man's wickedness, the Lord of hosts "will be exalted. He of whom they said, "Not this man," shall yet be the King of kings and Lord of lords.

Then he warns them in the eighteenth verse : "Woe unto them that draw iniquity with cords of vanity, and sin as it were with a cart rope." The strict meaning of the passage is, you draw iniquity first with a cord, or with a thread; you do not pull hard; you are not enamoured of it, but you just keep up your connection with it; but by continually doing so that thread will become a cart rope, and you will be fastened to it, and it fastened to you; nothing upon earth serving to separate the two, and unless God interpose they shall perish together.

He adds: "Woe unto them that say, Let him make speed, and hasten his work, that we may see it." Is not this very like the language—it is surely the taunt that was uttered at the cross: "If thou be the Son of God, come down and show thyself?" And, again, such language as this: "What sign showest thou ?" Then: "Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil." What a frightful perversity is here recorded! yet there are those still that call every truth of the Gospel heresy, and who regard the deadliest heresy and superstition as the very truths of the glorious Gospel. It is a most solemn phenomenon latent or revealed in our moral nature, that by trifling with a great sin it will eventually become itself its apology, and at length be accepted by us as a virtue. It seems strange, but it is true that man is capable of coming under influences that go to change the tone, and lower the whole temperature of his moral nature. The great

law in all these things is to resist the beginning, and then we shall not have to wrestle ineffectually with the powerful end; to strangle the vice in its infancy, and then we shall not have to contend with the giant in his full strength.

Again, he repeats: "Woe unto them that are mighty to drink wine, and men of strength to mingle strong drink." Now, this is worse even than to drink wine and rise up early in the morning to do it. This is boasting of what they do it is the boast of the drunkard how many bottles of wine he can drink; and, what is worse, there are people that will sympathise with the boast, and admire him as if he were a hero in the conflict, or a conqueror in the strife.

"Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight." And then judges that justify the wicked for reward are condemned: "Therefore as the fire devoureth the stubble, and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their root shall be as rottenness, and their blossom shall go up as dust."

And the result of all this will be: "He will lift up an ensign to the nations from far." That was not the Babylonians, but evidently the Romans, who were a far-off nation. God lifted up the ensign, and Titus, and Vespasian, and subsequently Hadrian came to Judea, laid siege to Jerusalem, and did not leave one stone standing upon another. The reason was, God gave them a sacred mission, and they came, none weary, none stumbling; their horses' hoofs were like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind; and the result was, that the land that had so dis

astrously sinned became the scene and subject of a series of calamities that have scarcely any parallel ; and Palestine has written upon its bosom what the eye of faith can at this moment clearly read: "Righteousness exalteth a nation; but sin is the ruin, as it is the shame of any people."

MYSTERIOUS TRUTHS AND PROCESSES.

ISAIAH VI.

WE have here, what frequently occurs in the course of the great and truly sublime apocalyptic drama, the seer or the prophet witnessing truths in figures, or in hieroglyphs, or in a sort of dramatic representative form; and so seeing them he conveys more vividly to the imagination, the feelings, and the heart truths which eye hath not seen, ear hath not heard, and human heart hath not adequately and justly conceived. It is plain that Isaiah when he saw this sight was in a trance or in a state of ecstacy; the word ecstacy meaning "standing out of himself," separated from sensible, and visible, and natural things; what Paul was when he says he was carried into the third heaven, but whether in the body or out of the body he could not tell.

Isaiah saw first of all "the Lord sitting on a throne." Now who is this Lord? We have no difficulty in determining. This chapter is quoted several times in the course of the New Testament Scripture, and constantly it is referred to Christ;

and all the allusions to it imply that it was a revelation of the glory of Him who sits as a King and a Priest upon his throne. Thus, for instance, the Evangelist John tells us that "Therefore they could not believe, because that Isaiah said again, He hath blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, that they should not see with their eyes nor understand with their hearts, and be converted and I should heal them." Then it is added, "These things said Isaiah when he saw Christ's glory." It is quite plain, therefore, that the glory that was here seen was that of Christ. "No man hath seen God at any time;" he is the Invisible, the only Potentate, who dwells in light inaccessible and full of glory; and the idea among the ancient Jews was that to see a glimpse of his glory was to be struck dead. For instance, Manoah expected judgment, because he believed he had seen the Lord of Hosts; and we have constant allusions in the Old Testament history to those who believed that a sight of God in his essential glory, if that was possible, would be the death of him that saw it. Whether that was just or not we are sure that this is true, "No man hath seen God at any time;" but it is no less true that the onlybegotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath revealed him. We have therefore in Christ seated on the throne, the Lamb upon the throne, to use the figures of the Apocalypse; or, to use the language of Zechariah, the Priest and the King upon his throne, high above all human objects, lifted up into the highest heaven; and his train, the influences of his glory, the reflected light of his majesty, far-off stretching and so shining, filled the whole temple of

the universe with its glory and its splendour. Then says the prophet, describing what he saw, for he is merely describing the scene that he witnessed in the upper sanctuary, in the language borrowed from the service of the Jewish temple, "Above it stood the seraphim." What was their shape we know not: there are angels, archangels, which literally mean messengers; there are cherubim and seraphim, which literally mean those that glow or burn, as if to denote the ardour and intensity of their feelings and their worship; and in the holy of holies in the ancient temple there were two seraphim, or cherubim rather, who stood above the mercy-seat, on which shone a glory or a bright splendour originally kindled from heaven: they were represented as in the shape of men with wings, and the tip of the wing of the one touched the tip of the wing of the other, whilst they looked down and gazed on the glory that shone upon the mercy-seat between. Now we have explained in the New Testament, that this was teaching the infant human family divine and evangelical truths by a sort of hieroglyphic symbol that they could not easily forget, and that would engrave deep and indelible impressions upon their hearts. We read that the mercy-seat, called by Paul the propitiatory, or the place of atonement, set forth Christ's atonement; that the two cherubim gazing down upon the glory, their faces radiant and shining with its reflected splendour, represented the heavenly worlds gazing into that stupendous sacrifice that was finished upon Calvary; and the glory upon the mercy-seat the immediate presence of Deity; as if there was something in a moral glory that would eclipse and