ided among the twelve tribes (chap. xlviii.), and that
in a way and order different from the division made by Joshua, which
cannot be understood of the restitution after the captivity, because the
twelve tribes did not return.

8. This new temple hath with it a new covenant, and that an everlasting
one, Ezek. xxxvii. 26, 27. But at the return of the people from Babylon
there was no new covenant, saith Irenaeus,(1368) only the same that was
before continued till Christ's coming.

Wherefore we must needs hold with Jerome,(1369) Gregory,(1370) and other
later interpreters, that this vision is to be expounded of the spiritual
temple and church of Christ, made up of Jews and Gentiles; and that not by
way of allegories only, which is the sense of those whose opinion I have
now confuted, but according to the proper and direct intendment of the
vision, which, in many material points, cannot agree to Zorobabel's
temple.

I am herein very much strengthened while I observe many parallel
passages(1371) betwixt the vision of Ezekiel and the revelation of John;
and while I remember withal, that the prophets do in many places foretell
the institution of the ordinances, government and worship of the New
Testament, under the terms of temple, priests, sacrifices, &c., and do set
forth the deliverance and stability of the church of Christ, under the
notions of Canaan, of bringing back the captivity, &c., God speaking to
his people at that time, so as they might best understand him.

Now if you ask how the several particulars in the vision may be
particularly expounded and applied to the church of Christ, I answer The
word of God, the "river that makes glad the city of God," though it have
many easy and known fords where any of Christ's lambs may pass through,
yet in this vision, and other places of this kind, it is "a great deep"
where the greatest elephant, as he said, may swim. I shall not say with
the Jews, that one should not read the last nine chapters of Ezekiel
before he be thirty years old. Surely a man may be twice thirty years old,
and a good divine too, and yet not able to understand this vision. Some
tell us, that no man can understand it without skill in geometry, which
cannot be denied, but there is greater need of ecclesiometry, if I may so
speak, to measure the church in her length, or continuance through many
generations, in her breadth, or spreading through many nations, her depth
of humiliation, sorrows and suffering