e glory of the will resigned to
God, and of God dwelling in and working through the will; the glory
of faultless and complete manhood, and therein of the express image
of God.

And as for the vision itself, that seeing which is denied to be
possible is the bodily perception and the full comprehension of the
Infinite God; that seeing which is affirmed to be possible, and
actually bestowed in Christ, is the beholding of Him with the soul by
faith; the immediate direct consciousness of His presence the
perception of Him in His truth by the mind, the feeling of Him in His
love by the heart, the contact with His gracious energy in our
recipient and opening spirits. Faith is made the antithesis of sight.
It is so, in certain respects. But faith is also paralleled with and
exalted above the mere bodily perception. He who believing grasps the
living Lord has a contact with Him as immediate and as real as that
of the eyeball with light, and knows Him with a certitude as reliable
as that which sight gives. 'Seeing is believing,' says sense;
'Believing is seeing' says the spirit which clings to the Lord, 'whom
having not seen' it loves. A bridge of perishable flesh, which is not
myself but my tool, connects me with the outward world. _It_ never
touches myself at all, and I know it only by trust in my senses. But
nothing intervenes between my Lord and me, when I love and trust.
Then Spirit is joined to spirit, and of His presence I have the
witness in myself. He is the light, which proves its own existence by
revealing itself, which strikes with quickening impulse on the eye of
the spirit that beholds by faith. Believing we see, and, seeing, we
have that light in our souls to be 'the master light of all our
seeing.' We need not think that to know by the consciousness of our
trusting souls is less than to know by the vision of our fallible
eyes; and though flesh hides from us the spiritual world in which we
float, yet the only veil which really dims God to us--the veil of
sin, the one separating principle--is done away in Christ, for all
who love Him; so as that he who has not seen and yet has believed,
has but the perfecting of his present vision to expect, when flesh
drops away and the apocalypse of the heaven comes. True, in one view,
'We see through a glass darkly'; but also true, 'We all, with
unveiled face, behold and reflect the glory of the Lord.'

Then note still further Paul's emphasis on the universality of this
prerog