Page:Cyclopedia of illustrations for public speakers, containing facts, incidents, stories, experiences, anecdotes, selections, etc., for illustrative purposes, with cross-references; (IA cyclopediaofillu00scotrich).pdf/362

 When Moses returned from communion with God his face shone so brightly that a veil was needed. There was another transfiguration which is the result not of glory reflected but of grace transfused. "Be ye transformed (lit. transfigured) by the renewing of your mind," says the apostle.

The visitor to the beautiful church of St. Paul without the walls at Rome is sure to be asked by the sacristans to notice the wonderful columns of pure alabaster which are among the splendors of that edifice. The guide brings a lighted taper which he places behind one of these massive pillars. The translucent alabaster immediately glows with the light that seems to play all through it with lambent effulgence. The solid mass glorifies the flame, as the flame illumines the solid substance. (Text.)

(1508)

See.

ILLUSION, SPIRITUAL

Worldly men on first coming into the spiritual life often misjudge the values and dimensions of Christian realities. Only long Christian experience enables men to get the right perspective of Christian realities.

If you have always lived in valleys or near the sea level, then you have always been viewing distant objects through a dusty or vaporous atmosphere. If you should go to a mountainous region or an elevated plateau, you would suffer great illusion as to distances. As you would still have the mental standards of the lowlands, very distant objects would seem to be quite near. You would travel all day to reach a mountain that seems but an hour's walk away.

(1509)

ILLUSIONS, MORAL

A celebrated naturalist tells us that one day he saw a bird drowning in a lake, and he felt sure that the bird had mistaken the water for the sky; it was a bright, transparent day, the clear, calm lake reflected the sky and the whole landscape in its depths, and the bird, not discerning that the world below it was a world of shadows, was betrayed to its doom. So all the glories of the upper world appear inverted in the world of evil. The lofty, the pure, the beautiful, the bright, are all seductively reflected in the depths of Satan; they are exaggerated there, they are seen in surpassing magnitude and splendor; error seems some nobler truth, disobedience some larger liberty, forbidden things seem the sweetest flowers and mellowest fruits of paradise.—, "The Transfigured Sackcloth."

(1510)

ILLUSIONS, OPTICAL

On the chalk downs of Wiltshire, in sight of the town of Westbury, there appears a great white horse, which presumably marks the sight of one of the battles between Alfred the Great and the Danes. As you look at that white horse upon the hill from the road approaching it it is perfectly drawn—it is so accurate that I doubt if any painter of a horse could improve upon it; but some time ago when I was in that neighborhood, I went up to the white horse to see it on the spot. There I found that this cutting in the green turf which revealed the chalk below was so extensive that if I walked round the outline, I could cover about a mile, and the shape as it lay along the slope of the hill had no resemblance to a horse whatever. Like the long shadows cast by the setting sun, its sprawling limbs went down the hill, and were so much greater than the width of the body that you could not have told in walking over it that the artist—for an artist he was—who designed it could possibly intend to be drawing a horse; that perfect horse upon the hillside, to the traveler approaching from Westbury, appeared to have no existence at all—it was a great perspective drawing upon the hill, which, when seen close at hand, did not even suggest a horse's form. Taking that as an illustration, does it not often strike you how the whole pageant of earth and sky, which delights our eye, is just as unreal as the scenery of the stage? Those clouds that drape the setting sun, and form lofty mountains and shimmering seas, making a landscape in the sky so beautiful that no painter on earth could reproduce it; those clouds that charm us with their beauty, if we were in the midst of them, would be merely like the drenching rain of an April day, without beauty, without charm. And those starry heavens which are to us all of the earth a subject of endless delight because of their beauty and their incomparable grandeur, are not in the least what they appear.—, Christian World Pulpit.

(1511)

The other day I came across the letter which Galileo wrote to Kepler, when he was afraid to publish the discoveries which had