character, condition, geographical position, its power of recuperating itself from corruptions and distortions, its undiminished adaptedness to the needs of this generation and of each of us—­enforce the stringency of the exhortation, and confirm the truth of the assertion:  ’This is My beloved Son; hear ye Him!’ ’The voice said, Cry.  And I said, What shall I cry?  All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof as the flower of the field:  the grass withereth, and the flower thereof falleth away:  but the Word of our God shall stand for ever.’  Three hundred years after Isaiah a triumphant Apostle added, ’This is the word which by the Gospel is preached unto you.’  Eighteen hundred years after Peter we can echo his confident declaration, and, with the history of these centuries to support our faith, can affirm that the Christ of the Gospel and the Gospel of the Christ are in deed and in truth the Living Word of the Living God.

THE CITY WITHOUT WALLS

     ’Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns without walls....  For I,
     saith the Lord, will be unto her a wall of fire round about, and
     will be the glory in the midst of her.’—­ZECHARIAH ii. 4, 5.

Zechariah was the Prophet of the returning exiles, and his great work was to hearten them for their difficult task, with their small resources and their many foes, and to insist that the prime condition to success, on the part of that portion of the nation that had returned, was holiness.  So his visions, of which there is a whole series, are very largely concerned with the building of the Temple and of the city.  In this one, he sees a man with a measuring-rod in his hand coming forth to take the dimensions of the still un-existing city of God.  The words that I have read are the centre portion of that vision.  You notice that there are three clauses, and that the first in order is the consequence of the other two.  ’Jerusalem shall be builded as a city without walls ... for I will be a wall of fire round about her, and the glory in the midst of her.’

And that exuberant promise was spoken about the Jerusalem over which Christ wept when he foresaw its inevitable destruction.  When the Romans had cast a torch into the Temple, and the streets of the city were running with blood, what had become of Zechariah’s dream of a wall of fire round about her?  Then can the divine fire be quenched?  Yes.  And who quenched it?  Not the Romans, but the people that lived within that flaming rampart.  The apparent failure of the promise carries the lesson for churches and individuals to-day, that in spite of such glowing predictions, there may again sound the voice that the legend says was heard within the Temple, on the night before Jerusalem fell.  ’Let us depart,’ and there was a rustling of unseen wings, and on the morrow the legionaries were in the shrine.  ’If God spared not the natural branches, take heed lest He also spare not thee.’