you as distant as before, imagination absolutely gives way, and you feel dizzy and bewildered with new strange thoughts, that have not a name.

But this is only one aspect of the case.  It looks only to time past.  The same overpowering calculations wait us when we bend our eyes on that which is to come.  Time stretches back immeasurably, but it also stretches on and on for ever.  Now it is by such a conception as this that the inspired prophet attempts to measure the immeasurable of God.  All that eternity, magnificent as it is, never was without an Inhabitant.  Eternity means nothing by itself.  It merely expresses the 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