ing great things among
its fellows, and thus through _it_ He addresses a doomed city and
devoted land,--"O House of Israel," He seems to say, "I have come up for
the last time to your highest and most ancient festival. You stand forth
in the midst of the nations of the earth clothed in rich verdure. You
retain intact the splendour of your ancestral ritual. You boast of your
rigid adherence to its outward ceremonial, the punctilious observance of
your fasts and feasts. But I have found that it is but 'a name to live.'
You sinfully ignore 'the weightier matters of the law, judgment,
justice, and mercy!' You call out as you tread that gorgeous fane--'The
Temple of the Lord! The Temple of the Lord! The Temple of the Lord are
we!' You forget that your hearts are the Temple I prize! Holiness, the
most acceptable incense--love to God, and love to man, the most pleasing
sacrifice. All that dead and torpid formalism--that mockery of outward
foliage--is to me nothing. 'Your new moons and Sabbaths--the calling of
assemblies--I cannot away with; it is iniquity even the solemn meeting.'
These are only as the whitewash of your sepulchres to hide the
loathsomeness within--'the rottenness and dead men's bones!' If you had
made no impious pretensions, I would not, peradventure, have dealt so
sternly with you. If like the other trees you had confessed your
nakedness, and stood with your leafless stems, waiting for summer suns,
and dews, and rains, to fructify you, and to bring your fruit to
perfection--all well; but you have sought to mock and deceive me by your
falsity, and thus precipitated the doom of the cumberer. 'Henceforth,
let no man eat fruit of thee for ever!'"

The unconscious Tree listened! One night only passed, and the morrow
found it with drooping leaf and blighted stem! On yonder mountain crest
it stood, as a sign between heaven and earth of impending judgment.
Eighteen hundred years have taken up its parable--fearfully
authenticated the averments of the August Speaker! Israel, a bared,
leafless, sapless trunk, testifies to this hour, before the nations,
that "heaven and earth may pass away, but God's words will not pass
away!"[33]

But does the parable stop here? Was there no voice but for the ear of
Judah and Jerusalem? Have _we_ no part in these solemn monitions?

Ah! be assured, as Jesus dealt with nations so will He deal with
individuals. This parable-miracle solemnly speaks to all who have only a
name to live--th