and the fruitful field (such as it will then exist) shall be esteemed as a forest ;" seeing that " the handful of corn cast upon the top of the mountains" will spring up so abundantly, that " the fruit thereof shall shake like Lebanon*" This is the kind of climax which often occurs in relation to that very period, It may be seen in chap. lxv. 20. where it is said, in reference to the protracted age to which men will then live, that " a person dying at the age of an hundred years will die a mere child, and be accounted as one accursed," that is, cut off prematurely, under a stroke of judicial vengeance. In chap, xxxii. 15. also, the very expres- sions of the text are again used in this precise view : " When the Spirit shall be poured from on high, (it is said,) the wilderness shall be a fruitful field, and the fruitful field be counted for a forest." Thus I under- stand the prophet as saying in our text, that " in a very little while" (it was but a little while even in Isaiah's clays, but now it is just at hand,) the Jews shall be converted to the faith of Christ, in such numbers as to be like the woods of Lebanon ; and then the poor benighted Gentiles also shall be gathered into the fold of Christ, in a way and to an extent altogether unprecedented from the first publication of Christianity to that very hour.
In this view of the passage it has an equally favour- able aspect both upon Jews and Gentiles : on Jews, to shew what blessings are in reserve for them, (and now just about to be poured out upon them;) and on Gentiles, who will by their means experience, as it were, throughout the whole world, " a resurrection from the deadV
It is not however my intention to insist on this point : but, waving any further notice of the millen- nial period, I shall simply shew,
I. What is that book to which the attention of all men shall be called — It is here called " the book ; " and must undoubtedly be, the book of revelation, in which all " the visions"
a Ps. lxxii. 16. b R0m, xj. 12, 15.