is short; doom
comes quickly. Habits of evil are not carelessly parted with, but have
their long and necessary consequences moral and physical. No wash of words
nor worship nor sacrament can cleanse the heart or redeem from guilt. It
is not the flagrant sinner whom he chiefly warns, but those who harden
themselves softly. And--very firmly this--forgiveness is not easily granted
by God nor cheaply gained by men; God has not only set our sins before His
face but carries them on His heart. And therefore, in view both of the
Just Wrath of the Most High and of His suffering Love, only repentance can
avail, the repentance which is not the facile mood offered by many in
atonement for their sins, but arduous, rigorous and deeply sincere in its
anguish. All of which carries our prophet, six centuries before Christ
came, very far _into the fellowship of His sufferings_.

I have already spoken sufficiently of Jeremiah's other original
contributions to theology, on the Freedom and the Patience of the
Providence of God, and his hope that God would be to Israel what the
prophet had bravely tried to be--no transient guest but a dweller in their
midst.(790) The titles for God which we may assume to have first come from
himself are few, perhaps only three: _The Fountain of Living Waters, the
Hope of Israel and the Saviour thereof in time of trouble_, and _Hasidh,
or Loyal-in-Love_,(791) a term elsewhere applied only to men. Sometimes,
but not nearly so often as the copyists of our Hebrew text have made him
do, he uses the title _Yahweh of Hosts_, doubtless in the other prophets'
sense of _the forces of history and of the Universe_ (the original meaning
having been _the armies of Israel_), sometimes he borrows the deuteronomic
_Yahweh thy God_, or a similar form. But most often (as the Greek
faithfully shows us) it is simply the personal name _Yahweh_ (Jehovah) by
which he addresses or describes the Deity: significant of the long
struggle between them as individuals.

Passing now from the world of nations to the world of nature we observe
how little the genuine Oracles of Jeremiah have to tell us of the Divine
Power over this; yet the little is proclaimed with as firm assurance as of
God's control of the history of mankind. Both worlds are His: the
happenings in the one are the sacraments, the signs and seals, of His
purposes and tempers towards the other: the winter blossom of the almond,
of His wakefulness in a world where all seems as