Works Volume N . 23

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ...would go forth from the place where His Honour dwelleth, to burn up and to destroy. Holiness is virtue, regarded in the one aspect of its separation from all that is opposite to virtue. It is thus that the attributes of clean and pure and untainted are given to it--free from all spot, because free from all mixture or vicinity with sinfulness. The vessels of the temple were holy, because, set apart from common use, they were consecrated, and that exclusively, to the solemn and separate services of a divine ritual. But the most striking of all the historical demonstrations that we have, of the deep and determined recoil that there is between a holy God and a sinful world, is, when He gave it in charge to set bounds about mount Sinai and to sanctify it--through which neither the priests nor the people were to pass, lest the Lord should break forth upon them. From this explanation, you will see how the fruit of holiness arises out of the cleansing of yourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and the spirit. The deeds of impurity must be given up at God's bidding, even though the urgency of His command should carry you beyond what you would have been carried to, by your own detestation of impurity. You, at the outset of your new course, make a wider departure from iniquity than your own dislike to iniquity would prompt you to. But then, this reformation of the outer man will tell upon the inner man. As you keep your fearful distance from evil, your dread and your delicacy against it will augment upon you; and it is just by this reflex influence of the habit upon the heart that its holiness is perfected. And this view of holiness, as consisting of virtue or moral excellence in its quality of uncompromising and unappeasable enmity to sin, harmonises with the characte...