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18 state; it was his state of love for God; it was, if you please, the kingdom of God in which he once had dwelt—not locally, but as to mind and heart.

This same figure is used by the Lord in speaking of Assyria, as again given in the prophet Ezekiel. He extols the Assyrian for what he had been, as a people, and condemns him for what he then was. Depicting, in the language of correspondence, his former high spiritual estate. He says: "Behold the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches and of high stature. Not any tree in the garden of God was like unto him in beauty. I have made him fair by the multitude of his branches; so that all the trees of Eden that were in the garden of God envied him" (Ez. xxxi. 3, 8, 9). The whole description, and much more too voluminous to quote, is purely symbolic. The cedar tree is the Assyrian man or mind, with its peculiarly rational tone as it was in its highest and best religious state. The trees of Eden are those men or minds who were in the love of the Lord; and the garden of God in which they were planted, is that state of spiritual intelligence in which are all who love the Lord, his ways, his truths, and his life. And therefore it is that Isaiah, in prophesying concerning, the future spiritual condition of the Church, declares that the Lord "will make