There is no man who understands the Transfiguration like John Ruskin. He says: "We are afraid to harbour in our own hearts, or to utter in the hearing of others, any thought of our Lord as hungering, tired, or sorrowful, or having a human soul, a human will, and affected by the events of human life as a finite creature is: and yet one-half of the efficacy of His atonement and the whole of the efficacy of His example depend on His having been this to the full. Consider therefore the Transfiguration as it relates to the human feelings of our Lord. It was the first definite preparation for His death.... What other hill could it have been than the southward slope of that goodly mountain, Hermon, which is, indeed, the centre of all the promised land, from the entering in of Hamath to the river of Egypt; the mount of fruitfulness, from which the springs of Jordan descended to the valleys of Israel. Along its mighty forest avenues, until the grass grew fair with the mountain lilies, His feet dashed with the dew of Hermon, He must have gone to pray His first recorded prayer about death; and from the steep of it, before He knelt, could see, to the south, all the dwelling-places of the people that had sat in darkness, and seen the great light, the land of Zabulon and of Naphthali, Galilee of the Gentiles: could see even with His human sight, the gleam of that lake by Capernaum and Chorazin, and many a place loved by Him and vainly ministered to, whose house was now left unto them desolate: and, chief of all, far in the utmost blue, the hills above Nazareth, sloping down to His old home; hills on which the stones yet lay loose that had been taken up to cast at Him, when He left them for ever. 'And as He prayed two men stood by Him.'" "Among the many ways in which we miss the help and hold of Scripture, there is none more subtle than our habit of supposing that, even as man, Christ was free from the fear of death. How could He then have been tempted as we are?--since among all the trials of the earth none spring from the dust more terrible than that of fear. It had to be borne by Him ... and the presence of it is surely marked for us enough by the rising of those two at His side." It was Christ's first preparation for death--and, therefore, to understand His Transfiguration we must understand His Crucifixion too; to see Hermon, we must go to Calvary; to discern how the fashion of His countenance was altered, we must witness that other time in the garden, when "His sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down on the ground"; to fathom how the three disciples slept through the glory, we must remember how they slept through the sorrow too.