bitual insincerity or self-indulgence; which made
them incapable of truth even under pain, and of a real conversion to
God.(784) All this is discovered to us by the eyes and the mouth of
Jeremiah. What in it is arbitrary? The record is awful, nothing like it in
literature. Yet every step is real. We follow a master of observation.

But perhaps the chief glory of our Prophet is that while thus delivering,
as no other prophet so fully or so ethically does, the just wrath of God
upon sin, he reveals at the same time that His people's sin costs God more
pain than anger. This no doubt Jeremiah learned through his own heart. As
we have seen, with his whole heart he loved the people whom he was called
to test and expose, and that heart was wracked and torn by thoughts of the
Doom which he had to pronounce upon them. So also, he was given to feel,
was the heart of their God. In the following questions there is poignant
surprise; an insulted, a wounded love beats through them.

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,
No more to meet Thee!"
Can a maiden forget her adorning
Or her girdle the bride?
Yet Me have My people forgotten
Days without number.(785)

So, too, when the deserved doom threatens, and in hate He has cast off His
heritage, His love still wonders how that can be--

Is My heritage to Me a speckled wild-bird
With the wild-birds round and against her?
Is Israel a slave,
Or house-born serf?
Why he for a prey?(786)

All the desolation of Judah is on Him alone: _no man lays it to heart,
upon Me is the waste_.(787) And what we have seen to be the most human
touch of all, the surprise of an outraged father at feeling, beneath His
wrath against a prodigal son, the instincts of the ancient love which no
wrath can quench,

Is Ephraim My dearest son,
The child of delights?
That as oft as against him I speak
I must think of him still!(788)

That these instincts are so scattered rather increases their cumulative
effect.

Thus whether upon the Wrath or upon the Love of God Jeremiah speaks home
to the heart of his own, and of our own and of every generation which
loves lies and lets itself be lulled by them. Sin, he says, is no fiction
nor a thing to be lightly taken.(789) Time for repentance