them. You go into that great mausoleum in Paris, where the mightiest soldier of the French race rests, where the French people have built their sense of national victory and national tragedy into monumental form; you descend into the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral, and you look upon the resting-place of Nelson, that mightiest lord of the sea, and the resting-place of Wellington, that greatest commander of the English race; you go to that other mausoleum on the banks of the Hudson, where rest the mortal remains of the great citizen-soldier that led the armies to victory in the war for the Union; in each of these places you do not feel obliged to compel thought; you are at once in the power of certain thoughts and your heart swells with feelings that you cannot resist. The place inspires the thought; the place fills the heart with unwonted feeling. The grogshop, the gambling-den, the low theatre do not lead to the divine vision of the universe; these places have no value for the soul. The psalmist said, "Till I went into the sanctuary"; that place had a power over his spirit possessed by no other. We lay it down as a principle that certain places inspire kindred trains of thought, kindred ideas return to glorify certain places.

What is the glory of the church: its ceremonial, its ritual? No, its vision of God. There was power enough in this vision which came to Isaiah

in the Jewish Temple to hallow that temple for a thousand years. What do you think the churches of this country need most to-day, more ritual, more ceremonial? Nay; but a profounder and more potent vision of the living God. If these churches were places of intense, original, and vital vision, do you not think they would stand in the mind of our fellow-citizens everywhere as venerable, exalted, beautiful, divine?

2. Our second question is, How did this vision come? It came when Isaiah was at church; how did it come? By the whole strength of his life. He inherited his faith; he inherited great traditions, great ideas, a great history. He had received a distinctive education as an Israelitish boy; he had experiences of a definite type as an Israelitish youth; love for his country, a sense of the troubled and distracted condition of it in his own time, a sense of prophetic forces working within it, a sense of impending calamity wrought together in his soul. With this inheritance and this education and this confused, troubled, and tremendous experience he went to the Temple; like a flash from heaven inheritance, education, and experience came forth in this august vision of God; it came up out of life; it was the crystallization of his entire being.

All this goes on in our world to-day; sometimes it is in sorrow. You read that saying of

Job as he stands in the utter wreck of his life, in the utter desolation that has come upon him, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." That vision of God, to be blessed in sorrow, to be trusted to the uttermost, is simply the clarifying, the bringing into unity and glory of his whole past existence. Sometimes this vision comes to a man in his sin, as in the parable of the lost son. He came to himself. There is a history of bitter shame and woe behind that experience; he came to himself, and when he came to himself he said, "I will arise and go to my father." All that was best in his past life flashed into clearness and rose into decision that moment; the decision and the vision came from his own soul. Sometimes the vision comes in thinking of a profession, as one of the apostles says, "Woe is me, if I preach not the Gospel." You cannot understand the woe, the sense of necessity, that lay upon Paul unless you think of him as loving righteousness from the cradle, as going like a hurricane in search of righteousness all through his youth, as being fascinated with the Gospel first of all because it brought to him an assurance that he might find the righteous life. It is this history that explains the sense of necessity that lay on him to go and preach the Gospel to the ends of the earth. You have been at sea and have been overtaken by fog;

day after day the gloom hung round you and you wondered whether the sun would ever shine upon your course again. All at once the wind shifted to the northwest, and almost before you could announce the fact to your fellow-passenger, the air was clear and the sun was out in its strength. We go into sacred places with our whole past; a new something is added which dissipates the confusion, which banishes the trouble, which puts a clear course before us and a transfigured universe round us.

3. This vision came in the Temple out of Isaiah's soul. What did it mean? That is our third great question. Where it came is a significant commentary on the value of places for a man's soul; how it came is a significant comment on the value of inheritance, education, and experience; what it meant leads us to the very heart of the matter. What did this vision mean? It meant the vision of God as the moral judge of the world, living in the world as a judicial process, as a judicial spirit; it meant at the same time the vision of God as infinitely above the work, as the eternal, moral reserve of the uni

verse.

God is first of all the judicial spirit, the judicial deity searching our entire world. God is in the conscience of every man; He is in the heart of every man; He is in the will of every

man; He is in the character and inmost soul of every man as approving or as protesting against the life there. "Where no eye can see, he beholds; where no ear can hear, he hears." He is the Soul in the souls of all men, comprehending all, searching all, judging all, recording all, holding all to an eternal accountability; like the force of gravity which lives in all the planets, in all the suns, in all the constellations, which is in the whole body of the material universe, so the most worthy Judge Eternal lives in the ideals, in the conscience, in the heart, in the will, in the character, in the being of mankind. The immanent God; that is the first half of Isaiah's message; the indwelling Judge infallible, the process of judgment and the Spirit of judgment in the life of the world. That is one half of Isaiah's message to mankind; a marvelous, a tremendous message; he speaks not of a judgment day at the end of the world, but of the Soul of judgment in the soul of the race.

The other aspect of Isaiah's vision is of the God who is above the world; here the vision is of the transcendent deity, the infinite moral reserve of the universe, the Incomprehensible, the Ineffable. How shall we represent this to ourselves? Here is the air that we breathe every day and upon which we live ; it searches us through and through; it is in our brain, in our blood, in