life, justice between
man and man, and care for the weak and the innocent.(769) To know Him is
to do justice and right.(770) Because the present generation have fallen
away from these, and practise and love falsehood, slander, impurity,
treacherous and greedy violence, therefore God, being justice and truth,
must judge and condemn them: _What else can I do?_(771) The ethical
necessity of the doom of the people is clear to the Prophet from a very
early stage of his ministry,(772) and throughout, though his heart
struggles against it. But, if possible, even more abhorrent to God than
these sins against domestic and civic piety in themselves, is the fact
that they are committed in the very face of His Love and despite all its
pleading. With Jeremiah as with Hosea the sin against love is the most
hopeless and unpardonable, and this people have sinned it to the utmost.

As a woman is false to her fere,
Have ye been false to me.(773)

Hence most deeply springs the Wrath of the Lord, a Wrath on which Jeremiah
broods and explodes more frequently and fiercely than any other prophet:
_I am full of the rage of the Lord; the glow of His wrath; take the cup of
the wine of this fury at My hand and give all nations to whom I send thee
to drink of it; the fierce anger of the Lord shall not turn until He have
executed it._(774) And He does execute it. God's Wrath breaks out in His
_spurning_ of His nation, in the hot names He calls it, _adulteress_ and
_harlot_, and in _hating_ it.(775) He will not relent nor pardon it, nor
listen to prayer for it.(776) He says, _I must myself take vengeance upon
them. I shall not spare nor pity them._(777) They will reel in the day of
their visitation. He will feed them with wormwood and drug them with
poison; He will suddenly let fall on them anguish and terrors; He will
take His fan and winnow them out in the gates of the land and as the
passing chaff strew them on the wind of the desert; the garden-land
withers to wilderness and its cities break down at His presence and before
His fierce anger; He will make Jerusalem heaps and cast out the people
before His face. He will give them to be tossed among the nations for a
consternation, a reproach and a proverb, for a taunt and a curse, in all
places whither He drives them: and will send after them the sword, the
famine, and the pestilence till they be consumed.(778)

The modern mind deems arbitrary such immediate linking of physical and