ished "to live when Jesus
walked the earth," for He alone could have revealed all things to
me. How wonderful must have been His wisdom! And if His indwelling
spirit were God, then Christ yet lives--lives in some inner world of
love and beauty. Ah, beautiful hope! for, if immortality is my
portion, I may yet see Him, and learn of Him in another existence.
Methinks the night of my soul is passing away; upon the rayless
darkness a star has risen; a fixed star of love and hope; what if
like other fixed stars it prove a sun?

Oh, Christ! holy and beautiful Man! if Thou yet livest in far-away
realms of light and blessedness--grant that I may see Thee, and
learn of Thy wondrous wisdom. Enlighten my darkness, and suffer me
to love Thee as the Divinest type of man that my thought has yet
imagined.

THE DAWN OF THE MORNING.--I have gone back to my Bible with the old
childish love and reverence. I read it with an object now. I know
that in it, the beautiful Christ-nature was portrayed; and I read
with infinite longings to find Him the "unknown God;" and bright
revealings come to me through this Book. I feel that it is Divine,
and the light grows upon me; and sometimes like the Apostles, who
awakened in the night, and saw Christ transfigured before them, I
also saw a transfiguration. I lose sight of the mere material man,
and I perceive an inner glory of being, a radiance of wisdom, and
purity, and love, that clothe Him in a Divine light, and make His
countenance brilliant with a spiritual glory.

This transfiguration, what was it? My thought dwells upon it so--it
was a wonderful thing. I know that the scoffing philosophers
ridicule the idea of there being any reality in it; they regard it
either as a fiction on the part of the writers, or as a dream or a
delusion of the senses. But I believe that it all happened just as
it was narrated. For it is beautiful to believe it. If it did not
happen, I am none the worse for believing it, even if the whole life
was a fiction, which all history proves to have been true; and had
no Christ lived upon the earth, yet, as a work of art, this fiction
would have been the highest and most beautiful dream of the human
thought. But if it is all literally true; if Christ was "God
manifest in the flesh," how much do I gain by believing in him! I
have attained the highest and best of all knowledge--I know GOD!

And this transfiguration becomes a wonderful revelation! It was the
Spirit of God shin