Paul says that the sight of the Lord will take that veil from their hearts. His light will burn it away. His presence gives liberty. Where he is, there is no more heaviness, no more bondage, no more wilderness or Mount Sinai. The Son makes free with sonship.
And now comes the passage whose import I desire to make more clear:
“But we all,” having this presence and this liberty, “with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image,” that of the Lord, “from glory to glory, even as of the Lord, the spirit.”
“We need no Moses, no earthly mediator, to come between us and the light, and bring out for us a little of the glory. We go into the presence of the Son revealing the Father—into the presence of the Light of men. Our mediator is the Lord himself, the spirit of light, a mediator not sent by us to God to bring back his will, but come from God to bring us himself. We enter, like Moses, into the presence of the visible, radiant God—only how much more visible, more radiant! As Moses stood with uncovered face receiving the glory of God full upon it, so with open, with uncovered face, full in the light of the glory of God, in the place of his presence, stand we—you and I, Corinthians. It is no reflected light we see, but the glory of God shining in, shining out of, shining in and from the face of Christ, the glory of the Father, one with the Son. Israel saw but the fading reflection of the glory of God on the face of Moses; we see the glory itself in the face of Jesus.”
But in what follows, it seems to me that the revised version misses the meaning almost as much as the authorized, when, instead of “beholding as in a glass,” it gives “reflecting as a mirror.” The former is wrong; the latter is far from right. The idea, with the figure, is that of a poet, not a man of science. The poet deals with the outer show of things, which outer show is infinitely deeper in its relation to truth, as well as more practically useful, than the analysis of the man of science. Paul never thought of the mirror as reflecting, as throwing back the rays of light from its surface; he thought of it as receiving, taking into itself, the things presented to it—here, as filling its bosom with the glory it looks upon. When I see the face of my friend in a mirror, the mirror seems to hold it in itself, to surround the visage with its liquid embrace. The countenance is there—down there in the depth of the mirror. True, it shines radiant out of it, but it is not the shining out of it that Paul has in his thought; it is the fact—the visual fact, which, according to Wordsworth, the poet always seizes—of the mirror holding in it the face.
That this is the way poet or prophet—Paul was both—would think of the thing, especially in the age of the apostle, I shall be able to make appear even more probable by directing your notice to the following passage from Dante—whose time, though so much farther from that of the apostle than our time from Dante’s, was in many respects much liker Paul’s than ours.
The passage is this: —Dell’ Inferno: Canto XXIII. 25–27:
E quei: “S’io fossi d’impiombato vetro,
L’immagine di fuor tua non trarrei
Più tosto a me, che quella dentro impetro.”
Here Virgil, with reference to the power he had of reading the thoughts of his companion, says to Dante:
“If I were of leaded glass,”—meaning, “If I were glass covered at the back with lead, so that I was a mirror,”—“I should not draw thy outward image to me more readily than I gain thy inner one”;—meaning, “than now I know your thoughts.”
It seems, then, to me, that the true simple word to represent the Greek, and the most literal as well by which to translate it, is the verb “mirror”—when the sentence, so far, would run thus: “But we all, with unveiled face, mirroring the glory of the Lord—.”
I must now go on to unfold the idea at work in the heart of the apostle. For the mere correctness of a translation is nothing, except it bring us something deeper, or at least some fresher insight: with him who cares for the words apart from what the writer meant them to convey, I have nothing to do: he must cease to “pass for a man” and begin to be a man indeed, on the way to be a live soul, before I can desire his intercourse. The prophet-apostle seems to me, then, to say, “We all, with clear vision of the Lord, mirroring in our hearts his glory, even as a
