Note 2 — ISAIAH. (continued 17)

God requires us to set a strict watch over its outgoings—a watch such as sentinels keep over the persons and goods which pass out of a city whose allegiance to the sovereign is suspected—to curb and quell at the earliest outbreak every rising of vanity, temper, bitterness, passion, and lust—to drag forth from its dark recesses and to stay every cherished iniquity which has found there a harbour and a hiding-place. Our own heart is a vineyard over which God hath set every one of us to dress it and to keep it. We are to extirpate the soil’s poisonous produce, and to implore upon the soil of this vineyard the precious dews of the Divine Spirit, which may remedy its native barrenness and turn it from a desert into the garden of the Lord.—Goulburn. See also H. E. I. 1841, 1842, 2695–2708.