But we must go a little further, and explain from what this sad confusion in the use of the term "mystery" has arisen. There are many things relating to ourselves and to things around us, which by nature we cannot understand; and of God we can scarcely understand anything. Now, while the gospel has revealed much that we did not know before, it yet has not revealed everything: of God, in particular, it has given us much most precious knowledge, yet it has not removed all the veil. It has furnished us with a glass, indeed, to use the apostle's comparison; but the glass, although, a great help, although reflecting a likeness of what, without it, we could not see at all, is yet a dark and imperfect manner of seeing, compared with, the seeing face to face. So, when the gospel tells us that He who made the world visited it in our nature, it does not indeed enable us yet fully to conceive what He is who made us, and then became as one of us; there is still left around the name of God that light inaccessible which is to our imperfections darkness; and so far as we cannot understand or conceive rightly of God, so far it is true that we cannot understand all that is conveyed in the expression that God was in the world dwelling among us. Yet it is still most true that by the revelation thus made to us we have gained immensely. God, as he is in himself, we cannot understand; but Jesus Christ we can. When we are told to love God, if we look to the life and death of Christ, we can understand and feel how truly he deserves our love; when we are told to be perfect as God is perfect, we have the image of this perfection so truly set before us in his Son Jesus, that it may be well said, "Whoso hath seen Him hath seen the Father;" and why, then, should we ask with Philip, that "He should show us the Father?"