(Octavius Winslow, "Evening Thoughts")

"Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am
 a man of unclean lips, and I live among a
 people of unclean lips, and my eyes have
 seen the King, the Lord Almighty." Isaiah 6:5

What prostrated his soul thus low in the dust?

What filled him with this self abasement?

What overwhelmed him with this keen sense of his vileness?

Oh, it was the unclouded view he had of the
essential glory of the Son of God! And thus
will it ever be. The beaming forth of Christ's
glory in the soul reveals its hidden evil; the
knowledge of this evil lays the believer low
before God with the confession, "I abhor myself.
Woe is me! for I am undone."

Beloved, let this truth be ever present to your
mind, that as we increasingly see glory in Christ,
we shall increasingly see that there is no glory
in ourselves.

Jesus is the Sun which reveals the pollutions
and defilements which are within. The chambers
of abomination are all closed until Christ shines
in upon the soul. Oh, then it is these deep seated
and long veiled deformities are revealed; and we,
no longer gazing with a complacent eye upon self,
sink in the dust before God, overwhelmed with
shame, and covered with confusion of face.

Holy posture!

Blessed spectacle!

A soul prostrate before the glory of the incarnate God!

All high and lofty views of its own false glory
annihilated by clear and close views of the true
glory of Jesus. As when the sun appears, all the
lesser lights vanish into darkness, so when Jesus
rises in noontide glory upon the soul, all other
glory retires, and He alone fixes the eye and
fills the mind.

"Hovering around him were mighty seraphim, each
 with six wings. With two wings they covered their
 faces, with two they covered their feet". Isaiah 6:2

Their own perfections and beauty were not to
be seen in the presence of the glory of the Lord.

How much more profound should be the humility
and self abasement of man! Have we covered
ourselves; not with the pure wings of the holy
cherubim, but with sackcloth and ashes before the
Lord? Have we sought to veil; not our beauties,
for beauty we have none; but our innumerable
and flagrant deformities, even the sins of our
best and holiest things; and, renouncing all self
glory, have we sunk, as into nothing before God?
Oh, we are yet strangers to the vision of Christ's
glory, if we have not.

If the constellation of human gifts and attainments,
distinctions and usefulness, on which unsanctified
and unmortified self so delights to gaze, have not
retired into oblivion, the Sun of Righteousness has
yet to rise upon our souls with healing in His wings!