water, and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the Lord, and shall water the valley of Shittim.

Compare with these, the vision given to Ezekiel of the holy waters issuing from the temple, and flowing forth to the healing of the desert and the sea, so that whithersoever the waters shall come, every thing shall be healed and shall live.

This, it may be said, is highly figurative language. Doubtless, it is so: but the figure means something literal; and we must bear in mind the difference between figurative language and figurative fulfilment. The latter is mere evasion. "The supplies of grace (literal blessings) are often represented in Scripture by rivers and streams of water, (figurative language,) which both cleanse and make fruitful the ground through which they pass.' passage refers to the wide effusion of divine knowledge from Jerusalem restored. By living waters, there is good reason to believe are meant the gifts and graces of the gospel dispensation. That these benefits will be diffused more extensively by the restoration of the Jews, is not obscurely intimated in Romans xi. 15."

-99 f 66

"The

In another prophecy, Zechariah informs us, with more literal plainness, "that there shall come people, and the inhabitants of many cities, and the

• Zech. xiv. 8. Joel iii. 18. Ezek. xlvii. 1- 12.

'Lowth on Zech. xiv. Compare John iv. 10-14; and vii.

37-39.

Newcome on Ezek. xlvii. Blayney on Zech. xiv. 8.

inhabitants of one city shall go to another, saying, let us go speedily to pray before the Lord, and to seek the Lord of hosts: I will go also. Yea, many people and strong nations shall come to seek the Lord of hosts in Jerusalem, and to pray before the Lord. Thus saith the Lord of hosts; in those days it shall come to pass, that ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you." h

On the prophecy of Hosea, which concludes with the words, "great shall be the day of Jezreel,” i Bishop Horsley remarks, "great, indeed, and happy shall be the day, when the holy seed of both branches of the natural Israel shall be publicly acknowledged of their God; united under one head, their King Messiah; and restored to the possession of the promised land, and to a situation of high pre-eminence among the kingdoms of the earth. The natural Israel were the first seed of the universal church; and there is reason to believe, that the restoration of the converted Jews will be the occasion and means of a prodigious influx of new converts from the Gentiles in the latter ages. Thus the Jezreel of the natural Israel, from the first, have been, and to the last will prove, a seed sown of God for himself in the earth." A remarkable matter of fact, respecting the pro

h Zech. viii. 20-23.

i Hos. i. 10, 11.

pagation of Christianity, closely connected with this scheme of interpretation, and I think strongly corroborative of it, is thus stated by Mr. Faber :"In the course of a very few years, the religion of Christ had more or less pervaded the whole Roman empire, and had made successful inroads into the contiguous nations, both barbarous and civilized : in the course of little more than three centuries, it became the established theological system of the greatest and the most polished monarchy then subsisting. Succeeding events seemed to threaten, if not its absolute extinction, yet, at least, its contraction within its original, narrow limits. But the result was the very opposite of what, by political sagacity, might reasonably have been anticipated. The religion of the conquering Goths was, in every instance, nationally abandoned; the religion of the conquered Romans was, in every instance, nationally adopted. Some of the northern warriors might be earlier, and some might be later proselytes: but the ultimate, universal concomitant of Gothic national invasion was Gothic national conversion.

"When this great moral revolution was effected, the victories of the Cross seemed, as it were, to be suddenly arrested in their mid career. Much about the time that our Saxon ancestors were exchanging the ferocious idolatry of their fathers for the milder religion of Christ, the Saracens attacked the whole southern line of the Roman empire: and, after the interval of a few centuries, they were

followed by the Scythic Turcomans. Each division of these irresistible conquerors obtained permanent settlements upon the Roman platform: the Saracens in Syria, and Africa, and Spain; the Turks, in the entire territory of the eastern empire. Yet, mark the wide difference of the result. All those earlier invaders, who seized upon the fragments of Roman dominion from the north, embraced the religion of the vanquished; though in direct opposition to a well-known maxim of Paganism, that the success of their votaries was the surest test of the power of the gods. All those later invaders, who planted themselves upon the Roman territory from the south-east and the east, not only rejected the religion of the vanquished, but continued to be pertinaciously animated by a most violent spirit of hostility against it.

"The difference between the two cases is sufficiently striking: but the matter does not rest here. It is not, that other remote nations were rapidly accepting the gospel, while the Saracens and the Turks, with an unhappy singularity, were rejecting it so far from such being the fact, it would be difficult, I believe, to produce any prominent instance of a national conversion to Christianity, subsequent to the period during which the ancestors of the present Europeans received it as their public rule of faith. The Mexicans and the Peruvians, indeed, may have been half exterminated, and half forced into a semblance of our religion;

and in our own days, on better principles and to a purer mode of faith, the petty islands which are washed by the great Pacific Ocean, may have been nationally converted: but what are these, when contrasted with the vast field for missionary exertion, which stretches far into comparatively civilized Asia!

"Individually, some conquests may have been made by the pious and laborious men, who have undertaken the mighty task. But what has been done nationally? What has been done upon a grand scale? What has been effected, which bears any resemblance or proportion to the earlier triumphs of the Cross? Both Romanist, and Protestant, and Greek, are alike compelled to give the same desponding answer-JUST NOTHING. Look at Persia; look at Arabia; look at Boutan and Thibet; look at Tartary; look at Hindostan; look at China; in one word, cast your eyes over the whole of Southern Asia with its dependent islands; and what do you behold? Nowhere, is the Cross nationally triumphant: every where, an incalculable majority of the people either bows to the idols of Paganism, or is besotted through the delusion of Mohammedanism.

"What I have stated, though it may well serve to produce abundant speculation, is itself a mere naked matter of fact. However we may account for it, and however we may reject it, still nothing can be more clear, than that the progress of the gospel has