upon ourselves, by never accepting in its fulness the idea that our
Lord was "perfect man,"--"tempted in all things like as we are." Our
preachers are continually trying, in all manner of subtle ways, to
explain the union of the Divinity with the Manhood--an explanation
which certainly involves first their being able to describe the nature
of Deity itself, or, in plain words, to comprehend God. They never can
explain, in any one particular, the union of the natures; they only
succeed in weakening the faith of their hearers as to the entireness
of either. The thing they have to do is precisely the contrary of
this--to insist upon the _entireness_ of both. We never think of
Christ enough as God, never enough as Man; the instinctive habit of
our minds being always to miss of the Divinity, and the reasoning and
enforced habit to miss of the humanity. We are afraid to harbour in
our own hearts, or to utter in the hearing of others, any thought of
our Lord as hungering, tired, sorrowful, having a human soul, a human
will, and affected by events of human life, as a finite creature is:
and yet one half of the efficiency of His atonement, and the whole of
the efficiency of His example, depend on His having been this to the
full. Consider, therefore, the Transfiguration as it relates to the
human feelings of our Lord. It was the first definite preparation for
His death. He had foretold it to His disciples six days before; then
takes with Him the three chosen ones into "an high mountain apart."
From an exceeding high mountain, at the first taking on Him the
ministry of life, He had beheld and rejected the kingdoms of the
earth, and their glory: now, on a high mountain, He takes upon Him the
ministry of death. Peter and they that were with Him, as in
Gethsemane, were heavy with sleep. Christ's work had to be done alone.

The tradition is that the Mount of Transfiguration was the summit of
Tabor; but Tabor is neither a high mountain, nor was it in any sense a
mountain "_apart_," being in those years both, inhabited and
fortified. All the immediately preceding ministries of Christ had been
at Cesarea Philippi. There is no mention of travel southward in the
six days that intervened between the warning given to His disciples
and the going up into the hill. What other hill could it be than the
southward slope of that goodly mountain, Hermon, which is indeed the
centre of all the Promised Land, from the entering in of Hamath unto
the ri