In this state of things, there is nothing but fear and torment.  Suddenly he gives way, acknowledges that it is a good and a just anger, no longer seeks to beat it back from his guilty soul, but lets the billows roll over while he casts himself upon the Divine pity.  In this act and instant,—­which involves the destiny of the soul, and has millenniums in it,—­when he recognizes the justice and trusts in the mercy of God, there is a great rebound, and through his tears he sees the depth, the amazing depth, of the Divine compassion.  For, paradoxical as it appears, God’s love is best seen in the light of God’s displeasure.  When the soul is penetrated by this latter feeling, and is thoroughly sensible of its own worthlessness,—­when, man knows himself to be vile, and filthy, and fit only to be burned up by the Divine immaculateness,—­then, to have the Great God take him to His heart, and pour out upon him the infinite wealth of His mercy and compassion, is overwhelming.  Here, the Divine indignation becomes a foil to set off the Divine love.  Read the sixteenth chapter of Ezekiel, with an eye “purged with 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?