ith euphrasy and rue," so that
you can take in the full spiritual significance of the comparisons and
metaphors, and your whole soul will dissolve in tears, as you perceive
how the great and pure God, in every instance in which He saves an
apostate spirit, is compelled to bow His heavens and come down into a
loathsome sty of sensuality.[8] Would it be love of the highest order, in
a seraph, to leave the pure cerulean and trail his white garments through
the haunts of vice, to save the wretched inmates from themselves and
their sins? O then what must be the degree of affection and compassion,
when the infinite Deity, whose essence is light itself, and whose nature
is the intensest contrary of all sin, tabernacles in the flesh upon the
errand of redemption! And if the pure spirit of that seraph, while filled
with an ineffable loathing, and the hottest moral indignation, at what he
saw in character and conduct, were also yearning with an unspeakable
desire after the deliverance of the vicious from their vice,--the moral
wrath, thus setting in still stronger relief the moral compassion that
holds it in check,---what must be the relation between these two emotions
in the Divine Being! Is not the one the measure of the other? And does
not the soul that fears God in a _submissive_ manner, and acknowledges
the righteousness of the Divine displeasure with entire acquiescence and
no sullen resistance, prepare the way, in this very act, for an equally
intense manifestation of the Divine mercy and forgiveness?

The subject treated of in this discourse is one of the most important,
and frequent, that is presented in the Scriptures. He who examines is
startled to find that the phrase, "fear of the Lord," is woven into the
whole web of Revelation from Genesis to the Apocalypse. The feeling and
principle under discussion has a Biblical authority, and significance,
that cannot be pondered too long, or too closely. It, therefore, has an
interest for every human being, whatever may be his character, his
condition, or his circumstances. All great religious awakenings begin
in the dawning of the august and terrible aspects of the Deity upon the
popular mind, and they reach their height and happy consummation,
in that love and faith for which the antecedent fear has been the
preparation. Well and blessed would it be for this irreverent and
unfearing age, in which the advance in mechanical arts and vice is
greater than that in letters and virt