ght to reduce the Object of Israel's religion--such as, "a tendency not
ourselves that makes for righteousness." The God of Israel was Righteous
and demanded righteousness from men; but to begin with He was Love which
sought their love in return. First the Exodus then Sinai; first Redemption
then Law; first Love then Discipline. Through His Deeds and His Word by
the prophets He had made all this clear and very plain.

What wrong found your fathers in Me,
That so far they broke from Me?
Have I been a desert to Israel,
Or land of thick darkness?
Why say My folk, "We are off,
To meet Thee no more."

Jeremiah has prefaced this Divine challenge with a passionate exclamation
in prose--_O Generation--you!--look at the Word of the Lord!_--which (as I
have said) I like to think was added to his earlier verses when he
dictated these to Baruch. Cannot you see, cannot you see? He is amazed by
the stupidity, the callousness, the abandonment with which his people from
their leaders down have treated a guidance so clear, a love so constant
and yearning. And again his soul sways upon the contrast between the early
innocence and the present corruption of Israel.

A noble vine did I plant thee,
Wholly true seed,
How could'st thou change to a corrupt,
A wildling grape?

The sense of their terrible guilt governs him, and of their indifference
to it, saying we are clean, to which he answers:--

Yea though thou scour thee with nitre
And heap to thee lye,
Ingrained is thy guilt before Me--
Rede of the Lord.

Yet the fervency with which he pleads the Divine Love reveals a heart of
hunger, if hardly of hope, for his nation's repentance. Indeed apart from
his own love for them he could not have followed Hosea so closely as he
does at this stage of his career, without feeling some possibility of
their recovery from even this, their awful worst; and his ear strains for
a sign of it. Like Hosea he hears what sounds like the surge of a national
repentance(197)--was it when Judah listened to the pleadings and warnings
of the discovered Book of the Law and _all the people stood to the
Covenant_? But he does not say whether he found this sincere or whether it
was merely a shallow stir of the feelings. Probably he suspected the
latter, for in answer to it he gives not God's gracious acceptance, but a
stern call to a deeper repentance and to a thorough trenching o