and more enlightened than all the wisdom of old men. In proportion as he grows up, his glory unfolds itself: John the Baptist, that man, the greatest of the children of men, humbles himself before him, and says that he is not worthy of performing the meanest offices to him. A voice from Heaven declares that he is the well-beloved Son. The affrighted demons fly from before him, are unable to support the sole presence of his sanctity, and confess that he is the holy of God. Collect together testimonies so different and so new, circumstances so unheard-of and so extraordinary; what is this man who appears upon the earth with so much eclat? And are not the people who have worshipped him at least excusable?
But these are only weak preludes of his glory. If he privately withdraw himself upon the Tabor, accompanied with three disciples, his glory, impatient, if I dare to say it, at having hitherto been held captive under the veil of humanity, openly bursts forth: he appears all resplendent in light; the heavenly Father, who then, it would appear, lest the glory of Jesus Christ should become an occasion of error and idolatry to the astonished disciples, spectators of this sight, ought to have warned them that this Jesus, whom they beheld so glorious, was nevertheless only his servant and messenger, declares to them, on the contrary, that this is his well-beloved Son, in whom he his well pleased, and affixes no bounds to the homages which, according to his pleasure, they are to render to him. When Moses appeared surrounded with glory, and, as it were transfigured on Mount Sinai, afraid lest the Israelites, always superstitious, should consider him as a god descended upon the earth, the Lord, amid a flame of fire, declared at the same time from on high, " I am that I am, and thou shalt worship only me." Moses himself appears before the people with only the tables of the law in his hands, as if to let them know that, notwithstanding the glory with which they had seen him arrayed, he nevertheless was only the minister, and not the author of the holy law; that he could offer it to them only engraven on stone, and that it belonged solely to God to engrave it on hearts. But on the Tabor, Jesus Christ appears as the legislator himself: the new law is not given to him by his Father to bear it to men; he only commandeth them to listen to him, and from his own mouth he proposeth him as their legislator, or rather as their living and eternal law.
What more shall I say, my brethren? If from the Tabor we pass to Mount Calvary, that place, in which all the ignominy of the Son of Man was to be consummated, is not less, however, the theatre of his glory and divinity. All nature, disorganized, confesses its Author in him; the stars which are hidden; the dead who arise; the stones of the tombs, which open of their own accord, and break in pieces; the veil of the temple, which is rent from top to bottom; even incredulity itself, which confesses him through the mouth of the centurion; all feel that it is not an ordinary man who dies, and that things take place upon that mount totally new and extraordinary.
