mber your own evil ways,
and your doings that were not good, and shall loathe
yourselves in your own sight for your iniquities and for your
abominations. 32. Not for your sakes do I this, saith the
Lord God, be it known unto you: be ashamed and confounded for
your own ways, O house of Israel. 33. Thus saith the Lord
God; In the day that I shall have cleansed you from all your
iniquities I will also cause you to dwell in the cities, and
the wastes shall be builded. 34. And the desolate land shall
be tilled, whereat; it lay desolate in the sight of all that
passed by. 35. And they shall say, This land that was
desolate is become like the garden of Eden; and the waste and
desolate and ruined cities are become fenced, and are
inhabited. 36. Then the heathen that are left round about you
shall know that I the Lord build the ruined places, and plant
that that was desolate: I the Lord have spoken it, and I will
do it. 37. Thus saith the Lord God; I will yet for this be
enquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them; I will
increase them with men like a flock. 38. As the holy flock,
as the flock of Jerusalem in her solemn feasts; so shall the
waste cities be filled with flocks of men: and they shall
know that I am the Lord.'--EZEKIEL xxxvi. 25-38.

This great prophecy had but a partial fulfilment, though a real one, in
the restored Israel. The land was given back, the nation _was_
multiplied, fertility again blessed the smiling fields and vineyards,
and, best of all, the people _were_ cleansed 'from all their idols' by
the furnace of affliction. Nothing is more remarkable than the
transformation effected by the captivity, in regard to the idolatrous
propensities of the people. Whereas before it they were always hankering
after the gods of the nations, they came back from Babylon the resolute
champions of monotheism, and never thereafter showed the smallest
inclination for what had before been so irresistible.

But the fulness of Ezekiel's prophecy is not realised until Jeremiah's
prophecy of the new covenant is brought to pass. Nor does the state of
the militant church on earth exhaust it. Future glories gleam through
the words. They have a 'springing accomplishment' in the Israel of the
restoration, a fuller in the New Testament church, and their ultimate
realisation in the New Jerusalem, which shall yet descend to