faithfulness and the manifestation of devotedness in His people. Abundance and blessing are found in Judah, and the Lord's house is filled with proofs of His goodness, brought in by grateful hearts, according to the ordinances of the law; and even in the cities of the priests, everything is set in order according to the law, and everything prospers.f God fully answered the king's faith; but the iniquity of the people's heart was little changed, and the ways of God in judgment began to be manifested; and in such a manner as to make it evident that in the midst of His judgments, and at the height of the enemy's power, the faithful seed of David should be the infallible resource of His people. This is the lessson of chap. xxxii. This man is the peace of the people when the Assyrian enters the land. See in Isaiah chap. viii. the Assyrian's entrance into the land, already called the land of Immanuel, through the prophetic revelation of the birth of the Virgin's Son, a revelation addressed to the unfaithful king, to Ahaz; see also in the same chapter, the revelation of the terrible distress of the people, the law being sealed and entrusted to the remnant who would follow Christ as a prophet, until the people confess that the Son was born unto them. See, also, in chap. xxii. of the same prophet, the Spirit's judgment as to the moral condition of the people, on the occasion of those events which are recorded in chap. xxxii. of 2 Chronicles. Hezekiah himself did not render again to the Lord, according to the benefit done unto him; but his heart was lifted up. Nevertheless, as he humbled himself, he was allowed to see the peace of Jerusalem all the days of his life.

Manasseh, his son, who gave himself up to iniquity in spite of the warnings of the prophets, brought desolation and ruin upon himself, and afterwards upon Israel. Guilty of sins which God had not forgotten, his personal repentance in his captivity procured him personal restoration and peace, through the mercy of God; and after his

f Observe here, that when God blesses, and there is faithfulness, the instruments whom He employs in His service partake of the glory that is connected with the blessing. Their names are inscribed in the record of God's dealings.

return to Jerusalem, he acted faithfully and was jealous for the glory of God, for the time of Judah's judgment was not yet come. His son Amon followed him in his iniquity, but not in his repentance, and he dies by the hand of his own servants.

We find in Josiah a tender heart, subject to the Word, and a conscience that respected the mind and will of God; only at last he had too much confidence in the effect of this to secure blessing from God, without that faith which gives intelligence in His ways to understand the position of God's people. God, however, makes use of this confidence to take Josiah away from the evil He was preparing in the judgments which were to fall upon Judah, the knowledge of which should have made Josiah walk more humbly. At the age of sixteen, he began, by the grace of God, to seek the Lord; and at twenty, he had acquired the moral strength necessary for acting with energy against idolatry, which he destroyed even unto Naphtali. We see here how sovereign grace came in, for both Hezekiah and Josiah were the sons of extremely wicked fathers. Having cleansed the land from idolatry, Josiah begins to repair the temple, and there the Book of the Law was found. The king's conscience, and his heart also, are bowed under the authority of the Word of his God. He seeks for the prophetic testimony of God with respect to the state in which he sees Israel to be, and God makes known to him, by Huldah, the judgment about to fall upon Israel; but tells him, at the same time, that his eyes shall not see the evil. It was this communication which should have made him act with less precipitation, and with a more exercised heart than he manifested, when he went up against the king of Egypt. The knowledge that their well-deserved judgment was soon to overwhelm Israel, and that there was no remedy for their sins (although Josiah himself was spared), ought to have prevented his going up against Pharaoh, when the latter did not attack him, and even warned him to forbear; but he would not hearken, and was lost through a hardihood which was not of God.

His death opened the sluices to the affliction of Judah

and Jerusalem, who had been blessed through his means, for they had followed the Lord all the days of Josiah, and had therefore been blessed: they had also mourned for his death. Jeremiah (that is to say, the Spirit of God by the prophet), in lamenting over the last king who would maintain the relations of God with His people, wept for the ruin and desolation which sin would bring upon the flock whom the Lord loved-the vineyard that He had planted with the choicest vine. However faithful Josiah had been, this had not changed the heart of the people (compare Jer. iii. 10). Josiah's faith was in action, and over-ruled this state of things; and, as we have constantly seen, blessing depended on the conduct of the king, although the under-current was always tending to the ruin and rejection of the people.

It remains for us to notice the Passover. Everything is set in order, according to the ordinances of Moses and David; and that in a remarkable manner. It appears that even the ark had been removed from its place (xxxv. 3); but now the ark being restored to its rest, the Levites occupy themselves diligently with their service; and even make ready for the priests that they might keep the feast. They were all in their places, according to the blessing of Israel in the rest they enjoyed under Solomon. Those who taught all Israel no longer bore the ark, but they ministered to God and to His people. The singers were there also according to their order, so that there had not been such a Passover since the days of Samuel. It was like the last glimmering of the lamp which God had lighted among His people in the house of David. It was soon extinguished in the darkness of the nations which know not God, and those who had been His people, under the judgment expressed by the word Lo-ammi (not my people); but this was only to give occasion afterwards to the manifestation of His infinite grace towards the one, and His unchangeable faithfulness to the others. Ezekiel dates his prophecy from the year of this Passover, when he says, the thirtieth year. Why so, I cannot tell. Was it the year of the jubilee, or did the Passover itself form an epoch?

Little need be said of the succeeding reigns. The

king of Egypt took possession of the land, and the iniquity of Jehoiakim, whom he made king in Jerusalem, was far from leading to restoration on God's part. One more powerful than the king of Egypt-a king by whom God would commence the dominion of the Gentiles-comes up against Jerusalem, and binds Jehoiakim in fetters, yet leaves him, after all, to end his reign and his life at Jerusalem. Three years after he carried away his son to Babylon. Zedekiah, whom this king had made to swear by the Lord-thus acknowledging the authority of that name over his conscience-more sinful in this respect, than Nebuchadnezzar, despises his oath and the name of the Lord; and, after an interval of fruitless resistance, in which he perseveres in spite of Jeremiah's testimony, he falls into the hands of the king of Babylon, who utterly destroys the city and the sanctuary; for both people and priests were thoroughly corrupted: they dishonoured the Lord and despised His prophets, till there was no remedy, and the land enjoyed her sabbaths.

Sad and solemn lesson of the sin and iniquity of man, and of the just judgment of God.

"You only have I known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities." But, in His judgments, God remembers mercy; and, in the counsels of His grace, He had already prepared, and even proclaimed by His prophets (and that by name) an instrument to give His people some respite. After the seventy years which Jeremiah had announced as the period of Judah's captivity, the Lord puts it into the heart of Cyrus to proclaim publicly that it was the Lord, the God of Heaven, who had given him all the kingdoms of the earth, and that He had charged him to build Him a house at Jerusalem. He invites the people of God to go thither, assuring them that the Lord their God will be with them.

Thus it is by mercy-but by a mercy which recognises that power has passed into the hands of the Gentiles-that the history of Israel's downfall concludes; the downfall of a people placed in the most favourable circumstances, so that God could say to them: "What

could have been done more to my vineyard that I have not done in it?"-a people that had already been pardoned once; and who, after having allowed the ark of the Lord to fall into the enemy's hands, and after God had forsaken Shiloh, His habitation, had been re-established in blessing, but re-established in vain. The long-suffering of God, the restorations He had granted them, the establishment of the house of David in grace, all was fruitless. The vineyard, for they were men, brought forth wild grapes. Its walls were broken down; it had been laid waste. Jerusalem has ceased, for the present, to be the throne of the Lord; and government and power in the earth have been entrusted to the Gentiles.

FRAGMENT.

The system which denies the existence of a responsible church, even from the Day of Pentecost, upon earth, because, according to the Divine counsels, the Church will not in truth be gathered together in one, save in the heavens, at the end, is false and absurd. 'Tis false; because Timothy had to be instructed how to conduct himself in the Church of God; certainly this referred not to the Church assembled in heaven. And the body of Christ increased (Eph. iv.) by joints and bands, etc.; and certainly this is not in heaven. 'Tis absurd; because no one dreams of corruption in the heavens; and the reasoning of every man of sense, and of the Bible, is occupied with the Church upon earth.

But, alas! the errors which crept in among true Christians (Gal. iv. 11 and 20) were such, that Paul, for a moment, stood in doubt of those who had adopted them. 'Tis true, also, that there is corruption now in the Church; for the sins and errors of the beginning have gone on augmenting, although God has often raised up in the midst thereof special light and testimony.