Thirty-sixth Sunday.
THE JEWS AT BABYLON.
FIRST READING.
"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion."—Psalm 137:1.
WHEN the Jews came to Babylon, some were made to live in the city, where they worked at trades, and kept shops. Others lived in the country and worked in the fields. These were not like the fields at home. The goodly land at home was full of hills and valleys, with sloping pastures for the flocks, and vineyards on the sides of the hills; but the land round Babylon was quite flat, with broad rivers flowing slowly and lazily through the meadows, with weeping willows upon their banks.
While Jerusalem was being besieged, Ezekiel, at Babylon, drew the picture of the town on a tile, and shut it in with a wall, and lay watching it, and weighing out a little bit of bad bread for himself to eat every day, that the other Jews who were with him might know what was going on among their brethren at Jerusalem, as God told him.
And in a vision he saw the angels come and mark in their foreheads all that were good, that they might not be hurt in the siege; while the bad would die by sword, and hunger, and sickness. So it is still, God saves His own good ones. The angels know and mark them, when all the rest are given up to God's terrible anger.