  Everybody admits that the latter class is distinctly the higher.  Now it is from no disregard to the importance and reality of that broad distinction that I insist, to begin with, that it is not the antithesis which is in the Apostle’s mind here.  His notion of ‘the things that are seen’ and ’the things that are not seen’ is a much grander and wider one than that.  By ’the things that are seen’ he means the whole of this visible world, with all its circumstances and relations, and by ’the things that are not seen’ he means the realities beyond the stars.

He means the same thing that we mean when we talk in a much less true and impressive contrast about the present and the future.  To him the ‘things that are not seen’ are present instead of being, as we weakly and foolishly christen them, ‘the future state.’  And it makes all the difference whether we think of that august realm as lying far away ahead of us, or whether we feel that it is, as it is, in very deed, all round about us, and pressing in upon us, only that ’the veil’—­that is to say, our ’flesh’—­has come between us and it.  Do not habitually think of these two sets of objects according to that misleading distinction ‘present’ and ‘future,’ but think of them rather as ‘the things that are seen,’ and ’the things that are not seen.’

I. Now, first, I wish to say a word or two about what such a look will do for us.

Paul’s notion is, as you will see if you look at the context, that if we want to understand the visible, or to get the highest good out of the things that are seen, we must bring into the field of vision ’the things that are not seen.’  The case with which he is dealing is that of a man in trouble.  He talks about light affliction which is but for a moment, working out a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, ‘while we look at the things which are not seen.’  But the principle on which that statement is made, of course, has its widest application to all sorts and conditions of human life.