of which the latter is the symbol.

It may be worth while to dwell briefly on the force of the emblem, which
is often misunderstood. Fire, then, all over the world has been taken to
represent the divine energy. Even in heathendom, side by side with the
worship of light was the worship of fire. Even that cruel
Moloch-worship, with all its abominations rested upon the notion that
the swift power and ruddy blaze of fire were symbols of glorious
attributes. Though the thought was darkened and marred, wrongly
apprehended and ferociously worked out in ritual, it was a true thought
for all that. And Scripture has from the beginning used it. It would
carry us too far to enumerate the instances which might be adduced. But
we may quote a few. When the covenant was made between God and Abraham,
upon which all the subsequent revelation reposed, the divine presence
was represented by a smoking furnace, and a lamp of fire that passed
between the divided pieces of the sacrifice. When the great revelation
of the divine Name was given to Moses, which prepared for the great
deliverance from Egypt, the sign of it was a thorn-bush--one of the many
dotted over the desert--burning and unconsumed. Surely the ordinary
interpretation, which sees, in that undying flame, an emblem of Israel
undestroyed in the furnace of bondage, is less natural than that which
sees in it a sign having the same purpose and the same meaning as the
deep words, 'I am that I am.' The Name, the revelation proper, is
accompanied by the sign which expresses in figure the very same
truth--the unwearied power, the undecaying life of the great
self-existent God, who wills and does not change, who acts and does not
faint, who gives and is none the poorer, who fills the universe and is
Himself the same, who burns and is not consumed--the 'I am.' Further, we
remember how to Israel the pledge and sacramental seal of God's
guardianship and guidance was the pillar which, in the fervid light of
the noonday sun, seemed to be but a column of wavering smoke, but which,
when the darkness fell, glowed at the heart and blazed across the
sleeping camp, a fiery guard. 'Who among us,' says the prophet, 'shall
dwell with everlasting burnings?' The answer is a parallel to the
description given in one of the Psalms in reply to the question, 'Lord,
who shall abide in Thy tabernacle?' From which parallelism, as well as
from the whole tone of the passage, the conclusion is unavoidable that
to I