went to them and said to one of them, "Your Christ said, 'Forgive
all your enemies and love one another.'" "Yes," he said, "Christ was
divine. He could. I cannot." But there was nothing of moral virtue
that God wrought in Christ that He cannot work in you and me if we
give Him time enough. And, on the other hand, this separation of "God"
and "man" in Christ denies the real manifestation of God to man.
Jesus called His disciples to watch while He wrestled with agony in
Gethsemane, and Dean Alford, speaking on Gethsemane, says this was the
manifestation in Christ of human weakness. No! no! A thousand times,
No! It is the glorious manifestation of that sympathy in God which
wants the sympathy of the feeblest of His followers, as the mother
wants the sympathy and love of the babe on her lap. "Beloved, now are
we the sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Only
we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." There are two
things we do not know. Genius is always a mystery, spiritual genius
the greatest mystery of genius, and Christ the greatest mystery of
all. We do not know what we shall be, any more than one who never had
seen a garden could guess what the mold would be when the spring had
finished its work. Those are two things we do not know. But there are
two things we do know. We shall be like Him, and when we are like Him,
we shall see Him as He is. We shall be like no imagination of Him, no
deteriorated or imperfect conception of Him; but when we come to see
Him in all the regal splendor of His character, with all the love, all
the justice, all the purity, all the divine glory which is adumbrated
and shadowed here because our eyes could not look upon it and still
live--when we come to see Him in all the glory of that divine
character, we shall be like Him--_we shall be like Him_.