Christ is the Agent of the spiritual contact with Christ
which imparts to us His life, and reproduces in us His life. He is the
bearer of the power as well as of the holiness of Christ.'

'That God claims from His people unreserved devotion to Himself, and
that what He claims He works in all who believe it, by His own power
operating through the inward presence of the Holy Spirit, placing us in
spiritual contact with Christ, is the great doctrine of sanctification
by faith.'

The same view, that holiness is a relation, had previously been worked
out very elaborately by Diestel. In what has been said on redemption and
proprietorship as related to holiness (see 'Sixth Day'), we have seen
what truth there is in the thought. But holiness is something more. What
is holy is not only God-devoted, but God-accepted, God-appropriated,
God-possessed. God not only possesses the heart, but absolutely occupies
and fills it with His life. It is this makes it holy.

However much truth there be in the above exposition, it hardly meets our
desire for an insight into what is one of the highest attributes of the
very Being of God. When the seraphs worship Him as the Holy One, and in
their Thrice Holy reflect something of the deepest mystery of Godhead,
it surely means more than merely the expression of God's claim as
Sovereign Proprietor of all.

The mistake appears to originate in taking first the meaning of the word
_holy_ from earthly objects, and then from that deducing that holiness
in God cannot mean more than it does when applied to men. The Scriptures
point to the opposite way. When Old and New Testaments say, 'Be ye holy,
for I am holy, I make holy,' they point to God's Holiness as the first,
both the reason and the source of ours. We ought first to discover what
holiness in God is. When we read at creation of God's _sanctifying_ the
Sabbath day, we have to do, not with a thought or word of Moses as to
what God had done, but with a Divine revelation of a Power in God
greater and more wonderful than creation, the Power which is later on
revealed as the deepest mystery of the Divine Being.

This Holiness in God, as it appears to me, cannot be a mere relation.
To indicate a relation, tells me nothing positively about the personal
character or worth of the related parties. To say that when God
sanctifies men He claims them as His own, does not say what the nature
is of the work He does for them and in them, or what the Power by w