and we shall not be a bit
the holier or the purer for our potential and imperfect Christianity.

III. Lastly, note the effects of the stream.

These are threefold: fertility, healing, life. Fertility. In the East
one condition of fertility is water. Irrigate the desert, and you make
it a garden. Break down the aqueduct, and you make the granary of the
world into a waste. The traveller as he goes along can tell where there
is a stream of water, by the verdure along its banks. You travel along a
plateau, and it is all baked and barren. You plunge into a wady, and
immediately the ground is clothed with under-growth and shrubs, and the
birds of the air sing among the branches. And so, says Ezekiel, wherever
the river comes there springs up, as if by magic, fair trees 'on the
banks thereof, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit
thereof be consumed.'

Fertility comes second, the reception of the fertilising agent comes
first. It is wasted time to tinker at our characters unless we have
begun with getting into our hearts the grace of God, and the new spirit
that will be wrought out by diligent effort into all beauty of life and
character. Ezekiel seems to be copying the first psalm, or vice versa,
the Psalmist is copying Ezekiel. At any rate, there is a verbal
similarity between them, in that both dwell upon the unfading leaf of
the tree that grows planted by rivers of water. And our text goes
further, and speaks about perennial fruitfulness month by month, all the
year round. In some tropical countries you will find blossoms, buds in
their earliest stage, and ripened fruit all hanging upon one laden
branch. Such ought to be the Christian life--continuously fruitful
because dependent upon continual drawing into itself, by means of its
roots and suckers, of the water of life by which we are fructified.

There is yet another effect of the waters--healing. As we said, Ezekiel
takes great liberties with the geography of the Holy Land, levelling it
all, so his stream makes nothing of the Mount of Olives, but flows due
east until it comes to the smitten gorge of the Jordan, and then turns
south, down into the dull, leaden waters of the Dead Sea, which it
heals. We all know how these are charged with poison. Dip up a glassful
anywhere, and you find it full of deleterious matter. They are the
symbol of humanity, with the sin that is in solution all through it. No
chemist can eliminate it, but there is One who can. 'He