their true intention is to draw back the thin curtain, and to show us
'the things that are,' the realities of the throned God, the skirts that
fill the Temple, the hovering seraphim, and the coal from the altar that
purges.

II. Let me suggest how our text shows us the compensation that is given
for all losses.

As I have pointed out already, the thought conveyed to the prophet by
this vision was not only the general one, of God's sovereign rule, but
the special one of His rule over and for, and His protection of, the
orphan kingdom which had lost its king. The vision took the special
shape that the moment required. It was because the earthly king was dead
that the living, heavenly King was revealed.

So there is just suggested by it this general thought, that the
consciousness of God's presence and work for us takes in each heart the
precise shape that its momentary necessities and circumstances require.
That infinite fulness is of such a nature as that it will assume any
form for which the weakness and the need of the dependent creature call.
Like the one force which scientists now are beginning to think underlies
all the various manifestations of energy in nature, whether they be
named light, heat, motion, electricity, chemical action, or gravitation,
the one same vision of the throned God, manifest in Jesus Christ, is
protean. Here it flames as light, there burns as heat, there flashes as
electricity; here as gravitation holds the atoms together, there as
chemical energy separated and decomposes them; here results in motion,
there in rest; but is the one force. And so the one God will become
everything and anything that every man, and each man, requires. He
shapes himself according to our need. The water of life does not disdain