in the temple both cast them down and lifted them up.  ’Oh that Thou wouldst rend the heavens and come down . . .  But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, and our iniquities like the wind have taken us away.’  Thousands in Israel found in these terrible words a door of hope, a sense of fellowship, and a call to trust and thanksgiving.  And tens of thousands have found the same help and consolation out of what have seemed to others the very darkest and most perplexing pages of the Pilgrim’s Progress and the Grace Abounding.  ‘It made me greatly ashamed,’ says Hopeful, ’of the vileness of my former life, and confounded me with the sense of mine own ignorance, for there never came into mine heart before now that showed me so by contrast the beauty of the Lord Jesus.  My own vileness and nakedness made me love a holy life.  Yea, I thought that had I now a thousand gallons of blood in my body, I could spill it all for the sake of the Lord Jesus.’  And if you, my brother, far on in the way of Salvation, still think sometimes that, after all, you must be a reprobate because of your filthy rags, read what David Brainerd wrote with his half-dead hand on the last page of his seraphic journal:  ’How sweet it is to love God and to have a heart all for God!  Yes; but a voice answered me, You are not all for God, you are not an angel.  To which my whole soul replied, I as sincerely desire to love and glorify God as any angel in heaven.  But you are filthy, and not fit for heaven.  When hereupon there instantly appeared above me and spread over me the blessed robes of Christ’s righteousness which I could not but exult and triumph in.  And then I knew that I should be as active as an angel in heaven, and should then be for ever stripped of my filthy garments and clothed with spotless raiment.’  Let me die the death of David Brainerd, and let my latter end be like his!

The third Shining One then came forward and set a mark on the forehead of this happy man.  And it was a most ancient and a most honourable mark.  For it was the same redeeming mark that was set by Moses upon the foreheads of the children of Israel when the Lord took them into covenant with Himself at the Passover in the wilderness.  It was the same distinguishing mark also that the man with the slaughter-weapon in his hand first set upon the foreheads of the men who sighed and cried for the abominations that were done in the midst of Jerusalem.  And it was the same glorious mark that John saw in the foreheads of the hundred and forty and four thousand who stood upon Mount Zion and sang a song that no man knew but those men who had been redeemed from the earth by the blood of the Lamb.  The mark was set for propriety and for ornament and for beauty.  It was set upon his forehead so that all who looked on him ever after might thus know to what company and what country he belonged, and that this was not his rest, but that he had been called and chosen to