How distinctly this comes out in God's own words: 'Draw not nigh hither; put off thy shoes from off thy feet.' Yes, God had drawn nigh, but Moses may not. God comes near: man must stand back. In the same breath God says, Draw nigh, and, Draw not nigh. There can be no knowledge of God or nearness to Him, where we have not first heard His, Draw not nigh. The sense of sin, of unfitness for God's presence, is the groundwork of true knowledge or worship of Him as the Holy One. 'Put off thy shoes from off thy feet.' The shoes are the means of intercourse with the world, the aids through which the flesh or nature does its will, moves about and does its work. In standing upon holy ground, all this must be put away. It is with naked feet, naked and stript of every covering, that man must bow before a holy God. Our utter unfitness to draw nigh or have any dealings with the Holy One, is the very first lesson we have to learn, if ever we are to participate in His Holiness. That _Put off!_ must exercise its condemning power through our whole being, until we come to realize the full extent of its meaning in the great, '_Put off_ the old man; put on the Lord Jesus,' and what 'the _putting off_ of the body of the flesh, in the circumcision of Christ,' is. Yes, all that is of nature and the flesh, all that is of our own doing or willing or working--our very life, must be put off and given unto the death, if God, as the Holy One, is to make Himself known to us. We have seen before that Holiness is more than goodness or freedom from sin: even unfallen nature is not holy. Holiness is that awful glory by which Divinity is separated from all that is created. Therefore even the seraphs veil their faces with their wings when they sing the Thrice Holy. But oh! when the distance and the difference is not that of the creature only, but of the sinner, who can express, who can realize, the humiliation, the fear, the shame with which we ought to bow before the voice of the Holy One? Alas! this is one of the most terrible effects of sin, that it blinds us. We know not how unholy, how abominable, sin and the sinful nature are in God's sight. We have lost the power of recognising the Holiness of God: heathen philosophy had not even the idea of using the word as expressive of the moral character of its gods. In losing the light of the glory of God, we have lost the power of knowing what sin is. And now God's first work in drawing nigh to us is to make us feel that we may not draw nigh as we are; that there will have to be a very real and a very solemn putting off, and even giving up to the death, of all that appears most lawful and most needful. Not only our shoes are soiled with contact with this unholy earth; even our face must be covered and our eyes closed, in token that the eyes of our heart, all our human wisdom and understanding, are incapable of beholding the Holy One. The first lesson in the school of personal