t in the present day. It is only an ideal picture that
is represented to Ezekiel, and not a real fact. It is not at all
probable that all these various forms of idolatry were found at any
time within the Temple itself. And the whole cast of the vision
suggests that it is an ideal picture, and not reality, with which
we have to do. Hence the number of these idolaters was seventy--the
successors of the seventy whom Moses led up to Sinai to see the God
of Israel! And now here they are grovelling before brute forms painted
on the walls in a hole in the dark. Their leader bears a name which
might have startled them in their apostasy, and choked their prayers
in their throats, for Jaazan-iah means 'the Lord hears.' Each man has
a censer in his hand--self-consecrated priests of self-chosen deities.
Shrouded in obscurity, they pleased themselves with the ancient lie,
'The Lord sees not; He hath forsaken the earth.' And then, into that
Sanhedrim of apostates there comes, all unknown to them, the light of
God's presence; and the eye of the prophet marks their evil.

I have nothing to do here with the other groups which Ezekiel saw in his
vision. The next set were the representatives of the women of Israel,
who, false at once to their womanhood and to their God, were taking part
in the nameless obscenities and abominations of the worship of the
Syrian Adonis. And the next, who from their numbers seem to be intended
to stand for the representatives of the priesthood, as the former were
of the whole people, represent the worshippers who had fallen under the
fascinations of a widespread Eastern idolatry, and with their backs to
the house of the Lord were bowing before the rising sun.

All these false faiths got on very well together. Their worshippers had
no quarrel with each other. Polytheism, by its very nature and the
necessity of its being, is tolerant. All its rabble of gods have a
mutual understanding, and are banded together against the only One that
says, 'Thou shalt have none other gods beside Me.'

But now, I take this vision in a meaning which the prophet had no
intention to put on it. I do not often do that with my texts, and when I
do I like to confess frankly that I am doing it. So I take the words now
as a kind of symbol which may help to put into a picturesque and more
striking form some very familiar and homely truths. Look at that
dark-painted chamber that we have all of us got in our hearts; at the
idolatries tha