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 highe