surrender its majestic birthright of immortality. Two things go hand in hand through the Bible, from the first chapter to the last, and mark it out from all other books: the one is its unique and awful sense of the guiltiness of sin; the other is the quite unapproachable splendour of its conception of the dignity of man, made in the image of God, and destined for His service here, and the fellowship of His love for evermore. The ethical process by which, in the imagery of the vision, Isaiah's sense of sinfulness came home to him, is finely natural and simple. It was at his lips that the consciousness of his impurity caught him. "Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips." That, judged by our formulas and standards, might seem a somewhat superficial conviction of sin. We should have expected him to speak of his unclean heart, or the total corruption of his whole nature. But conviction of sin, actual conviction of sin, is very regardless of our theories, and is as diverse in its manifestations as are the characters and records of men. Sin finds out one man in one place, and another in a quite different spot, and perhaps the experience is most real when it is least theological. Isaiah felt his defilement in his lips, for suddenly he found himself at heaven's gate, gazing on the glory of God, and listening to the seraphs' ceaseless song of adoring praise. Isaiah loved God, and instinctively he prepared to join his voice to the seraphs' chant, but ere the harmony could pass his lips he caught his breath and was dumb. A horrible sense of uncleanness had seized him. His breath was tainted by his sin. He dared not mingle his polluted praise with the worship of that pure, sinless host of heaven. Oh, the shame and agony of that disability! for it meant that he has no part or place in that fair scene. He is an alien and an intruder. Its beauty and its sweetness are not for him. He belongs to a very different scene and a very different company. He is no inhabitant of heaven, no servant of God; but a denizen of earth, and a companion of sinners. Down there, amid its squalor, and shame, and uncleanness, is his dwelling-place, remote from heaven, and holiness, and God. "Woe is me! because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips." With that, the horror of his situation reached its climax. He stands there, on the threshold of heaven in full sight of God and of His holiness, dumb and praiseless, while all heaven rings and reverberates with the worship of its adoring hosts. The awful tremor of that celestial praise passed into Isaiah's frame, and it seemed like the pangs of instant dissolution. He, a creature of God's, stands there in his Maker's presence, alone mute, alone refusing to chant his Creator's glory, a blot and blank in the holy harmony of heaven, a horrible and foul blemish amid the unsullied purity of that celestial scene. It seemed to Isaiah as if all the light,