and priesthoods and asceticisms and tortures of all sorts, and is the
inner meaning of Hindoos swinging with hooks in their backs, and others
of them measuring the road to the temple by prostrating themselves every
yard or two as they advance. These self-torturers are all asking the
same question: 'Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord?' It
sometimes rises in the thoughts of the most degraded, and it is present
always with some of the better and nobler of men.

Now, there are three places in the Old Testament where substantially the
same question is asked. There is this psalm of ours; there is another
psalm which is all but a duplicate, which begins with 'Lord, who shall
abide in Thy tabernacle? who shall dwell in Thy holy hill?' And there is
another shape into which the question is cast by the fervent and
somewhat gloomy imagination of one of the prophets, who puts it thus:
'Who among us shall dwell with the devouring fire? Who shall dwell with
the everlasting burnings?' There never was a more disastrous
misapplication of Scripture than the popular idea that these two last
questions suggest the possibility of a creature being exposed to the
torments of future punishment. They have nothing to do with that. 'Who
among us shall dwell with the devouring fire?' If you want a commentary,
remember the words, 'Our God is a consuming fire.' That puts us on the
right track, if we needed any putting on it, for answering this
question, not in the gruesome and ghastly sense in which some people
take it, but in all the grandeur of Isaiah's thought. He sees God as
'the everlasting burnings.' Fire is the emblem of life as well as of
death; fire is the means of quickening as well as of destroying; and
when we speak of Him as 'the everlasting burnings' we are reminded of
the bush in the desert, where His own signature was set, 'burning and
not consumed.'