NS TO THE DEPARTED
THE VOICES OF THE DEAD
MYSTERY AND FAITH

THE THREE TABERNACLES

And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to
be here: and let us make three tabernacles, one for thee, and one for
Moses, and one for Elias. MARK ix. 5.

Caught up in glory and in rapture, the Apostle seems to have forgotten
the world from which he had ascended, and to which he still belonged,
and to have craved permanent shelter and extatic communion within the
mystic splendors that brightened the Mount of Transfiguration. But it
was true, not only as to the confusion of his faculties, but the purport
of his desire, that "he knew not what he said." For even "while he yet
spake," the cloud overshadowed them, the heavenly forms vanished, they
found themselves with Jesus alone, and an awful Voice summoned them from
contemplation to duty,--from vision to work.

Peter knew not what he said. He would have converted the means into an
end. He and his fellow-disciples had been called to follow Christ not
that they might see visions, but had been permitted to see visions that
they might follow Christ. Just previous to that celestial interview,
Jesus had announced to them his own painful doom, and had swept away
their conceit of Messianic glories involved with earthly pomp and
dominion, by his declaration of the self-denial, the shame, and the
suffering, which lay in the path of those who really espoused his cause
and entered into his kingdom. They needed such a revelation as this,
then, upon the Mount of Transfiguration, to support them under the
stroke which had shaken their earthly delusion, and let in glimpses of
the sadder truth. It was well that they should behold the leaders of the
old dispensation confirming and ministering to the greatness of the new,
and the religion which was to go down into the dark places of the earth
made manifest in its authority and its source from Heaven. It was
well that they should see their Master glorified, that they might be
strengthened to see him crucified. It was well that Moses and Elias
stood at the font, when they were about to be baptized into their
apostleship of suffering, and labor, and helping finish the work which
these glorious elders helped begin. But that great work still lay before
them, and to rest here would be to stop upon the threshold;--to have
kept the vision would have thwarted the purpose. Upon a far higher
summit, and at a far distant tim