Lord, shew us the Father,— Philip, hearing our Lord's words, says to him with a pious ardour becoming his character, "Lord, do but shew us the Father, and bring us to the sight and enjoyment of him, and it is happiness enough for us. We desire no more, and resign every other hope, in comparison of this." This seems a very probable sense of this passage. One cannot apprehend that Philip, or any other of the Apostles, thought the Father visible, and therefore asked for a vision of the Father in a corporeal form. If Philip desired any thing more than what is asserted in the paraphrase above given, it could have been only to see, like Moses, the inaccessible light wherein God dwells, the acknowledged symbol of his presence in heaven.

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