Part 8 (1/2)

This was so, not only because He was their ancestral G.o.d-though such an apostasy was unheard of among the nations-but because He was such a G.o.d and had done so much for them; because from the first He had wrought both with grace and with might, while the G.o.ds they went after had neither character nor efficiency-mere breaths, mere bubbles!

The nerve of the faith of the prophets was this memory-that their G.o.d was love and in love had wrought for His people. The frequent expression of this by the prophets and by Deuteronomy, the prophetic edition of the Law, is the answer to those abstractions to which some academic moderns have sought to reduce the Object of Israel's religion-such as, ”a tendency not ourselves that makes for righteousness.” The G.o.d 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 pa.s.sionate 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 n.o.ble 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 G.o.d's gracious acceptance, but a stern call to a deeper repentance and to a thorough trenching of their hearts.

Fallow up the fallow-ground, Sow not on thorns!

To your G.o.d(198) circ.u.mcise 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.