Doubtless there was a degree of mysteriousness inseparable from those appearances of the Divine Person, arising, however, not from their infrequency, for they seldom seem to have occasioned surprise, but rather from the different forms of manifestation, the different degrees of visibility; a consciousness that He who was sometimes visibly present was, when unseen, not absent; not less cognizant of their thoughts and actions, nor less their preserver and defender. They knew that he could, at pleasure, render himself visible in the simple form of man, in a vision, in a dense or a luminous cloud, in the colors of the precious gems and minerals, and in the insupportable splendors of the solar and electric fires. They knew that he was of purer eyes than to behold iniquity with any allowance, and were conscious of their defilement and ill-desert. Their faith reposed on him, unseen as well as manifest; and when he was locally present to their senses, it was necessary to exclude or modify their accustomed discrimination between spiritual and physical, invisible and visible conditions and modes of being. There must have been, besides a familiarity with the fact of his visible appearances, a well-established association of authorized and intelligent convictions in their minds respecting his official person and character, the nature of his Agency, his mediatorial relations, which assumed a covenant or stipulated relationship of man with the Deity in his Person, and harmonized the Divine in his manifestations with the human in his visible form, all which necessarily involved more or less of the mysterious and unknown. Yet they well understood the tokens which identified him, and, if not exhibited in the first moments of his appearance, recognized them as soon as given, and promptly rendered him the homage, addressed him by the titles, and ascribed to him the prerogatives and works of the Creator, Proprietor, Ruler and Redeemer of the world. But he was not at all times visible. The patriarchs lived by faith as well for the most part of their days and years, perhaps, with respect to him personally, as with respect to the future issues of his interpositions and administration. They could not see him at their pleasure, even when his words or acts indicated that he was locally near them. "Lo, he goeth by me," saith Job, "and I see him not: he passeth on, also, but I perceive him not. Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: on the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him; he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him; but he knoweth the way that I take: when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold."