"valley which was full of bones; and caused me "to pass by them, round about; and behold they

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were many in the open valley, and lo! they "were very dry, then he said unto me, Son of "man, these bones are the whole house of Is"rael! behold they say, our bones are dried, "and our hope is lost; we are cut off for our "parts."

What a melancholy heart-rending scene! how would the prophet's heart meditate terror, when he first entered this valley of woe, but he must proceed and go the sad rounds of minute inspection and increasing horror. Throughout the whole valley he does not meet with a single object to relieve his eye or his heart. Say not, my friends that this dreadful representation was made by a gloomy distempered imagination, it was the object of prophetic vision. "The hand of the "Lord was upon Ezekiel, the Spirit of the Lord "carried him out, and set him down in the midst "of the valley which was full of bones."

The language indeed is strongly figurative, but expresses no more than truth. I do not say, the reality of corporeal dissolution, but of a death more awful. Death alone is the fit image of the fallen condition of Israel in Babylon, for there

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they ceased to be what they once were, what God designed and commanded them to be, and what under their distinguished advantages they might have been. Their proper, their best life was gone. Had they been alive, in the service and enjoyment of God, we must have found them in the land divided to them by an inheritance; but not a tribe was to be seen there. Shall we look then for them collected into the holy city, or assembled in the temple of God? not a worshipper is there, not a trace of piety remains on that consecrated ground, the glory is departed. God is not there, except in the tokens of just and awful displeasure. How mournful the complaint in "O God the heathen are come the 79th Psalm. "into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have "they defiled: they have laid Jerusalem in heaps, "the dead bodies of thy servants have they given "to the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy "saints to the beasts of the earth; their blood "have they shed like water round about Jeru"salem, and there was none to bury them." Here indeed, where it was least to be expected, is a valley full of dead men's bones, very many, and very dry, the slain of Israel.

But did none escape, to gain possession of an

other country, build another city, erect a new temple, and consecrate all again to the Lord? It could not be, my friends; they could not as the peculiar people of God live out of Canaan. Many indeed survived the slaughter of Jerusalem, but only to drag a miserable existence in foreign slavery for seventy long years. Banished on account of their idolatry, and left under the yoke of insulting idolaters, scattered among the heathen without any regard to domestic relations or social ties-deprived of every symbol of the divine presence, and destitute of all the means of religi ous fellowship, what can we think or say of these wretched captives, but that thus "abiding many "days without a King, and without a Prince, "and without a sacrifice, and without an image, "and without an ephod, and without teraphim,” they were" counted with them who go down in"to the pit, as men who have no strength, free 66 among the dead, like the slain that lie in the "grave, whom the Lord remembers no more; "cut off from his hand, laid in the lowest pit, in "darkness, in the deeps, lover and friend put "far from them, and their acquaintance into "darkness; that the enemy hath persecuted "their soul, hath smitten their life down to the

"ground, yea hath made them to dwell in dark"ness, as those who have been long dead."

I would not, my friends, have detained you so long with this painful recital, had it only been an ancient history, unconnected with our interests; but we have a deep concern in the whole. It reaches to our times, and extends to many people, tongues, kindreds, languages, and nations. If the Lord is not carrying us, as he did the prophet Ezekiel to the valley of the dry bones of the house of Israel, he is at least calling us by his providence, and with a louder than ordinary voice, to consider the destructive reign of the King of terrors over many countries. A valley is too confined a scene for his desolations. We must ascend the highest mountains, traverse the widest continents, penetrate into the wildest wilderness, and visit the remotest isles, to know the regions of death. Wherever men exist without Divine revelation, without the means of knowing the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom he hath sent, there is the state of the dead. There are men alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance which is in them, by reason of the blindness of their minds. Though the scriptures of truth be a Divine revelation

needed by all, and adapted to all, many have never heard that there is such a book. Destitute

of its infallible instructions, and of the means of grace and salvation, the people must perish for lack of knowledge. Though their remote ancestors could not be ignorant of the will of God, and might, and ought to have transmitted religigious principles to their posterity, yet the gradual neglect of such necessary education, or the increasing indifference and degeneracy of their children, or both, with their various dispersions through the world, soon deprived them of all just ideas of God, and of moral obligation. Now removed far from the pure source of original information, the streams of tradition have flowed through so many channels of corruption, that they have become universally polluted with every mixture of impiety, folly, and vice. Not a trace of truth remains among them with that degree of separate evidence, authority, and energy, which are sufficient to enable them to resume their first station, or to direct their future pursuit of the chief good. We accordingly find them inveloped in the thickest darkness of spiritual ignorance and moral depravity. Do they know, or can their priests teach them, that the Lord our God is one