n who had a friend whom he greatly admired and loved, and suppose
him to be talking with his friend, who suddenly excuses himself on the
plea of an engagement and goes out; and the other follows him, out of
curiosity, and sees him meet another man and talk intently with him,
not deferentially or humbly, but as a man talks with an equal. And
then drawing nearer he might suddenly see that the man his friend has
gone out to meet, and with whom he is talking so intently, is some
high minister of State, or even the King himself!

That is a simple comparison, to make clear what the apostles might
have felt. They had gone into the mountain expecting to hear their
Master speak quietly to them or betake himself to silent prayer; and
then they find him robed in light and holding converse with the
spirits of the air, telling his plans, so to speak, to two great
prophets of the ancient world.

If this had been but a pageant enacted for their benefit to dazzle and
bewilder them, it would have been a poor and self-conscious affair;
but it becomes a scene of portentous mystery, if one thinks of them as
being permitted to have a glimpse of the high, urgent, and terrifying
things that were going on all the time in the unseen background of the
Saviour's mind. The essence of the greatness of the scene is that it
was _overheard_. And thus I think that wonder and beauty, those two
mighty forces, take on a very different value for us when we can come
to realise that they are small hints given us, tiny glimpses conceded
to us, of some very great and mysterious thing that is pressingly and
speedily proceeding, every day and every hour, in the vast background
of life; and we ought to realise that it is not only human life as we
see it which is the active, busy, forceful thing; that the world with
all its noisy cities, its movements and its bustle, is not a burning
point hung in darkness and silence, but that it is just a little
fretful affair with infinitely larger, louder, fiercer, stronger
powers, working, moving, pressing onwards, thundering in the
background; and that the huge forces, laws, activities, behind the
world, are not perceived by us any more than we perceive the vast
motion of great winds, except in so far as we see the face of the
waters rippled by them, or the trees bowed all one way in their
passage.

It is very easy to be so taken up with the little absorbing
businesses, the froth and ripple of life, that we forget what gr