eality within each
bosom, that some day all that eye hath seen shall fall away from us, and
yet the true man shall remain intact.

Man has never seen more than a hint, an outcome, a partial
self-revelation or self-betrayal of his fellow-man.

"Yes, in the sea of life in-isled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live _alone_.

* * * * *

God bade betwixt 'our' shores to be
The unplumb'd, salt, estranging sea."

And yet, incredible as the paradox would seem, if it were not too common
to be strange, the play of muscles and rush of blood, visible through
the skin, do reveal the most spiritual and immaterial changes. Even so
the heavens declare that very glory of God which baffled the undimmed
eyes of Moses. So it was, also, that when rended rocks and burning skies
revealed a more immanent action of Him Who moves through all nature
always, when convulsions hitherto undreamed of by those dwellers in
Egyptian plains overwhelmed them with a new sense of their own smallness
and a supreme Presence, God was manifested there.

Not unlike this is the explanation of St. Augustine, "We need not be
surprised that God, invisible as He is, appeared visibly to the
patriarchs. For, as the sound which communicates the thought conceived
in the silence of the mind is not the thought itself, so the form by
which God, invisible in His own nature, became visible, was not God
Himself. Nevertheless it was He Himself Who was seen under that form, as
the thought itself is heard in the sound of the voice; and the
patriarchs recognised that, although the bodily form was not God, they
saw the invisible God. For, though Moses was conversing with God, yet he
said, 'If I have found grace in Thy sight, show me Thyself'" (_De Civ.
Dei_, x. 13). And again: "He knew that he saw corporeally, but he sought
the true vision of God spiritually" (_De Trin._, ii. 27).

It has still to be added that His manifestation is exactly suited to the
stage now reached in the education of Israel. Their fathers had already
"seen God" in the likeness of man: Abraham had entertained Him; Jacob
had wrestled with Him. And so Joshua before Ai, and Manoah by the rock
at Zorah, and Ezekiel by the river Chebar, should see the likeness of a
man. We who believe the doctrine of a real Incarnation can well perceive
that in these passing and mysterious glimpse