It is by the familiar name Jehovah of hosts--the proper name of Israel's national God--that the prophet hears the choirs of heaven address the Divine Presence. But what they ascribe to the Deity is exactly what Israel will not ascribe, and the revelation they make of His nature is the contradiction of Israel's thoughts concerning Him. What, in the first place, is HOLINESS? We attach this term to a definite standard of morality or an unusually impressive fulness of character. To our minds it is associated with very positive forces, as of comfort and conviction--perhaps because we take our ideas of it from the active operations of the Holy Ghost. The original force of the term _holiness_, however, was not positive but negative, and throughout the Old Testament, whatever modifications its meaning undergoes, it retains a negative flavour. The Hebrew word for holiness springs from a root which means _to set apart, make distinct, put at a distance from_. When God is described as the Holy One in the Old Testament it is generally with the purpose of withdrawing Him from some presumption of men upon His majesty or of negativing their unworthy thoughts of Him. The Holy One is the Incomparable: _To whom, then, will ye liken Me, that I should be equal to him? saith the Holy One_ (xl. 25). He is the Unapproachable: _Who is able to stand before Jehovah, this holy God?_ (1 Sam. vi. 20). He is the Utter Contrast of man: _I am God, and not man, the Holy One in the midst of thee_ (Hosea xi. 9). He is the Exalted and Sublime: _Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy: I dwell in the high and holy place_ (lvii. 15). Generally speaking, then, holiness is equivalent to separateness, sublimity--in fact, just to that loftiness or exaltation which Isaiah has already so often reiterated as the principal attribute of God. In their thrice-repeated _Holy_ the seraphs are only telling more emphatically to the prophet's ears what his eyes have already seen, _the Lord high and lifted up_. Better expression could not be found for the full idea of Godhead. This little word _Holy_ radiates heaven's own breadth of meaning. Within its fundamental idea--distance or difference from man--what spaces are there not for every attribute of Godhead to flash? If the Holy One be originally He who is distinct from man and man's thoughts, and who impresses man from the beginning with the awful sublimity of the contrast in which He stands to him, how naturally may holiness come to cover not only that moral purity and intolerance of sin to which we now more strictly apply the term, but those metaphysical conceptions as well, which we gather up under the name "supernatural," and so finally, by lifting the Divine nature away from the change and vanity of this world, and emphasizing God's independence of all beside Himself, become the fittest expression we have for Him as the Infinite and Self-existent.