1 own record of his life, his heart was not in the land of his exile, but in the land of his nativity.' His own home, where he dwelt with his wife, and guided the counsels of the small community of the Chebar, faded from his eyes. Across the rich garden of that fertile region, across the vast Euphrates, across the intervening desert, his spirit still yearned towards Jerusalem, still lived in the Temple-courts, where once he had ministered. Though an exile he was still one with his countrymen; and in the sense of that union, and in the strength of a mightier power than his own, the bounds of space and time were overleaped, and during the seven years that elapsed before the city was overthrown, he lived absorbed in the Prophetic sight of the things that were to be, and in the Prophetic hearing of the words that were to be spoken, in this last crisis of his country's fate. His proIn the presence of the impending catastrophe, he was phecies of Jerusalem, amidst his fellow-exiles, exactly as Jeremiah amidst his fellow-citizens. An unshakable courage and confidence was needed to bear up against the words and looks of fury with which each was assailed. Each of the two Prophets, without communicating with the other, is the echo of the other's sorrow. Deep answers to deep across the Assyrian desert: the depth of woe in him who, from the walls of Zion, saw the storm approaching, is equalled, if not surpassed, by the depth of woe in him who lived, as it were, in the skirts of the storm itself the whirlwind, the great cloud, the fire unfolding itself from the north;' gathering round the whole horizon before it reached the frontiers of Palestine. Not only in his words, but in his acts, he was to be a perpetual witness of the coming desolation. Now he might be seen pourtraying on a tile all the details of the siege of the 'city; then 1 Ezek. viii. 1, xxiv. 16. 2 Velut si duo cantores alter ad al⚫terius vocem se comparent' (Calvin). Ezek. i. 4; comp. Jer. xxiii. 19, xlvii. 2. ↑ Ibid. iv. 1. again he would lie stretched out motionless, for more than a year,' like one crushed to the ground under the burden of his people's sins. At other times, he was to be seen stamping with his feet, and clasping his hands, in the agony of grief, or stirring a huge 2 cauldron, as if of the scum of his country's misery. Then again he would fix their attention by acts most abhorrent to his nature and his priestly calling. He cut off, lock by lock, the long tresses of his hair and beard,3 the peculiar marks of his sacerdotal office, and one by one threw them into the fire. He ate the filthyfood, which belonged only to the worst extremity of famine. And last of all, when the fatal day arrived, when the armies of Nebuchadnezzar had gathered round the walls of Jerusalem, the last and most awful sign was given to show how great and how irresistible was the calamity. On the evening of that day his wife died. The desire of his eyes was taken from him by a sudden stroke. And yet when the sun rose, and as the hours of the day passed on, he appeared in public with none of the frantic tokens of Oriental grief. He raised no piercing cry for the dead; he shed not a tear; the turban, which should have been dashed in anguish on the ground, was on his head; the feet that should have been bare were sandalled as usual. He did in all things as he would have done had no calamity overtaken him himself the living sign and personification of a grief too deep for tears, too funereal dirge either to arrest or to express. roll which was placed in his hand seem to be written within and without with lamentations, and mourning, and woe.' 6 But as in the case of Jeremiah, so in the case of Ezekiel, there was the sweetness as of honey mingled with the bitterness of his grief." What had appeared in germ in the writings of Jeremiah was repeated in a fuller shape by Ezekiel. terrible for any Well might the Ibid. iv. 12. 1 Ezek. iv. 5. 2 Ibid. xxiv. 3-11. Ibid, xxiv. 16-27. 3 Ibid. v. 1. • Ibid. ii. 10. Ibid. iii. 3. His moral and spiritual doctrine. He is the disciple, such as has often been seen both in philosophy and theology, carrying out into their most startling consequences the principles barely disclosed by the teacher. He as well as Jeremiah is a Prophet especially of the Second Law-of the law written in the heart. He too reviews the history of the Chosen People, and has the courage to treat them 2 like any other people; to point out the natural and ethnological origin 3 of the Holy City-Amorite and Hittite by birth-the failure even of the ancient rite of circumcision as a safeguard for the nations which had adopted it. He too is the witness of the dispensation of the Spirit; he sets forth, in language which belongs rather to the coming than the departing epoch, the magic transformation of himself, of his country, of its dead institutions," by the 'Spirit' which breathes through all his visions; the Breath of Life which was in the utmost complexity of that Divine mechanism, in the utmost variety of those strange shapes, through which he was called to his mission. But the form in which this doctrine acquires in his hands the newest development is that of the responsibility of the individual soul separate from the collective nation, separate from the good or ill deserts of ancestry. The note which is struck for a moment by Jeremiah is taken up by Ezekiel with a force and energy which makes his announcement of it ring again from end to end of his writings. It is to be found in those familiar words which the Church of England has placed at the head of its ritual: When the wicked man turneth away from his wickedness, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save his soul alive.' Other Prophets have more of poetical beauty, a deeper sense of divine things, a tenderer feeling of the mercies of God for His people; none teach so simply, and with a simplicity the more remarkable from the elaborate imagery out of which it emerges, this great moral lesson, to us the first of all lessons. In the midst of this national revolution, when the day of mercy is past, and when no image is too loathsome to describe the iniquities of Israel, the Prophet is not tempted to demand the destruction of the righteous with the wicked, nor the salvation of the wicked for the sake of the righteous. He contemplates the extremest case of the venerable patriarchs of former ages, or perhaps of his own-Noah, Daniel, and Job-and yet feels that even they could save neither son nor daughter; they shall but deliver their own souls by their righteousness. He blames equally those false teachers who make the heart of the wicked glad whom the Lord hath not made glad, and those who make the heart of the righteous sad whom the Lord hath not made sad.3 The doctrine of substitution,' in any form, is unknown in the teaching of Ezekiel. The old Mosaic precept of the visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the children, had become popularised into the proverb afloat both in Jerusalem and in Chaldæa, that the fathers ⚫ have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on ' edge.' But in spite of its own authority and its acceptance by his countrymen, and although containing a partial truth, it is put to flight before Ezekiel's announcement of the still loftier principle, All souls are God's; as the soul of the 'father, so is the soul of the son. The soul that sinneth, it 'shall die. He that hath withdrawn his hand from iniquity .... he is just; he shall surely live.' In words like these, both before and after the fall of his country, the mighty soul of the Priestly Prophet poured itself out. How startling a doctrine to his own generation is 1 Professor Jowett on the Epistles of St. Paul, ii. 334. Ezek. xiv. 14, 20. Ezek. xiii. 22. evident from the iron firmness which was needed to proclaim it; a forehead of adamant, harder than flint,' a heart never dismayed. How startling to the Jewish Church of after times we learn from the narrow escape which this wonderful book sustained, on this very account, of exclusion from the sacred canon altogether. The Masters of the Synagogue hesitated long before they could receive into the sacred writings a Prophet who seemed boldly to contradict the 2 very Pentateuch itself; and even when they received it, attempted, it is said, to rewrite his burning words, in order to bring them into accordance with the popular theology of their day. It is hardly possible to overrate the vast importance of this, the last expiring cry of the Jewish monarchy, which, both from its indispensable connexion with the very foundation of Christian doctrine, and from the supernatural energy of its inspiration, may be truly called the Gospel according to Ezekiel. Nor is its universal significance impaired, because it is, we may say, wrung out of him by the cruel necessities of the age, at once their consolation and their justification. In ordinary times, the mutual dependence of man on man, the control of circumstances, the hereditary contagion of sin and misery, fall in with the older view which Ezekiel combats. But it is the special use of such critical calamities as that of the fall of Jerusalem, that they reveal to us in a higher and still more important sense the absolute independence of man from man; the truth that we are not merely parts of a long chain of circumstances which cannot be broken, but that we must each one live for himself and die for himself. It is, in fact, the doctrine bound up in the very idea of Ezekiel's mission. As in his own person he had exhibited the necessity of the judgment that was to fall on the nation at large, so he set forth in his own person the inalienable freedom of each individual conscience 1 Ezek. ii. 6, iii. 8. 2 See Spinoza's Tractatus theologico-politicus, ii. 49. |