lives above the region of events, and lives near to, and in communion with God. Is this peace of yours so real that you can say, "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him. Though the fig-tree do not blossom, yet will I rejoice in him?" Do you in times of trouble have recourse to him for peace, for rest? Do you rest on the Lord, and he will bring it to pass? Do you compose yourselves in God? Have you in him peace, wherever there may be, and from whatever quarter there may come, trouble? Then blessed are that people; they are a happy people.. They have their troubles, their sorrows, their trials; in the world they have tribulation, and if they had it not, they would be of it instead of being not of it.. But in spite of tribulation in the world, "in me they have peace;" for God keeps in perfect peace them whose minds are stayed upon him, because they trust in him.

"Thy dead men shall live.-Very various interpretations have been given to this verse, which may be seen at length by comparing Vitringa, Rosenmüller, Gesenius, and Poole's "Synopsis." It is not the purpose of these Notes to enter into an examination of these opinions. In verse 14, the chorus is represented as saying of the dead men and tyrants of Babylon that had oppressed the captive Jews, that they should not rise, and should no more oppress the people of God. In contradistinction from this fate of their enemies, the choir is here introduced as addressing Jehovah (comp. verse 16), and saying, 'THY dead shall live; that is, thy people shall live again; shall be restored to vigour, and strength, and enjoyment. They are now dead; that is, they

are, as I understand it, civilly dead in Babylon; they are cut off from their privileges, torn away from their homes, made captive in a foreign land. Their king has been dethroned; their temple demolished; their princes, priests, and people made captive; their name blotted from the list of nations; and to all intents and purposes as a people they are deceased. This figure is one that is common, by which the loss of privileges and enjoyments, and especially of civil rights, is represented as death. So we speak now of a man's being dead in law; dead to enjoyment; dead to his country; spiritually dead; dead in sins. I do not understand this, therefore, as referring primarily to the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead; but to the captives in Babylon who were civilly dead and cut off by their oppressors from their rights and enjoyments as a nation. Shall live. -Shall be restored to their country, and be reinstated in all their rights and immunities as a people among the nations of the earth. This restoration shall be as striking as would be the resurrection of the dead from their graves. Though, therefore, this does not refer primarily to the resurrection of the dead, yet the illustration is drawn from that doctrine, and implies that that doctrine was one with which they were familiar. An image which is employed

for the sake of illustration must be one that is familiar to the mind, and the reference here to this doctrine as an illustration is a demonstration that the doctrine of the resurrection was well-known."Barnes.

191

THE EXODUS OF THE FUTURE.

ISAIAH XXVII.

Ir is plain that the chapter we have read refers to the transactions that are briefly indicated in the previous chapter, because it begins with these words: "In that day;" that is, the day when thy dead men shall live; together with my dead body shall they arise;" when God's people shall have entered into their chamber to be sheltered from the wrath that is coming; in that day when the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity; "in that day," he says, "the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." To show the perfect consistency that runs through the whole word of God, we read in the Apocalypse that "out of his mouth went a sharp two-edged sword; he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood; and his name is called The word of God. And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations; and he shall rule them with a rod of iron; and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God." It is quite plain, therefore, that this imagery carries us forward to Christ when he comes again to execute those

judgments which he has predicted in his word on them that despise him, and, in the language of the Apostle Paul, to be admired in all them that believe. Well, "in that day," he says, repeating the term again, and showing it is a day yet to come, "sing ye unto her, A vineyard of red wine. I the Lord do keep it; I will water it every moment." You remember what our Saviour says, 66 I am the true vine;" and all his people are likened to a vineyard; each vine in that vineyard growing in the warmth of the same catholic sunshine, refreshed by the breezes of the same unsectarian atmosphere; the roots of every tree cohering with the roots of the parent vine that is in the midst of the vineyard, and from it and because of it deriving all their nutriment, their vitality, and their sap, and bearing fruit, and bearing it abundantly, to his praise, and honour, and glory. The vineyard that he speaks of here is perhaps not so much the church universal as it is his ancient, beloved, not forgotten nor altogether forsaken, though very much cast-down church, the church in the desert, the church that was before the flood, the church of which Abraham was one of the patriarchs, and Aaron one of the priests and the ministers; and ultimately expanded into that church whose limits no measuring rod can lay down, whose duration no arithmetic can count, and whose glory shall be so great that it shall have no need of the sun nor of the moon; for the glory of God and of the Lamb are the light thereof. After referring to this vineyard, I have no doubt his own ancient people, he tells them that though, in the language of the 80th Psalm, their vine is broken down, though the boar out of

the wood doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it, all this is not because fury is in me; for "fury is not in me;" that is to say, God inflicts judgment upon his ancient people the Jews, not because he is a furious or a wrathful God, but because of moral necessity; a great national example must live along the ages, and be projected through 1800 years like a dark, black shadow upon the earth, to prove to all mankind that righteousness exalteth a nation, and that a nation's ruin is the offspring of a nation's sin; and as that nation, emphatically a nation, more incorporated as such than any nation subsequent to them, crucified the Lord of glory; shouted, "His blood be upon us and upon our children; away with him; crucify him; give us Barabbas;" I say, because of that, this nation, God's ancient people, fragments of which are in all our streets; the voices of whose degenerate children, with their deep eastern bass tone, are heard every day upon the streets of every capital; that people covered with a great sin, and having on their brows the shadow of a great ancestral crime that they can neither expiate, nor yet repent of, or exhaust; are in the midst of us, the monuments of the exceeding sinfulness of treading under foot great mercies, or despising grand privileges; and Jerusalem has fallen not because, perhaps, she was more guilty than others, or we more righteous than she, but that we may repent, lest we likewise perish. "Fury is not in me;" that does not explain the sufferings of this people; on the contrary, he says, "Let him," let even that race, "take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with me; and