observe; would make us sure that the place whereon we stand is
holy ground.

Then follows the question: With this sign lost in its most essential
points, how can we supply its place? and how can we best avail ourselves
of those parts of it which still remain? and how can we each endeavour
to build up a partial and most imperfect imitation of it, which may
yet, in some sort, serve to supply our great want, and remind us daily
of God? This opens a wide field for thought, to those who are willing to
follow it; but much of it belongs to other occasions rather than this:
the practical part of it,--the means of most imperfectly supplying the
want of God's own appointed sign, a true and living universal Church,
shall be the subject of my next Lecture.

LECTURE XXIX.

* * * * *

PSALM cxxxvii. 4.

_How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land_?

This was said by the exiles of Jerusalem, when they were in the land of
their captivity in Babylon. There is no reason to suppose that their
condition was one of bondage, as it had been in Egypt: the nations
removed by conquest, under the Persian kings, from their own country to
another land, were no otherwise ill-treated; they had new homes given
them in which they lived unmolested; only they were torn away from their
own land, and were as sojourners in a land of strangers. But the
peculiar evil of this state was, that they were torn away from the
proper seat of their worship. The Jew in Babylon might have his own
home, and his own land to cultivate, as he had in Judaea; but nothing
could replace to him the loss of the temple at Jerusalem: there alone
could the morning and evening sacrifices be offered; there alone could
the sin-offering for the people be duly made. Banished from the temple,
therefore, he was deprived also of the most solemn part of his religion;
he was, as it were, exiled from God; and the worship of God, as it was
now left to him,--that is, the offering up of prayers and praises,--was
almost painful to him, as it reminded him so forcibly of his changed
condition.

Such also, in some respects, was to be the state of the Christian
Church after our Lord's ascension. The only acceptable sacrifice was now
that of their great High Priest interceding for them in the presence of
the Father: heaven was their temple, and they were far removed from it
upon earth: they, too, like the Jews in Babylon, were a little society
by