existence of the High and Lofty One that inhabiteth it. We make a
fanciful distinction between eternity and time--there is no real
distinction. We are in eternity at this moment. That has begun to be
with us which never began with God. Our only measure of time is by the
succession of ideas. If ideas flow fast, and many sights and many
thoughts pass by us, time seems lengthened. If we have the simple
routine of a few engagements, the same every day, with little variety,
the years roll by us so fast that we cannot mark them. It is not so
with God. There is no succession of ideas with Him. Every possible
idea is present with Him now. It was present with Him ten thousand
years ago. God's dwelling-place is that eternity which has neither
past nor future, but one vast, immeasurable present.

There is a second measure given us of God in this verse. It is in
respect of Space. He dwelleth in the High and Lofty place. He dwelleth
moreover, in the most insignificant place--even the heart of man. And
the idea by which the prophet would here exhibit to us the greatness
of God is that of His eternal Omnipresence. It is difficult to say
which conception carries with it the greatest exaltation--that of
boundless space or that of unbounded time. When we pass from the tame
and narrow scenery of our own country, and stand on those spots of
earth in which nature puts on her wilder and more awful forms, we are
conscious of something of the grandeur which belongs to the thought of
space. Go where the strong foundations of the earth lie around you in
their massive majesty, and mountain after mountain rears its snow to
heaven in a giant chain, and then, when this bursts upon you for the
first time in life, there is that peculiar feeling which we call, in
common language, an enlargement of ideas. But when we are told that
the sublimity of those dizzy heights is but a nameless speck in
comparison with the globe of which they form the girdle; and when we
pass on to think of that globe itself as a minute spot in the mighty
system to which it belongs, so that our world might be annihilated,
and its loss would not be felt; and when we are told that eighty
millions of such systems roll in the world of space, to which our own
system again is as nothing; and when we are again pressed with the
recollection that beyond those furthest limits creative power is
exerted immeasurably further than eye can reach, or thought can