f their
hearts.

Fallow up the fallow-ground,
Sow not on thorns!
To your God(198) circumcise ye,
Off from your heart with the foreskin!
Lest My wrath break out like the fire,
And burn with none to quench.(199)

Jeremiah has been called the blackest of pessimists, and among his
best-known sayings some seem to justify the charge:--

Can the Ethiop change his skin,
Or the leopard his spots?
Then also may ye do good,
Who are wont to do evil.(200)

And again,

False above all is the heart,
And sick to despair,
Who is to know it?

But to his question came the answer:--

I, the Lord, searching the heart,
And trying the reins,
To give to each man as his ways,
As the fruit of his doings.(201)

In this answer there is awfulness but not final doom. The affirmation of a
man's dread responsibility for his fate implies, too, the liberty to
change his ways. In the dim mystery of the heart freedom is clear.
Similarly, and even more plainly, is this expressed in the earlier call to
_break up the fallow-ground_. This implies that beneath those surfaces of
the national life, whether of callous indifference on the one hand or of
shallow feeling on the other, there is soil which, if thoroughly ploughed,
will be hospitable to the good seed and fit to bring forth fruits meet for
repentance. Human nature even at its worst has tracts other than those on
which there has been careless sowing among thorns, moral possibilities
below those of its abused or neglected surfaces. Let us mark this depth,
which the Prophet's insight has already reached. Much will come out of it;
this is the matrix of all developments by himself and others of the
doctrine of man and his possibilities under God. And for all time the
truth is valid that many spoiled or wasted lives are spoiled or wasted
only on the surface; and that it is worth while ploughing deeper for their
possibilities.(202)

In what form the deep ploughing required was _at first_ imagined by the
Prophet we see from the immediately following Oracles.

2. Oracles on the Scythians. (With some others: IV. 5-VI. 29.)

The invasion of Western Asia by the Scythians happened some time between
627 and 620 B.C.(203) The following series of brief poems unfold the panic
actually caused, or to the Prophet's imagination likely to be caused, in
Judah by the advance of these marauding horde