How could'st thou change to a corrupt,
A wildling grape?
The sense of their terrible guilt governs him, and of their indifference to it, saying we are clean, to which he answers:—
Yea though thou scour thee with nitre
And heap to thee lye,
Ingrained is thy guilt before Me—
Rede of the Lord.
Yet the fervency with which he pleads the Divine Love reveals a heart of hunger, if hardly of hope, for his nation's repentance. Indeed apart from his own love for them he could not have followed Hosea so closely as he does at this stage of his career, without feeling some possibility of their recovery from even this, their awful worst; and his ear strains for a sign of it. Like Hosea he hears what sounds like the surge of a national repentance[197]—was it when Judah listened to the [pg 108] pleadings and warnings of the discovered Book of the Law and all the people stood to the Covenant? But he does not say whether he found this sincere or whether it was merely a shallow stir of the feelings. Probably he suspected the latter, for in answer to it he gives not God's gracious acceptance, but a stern call to a deeper repentance and to a thorough trenching of their hearts.
Fallow up the fallow-ground,
Sow not on thorns!