But it is not clear that Jeremiah ever felt anything of this about himself; if he did so he has refrained from uttering it. Yet he must have been very near so high a consciousness. His love and his pity for his sinful people were full. He can hardly have failed to descry that his own spiritual agonies which brought him into so close a personal communion with God would show to every other man the way for his approach also to the Most High and Holy and his reconciliation with his God. Again he was weighed down with his people’s sins; he bore on his heart the full burden of them. He confessed them. The shame which the people did not feel for them, he felt; and he painted the curse upon them in words which prove how deeply the iron had entered his own soul. He had a profound sense of the engrained quality of evil,(741) the deep saturation of sin, the enormity of the guilt of those who sinned against the light and love of God.(742) A fallacy of his day was that God could easily and would readily forgive sin, that the standard ritual might at once atone for it and comfortable preaching bring the assurance of its removal. He denied this, and affirmed that such things do not change character; that no wash of words can cleanse from sin, no sacraments, however ancient, can absolve from guilt.(743) That way only strict and painful repentance can work; repentance following the deep searching of the heart by the Word and the Judgments of God and the agony of learning and doing His Will.(744) To its last dregs he drank the cup of the Lord’s wrath upon His false and wilful nation; he suffered with them every pang of the slow death their sins had brought upon them. And yet he was most conscious of his own innocence when most certain of his fate. The more he loyally gave himself to his mission the more he suffered and the nearer was he brought to death. The tragedy perplexed him, Why is my pain perpetual, My wound past healing?(745) The only reply he heard from heaven was the order to stand fast, for God was with him to deliver—but that more troubles awaited him. And beyond this what is there to answer the staggering Prophet save that if a man have the Divine gifts of a keener conscience and a more loving heart than his fellows, there inevitably comes with such gifts the obligation of suffering for them. Every degree in which love stands above her brethren means pain and shame to love though as yet she bear no thorn or nail in her flesh. This spiritual distress Jeremiah felt for the people long before he shared with them the physical penalties of their sins. Just there—in his keener conscience, in his hot shame for sins not his as if they were his, in his agony for his people’s estrangement from God and in his own constantly wounded love—lay his real substitution, his vicarious offering for his people.