called, The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it.”—Isa. xxxv, 8. The church is called upon for this cause to exult: “Awake, awake, put on thy strength, O Zion; put on thy beautiful garments, O Jerusalem, the holy city; for henceforth there shall no more come into thee the uncircumcised and the unclean.”—Ib. lii, 1. And again, John, in the vision of the glory of the new Jerusalem, which crowns and closes his revelation, says of her: “And there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth” (literally, “any thing unclean”), “neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie; but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.”—Rev. xxi, 27. For the purpose of inducing a profound sense of this evil and loathsomeness of sin, as working in the heart, the ordinances respecting the uncleanness of seven days were appointed, each having its own lesson. 1. The birth of a child was the actual propagation, from the parents, of part in the uncleanness of the apostate nature. It was, therefore, attended with natural phenomena, and marked by ritual ordinances which characterized it, and every function connected with it, as unclean and defiling. Emphasis was thus given to the challenge, “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean? Not one.”—Job xiv, 4. 2. Running issues of all kinds were appropriated as symbols of the corruption of man’s nature, festering within, and breaking forth in putrescent streams of depravity and sin in the active life. (Ezek. xvi, 6, 9.) 3. Death is “the wages of sin” (Rom. vi, 23), and physical death is a terrible emblem of its loathsome and accursed nature. And as sin and the curse are diffused to Adam’s seed by the very contagion of nature, this, their symbol, was ritually endowed with the same contagious character. He that touched the dead was reckoned no longer among the living but the dead. He was, therefore, cast out from the camp, from his family, the sanctuary, and the privileges of the covenant. To them all he was dead. He was unclean.