pleasure, joy, content, and peace.

They had found out that with God was the well of life; that in God they lived and moved, and had their being.  And as long as their souls lived in God, full of the eternal life and goodness, obeying his laws, loving the thing which he commanded, and desiring what he promised, they could trust him for their poor worn-out dying bodies, that he would not let them perish, but raise them up again at the last day.  They knew very little; but what they did know was full of light.  Cheerful and hopeful they were always; for they saw all things in the light of God.  They knew that God was light, and God was love; that his love was shining down on them and on all around them, warming, cheering, quickening into life all things which he had made; so that when the world should have looked most dark to them, it looked most bright, because they saw it lightened up by the smile of their Father in heaven.

O may God bring us all to such an old age, that, as our mortal bodies decay, our souls may be renewed day by day; that as the life of our bodies grows cold and feeble, the life of our souls may grow richer, warmer, stronger, more useful to all around us, for ever and ever; that as the light of this life fades, the light of our souls may grow brighter, fuller, deeper; till all is clear to us in the everlasting light of God, in that perfect day for which St. Paul thirsted through so many weary years; when he should no more see through a glass darkly, or prophesy in part, and talk as a child, but see face to face, and know even as he was known.

SERMON III.  THE TRANSFIGURATION

(Preached before the Queen.)

Matthew xvii. 2 and 9.  And he was transfigured before them. . . . And he charged them, saying, Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of Man be risen again from the dead.

Any one who will consider the gospels, will see that there is a peculiar calm, a soberness and modesty about them, very different from what we should have expected to find in them.  Speaking, as they do, of the grandest person who ever trod this earth, of the grandest events which ever happened upon this earth—of the events, indeed, which settled the future of this earth for ever,—one would not be surprised at their using grand words—the grandest they could find.  If they had gone off into beautiful poetry; if they had filled pages with words of astonishment, admiration, delight; if they had told us their own thoughts and feelings at the sight of our Lord; if they had given us long and full descriptions of our Lord’s face and figure, even (as forged documents have pretended to do) to the very colour of his hair, we should have thought it but natural.

But there is nothing of the kind in either of the four gospels, even when speaking of the most awful matters.  Their words are as quiet and simple and modest as if they were written of things which might be seen every day.  When they tell of our Lord’s crucifixion, for instance, how easy, natural, harmless, right, as far as we can see, it would have been to have poured out their own feelings about the most pitiable and shameful crime ever committed upon earth; to have spoken out all their own pity, terror, grief, indignation; and to have stirred up ours thereby.  And yet all they say is,—‘And they crucified him.’  They feel that is enough.  The deed is too dark to talk about.  Let it tell its own story to all human hearts.

So with this account of the Lord’s transfiguration.  ‘And he took Peter, and James, and John, his brother, up into a high mountain, apart, and was transfigured before them; and his face did shine as the sun; and his raiment was white as the light; . . . and while he yet spake a bright cloud overshadowed them; and, behold, a voice out of the cloud, which said: This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.  Hear ye him.’

How soberly, simply, modestly, they tell this strange story.  How differently they might have told it.  A man might write whole poems, whole books of philosophy, about that transfiguration, and yet never reach the full depth of its beauty and of its meaning.  But the evangelists do not even try to do that.  As with the crucifixion, as with all the most wonderful passages of our Lord’s life, they simply say what happened, and let the story bring its own message home to our hearts.

What may we suppose is the reason of this great stillness and soberness of the gospels?  I believe that it may be explained thus.  The men who wrote them were too much awed by our Lord, to make more words about him than they absolutely needed.

Our Lord was too utterly beyond them.  They felt that they could not understand him; could not give a worthy picture of him.  He was too noble, too awful, in spite of all his tenderness, for any words of theirs, however fine.  We all know that the holiest things, the deepest feelings, the most beautiful sights, are those about which we talk least, and least like to hear others talk.  Putting them into words seems impertinent, profane.  No one needs to gild gold, or paint the lily.  When we see a glorious sunset; when we hear the rolling of the thunder-storm; we do not talk about them; we do not begin to cry, How awful, how magnificent; we admire them in silence, and let them tell their own story.  Who that ever truly loved his wife talked about his love to her?  Who that ever came to Holy Communion in spirit and in truth, tried to put into words what he felt as he knelt before Christ’s altar?  When God speaks, man had best keep silence.

So it was, I suppose, with the writers of the gospels.  They had been in too grand company for them to speak freely of what they felt there.  They had seen such sights, and heard such words, that they were inclined to be silent, and think over it all, and only wrote because they must write.  They felt that our Lord, as I say, was utterly beyond them, too unlike any one whom they had ever met before; too perfect, too noble, for them to talk about him.  So they simply set down his words as he spoke them, and his works as he did them, as far as they could recollect, and left them to tell their own story.  Even St. John, who was our Lord’s beloved friend, who seems to have caught and copied exactly his way of speaking, seems to feel that there was infinitely more in our Lord than he could put into words, and ends with confessing,—‘And there are also many more things which Jesus did, the which if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written.’

The first reason then, I suppose, for the evangelists’ modesty, was their awe and astonishment at our Lord.  The next, I think, may have been that they wished to copy him, and so to please him.  It surely must have been so, if, as all good Christians believe, they were inspired to write our Lord’s life.  The Lord would inspire them to write as he would like his life to be written, as he would have written it (if it be reverent to speak of such a thing) himself.  They were inspired by Christ’s Spirit; and, therefore, they wrote according to the Spirit of Christ, soberly, humbly, modestly, copying the character of Christ.

Think upon that word modestly.  I am not sure that it is the best; I only know that it is the best which I can find, to express one excellence which we see in our Lord, which is like what we call modesty in common human beings.

We all know how beautiful and noble modesty is; how we all admire it; how it raises a man in our eyes to see him afraid of boasting; never showing off; never requiring people to admire him; never pushing himself forward; or, if his business forces him to go into public, not going for the sake of display, but simply because the thing has to be done; and then quietly withdrawing himself when the thing is done, content that none