This transfiguration, what was it?  My thought dwells upon it so—­it was a wonderful thing.  I know that the scoffing philosophers ridicule the idea of there being any reality in it; they regard it either as a fiction on the part of the writers, or as a dream or a delusion of the senses.  But I believe that it all happened just as it was narrated.  For it is beautiful to believe it.  If it did not happen, I am none the worse for believing it, even if the whole life was a fiction, which all history proves to have been true; and had no Christ lived upon the earth, yet, as a work of art, this fiction would have been the highest and most beautiful dream of the human thought.  But if it is all literally true; if Christ was “God manifest in the flesh,” how much do I gain by believing in him!  I have attained the highest and best of all knowledge—­I know GOD!

And this transfiguration becomes a wonderful revelation!  It was the Spirit of God shining through the Man.  And this spirit was a substance and a form.  And what was its form?—­that of a man, with a face radiant as the sun.  Now know I how to think of God.  He is no longer a vague, incomprehensible existence; an ether floating in space.  But He is a living, breathing human form, a Man! in whose image and likeness we were created.  Oh, how I thank God that He has revealed this to me!  Now, I know what manner of Being I pray to; and like as the apostles saw Him, in His Divine spiritual human form, will I now always think of Him.  I will look through His veil of flesh, I will love Him as the only God-man that ever existed.

When I think thus of the inner Divine nature, clothed in a material body, how wonderfully do the scenes of this drama of the life of Christ strike me!  Imagine Him, the God of the universe, standing before the Jewish sanhedrim, condemned, buffeted, and spit upon.  How at that moment in His inmost Divine soul, He must have glanced over the vast creation, that He had called into being; and felt that an Infinite power dwelt in Him.  One blazing look of wrathful indignation would have annihilated that rude rabble.  But He had clothed himself in flesh, to subdue all of its evil and vile passions; to show to an ignorant and sensual race, the grace and beauty of a self-abnegation—­a Divine pity and forgiveness.  And thus did the outer material Man die with that beautiful and touching appeal to the Infinite-loving soul, from which the body was born:  “Father! forgive them, they know not what they do.”  Oh, Thou!  Divine Jesus! make me like unto Thee in this heavenly and loving spirit.

How clear many things grow to me now!  I smile when I think of the old childish trouble over the word “Logos,” for this Logos, i. e. truth, has been revealed to me.  In the knowledge that Christ was the Infinite God—­the Creator of the universe, I see Him as the central truth.  Thus Christ was the Logos,—­the Word; the Divine Truth, and now I read, that “In the beginning was Christ, and Christ was with God, and Christ was God.”  And I am happy in this knowledge—­my thought has something to rest upon out of myself; and my affections grow up from the earth to that wonderful Divine Man, who, after the death of the body, was seen as a man, a living man!  Immortality is no longer the dream of a Plato.  It is a demonstrated fact.