lleys and vine-clad hills easily captivated the hearts
of its inhabitants; and Jerusalem was a city beautiful for situation.
But this natural attachment was transfigured into a higher sentiment.
Jerusalem was the hearth and sanctuary of the true religion. The
country was dear to the hearts of the prophets, because it had been
specially chosen by Jehovah as a home for His people, in which they
might work out their destiny. The people who inhabited this country
were to be married to Jehovah; He was to penetrate them with His
spirit and character; and in them and their seed all nations of the
earth were to be blessed.

To this sublime conception of the nation the hearts of all the
prophets clung. However unworthy of it their own generation might be,
they believed in the inexhaustible resources of their race, which was
immortal till its destiny was accomplished. It was this faith,
inspiring Isaiah, which enabled him to rally his fellow-countrymen to
the defence of Jerusalem, when, according to all human probabilities,
extinction stared it in the face. And even Jeremiah, though he had to
predict the ruin of the city of his heart, never dreamed for a moment
that its career was at an end; but, looking beyond the calamities of
the immediate future, he predicted that God would restore the
captivity of His people and yet make Zion a praise in the earth. It
was, indeed, in times of calamity and suffering that the patriotism
of the prophets burned most ardently. It was then that, speaking in
God's name, they poured out on the stricken city the affection which
breathes in such wonderful words of Isaiah as these: "Can a mother
forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the
son of her womb? Yea, they may forget: yet will I not forget thee.
Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of My hands; thy walls are
continually before Me." The second half of Isaiah,[18] addressed to
the exiles in Babylon, overflows with such outbursts of tenderness;
and, although there is obviously a love in them which is more than
human, yet the Divine love could not have found an outlet and a voice
for itself except through a human heart of the most exquisite
sensibility and passionate patriotism.[19] The prophets, who could
scourge the people in the height of their prosperity and wantonness
with words which smote like swords, became in the days of calamity the
assiduous ministers of comfort, pouring balm into the wounds of their
countr