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 his spiritual state, is the desire for the aliments sufficient to induce growth in the divine life; and there can be no progress made towards spiritual maturity, unless the heart's holiest affections long after, desire, and labour for the meat and drink by which it is attained. It is then that in hungering and thirsting after righteousness, we become "blessed;" the "Lord gives us the desires of our hearts," and we are "filled." But in this passage it is the Lord that is said to hunger:—"Now in the morning, as he returned into the city, he hungered." The city, in this case, implies the doctrines which exist in the soul of man, and in which he dwells, as does the natural man within the walls of a natural city. The city is therefore the Church with respect to its doctrine; and it was a city of the Jews, or of the representative Church—a Church rich in the forms and ceremonies of external religion, but destitute of the true life and power of godliness, to which the Lord returned. When therefore the sun of this Church had set and it was night, and the morning of a new state of the Church was beginning. Jesus returned to the city, and. This hungering of the Lord denotes the divine desire to fill His Church with heavenly goodness or love, if there be a reciprocal desire on their part to receive and be filled with it. For if the desire be for heavenly food, it will not be long before the desire becomes ardent for heavenly drink; the meat and drink of the spiritual man being to do the will of the Lord. But alas! the Lord's desire to communicate the divine goodness to the city into which he entered, met with no response. "He came unto" those who professed to be "his own, but his own received him not." He saw ample pro-