When Moses returned from communion with God his face shone so brightly that a veil was needed. There was another transfiguration which is the result not of glory reflected but of grace transfused. "Be ye transformed (lit. transfigured) by the renewing of your mind," says the apostle.
The visitor to the beautiful church of St.
Paul without the walls at Rome is sure to be
asked by the sacristans to notice the wonderful
columns of pure alabaster which are
among the splendors of that edifice. The
guide brings a lighted taper which he places
behind one of these massive pillars. The
translucent alabaster immediately glows with
the light that seems to play all through it
with lambent effulgence. The solid mass
glorifies the flame, as the flame illumines the
solid substance. (Text.)
(1508)
See Light.
ILLUSION, SPIRITUAL
Worldly men on first coming into the spiritual life often misjudge the values and dimensions of Christian realities. Only long Christian experience enables men to get the right perspective of Christian realities.
If you have always lived in valleys or
near the sea level, then you have always been
viewing distant objects through a dusty or
vaporous atmosphere. If you should go to a
mountainous region or an elevated plateau,
you would suffer great illusion as to distances.
As you would still have the mental
standards of the lowlands, very distant objects
would seem to be quite near. You
would travel all day to reach a mountain
that seems but an hour's walk away.
(1509)
ILLUSIONS, MORAL
A celebrated naturalist tells us that one
day he saw a bird drowning in a lake, and
he felt sure that the bird had mistaken the
water for the sky; it was a bright, transparent
day, the clear, calm lake reflected the
sky and the whole landscape in its depths,
and the bird, not discerning that the world
below it was a world of shadows, was betrayed
to its doom. So all the glories of the
upper world appear inverted in the world of
evil. The lofty, the pure, the beautiful, the
bright, are all seductively reflected in the
depths of Satan; they are exaggerated there,
they are seen in surpassing magnitude and
splendor; error seems some nobler truth,
disobedience some larger liberty, forbidden
things seem the sweetest flowers and mellowest
fruits of paradise.—W. L. Watkinson,
"The Transfigured Sackcloth."
(1510)
ILLUSIONS, OPTICAL
On the chalk downs of Wiltshire, in sight
of the town of Westbury, there appears a
great white horse, which presumably marks
the sight of one of the battles between Alfred
the Great and the Danes. As you look at
that white horse upon the hill from the road
approaching it it is perfectly drawn—it is
so accurate that I doubt if any painter of a
horse could improve upon it; but some time
ago when I was in that neighborhood, I went
up to the white horse to see it on the spot.
There I found that this cutting in the green
turf which revealed the chalk below was so
extensive that if I walked round the outline,
I could cover about a mile, and the shape as
it lay along the slope of the hill had no resemblance
to a horse whatever. Like the
long shadows cast by the setting sun, its
sprawling limbs went down the hill, and
were so much greater than the width of the
body that you could not have told in walking
over it that the artist—for an artist he was—who
designed it could possibly intend to be
drawing a horse; that perfect horse upon the
hillside, to the traveler approaching from
Westbury, appeared to have no existence at
all—it was a great perspective drawing upon
the hill, which, when seen close at hand, did
not even suggest a horse's form. Taking
that as an illustration, does it not often strike
you how the whole pageant of earth and
sky, which delights our eye, is just as unreal
as the scenery of the stage? Those clouds
that drape the setting sun, and form lofty
mountains and shimmering seas, making a
landscape in the sky so beautiful that no
painter on earth could reproduce it; those
clouds that charm us with their beauty, if
we were in the midst of them, would be
merely like the drenching rain of an April
day, without beauty, without charm. And
those starry heavens which are to us all of
the earth a subject of endless delight because
of their beauty and their incomparable
grandeur, are not in the least what they appear.—Robert
F. Horton, Christian World Pulpit.
(1511)
The other day I came across the letter which Galileo wrote to Kepler, when he was afraid to publish the discoveries which had
