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XII.]

HOW TO RESTORE THEM.

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blessings, which have come from Him, turn into curses and prove our destruction; but that He will, by taking them from us, by any restraints or punishments which may seem good to Him, bring us back to Trust in Him and to Fellowship with one another.

SERMON XIII.

THE VISION OF THE KING.

LINCOLN'S INN. 2ND SUNDAY IN LENT.-MARCH 7, 1852.

ISAIAH, VI. 1.

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw also the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple.

THIS vision evidently contains the designation of Isaiah to his work as a prophet. It does not follow that he may not himself have put his book together in the form, or nearly in the form, in which we have received it. The early chapters as they describe the state of the people not at one particular moment but through a course of years, announcing the punishments which must follow from that state with the blessings which would come out of them, are a living index to the subsequent prophecies and history. The place which they occupy, supposing it was assigned by Isaiah, cannot hinder us from accepting his own express words as a proof, that the year in which king Uzziah died, was the critical one of his life, that which explained to him why he had been sent into the world and what task he had to perform

in it.

Serm. XIII.] THE TEMPLE IN ISAIAH'S DAYS.

215

In that year he saw the Lord also sitting upon a throne. We are not told whether he saw this sight before or after the death of Uzziah. That king had long been a leper dwelling apart from his people. Isaiah might have been thinking that a time was near when even this semblance of royalty would pass away, when the poor stricken man would be gathered to his fathers. Or he might be wondering at the wild pleasure with which the people of Jerusalem hailed his successor, at the indifference with which they remembered the former ruler, at the dull mechanical way in which all things went on as if the departure of a shepherd of the people from the land left no gap in it at all. Whatever thoughts were occupying him when he entered into the temple, symbols were there which told him of something more permanent and substantial than the reign of a king or the recollections of his subjects. There were the cherubims veiling the mercy-seat; there was the altar on which the daily sacrifices were offered; there was the holiest place into which the high priest entered once every year. It was a place full of wonder and mystery. And yet how little consciousness of any wonder or mystery there seemed to be in those who went in and out of it; how little in those who presented the offerings, and had "Holiness to the Lord" written on their foreheads! With what hymns of joy had David entered into the city and borne the ark to the holy mountain! With what awe had Solomon prayed that the presence of the Lord might fill the house in which he and his people were worshipping together! What a sense of oppression and death there was now over both! No apparent calamity approaching; every thing even and regular as it had been for many a year past; but a feeling like that of a hot evening before a thunder-storm, when all looks serene,

216 THE VISIBLE FORMS & THEIR COUNTERPARTS. [Serm. but there is no breath of air. What could have relieved a man upon whose breast this heavy burden was sitting, who had a feeling of endless weariness, monotony, insincerity in the ordinary life of his fellow-citizens, in the most sacred and divine ordinances?

"I saw the Lord also sitting on a throne and his train filled the temple." Some of you may have been watching a near and beautiful landscape in the land of mountains and eternal snows till you have been exhausted by its very richness, and till the distant hills which bounded it have seemed, you know not why, to limit and contract the view, and then a veil has been withdrawn, and new hills not looking as if they belonged to this earth, yet giving another character to all that does belong to it, have unfolded themselves before you. This is an imperfect, very imperfect likeness (yet it is one) of that revelation which must have been made to the inner eye of the prophet, when he saw another throne than the throne of the house of David, another king than Uzziah or Jotham, another train than that of priests or minstrels in the temple, other winged forms than those golden ones which overshadowed the mercy-seat. Each object was the counterpart of one that was then or had been at some time before his bodily eyes; yet it did not borrow its shape or colour from those visible things. They evidently derived their substance and radiance from those which were invisible. Separated from them they could impart no lustre; for they had none. The kings of the house of David reigned because that king was reigning whom God had set upon His holy hill of Zion; because He lived on when they dropped one and another into their graves; because in Him dwelt the light and the power by which each might illumine his own darkness,

XIII.]

THE SERAPHIM.

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sustain his own weakness. The symbols and services of the temple were not, as priests and people often thought, an earthly machinery for scaling a distant Heaven; they were witnesses of a Heaven nigh at hand, of a God dwelling in the midst of His people, of His being surrounded by spirits which do His pleasure hearkening to the voice of His words.

"Above the throne stood the seraphim. Each one had six wings. With twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.” The sense of awe increasing with the clearness and purity of a spirit and with the nearness of its approach to God; the face being veiled which receives its light from Him, and most covets to behold Him; the absence of all wish to display their own perfections in spirits that are perfect; the freedom and the willingness to go anywhere, to do any errands of mercy; these are some of the more obvious thoughts which the study of this vision suggests. There are others which lie hidden, which we may have a glimpse of from time to time, and which words might mar. For it is true of earthly symbols, still more of heavenly visions, that they are meant to carry us out of words and above words; not so that we despise them or think lightly of them, but that we seeing the reality of the invisible may not be greatly disturbed by the processes and conceits of our minds.

"And one cried unto another and said, 'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts. The whole earth is full of His glory." From what we have been told of the eastern imagery of the prophetical writings, and from the specimens we have had of other oriental writings, we certainly should expect here some gorgeous accumulation of superhuman

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