ction, to the glory of God smiting him on the face, till the
reflected lustre with which it glowed became dazzling, and needed to
be hid. And again, if Paul is here describing Christian vision of God
as only indirect, as in a mirror, then that would be a point of
inferiority in us as compared with Moses, who saw Him face to face.
But the whole tone of the context prepares us to expect a setting
forth of the particulars in which the Christian attitude towards the
manifested God is above the Jewish. So, on the whole, it seems better
to suppose that Paul meant 'mirroring,' than 'seeing in a mirror.'

But, whatever be the exact force of the word, the thing intended
includes both acts. There is no reflection of the light without a
previous reception of the light. In bodily sight, the eye is a
mirror, and there is no sight without an image of the thing perceived
being formed in the perceiving eye. In spiritual sight, the soul
which beholds is a mirror, and at once beholds and reflects. Thus,
then, we may say that we have in our text the Christian life
described as one of contemplation and manifestation of the light of
God.
The great truth of a direct, unimpeded vision, as belonging to
Christian men on earth, sounds strange to many of us. 'That cannot
be,' you say; 'does not Paul himself teach that we see through a
glass darkly? Do we not walk by faith and not by sight? "No man hath
seen God at any time, nor can see Him"; and besides that absolute
impossibility, have we not veils of flesh and sense, to say nothing
of the covering of sin "spread over the face of all nations," which
hide from us even so much of the eternal light as His servants above
behold, who see His face and bear His name on their foreheads?'

But these apparent difficulties drop away when we take into account
two things--first, the object of vision, and second, the real nature
of the vision itself.

As to the former, who is the Lord whose glory we receive on our
unveiled faces? He is Jesus Christ. Here, as in the overwhelming
majority of instances where _Lord_ occurs in the New Testament,
it is the name of the manifested God our brother. The glory which we
behold and give back is not the incomprehensible, incommunicable
lustre of the absolute divine perfectness, but that glory which, as
John says, we beheld in Him who tabernacled with us, full of grace
and truth; the glory which was manifested in loving, pitying words
and loveliness of perfect deeds; th