disease superficially, and therefore do not know how
to cure it. The Bible can venture to give full weight to the gravity of
the sickness, because it knows the remedy. No surgery but God's can
perform that operation of extracting the stony heart and inserting a
heart of flesh. No system which cannot do that can do what men want. The
gospel alone deals thoroughly with man's ills.

And how does it effect that great miracle? 'I will put My Spirit within
you.' The new life-principle is the effluence of the Spirit of God. The
promise does not merely offer the influence of a divine spirit, working
on men as from without, or coming down upon them as an afflatus, but the
actual planting of God's Spirit in the deep places of theirs. We fail to
apprehend the most characteristic blessing of the gospel if we do not
give full prominence to that great gift of an indwelling Spirit, the
life of our lives. Cleansing is much, but is incomplete without a new
life-principle which shall keep us clean; and that can only be God's
Spirit, enshrined and operative within us; for only thus shall we 'walk
in His statutes, and keep His judgments.' When the Lawgiver dwells in
our hearts, the law will be our delight; and keeping it will be the
natural outcome and expression of our life, which is His life.

Then follows the picture of the blessed effects of obedience (vs.
28-30). These are cast into the form appropriate to the immediate
purpose of the prophecy, and received fulfilment in the actual
restoration to the land, which fulfilment, however, was imperfect,
inasmuch as the obedience and renewal of the people's hearts were
incomplete. These can only be complete under the gospel, and, in the
fullest sense, only in another order than the present. When men fully
keep God's judgments, they shall dwell permanently in a good land.
Israel's hold on its country was its obedience, not its prowess. Our
real hold on even earthly good is the choosing of God for our supreme
good. In the measure in which we can say 'Thy law is within my heart,'
all things are ours; and we may possess all things while having nothing
in the vulgar world's sense of having. Similarly that obedience, which
is the fruit of the new life of God's Spirit in our spirits, is the
condition of close mutual possession in the blessed reciprocity of trust
and faithfulness, love bestowing and love receiving, by which the quiet
heart knows that God is its, and it is God's. If stains and
inte