But it was not only the consciousness of sinfulness and antagonism that
woke up instantaneously in response to that vision of the holy God. It
was likewise a shrinking apprehension of personal evil from contact of
God's light with Isaiah's darkness. 'Who shall ascend into the hill of
the Lord? He that hath clean hands and a pure heart.' What is to become,
then, of the man that has neither the one nor the other? The experience
of all the world witnesses that whenever there comes, in reality, or in
a man's conceptions or fancy, the contact of the supernatural, as it is
called, with the natural, there is a shrinking, a sense of eerieness, an
apprehension of vague possibilities of evil. The sleeping snake that is
coiled in every soul stirs and begins to heave in its bulk, and wake,
when the thought of a holy God comes into the heart. Now, I do not
suppose that consciousness of sin is the whole explanation of that
universal human feeling, but I am very sure it is an element in it, and
I suspect that if there were no sin, there would be no shrinking.

At all events, be that as it may, these are the two thoughts that,
involuntarily and spontaneously and immediately, sprang in this man's
heart when his purged eyes saw the King on His throne. He did not leap
up with gladness at the vision. Its consolatory and its strengthening
aspects were not the first that impinged upon his eye, or upon his
consciousness, but the first thing was an instinctive recoil, 'Woe is
me; I am undone.' Now, brethren, I venture to think that one main
difference between shallow religion and real is to be found here, that
the dim, far-off vision, if we may venture to call it so, which serves
the most of us for a sight of God, leaves us quite complacent, and with
very slight and superficial conceptions of our own evil, and that if
once we saw, in so far as it is possible for humanity to-day to see, God
as He is, and heard in the depths of our hearts that 'Holy! holy! holy!'
from the burning seraphim, the easy-going, self-satisfied judgment of