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BUT THEY SHALL LIVE

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their walls should too faithfully represent what is passing in the more secret chambers of imagery, though at last the shrines that have been supposed to contain the mystery which they set forth should be utterly destroyed, and a voice should be heard out of the midst of them, saying, "Let us depart,"-yet that this will not be the sign that the Church of God has perished, only the sign that the temple of God has been opened in Heaven, and that from thence must come forth the glory that is to fill the whole earth.

SERMON XXVII.

THE NEW TEMPLE.

LINCOLN'S INN, 2ND SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY.-JUNE 20TH, 1852.

EZEKIEL, XLIII. 10—11.

Thou son of man, shew the house to the house of Israel, that they may be ashamed of their iniquities: and let them measure the pattern. And if they be ashamed of all that they have done, shew them the form of the house, and the fashion thereof, and the goings out thereof, and the comings in thereof, and all the forms thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and all the laws thereof: and write it in their sight, that they may keep the whole form thereof, and all the ordinances thereof, and do them.

THE later visions in the book of Ezekiel relate to a Temple, the form and proportions of which are very minutely described. What is this Temple? The first obvious suggestion is that Ezekiel was looking forward to the times of Ezra; that this Temple is an anticipation of that which Zerubbabel brought forth the headstone. But the building which rises before the eyes of the seer covers an area which the second Temple never can have occupied. The scale of it appears to exceed that of Solomon's, which struck the old

XXVII.] THEORIES RESPECTING THE TEMPLE.

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man, who had seen it or heard of it from his father, as so much grander than its successor. In Ezekiel's vision, moreover, there is a distinct allusion to that appearance of the glory of the Lord which belonged, the Jews say, exclusively to the elder building. Christian writers have availed themselves of these circumstances to decide peremptorily that the vision is of a spiritual, not an earthly Temple. The difficulties in the way of such an opinion are very great. Accurate admeasurements in feet and cubits seem as if they must relate to a visible, not to an invisible fabric. There are still two possible opinions. One is popular among many of our countrymen. It is that a Temple exactly answering to Ezekiel's description will appear hereafter in Jerusalem. The other you will at once identify as foreign. It is that of a critic of great learning and acuteness, often of much sympathy with the earnest patriotism of the prophets. He thinks that Ezekiel carried with him into Chaldæa the habits, prejudices, and formality of the priestly order to which he belonged. Therefore, though he had high moral purposes and divine instincts, he could not but regard the reappearance of a Temple like that which Nebuzaradan had destroyed, only more magnificent, as the consummation of an Israelite's dreams and hopes. The critic connects this explanation of the later chapters of the books with a theory respecting the whole of it. Ezekiel is, in his judgment, more of an artist than of a prophet. The elder prophets, he thinks, delivered their discourses before the people; the son of Buzi, for the most part, composed his in his chamber. The book therefore, he supposes, while it wants freshness, has a unity of purpose which we do not find elsewhere. The Temple, in which the early years of the seer were passed, gives it a beginning, a middle, and an end.

466

EZEKIEL'S PECULIARITIES.

[Serm.

I shall not seek to get rid of this last explanation by calling it the irreverent offspring of a modern or a foreign school. The criticism, which was fashionable among the most approved interpreters of our Church in the last century, leaves me no excuse for such language. They seem to have thought that—not one, but—all the prophets were busy, in the most solemn moments of their own lives and of their country's history, in selecting ingenious and striking epithets and in enveloping their thoughts with a grotesque oriental imagery. I believe the more recent commentator would shrink from such language. He would admit that the prophets were, one and all, deep-minded reasonable men; and that is one step towards the belief that they were really inspired by God. Nor would it hinder any one, I should think, in his progress towards that conviction, to suppose that, as each prophet exhibits a different character, temperament, and style-the signs of a distinct work; so the one who was least called forth by sudden emergencies, who was not in the midst of the fears and hopes of a siege or of an invasion, should have contemplated events less as detached, more in a series, than his predecessors. Least of all would it detract from the probability of a divine education, to suppose that the holy function of the priest had given a colour as I maintained last week that it did-to all Ezekiel's thoughts, and that in it we may discover the key to their order and connexion.

But on the other hand, I think, every thoughtful reader, whatever his notions about Inspiration may be, must admit that if there was any thing in Ezekiel's circumstances, or in the constitution of his mind, which disposed him to look upon the world as a student looks out upon it from his closet, no one had that tendency more repeatedly and painfully

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counteracted. Petty trials and the most serious trials, the eating of loathsome food, the death of his wife on the day on which he had spoken to the people, served alike to rob him of any lofty conceits, to bring him down to the level of the most unhappy of those with whom he was associated, to teach him that outward events were linked and fastened to the inmost fibres of his being. If the captivity withdrew him from some of those political relations in which he would have been involved at Jerusalem, it brought him into closer and more personal contact with the heartlessness and indifference as well as with the secret idolatries, of his countrymen. His removal from the Temple and the temple-worship threw him, as I endeavoured to shew you, more as an outcast upon the wide and profane world, and compelled him to ask whether he was away from God, because he was away from the place that directly testified of Him. Instead of being more surrounded with the means and appliances which tempt a man into artificial faith, he was stripped more bare of them than any prophet had ever been. Whatever value he might have set upon the temple in other days, whatever he might have set upon it then, he, more than any other man, had to learn that, if he had no better resting-place for his spirit than that, it must be dreary and homeless.

His earliest visions had taught him, that not only the Cherubim in the temple of Solomon, but that all Babylonian symbols, had a meaning; that they betokened a relation between the lower creatures and man, between man and God; that the most terrific powers of nature spoke of government and order and harmony. The later vision of the valley of the dry bones had taught him that no change in the outward condition of his countrymen could lift them