fore Me in this House upon which My Name has been called
and say "We are delivered"--in order to work all these
abominations! 11. Is it a robbers' den that My(286) House [upon
which My Name has been called] has become in your eyes? I also,
behold I have seen it--Rede of the Lord. 12. For go now to My Place
which was in Shiloh, where at first I caused My Name to dwell, and
see what I did to it because of the wickedness of My people
Israel. 13. And now because of your doing of all these deeds [Rede
of the Lord, though I spake unto you rising early and speaking,
but ye hearkened not, and I called you, but ye did not
answer],(287) [14] I shall do to the House [on which My Name has
been called] in which you are trusting, and to the Place which I
gave to you and to your fathers, as I did to Shiloh. 15. And I
shall cast you out from before My Face as I cast out(288) your
brethren, all the seed of Ephraim.

In this address there is nothing that contradicts Deuteronomy. The
sacredness with which the Book had invested the One Sanctuary is
acknowledged. But the people have no moral sense of that sacredness. Their
confidence in the Temple is material and superstitious, fostered, we may
believe, by the peace they were enjoying and their relief from a foreign
sovereignty, as well as by their formal observance of the institutions
which the Book prescribed. What had been founded to rally and to guide a
spiritual faith they turned into a fetish and even to an "indulgence" for
their wickedness. The House, in which Isaiah had bent beneath the seraphs'
adoration of the Divine Holiness, and, confessing his own and his people's
sin, had received from its altar the sacrament of pardon and of cleansing,
was by this generation not only debased to a mere pledge of their
political security but debauched into a shelter for sins as gross as ever
polluted their worship upon the high places. So ready, as in all other
ages, were formality and vice to conspire with each other! Jeremiah scorns
the people's _trust_ in the Temple as utterly as he had scorned their
_trust_ (it is the same word) in the Baals or in Egypt and Assyria. The
change in the pivot of their false confidence is to be marked. So much at
least had Deuteronomy effected--shifting their trust from foreign gods and
states to something founded by their own God, yet leaving it material, and
unable to restrain them from bringing along w