Our Lord makes no comment on the manifestation witnessed by the three beyond charging them “that they should tell no man what things they had seen, till the Son of man were risen from the dead.”(253) What they had beheld contained a varied store of lessons, and men in the after times of the world would draw out one or another according to the turn taken by their thoughts. The Apostles, at the moment, only understood a small part of what this revelation conveyed. No exposition given in words could have brought to the comprehension of the three a perception of the whole bearing of what they had seen, but they would live into more of its meaning in time. If our Lord had discoursed on this manifestation, and represented its purport in this view or in that, men might have supposed that He meant His account to be exhaustive, and that the fact contained no lessons beyond those which He Himself set forth. Here we come I think upon a possible reason why our Lord is sparing of exposition regarding the facts of revelation. He could not briefly point out _every_ truth that a fact embodied, and if in an exposition, which was seemingly full, He should pass any lessons by, these it might be supposed He intended to exclude; in this way His reticence preserves for us the many-sidedness of Divine truth and engages men to ponder on it for themselves. For the Apostles to have been allowed to spread abroad the story of the solemn scene upon the Mount would have been damaging to the work both for the world and themselves. The old cry might again have been raised to take Jesus and make Him a king; or the people might have been seized with a fever of curiosity, and the scribes would have grown all the more bitter in their hatred from its being leavened with awe. The ill effect on the Apostles of becoming authorised to promulgate such momentous tidings is easy enough to perceive. When people run about to disseminate some scrap of news which they alone possess the result is usually not beneficial either to character or to mind. From this temptation the Apostles were guarded. What they have seen and heard is not matter which they may use to magnify their importance or excite envy—it is a sacred trust. This signal manifestation besides being a light to help to the understanding of what Christ meant by eternal life, was to furnish them with a reserve of certitude. The three might never need to draw on it for themselves, but it would be of no slight avail with Jewish converts to be able to assure them that Christ had visibly appeared in Glory and that God had directed men henceforth to listen, not to the Law or the Prophets, not to Moses or Elijah, but to Him.