in this, that they exalt and spread the Word of God. There is the divine seed out of which a pure church will come, but not yet. The soldiers who have overcome Babylon will take the kingdom. The reformers, heroic souls, who could no longer bear the iniquities of Babylon, such as it was at its worst, who struggled against papal abominations, when it was danger to protest, and death to defy, these are the spiritual Medes and Persians. They renounced and broke down Babylon, and with them the Church would be, because with them the Word would be; the Church not in entirety or thorough purity, but as much as mankind could bear, and until the period when the New Jerusalem would come down from the Lord out of heaven. In that night was Belshazzar, the king of the Chaldeans slain. Belshazzar signifies Master of secret treasures. And his being slain in that night teaches that the state of the papal Babylon, in which she was master of the treasures of the Divine Word, which she kept hidden from the people, was brought to an end. The same thing is taught by the ten horns, who are ten kings, who hate Babylon the great, and make her desolate and naked, and eat her flesh, and burn her with fire (Rev. xvii. 16).

They repudiate, condemn, and renounce the cumbrous system of spiritual despotism, the substitution of man and his mystery for God and His Word, but they are not for a time able to accept the central truth of the New Jerusalem, that the Lamb, the Lord Jesus Christ, in whom are Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the whole fulness of the Godhead bodily, is King of kings and Lord of lords. The Lamb will in due time overcome them; not to harm them, but to save them. They will yield their homage to Him, and join those who with Him are called elect and faithful.

The Babylon of the ancients, though once a benevolent rule, became a fearful oppression, and when she fell the world breathed more freely. Mankind said, "How hath the oppressor ceased; the golden city ceased! The Lord hath broken the staff of the wicked, and the sceptre of the rulers. The whole earth is at rest, and are quiet; they break forth into singing" (Isa. xiv. 4, 5, 7). But oh! far more happy was it when the power of papal Babylon was broken, and the Word of God set free. Since then, spiritual liberty has led the way to liberty of every kind, political, social, and scientific. Man, with the Word in his hand, walks abroad in the domains of Him who is his loving Father and Saviour, and gathers truth everywhere. A free Bible ultimately makes everything else free. If the truth shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.

SERMON LII.

THE RESTORATION OF JERUSALEM.

So shall ye know that I am the Lord your God dwelling in Zion, my holy mountain; then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more."JOEL iii, 17.

THE careful reader of the Divine Word will notice that in the Old Testament a large part of Scripture is occupied with two captivities of the people of Israel, the captivity in Egypt and the captivity in Babylon. The first bondage to which they had been reduced under Pharaoh, and from which the Lord redeemed them by the hand of Moses, was the emblem as Christian divines have always taught, of that slavery to worldliness and sin, which is forsaken when a soul truly turns to the Lord, made spiritually free by truth from Him, and enters on the spiritual journey of regeneration. The journey of Israel led to the possession of Canaan, and was crowned by the constitution of Jerusalem as the capital of the country, the grand seat of their greatest ceremonies, and the centre of their worship and their church. Jerusalem was the temple, and to Jerusalem three times in the year must every Jew go up. It was the centre of their instruction, of their hopes and their love. It was to them "the City of God, the mountain of holiness; beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, the city of the Great King." It was, however much more than this, it was the symbol of the Lord's Church when the Blessed Redeemer, Jehovah in the flesh, would open it to all nations, replacing the sacrifice of lambs, sheep, bulls and goats, by the purer worship, the offerings of the affections and thoughts, the spirit and truth of His children.

At

The earthly Jerusalem was the type of the spiritual Jerusalem, the Christian Church; and the law was the shadow of good things to come (Heb. x. 1). Its priests were the type of Christians, who were to be a royal priesthood, a holy nation, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, and shew forth the praises of Him who had called them out of darkness into His marvellous light (1 Pet.

ii. 5, 9). Thus, the apostles frequently portray both the Jews and Jerusalem. "He is not a Jew," Paul said, "who is one outwardly, neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh, but he is a Jew who is one inwardly, and circumcision is that of the heart in the spirit, and not in the letter” (Rom. ii. 28, 29). Jerusalem that now is, is in bondage with her children; but Jerusalem which is above is free, and is the mother of us all (Gal. iv. 25, 26). Still more markedly does the Apostle speak in the epistle to the Hebrews, "Ye are come unto mount Zion 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, which are written in heaven" (Heb. xii. 22, 23).

That Jerusalem was the type of the Christian Church then does not admit of question. Its very name illustrates this, for it signifies THE SIGHT OF PEACE. What a beautiful ideal of a church is enclosed in that exquisite appellation, the sight of peace. For when we have a sight of the Lord Jesus, we behold the Prince of peace and the Source of peace. The principles of true Christianity are the principles of peace. Truth, charity, mutual love, doing unto others as we would they should do unto us, are the very essence and rules of peace. And above all, the glorious kingdom for which the Christian lives, and to which his hopes and aims aspire, is emphatically the kingdom of peace. The peace of a virtuous life, the peace of a soul abiding by faith and love in the Saviour, and the peace of the golden world of order, love, and joy; these are the very constituents of the Church, the heavenly Jerusalem, of which the earthly capital of Judea was the beautiful but transitory type, which would give place to the grander reality when the Prince of Peace appeared and opened His spiritual kingdom.

We thus have a most satisfactory reason why so large a portion of the Divine Word is taken up with the history, the events, and the loveliness of Jerusalem. The bondage the Israelites fled from, their coming into Canaan, and their being made citizens of their magnificent metropolis, were all typical of Christians rescued from the fetters of evil lusts and corrupt habits, and then being constituted into a Jerusalem, not confined to Judea, but wide as the world, embracing citizens whose renewed hearts and minds were knitted together by diviner things, than earthly Solyma ever knew, things of heavenly wisdom, living faith, devoted love to a Divine and loving Saviour, and self-sacrifice in doing His holy will. But earthly Jeru

salem, after some glorious centuries, became corrupt and faithless, disobedient and perverse. Where the living God had filled His house with glory, and shone forth with His responses from between the cherubim, there idols became multiplied, and the covenant broken. The people committed two evils; they forsook the Fountain of Living Waters, and hewed out for themselves cisterns, broken cisterns, that could hold no water (Jer. ii. 13). They burned incense to other gods, and worshipped the work of their own hands (Jer. i. 16).

They courted intercourse with Assyria, and with Babylon, until they became Babylonish themselves, and then the greater Babylon devoured them. The remains of the nation were kept in captivity seventy years, and they then were restored, and formed a second Jerusalem. This restoration of Jerusalem from Babylon, this second return from captivity, occupies almost as prominent a place in the prophetical writings as the return from Egypt does in the books of Moses. We shall not be astonished at the captivity of the Jewish nation in Babylon, and their return to their own land, being so often the theme of the prophets, if we bear in mind the extreme misery and degradation they sustained, and the deeply rooted patriotism of the Jew. The awful way in which Babylon strove to trample the nation out, is intimated in Jeremiah, "Moreover, I will take from them the voice of mirth, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride, the sound of the millstones, and the light of the candle. And this whole land shall be a desolation, and an astonishment; and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years" (xxv. IO, II).

The astonishing fixity and the wondrous depth of Jewish love of nation and country, has no parallel. Other peoples, after two or three generations, are unaffected by the remembrance of a land their ancestors have quitted. They become entirely contented denizens of their new homes, and mostly enthusiastic admirers of the new lands, now their own. But Jewish home-love has endured nearly two thousand years of absence, and burns with wonderful energy still. When, therefore, they were defeated, dispersed, almost destroyed as a nation, the temple burnt, their capital uninhabitable, and its remaining people carried away apparently never to return, settled as outcasts, and derided as slaves by the rivers of Babylon and the neighbouring lands, we may well enter into the spirit of the most pathetic of all the Psalms, and feel as though it were com

posed of the anguish and tears of the captives—“ By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea, we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows, in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy" (cxxxvii.).

How

With all their love of home, and all the misery of absence, combined with the accumulated sorrows of captivity and slavery, we may well conceive how joyous their return would be. glad they would learn the decree of Cyrus! How exultantly they would commence their return home. How they would kiss the dear spot from which they had so long been absent, and with what energy they would strive to rebuild the city and the temple, and once more have the faith that they were under the protection and blessing of the Lord their God. This feeling is portrayed in another Psalm-" When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The Lord hath done great things for them. The Lord hath done

great things for us, whereof we are glad" (cxxvi.). Bearing these considerations in mind, we may readily perceive why so much is said, and in terms of such joyous exultation, of the return to their own land, of Jerusalem being built again, of its being established with abounding prosperity to abide for ever. This latter phrase, however, strictly rendered, is for an age, or dispensation.

The prophecies of this return were all given either before the captivity, as in the instances of Isaiah and Jeremiah, or during the captivity, as in the cases of Ezekiel, Daniel, Haggai, and Zechariah. The restoration of the nation of Jerusalem after the misery of the Babylonish bondage fulfilled all those prophecies respecting the return of the Jews to their own land, so far as their literal application is concerned, and there is nothing in Scripture to warrant the anticipation of A THIRD RETURN. They have accomplished their use as a separate nation--the use of preserving the Word, and the great doctrines of the Unity and Fatherhood of God; and now that Christians are learning to be Christian to the Jews, and to rise to a Chris