Another thought connected with this source of the river of life is that all the blessings which, massed together, are included in that one word ’salvation’—­which is a kind of nebula made up of many unresolved stars—­take their rise from nothing else than the deep heart of God Himself.  This river rose in the House of the Lord, and amidst the mysteries of the Divine Presence; it took its rise, one might say, from beneath the Mercy-seat where the brooding Cherubim sat in silence and poured itself into a world that had not asked for it, that did not expect it, that in many of its members did not desire it and would not have it.  The river that rose in the secret place of God symbolises for us the great thought which is put into plainer words by the last of the apostles when he says, ‘We love Him because He first loved us.’  All the blessings of salvation rise from the unmotived, self-impelled, self-fed divine love and purpose.  Nothing moves Him to communicate Himself but His own delight in giving Himself to His poor creatures; and it is all of grace that it might be all through faith.

Still further, another thought that may be suggested in connection with the source of this river is, that that which is to bless the world must necessarily take its rise above the world.  Ezekiel has sketched, in the last portion of his prophecy, an entirely ideal topography of the Holy Land.  He has swept away mountains and valleys, and levelled all out into a great plain, in the midst of which rises the mountain of the Lord’s House, far higher than the Temple hill.  In reality, opposite it rose the Mount of Olives, and between the two there was the deep gorge of the Valley of the Kedron.  The Prophet smooths it all out into one great plain, and high above all towers the Temple-mount, and from it there rushes down on to the low levels the fertilising, life-giving flood.

That imaginary geography tells us this, that what is to bless the world must come from above the world.  There needs a waterfall to generate electricity; the power which is to come into humanity and deal with its miseries must have its source high above the objects of its energy and its compassion, and in proportion to the height from which it falls will be the force of its impact and its power to generate the quickening impulse.  All merely human efforts at social reform, rivers that do not rise in the Temple, are like the rivers in Mongolia, that run for a few miles and then get sucked up by the hot sands and are lost and nobody sees them any more.  Only the perennial stream, that comes out from beneath the Temple threshold, can sustain itself in the desert, to say nothing of transforming the desert into a Garden of Eden.  So moral and social and intellectual and political reformers may well go to Ezekiel, and learn that the ‘river of the water of life,’ which is to heal the barren and refresh the thirsty land, must come from below the Temple threshold.

II.  Note the rapid increase of the stream.