political disasters with the Wrath of God against sin. But we have to
ponder the following. The Prophet was convinced of the ethical necessity
of that Wrath and of its judgments on Judah--he was convinced before they
came to pass and he predicted them accurately, from close observation of
the political conditions of his world and the character of his people.
Granted these and God's essential and operative justice, the connection
was natural: _What else can I do?_ It was clear that Judah both deserved
and needed punishment and equally clear that the boiling North held the
potentialities of this, which were gradually shaping and irresistibly
approaching. Moreover, as Jeremiah insists, and as the history both of
nations and individuals has frequently illustrated, there is a natural
sequence of disaster upon wrong-doing. _Be thy scourge thine own sin! Thy
ways and thy deeds have done to thee __ these things. Is it Me they
provoke, saith the Lord, Is it not themselves to the confusion of their
faces? Wherefore have these things come upon thee?--for the mass of thy
wickedness._(779) As St. Paul says _the wages of sin_, not the judge's
penalty on sin but the thing it naturally earns, _is death_. Now one of
Jeremiah's most acute and convincing experiences as the _Tester_ of his
people,(780) is his observation of how all this worked out upon his own
generation. Not only were the war, the pestilence, and the captivity,
which were about to fall upon Jerusalem, directly and obviously due to the
perjury and stupid pride of her rulers; but, as he more subtly saw, the
immorality of the whole people had been disabling them, for years before,
from meeting these or any disasters except as sheer punishment without
place for repentance. Their previous troubles had failed to sober or
humble them or rouse them. _They would not accept correction_, he says of
them more than once.(781) To the Prophet's warnings that God will judge
them, they answer carelessly or defiantly _Not He!_ Instead of yielding to
the power which lies in all adversity to cleanse the heart and brace the
will they became incapable of shame, indifferent to consequences, and so
past praying for.(782) And in this they were fortified by the specious
dreams and lies of their false prophets, continued to sin, and so fell to
their doom, abashed at last but unassoilable.(783) If at any time they
were startled by disaster, this found them too enfeebled even for
repentance by their ha