all quarters of the world they are to come up to her sacred precincts, not in the spirit of enmity, but of fealty and love. They will seek as earnestly her welfare and peace, as before they sought to raze her to the ground. In every heart the spiritual Jerusalem will be enthroned as the city of the Great King. Thitherward will every pious aspiration be breathed forth. There shall praise wait for God and the vow be performed. Pilgrimages, not literal as in the days of monkish superstition, but in the spirit of purest self-consecration, shall be made to her shrines, and thus to all the members of Christ's family on earth, will "her walls become salvation and her gates praise."

This subordination of everything to the welfare of Zion, is still further set forth in the closing verses of the prediction. "Holiness to the Lord," is to be affixed to the "bells of the horses," and "upon every pot in Jerusalem and Judah." "The pots in the Lord's house shall be like the bowls before the altar." Every ornament and utensil of labor shall be consecrated to Christ, and there shall be no greater degree of holiness attached to one vessel employed in the service of the sanctuary than to another. All this shows that a spiritual sense is to be given to the celebration of the feast of tabernacles, of which idea these closing verses are but the expansion and emphatic reiteration.

As collateral proof that we are right in attaching a spiritual significancy to this prediction of Zechariah, let us refer to the mystic city of Ezekiel. This city, which is but the reproduction, on a grander and more imposing scale, of the Jerusalem of David and Solomon, has its temple, from under the threshold of which eastward, waters are said (47:1-5) to issue forth, increasing gradually in depth, until they become a great river which cannot be forded. These waters flow eastward into the desert and into the sea (i. e., the Dead sea), and possess the power of healing the waters of the sea, so that there shall be abundance of fish, as the fish of the great (i. e., Mediterranean) sea (vers. 8—10). How close the resemblance of this feature of Ezekiel's city to the streams of living water which issue forth from the

spiritual Jerusalem in Zechariah! With what graphic force and beauty does this indicate the outgoings of life from the church to save and bless a lost world!

Turn we now for a moment to the New Jerusalem of the apocalyptic vision. This city is a symbolical representation of heaven, but not strictly heaven itself; for it is expressly said, that "John saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven [the Greek ex denoting internal separation from], prepared as a bride adorned for her husband." A great voice was also heard out of heaven proclaiming: "The tabernacle of God is with men, and he shall dwell with them, and they shall be his people" (Rev. 21:2, 3). This city, before whose gorgeous splendors the most glorious creations of the human imagination fade away, has also its river of life; but, with a beautiful diversity of imagery and yet remarkable unity of sentiment, the healing property which belongs to the waters of Ezekiel and Zechariah, is here placed in the leaves of the "tree of life," which grows on either side of the river. These leaves are "for the healing of the nations." The inference from this

is that the nations are yet diseased. Sin and death are still in the world. But such medicinal virtue resides in these leaves, that they cure of every spiritual malady. Can any one doubt that the healing leaves of John's tree of life, as well as the living waters of Ezekiel and Zechariah, refer to the spiritual influence which the church, in the days of her future prosperity, shall exert upon the world? If so, does it not follow, as a plain and incontrovertible inference, that the imagery in other parts of these predictions is expressive of spiritual truths, and not of literal verities?

But that we have not erred in our exposition of the living waters which are to flow forth from Jerusalem, we have still higher evidence. In the last great day of the feast — the same feast of tabernacles, for the observance of which all the families of the earth, according to Zechariah, are to come up to Jerusalem our Lord proclaimed, in the hearing of the people: "If any man thirst, let him come unto me and drink; he that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said,

out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water" (John 7:37, 38). The general sentiment of this great utterance is too plain to be mistaken. Transferred from figurative to plain language the averment is, that from him who comes to Christ, and partakes of the grace which he freely bestows, shall issue refreshing and life-giving influences, so that his fellow-men shall also be benefited by the gift within him. This abundant supply of the water of life, its free and unobstructed intercommunication among those who have drunk of it, and its outflowings for the salvation of the world, are declared by our Lord to be what the scripture hath said; that is, what has been predicted in the Old Testament scriptures of the Messianic times. In what scriptures do we find this prediction, if not in Zechariah, Ezekiel, and in such passages as Isa. 44:3; 58:11; where floods of waters are promised to him who is thirsty, making him “like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not;" or, as Zechariah expresses it, "which are to flow alike in summer and in winter," that is, in perennial streams. To the same import is the prediction in Joel 3: 18, where abundance of milk and refreshing streams of water, are promised blessings to the church in the latter days under the Messianic reign. This latter prophecy is the more remarkable, from the resemblance of language in the clause (ver. 18), "and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the Lord, and shall water the vale of Shittim," to that employed by Zechariah. By the "vale of Shittim" is meant, as most interpreters suppose, the valley through which the Kidron flows to the Dead sea. This was the course of the waters of Zechariah, which flowed eastward toward the former (i. e., Dead) sea. In both prophecies, the restoration of an arid and unproductive soil to a well-watered and fruitful region, is the great elemental idea.

In the light, then, of this great declaration of our Lord, and of the scriptures of the Old Testament to which it unquestionably refers, can we hesitate to attach a spiritual significancy to these prophetic waters of Zechariah? Is not this one of the scriptures which predict that rivers shall flow

from the belly of each believer? The explanation which John adds, to prevent any misapprehension of the import of our Lord's words, is very significant: "This spake he of the Spirit." It was the Spirit's influence which, under the imagery of living waters, was promised to all such as came to Jesus. Not simply the office work of the Spirit, drawing the soul to Christ from a state of impenitence and unbelief, but the permanent indwelling of the Spirit, transforming the inner man into the image of God, and filling the soul to overflowing with all the graces and fruits of holiness. The vigorous growth of these spiritual graces is set forth in the rapid increase of the prophetic waters of Ezekiel, which, in the short distance of four thousand cubits, from a small rivulet, were swollen to a large river which could not be forded.

How frigid and unscriptural, then, is the exposition which refers these living waters of Zechariah to natural rivers, which are to burst forth from the sides of Mount Zion at the rending of the Mount of Olives, beneath the feet of the Messiah! What a descent from the table-land of vision, where the eye gazes with unobstructed view upon the future glory and prosperity of the church, to the dense and murky atmosphere of the vale below, to make Jerusalem "the mother of us all," she "which is above and free," a commercial emporium of Judea, differing in no essential respect from any of the large and flourishing cities of our globe! What more derogatory to the true dignity and glory of our Redeemer than for him to leave his mediatorial throne at his Father's right hand, descend to earth, and fight his way to the crown of an earthly potentate at Jerusalem? There is something revolting in the bare enunciation of such a stoop from the heavenly to the earthly, from the spiritual to the material, which of itself should cause us to distrust any interpretation of God's word leading to such a visionary theory. It were a violence to our ideas of the calm repose of the pious dead, to make them revisit this earth, and take part again in its distracting cares and anxieties; but, in addition to this, to bring Christ down again from his heav

enly throne, to tread the streets of Jerusalem as a temporal prince, is too gross a conception to be for a moment eutertained. An earthly crown has encircled the brow of a Nero and a Domitian, but a spiritual diadem is only his to wear, "on whose vesture and thigh is written the name KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS."

ARTICLE VI.

THE SALVATION OF INFANTS.

BY REV. ALVAN TOBEY, DURHAM, NEW HAMPSHIRE.

THE Controversies through which Christianity has been carried, were in many instances greatly useful in the development and application of the Christian doctrines, and especially in the correction of those errors which had become intertwined with them. The false philosophy which has often corrupted, and still oftener encumbered, the teachings of the scriptures, could not be so effectually removed in any other way as by the thorough sifting of discussion. It is indeed a process that shakes up truth and error in such confusion as may perplex observers not well skilled in distinguishing one from the other. The advocates of truth may be found defending some erroneous appendage, that should be thrown off as an excrescence, or mistaking some matter of fact supposed to be important, though really not material. But, in the result, truth comes out of the confusion, more beautiful and stronger for being freed from the incrustations of antiquated error, the monstrosities, contradictions, absurdities, which false philosophies have bound around it.

It is nearly a third of a century since a controversy arose, of not a little interest at the time, on the question, whether "the damnation of infants is a doctrine of the Calvinists." The parties were men of high standing and influence in their different spheres: Dr. Lyman Beecher, of Boston, and Prof.