A Goodly Heritage

"Lord, it is good for us to be here." I.  THIS EVENT HAD A SPECIAL EVIDENTIAL VALUE; it proved to St. Peter and — to the other apostles with him that their Master's claims were not exaggerated; that in giving up all to follow Him, they were not making a mistake; that the religion He had taught them, and of which He was Himself the centre, had come from heaven. These Jews see their Master in the correspondence with the great lawgiver and the prophets. Also they were assured by the voice out of the cloud. Then our Lord's glorious appearance at the Transfiguration was exactly fitted to remove a prevalent objection to the second advent. That objection was due to sluggish imagination rather than to offended reason. The picture of the Son of Man coming in " the clouds of heaven " seemed to a certain order of minds too remote from all experience to be conceivable, and St. Peter's answer in effect is this: "We have been witnesses of an event which has pr...

The expectation of a coming day of God affects Christian thought, in the first place, BY REMINDING US OF WHAT HUMAN LIFE REALLY IS AND MEANS. Springing, as it does, out of the very idea of duty, being, as it is, the inseparable concomitant of a reasoned conception of right and wrong as the law planted within us by some moral being, who must have the will and the power to enforce it, the expectation of a coming judgment at once raises man into his true place as the first of created beings here below; and yet, withal, it keeps him there. In short, the knowledge that we have to be judged at once guarantees our dignity and defines our subordination. It is only as moral beings having free-will that we are capable of undergoing judgment at all; and, as having to undergo it, we are necessarily and infinitely below Him whose right and whose duty it is to judge us. II.  A second way in which the expectation of the coming of the day of God powerfully affects Christian thought is THAT WHIC...