Page:Grace and Glory (Vos).djvu/26

22 on the part of God demands an equally exclusive return of love and service such as shall leave no room for strange devotion. Still at this point the reality somehow again transcends the figure. Not that God is husband, but the kind of husband He is, comes under consideration. It is not merely his general honor that is at stake, as would be the case in ordinary human marriage; apart from all else the specifically divine character of his Person and love renders exclusiveness imperative. Even in giving Himself God remains God and requires from Israel the acknowledgment of this. The gift is divine and desires for itself a temple where no other presence shall be tolerated. If we feel God to be ours, then we also feel that no one but God can ever be ours in the same exclusive ineffable sense and that every similar absorption by any purely human relationship would partake of the idolatrous. The only thing that can give a faint suggestion of the engrossing character of the divine hold upon His people is the first awakening of what we call romantic love in the youthful heart with its concentration of all the intensified impulses and forces and desires upon one object and its utter obliviousness to all other interests. This actually in some measure resembles the single-minded, world-forgetful affection we owe to God, and for that very reason is called worship. But it is a state of momentary, supernormal exaltation, which cannot last, because in the creature there is not that which will justify and sustain it. Eternalize this and put into it the divine instead of the human, and