its equivalent in working English.  It suggests at first a radiance of some kind, something dazzling or glittering, some halo such as the old masters loved to paint round the head of their Ecce Homos.  But that is paint, mere matter, the visible symbol of some unseen thing.  What is that unseen thing?  It is that of all unseen things the most radiant, the most beautiful, the most Divine, and that is Character.  On earth, in Heaven, there is nothing so great, so glorious as this.  The word has many meanings; in ethics it can have but one.  Glory is character, and nothing less, and it can be nothing more.  The earth is “full of the glory of the Lord,” because it is full of His character.  The “Beauty of the Lord” is character.  “The effulgence of His Glory” is character.  “The Glory of the Only Begotten” is character, the character which is “fullness of grace and truth.”  And when God told His people His name, He simply gave them His character, His character which was Himself:  “And the Lord proclaimed the name of the Lord ... the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering and abundant in goodness and truth.”  Glory then is not something intangible, or ghostly, or transcendental.  If it were this, how could Paul ask men to reflect it?  Stripped of its physical enswathement it is Beauty, moral and spiritual Beauty, Beauty infinitely real, infinitely exalted, yet infinitely near and infinitely communicable.

With this explanation read over the sentence once more in paraphrase:  We all reflecting as a mirror the character of Christ are transformed into the same Image from character to character—­from a poor character to a better one, from a better one to a little better still, from that to one still more complete, until by slow degrees the Perfect Image is attained.  Here

          THE SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF SANCTIFICATION

is compressed into a sentence:  Reflect the character of Christ, and you will become like Christ.  You will be changed, in spite of yourself and unknown to yourself, into the same image from character to character.

(1).  All men are reflectors—­that is

          THE FIRST LAW

on which this formula is based.  One of the aptest descriptions of a human being is that he is a mirror.  As we sat at table to-night the world in which each of us lived and moved throughout this day was focused in the room.  What we saw when we looked at one another was not one another, but one another’s world.  We were an arrangement of mirrors.  The scenes we saw were all reproduced; the people we met walked to and fro; they spoke, they bowed, they passed us by, did everything over again as if it had been real.  When we talked, we were but looking at our own mirror and describing what flitted across it; our listening was not hearing, but seeing—­we but looked on our neighbor’s mirror.