re,"
or "How can I know?" Well, you'll never say it that way, nor ask that
question again after the experience has come.

May I tell you a little bit about it? Yet, mark you, only "a little bit."
You can never _tell_ another one what it means to see _Him_. When once the
sight has come, every word you utter about it, or Him, seems so lame and
weak that you despair of ever being able to let out at your lips what has
gotten into you. But let me try, even if lamely, in the eager yearning
that it may help you know if, thus far, you have missed seeing _Him_, and
maybe--so much better--help you to _see_ Him. For until you have--well,
nothing, absolutely nothing, is worth while.

When you see Him there comes such a sense of _His purity_ that, instantly,
you are down on your face in utter despair, because of your own self--your
impurity; your lack of purity; the sharp contrast between Him and you. You
feel that young Isaiah's outcry in the temple that morning is wholly
inadequate. "Unclean lips," is it? Why, the whole thing, from innermost
recesses clear through and out, is unclean. Then it dawns upon you that
this is really what Isaiah is feeling and trying to express in his "woe"
and "undone."

And that vivid sense of contrast between Him and you never grows less, but
more acute and deeper. Even when you come to know Him better, and the
sweet peace comes with its untellable balm to your spirit, yet you are
always conscious of the contrast, and you know that _you_ are not pure;
only _He_ is; and all you can do is to keep under the cleansing stream of
His blood, very low down.

"Never higher than His pierced feet,
Never farther than His bleeding side."

With that comes such a sense of _Himself_, of His--what word can tell
it?--His glory,--which means simply His character, what He is in
Himself--that again words can never tell out the sense of your own
littleness; no, that is not the word, your own _nothingness_. And now you
recall, with an inner shrinking, how well you have thought of yourself,
how much you have talked about yourself and your view of things, perhaps
in the language of a properly phrased humility. Now you are dumb. His
presence dumbs you. You begin to wonder at the strange self-confidence and
self-complacence that have been so common even in your holiest moments and
experiences. It seems, in this Presence, as though you could never open
your lips again--except to speak of _Him_.

Then your eyes are