Ezekiel 8:1-18

CHAPTER 8.

THE IMAGE OF JEALOUSY AND OTHER ABOMINATIONS AT JERUSALEM.

Ezekiel 8:1. And it came to pass in the sixth year, in the sixth (month), in the fifth of the month, I was sitting in my house, and the elders of Judah were sitting before me, and the hand of the Lord Jehovah fell upon me there.

Ezekiel 8:2. And I looked, and behold, a resemblance (i.e. of a human figure) as the appearance of fire: from the appearance of his loins and downwards, fire; and from his loins and upwards as the appearance of light-splendour, as the glitter of Chashmal.

Ezekiel 8:3. And he put forth the form of a hand, and took hold of me by a lock of my head; and the spirit raised me up between the earth and the heavens, and brought me to Jerusalem in the visions of God, to the door of the inner gate that looks toward the north, where is the seat of the image of jealousy that provokes to jealousy.

Ezekiel 8:4. And behold there was the glory of the God of Israel, as in the vision that I saw in the plain.

Ezekiel 8:5. And he said to me, Son of man, lift up thine eyes now by the north way (i.e. the line of approach through the north gate); and I lifted up mine eyes northward, and behold on the north at the gate of the altar this image of jealousy, at the entrance.

Ezekiel 8:6. And he said to me, Son of man, seest thou what they are doing? the great abominations which the house of Israel are practising here, that I should go far off from my sanctuary? And yet turn again, thou shalt see greater abominations.

Ezekiel 8:7. And he brought me to the door of the court; and I looked, and behold there was a hole in the wall.

Ezekiel 8:8. And he said to me, Son of man, dig now in the wall; and I dug in the wall, and behold a door.

Ezekiel 8:9. And he said to me, Come and see the evil abominations which they are practising here.

Ezekiel 8:10. And I came and looked, and behold every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed everywhere upon the wall round about.

Ezekiel 8:11. And there stood before them seventy men, elders of the house of Israel, and Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan, stood in the midst of them, each man with his censer in his hand, and the prayer (or worship) (Our translators have here taken עָחָר as an adjective, rendering it thick. But it is evidently a noun, and must be understood either generally in the sense of worship, or more specially in that of prayer. To supplicate or pray is the common meaning of the verb, and in Zephaniah 3:10, where it occurs as a noun, it is in the sense of “suppliant,” or worshipper. It is here explanatory of the offering of incense, which was a symbol of the highest act of worship, believing prayer, which those elders were prostituting to the basest idolatry.) of the cloud of incense ascending.

Ezekiel 8:12. And he said to me, Hast thou seen, son of man, what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, every man in his chambers of imagery? (The chambers of imagery were so called from being painted all round with the images referred to in Ezekiel 8:10; and they are called each man's chambers of imagery, or the chambers of his imagery, because the idolatrous spirit of each had its representation there, and made the chambers what they were in pollution.) for they say, Jehovah does not see us, Jehovah has forsaken the earth (or, the land).

13. And he said to me, Turn yet again, thou shalt see greater abominations that they are doing.

Ezekiel 8:14. And he brought me to the door of the gate of the Lord's house toward the north, and behold there women did sit, weeping for Tammuz.

Ezekiel 8:15. And he said to me, Hast thou seen it, son of man? Turn yet again, thou shalt see greater abominations than these.

Ezekiel 8:16. And he brought me to the inner court of the Lord's house, and behold at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, as many as five-and-twenty men, with their back toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces to the east, and they themselves worshipping the sun toward the east. (The persons mentioned in this 16th verse are said to have been in number כְּעֶשְׂרִים, about twenty, as it is usually put; but in such a description, in numbers and names alike have a significance, it is not to be supposed that the number here was meant to be left indefinite. The כְּ of similitude, therefore, must be taken in its more exact sense of likeness in such a manner or to such an extent; he saw the appearance as of twenty men, as many as that. To express the act of homage in which these men were engaged, the Hebrew text has a peculiar, a sort of corrupt form: not מִשְׁתַּחֲוִים, but מִשְׁתַּחֲוִיתֶם a slip of the pen, says Ewald, and after him Hitzig. But with more reverence and better taste, Lightfoot, in the very form of the word, saw a reference to the monstrous abominations the men were practising. To him also Hävernick assents, perceiving in the word a strong irony; as if the prophet was so impressed with the corruptness of the service he was describing that he instinctively corrupted the word usually employed to express acts of homage and obeisance.)

Ezekiel 8:17. Hast thou seen it, son of man? Is it a light thing to the house of Judah to do the abominations which they commit here? For they have filled the land with violence, and have returned (i.e. given themselves again) to provoke me to anger: and, lo, they put the branch to the nose. (It is impossible to determine precisely the meaning of this singular expression, “they put the branch to their nose.” The Septuagint translator evidently took it for a proverbial expression, indicating a scornful or contemptuous behaviour: “And lo! these are as persons turning up the nose” (or scorning). The other more ancient translators seem also to have understood it as expressive of insolent or contemptuous feelings, though the exact rendering is different; but Jerome took it literally, and supposed it to refer to the use of palm branches in the worship of the sun. Various devices have been fallen upon to extract a plain and satisfactory meaning from the words, but with so little success that we deem it enough to refer to the two last. Hävernick views it as a pointing to the Adonis-festival; and changing the usual meaning of the two principal words, translates: “And lo! they send forth the mournful ditty to their anger” (viz. the anger they are provoking against themselves). But Hitzig, who justly rejects this fanciful interpretation, and takes זְּמוֹרָה in the sense, not of a branch, but of a pruning-knife, renders: “And lo! they are applying the knife to their nose,” the people being silently likened to a vine, and their nose to a branch, which they were themselves by their infatuated policy cutting off! Had it been their throat or their head to which the knife was applied, one could have seen some shadow of probability in the idea, but none as it is. Besides, the sense ascribed to the word in question is quite arbitrary, as it never occurs but in the sense of a branch, especially a vine-branch, as in Ezekiel 15:2. From the connection in which the clause stands, one would expect it to denote something that rendered their sinful ways peculiarly obnoxious to God; and as nothing would more readily do this than feelings of fancied security or insolent scorn, so the likelihood is, as the Septuagint understood, that the “putting the branch to the nose,” was a proverbial expression for something of that nature.)

Ezekiel 8:18. And I also will deal in fury; mine eyes shall not spare, neither will I have pity; and they shall cry in mine ear with a loud voice, and I will not hear them.

A NEW stage of the prophetic agency of Ezekiel, and of his spirit-stirring communications to the captives on the banks of the Chebar, opens with this chapter, and proceeds onwards in an uninterrupted strain to the end of the eleventh. These four Chapter s form one discourse (as the preceding portion had also done, from Ezekiel 3:12 to the close of Ezekiel 7.), and a discourse somewhat more specific in its character and bearing than the revelations previously made. The vision of the siege and of the iniquity-bearing, described in chap, iv., had respect to the covenant-people generally including, indeed, the inhabitants of Jerusalem, yet so as also to comprehend the scattered portions of Judah and Israel. This, too, was the case with the vision of the shaven hair, and its foreshadowing desolations, contained in Ezekiel 5:5-7. The burden there delivered was an utterance of Divine judgments against the whole covenant-people on account of sin; because, having been planted as the witnesses and heralds of God's truth in the midst of the nations, they had themselves fallen before the heathen corruptions, which it was their special calling to have resisted to the uttermost. Therefore in just retribution for the betrayal of God's cause into the enemies hands, the heathen were become his instruments of vengeance, to inflict on the whole house of Israel the various forms of a severe and prolonged chastisement. But now, in the section of prophecy which commences with Ezekiel 8, the people of Jerusalem, and the small remnant of Judah who, under Zedekiah, continued to hold a flickering existence in Canaan, form the immediate object of the prophet's message, not only as apart from the Babylonish exiles, but even as standing in a kind of contrast to them. And it is of essential moment to a proper understanding of the purport of the vision, that we rightly apprehend and estimate the circumstances which led to so partial and specific a direction in the message now delivered.

In the sixth year of the captivity, the sixth month, and the fifth day of the month, the prophet was sitting, we are told, in his own house; and the elders of Judah, namely, of that portion of Judah who sojourned with him on the banks of the Chebar, sat before him. No express reason is assigned for their sitting there, though we can have little doubt that it was for the purpose of receiving from his lips some communication of the Divine will. The Lord also was present, to impart suitable aid to his servant; but lo! instead of prompting him to address his speech directly to those before him, the Spirit carried him away in the visions of God to the temple at Jerusalem, that he might obtain an insight into the state of corruption prevalent there, and might learn the mind of God respecting it. The message delivered to the elders who sat around him consisted mainly in the report of what he witnessed and heard in those Divine visions; and it falls into two parts, the account given of the reigning abominations contained in chap. 8, and the dealings of judgment and of mercy which were to be pursued toward the respective parties in Israel, as unfolded in the three succeeding Chapter s.

Now what should have led the prophet to throw his message into such a form as this, but that some connection existed between the exiles of Chebar and the remnant in Jerusalem, which made the report of what more immediately belonged to the one a seasonable and instructive communication to the other? We formerly had occasion to notice, that among the exiled portion there were some who still looked hopefully toward Jerusalem, and, so far from believing things there to be on the verge of ruin, were persuaded that ere long the way would be opened up for their own return thither in peace and comfort. Among those also who were still resident in Jerusalem and its neighbourhood, it appears there were some who not only looked upon themselves as secure in their position, but eyed their exiled brethren with a kind of haughty indifference or contempt, as if these had no longer anything in common with them! That it was this latter state of feeling which more immediately led to the present interview between the elders and the prophet, and the revelations which ensued, we may not doubtfully gather from the allusion made to it near the close of the vision (Ezekiel 11:15), where the inhabitants of Jerusalem are represented as saying to the exiles, “Get you far (rather, Be ye far, continue in your state of separation and distance) from the Lord; unto us is this land given in possession.” As much as to say, “It may well befit you to be entertaining thoughts of evil and dark forebodings of the future; your outcast condition cuts you off from any proper interest in God, and renders such sad anticipations natural and just. Abide as you are; but as for us, we dwell near to God, and by his good hand upon us have the city and land of our fathers in sure possession.”It is not improbable that this taunting declaration of their own fancied superiority and assured feeling of safety had been called forth by the tidings reaching Jerusalem of the awful judgments announced in Ezekiel's earlier predictions; as, on the other hand, the express and pointed reference made here to that declaration leaves little room to doubt that the rumour of it had been heard on the banks of the Chebar, and had led the elders of Judah to present themselves in the house of the prophet. For in their unhappy circumstances, the knowledge of such thoughts and feelings being entertained toward them at Jerusalem must have exercised a most depressing influence on their minds, and could not but seem an adequate occasion for their endeavouring to ascertain the mind of the Lord as between them and their countrymen in Judea.

Raised, therefore, by the Spirit into a state of Divine ecstasy, the prophet forthwith beheld in vision the Lord of glory, though in human form, yet glowing with celestial fire from his loins downwards, and radiant with the splendour of light in the upper parts; that is, as well explained by Züllig at Revelation 8:2, “below, toward the earth, the person on the throne appeared in the glowing ire of his function as judge and avenger, above, in the pure splendour of his calm, untroubled, heavenly majesty.” In the presence of this glorious majesty the prophet was suddenly transported, by a Divine hand, to the north entrance into the temple at Jerusalem. There, at the altar-gate, as it is called in Ezekiel 8:5 (because the gate that opened into the inner court, and led straight to the altar of burnt-offering), he sees in vision the glory of the Lord as it had formerly appeared to him on the plain of Chebar, viz. in the parts standing nearest to the earth, the Divine likeness with the appearance of fire, indicating that he came in the fervent heat of his indignation; while still the upper parts of the form presented the aspect of the holy majesty of heaven in its pure and unsullied brightness. The vision appeared a little to the north of” the seat of the image of jealousy which provoketh to jealousy.” What precisely is to be understood by this image of jealousy has long been matter of dispute, or rather of various conjecture, among commentators. The more common opinion has been that Baal was meant, while some have under stood it rather of the Syrian Venus, called the Aschera or Astarte (the word used in the original for that Queen of Heaven in 2 Kings 2 Kings 21:3 2 Kings 21:7, 2 Kings 23:4; 2 Kings 23:7, where, unhappily, the translation grove has been adopted in our version). Hävernick, however, has recently advanced the opinion that it was an image in wax or clay of the Tammuz or Adonis mentioned afterwards, and called “the image that provoketh to jealousy,” with special reference to the youthful and attractive beauty of the object it represented; and that all the scenes of idolatrous worship described in the chapter were but the several and successive portions of the grand festival held shortly before at Jerusalem in honour of Adonis. Some show of support for this idea is derived from the view presented of the Adonis-festival by recent writers on the mythology of the ancients; but it is still entirely fanciful, and on many accounts to be rejected. For, first, it is against all probability to suppose, that when disclosing the abominations which were ready to bring down the consuming judgments of Heaven upon the land, those only should have been delineated which were connected with a single occasion, and that the festival of a comparatively inferior object of idol-worship. Then the idolatrous scenes described one after another have manifestly the appearance of separate and cumulative proofs of the people's appetite for heathenish pollutions, rather than the united and consecutive parts of some one religious festival. And still further, as the scenes in question were those submitted to the eye of the prophet in the visions of God, what we are naturally led to expect in them is, not a plain matter-of-fact description of things literally enacted at any set time in the temple, but rather a combined and concentrated view of the prevailing idolatries gathered from every side, and portrayed, as in one dark and revolting picture, within the temple at Jerusalem. That temple was the image as well as the centre of the whole kingdom. As the heart of the nation had its seat there, so there also, in the mongrel and polluted character of the worship celebrated, the guilt of the people found its representation; and hence, when the object was to give a clear and palpable exhibition of the crying abominations that existed in the land, the scene was most fitly laid in the temple, and assumed the form of things seen and transacted in its courts. But we are no more to regard the things themselves in the precise form and combination here given to them, as all actually meeting together at any particular moment in the temple-worship, and simply transcribed by the prophet from the occurrences of real life, than to regard the instructions that immediately follow to set a mark for preservation on the foreheads of some, and to destroy the rest with weapons of slaughter as actually put in force at the time and in the manner there described. In both cases alike the description is of what took place in the visions of God; therefore not the mere outward and naked literalities which the bodily eye might have perceived, and the pen of history noted down, but a representation so contrived and arranged as might serve most fitly to express to the apprehension of the mind, and render in a manner palpable to the sight, the realities of Israel's guilt and judgment. (Entirely similar in principle, though differing in the particular form, as also much briefer in detail, is the representation given in Amos 9:1: “I saw the Lord standing upon the altar; and he said, Smite the lintel of the door, that the posts may shake: and cut them in the head all of them,” etc., where, though the work of judgment had respect to the house of Israel as well as Judah to the whole covenant-people yet it is upon the one altar at Jerusalem that the Lord is seen in vision coming forth to execute it, and as if the people were all assembled there, appearing to bring the temple in ruins upon them. The reason is that there, as the services of the people should have been ever coming up for acceptance and blessing, so now their abominations were lying unpardoned, and crying for vengeance, though in reality, and in point of space, they had mostly been committed elsewhere. Therefore from that, as from the place of collective guilt, the work of judgment proceeds, both in Amos and here also in the next chapter; only, while Amos simply supposes the sins to be all clustered around the altar and temple, Ezekiel first gives an embodied representation of them as all appearing and nestling there. Compare also the visions of a somewhat marked description, such as Jacob's (Genesis 28; Genesis 31:11-13); Pharaoh's (Genesis 41.); Daniel's and Nebuchadnezzar's (Daniel 2:4; Daniel 2:7.); in all of which there was given an ideal picture, not a prosaic account of the things to which they referred.)

While, then, we see ample reason for holding that by “the image of jealousy” the statue of Adonis is not to be understood, we are further disposed to think, from the ideal character of the representation, that it should not be limited to any specific deity. The prophet, we are persuaded, purposely made the expression general, as it was not so much the particular idol placed on a level with Jehovah, as the idol-worship itself which he meant to designate and condemn. So sunk and rooted were the people in the idolatrous feeling, that where Jehovah had an altar, there some idol-form must have its “ seat,” a fixed residence, to denote that it was no occasional thing its being found there, but a regular and stated arrangement. And whatever it might for the time be, whether it was Baal, or Moloch, or Astarte that the image represented, as it was necessarily set up for a rival of Jehovah, to share with him in the worship to which he alone was entitled, it might justly be denominated “the image of jealousy,” as it provoked that jealousy, and called for that visitation of wrath, against which the Lord had so solemnly forewarned his people in the second commandment. That “he should go far off from his sanctuary” was so certainly the result of such an abomination, that in Ezekiel 8:6 it is represented as its very aim; and the moment of his departure must also be the signal for the execution of vengeance.

That we do right in thus taking into account the ideal element in the representation appears yet more obviously from the next scene, of which no clear and satisfactory explanation can be rendered but by ascribing to some of the leading traits a non-literal or symbolical meaning. Being commanded to turn again, that he might see other great abominations, the prophet presently finds himself at the door of the court, where he espies a hole in the wall, and after digging as he was enjoined, he discovers a door (a door, of course, not patent or accessible from without, as it only became visible when the wall was cleared away); and entering within, he saw “every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel portrayed upon the wall round about. And there stood before him seventy men of the ancients (elders) of the house of Israel; and in the midst of them stood Jaazaniah, the son of Shaphan, with every man his censer in his hand; and the prayer of a cloud of incense went up.” Now, that the prophet could not mean this to be understood of any actual exhibition that was wont to be made in the temple is evident, first, from the entire seclusion of the chamber in which the idolatrous scene is laid, a recess so hidden from public view, and so closely walled up, that an entrance could only be made good by a process of digging; an inexplicable mystery if understood as a chamber actually frequented by temple-worshippers, but plain enough if regarded as a symbol of the conscious guilt and cunning secrecy with which the foul rites in question were sought after among the covenant-people. It is also evident from the kind and variety of the objects said to have been portrayed against the wall, “every form of creeping things, and all the idols of the house of Israel,” necessarily a huge hyperbole if taken literally, but a perfectly intelligible trait if regarded as an ideal representation of the prevailing tendency to idolize after the manner of Egypt, where the portraying of such objects was so usual, and at the same time so peculiar to that country among the nations of antiquity, that it might with the utmost propriety be given as the characteristic mark of an Egyptizing spirit in religion. It is evident, once again, from the persons who are described as occupying the chamber, and filling it with the incense of devotion the seventy elders. A reference is plainly had here to those passages in the Pentateuch where the same number of elders appear in connection with Israel, and especially to Exodus 24:1, where seventy elders as representatives of the congregation go up with Moses to the mount, to behold the glory of Jehovah, and be witnesses of the more secret transactions which related to the establishment of the covenant. By mentioning, therefore, precisely this number of elders, the prophet sets before us a representation of the whole people, an ideal representation, and of such a kind as to indicate the strong contrast that existed between former and present times, the original seventy being employed in immediate connection with God's glory and covenant, while these here were engaged in an act which bespoke the dishonouring of God's name and the virtual dissolution of his covenant. To render the contrast still more palpable between what was and what should have been, the prophet singles out one from among the seventy, and places him in the midst Jaazaniah, the son of Shaphan. This he does not from any natural or official superiority in that person above the rest, but from the expressive import of his name, which means Jehovah hears, while by their deeds the whole company were intimating, what in the next verse they are reported to have said, “The Lord seeth us not, the Lord hath forsaken the earth.” The very prominence given to this person on account of his name the representation of the people by the primitive number of seventy elders the attributing of an act of worship to these elders, the offering of incense in censers, which was one of the most distinctive prerogatives not of the elders, but of the priesthood and the express declaration that what they were collectively doing there was just what “ every man was doing in the chambers of his imagery,” all plainly denote that it is no actual service which is here described, but an ideal or pictorial representation of the debasing idolatries which the people had begun secretly to practise in their own dens of pollution, beyond what they were willing to own and exhibit in the light of day. In a word, we are told their idolatrous spirit had outrun even their public defections, and was already drinking up the rank poison of Egypt, though in nothing did the transactions of their earlier history raise a louder and more emphatic protest than against such a retrograding to the foul region of Egyptian idolatry. (How little the commentators have succeeded in giving any satisfactory explanation of the leading points above noticed, on the simply literal plan, may be learned from the solutions of the latest of them, Hitzig. He admits a side chamber could hardly be supposed large enough to hold seventy worshippers at once, but then it was only in spirit the prophet saw them there together! That the entrance was closed up by a wall was a still remaining proof of Josiah's reformation; but, no doubt, the elders had some private door to enter by as if the prophet could not have discovered that, and as if now, amid the corruptions of Zedekiah's time, they needed to go about the matter so stealthily! And then, in regard to what is said of every man's doing so “in the chambers of his imagery,” as this seems to point to separate scenes of idol- worship enacted in private, why, most likely the text is corrupt; it should have been simply, what each one did in that one chamber in the dark!! With such an elastic style of interpretation, what convenient or wished-for meaning may not be extracted from the sacred text?)

From the secret abominations practised in the chambers of imagery, the prophet's attention was next turned to a scene in the outer court, at the north door, where he beholds women sitting in an attitude of grief and weeping for Tammuz. We have the explicit testimony of Jerome that this was the Hebrew and Syriac name for Adonis, the fancied paramour of Venus, who was fabled to have been killed by a boar, and restored to life again; in which the mystery is said to have been couched of the sun's yearly declension and return, or, more generally, nature's annual decay and renovation. However that may have been, there can be no doubt that the Adonis-festival, which had first its original seat at Byblos in Phœnicia, was celebrated by doleful lamentations, as for one lost or dead, and then by extravagant libidinous rejoicings, on again finding the object of affection. This fantastical and impure piece of worship bore in its nature so strong a resemblance to the Egyptian orgies connected with the lost and recovered Osiris, that not a few both earlier and later mythologists are disposed to trace the matter up to this source; although there seems no reason to question the Phoenician caste of the superstition, as practised in Asia and Greece. And the women seen in vision by the prophet sitting and weeping at the outer gate on the north, betokened that it had now also found its way into Judea. It was but a fragment, as it were, of the idolatrous scene which met his eye, but enough to indicate, in accordance with the pictorial style of the whole description, that this Phœnician abomination had become one of the festering sores of Judah's disease.

But turning from this, the prophet is once more directed to another, and what is expressly called a greater abomination, greater, not as betokening a worse idolatry, but implying, on account of the persons and the place connected with it, a more direct and flagrant dishonour to God. In the inner court of the Lord's house, and immediately before the door of the temple, between the porch and the altar, where only the most solemn services should have been conducted, and where the priests never advanced but on some rare and extraordinary occasions, when the most earnest cries were to be put forth for sparing mercy (Joel 2:17), there the prophet sees twenty-five men. The place where they were seen could be trodden only by the priests; and beyond doubt, the right idea was expressed by Lightfoot (in his Chronica Temporum), when he understood by them the leaders of the twenty-four classes into which the priests were divided by David, with the high priest at their head. With reference, apparently, to the same division, and the presidency of the several classes naturally connected with it, Isaiah speaks (Isaiah 43:28) of “the princes of the sanctuary,” and Jeremiah (Jeremiah 35:4) of “the chamber of the princes;” while in 2 Chronicles 36:14 we not only read of “the chief of the priests,” but are also told of their having polluted the house of the Lord which he hallowed in Jerusalem.” Therefore twenty-five men of priestly rank, “the princes of the sanctuary,” would be the precise number to represent the whole priesthood, just as the seventy elders were the proper representation of the whole people, and for that purpose had been employed in an earlier part of the vision. But how melancholy the appearance presented here by the élite of the priesthood! Their backs toward the temple, at the very threshold of which they stood (the reverse position of all devout worshippers, 1 Kings 8:44; Daniel 6:10), and their faces toward the east, doing obeisance to the rising sun! Thus they bore witness that the highest places in the land had become infected with the Parsee element of fire-worship. And not then, indeed, for the first time; for in the reformation effected by Josiah, we are told of his putting away those who burnt incense to the sun, and moon, and other heavenly bodies, with the horses and chariots that had been consecrated to the sun (2 Kings 23:5; 2 Kings 23:11). But the corruption had taken too deep root to be thus destroyed; it again revived, with other heathenish customs, and now, in the days of Zedekiah, had attained to a high ascendancy.

Thus, from the various scenes that met the eye of the prophet in his ideal walk through the precincts of the temple at Jerusalem, it was but too clearly manifest, that so far from the worship of God being preserved there in its purity, the land had become the common sink of heathenism. There was to be seen, side by side with the altar of Jehovah, the image of the Syrian lord of nature, whether known by the name of Baal or Moloch, or aught besides, the abhorred rival of heaven's real King; there also was the Egyptian beast-worship, with the foul rites of Phœnician licentiousness, and the more refined but still idolatrous and corrupting services of the Eastern fire or sun worship. Yet even these heathenish pollutions, the Lord proceeds to testify in the ears of the prophet, were not enough to satisfy the people's depraved appetite for evil; it was but a light thing, as it were, that they should thus dishonour God in the things immediately connected with his service; they had, besides, filled the land with violence, trampling as flagrantly upon the second table of the law in their dealings one toward another, as by their heathenish abominations they were trampling on the first. “And they have returned,” the Lord concludes, “to provoke me to anger; and lo! they put the branch to their nose. Therefore will I also deal in fury; mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity; and though they cry in mine ears with a loud voice, yet will I not hear them.” Even the most fervent supplications, such as those recommended by Joel, would be of no avail.

But to revert now to the occasion of these fearful disclosures, how does this state of heathenish corruption and rampant iniquity in Judah and Jerusalem comport with the proud satisfaction the people there are represented to have felt regarding their own case, as compared with that of their exiled brethren? It was well with themselves, they had been saying, because they were near to the Lord, and this made them sure of the continued possession of the land; while, according to the vision now delineated, they seemed to be rejoicing in anything rather than the conscious presence of God nay, were giving vent to the impious sentiment which is again, with marked emphasis, ascribed to them in the next chapter, “The Lord seeth us not, the Lord hath forsaken the earth.” There was certainly a deep practical inconsistence between the two states of feeling indicated, if tried by the truth of God's word; but not such an inconsistence as ought to shake our belief, or even greatly excite our wonder. Among the false religionists of our Lord's time, the very same inconsistence again reappears, only somewhat modified and chastened by the altered circumstances of the times. In them also we see both the elements above noticed very prominently displayed. There was proud self-complacence, as of persons who plumed themselves on their peculiar nearness to God, not without feelings of settled scorn toward such as seemed to stand at a remoter distance. Yet along with this there was the absence of any real love to God, and a plentiful distrust of his power and goodness, appearing in their vain traditions, their secret wickedness, their fleshly confidences, their manifold idolatry of a present world, and expectations of mere earthly deliverances; so that with the most perfect truth it might be said of them, they were cherishing the spirit and doing the deeds of their fathers in the days of Zedekiah. And wherever religion loses its true childlike spirit of faith and love, and degenerates into a superstition, the same practical inconsistence is sure, in some form or another, to manifest itself. For there being in such cases no genuine love of God in the heart, but a slavish dread of him, the affections of the soul will naturally flow into forbidden channels, while the very pains and services to which it is prompted by that slavish dread will as naturally tend to beget a feeling of presumptuous confidence toward God, and contemptuous behaviour toward those who take another mode of serving him. Is not this precisely what we see in the deluded votaries of Rome? On the one hand the most perfect conviction that they are peculiarly the people of God; and on the other, the most flagrant corruptions of the simplicity of his truth and worship, ways and services, such as seem rather to bespeak their sense of an absent or angry, than of a near and loving Father. Or look to the superstitious man generally. Did not Milton correctly delineate him when he said, “In very deed the superstitious man by his good will is an atheist [since, having only a dread of God, he would rather that God were not, and, as often as he can, strives to keep God away from his thoughts and feelings]; but being scared from thence by the pangs and gripes of a boiling conscience, all in a pudder he shuffles up to himself such a God and such a worship as is most agreeable to remedy his fear; which fear of his, as also is his hope, fixed only upon the flesh, renders likewise the whole faculty of his apprehension carnal; and all the inward acts of worship issuing from the native strength of the soul run out lavishly to the upper skin, and there harden into a crust of formality”? In a word, the inward desires and spontaneous movements of minds given to superstition, as well as many of their outward actions, virtually declare that God the spiritual and holy God of the Bible either does not exist, or, at least, is not near enough to regard them in their perverse and crooked ways. But yet if any one should talk to them of salvation, none apparently are so sure of it; for this to their view is inseparable from the formal ritualism in which they have encrusted themselves. Such a religion is as vain as it is contrary to the whole genius of the gospel. We err from the simplicity of the faith whenever we resort to other means and influences for obtaining life and peace to the soul than those which God has himself sanctioned and approved in his word. And we err not less plainly from its spirit of childlike confidence and devoted love, if we are not giving to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ the undivided homage of our hearts, and habitually realizing his gracious presence as alike our safeguard from evil, and our most inspiring motive to faithfulness in every good work.