of the formula is--"By reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord
we are changed." But this is not very clear. What is the "glory"
of the Lord, and how can mortal man reflect it, and how can that
act as an "impressed force" in moulding him to a nobler form? The
word "glory"--the word which has to bear the weight of holding
these "impressed forces"--is a stranger in current speech, and our
first duty is to seek out 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 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 for 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