There had to be a bridging of that gap.  It had to be from the upper side.  The other fell short.  The gap was still there.  There had to be a new strain of blood.  This was, this is, the only way.  We get into that old first family only by the Father of the family reaching over the break and putting in the new strain of blood, the germ of the family life, and so lifting us up to the new level.  And Jesus was God doing just that.

Our Tented Neighbour.

Then John begins a new paragraph.  He goes back to tell just how the thing was done.  Listen:  the Word, this wondrous One, became a man, one of ourselves, and pitched His tent in close amongst our tents.There’s only a stretch of canvas between Him and any of us.  He wanted to get close, close enough to help, yet never infringing upon the privacy of our tents, only coming in as He was invited.  But He has remarkable ears.  A whisper reaches Him at once.  And He is out of His tent into ours to help at the faintest call.  That was why He pitched His tent in amongst ours, to be one of ourselves, and to be at hand in our need.

And then a touch of awe creeps into John’s spirit as he writes, and the light flashes out of his eye with the intensity of an old picture surging to the front of his imagination again.  There was more than a tent here, more than a man.  Out of the man, out through the tent doorway, and tent canvas, flashes a wondrous, soft, clear light, that transfigures canvas and tent and man.  John’s face glows as he writes, “and we beheld His glory.”

I suppose he is thinking chiefly of that still night on white Hermon.  This despised Man had called the inner three away from the crowd, in the dark of night, and had gently drawn aside the exquisite drapery of His humanity, and let some of the inner glory shine out before their eyes.  So the way was lightened for them as their feet were turned with His down towards the dark valley of the cross.  I suppose John is thinking chiefly of this.

But this is not all, I am very sure.  There’s more, even though this may have been most.  Glory is the character of goodness.  It is not something tacked on the outside.  It is some native thing looking out from within.  So much of what we think of as glory and splendour in scenes of magnificence is a something in the externals, the outer arrangements.  Splendid garbing, brilliant colours, dazzling shining of lights, seats removed a distance apart and up, magnificent outer appointments,—­these seem connected in our thought with an occasion and a scene being glorious.