Hence most deeply springs the Wrath of the Lord, a Wrath on which Jeremiah broods and explodes more frequently and fiercely than any other prophet: _I am full of the rage of the Lord; the glow of His wrath; take the cup of the wine of this fury at My hand and give all nations to whom I send thee to drink of it; the fierce anger of the Lord shall not turn until He have executed it._(774) And He does execute it. God’s Wrath breaks out in His _spurning_ of His nation, in the hot names He calls it, _adulteress_ and _harlot_, and in _hating_ it.(775) He will not relent nor pardon it, nor listen to prayer for it.(776) He says, _I must myself take vengeance upon them. I shall not spare nor pity them._(777) They will reel in the day of their visitation. He will feed them with wormwood and drug them with poison; He will suddenly let fall on them anguish and terrors; He will take His fan and winnow them out in the gates of the land and as the passing chaff strew them on the wind of the desert; the garden-land withers to wilderness and its cities break down at His presence and before His fierce anger; He will make Jerusalem heaps and cast out the people before His face. He will give them to be tossed among the nations for a consternation, a reproach and a proverb, for a taunt and a curse, in all places whither He drives them: and will send after them the sword, the famine, and the pestilence till they be consumed.(778) The modern mind deems arbitrary such immediate linking of physical and political disasters with the Wrath of God against sin. But we have to ponder the following. The Prophet was convinced of the ethical necessity of that Wrath and of its judgments on Judah—he was convinced before they came to pass and he predicted them accurately, from close observation of the political conditions of his world and the character of his people. Granted these and God’s essential and operative justice, the connection was natural: _What else can I do?_ It was clear that Judah both deserved and needed punishment and equally clear that the boiling North held the potentialities of this, which were gradually shaping and irresistibly approaching. Moreover, as Jeremiah insists, and as the history both of nations and individuals has frequently illustrated, there is a natural sequence of disaster upon wrong-doing. _Be thy scourge thine own sin! Thy ways and thy deeds have done to thee __ these things. Is it Me they provoke, saith the Lord, Is it not themselves to the confusion of their faces? Wherefore have these things come upon thee?—for the mass of thy wickedness._(779) As St. Paul says _the wages of sin_, not the judge’s penalty on sin but the thing it naturally earns, _is death_. Now one of Jeremiah’s most acute and convincing experiences as the _Tester_ of his people,(780) is his observation of how all this worked out upon his own generation. Not only were the war, the pestilence, and the captivity,