At length the whole of Christendom became a vast field of dense ignorance, of wild ambition, passion, and ferocity; very faintly, indeed, moderated by a few good men here and a few there. A remnant remained, watched over by the Lord, under every name, but captive and depressed by the darkness which covered the church, illumined only by the flashes of terrible struggle, of wild hate and defiance, in which the cruel of one class battled fiercely against the cruel of another; or in which the fiendish despot who would murder a nation not obsequious to his senseless tyranny and his stupid priest, was met by the fierce gallantry of heroes of liberty, and a people in arms. But where was Christianity in these awful times? Jerusalem had been set on fire and destroyed by Babylon. What a marvel

lous view it gives us of the Word, and of the Lord's Providence, when we comprehend the great lesson, that the record of the career of Jerusalem in the Old Testament is the propheticdelineation of the Christian Church, the Jerusalem which the Lord Jesus established. Yet it is manifestly so.

"Ye are come unto Mount Zion," said the Apostle to the Christians, "and unto the city of the living God, THE HEAVENLY JERUSALEM, and to an innumerable company of angels, to the general assembly AND CHURCH OF THE FIRST-BORN" (Heb. xii. 22, 23). Again, he is not a Jew who is one outwardly, but he is a Jew who is one inwardly (Rom. ii. 28, 29). And still again, Jerusalem which is above (the earthly Jerusalem) is free, which is the mother of us all (Gal. iv. 26).

If, then, the Jerusalem of the Old Testament was a figure, a shadow going before of the Christian Church, the Jerusalem of the new, what will the degeneracy of Jerusalem, its courting communion with Babylon, and ultimately its destruction by Babylon, mean, but that the Christian Church would degenerate, would become corrupted by Babylonish intercourse, and ultimately be destroyed by Babylon? The consequence seems to be inevitable; there appears no escape from such a conclusion.

The Christian Church, as the Lord Jesus founded it, and the Apostles spread it, was a city suffused and filled by this spirit of humility, love, and the wisdom of humility and love; it was the city set upon a hill, the Jerusalem which was holy, pure, and free. How came it then to become the church of contradictory mysteries, of violent antagonisms, of fierce struggles, and burning hates? How came its great men to become monstrous for their crimes and their cruelties? Whence came the Torquemadas, the Alvas, the inquisition, the centuries of persecution,

of cruelty, and bloodshed in the name of the religion of the Prince of Peace? It was from Jerusalem shewing her treasures to Babylon, as in the days of good, but weak Hezekiah.

The Church having lost her first love, and manufactured the new creed of three divine persons, began to borrow showy rites and gaudy ceremonies from heathenism. Instead of kindling the fire of love in the hearts of men, she lighted plenty of candles; instead of holy truth, she provided holy water; instead of taking up the daily cross of the Gospel-the cross of subduing evil tempers and unhallowed desires, she put crosses on her buildings and into the hands of the people-rough crosses and dainty crosses-covered her priests with crosses in grand colours, quite as grand as those of the old priests of Thibet, or the priest of Egypt, which they flaunted in processions centuries before Christianity existed; she made and blessed jewelled crosses for wicked men and women of princely position and high degree, who were a scandal not only to religion but to mankind; instead of removing sin, she pretended to forgive it and satisfy God by saying many hurried prayers with unchanged hearts, and living as wickedly as before. To preserve this masquerade of religion, she martyred the true children of Christ, and massacred nations. O Lord Jesus, Saviour, infinite in purity, wisdom, charity, and holiness, was this Thy Church, for which Thou didst bow the heavens and come down? Was it for such a system as this Thou wert God manifest in the flesh, and didst suffer and die for men? Assuredly not. Thy Jerusalem had mixed with Babylon, and at length Babylon had burnt and utterly destroyed it.

Nothing but the Word of God, loved and obeyed, can change the human heart and mind: and the Word of God was closed from the people, and mysterious looking mummeries instituted instead; and so the fires of evil lust and passion, at one time smouldering in the heart, at another raging forth in cruel violence and battle, until Jerusalem was entirely destroyed. "Wickedness burneth as a fire" (Isa. ix. 18). "Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks ; walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks ye have kindled. This shall ye have at my hand, ye shall lie down in sorrow (Isa. 1. 11). The so-called Christian nations, sunk under Babylonish principles, did surely kindle enormous fires, and did indeed lie down in sorrow.

The name Nebuchadnezzar is found so abundantly upon the broad bricks or tiles of Babylon, that not only is his extraordi

nary grandeur fully testified by the extensive remains of the wonderful palaces and other great structures he built, but scarcely any remains are found of the city as it was before his time. The Birs Nimroud, four miles from Hillah, which had been long supposed, without any evidence, to be the remains of the Tower of Babel, has on every inscribed brick which has been taken from it the name of Nebuchadnezzar.*

But this king, great as he was, typified a principle far more terrible and powerful than he. The name Nebuchadnezzar means the anguish of judgment; and the name of his general Nebuzaradan means the fruits of judgment, also the winnowing of judgment.

When a church has lost its soul and life, and instead of its own nature and strength has borrowed from Babylon its influence and right to be, a time comes when even the appearance of it, the remains of it, will not be tolerated. All regard for gentleness, wisdom, justice, truth, and everything of the angelic character, will be thrown off, and it will stand out only what Nebuchadnezzar has made it, a ruin, a misery, and a desolation. His general, the winnower, will scatter everything inconsistent with Babylonish rule, and the Church will be judged by its own manifestation, a home for falsity, destitute of true goodness, true life, true wisdom, and true peace.

But, blessed be Infinite Mercy, Jerusalem was to be built again, and it was built again. The second temple was more glorious than the first. The Prince of Peace came and inhabited it in person; and in that house, as the prophets predicted, He gave peace (Haggai ii. 9).

Jerusalem was to be inhabited as towns without walls, for the multitude of men and cattle therein." The Lord declared He would be a wall of fire round about, and a glory in the midst of her (Zech. ii. 4, 5). And so it is once again. The New Jerusalem, THE SECOND SPIRITUAL JERUSALEM, the Church of great principles, revealing truths infinite in number and grandeur, and love extensive as heaven and earth, and embracing peoples, nations, languages, and tongues in all-encircling charities, now appears. The Lord is in her. His love surrounds her as a wall of fire. Come and see the bride, the Lamb's wife, the city of the great King. Let us hail the glorious dwelling, and say, "This is my rest for ever; here will I dwell, for I have desired it.'

* Nineveh and Babylon, p. 496.

SERMON XLI.

EZEKIEL'S VISION OF THE WHEELS.

"When those went, these went; and when those stood, these stood; and when those were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up over against them; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels."-EZEK. i. 21.

In meditating upon the Word of the Lord, we may observe that one of its features of perfection is, that its letter partakes of the genius of the age and place in which it was given. It not only embosoms Divine wisdom in every page, but it so enters into the spirit of the literature and circumstances of the period in which it was imparted, that it contains confirmations of its truth, which commend it more and more to the studious mind, the more it is examined. This characteristic illustrates and confirms to the thoughtful inquirer, the genuineness and the naturalness, so to speak, of each portion of the Bible. It is strikingly exhibited in the book before us, in several leading particulars.

Ezekiel prophesied in the land of the Chaldeans, near Babylon, at the time when the Jews were suffering the seventy years' captivity. He was commissioned to console the captives, who were now bowed down in penitence, to raise their hopes by consolation. He was to impart the promise of a return once more to their beloved country. They should build once more the temple, the centre of their best aspirations, and restore Jerusalem, their sacred city.

Now, at Nineveh and Babylon, the mythical genuis of the people displayed itself in marvellous allegorical forms of sculpture and painting. If we look at their recovered monuments, now displayed so largely at the British Museum, and in many other national collections, we see winged men, winged animals, extraordinary compounds of men and animals, no doubt representing their conceptions of the intellectual and animal nature in the human mind, and their views of these, both in order and in struggle. In such representations they abounded.

Manifestly in this opening of the magnificent prophecy of Ezekiel, we have disclosed to us the very same thing. There are the winged cherubim with their marvellous forms, compounded of man and animal. There are the wings and the mysterious wheels. We have evidently the Word clothed with the Chaldean genius. It is the Divine Truth, as it were, incarnated in the wondrous representations of that age and country. The same peculiarity is observable in the fourth chapter. It was the custom of the Chaldeans to write and paint upon tiles of baked clay. When the prophet was commanded to represent the siege of Jerusalem, it is said, "Take a tile, and portray upon it the city, even Jerusalem." It is not take a scroll, or take a book, as we find in other parts of Scripture, but take a tile. The same characteristic is manifest in the thirty-seventh chapter, in the resurrection, which is represented as taking place in a valley of dry bones.

The Babylonish people in very ancient times were remarkable for their spiritual character. They had, however, at length sunk into an exceedingly carnal state; and from worshipping the Lord, the Sun of heaven, the worship of the sun of the world became prevalent: from regarding the fire of love as the worthiest possession of spiritual life, they began to deem earthly. fire as something sacred, and keep it perpetually burning. "They had believed with the rest of the world in the resurrection of the spiritual body; they sank into the idea of the resurrection of the material body. The Jews had never held the latter doctrine before the captivity, and no traces of it appear in the books of Scripture revealed before that seventy years' residence in Babylon. But now, Ezekiel uses the resurrection believed by the Babylonians as a symbol of the resurrection of the Jews as a nation, and their return to their own land. He gives us the meaning in verses 11 and 12, but he uses the figure. Of course, in the spiritual signification, it means what the apostle calls the resurrection from the death of sin to the life of righteousness; the regeneration of the soul and of the church. There is a similar figure used by Daniel in chapter xii. verse 2, evidently with the same signification, that is, the resurrection of the Jews from the dust of captivity, to national honourable existence again. Anywhere else, as in Greece, Rome, or India, where the people only thought of the resurrection of man, not of the scattered dust, such a figure would have been strange and outrageous; but in Babylon, where the resurrection of the flesh and bones had already obtained credence as a doctrine,