We take the moral first for it is the deeper. Both Jeremiah and the prophets based their predictions on convictions of the character of their God. But while the prophets thought of Him and of His relations to Israel from the level of that tribal system of religion which prevailed throughout their world, and upon that low level concluded that Yahweh of Israel could not for any reason forsake His own people but must avert from them every disaster however imminent; Jeremiah was compelled by his faith in the holiness and absolute justice of God to proclaim that, however close and dear His age-long relations to Israel had been and however high His designs for them, He was by His Nature bound to break from a generation which had spurned His Love and His Law and proved unworthy of His designs, and to deliver them for the punishment of their sins into the hands of their enemies.(557) _What else can I do?_ Jeremiah hears God say. The opposing prophets reply, _Not He!_ This is the ground of his charge against them, that they plan to make the _people forget the Name_, the revealed Nature and Character, of God, just as _their fathers forgat Him through Baal_,(558) confusing His Nature with that of the lower, local god.(559) This ethical difference between Jeremiah and the prophets is clear beyond doubt; it was profound and fundamental. There went with it of course the difference between their respective attitudes to the society of their time—on the one side his acute conscience of the vices that corrupted the people, on the other their careless temper towards those vices. They would _heal the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly_, saying _it is well, it is well when well it is not_, and in their prophesying there was no call to repentance.(560) Moreover, though this may not have been true of all of them, some both in Jerusalem and among the exiles were _partakers of other men’s sins_; for Jeremiah charges them with the prevailing immoralities of the day—adultery and untruth. Instead of turning Judah from her sins, they were the promoters of the godlessness that spread through the land.(561) Though we have only Jeremiah’s—or Baruch’s—word for this, we know how natural it has ever been for the adherents, and for even some of the leaders, of a school devoid of the fundamental pieties to slide into open vice. Jeremiah’s charges are therefore not incredible.