We can have little difficulty in discovering the motive from which the seraphim act. We see at once that it is love — the love of God which ever moves them. They fly away on swift wing to do God's will, but they ever return to the throne. That is the place of their rest ; there they desire to dwell ; and they dwell there adoring God, forgetting themselves and hiding all their own, that God may be all in all. Now nothing but love, the most intense love, can account for this. Only love can draw the creature to God, and make him desire to abide in His presence and to behold His glory. And thus we see that the great motive power in heaven is just that which ought to be the great motive power on earth — the love of God. And that in- deed must move every intelligent being who will serve God, in whatever world he may dwell or to whatever race he may belong. When you go into some of the world's great workshops you see a vast variety of machinery, all, it may be, in motion,
' J. Vaughan, Sermons, iv. p. 5.
2 Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler, in Concerning Isabel Carnahy,
92 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
and engaged in a variety of operations; yet throughout that great manufactory there is just one motive power, so that what keeps going the gigantic hammer crushing in its descent the cold iron, also keeps in motion machinery which for delicacy of touch and operation the very spider might not excel. Even so, throughout His wide Kingdom God has many servants, and, we cannot doubt, many races of intelligent beings doing His will, and these engaged in an endless variety of labours, but the power which moves them all is the same — the sovereign power of love.
These then are the three — reverence and self-forgetfulness
and active obedience, — " With twain he covered his face, and
with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly."
' It is because of irreverence and self-conceit and idleness that
our lives are weak. Go stand in the sight of God, and these
wings of salvation shall come and clothe your life. They per-
. fectly clothed the life of Jesus. Eeverence and self-sacrifice and
i obedience were perfect in Him. In the most overwhelmed
moments of His life, — crushed in the garden, agonised upon
the cross, — he was really standing, like the strong seraphim, at
the right hand of God.
IT The seraphim were winged for service even while they stood above the throne and pealed forth their thunderous praise which shook the Temple. May we not discern in that a hint of the blessed blending of two modes of worship which will be perfectly united in heaven, and which we should aim at harmonising even on earth ? " His servants serve Him and see His face." There is possible, even on earth, some foretaste of the perfection of that heavenly state in which no worship in service shall interfere with the worship in contemplation. Mary, sitting at Christ's feet, and Martha, busy in providing for His comfort, may be, to a large extent, united in us even here, and will be perfectly so hereafter, when the practical and the contemplative, the worship of noble aspiration, of heart-filling gazing, and that of active service shall be indissolubly blended.^
vi. The Song of the Seraphim.
" And one cried unto another, and said. Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts : the whole earth is full of his glory." It was
' A. Maclareu.
ISAIAH 93
an antiphonal song, proceeding without interruption. Some of them commenced and others responded.
H I like to think of that. It was as if one of them cried, " Your strains are not lifted high enough; higher, brothers, higher!" And he cried across the intervening space to the seraphim opposite, and bade them rise to a higher note, till the chorus swelled and rose and broke. I have heard a bird in the spring morning cry to all the songsters of the glade till the whole woodland has rung again. Sometimes in our prayer-meeting an earnest man has shaken the very gates of heaven and has stiiTed the whole meeting. That is what we want. And as I tell you of a richer, fuller life, a life more abundant than many of you know, may you be convicted of the need of a new anointing, of a fresh application to the Son of God for the touch of fire. May ours be the seraph's reverence, with the veiled face ; ours his modesty, with the veiled form ; ours his balance of one-third obedience to two-thirds of contemplation. Then perhaps our cry may awaken similar results to his, and others shall cry, " Undone." ^
Two of the Divine attributes form the theme of the seraphs' hymn — God's holiness as inherent in Himself, His glory as mani- fested in the earth.
I. Holiness, the first of these, denoted fundamentally a state of freedom from all imperfection, specially from all moral imper- fection ; a state, moreover, realised with such intensity as to imply not only the absence of evil, but antagonism to it. It is more than goodness, more than purity, more than righteousness: it embraces all these in their ideal completeness, but it expresses besides the recoil from everything which is their opposite. This is the sense which the word bears throughout Scripture. Israel is to be a holy nation ; it is separated from the other nations of the earth, in order that it may reflect in idea the same ethical exclusiveness which is inherent in its God. The " Holy One of Israel," that fine designation, which is first used by Isaiah, and was indeed probably framed by him as the permanent embodiment of the truth so vividly impressed upon him in this vision, is a title which would remind the Israelite as he heard it of this distinctive attribute of his God, and arouse him to the duty of aiming after holiness himself. Holiness, again, is the attribute which in virtue of the tie uniting Jehovah and His people,