the reason? The sunlight that once gave them splendor and beauty was the light that shone from the face of a personal and living God, and when the sun sets, the mountains must be dark!

But this conception of God as the living God gives us back our faith. Divine holiness is no abstraction now, but a living attribute of God, penetrated through and through with the energy and activity of will. Moral law comes now to be the manifestation, not simply of what God is, but of what he wills and demands. Obedience is recommended now not simply by our needs but by the authority of God-it is not only the best policy of the soul to yield itself to him, but it is his bounden duty - and disobedience is enmity against the law giver. Now we need an atonement, not only to reconcile us to God, but to reconcile God to us. Now we need a forgiveness which shall bring us as guilty sinners into communion once more with a personal God. And how wonderfully personal on this better view does grace become; not simply the remanding us to some new working of law, by which all shall be made of us that naturally can be, but the free, unbought extension to us of God's will and purpose of redemption, restoring us to his favor and making us sons of God! So in redemption, as in creation and providence, we recognize the relation of a personal God to our souls, putting into every act and effort of his love the warmth and directness of an infinite, divine affection. So we come into a fellowship with God which would have been utterly impossible if God had been only another name to us for law. We find one who, "in opposition to all dead abstractions, all vague head-notions, is the living Person, the source and fountain of all life, loving and loved in return." It was this for which the Psalmist longed when he cried: "As the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God! My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God. When shall I come and appear before God?” "What we want,' says Robertson, "is not infinitude, but a boundless One; not to feel that love is the law of this universe, but to feel One whose name is Love. For else, if in this world of order there be no one in whose bosom that order is centred, and of whose being it is the expression: in this world of manifold contrivance, no personal affection which gave to the skies their trembling tenderness, and to the snow its purity; then order, affection, contrivance, wisdom, are only horrible abstractions, and we are in the dreary universe alone. It is a dark moment when the sense of that personality is lost: more terrible than the doubt of immortality. For, of the two, eternity without a personal God, or God for seventy years without immortality, no one after David's heart would hesitate. 'Give me God for life, to know and be known by Him! No thought is more hideous than that of an eternity without Him.""

And yet I do not know that we should ever be convinced of this, if God had not shown his will and power in the incarnation. The greatest proof of will and power is self-limitation; and the self-limitation of God in the person of Christ, the voluntary resigning of his glory, the narrowing of himself to our human conditions, and the taking upon him of our burdens of guilt and penalty, these show personality as nothing else could. Not will alone, but heart also, must go to the making of a man. So he in whose image we are made shows most that he is the living God by the exhibition of his love in

the cross.

For "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself;' and, as Jesus himself said: "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” If we have ever thought that God was a dead God, identical with the wheels and processes of nature; if we have ever thought of him as only a thinking mechanism, a God of mere Idea and Reason, as cold and emotionless as the white clouds above our heads or the snow beneath our feet; if we have ever thought of him as mere force or arbitrary will, without care for the creatures who sin and who suffer; let our eyes be opened to see the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. There we see that God has heart as well as mind and will, that his nature is tremblingly sensitive to our human griefs and needs, that he has an eye to pity and an arın to save. The living Christ, in whom God manifests himself as the Way, the Truth and the Life, is the final and conclusive proof that God is the living God.

There are two Scripture sentences which I would leave with you in conclusion. They suggest more than a thousand admonitions or invitations could. They are both found in the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the one sounds as if addressed to the children of God, the other as if addressed to those who know not God. The first is this: "Ye are come unto Mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God." It suggests the glorious heritage of the Christian with whom God has entered into relations of personal friendship and communion, and the infinite possibilities that lie before him in that future city which the boundless freedom and the inventive mind of God shall fill with wonders of blessing and glory to those who love him. The other text suggests the boundless possibilities of misery and shame and condemnation that lie before the unrepenting sinner, when once he shall see face to face that infinite Being whom he has made his enemy. Ponder this text, O sinner: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God !"

XIV.

THE HOLINESS OF GOD.*

Have you ever come to the very verge of death, and then been suddenly and unexpectedly delivered? If you have not, there are some lessons that you have yet to learn. Such times of rescue are full of instruction. The veil that hides the supernatural from us seems withdrawn. God fills the whole horizon of our thought. We cease to regard him as a dream of the fancy or as an appendage of our comfort. We see him as he is the personal and living God, the centre and stay of all things, the only eternal reality. In such hours, too, the conscience speaks, and, in the hush of earthly passion and selfishness, we perceive those moral attributes which chiefly make God to be God.

It was such a rescue from imminent destruction that occasioned the utterance of the text. It is part of the song which the saved people of Israel sang on the shore of the Red Sea, after that fearful night in which Pharaoh and his host had perished. They looked back upon the waters through which they had passed in safety, but in which their enemies had been overwhelmed, and depths of God's nature seemed opened to their view that were deeper than the depths of the sea. There was an attribute of God which had never been mentioned in previous revelations, never before had been put into a single word and so expressed to men, but which stood out clear and bright forever from the day that Moses and the children of Israel sang unto the Lord: "Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods! who is like unto thee, glorious in holiness!"

That song, in which the holiness of God was the culminating theme, was not merely the natural expression of a new-born nation's gratitude and wor. ship - it was an inspired song also. And the witness of inspiration to God's holiness has never ceased. Beginning here in the Pentateuch it goes on, in an ever-broadening and deepening stream, until we reach the book of Revelation. Throughout the Bible, holiness is the attribute insisted on more than any other. Do you say that this is only because in man's state of sin, his first and most pressing need is to be convinced that God is holy? But in heaven there is no sin, yet in heaven cherubim and seraphim continually do cry: "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty!" Do you say that this prominence is given to holiness only because the revelation of it is adapted to our present stage of progress and capacity? But look beyond the present; see the eternal future portrayed in the Apocalypse; hear the host of

*Originally prepared as a sermon on the text, Ex. 15: 11-"Glorious in holiness," and preached in the Chapel of the University of Rochester, on the Day of Prayer for Colleges, January 31, 1878; subsequently printed as an article in the Examiner, January 26, February 9, and February 22, 1882.

the redeemed upon the shores of another sea, in which the last of God's foes has been overthrown; there they sing again: "Who shall not fear thee, O Lord, and glorify thy name? for thou only art holy!"

Since the greatest thought of the finite is the infinite, and our ruling conception of God must make or mar our earthly career and settle our eternal destiny, how important a thing it is that we should have worthy thoughts of the divine holiness! May the Spirit of holiness enlighten us while we inquire what holiness in God is, how it is distinguished from other attributes, and what place and rank it holds in his nature.

The theme which we are to consider is the greatest of themes, and one of the most difficult. The difficulty arises partly from the relation of the divine attributes to the divine essence. But here, at any rate, it is plain that the attributes are not themselves God, nor are they mere names for human conceptions of God. They have an objective existence. They are actual qualities, distinguishable from each other and from the essence to which they belong. As in matter, so in mind, qualities imply a substance in which they find their unity. God is a spiritual substance, and of this substance the attributes are inseparable characteristics and manifestations.

Holiness is one of these characteristic qualities of God. We call it an attribute, because we are compelled to attribute it to God as a fundamental power or principle of his being, in order to give rational account of certain constant facts in his self-revelations. The attributes are qualities without which God would not be God. Intellect is an attribute of man, because man would not be man without it. And here arises another difficulty. Every essential attribute of a moral being has both its active and its passive sides. Active truth presupposes passive truth; truthful speaking, thinking, knowing, are impossible without truth of being.

Otherwise, the attributes of God would be his acts; his very being would be synonymous with his volition. This cannot be; although such names as Thomasius and Julius Müller might be cited as its advocates. If God were primarily will, and the essence of God were his act, it would be in the power of God to annihilate himself, and our primitive belief in God's necessary existence would be a delusion. Behind all the active aspects of God's attributes we must recognize the passive. Love is an active principle in God, but it could not be active unless there were a foundation for this activity in its very nature. And in any thorough analysis of the attributes, either of man or of God, the consideration of the passive side must come first, the thought of the attribute as quality must come before the thought of the attribute as power.

What When we speak

Let us now apply what has been said to the attribute of holiness. is holiness? I think we shall say at once that it is purity. of a pure soul, we mean not simply that the acts of that soul show an undeviating rectitude, that its words are transparently true and just, that its very emotions and thoughts are free from all sensuous or selfish stain, but we mean that the spirit itself, in its inmost substance and essence, is devoid of all tendency or impulse toward the wrong.

Among men we know that there is only an approximation to such purity as this. Absolute purity is not even an episode with us. We are never wholly single in our motive. Even when we would do good, evil is present with us,

and below the surface-stream, which sometimes seems so clear, there are turbid undercurrents which God sees even if we do not. Most often two streams, plain even to our own sight, flow on side by side, like the Arve after its junction with the Rhone; or the Ohio, made up of the Alleghany and the Monongahela, not yet fully united. The muddy current is the current of our natural life, but we are compelled to recognize in the clear stream a branch of the river of the water of life that flows from the throne of God. That stream which joins itself to ours to purify and cleanse is clear as crystal. It proceeds from deep unfathomable fountains in the being of God, and it flows on and on without change or stint forever. What then must that purity be from which all purity in men or angels is derived, as the trickling rill from the inexhaustible reservoir!

And yet we must not allow ourselves to think of holiness in God as if it were a passive purity only. All God's thoughts and deeds in truth are pure, because they flow from deeper than Artesian sources in his clear and perfect nature. But then we are speaking of a moral nature, even when we use these physical analogies. The purity of God is also a purity that reveals itself in active will. Men ignore this consciously or unconsciously. They conceive of holiness in God as a still and moveless purity, like the unspotted whiteness of the new-fallen snow, or the stainless serenity of the blue sky after a summer rain. They forget that all God's moral attributes are penetrated and pervaded by will.

In God there is nothing inert. He is alive in every part. That mighty will which brought the universe into being, and which unweariedly sustains it from hour to hour that mighty will whose reflection and result we see in the fixed successions of nature, and in the majestic order of science that will is the active element in God's holiness. Holiness is purity, but purity unsleeping-the most tremendous energy in the universe eternally and unchangeably exerting itself "that living Will that shall endure, when all that seems shall suffer shock."

Holiness, then, is not the passive material purity that is unconscious of itself and indifferent to change or injury. It is purity in conscious and determined movement. All the intensity of human volition, all the combined energy of all human wills, is as feebleness compared with that concentration of mental and spiritual power which is involved in the holiness of God. Holiness in him is imaged in the sea of glass, of which the book of Revelation speaks. It is of crystal purity, but there is more than that. In it the enemies of God are overwhelmed. It is a sea of glass mingled with fire!"

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I have said that God's holiness is purity exercising will-purity willing. What is the object of this willing? I answer, itself. Holiness in God is purity willing, affirming, asserting, maintaining, itself. In virtue of his holiness, God eternally asserts and maintains his own moral excellence. We have a faint analogue in human experience. There is such a thing as a man's duty to himself. You respect no man who does not respect himself. You revere genuine dignity of character. When the fierceness of slander or of temptation assaults the true man, there is no nobler sight on earth than to see him holding fast his integrity, and asserting his innocence before God and the world. So did Job of old, and within certain limits God justified