moral unit from
the beginning of her history to the moment of his charge to her. He
continues the figures which Hosea had used. Long ago in Egypt God chose
Israel for His child, for His bride, and led her through the desert to a
fair and fruitful land of her own. Then her love was true. The term used
for it, _hesedh_, is more than an affection; it is loyalty to a relation.
To translate it but _kindness_ or _mercy_, as is usually done, is
wrong--_troth_ is our nearest word.

I remember the troth of thy youth,
Thy love as a bride,
Thy following Me through the desert,
The land unsown.

Upon the unsown land there were no rival gods. But in fertile Canaan the
nation encountered innumerable local deities, the Baalim, husbands of the
land, begetters of its fruits and lords of its waters. We conceive how
tempting these Baalim were both to the superstitious prudence of tribes
strange to agriculture and anxious to conciliate the traditional powers
thereof; and to the people's passions through the sensuous rites and
feasts of the rural shrines. Among such distractions Israel lost her
innocence, forgot what her own God was or had done for her, and ceased to
enquire of Him. Hence her present vices and misery in contrast with her
early troth and safety. Hence the twin evils of the time--on the one hand
the nation's trust in heathen powers and silly oscillation between Egypt
and Assyria; on the other the gross immoralities to which the Baals had
seduced its sons. There was a double prostitution, to gods and to men, so
foul that the young prophet uses the rankest facts in the rural life which
he is addressing in order to describe it.

The cardinal sin of the people, the source of all their woes is religious,

Is not this being done thee
For thy leaving of Me?

This was so, not only because He was their ancestral God--though such an
apostasy was unheard of among the nations--but because He was such a God
and had done so much for them; because from the first He had wrought both
with grace and with might, while the gods they went after had neither
character nor efficiency--mere breaths, mere bubbles!

The nerve of the faith of the prophets was this memory--that their God was
love and in love had wrought for His people. The frequent expression of
this by the prophets and by Deuteronomy, the prophetic edition of the Law,
is the answer to those abstractions to which some academic moderns have
sou