he 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.

The Prophet describes how his companion, the interpreter, measured down
the stream a thousand cubits--about a quarter of a mile--and the waters
were ankle-deep another t