aiment stripped
off him, and a fair priestly garment, with 'Holiness to the Lord'
written on the front of it, put upon him. And then follow a series of
promises, of which the climax is the one that I have read. 'I will give
thee a place of access,' says the Revised Version, instead of 'places to
walk'; 'I will give thee a place of access among those that stand by';
the attendant angels are dimly seen surrounding their Lord. And so the
promise of my text, in highly figurative fashion, is that of free and
unrestrained approach to God, of a life that is like that of the angels
that stand before His Face.

So, then, the words suggest to us, first, what a Christian life may be.

There are two images blended together in the great words of my text; the
one is that of a king's court, the other is that of a temple. With
regard to the former it is a privilege given to the highest nobles of a
kingdom--or it was so in old days--to have the right of _entree_, at all
moments and in all circumstances, to the monarch. With regard to the
latter, the prerogative of the high priest, who was the recipient of
this promise, as to access to the Temple, was a very restricted one.
Once a year, with the blood that prevented his annihilation by the
brightness of the Presence into which he ventured, he passed within the
veil, and stood before that mysterious Light that coruscated in the
darkness of the Holy of Holies. But this High Priest is promised an
access on all days and at all times; and that He may stand there, beside
and like the seraphim, who with one pair of wings veiled their faces in
token of the incapacity of the creature to behold the Creator; 'with
twain veiled their feet' in token of the unworthiness of creatural
activities to be set before Him, 'and with twain did fly' in token of
their willingness to serve Him with all their energies. This Priest
passes within the veil when He will. Or, to put away the two metaphors,
and to come to the reality far greater than either of them, we can,
whensoever we please, pass into the presence before which the splendours
of an earthly monarch's court shrink into vulgarity, and attain to a
real reception of the light that irradiates the true Holy Place, before
which that which shone in the earthly shrine dwindles and darkens into a
shadow. We may live with God, and in Him, and wrap a veil and 'privacy
of glorious light' about us, whilst we pilgrim upon earth, and may have
hidden lives which, not