for sinners. In these He saw still possibilities worth
His dying for.

But as Christ Himself taught, there are, and ethically must be, limits to
the Divine Patience with men. Of these the men of Judah and Jerusalem are
warned in the verses which follow the parable. While it is true (verse 7
ff.) that if a nation, which God has said He will destroy, turn from its
evil, He will relent, the converse is equally true of a nation which He
has promised to plant and build, that if it do wrong and obey not He will
surely repent of the good He had planned for it. For this refractory
people of Judah He is already _framing_ or _moulding evil_--the verb used
is that of which the Hebrew name for _potter_ is the participle. Though
chosen of God and shaped by His hands for high service Israel's destiny is
not irrevocable; nay, their doom is already being shaped. Yet He makes
still another appeal to them to repent and amend their ways. To this they
answer: _No use! we will walk after our own devices and carry out every
one the stubbornness __ of his evil heart._ At least that is how Jeremiah
interprets their temper; his people had hardened since Megiddo and the
accession of Jehoiakim.

Some moderns have denied these verses to Jeremiah and taken them as the
addition of a later hand and without relevance to the parable. With all
respect to the authority of those critics,(356) I find myself unable to
agree with them. They differ as to where the authentic words of the
Prophet cease, some concluding these with verse 4 others with verse 6. In
either case the parable is left in the air, without such practical
application of his truths as Jeremiah usually makes to Judah or other
nations. Nor can the relevance of the verses be denied, as Cornill, one of
their rejectors, admits. Nor does the language bear traces of a later
date. They seem to me to stand as Jeremiah's own.

The Prophet's threat of evil is still so vague, that, with due
acknowledgment of the uncertainty of such points, we may suppose it, along
with the Parable of the Potter, to have been uttered before the Battle of
Carchemish, when the Babylonian sovereignty over Western Asia became
assured.(357)

The next in order of Jeremiah's symbols, Ch. XIX, the breaking of a
potter's jar past restoration, with his repetition of doom upon Judah, led
to his arrest, Ch. XX, and this at last to his definite statement that the
doom would be captivity to the King of Babylon. Some therefore dat